A rain of roses. Erections. The boy king, drops of sweat forming on his almost-mustachioed upper lip, is surveying the courtyard when she calls.
Grandmother.
“Marcus!”
Imperious, matronly, she glides into view, her voice still echoing off the palace stone. She blankly regards the scene playing out in the courtyard—nakedness!—youth!—lust!—flowers! Elagabalus, the one she calls Marcus, has created this divine spectacle by releasing flowers from a false ceiling. Tanned bodies curtained by petals. Music plays. She looks over the mess of flowers and bodies at him.
“Marcus.”
We hate her hair like that. Pushed up at the front like Neptune's shield, a tidal wave of iron.
“Dear grandmother," he answers. Marcus? Elagabalus! Named in honor of the great god of the mountain, El-Gabal, the unconquered sun god. Ave!
“This is a marvelous spectacle, Marcus," she says, gesturing to the field of roses, narcissi, oleanders, violets, lilies, irises, poppies, amaranths and wildflowers that Elagabalus has just showered over his guests. “But you are needed at the Senate."
Boy king pulls the tiara from his head. My heart breaks.
I (the one telling you this story) am the third figure from the right in the lower part of the painting by Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888). Note that I am the one the emperor regards. I might seem unimpressed at the flowers, but that's not it at all; of all the goddesses, Flora is the dearest to me. The garlands the emperor and I make to crown each other in our bed are little sacrifices to Her. I'm just tired of the advances from the person to my right. Livia? Take a hint.
No one died in the rain of roses. Another lie of the historians.
Elagabalus, or Marcus, walks between the columns toward his grandmother, and they disappear into the cool shade of the palace. A warm wind blows, the flowers stir and scent the air. I turn over on my couch and think of his cock, circumcised now. In my mind, I suck him off on the imperial throne. Into the back of my throat. The sweat from his balls reaches my lip. The sweat on his lip again. I pull his thighs up, sliding his ass forward, licking the hair at his hole. The solar anus of the Sun King. My bride.
I stand up from my couch and go to our chamber to wait for the business of government to be over with.
Nearby, in the sanctum on Palatine Hill, the black meteorite, El-Gabal, throbs with primeval energy. Time, libido, concentration all warp and seem to pulse when you stand too close. The old priests sense it and move away uneasily.
* * *
In our room that night, Elagabalus is beating his face with white powders inherited from his former wives. The burnished mirror casts an eerie bronze light. He adds the blood of berries to his lips, making them a violent purple. It makes his kisses bitter, but that pleases me.
“Will you go out tonight?” I ask.
“Yes, Hierocles." He sounds far away. In his mind he is already with other lovers. Sailors. Ex-slaves. Butchers' boys. Hairy, hard hands pull at his mouth and his dress. I turn over.
“What did you talk about at the Senate today?”
“Severus Alexander."
“Your cousin?”
“Yes." He adds color to his cheeks. “He's fifteen now. Grandmother would like to involve him in the administration."
“As what?”
“As caesar." A title I should have had, except Grandmother objected. “And what will you do this evening, my husband?” Elagabalus is bored with talk of state. Or worried?
“Drink with your mother. Wonder where you are."
I know where he, who calls himself my mistress, will be, more or less, because on nights like tonight he often feels himself called into the city streets, the hot nights in the lower parts of Rome, disguised among the people. To receive them. Taking his citizens inside of himself. Coming home with a full purse—the sacredness of his being fucked consecrated further by receiving coin. Sex work is work. The work of the gods. Divine service. We kiss good night.
* * *
Julia Soaemias Bassiana, Elagabalus' mother, is a second mother to me. Though she is noble and rich and I am a former slave, child of a slave, and maybe the reason why the Guards murmur about our emperor, I feel she loves me. She loves me because he loves me. Her heart is like a great hearth for him, always glowing with welcome.
“I like to drink with you because you're such easy company, Hierocles."
I laugh softly. We have been speaking about her family and I've been listening quietly. Receiving an education in religion.
“El-Gabal's blessings are well known everywhere. In Carthage, a great center of His worship, they grew rich through the sacrifices they offered the great god, who they called Ba'al Hammon—the brazier!—Were you the firstborn in your family, Hierocles?”
“Yes."
“You would have gone into the fiery pit." She laughs. Grim staccato. “We have brought him to Rome, and every barbaric tribe that falls to Rome will also fall to El-Gabal! This is the beginning of a great ascent." Her eyes flicker with the firelight, and I see furnaces.
As I walk back to our rooms later that night, I think of my home in Caria, of Gordius, who taught me how to steer chariots and fuck, of my love for Elagabalus, all only alternatives to the cult of Ba'al, the burning babies, me burning.
He wakes me up screaming about his sex again. Terrorized by his own body. Shaking. Crying so hard he seems to stop breathing at moments. I hold him. Her. My queen, still powdered, dress falling from her shoulders.
When the historian Dio called Elagabalus by feminine pronouns, was he mocking her or honoring her true nature?
