“Perhaps I should have a little talk with Torquatus about this,” Apollinaris said, rising and tucking the list of the arrested men into a fold of his robe.
Torquatus’s office was one floor above Apollinaris’s in the Consular building. In the old days the two Consuls had divided the ninth floor between themselves: that was how it had been in Apollinaris’s first three terms as Consul, certainly. The first time, as junior Consul, he had used the office on the eastern side of the building, looking down into Trajan’s Forum. During his second and third terms, when he now was senior Consul, he had moved over to the somewhat more imposing rooms on the western side of the top floor. But during Apollinaris’s long absence in the provinces Torquatus had expanded his own Consular domain into the part of the floor that had previously been his, and had set up a secondary office for his colleague on the building’s eighth floor. “The Consul’s tasks have increased so greatly since we reconstituted the post,” Torquatus explained, a little shamefacedly, when Apollinaris, having returned, had showed up to reclaim his old office. “You were away fighting in Sicilia and probably wouldn’t be back for two or three years, and I needed more room close at hand for the additional staff members that now were required, et cetera, et cetera—”
The new arrangement rankled more than a little, but this was not the moment, Apollinaris felt, to start quarreling with his co-Consul about office space. There would be time to express concern over matters of precedence and status once things were a little more stable at the capital.
Torquatus was busily signing papers when Apollinaris arrived. He seemed unaware, for a moment, that his fellow Consul had entered the room. Then he looked up and offered Apollinaris a quick apologetic smile. “So much paperwork—”
“Signing more death warrants, are you?”
Apollinaris had meant the statement to sound neutral, even bland. But Torquatus’s frowning response told him that he had not quite succeeded.
“As a matter of fact, Apollinaris, I am. Does that trouble you?”
“A little, perhaps. I don’t think I understood that you were actually going to have Demetrius’s people put to death.”
“I thought we had discussed it.”
“Not in so many words. You said you were ‘removing’ them, I think. I don’t recall your explicitly explaining what you meant by that.” Already a defensive iciness was visible in Torquatus’s eyes. Apollinaris brought forth the list of prisoners that Charax had procured for him and said, “Do you think it’s wise, Torquatus, to inflict such severe penalties on such trivial people? The Emperor’s barber? The Emperor’s clown?”
“You’ve been away from the capital many years,” Torquatus said. “These men are not such simple innocents as you may think. I send no one lightly to his death.”
“Even so, Torquatus—”
Smoothly Torquatus cut him off. “Consider our choices, if you will. Strip them of office but let them go free? Then they remain among us, stirring up trouble, conniving to get themselves back to their high positions in the palace. We merely imprison them? Then we must maintain them at public expense, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Send them into exile? Then they take their illicitly gained wealth with them, which otherwise we could recapture for the treasury. No, Apollinaris, getting rid of them once and for all is the only solution. If we allow them to live, sooner or later they’ll manage to get access to His Majesty again and begin working him up to overthrow us.”
“So we put them to death to minimize the risks to ourselves?”
“The risks to the Empire,” Torquatus said. “Do you think I care that much about my own life? But if we fall, the Empire falls with us. These men are the enemies of the commonwealth. You and I are all that stand between them and the reign of chaos. They have to go. I thought we had already come to full agreement on that point.”
In no way was that statement true, Apollinaris knew. Yet he saw the validity of the argument. The Empire stood, not for the first time, at the brink of anarchy. The disturbances in the provinces had given early warning of that. Augustus had created the Imperium by dint of military force, and it was the army that had sustained the Emperors on their thrones all these centuries. But Emperors ruled, ultimately, by the consent of the governed. No army was strong enough to compel the populace to accept the authority of a wicked or crazy Emperor indefinitely: that had been shown again and again, from the time of Caligula and Nero on up through history. Demetrius was plainly crazy; most of the government officials were demonstrably corrupt; if Torquatus was right that the plebeians were muttering about a revolution, and it was altogether possible that he was right about that, then a fierce purge of the corruption and craziness might be the only way of heading off calamity. And to allow Demetrius’s minions to live, and to regroup, and to regain the Emperor’s ear, was to invite that very calamity.
“Very well,” said Apollinaris. “How far do you intend to carry this, though?”
“As far as the situation demands,” Torquatus said.
The month of Julius gave way to the month of Augustus, and the worst summer in Roma’s long history went grinding on, intolerable heat, choking humidity, low ominous clouds hiding the sun, lightning in the hills but never any rain, tensions rising, tempers snapping everywhere as the daily procession of carts bearing the latest batches of the condemned rolled onward toward the executioner’s block. Great throngs came to watch each day, commoners and patricians alike, looking toward the headsman and his victims in the fascinated way one stares at a weaving serpent making ready to strike. The spectacle of horror was terrifying but no one could stay away. The reek of blood hung over Roma. With each passing day the city grew more pure, and much more frightened, paralyzed by fear and suspicion.
“Five weeks now,” said Lactantius Rufus, who was the presiding magistrate of the Senate, “and the killing has spread into our own House itself.”
“Pactumeius Pollio, tried and found guilty,” Julius Papinio said. He stood closest to Rufus among the little group of men on the portico of the Senate this sizzling, steamy morning.
“Likewise Marcus Florianus,” said the rotund Terentius Figulus.
“And Macrinus,” said Flavius Lollianus.
“And Fulpianus.”
“That’s it, I think. Four all together.”
“Four Senators, yes,” said Lactantius Rufus. “So far. But who’s next, I ask you? You? Me? Where does it stop? Death is king in Roma these days. This whole House is endangered, my friends.” He was a great sickle of a man, enormously tall, stoop-shouldered, his back curving in a wide arc, his face in profile a jagged blade of angular features. For more than thirty years he had been a prominent member of the Senate: a confidant of the late Emperor Lodovicus, a close adviser to the present Emperor Demetrius, a three-time holder of the Consulship. “We must find a way of protecting ourselves.”