Lamp-light glinted off the cuirass of burnished bronze with its protective medusa head, honorific scorpion emblem and winged horses and off the tip of the gladius in the man’s hand. Breath clouded in the chilly night air and condensation formed on the red-painted walls.
Titus Flavius Genialis leaned around the corner of the corridor and glanced left and right sharply before pulling back to safety.
“No one. The passage is clear, Caesar, but we must hurry.”
Behind him, the emperor Marcus Didius Julianus flattened against the wall, wild-eyed and breathing heavily. His normally intricately-combed and curled black beard hung loose and ragged, much like his hair. His normally swarthy, handsome features were strangely pale and glistening, the result of such desperate nerves. His toga was muddy and covered in dust from the many hiding places they had been forced to utilise on the way through the enormous Palatine palace complex.
“Where now, prefect?”
Genialis shrugged.
“Rome crawls with your enemies, Caesar. The circus maximus throngs with the soldiers of Severus; his agents are abroad across the forum and the Capitol. Most of the praetorian cohorts are already shouting his name. There is nowhere to go but to your chambers and prepare for death.”
The emperor stared at the commander of his praetorian guard. Behind them, Julianus’ son in law shuddered like the inveterate coward he was.
“I thought you were helping me escape!”
Genialis sighed.
“I would give my life if it would save yours, Caesar, but there is simply no escape. Rome belongs to Severus now. All that is left for you is to decide the manner of your end.”
“There is a way. There must be a way. We can leave the palace by the servants’ quarters. Make our way down the hill past the Magna Mater temple dressed as common folk and head to the docks. We can be in Ostia by dawn and then take ship to anywhere we want.”
Genialis’ lip curled. It galled him in the extreme to be laying his life on the line for such a man but, regardless of what anyone said about the praetorian guard, he had only been prefect for a month and was damned if he would be remembered for turning on his rightful emperor in a time of trouble. When it was over and Severus came, he would decide whether Genialis should live or die, but for now the rightful emperor of Rome should stand proud as the office he held demanded.
“Nero fled his palace in disguise. It gave him little extra time, and think how eternity remembers him. Come, Caesar.”
The praetorian commander ducked around the corner and ran lightly down the beautiful mosaic floor, his white cloak billowing behind him.
The ruler of the world’s greatest Empire peered nervously around the corner, reluctant to follow this man who claimed to be leading him to his end, but equally sure of the fatal nature of cowering alone in these corridors. Severus’ supporters were already in the Palatine complex somewhere and could be here at any moment.
He felt an embarrassing warm trickle and cursed his nerves.
More than thirty million sesterces he had paid the guard to secure this throne and here he was, after little more than two months under the purple, fleeing through his own palace from the rabble of a barely-literate African thug. Where had the majesty and glory of the Empire gone? Where had justice gone?
Ignoring the warm yellow pool gathering in his boot, he waved his son-in-law on with him and rounded the corner to see his praetorian prefect ahead, holding open the door to the great chamber that overlooked the circus maximus.
Running breathlessly, he pounded down the corridor in his soft, stinking leather shoes and hurtled through the door, throwing himself onto the low couch by a table covered in fruit and dining accoutrements.
“Perhaps I can appeal to them again? Severus might want to exile me? I could go and be governor of Hispania? I think I’d like Hispania. They make a lot of fish sauce there, and I like garum. Maybe I could build an estate and retire? Just grow olives or something? I could…”
He stopped rambling in shock as his guard commander gave him a stinging slap across the face.
“You are the emperor of Rome for however long you have left. Have the grace to act like it!”
Julianus stared. He hadn’t paid this man’s unit more than thirty million sesterces just to be treated like this: like a schoolboy.
“Don’t shout at me!” he burbled petulantly.
Genialis shook his head in disgust.
“I took your money and the vow to protect you. If it weren’t for that, Caesar, I would see nothing worth protecting!”
The prefect tossed his gladius into the air and caught it deftly by the blade, proffering the hilt to his master. The emperor stared at the weapon.
“No!”
“Do the honourable thing, Caesar, and I shall do what I can to protect your daughter and son-in-law. If they renounce their titles, Severus and the senate may let them live.”
Repentinus, the only recently married son-in-law of Julianus, nodded vigorously.
“Caesar, you must save your daughter!”
Again, Genialis’ lip curled in revulsion at the constant displays of cowardice and fear this family exhibited. Despite his oath to serve and protect them, he was rapidly becoming convinced that Severus, the ‘Lion of Leptis’, might just be exactly what Rome needed: a strong leader, unafraid and severe.
Marcus Didius Julianus, master of the world, hugged the couch and wept like a little girl, his nose running, mucus matting his moustache.
“Get up!” Genialis snapped at him.
The heap of toga, shuddering and whining, remained exactly where it was, the cowardly Repentinus gingerly embracing his father-in-law, ostensibly begging him to save the young princess. Genialis was in no doubt as to whose skin the young man was really interested in saving.
