The Last Stoic (13 page)

Nasir woke.  He grabbed at the
old, discarded axe handle near his head and clambered to his feet. 

“Who?!”

Patricius retreated.  The Parthian
awake, crazed, brandishing a club changed everything.  Patricius decamped down
the street, far enough to placate Nasir, near enough to monitor the alleyway. 
He would wait, he decided, until morning, follow Marcus when he left, find out
where he lived, report his activities to the town guard, and collect his
reward.  He retreated, Nasir calmed and returned to his restless sleep against
the wall.  Patricius found shelter in the next alleyway, five shops down.  He
settled in.  Within another hour, he too was asleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The noon day sun poured undiluted
into the alleyway and baked Marcus in his cowl like a sausage in pastry.  Sweat
streamed from his face.  His mouth was pasted together and his head pounded. 
There was a makeshift bandage on above his brow and one on his neck.  He threw
off the cowl and sat up.  The alleyway was deserted.  The connecting street
bustled, with its adjoining shops and market square.  Above the cacophony of
the street traffic, he heard music.  Bright, fluttering notes.  A flute. 
Marcus poked his head around the corner.  People crowded the street, standing
and chatting, haggling and arguing, hurrying along.  At the corner of the
street sat Nasir and Sura.  Marcus recognized them from the night he met them
on his way home from the caupona.  Sura was playing her flute for passersby
while Nasir solicited alms.  Sura had tended to him earlier that morning.  It
was her face that had hovered over his.  It was Nasir’s cowl that had covered
him.  Marcus flushed as he realized what a shameful picture he must have
presented, inebriated and incoherent, bleeding and broken.  He patted his coin
purse with his fingers and realized again that all of his money was spent.  He
collared a boy from the street and asked him to take the cowl to them.  From a
hidden distance he watched to make sure they received it.  They looked around,
wondering where he’d gone. 

Marcus turned for home.  As he
rushed past he failed to notice Patricius curled up asleep in the mouth of the
next alley.

In the days following the Super Bowl
, Mark recalled the scornful
expressions on the faces of the hookers.  He remembered Chantelle’s angry
words.  She was someone he was interested in knowing.  She had brought him a
book.  Not just any book. 
The Meditations.
  He still didn’t have his
copy.  But he guessed he wouldn’t be seeing her again.   

He kept busy.  Most weeks he
worked overtime, sixty to seventy hours, meeting and exceeding the project
manager’s arbitrary deliverable targets.  He kept pace with his colleagues, all
of whom regularly clocked twelve hour days.  At every Monday morning meeting,
Gus would re-roast the chestnut, “we work hard, but we play even harder.”  All
would wink and laugh.  For Mark, playing usually meant heading to the bar in
the evenings with his workmates for jugs of beer, all you can eat chicken wings
on Mondays, all you can eat fajitas on Tuesdays, or all you can eat pork ribs
on Wednesdays.  There might be a few rounds of pool, video trivia, or football
on the big screen.  Most Thursday nights Gus would form a posse and they would
descend upon the city’s strip clubs.  On weekends Mark did his errands, his
laundry, and his shopping. There were parties at Paul’s villa on the water,
lots of water-skiing, swimming and hot-tubbing, beer and tequila, coke, dope,
sundry depressants and stimulants, lots of barbecuing, and plenty of
nakedness.  Sometimes Mark would be invited and sometimes he would go.  Often
he found himself unaccountably uninterested. 

Often, even months after the
incident, he replayed his unsettling encounter with the peculiar kid from the
highway rest stop.  The mugger.  He always dismissed it as one of those odd
coincidences that sometimes happen.  An unexpected intrusion of chaos and malevolence
into an otherwise ordered life.  The kid had moved on, he told himself. 
Surely.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Patrick had not moved on.  He had
nowhere to go and no means to get there.  The morning after the Super Bowl,
Patrick awoke around noon from his spot at the end of the second laneway.  He
knew upon waking that he had let Mark escape again.  The beggars were at their
customary corner soliciting alms; Mark was gone.  He sat at the end of the lane
for hours.  His stomach was as empty as the alley and his head throbbed from
thirst. 

Robbery or beggary.  That was all
that was left. 

“What’s a good American boy such
as yourself doing loitering around the streets?”

