The Scarlet Fig: Or, Slowly Through a Land of Stone, Book Three of the Vergil Magus Series

Appendix II The Nine Roses of Rome (1988)

The Nine Roses of Rome consisted of the Six Vestal Virgins, the Empress, a woman of the people selected by lot, and a ninth, who was never publicly identified, but was popularly believed to be The Sybil. The only one who received pay was the woman of the people, who was entitled to every lamb struck by lightning; this happened more often than one might think. What the Nine Roses did was even more of a mystery, as no man was allowed to be present, not the Archiflamen, not the Emperor; not even a eunuch: not a castrate priest of Cybele, not even a natural-born eunuch; not even Cumus, who was allowed to help bathe the Empress and to be present at the Women’s Mysteries, dressed as a woman; and whose gifts included that of making fire by striking his dexter hand against his opposite thigh. Several sacred lamps were thus lit at intervals, but not the sacred fire of Vesta: and, indeed a certain ancient family was charged with the task of keeping guard over Cumus at intervals (which they did with much grace by dining him among the patricians), just to make sure that Cumus did not at those times assume the likeness of a woman and somehow pass as one of the Roses, he was supposed to have at various times been both a priest and a priestess, python and pythonissa, at Delphos. But enough, for now, of Cumus. Popular and current belief no longer held that the Roses recited rhymes to ward off the Gauls, but there was always a whisper that only the Roses kept at bay The Death of Rome. As one Vestal had always to tend the fire, a question inevitable: who, then, was actuually the Ninth? Common sense made very doubtful the truth of the suggestion that one of the group had the power to divide herself in to, pro hac vice. The year that Hugo was the co-consul, “and kept the King’s sword,” a certain Stilicho, merely for suggesting when in wine that there was always a secret seventh Vestal to replace whichever of the regular Six had to go piss, was sent, and in chains, to that city on the far southern frontier of Lybya on route to the Guaramantes and their dogs, where the houses are made of slabs of salt — rose-colored salt, one hears — and then, tooo, onehears that it took only a month for his skin to slough off, instead of the usual year. (The skin, stuffed with fragrant gentian flowers and with yellow oxalis, is on view or not on view somewhere in the warren of the Palatine, where unlicensed cults are compelled to worship, lest their gods be wroth with Rome; and as for Stilicho himself, does he indeed receive worship by the ophioloters in the darkness, who can say?) The Nine Roses of Rome.

The magnate Latulus, who had at one time owned half of Sicily, rich in grain, and was thus said to have his finger-marks on every loaf of bread baked in Rome, had determined to buy the Empire … or, at least, the Crown Imperial — as he might buy another field of wheat. He visited all the Kings — every single King — made immense presents and promised more if he were elected to the next vacancy: no one refused. Averroës was Emperor then. Averroës would ride spirited horses. On one public occasion publicly changed his mount for an even more spirited one on the breath of the moment: at the first prick of the spurs it not only threw him but trampled on him — “If it had been one of the Thracian stallions trained by King Diomedes to deal with unwanted guests” (a problem with which not only kings are vexed), “they would have eaten him as well!” said Quint to Vergil, rubbing his ever-sore eyes: but Quint’s eyes, like the horses of Diomedes, were besides the point, the point was that the Emperor was dead (“he has bought his own death,” the Levantines in Rome said), that there was not, as there sometimes — seldom — was, an emperor-designate, no one could charge or should even suspect conspiracy (well, “no one,” there was, as there always is, some antique ninny-dizzard: he muttered that the priests of Poseidon Horse-breaker, offended by some neglected sacrifice, et sic cetera; sure it was that Poseidon/Neptune was no greatly popular deity with the ever-sea-sick-prone Romans: several passers-by threw used orange-rinds at the antique ninny-dizzard and several others threw used sponges at him, not used at the Baths but used by patrons of the public cloaca to wipe themselves: vox populi, vox dei, and the antiquity withdrew himself in ungainly haste, presumably to mutter in some less public space); and Latulus was elected Emperor by the electoral kings.

