intempesta nox

The image flees away from him just as he turns his head to glimpse his visitor. Whatever has disturbed him vanishes as insidiously as it had arrived — lingering upon waking, perfectly unwelcome, only to dart off the moment he ceases to be alone. It is almost comforting to forget, even at the cost of attracting his host’s attention.

Whatever Atia imagines when the two of them are together, it can scarcely be this — Octavian with a crick in his neck and a restless mind, Caesar companionably concerned with his hair untidy from the pillow. Caesar at home is not as bald as they say, though no doubt he is vain about his hair; he is beautifully barbered, with a cheek as clean and lined as old leather, and there is a faint furrow in his forehead between his brows.

“Ah, Octavian. I saw your light from across the courtyard. I wondered if everything was quite all right."

“I had a dream, and I had thought to write it down. I didn’t hear you come in, uncle.”

The tablet is blank without a mark on it and his hand can scarcely hold the stylus. He is in a dream yet; Caesar is in his bedroom, with pillow-lines on his cheek.

A nice fiction for hosts — if you don’t question why the host himself is out walking the halls of his villa on the night before his triumphal festivities begin. If Caesar had truly only wondered, he’d have sent that man of his, Posca, or another bleary-eyed lackey to check for a disturbance. Octavian turns the tablet over and pushes back to smooth his tunic over his legs. He presses the heel of one hand into the hollow of his aching eye.

“Tell me what you dreamed," Caesar says. It is unmistakably a command. No doubt he wants to know all that he can about his great triumph — raking over another man’s dreams is just the same to him as interrogating the caterers or asking after which slaves will sweep down the path of his chariot. It used to be said that mother’s uncle Gaius had a man whipped for falsifying the grade of flour in the bread baked for the general’s dinner guests — how much more so will he probe into the matters of his own triumphal festivities?

“Don’t start,” Octavian answers, but this seems to be the wrong thing; a shadow passes over his great-uncle’s broad face, so he must continue. “It seems as if every man wants to know my dreams these days, and the reality is that they’re terribly ordinary, even this one. It must be a great disappointment. Anyway, I don’t believe the gods send each of us dreams. How would they find the time for it?”

“That’s a fine way for a pontiff to talk,” Caesar says, but his tone is warmer than the glacial look that had passed before. “You will make a different sort of priest, I think.”

“I don’t disagree that dreams have profound significance, only concerning the mechanism by which we receive them. It’s the stars that move us like the moon moves the tides.”

Every man in accordance with his birth; even slaves dream. The hour is too late for Octavian to reckon offhand; there’s a water clock dripping away beside his couch, but he has little inclination to crouch down with an oil lamp in hand for a better look.

Caesar seems amused now. “Then what have the stars shown you tonight, my dear boy?”

“I dreamed I carried my sister in my arms," Octavian says. “The meaning of that is that she’ll profit by me, perhaps in public life. It would be more fortunate for me to dream the other way around.”

“That bodes well for her, at least.”

“I dreamed I carried her through the Forum. There was some uproar among the common people, and she clung to me. I confess I found it unsettling. I prefer not to dream of family.”

“Have I ever told you of the dream I had in Spain?”

“Tell me, then.”

“Many years ago, when I served as quaestor in far-flung Spain, I dreamed that I outraged my own mother. It affected me deeply. When I took the matter to be interpreted, I was told that what I would take by force was mother earth herself, the very world.” He is not crowing, he does not sound pleased with himself or with the recollection of something vulgar. He only sounds thoughtful. How many years since then? Caesar’s mother must be long-dead now.

Octavian does not enjoy this mental image, but he can’t take issue with the logic of it. “It seems your interpreters hit the mark.”

However distasteful the image, it has cast its shadow over the man Caesar has become. His Spanish soothsayers were hardly likely to form a more modest conclusion, in examining the case of a young man with Caesar’s character already stamped on him — his hard intelligence, his wonderful pride.

In any case, to dream of fucking one’s mother is lucky, if one’s mother is not Atia of the Julii. One wonders what Pompey dreamed of, before his own triumphs — his pearls, his sundials, his brazen statues.

“Well, then. How is your lovely sister, anyway? Has she been ill? I haven’t heard anything concerning her in a while.”

“She’s just come back from visiting a friend in Stabiae,” Octavian lies. “She’s very well. Have you dreamed tonight, uncle?”

“I haven’t.” Caesar sounds surprised at this; he must be accustomed to reading importance into such things. “But I dream so often of ill omens that I’ve taken to disregarding them. To dream of one’s waking worries is of little significance. I would rather have your dreams, and sleep easier.”

