The Trident

(Age of Decadence)

Lies and deceit leading on,
the maelstrom swirls us back.
We return to where we began.

PROLOGUE:

Mucia Faustina was seated on the third level of the amphitheater, the maenianum summum, the section allocated to women. On the roof above her the poor, the pullati, stood to watch the games. Fortunately she was in the first row of seats above the balteus, one of the steep walls that separated the three levels of Rome's Flavian amphitheater, giving her a clear view of the oval arena without having to look over someone's shoulder. Though she would have preferred to be on the podium just above the arena where she could see all the action up close. But, then, she couldn't complain. The late emperor Nero, it is said, even in his privileged box, had been forced to use a cut emerald to see all the action having had poor vision.

And she certainly couldn't complain about the weather. A balmy breeze kept down the stench of animals that had been slaughtered by the bestiarii during the morning hunt. And banks of white, fluffy clouds cut down the heat and glare of the sun. It had been such a pleasant a day so far that there had not been any need to unfurl the velarium to provide shade for the spectators.

Soon the noxii, prisoners and other antisocial types, would be brought out for the noon executions. Normally this was when many people would take a break for meals or to relieve themselves, but not today, for today the amphitheater was jam-packed. Over 50,000 people took up all the seats while another 25,000 stood shoulder to shoulder in the passageways that encircled the three levels above the arena. No one wanted to leave and take a chance of not being able to get back in, for Rome's greatest living gladiator, Thanatos, a retiarius, was scheduled to fight two secutors that afternoon on the Bridge of Death.

A canvas tarp hid the bridge sitting in the middle of the arena waiting to be unveiled when Thanatos would make his grand entrance later that afternoon. Mucia Faustina squirmed on her wooden seat in anticipation. Thanatos was her idol. Many nights she had lain awake feverish with sexual excitement as she recalled his hard, young body and handsome face. All the women were hot for Thanatos. On all the walls were graffiti extolling his sexual magnetism by female and male fans: "Oh, Thanatos, sheath your mighty dagger in me." . . . "One night with me, Thanatos, and you'll never desire another.". . . "You are the heartthrob of all women, Thanatos."

Mucia felt the excitement rise in her as the trumpets blared and the first noxii were escorted into the arena by men armed with spears and whips. Mucia glanced at her program of events purchased from a hawker for a quadrans. These were Christians who would not declare Domitian their God. They always held themselves up as being better than others. Mucia had no sympathy for people disloyal to Rome. Especially Christians who everyone knew conducted lewd orgies, engaged in incest and practiced cannibalism as part of their obscene rituals.

Whatever punishment they received in the arena they deserved.

Mucia felt her heart race as a nude woman was shoved onto her knees into a circle of muscular men wearing only loin cloths and armed with whips. As she rose up one of the men lashed her naked flesh; even as high up as she was Mucia could hear the woman's scream and the crack of the whip. All around her spectators shouted their encouragements.

"Give it to her!" "Rip her!" "Make the blood flow!"

Catching the fever, Mucia rose to her feet shouting her own imperatives with clenched fists raised above her head. When she sat down the woman next to her placed a hand on her thigh. Mucia glanced at her and saw the events of the moment distorting her face with raw lust. Her hand, smooth and warm, trembling, moved up under Mucia's stola and up the inside of her thigh. Mucia gasped as she felt the tip of the woman's fingers touch the shaved surface of her cunt.

Below the screams of the noxii rose to the highest levels of the maenianum. When the naked woman had been reduced to a bloody pulp two men dressed as ancient demons rushed out with red hot irons which they placed against her flesh. She made a feeble motion indicating that she was still alive. Seeing that, one of the men slit her throat with a dagger, then they dragged her off toward the Portal of Death by poles fixed with sharp hooks in her heels. Other noxii were impaled on spears and forced to crawl around until they bled to death while the crowd roared with laughter at their frantic struggles.

Mucia watched the blood flow, the screams of the dying feeding her libido. The woman's fingers were working in her. The seat became wet beneath her, then a delicious delirium engulfed her as the woman clutched her tit and forced a wet tongue in her mouth.

Chapter I

"One thing I know, and it's this: all the works of mortal hand lie under sentence of mortality: we live among things doomed." -- Seneca

Loud claps of thunder followed brilliant tributaries of lightning on a rainy night as two youths in their mid teens walked down the Vicus Farbricii to where it terminated in the Via Sacra. Flashes of lightning revealed the gilded statue of the late emperor Nero looming one hundred and twenty feet high and the Flavian amphitheater to the right.

