Anyone could be a member of the Dei: your best friend since childhood, even your brother or mother. It was this ruthless reality that kept the empire on edge. His first-hand knowledge that the Dei counted their lives for nothing next to their cause only further unnerved Virtus as he and Caelus merged with the cross-traffic of Crooked Street.
Vendors clapped cymbals and called out to the crowd as it snaked along the thoroughfare under the strung-up torches.
“New versions of Oedipus and the Oracle! Ceramic, bronze and silver!”
A young boy from a nearby stand shoved a figurine into Virtus’s hand and stretched out his own for payment. “Oedipus!”
Virtus looked at the souvenir idol. The face was cut to resemble the late emperor Nero, just like the colossus near the Flavian Amphitheater back in Rome. The Oedipus “comedy” tonight was a fiendishly clever, thinly disguised retelling of Nero sleeping with his own mother. It was a staple of the Greek playwright Athanasius of Athens to take the classic tragedies and twist them into humorous, subversive commentary about contemporary Roman virtue in high places, or lack thereof.
“Did you see this, Virtus?” demanded Caelus, showing him the figurine of the Oracle from the play. Actually, it looked more like an orb than a figurine. “Did you see this?!”
Virtus gave the marble orb a closer look and with a start realized it was cut to look like Caelus.
Caelus waved his arms hysterically. “How does that Greek get away with it?”
Virtus had no idea. But he didn’t like standing in the open with Caelus, flesh pressing against them on all sides. A blade could shoot out from the crowd and withdraw, leaving him to stand over the crumpled corpse of portly Caelus. A bad omen for Caesar, for sure, and for his own future.
“Entertainment is our religion, and religion is our entertainment,” Virtus said, handing the figurines back to the disappointed boy. “The rules of mortal men don’t apply to the gods of the cosmic theater.”
Caelus, who clearly considered himself one of the gods, nodded as Virtus moved them along. “Well said, Virtus. You are wiser than you look.”
Having cleared the river of revelers on Crooked Street, they turned north into the quieter, darker streets of Ephesus. It was a better, wealthier part of town, and they were free of the anonymous masses.
“See, Virtus, I told you we’d make it. The stars said so because I say so. Wait until you see the delights in store for us!”
Up ahead was a villa perched on a hill. It overlooked the sparkling lights of the great theater, library and harbor beyond. The entrance was a nondescript bolted door. One could have easily missed it save for the bronze celestial globe on a stone pillar in front, and the two guards posted on either side under torches, so frozen in bearing they could have been statues.
Ex-legionnaires, Virtus guessed, who either weren’t satisfied with their pensions or enjoyed certain side benefits from their new profession in retirement. As for the celestial globe, it was often depicted in art with Urania, the muse of astronomy.
Ergo, they had found Club Urania.
Virtus didn’t like the looks of the thick smoke that hung in the air above the courtyard wall, nor the loud and slurred sounds of men and women high on wine and aphrodisiacs wafting over as well. Rome pretended that the empire was one great banner cut from a single cloth. But establishments like Urania revealed its underside as a patchwork of both silk and sackcloth, its seams stretched to the point of tearing apart. That the only thing holding this world together was so thin a thread as this fat pretender Caelus, who existed solely to prove the prophecies about Domitian wrong, only heightened Virtus’s unease.
Caelus, however, looked delighted. “The priestess back at the temple said you must speak into the globe. There must be a pipe inside that snakes into the villa.”
Ignoring the guards, Caelus walked up to the globe in front of the bolted door. “Muse of heaven,” he commanded, his voice winded from the short but steep climb to the villa. “Open the sky.”
The door seemed to open by itself, inviting them inside.
Poor Virtus didn’t know what he was missing, thought Caelus, resplendent after an arousing ritual of mineral baths in progressive tubs of hot and cold water. The stoic simpleton could have joined him on Caesar’s denarius but had chosen to stand outside in the courtyard with the chariot drivers and bodyguards of other dignitaries. He didn’t understand that the spirit was freed from the body by indulging the senses, not restraining them. Life would pass the fool by and he’d mourn these missed opportunities to taste the nectar of the gods and feel like one himself.
Now Caelus lay naked on a gigantic divan in a circular chamber as two exotic muses imported from beyond the corners of the empire worked special oils into every crevice of his body, under every flab, even into parts unknown to him. Caelus could only stare up at the domed ceiling painted black with white points of light arranged like constellations of the zodiac and thank the gods for his good fortune.
The haze of the opium above the flicking candles was already taking effect. The mosaics of the nine muses on the walls seemed to dance like shadows, and the constellations drifted across the painted heavens above him. The muse working on his face cupped her hands over his nose and mouth so he could inhale some exotic extract, while the muse working his legs began to massage his loins.
And then they came, one by one: seven more naked muses with foreign tongues to take their turns on him, giggling as his blob of a body writhed and wriggled uncontrollably. Together they took him to a higher plane of pleasure beyond the bounds of any he thought this earth could offer.
Truly, I have been born again, he thought when it was all over and he was alone in the chamber, the muses magically gone.
His body still vibrating with a new energy and lightness of being, Caelus slid off the divan and walked under an archway to the adjoining bathroom, which was even larger than the chamber he had just left. It was arranged like a public toilet with a fountain in the center and around it a long marble bench in the shape of a horseshoe with neatly spaced holes. A small water trough like a stream ran along the base of the bench to wash patrons’ feet as they sat down.
He noticed a small fish symbol scratched into the mosaic floor. It was the sign of those blood-drinking, flesh-eating Christians. They had usurped the new Age of Pisces in the stars as their self-fulfilling sign of ascendancy. He resented anyone who dared muscle in on his heavens, most of all these superstitious amateurs.
“I piss on Christ!” he proclaimed and painted the fish graffiti with his urine. “Swim in this!”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move in the water below the toilet bench. He leaned over the dark hole to have a closer look.
Was it a shadow? No.
A face!
All of a sudden the floor gave way beneath him. His head banged on the trapdoor paver, and he felt himself begin to slide. Then two sets of hairy arms reached up out of the darkness and dragged him down to Hades.
Caelus awoke in a dank, underground cell. Dazed, he squinted his eyes in the dim light. Next to him lay the bruised and bloody corpse of Virtus. Rats had begun to nip on his bodyguard’s flesh.
What foul fate is this? Caelus wondered as panic seized him. He was on his knees now.
Virtus had lectured Caelus for his own safety about the so-called Ephesian Underworld — the network of mysterious tunnels that lay beneath the streets of the old city. The tunnels connected the cellars of certain downtown inns and taverns to the great harbor. Originally built to move goods from storage to the ships and avoid the cart and foot traffic on the streets, they were also used to abduct unwary visitors and sell them as galley slaves. Caelus had assumed this type of passage was reserved for prostitutes and female slaves, and that Virtus had only been trying to scare him.