The Head of Diocletian, Post AD 290

My teeth hurt.

Standing here beyond the margins of the village there is only night; the hollow yawning of November wind across cold, furrowed earth; a dark that swallows utterly, so that I cannot tell where darkness ends and I begin. The tin-sharp soreness in my gums is all I have to tell me where I am, and I am almost glad of it out here among the black fields, where the damp wind cuts my cheek.

I have been staring at this void so long my eyes are watering, unable to distinguish between sky and landscape; near and far. Worse yet, this is the second night I have subjected my complaining lungs to this ordeal, this vigil out here in the miserable chill before the winter comes. All for the sake of some half-witted local yarn, the fancy of a farmer’s boy with eyes so close together he seemed bred out of a pig.

Still, for all that, he answered when I spoke to him. He did not make pretense at inability to comprehend my tongue, or simply spit and turn away as have the other villagers, though all he said was antic mysteries, fantastical accounts of walking spirits: on a hill, not far from here and up past the cremation fields, there is an ancient camp, hundreds of years of grass and weed above its ditches and its ramps. A settlement, he said. Score upon score of people who one night, according to the tale, were quite devoured by giant dogs with neither hair nor drop of blood to mark that they were ever there. As is the custom with such histories, the place has ever since been shunned, afflicted by ill reputation. There are specters, naturally. On certain nights the fiery eyes of monstrous hounds may yet be seen atop the hill, their awful gaze enough to light the sky. I’m watching for them now, but there is nothing.

Off behind me in the village, distant voices, quarreling at first, then laughing. Foul and careless oaths. The hateful braying of their women, coarse, insinuating. Is it me? Stood here, out in the bluster and the tarry dark for no more reason than the village fool sees light upon a hill-top? Is it me, the source of all their scorn, their noisy ribaldry? My teeth are screaming. Soon. A moment more then I’ll give up the night, make for the tavern; bed; my bad, louse-worried dreams.

Robbed of my range and bearings by the dark, the sudden flare of low cloud lit from underneath seems closer than it should, before my face rather than off across the fields. Its shadows lurch and flicker, make as if to leap towards me so that I step back unnerved and almost fall before my tired eyes have the measure of it.

Lights. Up there beyond the burning grounds where they reduce their dead to ash and cinder. Lights upon the hill, not cast by dogs unless they walk upon two legs.

I have them.

No. No, better not to think such things, that fate is not provoked: there might be other reasons, commonplaces that will quite explain these glowerings. Tomorrow, with the light, I may ride up that way and judge things for myself. Why, here I am as good as ordering the crosses built before a single shard of evidence is in my hands. I can imagine Quintus Claudius there in Londinium, his office at the treasury, how he would cluck his tongue with disapproval.

‘First the tests,’ he’d say, ‘the scales, and the coticula of basenite. If there are further proofs required, employ the furnace and a white-hot shovel. Then, and only then, announce the guilty and bring out the nails.’

Above the tumulus the gray lights shift and writhe. At last I turn away to trudge and trip across the rutted earth, back through the long, unbroken dark towards the settlement, the listing wooden alleyways with tiny, crooked windows squinting.

I have been here for some several weeks now, and the tavern is no longer plunged in hostile silence when I enter. For the most part they ignore me as I pick my way across the straw-tossed floor between the pools of vomit and the copulations, making for the stairs. Tonight at least, they’ve better entertainments, with a buck’s night celebration in full throe.

The groom, a youth of thirteen years or so, is climbing drunkenly to stand upon a stool that lists and tilts, abetted by his friends and uncles. All around the tavern’s lower room the hulking, copper-headed creatures whoop and clap their hands together in a fearful unison, a rhythm that grows faster as the young man wobbles there upon his stool and beams, befuddled, down upon his audience.