A man with a round, fleshy head
hovered over him.  His sky coloured tie was pinned with a chunky gold cross,
close enough to Patrick’s face that he could pluck it, if he dared.  The man
leant in and smiled.  The noon day sun created a nimbus around his globular
head.  Patrick could see himself, distorted and doubled in the man’s mirrored
sunglasses. 

“Had some bad luck, have we?”

“You could say that.”

“A bad decision or two?”

“What’s it to you?”

“No matter.  You’re still an
innocent child in the eyes of the Lord.”   

“I’m hungry.”

The man laughed and his jowls
wobbled.  “We all are, son, we all are.”

“I need a drink.”

“This is your lucky day.  You may
drink from the Lord’s cup.  Jesus will fill you up!”

Patrick stared.

“Are you going to give me
something to eat?”

“Gather him up boys,” the man
said to the four lean, young men flanking him, “we’ll take him with us.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After work one Friday, months
later, sitting at the bar behind a third round of oversized martinis, Gus
extended to Mark an exclusive invitation.  A meeting for prospective members,
initiates to be introduced and presented by their sponsors to the elders for
preliminary consideration.  It would take place the following Sunday, after the
company outing to the Pizza Emperor Five Hundred, the season’s only NASCAR
event at the city’s speedway.  A secret society.  Odd Fellows?  Knights of
Columbus?  Freemasons?  Rosicrucians?  He wasn’t sure.  Gus was speaking in
hushed tones and Mark was distracted by a pretty woman in a low cut blouse who
had just come up to the bar.  He accepted. 

He couldn’t have known that
Patrick Constantine would also be attending, in an official capacity.

“I beseech you, oh Isis and Ceres, all you holy ghosts of
the Greens
, to
invoke your magic, weave your spell, speak your true names.  I beseech you to
thwart the Blues, bind their legs, benumb their arms, strain their sinews,
addle their heads, hobble their horses, break their wheels, whip sand in their
eyes, muddy the earth at their hooves, and shatter their chariots at the
metae.  Make this the last race Nicostratus ever contests.  Let’s go you
Greens!”

Tertius pulled several handfuls
of grain from a leather pouch and hurled them towards the track over the heads
of the spectators in front.  Several of those seated below craned their necks
to see who was pelting them with barley.

Marcus pulled Tertius’ tunic and
whispered up to him.

“Sit down!” 

The expressions on the furrowed
faces looking back from the lower tier were familiarly dark.  Marcus had been
anxious all day.  There was ferment in the thick, miasmatic air.  Anything
could happen.

“You’re making enemies.”

Tertius made a tempting target encased
in a brilliant green toga, interwoven with twigs, leaves, and moss, and a pouch
of grain bulging at his waist.  His face was daubed with streaks of green and
brown dyes and an absurd, makeshift sheaf of wheat stalks crowned his head.  He
was bedecked in the typical fashion of a Green team zealot on race day. 

“Do you honestly think that hocus
pocus works?” Marcus asked when his friend finally sat down.

Tertius sniffed.

“You’ll thank me when those
beautiful Greens come thundering across the finish line and you get your cut.”

“You’re part of his syndicate?”
Secundus asked.

“Tertius still owes me from cards
this week and last.  This is the only way I can collect. He claims to have an
insider tip.  I get two thirds of the take.”

“How much invested?”

“Fifty denarii.”

Their colleagues whistled.

“I don’t know why you’re all so
shocked,” Tertius said, “you’re all betting on the Greens aren’t you?  Primus?”

“Of course.  Green until I die. 
But only four denarii.  I make sure I eat this week.”

Gnaeus, just returned from the
food stalls with a fist full of dried herring and a pot of garum to dip them
in, grunted as he took his seat again. 

“The wise money is on Blue. 
You’re all fools.  Especially you Tertius.  Nico hasn’t lost a race all week,
and by Mithras, he’ll win again today.”

“Curses on Nicostratus!”

Tertius pelted Gnaeus with barley
and a short, explosive Baetican phrase. 

Primus, Secundus, and Tertius,
uniformly jovial at work and at the caupona and just about any time Marcus had
ever been in their company, were overtaken by a singular type of madness at the
track, a delirium that infected the greater portion of the city on race days.

“What kind of despicable traitor
rides for the Greens for two years and then switches factions, just like that?”
 Secundus asked.

“A Pannonian,” replied the Gaul,
“and a damn fine rider at that.  The whelp is a natural Blue.”