“Get up!” he barked again.
Reaching down, he grasped the emperor by the throat, bunching the folds of the toga in his fist and hauling the man to his feet with a grunt. The waxy, pale Julianus, tears in his red-rimmed eyes and mucus in his beard, staggered, his knees quaking, the stink of urine about him.
Genialis thrust the gladius into his unwilling hands and folded the emperor’s fingers around the hilt. Julianus stared down at the weapon and raised it hesitantly, gesturing at the prefect. Genialis sneered and simply batted it aside.
“Killing me would hardly help you, Caesar.”
“Perhaps I can appeal to the masses? To the army? I still have a fortune. They’re gathered in the circus maximus, you say? I could shower them with sesterces from here! They will hear me and they will love me and I’ll be safe and they’ll kill Severus and I’ll rule Rome and I’ll be safe forever and…”
Another ringing slap stopped him chattering. He pulled away, the sword in his hand, and started toward the balcony before stopping dead again. His son-in-law was standing on the hem of his partially-undone toga, shivering, while the praetorian prefect glared at him with barely concealed loathing, his arms folded.
“Repentinus!” he barked, but the young man remained where he was, reached toward him, gripping the blade of the gladius in the emperor’s hand and gently pulled it from his grasp.
“Yes, yes” Julianus nodded. “I won’t need that, you’re right. I can buy them off. I will buy their love.”
Repentinus nodded and turned.
Genialis’ eyes widened as the young, cowering son-in-law drove the blade deep into the praetorian officer’s side, above the cuirass and below his folded arms, pushing the hilt with a grunt and listening to the grating as the blade slid between bones and vital organs. It was a masterly blow, worthy of a soldier; an almost instant kill.
Silenced first by shock and then simply by the journey to Elysium, Titus Flavius Genialis, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, collapsed in a heap, his legs buckling beneath him as blood rushed from the mortal wound in his side. A single gasp escaped his lips. Repentinus let go of the sword hilt and helped lower the dead man to the floor with a surprising show of respect. Fumbling with his toga, the young man stood.
Julianus, his eyes still wide with shock, started to nod madly, grinning like an idiot.
“Of course. Good boy. He had to go. He would never have let me live. Now we can buy them off and I can…”
His voice tailed off as Repentinus stood again. The respectful lowering of the body and strange toga-fumbling had simply been the boy removing the prefect’s dagger from his belt. Now he brandished the leaf-shaped blade with a sad, resigned look.
“What is it, Repentinus?” the emperor squeaked.
“You see, Caesar, there is a problem. Genialis would never manage to save us. Severus will kill him for simply being in your guard, and Didia and I will follow quickly. But he was right that you simply have to die. No amount of generosity and coin will save you now. But there is still time for me to secure my future.”
Reaching out with his free hand, he grasped the emperor’s toga and bunched it in his fist in the same fashion as Genialis had done.
The emperor stared in shock and panic.
“But you’re my family!” he wailed.
“Sadly you’re no longer in mine, Caesar.”
Julianus tried to say something. His last words may have been profound and noble, though they probably weren’t. Whatever they may have been, they were inaudible as Repentinus drew the knife across his throat, watching as the blood began to gush and spray, soaking his own toga.
Letting go of his father-in-law as he fell, Repentinus ignored the thrashing as the emperor tried to hold his throat closed, making hissing, rattling sounds. Reaching down with the knife, he began the onerous task of sawing through the prefect’s neck with the razor-sharp dagger and removing the head. Moments later, treading through the blood-slick, he repeated the process on the now-expired emperor.
Letting the knife fall and grasping the heads by the hair, he walked, one in each hand, toward the balcony.
Quintus Aemilius Saturninus, loyal soldier of Septimius Severus and future prefect of the Praetorian Guard looked up. The crowds of soldiers in the circus maximus continued to shout momentarily, but the noise gradually died away as they took note of the small figure, high up in the palace window perhaps sixty or eighty feet above them, past the stands of the circus and the Imperial box.
The man was clearly wearing a toga, though it could be seen even at this distance that it was stained heavily red.
“Behold the heads” the figure repeated for the third time, now finally sure of attention in the silence, “of the traitorous renegade Marcus Didius Julianus and his chief enforcer Genialis!”
With masterly theatrics, the man hurled first one head and then the other out into the air, watching along with the gathered crowd of legionaries as the heads of the emperor and praetorian prefect struck the seating area below the window and bounced, clunked and rolled down the stands until they fell, bloody and battered, to the sand of the circus.
The guards stared down at the grisly prizes as the killer in the window bellowed once again.
“Hail and long life to the Emperor Septimius Severus, Lion of Leptis!”
A roar rose from the crowd.
And so passed Marcus Didius Julianus: the man who bought Rome.
Sold by his own kin in return for a future.