The canny corn-factor evidently lost his senses as he gained the Crown, and, once having mounted the Elephant Throne, that ugly, elephant chair which symbolized Roman dominion over Asia and Africa and — counting the small herd descended from Hannibal’s elephants, which had ever since been eating its way through the Pontine Forests — Europe; at once began to play the fool. None of his japes and follies more shocked the people than his sending a loud and gaudy procession to the Nine Roses (who existence was supposed to be quietly and politely ignored) asking “humbly” for “advice.” Mention of the Roses always brought to Vergil something which was not exactly a vague memory: the phrase The Death of Rome and the odd, alliterative syllables, Atilla Totilla Bobadilla[15], which made no sense: being a mage sometimes informed him not only of morethan he wanted to know but of more than (sometimes) he knew at the time of being informed.

A reply to Latulus did come — inscribed in the ink of a scuttlefish on the much-scraped skin of a bidens, a lamb struck by lightning and which thus had never known the butcher’s knife — cooly containing the single word Delphos. Latulus struck his pumply forehead with the flat of his warty hand … no one had ever been able to dismiss Latulus contemptibly as “just another pretty boy” (this he well-knew, and, “Was Socrates comely?” he asked; “Was Æsop?” — rhetorical questions which would have had more force if it had not been generally known that Latulus believed Socrates had told fables and that Æsop had stolen the Golden Fleece) and cried Of course! why had he not thought of that himself? “It was because he did not have the time,” murmured Vergil in Quint’s ear, referring to the Emperor’s well-known habit of assigning preposterous and impossible tasks (draining the Putrid Sea, for example; or turning the Adriatic into a carp-pond), invariably adding, “I would do it myself, if I had the time …” Quint snorted, and even, for a moment, left off rubbing his eyes.

Off went the rich gifts — chauldrons of gold filled with gold coins; back came the Oracular answer, reducing the single word of the beloved women to a single letter, phi. Faster than fire the news spread, and in a trice the Emperor — who, alas, did have a notoriously bad digestion — became know as Flatulus. It took much to erode the immense dignity of the Imperial Office; and the final blow which slpit that great rock was a Decretal forbidding “the issuance or utterance of vulgar sounds or noises when Himself the August Caesar passed by.” The usually subservient Conscript Fathers of the Senate immediately convened, and, first, ordered the Imperial Guard to discharge their allegiance to the present Himself, on pain of not being paid the customary gift at honorable discharge of a farm (invariably someone else’s farm, but what would you?); and, second, ordered Phlatulus the choice of abdicating, committing suicide, or being whipped from the throne with an eel-skin. The man was of noble family, he did behave like a child, and the ancient republican law (never amended or repealed) provides that this was the only instrument with which the magistrates — of whom the Senate was the highest order — might publicly flog a boy of the Blood. Petulantly but promptly, and farting indignantly, the Emperor abdicated; and retired to one of his innumerable and private estates, whence he did — having so little dignity — from time to time return to Rome under cover of one of the numerable legal reasons for doing so: to consult a physician or an astrologer, to offer sacrifice at one of the temples found only in Rome (Juno of the Two-Headed Heifer, for example, a goddess much favored by the simple … or simple-minded … and pious farmers of the days of King Numa, but whose cultus was by now shrunk to almost nothing nothing and whose temple was little more than a mud hogan crouched under the portico of the Inspection Entrance of the Cloaca Maxima, of which perhaps Vitruvius had said that it — the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s chief sewer — was in the aggregate as massive as the Pyramids, and infinitely more utile. The pilgrimages, if such they could be called, were very much welcomed by the temple’s priest, who otherwise depended for sustenance upon his small plot of samphire, which his wife hawked in the streets out of two larg jars — one sort in pickle, with garlic and onion, and one sort in brine, without, the old priest-farmer, when asked if this were not a dreadful trade, denied with emphasis that samphire could only be found flourishing in the clefta of cliffs; he called this a vulgar superstition, and he said that it grew as well upon the level land as would so many cucumbers. Nevertheless he was very glad to receive the worship and the offerings of the former Emperor, and, indeed, had some notion that it was compulsory for those in that status; and muttered very complimentary things about the Pax Romana. But these pelrinages were made rather furtively, and in a closed litter, for the populus took much joy in greeting their late liege with jeers, hoots, poots, and other manner of vulgar sounds and noises; until, finally, he gave them up altogether, and crossing o’er the perfumed sea, confined his urban trips to Messina, Palermo, Syracuse, on that tri-cornered island, where, even if he no longer owned a half of it, he was received with respect. But, after no great passage of time, he, still acting the clown, tripped and fell into one of hsi own eel-ponds and vanished or dissolved at once in a flurry of blood drawn by those ferocious teeth, and only his ring, found by draining the pool and slaying and examining each eel, every single eel) remained to identify him. Their flesh was offered to the slaves, who, one and all, refused to eat of it.

