The prime retribution on the guilty
Is that no one can acquit himself of his own judgement.
Juvenal
Ten columns, dyed with Tyrian, marched down the cella of the temple, to the obsidian plinth, figured with shields. There stood the god: Mars Pater, in his armour, bearded and helmed, night-underlit by the votive lamp. The sprays of fig, oak and laurel from the spring festival were still aromatic and sappy. In his small house by the shrine, the elderly, tame wolf, sacred to the god, lay quietly, muzzle on long paws. He was a pet of the priests, more often than not his chain was off. He would eat from your hand, had forgotten he was ever a wolf at all.
The man who had entered, grizzled and muscular, perhaps in his fiftieth year, offered the wolf a titbit, watched him eat, nodded, and walked back into the central aisle before the statue.
The man carried a bundle, which he now unwrapped and put down on the altar. He bowed his head, and seemed to pray.
A priest came into the cella.
The man who prayed broke off, looked up; he appeared glad that the priest was an old man, someone he had known for years.
“Commander,” said the old priest, then smiled. “I always forget.”
“You forget, to please me,” said the man. “A young puppy rules the Fort of Par Dis. I’m a retired pensioner of the Empire. I tend my farm. My business is goats and vines and fruit trees.” He stopped, and said, “And the lies I tell myself.”
The priest looked at the things which had been placed on the altar. There were three legionary javelins, three swords, some knives, the breast-plate of a cavalry skirmisher, service bracelets, bracelets for valour, the badge of command, a Medusa shield.
“The things that matter,” the man said, “that the god values.”
“The arms of the warrior,” said the priest. “They should hang proudly in your house. Why?”
“Because my house is ruined. There’s a disease – something due to me – do you remember, I told you once –?”
The priest’s face closed like a fist. Not against the man, against the fate.
“But that was finished.”
“No. When the boy was born – I knew then. I knew.”
“You did nothing.”
“Nothing. I should have killed him.”
“You must speak to no one else in this fashion,” said the priest. “There were only twenty at the Spring Rite. The priesthood outnumbers the worshippers now. These Christians have the town, as they have the Empire. The Christians are powerful, and understand nothing of this sort. Be careful, Vusca. I warn you as a friend.”
“The time for carefulness is done. Don’t you see why I came here, with the offering?”
The old priest reached out and took the hand of Retullus Vusca.
“Yes, Commander. Is that all you want? Isn’t there some way in which –?”
“No, Flamen. No way but this.”
“Then, it can be arranged for you.” The priest touched the pattern of laurel on his breast, and let go the hand of the man, which was cold as winter marble. “Your family?”
“I have – left provision, all the correct documents. But my family’s cursed, Flamen. I should have seen to it. I can’t. It isn’t in me. A weakness. I make this sacrifice to Mars in the hope that he –”
“Hush,” said the priest, gently. “Only the god can decide that.”
“The caterwauling of the Christos dulls all their ears,” said Vusca.
“Hush,” the priest said again. “Come now. There’s the purification. They’ll make ready for you.”
“The room under the altar.”
“Yes. Come now.”
Lies and weakness. The deception of self. More than eighteen years of that, aided by them all.
The boy was handsome, his son. Everyone cherished him. He was his mother’s. The women’s. Vusca did not go too near. That much, at least, that distance … a sop to the truth. So his son grew up pampered by women, by Lavinia, and Lucia, and all the slaves. He liked the villa farm, had no hankering after a military career. At seven, Vusca had been dreaming night and day of the legions. But not Vusca’s son. And Lavinia, so afraid: if he becomes a soldier he’ll be sent far away. Sent away … something in that. Eighteen and a commission – it might be anywhere, now. It might be Rome. Vusca might send – that – to Rome. (Unnamed, unthought of, somewhere in his brain or heart, it stayed him.) Let the boy be a farmer, then. He was good with the land. That too was under the favour of Mars, and of Lavinia’s Isis, if it came to that.
Vusca watched the boy grow up, as if from a nearby hill.
Petrus, they had called him. She had wanted the name. It had been the uncle’s, popular among Christians. Vusca might have argued, but it did not seem to matter. He had no pride in this handsome son. He would say to himself that that was because Petrus did not take after him, would not be a soldier. That made it easy.
