When the day’s sun dances had ended, Ancilla was summoned to prepare the emperor’s bath. She set up his heliotropes and filled the water with perfumes, then set out the strigil. She warmed oils with frankincense to soothe his sore body and his wounds. Elagabalus entered the room unselfconsciously, already naked, grinning. “I requested you,” he said. She smiled bashfully and got to work. He basked for a while as she slathered him in oil. He reached for the novasilla. “Shave me,” he said coyly. Elagabalus liked to be shaved everywhere, leaving only the dark curls on his head. Ancilla hesitated, and then did what she was asked. He started to moan and she saw his member stiffen as she worked at his most sensitive parts. “I told you we’d spend some time together today,” he whispered. “Come, join me in the water.”
Of course she had to do what she was told. He had complete ownership over her. But also, she wanted to. She couldn’t help the ripples of excitement she felt at his touch. She loved to straddle him and ride until her pleasure peaked, a phenomenon no one else ever acknowledged but something her Master made sure of. “Atta girl,” he said throatily when she was finished. She was terrified, of course, of pregnancy, but Elagabalus supplied her routinely with pennyroyal tea. She was even more scared of her feelings for him, intense and wild, but also, oddly maternal. The boy was a mere political pawn, of his own family and the empire, only fourteen when he became emperor. It had been only a few years since then. How could he have a clue about state affairs or the malicious motivations of others?
She knew, too, that he was lonely, because once she found him in her own servant quarters, weeping for his mother. And it broke her heart to see how power corrupted and led to decadence so quickly: she’d been born into servitude, and the story was the same with each new master. She couldn’t help thinking that the boy was far too young for this deviant world. He didn’t stand a chance.
But still. Ancilla was not a fool. She knew Elagabalus did not love her. Could not, would not, did not. Her own girlish hopes and feelings did not matter. The cold truth was that such a person was beyond redemption.
“Dominus,” she said as she dressed him. “There has been more talk in the palace. Tensions are high. I fear you are in danger.” Elagabalus held a finger to her lips. “I know, I know,” he said. He kissed her almost wistfully. “Don’t worry your pretty little heart about me. I am protected by al-Gabal.” He waved his hand to show her the sunflowers, how their bobbing yellow heads all leaned in toward him. He let her finish his makeup. “Besides,” he said. “I won’t let anything happen before tonight’s party. It’s going to be epic.” His chortling laughter was still ringing when she pulled the curtains behind her.
When dawn broke, and Ancilla dressed and headed to her duties, there was a dreadful hubbub in the palace. She was used to all the noise, and the gongs and cymbals the night before, the shrieking and hooting of wasted revelers, had barely stirred her. A dozen slaves were furiously coming and going, carrying armloads of garlands and yellow flowers and gore outside, some of them dragging bedraggled corpses behind them. She did not dare ask anyone what had happened, as happenings of the royal festivities were none of the slaves’ concern. But eventually, as they were washing up a hundred platters, one of the cooks told her everything.
The emperor had waited until the third wine amphora was nearly drained, and then abruptly announced his retirement, leaving the hall. Everyone was naked and dancing. Then, the ceiling had come crashing down in an avalanche of sunflowers. At least a dozen guests had been smothered to death, along with as many servants and guards.
Ancilla felt sickened. Disgust and grief overwhelmed her. There were many friends from the kitchen that she wouldn’t see again. A dark pit of disappointment grew inside her, threatening to engulf her. She could barely comprehend the gravitas of it all. As she went about her morning chores as usual, she grew more unsettled.
She really couldn’t care less what randy escapades Elagabalus got himself up to, or what social norms he upended. Rather, it was his cavalier cruelty that broke her. This wasn’t the first time something so brutal had happened. It was impossible to understand how someone who sometimes touched her with such tenderness could delight in ruthless debauchery.
She prayed all morning that he would not summon her for dressing. She didn’t think she could stomach going through the motions.
Still, a jolt of envy ran through her when he didn’t. A feeling of betrayal.
He called for one of the gardeners instead, a rough, hulking man twice his size, whose extraordinary…proportions…the emperor often joked about. A mean brute with a terrible temper.
For a fleeting instant, Ancilla wondered if she understood something of Elagabalus’s thirst for punishment. Perhaps there was a strange penitence at play in his desires. She wiped the thought from her mind. So what if there was a shred of sorry in his sickening soul. It wasn’t enough. It was almost nothing at all.