“You can scarcely do better than conquering the Earth. You could dream of tumbling Venus Birthgiver, but that may be a more common dream, and less specific in its significance. One man dreams of snakes, and inherits a sum of money; another man who dreams of the same grows sick and dies.”

“If these things are mere consequences of the stars, as you say, what does it signify to dream of coupling with a god?”

“It only means you will advance yourself to some benefit. To dream of coupling with a priest is to dream of having one’s way in matters of state.”

It is difficult not to grow a little didactic in recounting these things, but Caesar endures it patiently enough. “Ah. We should all be so lucky as to see these things come to pass in our dreams.”

“There’s still time before morning. You can go back to your room. I’ll put out the light. He pushes back his chair as if to rise, but Caesar extends a hand to stop him.

“You’ve become a fine man, Octavian.”

“Thank you. I hear it from so many people, but I only care to credit it when it’s you paying the compliment.”

In truth he will never really be a man until people stop telling him what a fine one he’s become — his mother plucking at the folds of his toga, great gangling Brutus clasping at him gormlessly, Marc Antony grinning at him while his right hand makes a vulgar gesture. Antony has lost any pretense to pleading his youth as an excuse for folly; there are bags under his eyes. When Caesar looks at him he does not see Octavian’s height or his complexion or his manners, but rather his guile, and that’s higher praise than any other man has offered.

Caesar’s great warm hand passes over the nape of his neck. “When I was your age, I had already put aside my first wife. You ought to be thinking of matrimony before long.”

“Not just yet,” Octavian says. “I’m in no hurry to begin family life. I’ll take a wife when it pleases me.” Your wife is sleeping not so far away, he does not add, with her cherished slaves asleep before the doorway on gilded mattresses. But Caesar’s strange warmth is so all-encompassing that he longs to creep closer. The man’s presence is like summer sunlight, his smiles are better than fulsome praise from lesser men. It’s easy to see why his men will die for him.

“You’re a well-made young man, from a good family. You need only ask, and it’ll happen for you.”

Caesar will make it happen, no doubt — another game-piece to arrange on the playing-field of Rome. There are many ways to describe Octavian’s immediate family, after its latest developments in the arenas of sex, politics, and religion, and ‘good’ is hardly one of them. His mother has turned pure harridan and his sister brutalizes herself out of some misplaced guilt — when the guilt is his own, he is guilty of foolishness. Of course, she hadn’t come to him out of the feverish height of desire, but she had looked so sad, and it pricks at something in him which he does not like.

To breathe a word of these things between brother and sister would be terribly shameful, it would make a blot too dark to efface — he can no more unburden his heart of these things than Caesar can be seen to call off his triumph, or to make his infirmity known to the people. What a terrible thing it would be, to be taken in a fit at the height of one’s pomp—

—but Octavian is inventing monsters, he is squinting to see things that may never occur. “You’re very kind, uncle. I’m grateful for your company, on a night like this, but I won’t keep you..”

Caesar’s dark eyes are on him; his hard-featured face is nothing if not calm, with an easy arrogance and a darkly questioning mouth.

“Tomorrow, you’ll watch the ceremony from the steps of the Regia with your fellow men of the College. You’ll keep a watchful eye on the proceedings for me. The old men will be watching you in turn, waiting for you to make a mistake. You must do your duty exactly, without faltering.”

“Yes, uncle.”

He finds himself lowering his eyes out of habit, like a modest patrician youth and not a scholar of divine affairs. They are very near together now; Caesar’s hand is on his shoulder. Octavian holds him by the sleeve.

“You don’t need to call me ‘uncle’, now. You’re old enough to look me in the eye.”

“I only want to show my respect. If you weren’t my blood relation, I don’t know how I would address you. You would simply be Caesar.”

Priest, consul, dictator — a triumphant general wrapped in the honors of a god. He is only a man, like other men. They will be men together, Gaius and Gaius. Octavian watches him closely, with the warmth of that hand at his back. For a moment it is quiet, with only the steady dripping of the water clock, and the rustle of spring leaves somewhere in the courtyard, in the darkness. It’s a cold night, for spring.

“Will you come to bed with me?” Caesar asks, as simply as if he is asking whether he will take a cup of honey water or if his rooms are to his liking.

Octavian considers.