* * *
Since Elagabalus took power through the machinations of Grandmother, Rome has become a very different place. It only took a few years. Women come to the senate now. Jupiter has been supplanted as the king of the gods by a foreigner, El-Gabal, the god for whom my love is high priest. Not everyone is happy that the pantheon has a new daddy.
Coming from Emesa to reclaim the seat of power, with Grandmother in the fore like a ship's prow, this clan brought with them a strange black stone sent from heaven, and placed it at the heart of a new temple to which all the holy trinkets of the other gods were brought, so that no god may be honored beyond the presence of this inky thing from the night sky. Grandmother seems indifferent to spiritual questions, but the young king and his mother are devout. Zealous, even.
The god embodied in stone is at the center of our thoughts this morning, as the sun rises over the palace walls and my love wakes, tired of tears but still yearning to be delivered from his sex; imagining a holy operation, the physician's knife, a blessing from Asclepius, to be cut and healed, to open herself for the sun god, a dawning of new light in the world. Sol Invictus.
What does it mean to be called into light-bearing in this way? I contemplate this as she wakes more fully and looks at me.
“I love you,” I say. She knows.
“We have to kill Alexander."
* * *
Three quiet days pass before all of Roman society is ordered to the Hill for a feast in honor of our strange new god. El-Gabal has been brought out into the daylight, glinting black in the hot sun and regarded warily by the nearby Guards.
Tables overflow with food and wine is dispensed to everyone present. The censers burn with strange drugs. The emperor arrives in high drag. Her beauty is sickening, radiant. There are no speeches – drumming starts immediately. Among the matrons, Julia Soaemias Bassiana alone is ecstatic, rapturously watching her child begin the divine rite. Grandmother scans the gathering surreptitiously, clearly anxious that this cultic display will further upset the patrician class to whom she owes her current power.
In time with the drums, Elagabalus begins to move, first from side to side and soon in short steps around the great god. The meteorite glints and seems to sweat. The crowd, some drunk but all beginning to feel the effects of the votive smoke, look fixedly at the sight of their kingly queen. Elagabalus dances around the stone. The drumming becomes more rapid, as does the dance. She is strutting. Dipping and swaying. Slipping free from her dress, pulling it after her like a great banner, her naked body is adorned with sigils; Are they glowing with black light?
The crowd is spellbound, moving to the music. Closest to the censers, the vestal virgins vomit. Jupiter's priest watches at a distance, his face fixed in a hateful grimace. But El-Gabal is fully present now. The stone surges with black light. Ave! Ave! Ave!
Through the smoke and stygian glow, visions materialize and dissipate. Androgyne angels, science and theory unfetter us, kings become queens, and queens kings. Children grow free as flowers. There are senates of women, senates without sex, all the statues fall—gods and generals alike—everyone is crowned in flowers, the works of Sappho are known everywhere. Beauty reigns!
Elagabalus is dancing a future into existence before the people of Rome, who clamor with delight at the spectacles of liberation emanating out of the stone's black fire.
And now I strike. We don't want to wait for that distant future, beyond dark ages, beyond inquisitions, beyond laws and executions and beatings to death. Queer intifada now!
I seize Alexander and pull him with me toward the stone. A sacrifice. Let the young patriarch burn for the future to come. He struggles weakly, and I overpower him, dragging him forward into the queer mist.
But my adrenaline blinds me to the actions of Grandmother, ever decisive, never losing sight of the political circumstances. She has not allowed herself to succumb to the smoke and calls in the Guard. The crowd erupts. A table is overturned, people shout, someone is trampled. The god makes a sickening noise, throbbing as the images fade.
In the tumult, I lose my love. They have danced into exhaustion, into their mother's arms, and both are quickly arrested by the Guards. It is all over as soon as it's begun. No liberation. Not now. The executions are summary and immediate – they have been approved in advance by Grandmother. She knew well before we did how the tide was turning against us, how the citizens complained of extravagances, tableaux for Flora, nightly escapades by the bordellos, how the Praetorian Guard (all closeted tops) made a show of their disgust for the effeminacies they saw permeating the capital. In an instant, Jupiter is back in fashion.
Here comes the death blow.
* * *
Beheaded and dragged through the city, Julia's body is discarded to be eaten by stray dogs. Elagabalus' is thrown in the Tiber. To the grunting guards they were a headless body, crashing through rapids, against rocks and, later, gently bobbing among the reeds. Deposed faggot. Dead at eighteen. Headless but haloed, divine prostitute, sexless monarch forced to play king, finally supplanted by more forgettable kings.
Grandmother remains the puppeteer throughout Severus Alexander's reign and the meteorite is sent back to Emesa. The Guards come for me too; no more festivals of flowers.
Who needs a body anyway? Like I'm not in the furnace of Ba'al, I know my love is not lying among the brushes: They are streaming in perfect light to the future. No more Jupiter, no more Senate, no more caesars. Lilacs instead; flowers everywhere! Genderfuck; divinity! They danced a world into being that can't be un-danced, and it's approaching us like light, light, light, light!