Faustina and the Barbarians Read Free Page B

fog-shrouded rain-swept island where the sun never shines? Yes, a thousand times yes, for it’s home to one of the most splendid men I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet: the Count Comminilingus. And though I love Rome with all my soul, I shan’t be sorry to leave it, for a while at least—and do I not carry the best of Rome within me, wherever I wander?—for it’s become a dreadful bore of a place. All of the best pagan temples torn down or converted into churches. Bishops and priests thick as buzzing flies in dispute over the latest theological turd. The best of the bathhouses closed because of ‘immoral behaviour’—as if we went to the baths for anything else. And half of the bars and taverns of my youth converted into shops selling over-priced trinkets for gullible tourists. Apart from all this what really galled me—for I’ll tell you in a moment what I did about it—was the continual moaning about how Rome was finished simply because a few hundred Goths had gotten in and carted off a few wagonloads of gold and silverplate. It was through the lazy perfidy of our Emperor Honorius—was ever a son less like his bold martial father Theodosius the Great?—that Alaric the Gothic leader, who really only wanted to settle in one of our most modest provinces and become Roman, was practically compelled, as a matter of honour, to encamp beneath the walls of Rome. And as you may know by now, the Goths would never have gotten in had not a group of disaffected plebeians opened the Salarian Gate to them.
    Sneaking treachery of this kind has always infuriated me, and I swore to avenge the Gods and the divine Emperors by doing something about it, and rousing the senate and people of Rome to shake off their self-pity and face up to the conditions of our chaotic modern age.
    I decided to track down the slaves responsible and have their heads—and I don’t mean the ones between their cur-like shoulders.
    I was pleased to find that the name of Faustina Maxima still had much influence in Rome, particularly among the upper classes, though it was not they who could help me much in my detective work. No, it was the mob, the plebs alone who could help me. And though, these days, they hardly care who runs the City and the Empire, a Gothic puppet Emperor like the ill-advised Attalus or the useless Honorius, as long as they get enough food and wine and entertainment, they hate traitors as much as I do.
    It was among the populace in the quarter around the Salarian Gate that I deployed a group of well-paid spies who would receive a bonus for any information leading me to the betrayers of our Eternal City.
    It was only a matter of weeks before I had a shortlist of the most likely candidates. Three in particular seemed to have gone from being butchers and barmen to rich slave-owning businessmen virtually overnight. A real ‘tunica to toga’ story almost unheard of among the lower orders.
    And then, one excessively hot early evening I was brought confirmation that it was indeed a Felix Quislincus, Caecilius Gallus, and Rufinius Lucanus who were responsible for admitting the Goths. After careful preparation, and making myself look as plebeian as it is possible for me, with my fiercely blue blood, to look, I headed for the address of Quislincus, in the Alta Semita district.  
    I was admitted into the brand new and ostentatiously tasteless inner courtyard of Quislincus’ house and told he wasn’t at home. But he was nearby, in the Gardens of Sallust. An antoninianus in the slave’s palm bought me agreement to be guided to him immediately.  
    The ornamental gardens were packed with people vainly trying to escape the evening’s unabated heat. While the plebs swatted away the flies with cheap straw hats, the rich lay with their fat arses ensconced behind screens and silk tents, being fanned by slaves. It was behind one of these all-encompassing screens that the traitor and his two confederates, along with a fourth who looked