and Kenamun threw their priest's staffs to the stones with a resounding clatter as each of the assembled clerics fell to their knees to prostrate themselves in reverence to the new incarnation of their deity lying upon the bier.
Hadrian rose slowly, tiredly, exhaustedly from his throne. He paused thoughtfully and muttered something half-voiced towards the assembled onlookers.
Many in the chamber missed his words, but Suetonius, Clarus, Surisca, and Strabon heard clearly. Thais and Lysias too caught the phrase, while Geta's response indicated he too had apprehended the remark. The Augusta turned in reaction while Arrian stood motionless in grave solemnity. They had heard him intone feebly, even reluctantly:
'Love is something to be pitied in a Caesar. Pitied.'
Hadrian signaled to his retinue with his eagle-tipped baton of office to dismiss the assembly. He clasped his puke-soiled toga folds about himself and lunged unsteadily towards the entrance corridors followed by his staff and soldiers. He paused by the bier to look upon the face of his departed companion as the morning sunlight flared across the youth's calm features.
Caesar lingered for an instant seemingly frozen in eternity. He then averted his eyes to move speedily away. Duty called. The business of governance beckoned. The Empire waited impatiently. Sentiment will be postponed to some other time.
Suetonius again detected the glint of moisture at his eyes as the Princeps passed by.
Yet, the biographer wondered to himself, is it really true love is something to be pitied in a Caesar?
EPILOGOS
The first sounds I heard were calls of alarm and shouted voices. The camp lanes at the Nile's banks were alive with slaves and attendants scurrying to-and-fro, while passing members of the Household and its military drew closer for a better view. In the sweltering blaze of noon I saw leaping flames and roiling smoke. The Governor's barque was ablaze.
The She Wolf, Hagne, nee Anna Perenna, and her Wolf Warrior brother Scorilo had been imprisoned under guard in her witch's den at the stern of The Alexandros. They were both manacled to separate beams facing each other in that musty chamber of decayed detritus, razor-sharps, and ill omens, to await examination by torture.
Governor Titianus announced he would comprehensively explore the origin of the conspiracy which culminated in the distasteful murder of Antinous, and determine if the incident connected to other disaffected members of the Court, Horse Guard, or Praetorians.
The barque chamber had been cleared of the remaining residues of her sacrificial victim, Antinous. These included the two amphorae of his putrefying blood and half-burned locks of hair. The ooze which had splashed over the temple flagstones was respectfully scraped up and interred in an embalmer's canopic jar. Antinous's bier soon carried nine jars of assorted viscera or bloody slimes.
But the remnants of desiccated organic matter, lizards, frogs, spiders, beetles, a stillborn fetus, exotic herbs, wild grasses, and evil-colored fungi, remained aboard The Alexandros. They were stocked in their racks and chests surrounding the two prisoners. Titianus anticipated his interrogation might uncover what further mischief his consort had been entertaining during the four years of their lusty, if tempestuous, relationship.
But this was not to be.
I was told by a reputed witness how under some pretext the devotee of Zalmoxis, Hagne, found a way to shift her manacled limbs to strike at a candelabrum which happened to be close nearby. She toppled its lamps and their oil splashily to the cabin's floor. At least that's the story we were given.
The splashed oil and nearby hangings caught fire instantly, with the flames skimming from drape to drape across the den in a cascading rush. The blaze latched onto the parched timbers and other flammable materials of the old Governor's barque. It was soon sweeping around the chamber and taking grip of the vessel in a rapidly expanding conflagration.
Despite the efforts of staff trying to bucket water onto the flames, The Alexandros became engulfed in a raging firestorm. The gilded tinderbox confection became a searing inferno. Its few inhabitants at that time, male and female, scattered swiftly. Some leapt overboard into surrounding boats, a few hurtled less felicitously into the river's rush. All escaped the inferno. The grand Alexandrine allegory and its two manacled prisoners were abandoned to their fiery fate.
We were told how at the advent of the fire the shrill jibes of the She Wolf, shrieking insults in the guttural rasps of her original dialect, cut through the snarl of flames. Her gales of victory laughter rose above the holocaust in defiant taunts.
I am also told no sound emanated from her brother's lips. He journeyed to the Underworld of Zalmoxis without so much as an audible whimper.
After some moments the She Wolf's vocal barbs transformed to less-exultant, high piercing screams of anguish and pain. Soon, only the crackle-and-snap of the consuming flames radiated across the river's surface as the ornate craft burned spectacularly to the waterline beneath the hovering midday sun.
We four members of the investigating team recalled the words of the Oracle at Siwa, 'Fire purifies!' Nevertheless it seemed a remarkably convenient accident or turn of affairs, we each thought.
So, does my secret history have a happy ending? Well no, if you consider our loss of the well-favored Bithynian youth. Yet these events possessed their own satisfactions for some.
Titianus's Iberian slave companion Sotira moved into tent chambers with the Governor within the encampment the very same day.
Vibia Sabina Augusta and her gentlewoman companion Julia Balbilla retired from social events during the remainder of the Nile tour. The revelations at the assembly in the temple had unsettled many at Court, including Hadrian's wife.
Instead Balbilla, a classicist poet of note, commissioned stoneworkers to inscribe flattering verses to her Imperial patron on the granite plinths of ancient monuments along the route of the Household's travels. She intends these public tributes in elegant verse to the Augusta to weather the long life of these monuments, perhaps as eternally as those to Antinous by her husband.
It seems devising ingenious ways to survive into eternity is an almost universal compulsion among us these days?
Curiously, later I learned at a distance how the Alexandrian Praetorian, the centurion Lucius Quintus Urbicus, didn't face a court martial. He didn't meet discipline and execution as might be expected. After all, to our view he was implicated somehow in the death of several people including that of Antinous himself. His role seemed as murderous as the Dacian brother and sister.
Instead I am told Urbicus has been quietly reassigned to the service of the Prefect of Praetorians, Quintus Marcius Turbo, at the grim Praetorium Fortress on Rome's Quirinal Hill. I haven't yet fathomed the implications of this unexpected gesture, but it seems to suggest a promotion?
Clarus simply raised an eyebrow charily when I mentioned it, but he diplomatically made no comment.
One wonders at the coincidence of so many of those of African origin involved in the matter, such as Urbicus, Titianus and, more remotely, Prefect Turbo himself. Did I, Clarus, and Surisca miss something?
My complete lack of success in engaging Surisca's professional charms continued. After three days of ineptitude in exacting a Roman male's customary prerogative with a woman, especially a woman well paid for the purpose, I finally desisted. Fortuna is telling me something? Several days in each other's company had changed the nature of the relationship. I became fond of her.
Perhaps it had been the Three Fates' way of telling me I should pursue other diversions so late in life than pursuing women young enough to be my granddaughter?
Instead, I endowed Surisca with half of my award of sesterces from Caesar. I did this because she contributed to our enquiry in ways far beyond her contracted fee. In fact, her perceptions had been pivotal to the crime's resolution. Even Clarus agreed to this, if grudgingly.
At first Surisca was wary of receiving my pledge of the fifty thousand sesterces, possibly thinking I possessed some gross intention upon her person in exchange. Once she realized my gesture was genuine and without strings attached, she became the joyful grand-daughter I had never given birth to, but vaguely hankered for. The donation,
