“He talks that way all the time,” Selous said again. “I’m a solitary man, used to the silent places. You deal with him; I’ve had quite enough, thank you.”
“We’ve all had enough,” said the smooth-faced man. “It’s amazing how much you can take, though.” He stared at Caligula intently, knelt, tugged at a knot. “Every man a god, that’s my philosophy,” he said. “What else would have brought us here?”
“Godhood is restricted,” said Caligula. “It becomes only one of us.”
“Oh, calm down,” said his rescuer. “Calm down and stop babbling, at least for a moment. Beethoven, come and step on this cord, will you? We’re never going to get him loose at this rate.”
EVERY MAN A GOD
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They bent intently to minister to him. Caligula crouched proudly, his head inclined at an angle, seeking the sun, the thin blades penetrating the heavy rolling clouds. An image pressed upon his mind, an image that inserted itself, unbidden, and that he could not remove. Hunched as if in this position, clinging to the stones, his belly heaving and inverted, his knees feeling the cold damp of the stones as he clutched the handles.
The vomitorium.
. Without instruments he could not carry a tune, and this place yielded not even percussion, but Beethoven gave them a march anyway as they labored up and down with the one called Caligula at their head. It was the Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens, not his favorite, but good enough for this rabble with its piercing woodwinds and rattling snare drums, effects that he could reproduce in his head if not his muttering, groaning voice.
Take the city, that was Selous’s idea too, take back the city. Not that they had ever had it in the first place, not that the city was anyplace to take. What could you do with it? But the Roman emperor, the strange youth with the glaring eyes, seemed to know his business: he had the assurance of Napoleon and the madness of an archbishop, moving out at the end of them in a curious, shuffling stride that conveyed, if not regality, then a kind of determination that Beethoven could appreciate.
Selous and Huey Long seemed deep in conversation as they shuffled along. From time to time some form would leap from the crowd that streamed alongside them and slap at the Roman emperor, then fall back with a roar.
It was a procession unlike any Beethoven had ever known. He had written his share of marches and
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Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
contradances in his time, junk and diversions for the rabble, but he had never seen a group such as this. He could tell that things had changed since they had come upon Selous and Caligula, had released Caligula from his bondage and started back toward the place from which he had come. Matters were not at all as they had been. The air was thicker, clotting his nostrils, and the crowds pressed with an insistence he had not known before. Every man a god, Huey Long had said, and indeed attention was being paid to this Caligula unlike anything Beethoven had ever seen. Maybe there really was something at the end of this trek; Beethoven did not know, and it was not worth thinking about. What you did was take the staff and make your way with the rest of it: Roman emperors, Gallic emperors, democrats, freedmen, archbishops or slaves, they were all the same. There was almost an insight there, but he would not think about it. Not with the music roaring in his head, the cymballo rattling, the pedal of the snare drum furious against the screen of his consciousness.
When they came to the rise and looked down upon the enclosure, the huts erected along the River, Selous felt a sense of triumph, of vindication.
“You see?” he said, turning to Huey Long. “I told you we could get here. I knew it was just a matter of turning around and coming back, that no one would stop us!” Indeed, no one had stopped them, and they had in fact gathered a considerable group that was not discouraged by the heat and the brutality of the conditions, nor by Caligula’s ravings. “Now we go on to the next step.”
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