The then-Emperor ordered five minutes of official mourning.

After that, no one sent messages overtly to the Nine Roses of Rome, who were left, unvexed, to continue, at intervals, and covertly, their apotropaic activities against The Death of Rome. Leaving to sound and resound in Vergil’s min the meaningless and yet, somehow, fearsome syllables, Attilla Totilla Bobadilla … and, like an echo of a drum-beat, the final syllables: ilia … ilia …

“This fire which Cumus is said to kindle,” began Quint, interrupting his friend’s echoes.

“Not ‘said to,’” Vergil corrected. “He does. I have seen him do it. Twice. Once at the extinguishing and re-lighting of the lamps in the adyt of the Temple of the Magna Mater. And once, when that great storm of the Consulate of Peppin blew out the torches in the Oratory of Orpheus; that was rare music, and the Head sang so —”

“Rarely, I am sure,” said Quint in his best languid manner. “But I wanted to ask you about the fire …?”

Vergil considered a moment or two. “The Sages of Sidon,” he said at last, “are of two schools in the matter. One, called the school of Odishu, holds that there are twenty-three different and distinct sorts of fire, which they distinguish by substance, by essence, and by fluouressence. These I found very hard … not impossible, but very hard. The other, called the School of Shelemon, holds — as do I — that these distinctions are over-subtle; and maintains that there are but seven. The third lowest is that brought about by striking the hand upon the thigh … which hand, and which thigh, does not matter, according to Shelemon: but it matters very much according to Odishu, who rates them as, respectively, second and third lowest so that we cannot admit the fire of Cumus to be of very high order. It would not serve you to light cedar-wood, for instance.” The sacred fire of Vesta, for instance, was of cedar-wood, and that of Haddad, specifically of cedar of Lebanon.

Fire produced by Cumus, Vergil explained, consisted of scattered sparks, of a pale blue-green color, not unlike that of certain fungus shining in the woods at night. These were caught in a sort of punk, which, blown upon and made to smolder, were transferred to a wad of tow; and thence to the pith of papyrus reed, and at that point you had a fire which would serve for most purposes.

Quint said that he thought the same effect could be had by rubbing two dowagers together. “Or the same number of rather elderly catamites.” Vergil laughed, but on that subject said no more, and began to discuss why the question was not yet solved, if the blood of dragons was hot or cold; and from there he passed to a rather nice point in Theophrastus on Plants, in which both illustration and text was precise and clear, but precisely and clearly differed from each other. Quint, although it was not his subject, offered several reasonable suggestions, and did not revert to the previous subject. It was one of Quint’s great values as a friend that he did not push. It was one of Vergil’s drawbacks that he could not endure those who did.

By that time … about the time of the five-minutes court mourning for (Ph)latulus — white truffles might not be served, nor might readings from any author save those named Pseudo-anything go uninterrupted, and everyone was forbidden to belch or break wind without paying a forfeit of the price of a palmful of pine-nuts … by that time Junius was Emperor; and Junius loved Vergil very much.

The mystery, however, remained.