The boy of course knew his father did not really care for him. He seemed to accept it was for the logical reason, the reason of the army. Once he had apologised to Vusca, quietly, on his fourteenth birthday. Vusca had taken the boy to the Fort, shown it to him, since that would somehow be expected. There was no doubt Petrus showed an interest. And the men took to him, the way everyone did. A father might have been able to persuade such an interested and likeable son to a taste for the soldier’s life. Vusca did not attempt it. And Petrus, feeling the lack, assuming it was his fault, his omission, said that he was sorry.
When others looked at Petrus, they saw the Roman virtues. He was a beauty, but not effeminate, not soft. He was modest, friendly, reserved without coolness, dignified but ready for a laugh. The farmer’s life built his shoulders and legs, he could handle a five-horse chariot with skill before he was fifteen.
When others looked at Petrus, they saw all that.
When Vusca looked at him, he saw the peculiar eyes, which others found so attractive, grey-lilac, Lavinia’s. And Vusca also saw an odd birthmark, the quarter ring of tiny dark blotches around his son’s collar-bone. Isis’ necklace of love – that was what Lavinia called it when he was a child, kissing the marks. Women who saw them always seemed fascinated. The villa slaves had said it was something holy. Even Drusus at the Fort, who had taught Petrus chariots, had been heard to say that the broken ring was the memory of a war-scar of some forebear, carried in the blood. When Vusca looked at the marks they turned him queasy.
He had never liked to touch his son. He found it difficult to pick him up as a child. Later, if their hands brushed over some dish at table, Vusca felt a surge of revulsion, to which he never gave its actual name, and which he refused to acknowledge.
Rome still stood, like a shadow. The power of the shadow took effect. Retullus Vusca quit his command at the ordained time and went to the villa to be another farmer.
He did his best with it, the portion left to him. He had got accustomed again, quite quickly, to disappointment, to sourness. There had been that shining space, less than a year, in the centre of his life. It died down like a fire and left him with the used-up charcoal, which crumbled and had no heat.
There were no other children. He did not sleep with Lavinia after the boy was born. Latterly he did not want women.
Then there was the day in the orchard.
It was the start of harvest, the fields full of men, and the pickers busy with the fruit. At noon, activity fell off. He sat polishing one of the swords by the trough, with the dog at his feet – and then the dog growled very low, and got up and went away, and his son came through the sunlight and the trees. It was curious that, the way the dog never took to Petrus. Vusca’s dog, perhaps it had caught Vusca’s allergy. Vusca thought of a recent incident with the horses hired by Petrus for the chariot, some trouble – then Petrus was in front of him. The sun was behind his head, giving him a sun god’s halo, dampening down the shade of his eyes.
“Father –”
“Yes?” The false jovial voice came out pat, the tone which held Petrus firmly off.
“Father, can I speak to you?”
“Why not?”
His son – he was sixteen, a young man now – uninvited did not sit. He said, as if searching in a barrel for the words: “Mother’s going to talk to you. She’s been going on about it. A marriage.”
Bored (and under the boredom the aversion rising in him like sickness). “Well, if you want,” said Vusca.
“I don’t, sir. I don’t want to marry.”
“You’ve heard the girl’s ugly.”
“No. I think she’s supposed to be all right.”
“Too old?”
“Only twelve.”
“That’s nothing then. She’s young enough to train. Oh, I know who your mother has in mind. A decent family, with Roman blood. You might as well. Out here, choices are limited.”
“I don’t want to marry, sir.”
“Wait,” said Vusca. “What are you saying?”
“Never,” said Petrus.
“Some vow?” Vusca scowled. He wanted to feel an ordinary emotion. It was coming, if he tried. Normal annoyance. A son who would not breed. “Or do you have the Greek ailment? You like your own gender best? You’ll grow out of it. Have you never had a woman?”
Under this ballista strike, Petrus went very white. The pallor threw up the colour of the eyes. Suddenly they were brilliantly in evidence.
“Not – not what you said. And I’ve never had a woman, no. Father – I’m afraid to do that.”
Vusca laughed. He looked away from the eyes, down the orchard. “Yes, you’re not the first coward there. Believe me, it’s not any punishment. You’ll like it. Only virgins can be tiresome. You’d better get in some practice first. Go to the She-Wolf. The other places aren’t worth –”
“No, Father. I don’t mean any of that. I can’t.”
