Body Surfing

Prologue
    T he centurions captured the boy in a raid on his family’s home somewhere in Gaul—even he didn’t know the exact location, maps being not particularly common in his part of the world, or reading for that matter. He’d been ten at the time of the attack, perhaps eleven (calendars were also scarce): too young to fight, which was the only thing that saved his life during the initial raid, but still lissome, and the conquering soldiers thought he might fetch a good price in the slave markets back home. Either in the Coliseum, if he toughened up during the thousand-mile march to the Eternal City, or, if they were lucky, as a sexual servant in one of the decadent wealthy houses that had multiplied like the pox with the empire’s ever-expanding power. Along with their gods and their architecture, many noblemen in the new Rome had embraced the ancient Greek custom of regarding women as cattle: necessary for breeding, but not much else. It was a boy to whom one brought one’s most ardent—and adroit—lovemaking. It was said Nero himself enjoyed slitting a boy’s throat as he sodomized him, so that his death throes would cause his anus to contract around the royal member, and bring the emperor that much more pleasure.
    But six months of forced marching took their toll on the boy’s physique. By the time the colonnade reached Rome, a slave trader flipped up the tatters of his tunic and pronounced his ass too stringyto appeal to anyone, let alone the emperor. Into the ring he went. If he was too stringy to be a prostitute, he was too small to be trained as a gladiator. His only role was to run around screaming until he was cut down. To a boy who had never seen more than a hundred people gathered in one place, the roar of the crowd was disorienting and terrifying. Add to that a host of lions and tigers, water buffalo and elands, a pair of rhinoceroses, half a dozen cobras, and one enraged elephant, and all he could do was dodge, jump, run, fall, roll—and scream. Fifty armed men slashed and stabbed at each other, while another hundred—barbarians and Christians and other undesirables—were added to the mix, primarily for the sake of volume.
    People died to his left and right, gored by horns, slashed by jaws, disemboweled by claws, swords, staves. But even as the boy did his best to escape the hundred deaths that stalked him, a part of his attention was consumed by the canopied emperor’s box. For six long months the Roman soldiers had filled his mind with gruesome stories of what their depraved ruler was going to do to him. The great Caesar was insatiable. He consumed aphrodisiacs from the deserts of India and jungles of Africa to keep him potent, and was even rumored to refuse to spill his seed so that he didn’t have to wait the minute or hour it might take him to recover his virility. Perhaps the strongest proof of the centurions’ stories was the fact that none of the soldiers bothered him, since the emperor was said to pay a premium for virgins. And even now, while wholesale slaughter took place in the arena below him, he was being attended to. A succession of boys, girls, and women took their turns rubbing his feet and shoulders, fanning him, bringing him food and drink, or simply fellating him. Beautiful women placed their breasts in his mouth one at a time, so that his view of the ring wasn’t spoiled. His mother and sister—both of whom were said to have shared his bed—flanked him, and occasionally received the attentions of one of his slaves after he or she had serviced the most powerful man in the known world.
    The sandy floor of the ring became gooey with blood. Whether it was because he was fast or small or just very, very lucky, the boy continued to elude sword, tooth, claw. There were fewer than a dozen men left, fewer than half a dozen. A tigress, bleeding from a long gash in her flank, nibbled at the copper skin of a Scythian, while other beasts, still in battle frenzy, pawed and sniffed at the bodies to see if any were merely faking death.
    One of the rhinoceroses had been killed, and the boy hoisted himself atop the mountainous corpse, hugged the leathery hide like a monkey clinging to its mother’s back. His eyes were screwed shut, but he had the strangest feeling someone was looking at him. He slitted his lids, and there he was. The emperor. Undisputed ruler of Mare Nostrum and all the lands that broke upon it. He was shaded beneath his striped awning on the far side of the