“The jingling of a big bag of
silver woke him up.  Bought by the emperor.”

“Caracallus shouldn’t interfere
with the races,” Marcus ventured.  “It’s not sporting.”

“I didn’t know you cared,” Gnaeus
said, between mouthfuls of herring, “I didn’t know you wagered.”

“I don’t, usually.” 

Xander leaned forward from his
seat one row behind Marcus.

“A wise policy Briton,” he said. 
“Ab educatore, ne in circo spectator Prasianus aut Venetianus neve parmularius
aut scutarius fierem, ut labores sustinerem, paucis indigerem, ipse operi manus
admoverem, rerum alienarum non essem curiosus nec facile delationem
admitterem.”

When no-one responded to his
offered bait, as was typical, the ancient Greek continued of his own accord.

“Marcus Aurelius,” he said
tersely, “one of your own.”

No response.

“In his meditations.”

The conversation a row below had
already moved on to discussing the relative fitness of the stallion quartets
assembling ahead of their chariots at the carceres.  But Marcus was listening. 
A picture of his forlorn grandfather’s face presented itself to his mind’s
eye.  Once more, he chided himself for forgetting his parting gift.  I must
remember to send for it. 

“Written in Greek.  They were
notes to himself.  He didn’t intend to publish them.  Most scholars aren’t even
aware that the journal exists.”

An argument arose between Simon
and Tertius on whether the grey Barbary stallion from Mauritania racing for the
Greens should be yoked to the all-important centre-right position, or if he
would be better setting the pace on the inside, traced on the outer left.

“A lot of personal observations. 
Not overly rigorous.”

Secundus mocked Primus and
Anthony for their insistence that the Egyptian should drive the Green team, not
Felix, the Galatian, who was suited up and was at that moment checking the
harnesses and other gear.

“Mostly derivative of Greek
thinking, of course.”

As with most of Xander’s
speeches, this one started strong, waned quickly, and then, as it was steadily
abandoned by listeners, it died from neglect.  It was clear that his words were
being whisked away by the breeze sighing through their section of the cavea and
he was no longer reaching his younger associates.  He capitulated and ceased
talking. 

Marcus turned to ask Xander if he
had a copy of the Emperor’s journal and whether he might be able to borrow it. 
But the crowd roared, the heavy doors of the carceres burst open, chariots and
horses rumbled out; the race had begun.  Almost immediately, the overeager
horses of the first Green chariot charged into the alba linea, and stumbled
against that heavy, chalked rope that staggered the starting line.  The Green
chariot was upset and the driver thrown to the dirt track.

“Oh by Isis and all that is worth
living for!  That was a foul by Nicostratus was it not!”

Gnaeus sucked another dried
herring into his mouth.

“He didn’t touch him,” he said,
“that was just poor driving.  Nico, as brilliant as he is, couldn’t have
orchestrated a take-out like that on the start.”

“The alba linea was too close,
too close!”

“Nonsense.  Bad driving.”

The rest of the teams, one Green,
two Blue, one Red and one White, successfully bypassed the fallen chariot and
rattled down the eleven hundred feet of the straightaway.  The tempo was
furious as the tethered beasts strained at their harnesses, wild-eyed and
snorting, and their young, willowy drivers leaned back from their riding platforms
as far as they dared, a web of leather leads lashed about their forearms.  The
pell-mell rush, the frenzied limbs of horses and men, the smell of sweat and
desperation, and the verbal violence in the stands; Marcus had been to a few
pony races back in Verulamium, nothing like this.

By the time the three ovoid
stones had gone up on the spina and the race was at its midpoint, the lead Blue
and Green chariots were two abreast, having opened up a sizeable lead on the
other two teams.  Red retired partway through the second lap.  Shouts of
encouragement and abuse, cheers and imprecations rained down on the competitors
from the enthralled multitude in the cavea, now on their feet.  Felix, the
Galatian driver of the Green team, made a bold move to cut inside of the Blues
at the meta secunda, taking advantage of the narrow gap uncharacteristically
allowed by Nicostratus.  It was a risky manoeuvre; he missed shattering his
chariot against the columns and statuary at the end of the spina by no more
than a cubit.  Nicostratus was forced to take a wide approach to the corner or
risk injuring his horses in the machinery of the Green chariot and Felix
emerged from that meta with a slight lead going into the fourth lap. 