Vusca was exacerbated, embarrassed. (Something in him said, Don’t let him speak. Don’t hear him out.)
“What about your friend Drusus? Hasn’t he –”
“Father, I’ve never even – once, it started – and I couldn’t – I knew if I did – something horrible – it was like falling out of my body, swallowing and choking –” Petrus was no longer rational. His voice was high and hysterical, like a girl’s.
Vusca stood up. He pushed his son away from him.
“You spend too much time with your mother. Go to a harlot and tell her all this. Let her put you right.”
He walked away and left Petrus by the trough.
What should I have done then? Heard it, and known it. I should have held him in my arms and told him, because I could have reasoned it, could have seen through the flimsy veil. I should have loved him like my son, that he was, and had the courage, with the enemy at our gate, to speak the truth and run him through. By the Light, he knew, he knew. Not knowing, and knowing it all. He only came to me for the answer. He would have made the sacrifice. He was my son.
Vusca knelt in the cell under the altar.
The purification was over. They were bringing him the wine, now. He needed the wine. He was so cold.
He could not weep, his whole life had taught him steel, not water.
The marriage came two years later. The same girl, fourteen by then. The family had waited, for Vusca’s name was reckoned on. The girl brought a small house with her dowry. It was in the town, near the Baths of Mercurius, a poor area going generally to hovels. There seemed to be a reverse of the arrangement between Vusca and his wife: Petrus installed his bride in her town house, and kept to the farm. He only brought her there when for propriety he must.
She was a pretty girl, a blonde with dark Roman eyes, and all the Roman ways studiously ingrained in her. Though she was a Christian, she also worshipped the other gods at their festivals.
At first she seemed merely nervous. Eventually it was obvious she was unhappy. At some point, about a year after the wedding, she confided to Lavinia that Petrus had never slept with her. She was still a virgin. She thought it was her fault, that she smelled, or that he despised her barbarian blood. (Vusca only heard of all this later.) Lavinia reassured the girl, and took her to the Isis temple, where they procured some draught or other, an aphrodisiac.
Whatever the plan, it was carried out while the girl was still staying at the farm. She wanted Lavinia’s approval and support, and perhaps to boast of success.
Vusca was off with a couple of the men, hunting. The woods to the north were full of boar that season, though they did not have any luck. They were away five days.
They returned one late afternoon, coming along the west road with the sun behind them. The villa looked as usual, the fields ripening, smoke going up from the bath-house. Then, getting closer, Vusca saw no one was out in the fields or the orchard, that the smoke was not from the bath-house vent, but from a burning strip on the slope beyond. He sent two men running to deal with that and rode fast for the villa.
The slaves and field-workers were clustered in the outer compound. They parted before him and could not seem to find any voices when he shouted at them. Then a mad screaming started in the house. It sounded like a woman in labour. The slaves made signs against evil.
Vusca ran into the building. His actions were horribly prepared. He was not amazed, or alarmed, there was only depression, a sense of futility and defeat.
Lavinia dashed into his arms. She said that in the night Petrus’ wife had gone mad. She had begun to shriek, and done so intermittently ever since. She had also torn herself with her nails. They had had to tie her to her bed. Petrus, who had been with her, had vanished. A window was shattered and there were marks on the wall. Lavinia believed a murderer had got in and killed her son, carrying off the body. This was what had driven the girl insane. Far-fetched as it was, what other explanation could be possible? (She did not admit to the story of her son’s sexual reticence, the aphrodisiac, until three days after.)
Vusca went to see the wife of Petrus.
Lucia watched over her, in apparent terror. The girl was trussed. Her body, partly bare, showed deep bleeding scratches, but her nails had never been long, these were more like the scoring of a bone pin. She screamed and tossed, then fell slack until another fit of screaming and tossing came over her. She had forgotten speech. The window had been covered now, for it seemed the sounds of pigeons flying by made her worse.
There was a faint odour in the room, something like poultry.
Vusca found that he had gone near the bed, and was staring into the eyes of his son’s wife. They had a curious glaze on them. Then she screamed and screamed and her tongue poked out like a lizard’s.
Retullus Vusca had the wine now, in the room under the altar of Mars Pater. He drank it slowly, longing for the warmth, which did not come.
He thought dimly of the time which followed his son’s disappearance. Was it only now that it seemed to have such a preordained progression?
