Boy Caesar by Jeremy Reed

Author:Jeremy Reed [Reed, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 2014-01-10T13:00:00+00:00

7

Against all advice, he had gone ahead and married Hierocles. That Rome had taken the matter seriously bit into his sleep as he sat up in the empty dawn hours, listening to a subdued roar surf over the city.

Sometimes, when he awoke before daybreak, a nerve resonating in his unconscious told him he had gone too far. While he couldn’t locate the exact source of his unrest, he knew it existed somewhere within the modalities of his confused gender. He had risked a same-sex marriage, despite it being regarded as a violation of taboo by almost everyone, including the Army. And that he had insisted his bride dress as a woman had been considered detrimentally faggy even by the gay community.

Hierocles had taken to going out at night and sometimes not coming back for two or three days at a time. Heliogabalus had grown to despise Hierocles for his reckless hedonism, and propped up on a couch, counting his thoughts, he wished him dead.

He thought of Nero, who had been terrified to go to sleep for fear of encountering those he had murdered in his dreams, and now insomnia had overtaken him, but for different reasons. He had committed no atrocities in his reign, but pacifism and a refusal to become involved in political issues had turned the Senate against him.The one war he could have staged – against the Marcomanni – he had refused to initiate on the grounds that Commodus had subdued this state by Chaldean magic and it was dangerous to risk lifting the spell. He stood by his decision, proud of having avoided a bloody offensive.

Giving up all attempts at sleep, he took himself out to the terrace and looked up at the shattered stars exploded across the galaxy. It would be light soon, and his thoughts were busy with the coming day’s agenda. He reminded himself that he was due to address a convention of rent boys later in the day and that he was to be given first choice from a priceless cargo of silks recently arrived from China.

He was drinking already, but he didn’t care. His mind raced with buzzy data. Finance, he assured himself, was stable. Under him the government had increased its volume of credit by depreciating the standard of the currency. Gold was still relatively pure, and he had succeeded in keeping the weight of the aureus at 6.55 grams, no mean feat given its significant reduction under Caracalla.

He was about to go inside and fetch another bottle when he felt Hierocles’ hand on his shoulder. He could smell the alcohol on his breath as an undeclared roster of drunken nights. He knew the procedure backwards now, his lover’s appeals for forgiveness, followed by the usual vicious recriminations that he was being used and forced to live in the emperor’s shadow.

This time Hierocles looked ravaged by the scene. He was losing weight and the story of his nights was written in his face. Heliogabalus didn’t like the look of this waste: it seemed to cut to the bone like the inroads of plague.

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