Moving beyond they entered a cluttered section of Rome called Subura located between the Viminal and Esquiline hills. The buildings here bordered a dreary warren of narrow winding streets and alleys as dark as the roiling clouds overhead. Fortunately the heavy rain would soon wash all the foul-smelling offal thrown from windows into the streets down drains to empty eventually into the Tiber.

The two youths moved warily now, for it was dangerous to walk the streets of Subura at night due to roving gangs of robbers and murderers who preyed on the hapless. They carried stout sticks for protection and for light lanterns, but there were no street signs or house numbers to guide them.

"Now tell me again, my dear friend, why we are risking our asses to be here."

From underneath the dripping wool hood of his cloak Gaius Antonius Saturninus turned his head and grinned with smooth, gleaming teeth at his hawk-faced companion, Lucius Horatius Calvus.

"You've seen my stepmother, amicus; isn't that enough reason?"

Lucius raised a judicious eyebrow. "Perhaps, but I think you're headed for a world of trouble.

"No doubt, but I've got to have her. She's like a goddess, so beautiful.

"What about your father?"

"As you know, all he delights in is governing Judea. Besides, I've asked Venus to give me a sign if what I wanted was wrong; I've received nothing."

"That's because the void does not speak to us, Gaius."

"Humph, I detect Epicurus, or one of those, speaking through you. If the gods are indifferent, then what does it matter what we do?"

Lucius grinned, water dripping from the tip of his nose. "That's a conundrum I'll have to bring up with my instructor and get back to you. But he did say once, I believe, that a stiff dick lends itself to a perverse youth."

"And was he speaking from experience?"

After a few minutes they came to a fork and paused.

"Are you sure you know where the fuck we are?" Lucius asked.

Gaius stroked his chin. "Hmm, I think we go to the right."

They walked on for several more minutes, hunched against the wind and rain, before coming to an intersection. On a corner diagonal to them was a tavern emitting a dim, amber glow from an open doorway sheltered by an extended arch with embedded Corinthian columns on either side.

They paused for a heavy gush of wind to pass, then stepped from the raised gravel-surfaced sidewalk down into the calf-deep rushing water of the cobblestone street. Refuse swept past them; a human fetus was revealed monetarily in the light of their lanterns. Certainly no petcocks would have to be opened to clean the streets for several days hereafter.

They hurried into the tavern lowering their hoods and shaking water from their cloaks. The sour smell of stale urine and vomit permeated the air. A bronze cock with a grinning human head hung from the ceiling with several lamps dangling on chains. Two men were playing dice at a small table, clay cups of wine at their elbows. Although gambling was illegal except on the Saturnalia or for athletic events the prohibition was rarely enforced. An older woman and a younger woman, both heavily made up, sat at another table next to a counter where a burly man, with a brutish, sly face, reclined in a chair, arms folded across his chest. His eyes followed them as they took their seats at a table near the doorway.

The older woman gave the younger one a nod, and she rose and came over. She may have been pretty, for she had a well shaped oval face, but too much makeup made it hard to tell what lay beneath. Her eyebrows had been plucked and dark, artificial ones painted on with exaggerated arches like the wings of a raven taking flight. Her eyelids were rubbed to a dark brown and her lips and cheeks reddened with lees of wine, or perhaps blood.

She looked over the two youths, a hand on hip. One had curly, black hair over a hooked nose, angular face and close set brown eyes like a raptor. He would be the scholarly one, no doubt, but the other youth was much more to her liking. Handsome beyond belief. The face of a Greek god. Blond with piercing blue eyes that chilled her in exciting ways. Adonis. Adonis. Oh, to be his Aphrodite. His wool cloak hid the shape of his body, but the broad, sloping shoulders and the muscular neck hinted at a body to die for.

"What can I do for you?" she asked, focusing on her Adonis. She slid her hand down the curve of her hip slowly, seductively.

Gaius gave her a narrow stare. "We need to see Bagus."

"Anything else you want?"

"Maybe."

"Hmm, I'll be waiting -- Bagus," she called over her shoulder, then with swaying hips went back to her table.

"Gods be damned," Lucius murmured. "Has there ever been a woman you couldn't have?"