How they had searched, and not found. How the screams had flickered out in the shuttered room, and the girl who was Petrus’ wife became silent and heavy and pliant like a piece of dough. The day when they knew she was with child. When he first saw the new colour of her eyes, like lotuses in a marsh.
How he heard of a demon in the woods. How a native man was killed and a native girl was raped by something among the trees. How her eyes looked, and her belly began to swell.
How Retullus Vusca began to go hunting, and when he went away in the twilight of the dawn, not after boar any longer, he saw the lotus eyes of Lavinia watching him from a window.
And when he slept in the woods, he saw the eyes in his sleep, all those eyes made from the amethyst, and waking and lifting his hunting knife he looked and saw the same eyes there, reflecting in the blade.
How he hunted over the hills, above the native hutments, in the woods, going always further and further from the town, the shadow of Rome, and reason.
He wondered if he would discover the polecat man from the hills, who had done this. He did not think he would. Barbarus had died years back of a stomach sickness. But Vusca too kept the small pain under his ribs, the scar of the battle he had not, after all, won –
The woman from the hutment gave birth before term, to a monster. Evidently they killed the baby, which was scaled. The mother died, or they helped her die. Then Petrus’ wife started her labour.
As Vusca was in the atrium collecting his spears and knives for hunting, Lavinia entered. Her hair and robe were loose in the early morning. She smiled and said, “Don’t go.” She had not smiled since Petrus’ “murder.” Now she took Vusca’s hand from the knife and put it on her breast. A flare of lust went through him. For years he had not gone with any woman. Now he engorged, and in her starving smiling purple eyes he saw the reason.
“Get away from me,” he said. “It isn’t you, you bitch, don’t you know that yet? How we are – what’s in us, with our blood?”
She shook her head, she rubbed herself against him. He went past her, and out of the villa. His dog, which had been running up to him, turned suddenly back with a whine.
“Good, Remus,” said Vusca. “Good dog, brave lion. Yes, that’s right. Stay away.” And the dog wagged its tail, trembling.
Vusca leaned on the wall until nausea and darkness subsided.
Then he went towards the hill country.
He realised, almost too late, his error. Or perhaps the god – Mars the Warrior, Mithras, Bringer of Light – perhaps the god told him.
He turned back, got on the road, and reached the town gate before sunset.
Only the whores of the west town now went to the Baths of Mercurius; the deity was their patron, they had some claim. Behind, a plethora of huts had gone up, among mud alleys where once a garden grew. There had been some talk, in a wine-shop, some killings, orgiastic and bloody, the fanatic work of some fresh sect … the women went out in pairs.
The house of Petrus’ wife stood by a ruined shrine, and a great castanea shaded the doorway, while it wormed roots like levers under the wall.
The decrepit slave who kept the door knew Vusca, and let him in. The slave had forgotten, or else did not know, asking after the young master and his wife. Vusca grunted some falsehood. He inquired if the house stayed quiet. The slave said it did, but he was deaf and almost blind. The other slaves had been taken over to the villa or reclaimed by the girl’s family.
The ancient slave brought candles, and bread and wine for Vusca’s repast, then crept off to his quarters on the upper floor.
Vusca ate, and inspected his hunting weapons. Then he doused the light.
Even here, over the quiet night, he could make out the trumpets from the Fort. He had not heard them for a long while. Gates, and the first and second watches. Then there was some clatter from a nearby brothel that cut other sounds off from him. He resented that. He visualised the drunken party, the men topped up with lechery and the whores loud with beer, the bad musicians, all the stuff of a paltry world that he had looked down on and which now he nearly envied.
The party guttered and went still at last. An owl cried over the roofs of the town. The dining room, where the slave had taken him, looked on the garden court (weeds and a cracked urn) and he saw the stars, and the opposite roof over the colonnade and vaguely the stars darkened and the tiled roofs, the pillars, the urn, came clear. An hour to cockcrow, dawn. And something was moving on the tiles there, something –
Vusca sat in his shadow like stone. What was on the roof? He thought of the owl, the wide wings, a dart of a head – then it was gone.
In the stillness, sharp as a needle, Vusca heard the noise of something inside an upper room across the court.
It was not the slave. The slave slept at the other end of the house. It did not sound like the slave, either. It lightly shuffled, and hopped.
Vusca gripped one of the spears. The knife was in his right hand.
