The Far Arena Read online

  Petronius stood like a patrician. Lucius Aurelius Cotta mentioned the two praetors who were Aurelii. I played a small part - in making one when Cotta freed me at the behest of the crowds at games he sponsored. I was seventeen at the time, had killed twelve, and heard the same speech about his family, But, where I had stood dumbly and answered only in gratitude, Petronius took the speech of the patriarch, turned it neatly around in return praise of the Aurelii, adding that no little virtue came to the family through his father, me, who showed Romans their worth by his worth in the most trying circumstances. In that manner said Petronius so proudly and evenly, were the Aurelii shown to be most Roman of them all.

  I could have cried with joy, for he had told the patriarch that we gave more to the Aurelii than we received, but I could never do that without blunt crudeness. Petronius did it with nobility and oil. Showing complete respect, he demanded respect. Unfortunately, the patriarch was a bit drowsy in years and failed to realize his speech was turned back to him.

  He even made the mistake of responding that Petronius was now freed by his own hand, not realizing it was a ceremony of early manhood not a manumission. To this, with full smile Petronius answered that the mountain thanked the pebble for lightening its load by rolling down it. Ordinarily this would be an insult, but Petronius said it with such sweetness and such a good smile that all, including the patriarch, laughed. And the patriarch apologized to Petronius for his mistake. Petronius accepted it.

  In three years, I would give Petronius his toga and take him to the forum in it for the first time, and he would be a man. These were my plans.

  After the supper of flamingo tongues, stuffed pigs, asparagus cooked in honey, peacock, and large slabs of wild ass, I spoke with Petronius alone, as I had on each birthday since I had first explained to him the danger his own tongue was to him and the family.

  I reviewed the things I had told him, such as all things really serve themselves, and masters of people and crops only turn this self-interest to themselves. A plant grows not to give us food, but for itself. The pear is but the seed for a new pear tree, which we steal for our stomachs. These were things he would not learn in school.

  I saw that he was cold to me, so I said that this truth I gave I had learned in the arena.

  'Men are more alike than they are different. Despite what you see, men are virtually identical. Man makes the difference. Man says one is slave and one is master. Man trains to be different. But we are all alike. The slaves we own and the emperor we serve are no different but for the way they think of themselves and each thinks of the other. Syrians are not naturally sneaky, Greeks born sycophants, Jews nursed beggars, Germans wild in blood, or Aetheops stupid, anymore than Romans are weaned courageous. Armies wear different colours to tell themselves apart.'

  Petronius interrupted me. 'Do you have the chamber pot ?'

  'What for ? Are your needs that urgent ?'

  'No. Yours are. You're spreading it in the room,' he said, and his eyes were cold as winter. They could not have been colder if they were barbaric blue.

  'This is true what I tell you. What we pretend is true for others is not true.'

  'We do not pretend, father. The only thing to be is Roman. You would have married Roman if you could have conceived Roman. Greek and Jew blood is stigma. But never mind, I will do what you should have done. I will put more Roman blood into my offspring than you did into yours.'

  I tried explaining the weaknesses of the mobs, which were composed of lazy Romans on the corn dole, and how his mother was the best of women.

  Even Publius, acknowledging her virtue above Roman women, said: 'Mother cannot read or write. You keep her in this house because you are ashamed of her. And look who you use to certify her worth. A Roman patrician, who has a mind pebbles could bang in, whose entire fortune would not pay a day of your retainers' expenses. A man of such little consequence that he would be an amusement in any other land.'

  Petronius said this without an oration stance, each word delivered dully and thumping like the last. His eyes and my eyes locked. He was not a boy any more. I lowered my eyes.

  "This is not so. Your mother has far more virtue than Roman women, who sleep about and pretend they're men.'

  'You did not hear the patriarch mistakenly give me manumission?'

  'He is old. His mind wanders. It was funny.'

  'You were the only one smiling, father. Like a Greekling when embarrassed by his Roman better. I took offence, because I have learned that every day I must prove myself Roman, and with each effort that makes me seem more Roman, I feel less Roman. Publius in chains is more Roman than you will be in the senate.'

  'He will be dead and you will wear the broad stripe.'

  'Which you will pay a fortune for, because we must buy what others have by right. And people will say, look at how the patricians have fallen because now even the son of a slave wears the stripe.'

  'Did I hurt you that much with my hands ?' 'Eat your barley.' 'I am sorry.'

  'It was not I who cried afterwards,' said Petronius.

  And by barley he meant gladiator's food. Barley without wheat is a punishment for the legions, but it is a gladiator's staple which I eat for fifteen days before an appearance. With the sudden games Publius had brought down upon himself following the secutor match, I had eaten barley steadily for more than a month. The good food had been for my guests and as always for Miriamne and Petronius, although meat eaten regularly poisons the blood.

  Perhaps it was eating barley so long when I could afford a granary full of peacock tongues or miles of bread as white as milk. Perhaps it was Petronius, from whom I had kept the sad history of his ancestry. Perhaps it was Publius, the first man I ever hated in an arena.

