Caligula

I

Rome AD 36

Rufus sat with his back to the warm bark of a pear tree and pondered his future. For the first time in his life he was tortured by the luxury of choice.

Should he stay with Cerialis, or should he accept the animal trader's offer? The question had vexed him all morning, and he was no nearer the answer now than he had been two hours ago.

The household of the fat baker had been his family since he was six years old and he considered himself fortunate. How else could he feel when Cerialis showed enough regard for him to allow a slave to decide his own future? He was learning a trade. He did not go hungry and he had never been beaten.

So, stay with Cerialis. It was obvious.

But on the opposite side of the scales was the prospect, the unbelievable prospect, of freedom. Freedom. The word made his senses spin. Did he really want to be free? Free to do what? To starve? To beg on the streets?

In any case, the animal trader was not offering freedom now. It might be years before he fulfilled his bargain.

It was the bear's fault. If it wasn't for the bear he would be at his ovens baking the finest bread in Rome, instead of sitting in the gardens of the Porticus Liviae with his head pounding like the inside of a drum.

Two butterflies, one a delicate pale blue, and the other a beautiful mix of red and brown, flitted across the edge of his vision towards the flowerbed. He grinned and touched the charm at his throat.

So be it. Let the gods decide.

Cornelius Aurius Fronto was endowed with a laugh that bent forests and shattered roof tiles and he was laughing now.

'So, the baker's boy has finally made up his mind? He has chosen the certainty of greatness with Fronto over the drudgery of picking weevils out of stale bread for that lard-arsed shopkeeper. How could it be otherwise?'

This last, with a theatrical whirl, was addressed to the half-dozen slaves and freedmen who emerged at his shout to welcome Rufus. They appeared, showing various attitudes of boredom or interest, at the gateway of a walled enclosure which hid the animals that were Fronto's stock-in-trade. Rufus wondered what the animal keeper would think if he knew that he had placed his destiny in the flight of a blue butterfly.

As the slaves gathered, he reflected on the contrast between Fronto's welcome and the previous occasion on which he had changed masters. The ordeal at the enormous slave market outside Ostia when he arrived on the ship from Carthage was one he would never forget. He had been a small, terrified boy, alone among more people than he ever dreamed existed. He remembered looking for somewhere to hide among that great ebb and flow of humanity, but it had been hopeless. Eventually, he had sat down close to the wall and cried until he could cry no more. It was a relief when he was bought by Cerialis the next day.

He returned the stares of the little group, noting whose smile was open and who among them saw him as a potential enemy. They were evenly split.

'Did I tell you how he saved my life?' Fronto demanded, and a few wide grins told Rufus that the answer was 'yes' — several times over — but they knew they must endure the story one more time.

'It was a large bear, but not one of my finest. No, the finest must be kept for the arena. In truth this one was old and mangy and worm-ridden. But it still had its claws. Great hooked claws that would tear the top from a man's head. Is that not so, young Rufus?'

Rufus remembered that the bear's claws were clipped short, but thought it would be impolite to cast doubt upon his new master. So he nodded. The beast's yellowing fangs were terrifying enough.

He had been escorting Lucretia, the cook, to the fruit market along one of the narrow streets off the Sacer Clivus when it happened. One moment the street was filled with laughing, jeering peasants, the next it was emptied by a single scream. The bear stood on its hind legs, a broken length of chain hanging from a metal collar round its neck, its dark brown fur matted with patches of dried blood.

'And that poor child,' Fronto was almost weeping now, 'abandoned by her wet nurse, alone and defenceless with that ferocious monster drooling over her. Poor little…' He faltered for a moment.

'Tullia,' chorused his audience helpfully.

Tullia. She was blonde and tiny; the bear enormous and angry.

'Certain death,' the animal trader roared. 'Certain death awaited her, but for this brave boy.' An arm as thick as a tree branch swept towards Rufus.

He meant to run away from the bear with Lucretia. Instead, he found himself scrambling towards it.

'And do you know what he did? He danced.' Fronto roared with laughter, his great belly shaking. 'He danced with a bear.'

At the time, it seemed the only thing to do. He couldn't fight the bear — it was twice his size and many times his strength. But to remain still was to die.

'How did you think of that, boy?' Fronto demanded. 'What made you dance with my bear?'

Rufus remembered the terrifying moment when he had stood at the great beast's mercy, but he shrugged as if dancing with bears was an everyday occurrence.

'When I was small a travelling circus visited our village,' he explained. 'It was nothing like the circuses in Rome, just some bad actors and their flea-bitten animals. They owned a bear, a little thing the same height as I was. They had taught it to dance. Just a few steps, but it would dance, and people would dance with it. It seemed to enjoy it. I suppose in my head I was dancing with the same little bear.'

