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now, almost frenzied, pulling them all behind him in his wake, often faster than Menandros wanted to go. Faustus and the Hebrew went along obligingly. This behavior of Caesar’s was nothing new to them. It was almost as if some fit came over him when he was here in these tangledgrottoes, driving him on from one sight to the next. Faustus had seen this happen many times before down here, the bursting forth of this restless furious hunger of the Caesar’s for novelty, this raging inexhaustible curiosity of his.
    It was the curse of an idle life, Faustus thought, the poignant anguish of an Emperor’s superfluous younger son, vexed by the endless torment of his own uselessness, the mocking powerlessness within great power that was the only thing that his high birth had brought him. It was as if the greatest challenge that Maximilianus faced was the boredom of his own gilded existence, and in the Underworld he warded off that challenge through this quest for the ultimate and the impossible. The Hebrew was a necessary facilitator for this: more often than not it took a quick word from bar-Heap, not always speaking Latin, to gain admittance for them to some sector of the caverns normally closed to the uninvited.
    Here, under an array of blazing sconces that filled the air with black smoke, lights that were never extinguished in this place where no distinction was made between night and day, was a marketplace where strange delicacies were being sold—the tongues of nightingales and flamingos, lamprey spleen, camel heels, bright yellow cockscombs, parrot heads, the livers of pikes, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the ears of dormice, the eggs of pelicans, bizarre things from every corner of the Empire, everything heaped in big meaty mounds on silver trays. Menandros, that cosmopolitan Greek, stared in wonder like any provincial bumpkin. “Do Romans dine on such things every day?” he asked, and Caesar, smiling that opaque Etruscan smile of his, assured him that they constantly did, not only at the Imperial table but everywhere in Roma, even in the humblest houses, and promised him a meal of nightingales’ tongues and peacock brains at the earliest opportunity.
    And here was a noisy plaza filled with clowns, jugglers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, tightrope-walkers,and performers of a dozen other kinds, with snarling barkers loudly calling out the praises of the acts that employed them. Maximilianus tossed silver coins freely to them, and at his urging Menandros did the same. Beyond it was a colonnaded hallway in which a freak show was being offered: hunchbacks and dwarfs, three simpering pinheads in elaborate scarlet livery, a man who looked like a living skeleton, another who must have been nearly ten feet high. “The one with the ostrich head is no longer here,” said bar-Heap, obviously disappointed. “And also the girl with three eyes, and the twins joined at the waist.” Here, too, they distributed coins liberally, all but bar-Heap, who kept the strings of his purse drawn tight.
    â€œDo you know, Faustus, who is the greatest freak and monster of them all?” asked Maximilianus, under his breath, as they walked along. And when Faustus remained silent the prince offered an answer to his own question that Faustus had not anticipated: “It is the Emperor, my friend, for he stands apart from all other men, distinct, unique, forever isolated from all honesty and love, from normal feeling of any sort. He is a grotesque thing, an Emperor is. There is no monster so pitiable on this earth as an Emperor, Faustus.” The Caesar, gripping the fleshiest part of Faustus’s arm with iron force, gave him such a queer look of fury and anguish that Faustus was astounded by its intensity. This was a side of his friend he had never seen before. But then Maximilianus grinned and jabbed him lightheartedly in the ribs, and winked as if to take the sting out of his