Ravenna, December 5, 476 AD
Eleven days after the arrival of Gelasius.
Gelasius started with a book.
Not with a sermon. Not with a prayer. Not with warnings of sin and hell. He started with a book, because Gelasius believed that the gateway into a person's soul was not through their ears, but through their mind. Ears could be closed. A mind once opened could not be shut again.
The Ravenna palace library was a sad little room. Three wooden shelves holding parchment scrolls that were mostly moth eaten. A few leather codices with pages yellowed and brittle. A worn copy of Cicero's De Re Publica missing a third of its contents. A Vulgate Bible whose cover was patched with goat leather. And in the darkest corner, forgotten behind a pile of moldy military maps, a nearly intact copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditationes.
Gelasius took the book, brushed the dust from its cover, and placed it on the table.
"Can you read?" Gelasius had asked during their first session, five days ago.
Romulus nodded stiffly. He sat in the chair across the table with a posture too rigid to be called comfortable, like a fresh recruit unaccustomed to sitting before his superior.
"Latin and a little Greek," Romulus answered. "My father taught me. Before... before he..." his sentence hung in the air like smoke unable to find a direction.
"Before he died," Gelasius said, finishing the sentence without harshness and without excessive gentleness. Flat enough not to hurt but clear enough to show that difficult words did not need to be avoided.
Romulus nodded again. His eyes dropped to the surface of the table.
Thus began a new routine. Every morning, after sword practice with Spurius and Decius, Romulus sat with Gelasius in that small library for two hours. Gelasius did not teach like an ordinary tutor who stood before a student and dictated the truth. He sat across the table and asked questions. Asked about what Romulus read. Asked what he understood. Asked what he did not understand and why.
Romulus, accustomed to receiving orders and information, was initially confused by this method. He waited for Gelasius to tell him what was right and what was wrong. Gelasius did not do that. He simply asked again.
"Marcus Aurelius writes that anger is a weakness, not a strength," Gelasius said on the third day, pointing to a paragraph in the Meditationes. "What is your opinion?"
Romulus read the paragraph twice. His lips moved softly following the Latin words flowing across the yellowing page.
"I... do not agree," Romulus answered carefully, as if testing whether he was allowed to disagree.
"Why?"
"Because... if I was not angry that night, in Odoacer's tent, I would be dead. It was anger that... that made me raise that knife. Without anger, I was just a trembling little boy."
Gelasius did not correct him. He did not nod and neither did he shake his head. He merely looked at Romulus with his dark brown eyes that did not judge, and said:
"The more interesting question might not be whether anger is a strength or a weakness. But whether the anger that saved you that night is the same kind of anger you felt when you threw the wine pitcher at the wall last week."
Romulus stared at Gelasius. His mouth opened slightly. He did not know that Gelasius knew about the wine pitcher incident. Then he realized that in a palace this small, nothing was truly a secret.
He did not answer. But his eyes said that the question had landed in the exact right place.
On the eleventh day, Gelasius decided that the time had come.
Not the time for books anymore. Books were the gateway. Now he needed to enter the room itself. The dark room inside Romulus guarded by layered locks and monsters standing watch at every corner.
That morning, rain fell in Ravenna. Not a heavy downpour that flooded the streets, but a constant and cold drizzle, the kind of rain that seeped into the bones and refused to leave. The small library felt narrower than usual, its walls seeming to shrink, and the light entering through the small window was a pale gray like the face of a sick man.
Romulus arrived with wet hair and a tunic damp from the drizzle. He sat in his usual chair. The book of Marcus Aurelius was already open to the page they left yesterday.
Gelasius closed the book.
Romulus raised his eyebrows.
"Today we do not read," Gelasius said.
Romulus shifted uncomfortably in his chair. His left foot began to sway.
"Then... what?"
"Today we talk."
"About what?"
Gelasius did not answer immediately. He poured water from a pitcher into two glasses. Placed one in front of Romulus. Drank from his own glass. Small, measured movements, giving time for the air in the room to become calmer before he steered it to a place that was not calm.
"About that night," Gelasius said.
He did not need to explain which night. There was only one night in Romulus's life worthy of being called that night without additional context.
Romulus stopped swaying. His body became completely still. He was too still. A silence that was not calmness, but freezing. Like an animal feigning death when a predator approached.