Now they throw a rope across one of the black and sticky-looking beams, with one end fashioned in a noose. A horrid intrigue seizes me and at the bottom of the stairway leading to my room I pause and turn to watch. Jeering and sputtering, their faces pink and bright with perspiration, they are settling the loop of rope about the bridegroom’s throat, yet still that foolish grin across his face. One of the brutes, a great fat creature with his skull shaved bare save for a top-knot, presses something that I cannot see into the young man’s hand, then turns towards the audience, his tattooed belly glistening as he stills the pounding handclaps with a string of slurred vulgarities. He belches, and is met with waves of laughter. In the bridegroom’s hand, I see it now, a short bronze knife. With his other hand he waves happily down to a dark-haired girl at the front of the pressing crowd, barely aware of where he is through the clouds in his eyes.

The fat man kicks the stool away.

The rope jerks taut against the dangling, kicking weight and now the clapping starts again, its mounting pace set off against the slower, burdened creakings of the beam. How can it be that I am witness to such things? The young man twisting there between the floor and ceiling smiles no longer, and his eyes bulge terribly. His thin legs, swimming, tread air. From out of the crowd now, as one man, a kind of grunting is commenced, as that of animals in rut.

The nature of the game is now made clear to me as suddenly the strangling boy remembers that he holds a knife there in his hand. Reaching above his head, his darkening face suffused with horrid concentration, he begins his desperate sawing at the rope. Clenched in his trembling fist, the short blade plunges back and forth, this motion echoing grotesquely that of solitary pleasure. Quite as if responding to the lurid and familiar movements of the hand, although remote, a bulge is raised that strains against the young man’s britches, and the dark girl points to this and laughs. From broken, scattered comments overheard amid the din I understand that if the youth survives this game the dark girl shall be his, a final whore before he’s wed.

The young man twirls, and jigs, and rasps the knife’s edge back and forth against the rope, face purpling, and fearful throttled noise leaking from him now. If Rome falls, all will be as this. All of the world.

Unable to bear more, I turn away and stumble up the stairs, the tread worn thin there at the center and the worm-shot risers dusted green with age.

Safe in my room beneath the low-slung eaves, the door pushed shut behind me, from below there comes the muffled thud of body hitting floor with cheering in its wake, so that, despite myself, I am relieved. I dare say that his windpipe will be crushed and bruised, and he’ll be helped home in no state to claim the proffered prize for his ordeal. No doubt the same friends who encouraged him to mount the stool will see that any favors paid for in advance do not go wasted.

In the corner, stained gray bedding. Morbid spiders curled about themselves, translucent, hang from rafters in dust-colored shrouds of their own making. The girl who used this room before me moved into a chamber downstairs at the rear when I arrived, but every day I find some piece of her: a chipped shell comb, the scraps of clothing halfway through their journey into rags, blue beads strung on a hair of rusted wire. Sometimes I smell her ghost upon the blankets and the boards.

When I came to Londinium a half-year since, I thought it hunched and squalid, breeding ugly humors, pestilences in among the jetties and the narrow yards, pooled urine yellowing there where the cobbles dip. The locals, hulking Trinovante fishermen or shifty Cantiaci traders, had a pleasing insularity, despite their sullenness. They kept among their own kind and made little fuss, yet fresh from home I thought the city Hades; they its fiends and chimera. One of a team of treasury investigators sent from Rome at the request of Quintus Claudius, I spent my weeks there with my fellows quaffing vinegary wine, awaiting our assignments complaining each new inconvenience, each fresh indignity.

I work one thumb and forefinger inside my mouth and gently test the teeth to see how many move, loose in the blue and shrunken gums. I fear that it is all of them, and wish that I were in Londinium again, for it would seem a paradise now in my eyes.

Sent here into the middle-lands two months since with reports of forgery, I was a child with nothing to prepare me for this place, these Coritani, reeling drunk through short and bloody lives they take for granted; for their unconsidered, unrelenting violence; for the colored scars, the curls of ink that craze their brows and backs, as terrible and queer as painted dogs. When I arrived here, I was yet so delicate of sensibility that I might blanch to hear some lurid passage from a drama told in verse, and now I watch them hang their young for sport, and scarcely think of it.