He had danced around the bear, and the bear followed, its obsidian eyes never leaving him, as if it was concentrating every part of its brain on copying his movements. As it turned, a group of men appeared behind it. One motioned to him to keep dancing, while the others untangled a large net. They crept closer to the bear while he opened up the distance between himself and the animal a few precious inches at a time. Then the net whirled and the bear became a spitting, growling ball of fury, paws clawing at the all-enveloping mesh.

'You saved your own life, and, though you did not know it, you saved Fronto's, and Fronto pays his debts.' The trader wrapped an enormous arm round Rufus's shoulders and he felt he might collapse under the weight of it. 'I pledged my word to Vitellius Genias Cerialis, and I pledge it to you now. You have a way with animals, and I can use that. I buy them and I train them for the arena and the circus. I'll teach you every trick I know, and, if you come up to scratch, in a few years I will make you my heir and sit back and watch in comfort as you make me rich. We will draw up the papers tomorrow.'

A murmur ran through the group of workers. Rufus noted the frowns and understood that Fronto's generosity wasn't received with universal approval. He saw their point. He doubted if they were impressed by the tousle-haired seventeen-year-old in the ragged tunic. The ambitious among them would resent him and attempt to obstruct him, but he was not concerned. Years of lifting sacks of grain at the bakery had made him strong. He would be ready for them. It was his good fortune that Tullia was the daughter of a very senior senator. Her father was as well known for his devotion to his youngest child as for the cold-blooded manner in which he disposed of his political rivals. If the bear had harmed her, Fronto would have ended up in a sewer with an assassin's knife in his liver.

'What if I don't come up to scratch?' he asked.

'I'll feed you to the lions.'

There was a long silence.

'Only joking, boy… feed you to the lions.' The laughter shook Fronto's great frame once more. 'You should see your face.'

Fronto's business was to the south of Rome, across the four arches of the Pons Sublicius. It was far enough from the city to deter crowds from coming out to gawk, but close enough to the cattle market at the Forum Boarium to ensure the trader a constant supply of food for his carnivores.

Inside the animal compound Rufus's heart quickened as Fronto proudly listed the exotic treasures he bought and sold to perform at the great spectacles in the arena. The grass-eaters browsed peacefully in a series of wide paddocks. The trader pointed out the different types.

'Antelope.' He indicated a herd of graceful animals standing placidly in one enclosure. They were several shades of dusty brown, and varied in size from tiny fragile creatures the height of a small dog to broad-chested giants with long spiralling horns and dark patches on their haunches.

'What are those?' Rufus asked, pointing to another small group. 'I've never seen a horse with stripes.'

'They're a type of wild ass. I tried to train them to pull chariots, but they are much more stupid than horses.'

'And those?' Rufus pointed to a dark brown, hunch-backed, front-heavy creature built on the scale of a small donkey, but with short incurved horns, heavy brows, wide-set narrow eyes and a nose that trailed streamers of snot.

'Those?' Fronto grinned. 'We just call those ugly.'

Beyond the paddocks and in a separate compound were squat huts built of heavy timbers. Fronto led the way towards them. As they approached the buildings, Rufus was aware of a vaguely familiar scent, a powerful, pungent aroma which dominated everything around it. It was a few seconds before his memory swept him back more than a decade.

Lion.

The galley from Carthage to Ostia had carried them as cargo. Two big females and two cubs. Now he was staring into those same murderous eyes, pale golden yellow flecked with shadows of grey and shooting back pure hatred.

He still did not truly understand why he had been sold to the slaver. His father was a Spanish auxiliary who had settled in Mauretania at the completion of his service. He had been a better soldier than farmer. Their little homestead in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains was a parched, dusty place in the summer where the rocks cracked with the frost in winter. His mother was a vague memory now, but he knew with certainty that she had loved him, if only because of the contentment he felt whenever he thought of her. If he closed his eyes he could almost recall her face and the damp, morning smell of her long black hair. They were always hungry, but could she have stood by while he was dragged away crying? He supposed she must have. That, he calculated, was in the eleventh year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

Fronto had a dozen lions, including three magnificent blackmaned males. But there were also slim, athletic cheetah, and three lithe, spotted cats of a species unfamiliar to Rufus.

'They are leopard,' Fronto explained. 'The crowd loves them. Big as a lion. Twice as fast. Once they get on top of a man, it doesn't matter how well protected he is, he's dead. Their teeth go for his throat and their claws go for his belly. You've seen a kitten worrying a dead pigeon, little paws scraping away like mad? Same thing with a leopard. If they can't get his belly, they'll get his balls. If not his balls, they'll strip his legs to the bone. Doesn't matter really. Just means it's over more quickly if they get his belly.'

Finally, they came to what Fronto called his monster.