"I do not want to talk about it," Romulus said. Fast, too fast.
"I know."
"If you know, why do you ask?"
"Because the things we least want to talk about are usually the things we most need to talk about." Gelasius set down his glass. His hands folded on the table, fingers intertwined. Not a threatening posture. A waiting posture. "You do not have to answer my question, Romulus. You can stand up, walk out that door, and return tomorrow to read Marcus Aurelius. I will not force you. But I want you to know one thing."
"What is it?"
"Pope Simplicius sent me here not to investigate your weapon. That was only the official reason. The real reason..." Gelasius paused, choosing his words with the precision of a goldsmith arranging gems, "...is because someone who loves you very much wrote a letter to him. Asking for someone who would guard your soul, not your body. Because your body is already guarded by armies and walls and weapons that can burn the sea. But your soul... your soul has no guardian."
Romulus blinked. His lips moved soundlessly. He knew who wrote that letter. There was only one person in this world who would do that.
"Spurius," Romulus whispered.
Gelasius did not confirm and did not deny. But his silence was answer enough.
Romulus stared at his glass. The water inside trembled slightly due to the vibration of the table from a foot that began to sway again. He swallowed hard. Once. Twice. Three times.
Then he spoke.
"What do you want to know?"
Gelasius drew a slow breath. The door was open. Now he had to walk in very, very carefully.
"Tell me about that night. Not the facts. I already know the facts from the reports. The sewer, the tent, the knife. Seven slashes. I know all of that." Gelasius leaned forward slightly. "What I want to know is what you felt."
Silence. Rain tapped on the window with cold fingers. A rat scurried behind the bookshelf and vanished into a crack in the wall.
"Afraid," Romulus said finally. A single word that came out like a boulder pushed from the mouth of a cave. "I was afraid. So afraid. My entire body trembled from... from the top of my head to my toes. My hand holding the knife, I could not stop it from shaking. That sewer was dark and full of a stench that made me almost vomit but I could not vomit because the sound would be heard and they would find me."
The words began to flow now. Slowly at first, stuttering like water trying to break through a cracked dam. But every sentence that came out made the crack wider.
"In that tent... Odoacer slept. He... he was huge. Bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I was smaller. Maybe in the dark everything looks bigger. "Romulus stared at his own hands on the table. Small hands with dirt under the nails. "I stood over him with a butcher knife I took from a table there. And I thought... I thought that I had to do it now or I would never do it. So I..."
He stopped. His eyes blinked rapidly. His hands that had been still began to tremble faintly.
"You do not have to continue if..."
"Seven times." Romulus cut Gelasius off. His voice was flat now. Too flat. The voice of someone reciting facts to avoid having to feel those facts. "I had to... stab seven times. Because the knife was dull. And his neck... was so thick. And the blood... there was so much blood. Warm. On my hands, on my face. Getting into my mouth because I... because I screamed while cutting but my screams were drowned out by..."
Romulus stopped again. This time more abruptly. His hands gripped the edge of the table. His knuckles turned white.
Gelasius did not move. Did not reach out. Did not touch. He knew that a touch in a moment like this could be an anchor that saved or a trigger that destroyed. He did not yet know Romulus well enough to know which.
"The final slash," Romulus said. His voice was practically soundless. A whisper quieter than the rain on the window. "His head came off. And I... held it. With one hand. By the hair. Very heavy. No, perhaps my hand was too weak. And I shoved it into a sack and I crawled back to the sewer and during the entire journey back... during that entire journey, all I heard was the sound of his head bumping against the sewer wall every time I turned. Thump. Thump. Thump."
Romulus mimicked the sound by tapping his finger on the table three times. Slowly. Rhythmically. A small sound that in the quiet room sounded like a hammer striking a coffin.
Gelasius felt something he very rarely felt. The hairs on his arms stood up. Not from the cold. From listening to a child describe a murder he committed with a level of detail no child should ever possess.
"Do you dream about that night?" Gelasius asked after a silence long enough to honor what had just been said.
"Every night," Romulus answered. "Not always the same. Sometimes I cut his head off and the one that falls is not Odoacer's head. Sometimes it is my father's head. Sometimes it is my own head. And I see myself staring from the tent floor while my body still stands holding the knife."