I light the lamp and sit upon the crumpled bedding to remove my army-issue boots. Downstairs, a woman starts to hiss and snort, as rhythmic as a bath-house pump, thus signaling that someone has received the hanged boy’s prize. The women here discomfit me. They are so big and filthy, smell so foul, yet not an hour goes by save that I think of them, the red hair lacquered by their perspiration coiling into tiny sickles underneath their arms, their cow’s-milk haunches swinging under prickly skirts. I have not had a woman for a year, not since the dyer’s eldest daughter back in Rome. How long before I take a whore? Their flat white faces, and their speckled breasts. I must not think of it.

Naked now in the chill November room, I pull on the night-shirt I have taken, folded, from my army bag, that has the stenciled crest. There’s few signs of the Empire to be seen out here, a scattering of villas where retired generals struggle to afford their mistresses. Some small way north beyond this settlement one Marcus Julius, a veteran of the Emperor Aurelian’s campaign against the Gallic Empire still maintains a modest farm. I was told to visit should I find myself close by. It was excruciating. On discovering I was not long from Rome, he seemed capable of making only one inquiry: ‘Well? How fare the Blues?’ I told him I took little interest in the chariot races, whereupon his disposition to me cooled, so that I left not much thereafter.

I fancy it was him who let the cog-name by which I am known be bandied back and forth among the village folk, so that they do not call me Caius Sextus now but taunt me with ‘Romilius’: ‘Hello there, Little Roman! How d’you like this woman on my arm? I’ll bring a stool that you may kiss on her above the waist!’ All of them hate me, all the women, all the men, though to be just, it is not without cause. They know why I am here, and further know the punishment for forgery. How shall they be the friend of one who’s come to see them crucified?

I burrow deep into my bed, such as it is. Downstairs, the woman barks this people’s word for copulation, over and again. If Rome should fall ...

Put that aside. The day will never come while we are still producing Emperors of Diocletian’s mettle, men of scale who single-handedly vindicate their times. Those bold reforms to stem the plots and murderous feuds that threaten our stability, dividing up his office so that Maximian is become Augustus in the West with Diocletian as Augustus in the East. The weavers and the brewers carp, complain that he has fixed the price of rugs or beer, and yet inflation is contained. Our currency is strong. Without that strength the wilderness would have us all.

And yet my teeth hurt. Mine and my fellows’ teeth alike. Why, on the boat across there were some ten of us, investigators to the man, all with the same blue and receded gums, the headaches and the lethargies, the lapsing concentration, lapsing memory. One of the youngest said he felt as if already dead and crumbling away, stupid with maggots, though for my part it is not so bad. It’s just the teeth. No one can fix this ailment with a name, nor yet determine any cause. We speak about it as ‘the sickness’, if we speak of it at all.

Perhaps we are so much a part of Rome that we grow sick as she does; some peculiar bond, some sympathy of flesh and land. The bangled, ragged kings are at our gates and we appease them, grant them settlements and territories in the lands surrounding Rome until it is as if the vagrant tribes sit patient all about a sumptuous table at some beggars’ feast, with Rome the center-piece. They sit politely for the moment, but their stomachs growl. If they commenced to dine the world should all be gone. The dark that gusts above the chill fields at the village edge would swallow us entire; the bright towns guttering, extinguished, all across the globe.

Sprawled on my side beneath the coverings, I notice that the quality of lamplight in my room has changed, and glancing up I realize with a dull uncertainty that all along the girl who had this room before me has been sitting there against the furthest wall, cross-legged, watching silently. She stands and walks without a sound across the cracked, uneven boards towards a doorway set behind my bed. Rising to follow her, I notice as she passes through the door that it is inlaid all about the frame with black and tarnished coins. I wonder that I never noticed it before.