  But all my discipline and all my plans and all the caution I had used so long were about to blow away like a small cloud in a sudden great storm.

  Nine

  Lew McCardle had spent all his working life avoiding manipulating people and was surprised that, after two days of being a vice-president on sabbatical leave to the university, his biggest remaining problem was not managerial, but academic.

  He had taken sole responsibility for determining the language snatches mumbled by the patient. He thought at first it would be easy, because he was fairly certain it was French. But he didn't speak French. Someone who did said it sounded Spanish. The Spanish-speaking person said it sounded Italian, and he finally ended up with a professor of Romance languages who asked if this was the same language Dr Petrovitch had asked him about several days before.

  Lew said it was.

  The professor said it was some form of Latin. Lew said it didn't sound like it to him. The professor said he had recommended to Dr Petrovitch a woman whom he had known at Oxford and who was in this country now, at Ringerike.

  The professor hadn't said she was a nun, and Lew had to get permission from the metropolitan's office in Oslo before he found himself in the back of a rented limousine driving through the wet and gloomy afternoon of early Norwegian spring, looking for a convent of Dominican sisters in Ringerike. He wore a dark pinstriped suit with vest, white shirt, and subdued dark blue tie. If he dressed like a vice-president, he thought, he might feel like a vice-president. At least people would not as readily discern how strange the job was to him.

  He could see how these winters could depress people if they didn't have intense things to keep them occupied. He missed the surety of his work, knowing his skills were needed, and being certain of his worth. He did not like this job, but he had done it well, discovering from the staff itself just the right deceptions and putting most people like pegs in proper holes.

  Dr Petrovitch himself shunned publicity like a disease and was overjoyed when Lew, through the Houghton grant to the university, got him an intensive-care unit built into the floor where his office was, cleared out the entire floor by funding new and larger quarters for other professors, and filled a technological shopping list for the Russian, sufficient for anything short of a smal
l-scale war. The entire Petrovitch operation had become sealed.

  The talkative staff was dispersed to other discreet jobs. The doctor who had worked with Petrovitch had always wanted to work in Russia where cryonics received, as he call it 'more respect and public notice'. Even Petrovitch was amazed at how quickly the man was cleared for entry.

  Houghton Oil suddenly had incredibly lucrative nursing jobs open in Indonesia for four-month periods.

  Only one person proved not to have a price. It was the nurse who had explained to him what was going on in the hyperbaric chamber, the one who had cried at the first brain wave. There was nothing she wanted outside of Oslo. She wanted to continue working with Dr Petrovitch. She was proud of what she did.

  'I don't know what you want from me, Dr McCardle, but I have given my word to Dr Petrovitch that I would not discuss this current patient. You cannot buy my word.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Lew. And he was deeply embarrassed by her integrity, and later he resented it.

  One very buxom nurse, with massive shoulders and fat thighs, said she knew what was happening. There was too much money and secrecy for Dr McCardle to be on the up and up. She knew what they were trying to hide.

  'Really,' Lew had said, thinking that any moment there would be a swarm of reporters and television cameramen coming to see the man resurrected from ice, back from the dead, miracle in Oslo. And of course the dreaded question: 'Dr McCardle, where did you find this miracle ?'

  ‘Yes,' the nurse had said in workable but not perfect English. 'He got frostbite by playing hanky-panky nude without his clothes on. He was one of your people doing dirty business. This is not Sweden or Denmark. This is Norway, and he got caught frozen doing dirty business.'

  'Please don't tell. I beg of you,' said Lew.

  ‘I don't talk. These things are not so unusual for Americans, who think because they leave home they can do anything here.'

  Lew begged three more people not to mention a word about a Houghton employee who got frostbite during a sexual excess, and within one day the body, John Carter, had become just another little dirty American story, to go along with dirty German stories, dirty Swede and Danish stories.

  Coming up to Ringerike before the weak, pale sun had gone, Lew had watched the snow melt condensing that unmistakable layer of grime he had seen around New York City and London and other industrialized areas. Carbon, he thought, the waste of what was burned to make the world run. Perhaps that was what an education gave a man - the knowledge that you were looking at carbon and not just dirt.

  The spring had begun, and by summer the sun would be almost constant with a short, brief night, as winter had a short, brief day.

  The convent was an imposing stone structure that reminded McCardle of the stone strata of the region. This was a Protestant country, in that respect like Texas, yet here in Norway the Catholic families were usually the intellectuals. One would have to be an intellectual to take the name of Sister Olav, thought McCardle. He told the driver to wait. He entered the convent and was received by the mother superior, who had spoken with the metropolitan's office. She was in her late fifties and seemed quite effective, even in a white bonnet and black robe. She wore a large onyx crucifix on a beaded belt.

  'Why, she wanted to know, did Dr McCardle of the university not use the university? She was not forbidding an audience with Sister Olav, but she had to know certain facts. He explained about delays and that all he wanted to do was verify a language on a tape he had. He didn't want a lengthy position paper from a whole department. He smiled. It was not returned.

  Why didn't he go to Saint Sabina's, a teaching hospital in Oslo ?

  He would have, he said, but he was given the name of Sister Olav at this convent.