Is that the way Julius Caesar bends kings and princes to his will? With a light hand between the shoulder blades, and a reasonable voice, with nice manners. Only Caesar would have the gall to seduce another member of the College of Pontiffs on the night before his own triumphal procession. It’s the stuff of courtroom rhetoric and abusive oratory; the scandal if it were to become known lends the affair some perverse piquancy. This will be another secret between them — not a weapon but a cord that binds them. What would mother think? She’d call him a latecomer.

The attentions of such a man, in a position to offer towering advantages… of course he offers advantages, but he would offer them regardless. Caesar sees merit where other men see only strangeness, and Octavian would give him whatever he wanted, even if he had nothing better to offer than his words and the example of his deeds. If the gift of one’s body is the price of an education in politics, it’s a small enough fee to pay.

The empty peristyle is bracingly cold and grand enough to carry an echo —it makes for an interlude of glacial clarity as they pass between smoky rooms, and allows for a period of reflection. He is about to do something he may not take back. Whatever that will be, it may seal him forever to history.

In Caesar’s bedroom, the floor tiles have been newly taken up, and the latest pattern shines in ocean colors under the spill of lamplight. Garlands, thyrsi, a woodland pool darting with fraudulent freshwater fish. Julius Caesar makes his bed like Jupiter’s own couch, in scarlet and brass. It isn’t so delicately strung together as the accommodations for his guests, but military men have their own customs.

The sight of the other bedroom things cast in yellow lamplight is strangely homely — all of a sudden a cast-aside garment, a writing desk, a gold box at the bedside, a pair of slippers. Octavian casts around the room for its master as if fleeing from these prosaic things; when he finds him, he casts himself against Caesar like a man shipwrecked.

Octavian cleaves against that form with a desperation born only in part from desire — the lamp-flame nearly scorches his fingertips, and Caesar exhales at the impact of his body as if he has fetched him a blow and not made to embrace him. When Octavian kisses him, Caesar’s mouth has the taste of fennel-seed. It is not the least bit unpleasant.

“This is why you’ve brought me,” Octavian says, by way of explanation. His breath has gone from him, driven from his lungs. “Am I wrong?”

“Have I offended you?”

“No.”

His great-uncle pauses, setting aside the lamp and surveying his face. The fact of being surveyed rankles at him such that when that great warm hand catches him by the back of the head he thinks only of turning away. He wishes to take action once more, to play the assailant, and instead, he must wait. Is this how Caesar conquers?

Relation along the maternal line is not enough to constitute incest — only the father is significant, the parent is he who mounts. Regardless, a youth can’t be seen to be shameless. If he’d wanted to make a scandal of himself, he’d have had ample opportunity — in his school days, or in his mother’s house with Antony about the place at all hours like a prick on legs. He could have made himself notorious if that were what he wished for — but what he wants is something stranger. Octavian closes his eyes.

Caesar kisses his eyelids; Octavian can feel his breath against his cheek. The fellow has fine teeth for a man his age, and his breath is pleasant; his garments smell of marjoram and sweet clover, like a country road.

Whatever comes easily to other men, Octavian must study. What do women do, when they set out to entrap a man? What is it fitting for a man to do? He settles his arms around his uncle’s neck; Caesar bends against him, tolerantly.

“I’m not simple,” Octavian says. “I’ve had a woman. I’ve had several women. I’m not inexperienced.”

“I never said you were.”

“Nor am I depraved. I haven’t had the opportunity.”

Caesar’s eyes are mild and black and unreadable. “I didn’t bring you here to damage your reputation.”

What, then?

Caesar kisses him with deliberation, and Octavian endeavors to meet it with an appropriate seriousness — but in truth, he does not know how to do it. What a pathetic state of affairs, to say one has only kissed one’s sister, and to mean it. The pressure of it takes his breath away, and when his mouth opens Caesar’s tongue passes into it.

He is all in confusion, all afire with a muddled heat. His mouth is smarting from such kisses, from lips pressed to his jaw and throat and collarbone, and the flush of blood extends down his bare chest — it seems a certainty that this scalding inexperience can be felt, that it issues off of him in waves and another man with a less glacial temperament would be laughing at him for the way his body has responded to a little pawing. That broad blunt thumb traces down his throat and Octavian wants, all of a sudden, to bite him — to sink his teeth into Caesar’s lip and to hear him cry out.

“Sit down, or you’ll topple.”

Caesar lays him down on the couch, brushing aside his cloak. Octavian leans back on his elbows and swallows.

“Before we begin — I’d like to go with you to Spain if you’ll have me. I’m old enough to pursue a military career, and I must have some accomplishments to speak of if I’m to take a wife.”

