Fresh Glories From The Heavens

He has seen Commodus spring up from his sister’s shadow like a night-growing mushroom, pale and unwholesome; he was once the urgent-spoken harelipped boy who fell behind in his studies and wrote bad verses. He had never been a moral man, or likely to become one. Now he is the emperor of Rome, and he is monstrous.

He has the Spaniard brought to him in chains, and stripped; he briefly makes a show of admiring his scars while they chain him to the wall, fixed to an iron ring meant for the keeping of wild beasts and other such dangerous pets. The Emperor paces like a caged leopard.

“There’s splendid uniforms for you, at the end of all this. What they put on you for the arena is no better than a toy, it’s just for looks, but this – Hercules himself could wish for no better attire. Or perhaps I mean Alexander, I don’t know.”

Maximus bristles and wrings his wrists against the cuffs, but he is on too close a tether to do more than jostle at him and be hotly aware of his limitations. They both must know this – the moment he is relieved of these chains, he will strangle him. As it is, he cannot raise his arms, nor extend them more than a hand’s-breadth or two beyond his thighs. Were his bonds before him, he could wrench himself free as he has before and make him rue well what a risk this was. He’d gnaw his own hand off if it let him get better access to the Emperor’s throat.

“Would you care to know the price named for you? For Maximus the Spaniard – or is it Maximus the Merciful now? I could have purchased two dozen of your fellows for it, for that sort of sum your father-in-law would have turned his own daughter out and thrown in the boy for free. Yet your manager was so reluctant to part with you; why is this? He must have known he couldn’t deny me. It would have been terribly impolite, not to mention impolitic. Would you care to know your price? The going rate for a crowd favorite in the bloom of health?”

Maximus couldn’t care less; he sets his own life at a price too low to estimate, and the things he’s living for at a higher price than all the world. He wishes this farce were over and done with.

“I would not.”

A line flickers between Commodus’ brows, and his lip begins to curl. But he proceeds with the absurd farce of his performance,

“Proximo must have been fond of you. Fond of how much money you could bring him, certainly, or perhaps he hoped to keep you to himself in order that your good reputation might rub off on him.” It’s a clumsy jab, delivered by a man who would not possibly understand the allegiances men form in adversity – or any affections that were not at their root empty, perverse, venal. It explains a great deal about his own dispositions. He lifts his eyebrows as if Maximus may have missed the insinuation, and his sloe-colored eyes search his face for some indication this gross probing may have struck home. Maximus’ jaw is set, and his face is as impassive as stone.

Commodus places his hand on his chest, plays with the folds of his tunic, then sets his hand against a scar in Maximus’ shoulder. He looks down, thoughtful enough, humming through closed lips.

Maximus stays silent.

“You mean to kill me, of course.”

Maximus needs no more than one look to answer that.

“How sad it is, for brothers to so mistrust each other. But you won’t, in the end, and if you try, they’ll cut you open navel to chin and heap your entrails ‘round the triumphal columns inscribed with my name. With your history of improbable escapes, the arena would only be a disappointment –you’ll draw a greater crowd drawn and quartered on the Campus Martius. You’ll live long enough with your guts hanging out to know the taste of your own cock in your mouth when they cut it off. Would you like that, Spaniard? You who my father found so pleasing–”

He strikes him, hoping to stagger him, but Maximus is braced for it; his unshaven cheek stings from the rings on his fingers.

No amount of words Commodus can summon up to his command will serve him as well as a single sentence from his father’s lips. He lacks the quality of soul which his father possessed, not the palest shadow of it.

“My sister tried to persuade me, no, no,” he briefly adopts a flutish lilt that must be his approximation of Lucilla’s voice, “that you’re made for the arena, and there you ought to die, and I am so fond of what you’ve done for the games. We had to have you for ourselves. Lucius talks of nothing but your triumphs in the arena, and his mother may say otherwise, but I know even she must be impressed. Perhaps I’ll make a gift of you when I’ve finished. I’m certain she will accept.”

Maximus stands at attention as he would before a competitor, or one of Proximo’s investors intent on inspecting the goods; however much wrath needles him he does not let his bearing go rigid, all muscles readied for instantaneously action. His jaw is tight,

Commodus takes a small step closer; close against his chest as if to part his legs with a nudge of his knee, the cloth of his toga rustling. He smells clean, if not for the dregs of spilled wine, the insipid threads of a woman’s perfume twisted around him like a wreath.

“My sister must learn I will not be denied.”

He thumbs lightly against Maximus’ cheek. The emperor’s hands are soft, for all he prides himself on his swordsmanship, and Maximus will not give him the satisfaction of touching him in return until he can drive a sword through his guts. Commodus’ eyes are womanish but no woman is as mad-desiring as this. Women find the Spaniard irresistible; just the same he has had grease-painted catamites to hang their arms around his neck and whisper ecstasies of devotion, when they can keep up with the throng. Roman whores are honest, in comparison with its Imperial family. Maximus has never sold his favors, nor given them away; he is not the only gladiator with a wife dead or absent or otherwise lost to him, but he can afford to decline. His disgust is so total that it has become numbing; he is so close, so close to what he hates, and he cannot swallow down his total detestation. If he speaks now he will come undone entirely.

From the slaves’ chatter and judging from Commodus’ own intimations, Lucilla is in the palace tonight; likely not far from here. He trusts her only slightly further than anyone else, in this nest of snakes.

“Will you not speak in your own defense, brother? Should I cut out your tongue?” He lowers his hateful eyes. “Here, Spaniard. You’re no stranger to hard service, and my sister recommends you most highly. Would you kindly kneel?”

There’s no question in it. He is too tired, too filthy, and half-drugged from the wine poured down his throat before he arrived here, surely in the expectation of something of this sort or something equally ugly. Maximus sinks to his knees, arms aching behind his back, but he is unbowed and no more submissive there than before. Sticky-soft hands grip his face and the side of his neck, irritably digging in for want of anything to grasp and pull on; he shakes him by the scruff of the neck, like a dog or an unruly child.

“Open your mouth. Open your mouth, or I’ll give you both cause to wish you had.”

Maximus raises his head; Commodus’ thumbnail digs in against the hollow place beneath his jaw. His intentions are plain enough.

He thinks of Lucilla – in his mind’s eye he knows horribly well what Commodus might do to a woman he wished to punish, a thousand bloody inventions or the hammer-strike of brutality that was his own wife’s end. He thinks of flame-kissed blackened corpses swinging in the Spanish breeze. He considers.

When Commodus has him, he has him worse than he might have a woman; his fingers force between his lips as if daring him to bite and accusing him of the intention all in one. He fucks him mercilessly, in the mouth like a prisoner or a slave, forcing him down on his spite-hard cock and thrusting against him when he jerks back, then again; Maximus does not know if the sharp burst of copper he tastes is blood or the other man’s seed. The act gouges and scrapes and threatens to gag, but his choking seems to excite him rather than repulse. It’s ugly and brief and it is far from the worst thing to happen to him but it is a glimpse of Hades.

When he’s finished with him, he lets him drop.

“You might have loved me, once,” Commodus says, with a queer mad chokedness in his voice that can scarcely be recognized as threatened tears, “is that not so?

He reaches down and his thumbnail traces his split lip, trailing dampness from his mouth to his chin. Maximus bares his teeth, and spits.