Beyond the door I follow her by tallow-light through winding passageways between great piles of nameless oddities. She rounds a bend ahead and, as the half-light catches on her features, I begin to feel disturbed. They are more small and pinched than I recall, so that she seems a different girl. I would not know her save she wears her necklace of blue beads, the wire that threads them burnished to a brazen sheen.

Now we are at the center of the labyrinth, where painted skins are hung. About a low red fire peculiar figures gather in a ring, and wait, and do not speak. There is a boy that I at first mistake for the young man I saw hanged, but this one’s younger, still a child, and on his throat the wounding mark is not a rope-burn but an ugly gash. Beside him sits a beggar, barely conscious, vomit matted in his beard and mumbling to himself. A crone with one foot gone. A black-faced man with twigs tied in his hair. An awful stork-limbed creature, half as tall again as any man, stands agitated, shifting now from one foot to the other, shoulders hunched beneath the ceiling, coughing now and then. The girl and I step up and join the circle; gaze like them into the dying coals. Outside, there is a fearful barking, growing closer by the moment, and I feel a monstrous loss, a crushing sadness unlike any I have felt in life, and I am weeping. Next to me, the boy whose throat is slashed steps close and takes my hand. He makes great show of giving me a pebble that’s been carved into the likeness of a tiny man. I put it in my mouth. The sound of dogs is deafening.

I wake up with the mare’s-tail gray of morning in my room.

There’s something rattling in my mouth.

A sudden terror grips me and I spit it out, afraid that it will be the pebble-figure from my dream, its scribbled eyes and gaping maw, but no. It is a tooth. My tongue-tip probes the bloody socket left behind with childish satisfaction, and I roll the ivory pellet in my palm, letting the pallid daylight rinse away the after-flavor of my dream. I think about last night, the bale-fires dancing there atop the hill, recalling my resolve to ride that way and make inspection with the morn, and then I dress and go downstairs.

Breaking my fast with cheese and fruit and bread, the only foods on offer safe to eat, I walk down to the stables where I choose my horse; a tan, steam-snouted thing with eyes more civilized than any else I have seen in this place. Leading her out between the water-troughs I notice several men that loiter near the stable-entrance, watching me. One of them is the fat man with the top-knot, he who thrust the knife into the hung boy’s hand. The other men I do not recognize, but all their eyes are on me as I mount and trot towards the gates, not looking right nor left, attempting to display more unconcern than I can truly muster in my heart. They watch me go. Some difference in my bearing has alerted them. They know I’m close to something.

I ride near the river’s edge much of the way, then branch towards the looming hill; follow along the beaten path meandering up by the cremation fields. Halfway towards the summit, I look back, the fields a pauper’s blanket made from scraps displayed beneath me. Further up the road that passes near the bottom of the hill I spy the low sheds of the Christian colony, established there upon a swelling mount beyond the bridge’s further side. I almost feel a pang of kinship for the wretched, ranting lunatics, subjected as they are to all the same suspicion and mistrust the villagers afford to me.

The cultists own one of the only two mills in the settlement, the other being managed by a drunkard with an idle son who lets the business fall to disrepair. The Christians, irritating with their somber dirges and their palsied testifying, are yet shrewd in matters that pertain to commerce. Finding their reward in faith alone, the converts work the mill unwaged, all singing while they slave, and as they toil the major trade within the village falls to them and so the coffers grow. Soon, it is rumored, they will buy the other mill. Increasingly dependent on these jabbering fanatics, so the village grows uneasy while its children wander off, next seen garbed all in black and crooning at their millwheel.

If I find no solid evidence that will connect a culprit to the forgeries, I might fare worse than to attribute authorship to these religious outcasts. There’s no doubt that it would be a popular decision with the villagers, absolving me from blame or, more alarming yet, reprisals. Better still, the Emperor is presently inclined against the sect and of a humor that would welcome persecutions. Though a dozen forgers crucified might earn for me a favorable report, a Christian plot against the treasury, against the very heart of Rome, might earn me a promotion. We shall see.

