Galen the Deathless

conclusion

by Danielle L. Parker

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

“You were cut again,” he commented at last. For all the intoxication revealed in the widened pupils and the fluttering pulse in his throat, those were calculating eyes, eyes as hard as those in the fresh bloody head of the chimera-wolf trophy stuck upon the pole behind him. He reached out and touched my arm with a finger as soft as down, there where the nova-flesh lay pink against my milk-white skin. “I do not like that. You are no longer perfect in that body, Galen the Deathless. Perhaps a gladiator should not reach thirty. Beware I do not tire of your naming.”

“I live to serve the gods and the Imperator,” I answered steadily. I could not feel fear of his threat, though I knew it was real, and deadlier than the mace and spear that Aquila had used to inflict today’s wounding. When a man is so familiar with death that he no longer fears it, perhaps Death is moved to rise to his challenge: I remembered that, fleetingly, and felt deep within the cold breath of that presence. I said, seeking to divert that thought, “Thank you for the loan of Theo. He is an impudent one!”

His mood changed abruptly, with that erratic untrustworthy swing imparted by the smoke he drew into his lungs. He laughed. “Cratan is still wailing his stings,” he said. “Treat the lad gently. I will have Theo back, when he has learned not to trouble my peace with his pranks.” He smiled and twisted his free hand lightly in the curls on the bowed head of the slave. “After all, he is wasted on you, is he not? Go, Galen. I think that young slave Julia has been holding out for you. She was hiding behind a curtain, trying to escape old Demetrius, last I saw her.”

There was a dutiful laugh at that from the circle of those who sprawled on couches around him. They were too much afraid of Lucullus, all of them, except for Kratur, whom thankfully I did not see here, not to match his moods. Anthony Flavius called teasingly, “You’re out of luck, Galen. I saw Demetrius drag her away. She’ll not be fit for a goat after that old satyr is done with her!”

It seems more and more I seek not to remember these nights, and it is a goblet that is my companion more often now than a pair of dark eyes. Yet I remembered dimly a small lithe form, sweet breath and a chain of silver about a delicate ankle, wrists thin and breakable as strings yet unexpectedly strong in their grip upon my shoulders. The image of Demetrius hovered before me in all its vileness: splattered broken nose and coarse yellowed teeth, thick sour-smelling body, toga bespattered with his dinner and his vomit. Foulness should not embrace a flower, or an ape a sprite. The slime I felt in my nostrils choked my throat. I rose to my feet. “My lord,” I said. “I beg your leave.”

He waved his free arm negligently in dismissal. But I felt his eyes as I made my way across the courtyard, and I felt that other smile... the one that shows the teeth. I felt those teeth upon my nape now, as promising and as possessing as his hand had been upon the neck of the child.

I caught a serving girl carrying a tray and took her three newly opened bottles from her. My mood was too black for anything then but a goblet and all the bottles of Lucullus’s potent Lydian wine I could carry away. I went out the archway with them under my arm, into the dusky shadows beneath the fascination trees that perfumed Lucullus’s fine large garden.

The great central fountain threw out revolving red and blue and purple lights, making the marble statues of the god (Lucullus favors Bacchus, even in appearance, as well he should) seem as if they moved in a dance. Sounds I heard, those who sought the shadows and the thickets for their own purposes; some of pleasure, others of laughing unmeant protest, once stifled panting cries of pain crescending unheeded into a cut-off scream. Those made me think of Kratur again, whom I did not wish to think of, tonight or any night, and I moved away quickly.

Against the wall I found the place I had sought, a dense thicket of bushes adorned with twining vines with drooping small fruits and purple flowers. I was told once this is a vine brought from Old Earth, rare and precious, called nightshade, and that its tempting fruits are poisonous. I did not care. It was hidden enough for my private purposes, and here the drug of the trees was less potent than elsewhere. I sank to my knees.

It was when I had drunk the second bottle, and was thinking, in the coldness of my continued sobriety, that my release seemed as unattainable as a eunuch’s orgasm, that I heard the voices, and the crunch of gravel under shod feet. There was a laugh I knew, a soft yet somehow raspy sound, like a knife-edge drawn lightly along a whetting stone. There are some things a wise man knows instinctively to fear, though they may be a smile from one man, and a laugh from another. I drew up my knees beneath the thick covering of vine.

“You have my blessing,” the voice said, and laughed again (I was not drunk enough not to be chilled by the sound, because I know what makes Kratur laugh, and someone, tonight, would lose blood). “I have been patient, Agonistes, very patient; you must admit it. See for yourself how he avoids me. Have you ever known me to lavish such patience upon another, my friend?” The heavy crunch passed me by, and I saw the edges of a silk kilt, and the silhouette of a thick-shouldered powerful man through my lattice of limbs and leaves. I could glimpse the sandaled feet of his slighter companion on the other side. “Perhaps I shall have better luck with the new one. Especially,” and the laugh too moved away from me, “when I remind him how he lost his name. Even that one can be taught fear.”