He didn’t call for her for several days. She was plucking geese with other servants in preparation of another feast when the summon finally came. It was the same afternoon that some guards had been talking about a rebellion. They were conspiring to overthrow the Master to replace him with someone who was actually invested in the affairs of the state and her people, and her own gods. They planned to lynch the boy during the afternoon procession, and even Hierocles, his most adored of lovers, the charioteer who would drive the fleet of white horses, was plotting against him.
Ancilla entered her Master’s lair and prepared his bath, then busied herself rearranging the vessels of sunflowers. She thought about what it would feel like to be buried alive and suffocated by a throng of bobbing flower heads. She imagined stuffing them down his throat.
Elagabalus pranced inside in his usual manner and immersed himself in the water. His body, hairless, and for a rare moment flaccid, seemed puny and vulnerable, repugnant. A flash went through her of their last meeting, when she had eased herself onto him and bucked there with reckless abandon. She knelt behind him and began to soap his curls.
As she perfumed his body afterwards, her fingers moved tentatively, rubbing the salve into his tiny nipples, the smooth hollows of his underarm. She felt a wave of the profound sorrow that had been growing inside of her.
When he circled her with both hands and moved his lips across her throat and face, she wondered if she was going to unravel.
“Purple today,” Elagabalus said after a while, and she slid his robes over his body. He pointed to a rope of silk and amethyst, and another heavy with amulets. “Word is, I need to double up on the charms tonight,” he said, tossing his head back the way he always did when he amused himself. Then his expression grew more serious. “Is it true, girl? What have you heard?”
Ancilla swallowed. “Yes, Master. You know there is always talk around the palace.”
She wanted to tell him more. She wanted to tell him to run. But she left it there, without revealing any specific details. Not even an emperor could outrun his fate. Come what may.
Elagabalus looked her intensely in the eyes. “You would tell me everything, wouldn’t you, Ancilla?” She wondered how much he knew. She wondered if he felt her slipping away.
“Here, take this, girl,” he said, unfastening a sunflower amulet from his necklace. He reached for her hand and pressed the charm of gold, black basalt and citrine into her hand, closing her fingers around it with his. “May al-Gabal protect us both.” He kissed her then, and it felt like goodbye.
The sun was high in the sky, reflecting al-Gabal’s mighty power, when the jewelled chariot began its procession from the Coliseum. The sounds of the cornu and lituus, of the tambourines, could be heard across the hills and gardens. Elagabalus was resplendent in his flowing amaranthine dresses and a dazzling tiara of amethyst and garnet. The chariot was festooned with orchids and sunflowers. Even the horses were jewelled along their crests, and flowered, the yellows and purples blazing against their alabaster flanks.
Every leaf and flower turned toward the emperor, the heliotropes, of course, but the roses and lilies, too.
Then, the clanging of the cymbals. The cue.
The charioteer whipped the horses in the rhythm of the tympanum, then let go of the reins. The horses took off, scattering blooms in their thunder. The dogs went wild.
And a legion moved in on the carriage in the mayhem.
Elagabalus was a flash of purple lightning, bolting at breakneck speed. But there was nowhere he could flee. His most loyal bodyguards in the palace had already turned on him.
They came upon him in his hiding place, cowering in the putrid stench of the latrines. His robes had been torn away and he was nearly naked, with nothing left but the subligaculum around his loins and a dishevelled tiara. His useless amulets were scattered across the dank and grimy floor.
“Please,” the sun god priest begged. It was his final word.
They closed in on him, with fists and swords. His body spouted blood like a great fountain. One soldier picked up a xylospongium, the sponge on a stick used to clean the toilets. In a final indignity, he thrust it down the boy’s throat.
The day grew dark, as if the sun had simply vanished from the sky. All around them, the heliotropes, their terrible black and yellow, snaking swiftly, suddenly up the rank walls, down through the windows, up through the floor stones, and out of the toilet cesspits. There were sunflowers by the thousands, with heads twice as large as nature had ever before endowed them, bowing to their high priest for the last time.
Author’s note: Sunflowers did not grow in Rome (or Syria) until the 16th century. Their appearance in this story can be considered artistic licence. Elagabalus was a Syrian high priest of al-Gabal, a sun god local to Emesa, who became the teenaged emperor of Rome who ruled from 218-222. He was assassinated at the age of eighteen because the locals did not appreciate his importing of foreign religious rites and his decadent sexual appetites. Historians are not certain about the extent that his recorded exploits were true, as the records of his history may have been exaggerated or misunderstood.