I turn the horse about and move on up the path, coming at last upon the summit, where a splendid quiet and desolation reigns. Save for a general indentation, nothing can be seen that marks the fated hill-camp’s site, whatever contours that may yet remain all smothered by the heaping weeds. Here I dismount and leave my tethered steed to slobber on the grass while I regard the flat expanse more closely.

After a moment’s scrutiny the rounded outline of the camp is made discernible, part fringed by brier. The rill of risen turf that measures the perimeter is broken at one point, perhaps denoting where a gate once stood. I walk across towards it and, on my approach, notice a smaller ring of time-worn stones set just inside the gap; perhaps a remnant kiln or oven of some kind.

Save that there are warm ashes at its center.

Although the fire is dead, these cinders are its voice: it speaks to me. Someone has set a blaze atop this hill, and on more nights than one if what I’m told is true. Too big to simply roast a fowl or warm the hands by, this is fire with purpose, and that purpose would seem clandestine. Why else choose this remote spot, shunned by all your superstitious kinsmen? Why else choose the crack of night to be about your labors unless they are secret; works which, if discovered, would ensure that you were pinned out in the sun to dry?

For purposes of forgery, a quiet and isolated spot whose vantage will allow intruders to be noticed half a league away’s preferable. A haunted hill is quite ideal. The fire would be required to heat the unmarked metal blanks and make them soft, following which they would be set upon an anvil where is raised the obverse imprint of a coin. A punch, cylindrical in shape, is placed above the weighed blank disc, and in the punch is a reverse impression of the same silver Denarius. The punch is beaten with a hammer and in this way are the fresh-forged coins stamped out.

I drop down to my knees and carefully begin to comb the dew-drenched grass, working out in a spiral from about the remnants of the fire. If they were beating out the coins by lamplight, hurriedly, and if my luck is with me ...

After one half of an hour I find it, fallen there between a brace of gray and spectral dandelions. I lift it up between my thumb and finger, turning it against the light. The head of Diocletian gazes unforgiving, out across the buried camp.

A bird shrills from the brier hedge. I flip the coin about and note without surprise a fault there in the reverse. Simply, it is that belonging to a different coin; a different year, perhaps the reign of Severus. Mismatchings such as this are commonplace, for though an anvil with an obverse die might last for sixteen thousand punchings, only half as many would be made before the punch wore out, so that another was required. If the correct reverse could not be found, a different one was used on the assumption few would notice.

But this Little Roman notices. He doesn’t miss a thing.

My trophy safely fastened in a hip pouch, I remount my horse for an uneasy stumble down the hill towards the river-track, where my excitement at my find quite overcomes me and I gallop all the way back to the settlement. The crew about the stout, top-knotted man mark my return and read my agitation. There are decorations hung about the streets in preparation for some senseless festival. A small boy dressed up as a girl walks at the head of a procession with a pig upon a leash, but in my haste to get indoors and race upstairs I fail to register this vision until I am in my room, pulling a set of scales from out of the army bag.

There are three proofs for silver, any one sufficient to establish forgery. The first employs the use of the coticula, a touchstone made of basenite or lydian. When it is rubbed on silver or on gold, from the markings left an expert may read the metal’s purity down to the closest scruple. I have seen this done, always by older men, but do not have such confidence about my own abilities.

The second proof requires a furnace, with an iron fire shovel heated white, the metal to be tested heaped thereon. At such heats, purest silver will glow white, while an inferior grade will glow dull red, and black will signal worthlessness. The test is not infallible. The shovel may be drenched first in men’s urine, and will then provide a different indication.

On the whole, for coins, the proof by weight is still the best, and easiest. Assembling the scales, I take the forged Denarius from out my pouch and set it down beside another coin, a newly struck one given to me at the mint there in Londinium, to serve as a comparison.