“We waited only for your blessing, Kratur,” replied his companion with obscene deference, and as their footsteps faded I heard hushed intense whispering, until I could hear no more.

I lay still for a long moment, painfully sober in spite of the empty bottles that lay discarded by my side. The breeze rustled the branch limbs and brought me again the tantalizing stupefying perfume of the fascination trees. The third bottle lay warmly within the crook of my arm, sweet as the promise of sleep, yet I knew it could not help me. How is it that one may be certain, absolutely certain, that Death has finally accepted one’s challenge? His answer was there in the smile of my patron and the laughter of the man who so long pursued me for the solace of his dark stained bed and thin long knives.

When I had drunk the last bottle the moon Deformus too had disappeared, and dawn light, pale and ghostly faint, shone on the edge of the horizon. I took a long slow way home, wandering through streets where sweepers and early risers stared in fear at the great white giant that moved among them. The arena had been swept and prepared for today’s lesser games already, and its surface gleamed like the face of a great smooth sea. Its tides would rise red again by evening.

I do not know why I expected him to be awake also, in this hour before true dawn. But I found him almost as I had left him, with his large knobby hands upon the bar, looking through the crystalline panel again. Only the face within this room was his own, and in sleep it seemed nakedly sorrowful, more sorrowful even than that of the one who watched.

“Why do you not sleep?” I said to him. “It is but an hour of dawn.”

He did not look up. “I have had years of sleep,” he whispered. “Should I not stay sleepless to pray for him, he that will wake to but one short hour of pain and death? Perhaps mercy will be granted to him, if not to me. Seventy-eight years ago, a night to me but yesterday, Socrates the heretic was condemned to eternal death by the Imperator. His flesh has fed generations of chimera-wolves since. Should I not pray, then, for that man?”

“To whom do you pray, then, old man?” I asked him. But he turned his face away from me, and what I could see of his profile was as remote and sad as the old wrinkled face of Deformus.

“I cannot tell you his name,” he replied. “You seek for a name and a man’s image, like the statue of Zeus-Arcturus upon Palatine Hill. Such images are hollow delusions. I cast my hope upon another. It is not by man’s carved image that one knows that one. I trust that one day he will have mercy upon us all.” And he nodded to the image that lay sleeping inside its glass chamber.

“That is a fool’s hope,” I said. “I am told that in three hundred and nineteen years the resurrection cycle has failed only three times. The wheel will turn again, old man, and you and I will be bound upon it.”

He looked up at me at last with his tired dark eyes. “So Galen the Deathless senses mortality at last, does he?”

“Death is always here,” I said. One of the orpheusites passed behind us then, its thin white robe fluttering in the cold moving air. “You will die in a week, old man, and your successor will wake soon after for his own hour of terror. One day I too will be no longer Galen the Deathless. He will not remember my ten years of life, or know yet that women and wine are props only the weak lean upon. And Kratur will eat him. Will you pray for us as well? I would be grateful.”

He was silent for a long time. I thought, he will not. “I believe I can,” he said at last. “But if there is an appeasement you can offer, my son, think on it. Perhaps it will be acceptable.”

“I am grateful,” I told him again, and left him then, brooding upon the sleeper with the sorrowful face. I went slowly up the old, old stairs. Ten years of my own footsteps lay there in the deep dust before me. Would he see them, one day? I turned wearily to my quarters.

There was a shadow lying upon my bed: as I lit the lamp it uncurled into long thin arms and legs like a colt’s and a tangle of hair like a girl’s and huge dark agonized eyes. “You should not be here,” I said to it. “I told you I am not for boys.”

He fell to his knees again, though I had not yet cuffed him. “Master,” he whimpered, knotting the hem of my kilt with both fists. “I heard! I heard! Kratur and Draconius and Agonistes have placed secret bets against you. They’re going to kill you!” And the boy fell to piteous weeping and wailing as he clutched the edge of my kilt. “You will die!”

“I have heard,” I said, and bent to prize his fingers free of my clothing. “So do we all, in time. I told you not to tempt the gods. Come, child! Have you been here all night?” But I could not pry his fingers free without hurting them, and at last I had to lift him up, with his tears still falling upon us both, and my kilt riding up in his grip because of his ridiculous stubbornness. “Leave off! Here is bread and wine and dried apricots; you may have my own breakfast. Then go. Lucullus told me he would accept you when you repent of Cratan’s stings. Cease this crying, or I will have to disappoint him.”