Gaius chuckled. "My stepmother."

"I bleed for you."

The burly man got up slowly and came over to them.

"You wanted to see me?" His voice was gravelly. A jagged red scar circled his throat. He had the unmistakable military bearing of a former soldier that never rubs off after twenty years of mandatory service. He stood with both feet firmly planted on the tile floor, weight evenly distributed, hands down by his side, a defensive stance that he'd probably assumed many times in combat, and which had become by now unthinking second nature.

"We want to see Merlo," Gaius said.

"What makes you think I know anyone by that name?"

"A friend of mine got knocked up. She needed a remedy. She told me you could put me in touch with him."

Bagus sized them up for a moment then pulled a chair over and sat down. Two rich kids dressed like commoners in coarse woolens.

"Okay, but keep your voices down." He glanced over his shoulder toward the two customers playing dice, but deep in their cups they were too engrossed in their game to pay them any attention. Slowly he rubbed the back of his neck with a beefy calloused hand.

"I might be able to help you, but it will be expensive. This man Merlo is reclusive; a mystic from the Lake Fucinus region, who worships Angitia, the Marsi's goddess of healing, especially snake bites --"

"Witches, warlocks, necromancers," Lucius murmured.

"Yes, many are, but they know more of the legitimate healing art than all the doctors and herbalists in Rome."

"Can you take us to him?" Gaius asked.

"Tonight?"

Gaius nodded.

"For a price." He glanced toward the arched doorway, where rain splattered loudly against the concrete walls, as if to say the price would be higher on such a night."

"Twenty-eight sestertii," Gaius offered. "A week's salary."

"Fifty," Bagus countered. "That's nothing to one of your class. Besides, I risk a lot if we're caught; it is death to consort with a necromancer."

Gaius, shrugged, "Not much chance of that. Thirty-five."

Bagus nodded reluctantly, then excused himself, returning in a few minutes wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a lantern. Gaius noticed a sword hanging from a baldric. Only the frumetarii, the secret police, and the emperor's praetorian guard were allowed to carry a sword within the pomerium, the sacred boundary of Rome.

"Come on, gentlemen. We've got a long, wet walk ahead of us," Bagus said, pulling his hood up and stepping outside.

"Take care, Lucius," Gaius whispered. "I'm betting he knows how to use that sword. Don't let him get behind you."

As Gaius started to follow Lucius out a voice stopped him.

The younger woman.

"You are coming back, aren't you?" She stepped up to him and placing a hand on his upper arm felt an impressive bulge of hardness.

"Do you doubt it, my Princess?"

"You won't regret it. I'll do anything you ask."

She reached down between his legs and squeezed another impressive bulge.

Outside, Bagus turned to Lucius as the rain beat down upon them.

"Your amicus is good with women, isn't he?"

Lucius grinned at the bulldog face. "He can get more pussy in a day than most men will get in a life time."

"If they're all like my daughter I'd say you're right about that."

Before Lucius could reply Gaius lurched out the doorway quickly raising his open mouth to fill with rainwater, then with a disgusted gag spit out a mouthful.

"What the fuck?" Lucius asked.

"That filthy bitch almost made me swallow her rancid tongue."

Y

Bagus led them up Clivus Suburanus, a hill-street that went up into the Esquiline past high walls encircling the villas of the rich. Water rushed past them and down the street cleared now of garbage.

As they reached the top of the hill the villas thinned out to be replaced by lush gardens and nymphaeums, water temples -- marble buildings, set in park complexes, filled with fountains and sculptures open to the public.

Up until the beginning of the empire this area of the Esqiline had been full of deep pits used as the mass burial ground for tens of thousands of slaves and the poor as well as a dumping ground for dead animals and garbage. Under Augustus' reign these dumps and mass graves were ordered filled in and beautified. But the dumping continued beyond the Servian wall.

As they reached the eastern edge of the Esquiline they could see the lanterns of wagoneers waiting at the gate to enter the city and haul out the dead and other refuse to dump 400 hundred feet beyond where a series of black stones marked the legal limits.

Passing by they saw crucified criminals, naked, hanging from crosses, some still alive moaning in agony. Others were impaled on long spikes and sent up loud screams and wails of pain as their bodies slowly descended down the bloody shafts. Beyond them was a dumping ground where the bloated bodies of humans and animals lay mixed together in tangled heaps of garbage. Huge rats, eyes red in the lantern light, brazenly munched on the dead, lurching up inside the bodies which moved as if of their own volition in a danse macabre.