Each coin, if genuine, should weigh one-sixth part of an ounce. Adulterated metal would not weigh so much, having less heavy silver in the blend. This test is a formality, yet one which Quintus Claudius specifically requires, and so I set the coins, both true and false, one in each bronze pan of the scales, to weigh them one against the other. Then I watch.

The false coin sinks. The true coin rises.

Frowning, I remove both coins and test the scales before replacing them, taking especial care to see which coin is in which pan.

The false coin sinks. The true coin rises.

How is this? How can this be? The coin found at the camp can be no other than a forgery with its two sides mismatched, and yet ...

(Upon the stairs up from the tavern to my room there comes a muffled sound: one of the dogs that haunts the inn. Engrossed in mystery, it barely registers.)

I take the scales apart and reassemble them. I set the coins back in their separate pans. The false coin sinks. The true coin rises. Are the laws of nature now reversed, that such things may occur? How may a wren outweigh a horse? How may a coin plucked from a forger’s den outweigh one fresh struck from the mint itself, unless ...

The forgery. Unless the forgery were purer, had the purest metal, purest silver, purer than the mint. But no, that cannot be. No point in forging money purer than the Empire standard, not unless ...

Unless it is not that the forged coin is more purely struck, but rather that the true coin is found lacking. This cannot be so. I saw it, freshly minted. Held it, yet warm, closed within my hand. It is as pure as any coin in Rome.

(Outside my chamber now, a closer scuffling. Something nears, and still I cannot take my eyes from those of Diocletian, argent and severe.)

Unless. Unless we cut the coins.

The blood is scalding, simmering in my cheek that I should entertain such blasphemy. It is grotesque and flies against all reason to suppose the Empire capable of such adulteration, to the point that ounce for ounce a worthless forgery might hold more value. Why, if that were so, if all the wealth of Rome were but a gilt concealing poverty, then Rome itself would be the forgery, a sham, as good as fallen with no rampart save for promissory notes to keep the tick-scarred hordes at bay. It is monstrosity itself, this thought. It is a night-start. It is stark, and bottomless.

And it is true.

It crashes in, the fearful certainty, and breaks me. Let me die, or better yet have died before this cold, weighed fact could murder me, before I knew that we were poor and all was ruin. Though my cheeks are simmering yet, the eyes boil over, tears that sting like vinegar. Behind me now the door is opening. I hear a shuffle as of many feet, and know it is the village men, that they have come to kill me, but I cannot look at them for shame: for them to witness me, to witness Rome like this.

At last I lift my head. They stand hulked in the door with muscled cudgels in their fists, the gray man with his paunch and top-knot to the fore. Stone-faced, expressionless, they watch me, watch the little Roman as he sobs above his scales, and if they feel disgust at this display it is not sharper than my own. They pass a glance between them, and the gray man shrugs. They’re going to kill me now. Kneeling upon the floor, I close my eyes and I await the blow. A final silence falls.

Then, many footsteps, moving off downstairs, an avalanche of wood and leather. Doors slam somewhere far below. I open up my eyes. The men are gone.

They saw it in my face. They saw me as a man already slain, not worth the killing. Rome is dead. Rome is dead. Rome is dead, and where shall I go now? Not home. Home is a stage façade of paper, peeling, faded by a sun of cheap pyrites. I cannot go home, and who, who else will have me?

I crouch staring at the coins, one false, one falser yet, until the light begins to fail and they are both become pale blurs there in the gloom, no longer to be told apart, a shadow fallen on that noble brow.

The room fills up with murk. I cannot bear the darkness here, that drinks all definition, and I rise and stumble as one in a dream, first down the stairs, then, dazed, into the street. The celebrations are already under way, streets heavy with the stench of ruffian life. They piss in doorways, swing oars at each other’s heads, and laugh, and kneel in their own sick. They fornicate against the alley walls like prisoners. They fart and shout and they are all that is, and all that will be. Slow, I shuffle out among the great lewd push of them. A jug of ale is pressed into my hand. With rotten smiles they grip my arm, and kiss my tear-tracked cheek, and draw me in.