'Amazing, isn't it? You'd never think something like that only eats grass.'

Rufus gazed at the grey goliath standing alone in its paddock. The animal was about twice the size of a bull, with thick, leathery skin. Its head was large even compared to its body, but its legs were almost comically short. It had tiny eyes and from low on its wide, shovel nose projected two horns, one behind the other. The larger, at the front, was nine inches across at the base and tapered over about the length of two feet to a deadly point. The second was half the size, but looked even sharper.

'I don't know what to do with it. It looks dangerous, but it never seems to do anything except stand around. You can pat it like a dog. Why don't you give it a try?'

The eyes which studied Rufus brimmed with sincerity. Fronto wore the look of a man who had never done wrong in his life; a man who would go to his grave without a stain on his reputation. A man Rufus did not trust an inch.

Fronto was testing him, and he believed he knew why. The shrewd trader was giving him his opportunity to prove himself in front of the men who might one day call him master. He looked again at the monster, which seemed to have grown even larger. The question was, would he survive the test?

With more confidence than he felt, he grinned cheekily and said: 'Of course.'

Titus, one of the slaves who formed Fronto's welcoming party, held the gate open for him, then, as he shut it again, whispered: 'Watch his ears.'

Rufus walked slowly into the enclosure. The tension made his heart race, but the world seemed a clearer place and his stomach tightened with anticipation. He saw that the walls of this paddock, although built like the others of wooden planks about the height of a tall man, were strengthened by horizontal beams. In places, raw white patches stood out clearly as if the wood had recently been splintered.

The heat of the sun beat on his back like a hammer as he marched further into the enclosure. Where the monster waited.

After about twenty paces he noticed what might have been a flick of movement at the side of the animal's head. Yes, there it was again, an almost imperceptible twitch of the left ear.

Never taking his eyes off the beast, he subtly changed direction. Now, each step took him diagonally across its front, rather than directly towards it.

He couldn't believe something so big could move so fast. One moment the monster was motionless, its small eyes staring unseeing into the middle distance. The next its short legs were a blur of speed and it had covered half the distance between them with its head lowered and that lethal scimitar of a horn pointed directly at his groin.

To turn and run directly towards the fence was pointless. He would never outpace this animal. But his change of direction had taken him slightly out of its path and that gave him a fraction of a second to sidestep the charge.

He waited until he could have touched the lower horn with his outstretched hand before he dived low and to the right. With one movement he was on his feet again and his long legs flew as he sprinted towards the fence.

As he ran, he could hear the beast's thundering hooves close behind and knew it had turned its huge bulk in an instant and was pursuing him. He could see the gnarled knots in the wood of the fence and the rusty heads of the nails which held it together. Behind him, the explosions of breath from the animal's nostrils told him it was closer still.

One moment of hesitation and he was dead. He picked his spot on the fence, kicking up one leg and pushing with the other, so that for the final two paces before he hit it he was in the air. His front foot met one of the horizontal bars and he used every muscle he possessed to turn forward momentum into an upward leap that would carry him safely over. Another inch and he would have made it. Instead, the knee of his trailing leg smashed into the top plank, generating a fiery stab of pain and turning a controlled jump into an untidy, somersaulting flight. While he was airborne, he distinctly heard the thundering crash of something enormous and fast-moving hitting something even more solid and unyielding. Half a second later he landed with an impact that knocked the breath from his body, loosened several teeth and left him wondering how many bones he had broken.

He lay, stunned, with the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth and dust clogging his nose.

'You show a fair turn of pace for a baker, but your vault could have been more elegant.'

Rufus opened one eye. Fronto was standing over him, his bulk blocking the sunlight.

'Come on, get up and let's see what you've done to the poor old monster.' He gave Rufus his arm and pulled him to his feet.

Wincing with pain, the boy limped to the fence, which now sported a splintered hole the size of a man's fist. Rufus looked through the gap and flinched as he stared into the angry eye of the monster. It gave a shake of its head before trotting back towards the centre of the paddock.

'She'll have a bit of a headache, but she should be fine,' Fronto said proudly.

'What about me?' Rufus demanded. 'She could have killed me. You said I could pat her like a dog.'

'I may have exaggerated a little,' Fronto admitted. 'But that is lesson number one for you, boy. You've proved you're not frightened of animals, but you must learn to respect them. Next time you go into a paddock or a cage, study what is in it first. These animals are all dangerous in one way or another. Even the small antelopes will knock you into the middle of next week if they're protecting their young.'

He picked up a piece of dung that lay at his feet and held it up to Rufus's face.

'See? It's all about profit. It doesn't matter whether it stinks like shit or smells of perfume — if it makes a profit it smells sweet. Now, we'll start you at the bottom. Titus, show him how to muck out the wild pigs.'