Looking up, Apollinaris became aware that Prince Laureolus was in the room.
“Bad news, sir?” the prince asked.
“Infuriating news,” said Apollinaris. He made no effort to hide his smoldering anger. “A letter from Torquatus. The Emperor is running the treasury dry. What did he pay, I wonder, for that mountain of snow he had them set up in his garden last summer? Or for that tunic of plates of gold, studded with diamonds and pearls? And what little expenses are coming next? I fear to guess.”
“The Emperor,” Laureolus said quietly, and a derisive flicker appeared for a moment at one corner of the younger man’s mouth. “Ah! The Emperor, yes.” He needed to say no more.
Apollinaris had come to like the prince a great deal. They were men built to the same general design, short, compact, muscular, though there was little else in the way of physical resemblance, Apollinaris being a man of dark, almost swarthy complexion with a broad triangular nose, a generous mouth, and deep-set coal-black eyes beneath a dense, shaggy brow, while Laureolus was pale, with chilly aristocratic features, a long, narrow high-bridged nose, a thin-lipped mouth, ice-cold eyes of the palest blue. He came from ancient Imperial lineage, tracing his ancestry in some fashion to the Emperor Publius Clemens, who had reigned a hundred years or so before the Byzantine conquest of the Western Empire. Disgusted with the profligate ways of Demetrius II, he had withdrawn five years back to his family’s property in the country to occupy himself with the study of early Roman history and literature. That was how Apollinaris, whose own country home was nearby and who shared Laureolus’s antiquarian interests, had come to meet him. He saw quickly that Laureolus, who was ten years his junior, had the same nostalgia for the strict ethical rigor of the long-vanished Roman Republic that he himself had, and Larcius Torquatus, and virtually no one else in modern Roma.
When he embarked on the War of Reunification Apollinaris had chosen the prince to be his second in command, sending him shuttling from one newly pacified province to another to see to it that the process of restoring full Imperial control went smoothly forward in each of them. Lately Laureolus had been in northern Gallia, where there had been some minor disturbances at a place called Bononia, on the coast along the channel that divided Gallia from Britannia. Thinking that this renewal of the troubles might spread across the channel to the previously unrebellious Britannia, he had repressed it rigorously. Now, with all resistance to the Imperial government at last wiped out, he had come to Tarraco to present Apollinaris with his final report on the state of the provinces.
Apollinaris leafed quickly through it and set it aside. “All is well, I see. I need stay here no longer.”
Laureolus said, “And when you return to the capital, sir, will you attempt to get Demetrius to restrain himself a little?”
“I? Don’t be silly. I know better than to try to tell an Emperor what he ought to do. History is full of tales of the sad fates of those who tried it. Go back and reread your Suetonius, your Tacitus, your Ammianus Marcellinus. No, Laureolus, I’m going back to my estate in the country. Four Consulships is quite enough for me. Anyway, my fellow Consul Marcus Larcius has the responsibility for affairs in Urbs Roma.” He tapped Torquatus’s letter. “He tells me here that he’s going to take severe measures to clean things up. Good for him, if he can do it.”
“Can he do it single-handedly?” Laureolus asked.
“No. No, probably not.” He shot a glance at the prince. “How would you like to be Consul, Laureolus?”
“Me, sir?” Laureolus’s eyes were wide with astonishment.
“You, yes.” Then Apollinaris shook his head. “No, I suppose not. Demetrius would never allow it. You’re of royal blood, after all. He’d see it as the prelude to his own overthrow.” Smiling, he said, “Well, it was just a thought. You and Torquatus, between you, might just be able to do the job. But it’s probably safer for your health to stay out of the capital, anyway. You go back to your estate, too. We’ll get together once a week and have a good meal and discuss ancient history, and let Torquatus worry about the mess in Roma. Eh, Laureolus? We’ve worked hard out here in the provinces for five whole years. I think we deserve a rest, don’t you?”
In his wood-paneled office at the top of the nine-story Consular building at the eastern end of the Forum the Consul Larcius Torquatus stacked and restacked the pile of documents on his desk, tidying their edges with a fastidiousness that one might not have expected in a man of so massive and heavy-set a build. Then he stared fiercely up at the two prefects of the Fiscus, who had delivered these papers an hour ago and now were sitting uneasily in front of him. “If I’ve read these correctly, and I think I have, then there’s no single department of the Imperial government that even came close to staying within its budget in the last fiscal year. That’s correct, isn’t it, Silanus?”
The Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus nodded unhappily. His famously buoyant spirits were nowhere in evidence just now. “This is so, Consul.”
“And you, Cestius,” Torquatus said, turning his glare in the direction of the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis. “You tell me here that the Emperor overdrew his personal funds last year by thirty-one million sesterces, and you made the deficit good by borrowing the money from Silanus?”
“Yes, sir,” big round-bellied Cestius said in the smallest of voices.
“How could you? Where’s your sense of responsibility to the nation, to the Senate, to your own conscience? The Emperor squanders thirty-one million on top of what he’s already got on hand for squandering, which must be immense, and you simply grab it out of the funds with which we’re supposed to be repairing the bridges and sweeping the dung out of the stables and paying Apollinaris’s soldiers? I ask you again: how could you?”
A flicker of defiance glowed in Cestius’s eyes. “You’d do better to ask, how couldn’t I, Consul. Would you have me tell the Emperor to his face that he’s spending too much? How long, do you think, would it take him to find a new Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis? And how long would it take me to find a new head?”
Torquatus responded with a snort. “Your responsibility, Cestius, what about your responsibility? Even if it does cost you your head, it’s your job to prevent the Emperor from overspending. Otherwise why do we have a Prefect of the Fiscus at all?—And you, Silanus? By what right did you grant Cestius’s request for those thirty-one million? You weren’t being asked to confront the Emperor here, only to say no to Cestius. But you didn’t do it. Is saving your friend’s neck more important to you than the financial welfare of the Empire, which you are sworn to defend?”
Silanus, shamefaced, offered no reply.
Torquatus said, finally, “Shall I ask for your resignations?”
“You can have mine at any time,” said Cestius.
“And mine, sir,” Silanus said.
“Yes. Yes. And then I replace you with—whom? You two are the only worthwhile men in the whole administration, and neither of you is worth very much at all. But at least you keep honest accounts.—You do keep honest accounts, don’t you? The deficit isn’t even bigger than these documents of yours claim it is?”
“The accounts are accurate ones, sir,” said Silanus stiffly.
“The gods be thanked for small mercies, then.—No, keep your jobs. But I want reports of a different sort from you both from now on. I want the names of the spenders. A detailed list: department heads, the ones who encourage the Emperor in his folly, those who sign the vouchers authorizing the payouts that you two are so ready to approve. And not just the department heads but anyone in the chain of command who is in a position to say no to spending requests and conspicuously fails to do so.”