Back on the Palatine, the beautiful naked boys were serving cheesy pastries.
“Mmm … I always find funeral food so more-ish!” muttered Aulus, not even trying to sound guilty. It was all he could do to hold off long enough to let his little slave boy taste the cheese parcels first.
Quintus was munching wheat cakes, even though they had been coloured black. This seemed to be achieved through charring, though the subtle palace kitchen staff had managed to avoid any taste of cinders. A crisp coating held together a luscious interior.
With his mouth full of spiced, honeyed cake, he could not answer. Both men had healthy appetites, despite the unnerving occasion; the imperial chefs had no problem enticing them with traditional graveside concoctions, rich in almonds, hazelnuts, sesame and pomegranate seeds, currants, cinnamon and cloves, parsley and bay. There comes a point for a nut-lover, Quintus thought, where funeral food is worth taking a risk, even when you are dining with a megalomaniac who wants to kill you.
“Dig in!” he managed to utter eventually, picking a grain from between his teeth with one fingernail. “We are honouring the dead by sharing.” He began waxing lyrical, to keep his spirits up. “Hypothetically there may be no corpses tonight, but we must imagine their presence. Just as, at a necropolis, spirits pass us unseen, a breath in the breeze that wafts by their teary mourners, we feel their unseen company as we remember them tonight. The poor sods who died at Tapae may be have been buried miles from here, assuming anyone did ever collect the bodies up, but here we are, heaping upon them the reverence they deserve.”
“You are insufferable when you descend into mystic claptrap,” was his elder brother’s cool judgement.
Quintus gave him a grin that was honestly infantile. They could have been still precociously five and self-consciously seven. “All right. If we have to go, better to die while chomping on the good flavours that have sustained our grief-stricken forefathers.”
“I remain unimpressed by your ‘remembering our roots’ stuff. You wouldn’t know a root if you stumbled over it and broke your ankle.”
“You’re just so humourless,” Quintus continued, declaiming, “Think of tonight as having a real purpose. Yes, it is dining with the dead in order to be at one with our ancestors, but at the same time, a good scoff in shared company provides solace for the unhappy, it anneals the internal stress of bereavement, it helps the living along the path of their recovery from grief.”
“That’s a useful motto for a caterer!” Aulus dismissed the bombast. “Actually I was talking to Genius, you know that famous cook Falco bought and quickly sold on because the man couldn’t cook—in case you didn’t notice, they had him back when Albia got married. Weird people. According to Genius, you would think happy wedding guests would tuck in with gusto—yet he said they eat far less than expected. It’s mourners at funerals who scoff.”
“Because this is food as human comfort, plus respect for the national gods. We are one with our ancestors and one with our fellow mourners. Perhaps,” suggested Quintus darkly, “this night on the Palatine, we are even one with the Emperor.”
“Our Master wouldn’t like you saying that!” replied Aulus, lowering his voice. Domitian was not one for sharing himself with people. He thought everyone was against him, which in general they were.
The brothers had the sense to glance around to check, but their fellow guests were lost in fearful concentration on whatever the naked servers pranced up with. Cynics, who knew the ways of rough-end slaves, were keeping an eye on the boys in case they peed in the dish they were offering. If anyone looked up, it was only to squint nervously at what the Emperor was doing.
Domitian was not eating. He rarely did in public. It was said he preferred a hearty meal by himself at lunchtime. Tonight, he was simply watching. So, diners who dared turn in his direction found him staring at them, intent on how they received his strange banquet.
This was not a feast where people raised a beaker to compliment their host if they caught his eye.
There was wine, however. Dark red-black vintages, heavy in tannin, served in ebony goblets. Domitian was not drinking. His young eunuch cupbearer, Earinus, spent more time preening than presenting drinks. Some world-rulers and empire-builders drown themselves in liquor until their reddened bloated bodies expire in alcoholic excess. Others never drink. They will not risk loss of self-control. Domitian was one of those. Inevitable, really.
Still, wine was one of the traditional beverages served during feasts at tombs. At first, the Camilli tried sticking to water because wine was the obvious carrier for any poison with which the Emperor hoped to purge large numbers from the Senate. Eventually, Aulus reminded Quintus that when Nero murdered his stepbrother, his young and popular rival Britannicus, the taster passed the wine as safe but Nero’s fatal drug, reputedly supplied by the famous palace poisoner Locusta, was hidden in the cold water for mixing. One sip and the princeling was done for.
“Do we think Locusta is still alive?”
“If so, she would have to be about two hundred.”
“Sipping at the Fountain of Youth?”
“No, I think she was killed in the Year of the Four Emperors.”
“Poison?”
“Natural causes—execution.”
“Did she train up apprentices?”
“Yes, but the old crafts are dying. No one wants to be bothered. These days you can’t find suppliers with the expertise, however big a bribe you offer. The fine art of removing enemies has been allowed to fade; commercial drug-dealing is all pastilles for breath-freshening and pods of wax to push up your arse for your haemorrhoids.”
“I wouldn’t know!” Quintus demurely pretended, with a smile he intended to annoy his brother. Aulus ignored him.
They decided to move on to wine, taking it neat as a safety precaution.