He went to the place where the stair was, and climbed up sightless, silent, to the second storey. He heard the noise again at once, behind a door, a bird’s noise, scuttering and pecking about.
He felt nothing now. His heart raged, but he was numb, as if from poison.
He opened the door, and pushed it, and went through.
It was a room without furnishing, save for some old sacks. A window showed grey sky, and the other way in.
Under the window something was feeding. It glanced up, and a coil of black tissue trailed from its mouth back to the torn-out human heart that lay before it. The mouth was not a mouth, but the beak of a gigantic bird. The eyes shone, two mauve stars came in with it at the window.
Vusca knew it. He knew it for the demon on the amulet, and also he knew it for his only son. Then he plunged forward, kicked it down, crashed upon it, and drove the knife through its left eye into the mindless brain beneath.
The hands and arms held him in a desperate embrace as it died. It was the only time Vusca had been held in the arms of his son. When they let go, the creature was stretched under him, the beak open and the remaining eye glaring.
Vusca stood up. He felt neither triumph nor grief, only an awful freezing coldness. For a time he stayed there, aimless, and the sun started to come and cockcrow sounded miles away. The dreadful thing, the worse thing was, he did not know what to do.
It was broad day when he thought of something. He could detect the slave creeping about below by then, and sparrows twittered in the garden court.
Vusca rolled the body of Petrus into a corner, among the sacks. Then he struck fire, and gave the room to it.
When he was sure the flames had hold, he went down and collected the slave, explaining to him that the house was burning. The slave sobbed as they went into the street. Soon a crowd collected, and watchmen came running to tackle the blaze. Vusca got away easily in the confusion. Probably they would save most of the house, but not the upper room. Petrus had had his funeral pyre. He had even had tears, though they were the tears of a slave, and shed in ignorance.
He did not go back to the villa. He sent a man, discovered in a tavern, a former legionary who had served under him, and was known to Lavinia, to fetch the shield and breast-plate and swords. The man was an habitual drunkard, but could be trusted in the morning, if offered money. That was what the Auxilia, the legions, had become. He told the man to ask after his son’s wife.
When the fellow returned he had had a drink or two, but carried all the gear in an untidy bundle. He grumbled, not bothering as to why it was wanted, said he had had nuisance with Vusca’s slaves who seemed to think thievery was afoot. There had been another murder, in the native slum over the river – the heart of the victim was missing. And there had been a fire at Vusca’s son’s house on the west side, did Vusca know? Vusca said he had heard.
“And my daughter-in-law?”
“Ah that,” said the soldier, “two of ’em. A fine boy, and a little girl. Now maybe you think that calls for a cup of wine?”
Vusca paid him and gave him his wine, and left him in the tavern.
Vusca went out carrying his nondescript bundle, wrapped in the old army cloak.
He had prayed she would die, and the progeny would die too.
Now he should go to the villa after all, go with the knife, see to it. Simple, to kill a child with amethyst eyes. But he knew he could not.
He sat on a stone bench in the street, near to a baker’s. All the town passed him, the carters and loafers, the powdered girls with their attendants, a Christian priest, a sweating bricklayer who asked him to move his feet and said, when he did, “Thanks, dad.”
Vusca sat all day on the bench. No one knew him. He was some old worn-out dad to this town where he had lived his manhood and commanded the Fort and walked the arrogance of Rome into the streets.
When it was dark, the whores began to call from their lamplit doors.
He shouldered his life and his soul, and went to the temple of Mars.
He had finished the priests’ wine.
Only death could warm him now.
Retullus Vusca, purified for the act by an elder priesthood, took up the sword. He drove it in through the abdomen, upward, leaning into the agony to meet the point, until it bit into his heart. Then he rested. The stroke had been exact. He need do nothing more. He was not afraid. He did not mind the pain, which was already flowing out from him. A tender warmth blossomed where the pain had been, on the blade in his heart.
It was then he discovered the final task still to do. By the miracle of the sword cut, a warning had been left to him, under his hand, to give – somehow he must achieve it.
The Roman crawled over his blood to the spot where the Medusa shield leaned on the wall. Through the nothingness of death, he struggled to see and feel her wounded face.
He prayed for an impossible strength. The god heard him.
As he fell back on the floor of the cell, Vusca dragged the shield with him. It covered him against the cold and dark. He could sleep now.