"Damn, the smell," Lucius said.

"Bah, it's nothing compared to the battlefield," Bagus replied.

Members of the cohorts II, the urban police, stood guard; some under a makeshift tent cast dice. Three were holding down a man while another nailed his wrists to a cross beam. They then lifted up the beam with the man hanging from it and placed it on top of a seven foot pole sunk in the ground. Then a cohort nailed his feet to the pole.

"That'll keep him," he said, patting a leg.

Gaius had moved closer to the man hanging from the cross. Blood welled from his wounds and was instantly washed away by the rain.

"What was your crime?"

"Hah," the cohort interjected with a contemptuous grunt, shoving the handle of the hammer under his leather belt. "He's a baby killer, one of those fucking Christians who deny the divinity of the Emperor."

Abruptly from the cross the man spoke in gasps. "My only crime... was... to love the Christus. Please, plunge...a dagger in my heart... end my suffering."

"Hah," the cohort railed, "you haven't begun to suffer yet, asshole; if you have anymore crap to spew out you'd better do it now; in a few hours you won't be able to speak when your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and your bones start popping from their sockets."

As they walked on, Lucius turned to Gaius. "It's a shame that some people will die needlessly for a myth."

They followed after Bagus on the Via Labicana lined with the towering, ostentatious tombs of the wealthy mingled among those lesser ones of the middle class and the poor.

Along each side of the stone-paved road flashes of lightning revealed in silhouette a vast monument-strewed city of the dead fixed against a purple drapery of clouds.

Turning off the road they made their way through a series of narrow muddy passageways among the tombs. The farther they went the more dilapidated and ancient the tombs became. Stucco had sloughed off many revealing crude brick underneath. Once pristine marble now showed cracks or had fallen away under the crumbling grip of vines. Some had roofs that had caved in centuries before. Others had become rubble, the names of the deceased as long vanished as was their days of glory.

"Here it is," Bagus said, stopping before a ramshackle brick structure.

Gaius peered in the doorway, his lamp revealing what was left of a rectangular room. To his left a stairway led down to an underground chamber and was sheltered from the rain by an overhang of what remained of cross vaulting. Where the roof was open to the sky rain beat down on the broken and overgrown tile floor with a hollow splattering sound.

Moving to the head of the stairs he could see a faint glow at the bottom of what was a columbarium.

Bagus moved next to him.

"Merlo, it's me, Bagus; got a couple of customers for you."

After a moment there was a scuffing sound and a mutter.

"We'll handle it from here," Gaius said.

"Perhaps I ought to stick around," Bagus answered. He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword.

"I don't think so."

Bagus' eyes narrowed slightly and moved from Gaius to Lucius and back to Gaius. Gaius saw his fingers tighten on the hilt.

"Ho, if I wanted to kill you two punks nothing would stop me."

"Since you don't you won't mind leaving, will you?" Gaius shuffled some coins out of his purse and laid them in his meaty hand.

Bagus stood motionless for a moment working his tongue against the inside of his cheek, then lower lip. He shrugged finally, and without another word stalked off.

"Phew, I thought we were going to get into it there," Lucius said, after letting out a breath of air. Relaxing, he loosened his grip on his stick.

"We almost did, but I don't think he wanted to engage us by lantern light. I'll go down and see Merlo; you stay up here. Put out your light and wait by the doorway. If he comes back he'll put out his light, too, so be careful. He's an old veteran who probably knows more tricks than a weasel. If he does come back give a whistle and haul ass through the open section of the wall that's crumbled away."

With his lantern before him Gaius made his way down the stone steps. At the bottom was a darkened hall. The smell of incense came from a dimly lighted chamber at the end. Along the walls were rows of dusty, square niches from floor to ceiling containing urns holding the cremated remains of the centuries' dead. Some of the niches held busts of the deceased and underneath each was a small plaque giving names and dates, some with brief testaments.

All was quiet now, the sound of the rain muffled by the thick covering of stone overhead. Someone moved in the chamber, and as Gaius came to the entrance he saw a tall man in a black robe, dark hair pulled back in a knot. The head was narrow with a pointed chin, the nose abnormally long giving his face a feral look.