“Blessed be!  Praises to Ceres! 
Praises to Isis!”

Tertius was again on his feet
hurling barley. 

Nicostratus was far from out of
the race.  On the back stretch, he quickly re-gained the ground, galloped
alongside and whipped at the Green team horses, hoping to strike an exposed
eye.  The second Blue team had also crept up to the front-runners and was
attempting to help Nicostratus box in the Greens and drive them into the
spina. 

As they converged on the corner
of the meta prima and prepared for their turn onto the back stretch for the
last half of the fourth lap, the thudding left wheel on Nicostratus’ chariot
broke, crumpling along a portion of its circumference, causing the platform to
buck wildly.  Nicostratus had been leaning back at an impossible angle, reining
in his team to manage the corner and when the chariot jolted, he lost his
balance and fell from his vehicle onto the unforgiving track.  He could not cut
himself free before tumbling out and the horses dragged him and his disabled
chariot another ten paces.  The second Blue team swerved abruptly to avoid
trampling the unconscious racing star, but then ended up colliding with the
spina, causing them to lurch from the inside to the outside of the track,
stopping in a tangled mess at the track’s stone edge.

Only the Green team emerged from the
meta prima unscathed.  Half a lap back, the Whites had been able to weave
slowly through the hazards successfully, but by the time they reached the back
stretch, they found themselves at least three quarters of a lap behind. 
Suddenly, the way seemed clear for the Greens.

Gnaeus exploded.

“Treachery!” 

“No treachery,” Tertius said
breathlessly, “divine intervention.”

As Felix pulled his chariot
competently around the meta secundus and on to the lower straightaway, slowing
his pace to conserve the energy of his four stallions, a half dozen officials
flooded the track waving big yellow and black flags.  They waved the Galatian
over to the side of the track, signaling to him to slow his speed, and
eventually he rolled to a stop.  The White team caught up and was directed to
do the same.

Tertius now stood erect.  His
grain pouch was empty.

“What is going on?  What are they
doing?”

“Never in all my years at the
races have I seen them stop a race for something like this.”

Across from Marcus and his
colleagues, nearest the exclusive, reserved seats with the best sightlines,
where the governor, quaestors, praetors, and other magistrates and dignitaries
all sat, a herald flanked by city officials was on the track holding a large,
brass cone to his lips.  He addressed the crowd in that section, but his words
did not extend to the cheaper seats.

“What’s he saying?”

Gnaeus heaved himself forward in
his seat, his dewy eyes sparkling.

“I’m sure he’s explaining that
the Greens have been found guilty of foul play.  And that the race needs to be
re-run.” 

Marcus was skeptical.

“A city herald?  Why him?  Why
not a race official?”

Tertius tore at the moss and
twigs fixed to his robe.

“But they can’t stop the race
now!  That’s preposterous!  Unprecedented!   This is a Blue trick.  They’ve
paid off the race officials!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The crowd within earshot of the
herald had suddenly gone quiet.

“I don’t think this has anything
to do with the race,” Marcus said.  He stiffened in his seat.  His earlier
apprehension had found its object.  Whatever had been brewing was now bubbling
over.

“Why do you say that?” 

“Well, if they were stopping the
race due to a Green foul, you’d be hearing a big protest from that side. 
Listen.  Nothing.”

“And look!  The crowds!  They’re
starting to leave!”

“It looks like the race won’t be
re-run today.”

Finally, the herald had finished
his address to the folks in the choice seats and had come around to give his
announcement to those in Marcus’ section.

“Your attention please!” the man
hollered into the megaphone.  “We have received news by dispatch that on the
morning of the seventh day of the Ludi Romani, a horde of barbarians invaded
Rome, and caused considerable damage to the city of the Emperor.”

A collective gasp went up from
Marcus’ section.  They were expecting a ruling on the fourth lap.

“Does this mean they’re not going
to let the race finish?”

“Tertius, be quiet.”

“We don’t know exactly from
whence they came,” the herald continued, “they may have attacked the Emporium
and burned it to the ground.”

“They may have also destroyed
Trajan’s Forum.”

Marcus’ side of the circus was
now silent too. 

“We don’t know how many savages
there are.  We don’t know their intentions.  The Praetorian Guard captured no
prisoners.  The attackers immolated themselves.”

Disapproval rippled through the
cavea.