Caesar frowns vaguely. “It wouldn’t be an easy campaign, for a young man.”

Is it better to pursue the matter now, and be seen to be presumptuous in his expectations, or to ask later and seem like an ungallant lover? How humiliating it is to have his infirmities remembered, now of all times — surely a young man is best equipped of all ages to endure hardships. What Caesar means is that Octavian is soft-handed, that he is inexperienced — not headaches or heatstroke but the softness of a pampered patrician. How else is he to become hardened?

Any objection Atia might have now is meaningless — the dreadful woman expresses concern for his health when some half-dozen years ago she was champing at the bit for him to ride into a war zone simply to visit dear Uncle Gaius. Whatever she thinks of him now, as a cold-hearted pervert or an unnatural ingrate, she knows he’s no weakling. Even if he were so afflicted by some minor infirmity of the body, the only thing for it would be to do as Caesar has done — to be twice as hardy as other men, twice as vigorous, and to compensate for a sickly disposition with valor. His condition has only made him wilier.

Caesar undresses him as if he is undressing himself, drawing the tunic off his shoulders and casting it aside with his own wine-red cloak. In the lamplight, it is very nearly purple.

At the dictator’s bedside, there is a carved box, and inside it is a shallow pot of balm. Caesar presses into it with his fingers and the sight of the slick motion makes Octavian’s prick jump. To be entered in this way is as unthinkable as a beating, but there can be no other way that isn’t some greater disgrace. These matters will proceed in a certain way, like all couplings. Caesar will turn him over on all fours and have him roughly, or he’ll bend him over the couch — at any rate, he’ll use him like a boy, and remind him who is the garlanded dictator of Rome and who is only a callow youth.

Octavian is too-eager to begin, to get matters over with, and Caesar knows it; he is all warmth and welcome, caressing him with powerful hands, but beneath there is some stony ridge of contempt that cannot be crossed. Time to withdraw, and think tactically. Octavian pulls back and sets his face.

“How would you like it?” Caesar asks. Rhetorically, no doubt.

“Show me how to do it,” Octavian says. “I trust you.”

He would trust no one else to see him at such a disadvantage — to take him and move his body into position, to bend him and pierce him like a woman or a slave. Caesar draws the length of his body in beside him on the couch; his hand finds the crook of Octavian’s knee, drawing his legs apart.

Caesar’s hand presses between his legs; Octavian manages not to make a sound indicating his surprise, but he can’t keep his spine from stiffening.

Caesar’s voice is low and pleasant against his ear: “Lift up your leg for me, if you can.”

As if he were tutoring him in swordplay or in riding. The pads of his fingers rest over the customary entrance for this kind of thing, tracing easy north-south movements; the gentle motion of it makes his balls tighten and his throat go dry. If he is to play the passive part, then he’ll be damned good at it, and not thrash around like a speared fish. Octavian takes deep breaths and wills himself into patience.

It is not a natural posture, to incline on his hip with the weight of a body against his back, and to spread his legs — the pleasure that flickers over him with the gentle press of fingers is enough to send the blood rushing to his prick. When the head of Caesar’s cock presses against his arsehole, bidding it to yield, Octavian gives over to it and lets him inside.

It’s a queer sensation but not painful. Men are buggered with worse things than conquerors’ pricks every day, and he can lean back against Caesar’s chest and let his legs sprawl open. But for all his studied readiness, with the first thrust that breaches him in full, he must stifle a cry — he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he doesn’t know how to catch his breath, he is lost.

“How’s this? Is it well with you?”

Octavian gives his assent to this. From behind Caesar cannot see him grimace, but his voice is as even as he can make it.

A hand grips his shoulder solicitously. “Shall I withdraw?”

“No, it’s all right— you haven’t hurt me.”

It is more embarrassing still to admit to surprise at the sensation of being penetrated, at taut pain giving way to ease. There’s a tremor in his voice that he hates; Octavian shifts himself against the couch to bear up straighter and to square his shoulders. It would be so much easier to be only playing at modesty, acting coy while secretly debauched, rather than displaying authentic inexperience in front of the man he wants most to impress.

At least what his dear uncle wants from him is relatively transparent. Between them, there are no contrivances, no secrets, no crooked little games. Caesar’s arm wraps across Octavian’s thigh to cup his prick — in his present state his erection is only too ready to spring up and to fill with blood, almost to spill his seed before they’ve even really coupled.

“Is that better?”