But he would not be comforted until I made him drink the wine, and then at last he consented to eat the apricots, diverted like any child by the sweets. I put him on the bed and he fell asleep there at last with a bitten apricot still clutched in his fist. I put on my training kilt and went out again. There was Marcus to appease. Somehow it had become morning.

I do not remember the passage of that week except in snatches and bright isolated images, fractured like those of a man who has drawn in too much smoke. Faces came at me like vengeful harpies, teeth white and sharp, grinning like bears with their pleasure. Tacitus said to me, “I will live to see it now,” and grinned as he hobbled upon his stiffened leg. Marcus watched my daily practice from his stool, an old sour saddened frog, and never corrected me once as he usually did. I did not seek out the Penitent again. I did not know to whom I might pray, and I could not think of a suitable appeasement, though I besought one with all my might, long into my wakeful nights.

Lucullus sent his servant in the middle of the week to take Theo again into his service, which relieved me, for the child would not leave me even when disciplined by a half-hearted cuff. He spent the nights sleeping at my feet like an old familiar dog. I had not the will to beat him for it.

Then the day of the Great Game dawned bright and fresh: a fair day, one of those blessings of early autumn, and the air like a taste of cool water as one drew it into one’s lungs. The trees dropped their blossoms suddenly and stood naked and ebony above the splendor of dying white flowers. I went for a walk, and stirred their scented snowfall with my sandal. Then there were the long hours of cleaning and sharpening of weapons, which I had done before so many times; though it seemed another’s hands did it now. I ate, and did not remember the taste in my mouth, and I waited for the hour.

I dressed early and waited in the antechamber. I could hear the great roaring of the chimera-wolves as they slavered and leapt howling at the bars of their prison: this is the day that they wait for every week, for they eat fresh meat. Men brought a vast tangle of netting past me with much yelling to each other, and shortly thereafter, with thick gloves and chattering fear, pairs of great silent mordant bats hanging upside down from poles and wrapped in their wings like rotting brown fruit. One man, holding the bar too carelessly, screamed as acid drool pierced his glove. After them came the gay unsuspecting goats, victims to be of this week’s Comedia, and soon a great tumult from the crowd that I heard even through the thick ceiling above me.

Cillius, smooth as a snake and smiling behind the faceplate of his scaled murmillo, went past me holding his trident. This Cillius knew me not, though I had known him for more than a year. I heard the orgiastic roar of the crowd again, though not as loud as it had been for the Comedia. Now it was almost the time.

Someone darted toward me then, a small spindly form, racing through the widespread clutch of the old soldier who guarded the door. I heard a yell and curse, but the boy had already cast himself at my feet, gasping like a greyhound and seizing my kilt in two desperate fists.

“The knife,” he panted. “Master, the knife. It will be poisoned!” He looked up at me. The eyes were painted this time and his lips rouged, but it was a child’s love and a child’s terror that glared out of those kohl-rimmed orbs.

“Here,” grunted old Horatio, stomping forward. “You’re not allowed in here, boy!”

“Be easy with the child,” I said to him. A tall slim young man came through the door then, with the smooth easy beauty of a panther in his movements, and looked long upon me with his coldly thoughtful eyes. It was at that instant I understood what I must do. I felt a great rush of emotion, so strong my body trembled with it, and all my breath fled my chest. Yet I could not name what it was I felt.

I bent and picked up the child and kissed him on his hot wet cheek. “Go,” I said to him. “Do not fear, Theo.”

Horatio took Theo’s collar with an old soldier’s gruff kindness. “He’s the Deathless,” he explained with rough simple comfort. “Don’t ye fear, boy. Ye’ll see your master agin.”

“Be brave,” I called to him as the old soldier bore him away. “Be brave, Theo!” He no longer wailed. But his eyes looked at me over Horatio’s shoulder, huge, frightened, doubting eyes in twin rings of black. Water was still leaking from the corners, smearing the oily rings of kohl, but he did not seem to know it. I picked up my weapons.

The sky is azure. I have seen that sun with its throbbing ring of blue many times before. I hear the great and mighty voice of the crowd, the millions who ring us about in their baying circle; far away, sitting like a white grub upon his throne, I glimpse the tiny chubby face of the Imperator. Aquila and I turn together and salute him with our raised weapons in the ancient way: We who are about to die salute thee, Caesar!

We turn and face each other. We are too close this time, of his intent. The poisoned knife flashes in the sun like a light-shot icicle, and I allow my bare arm to meet it. Cold it is, more bitter than the edge of the metal, and I feel its morphetic chill poison my blood. Yet for an instant longer there is still great strength in me, and with all the might of my body and my will I hurl the sword high, high, in the air. As it rises the blade twists and spins like a glittering snake, until on its downward arc the blue lightning flashes upward from his throne to seize it and suspend it in the heaven. You are beneath its point, Caesar. Another shall see it fall.