  Sister Olav had left Oxford before she had completed her language programme, said the mother superior. Did Dr McCardle know that?

  No, he didn't, he said, but that wouldn't matter if she were competent

  Competence, said the mother superior, was not one of Sister Olav's problems.

  But that was neither here nor there, she said. She would see, if Dr McCardle would be so kind as to wait, if the office of the metropolitan had given clearance. She would ask Sister Olav if she would give an audience to Dr McCardle. Although this was supposed to be a cloistered convent, but one would not know it, would one?

  Lew McCardle, standing there in the office with his grey gloves like a loose handkerchief in his large hands, feeling very awkward despite the cashmere coat and the five-hundred-dollar suit and the Italian shoes and the British tie and shirt, slipped into down-home talk and a surprising stutter.

  'Well, uh, n-no, ma'am. I guess I wouldn't guess I don't know fer sure...'

  "That's all right, wait,' said the mother superior. 'If you have permission from the metropolitan, and since your doctor has sent us a machine for these tapes, we will see what we can do. Although I cannot vouch for Sister Olav. She thinks people play games with her. And for that, the order has paid for her to go to Oxford. You do not play games with people, do you ?’

  'N-no, ma'am. Not at all, all,' said Lew.

  ‘I did not think so.'

  The ten-minute wait felt like a day. And Lew heard Sister Olav before he saw her. She was apparently reciting a prayer, yet it had too much rhythm. It had metre. She was reciting some form of what appeared to be Italian poetry. The mother superior escorted her into the room in which Lew waited on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair.

  Sister Olav with a start stopped her recitation and looked to the mother superior, who motioned that she too should sit.

  'Good afternoon,' she said. She was tall, with perfectly symmetrical features and skin as soft as fresh-powdered snow. The lips were light pink and fine enough to be etched by a draftsman. She was apparently blonde because her eyebrows were pale yellow, almost white. 'Good afternoon,' said McCardle.

  ‘I was talking to myself,' she said, and her smile came like a glory of marble from the fondest dreams of Michelangelo. She was beautiful but too intense to be attractive, he thought.

  'I heard,' said McCardle.

  'It was more like reciting,' she said, and her singsong English was softer than most Norwegians'. 'It is a habit I hope to break.' 'I do it often,' McCardle lied.

  'You wished our assistance with a language problem you have. Greek? Latin?'

  'No. It's some form of Latin, or a language closely allied with it. I had some Latin, so I recognized a few words. I would like you to identify this if possible.' Lew took a pocket tape recorder from his coat.

  'Someone spoke that recently ? In conversation ?'

  ‘Not exactly. He was just sort of rambling on.'

  'Vulgate,' said Sister Olav. 'It is undoubtedly vulgate, because that is the Latin of the church and that is the only Latin spoken today. That is, if it is Latin.'

  'We'll see,'said McCardle.

  He ran the machine and there was the rambling voice, slurring words, repeating the word 'Pebbles' or 'Poubles', sometimes angrily.

  'That's very interesting,' she said. 'Would you play it again?’ She listened with her hands clasped over each other, and, when the tape was done, asked that it be played again. After the third short playthrough, she shook her head.

  'I am sorry, I cannot recognize what it came from. I have never read an ode or a play or even an edict that reminds me of that.'

  'Well, maybe it's not from something written down,' said McCardle. 'That's very unlikely. Highly unlikely,' 'Maybe the person is a priest talking.' That certainly is impossible.'

  'Why?'

  This is not the Latin used by the church. Vulgate Latin used by the church is a deteriorated form of Latin, and by that I do not mean inferior, rather one that requires more pronouns. It is not quite as pure. Like street languages in the provinces that develop over a period of time.'

  'Down-home,' said McCardle.

  'If that is what you call provincialism. What you have on your tape recording is what we call classical Latin, which schoolchild
ren learn. It was the language of the Roman Empire or the civilized world, if you will.'

  "The ancient Roman Empire?' asked McCardle. He felt a heat in the room, like a blowtorch at his face. He was telling himself not to panic at this moment, while at the same time forcing a smile and telling the mother superior and Sister Olav everything was all right.

  'Are you sure ?' asked Sister Olav.

  McCardle nodded.

  'Well, there was only one Roman Empire, and technically it's not considered ancient. Egypt and the pharaohs are considered ancient. The Roman Empire lasted until about sixteen hundred years ago. But I can't place the play or the book of history. No. I don't think it is a history. Although they had so many. And the words, some of them are mispronounced. The grammar would never be allowed in a history. Never. Is this the same voice as on previous tapes sent by Dr Petrovitch ?' asked Sister Olav.

  'Yes,' said McCardle.

  'Someone is playing a trick on you. I have never heard Latin pronounced like that.'

  'How should Latin be pronounced, if not that way ?'

  Sister Olav raised her shoulders in a shrug. The polite reserved hand upon hand resting on her lap had begun, moment by moment as she talked, stirring with sudden gestures. Now she shrugged under her black gown. The face, no longer composed, grimaced.

  'No one knows with certainty. We've never heard a Roman speak Latin.’