“Use me,” he says with all the bruised dignity he can muster while still spitted on a cock. “I’ll see to myself.”

The man does not merely hammer away but moves into him until it is easy — until he is stretched and ready for using, until he’s ready to beg him for it. Caesar’s presence is heavy as stone and unmistakably that of a man — the rough sound of his breaths, the roughness of his hands and the hard muscles of his legs, his mouth moving against Octavian’s skin with burning kisses pressed to his naked shoulder. Octavian twists against him and feels the weight of him shift, feels his own pulse pounding where they are thrust together skin to skin.

Now Caesar slips into him like a knife into a wound, easily. He ought to be ashamed, but he can’t keep from pressing against his own hand as his prick stiffens, pulling himself off. When he takes himself in hand Caesar’s grip adjusts to cover his own fingers— at first, he thinks, as a reprimand for poor technique. He murmurs a miserable and self-abasing apology, but Caesar kisses his throat and draws back the foreskin of his prick in sleeking strokes.

Octavian is not much in practice for this, and his arousal is embarrassingly urgent. He sighs and sprawls and spreads his legs; the thrusts strike more closely, and the slap of skin makes him wince with each repetition. Caesar holds him in place like a thing to be fucked; he is not pinning him down with any special violence, but the pressure makes his blood quicken and the force of his presses catches him off-guard and gasping. The muscles in his thighs are quaking, and the dull throb of pain between his legs rises to a din of pleasure.

Caesar’s great hand leaves Octavian’s prick to rub at his chest, as one cups the breast of a soft boy in some filthy Greek verse. He can feel his nipples stiffening at the touch, Octavian realizes with dim disgust, like a woman’s. That frightful ache is coiling at the base of him, and all of his body is crawling in thin fire — desire and humiliation.

Did Caesar ever use Mark Antony like this? It’s common knowledge that for all his martial hardness Caesar was once something of a dandy, that he was once given to a streak of softness — he dresses well, he smells sweet, he is infamously familiar with other men’s wives. The men who bend for him despise him for it. But Antony exhibits his body like a common whore; in his short tunics, he is half Hercules and half overgrown rent boy. No doubt his chastity was in ruins long before Caesar ever met him.

He shouldn’t think of Antony now, here at the last. This man who caresses him is the most powerful man in Rome: he who disdains to be king, he who would rather be Jupiter. Octavian grips the coverlet in his fist — some mark is struck, some final territory is conquered, and he spills his seed all at once in a helpless spasm.

Something is misaligned in him, something is broken. He could weep now when he’s never been accustomed to shed tears for what cannot be helped. All at once his mind is terribly empty, swept clean of such low desires — all recalculation and regret. Caesar finishes outside him, withdrawing with a groan to spill against his legs — he does not dishonor his great-nephew by polluting his innermost parts, though under the circumstances the distinction seems negligible.

What an odd thing it is to be held. He rests in Caesar’s arms for a long while, panting like an athlete, damp and spent. He does not care to be embraced and petted, but only to lie here as he is,

Caesar holds him without further expectation, as still and unmoved as the alabaster figure on a tomb. His majesty is unreachable and cold as marble. This man will make a god of himself if men let him.

His own bed feels as if it’s miles away. Octavian has no sense of himself as small except when he is side by side with an already tall man. He may yet live to be as tall as his mother’s people if the last months of adolescence hold further mysteries. Afterward, he wipes himself clean — the slaves will see to the mess, without remark if they know what’s good for them — and tries to rearrange his limbs in a way appropriately final. The cooling sweat makes the hairs on his legs prickle.

When Caesar speaks again it is as mildly as if they have just been playing a game of brigands or throwing dice. He’s settled in on silk pillows, no doubt drowsy from spending.

“It would be good to have you with me on my next campaign. You can write your poetry in the field if you wish.”

“It’s nothing, really. Just some verses.”

“Now get some rest. I don’t want to see any mishaps tomorrow.”

A great deal goes on before such sacrifices to ensure they don’t go wrong. It would hardly do to have a bunch of priests in their red robes lining up to take a wild stab at a stampeding beast. An elaborate groundwork must be laid for the next five days; preliminary sacrifices must take place and formal petitions issued. The old men of Rome have made these matters in their own image; one hand washes the other. Does Caesar want his blessing, or does he have some further lesson to teach?

Octavian has no blessing to give him. Tomorrow each of them will play his part in the administration of sacrifices, and in the shedding of blood. He sleeps there in scarlet and does not dream.