"And after those dreams, you go down to the underground cells."
Romulus nodded slowly. Not surprised that Gelasius knew. Everyone knew.
"Why?" Gelasius asked. "What do you find there that you cannot find anywhere else?"
Romulus was quiet for a long time. His hands had stopped trembling. His eyes gazed out the wet window, toward the gray sky of Ravenna crying softly outside.
"He is not afraid of me," Romulus finally said. "Everyone in this palace... they are afraid of me. Or they pity me. Or they want something from me. Spurius looks at me and sees a child to be protected. Vitus looks at me as if looking at a weapon perhaps. The soldiers look at me and see a symbol that must be saluted." He swallowed hard. "Fritigern looks at me and only sees... me. Just me. Not an emperor. Not a killer. Just a child carrying too much burden."
Gelasius stored those words in a safe place inside his head. Later, in his next letter to the Pope, he would write them almost verbatim. But for now, he let those words reside in this room, between the two of them.
"Tell me about your mother," Gelasius said.
The change of topic was intentional. Not to escape the darkness of Odoacer's night. But to illuminate that darkness from a different angle. Gelasius believed that to understand a man, you must look not only at what he has done, but where he came from. And for Romulus, where he came from always led back to two people. The father whose name he inherited in his lineage and the mother whose presence was almost never mentioned by anyone in this palace.
That absence itself was already a question.
Romulus stared at Gelasius. The expression on his face changed. Not becoming more closed off. Becoming emptier. Like a page of a book whose words had been erased but the shadow of the ink could still be seen if you tilted the paper toward the light.
"My mother," Romulus said. Those two words came out with a tone different from any word he had spoken before. Softer. More fragile. Like the sound of a glass that was already cracked and still standing only because no one had touched it yet.
"Her name was Flavia. Flavia Serena."
The name sounded foreign in Romulus's mouth, like a word from a language he once mastered but had not used in a long time.
"She was beautiful. That is what I remember most clearly. Her hair was dark and long down to her waist. Her hands were soft. She always smelled like... I do not know the name. A flower. Little white flowers that grew near the fence of our house in Ravenna. She planted them herself."
"She taught me to sing," Romulus continued, and now his voice held a very thin tremor, like a lute string plucked too softly to produce a clear note but loud enough to make the air vibrate. "Old songs. Songs about the moon and the sea and ships sailing to places not found on any map. My father hated those songs. He said it was a waste of time. But my mother kept singing them to me every night before sleep. Every night."
A pause. Long and heavy.
"Until she did not anymore."
Gelasius waited. Did not push, did not pull. Only present.
"My mother fell ill," Romulus said. "A fever. It came in the summer when I was nine years old. Ravenna is often like that. The swamps around it always fill the air with something that makes people sick. I hate those swamps." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, a childish gesture that did not match his eyes that were too old. "The physician said it was swamp fever. Malaria, the Greeks called it. Half the servants in our house caught it too. Some died. But the others recovered."
Romulus drew a trembling breath.
"My mother did not recover."
"I remember her last day. My father was not home. He was handling something at the palace. Political matters. Always political matters." There was an old bitterness in those words, a bitterness that had been salted for years until it no longer tasted sharp but remained. "My mother lay in bed. Her body was small. Smaller than I remembered. Her skin was yellow. Her eyes... her eyes were no longer entirely seeing. But her hand still held my hand. Very strong for someone who was almost dead."
Romulus raised his right hand and stared at it. The same hand that cut off Odoacer's head. The same hand that was last held by his mother.
"She told me one thing before she left. She said..." Romulus swallowed hard. His eyes welled up but the tears did not fall. Not yet. "Do not let them make you hard, Romulus. This world already has enough hard people. What it lacks are people brave enough to be soft."
That sentence hung in the air of the small library like the fragrance of a flower whose plant was no longer there. Gelasius felt something tighten behind his eyes. Not tears. The Archdeacon of Rome did not cry in front of anyone, much less in front of the child he was shaping. But something there moved and wanted to get out.
"How old were you when she died?" Gelasius asked. His voice was lower than usual.
"Nine," Romulus answered. "Six years before I... before that sewer."
"And you remember her words until now."
"I remember everything about her," Romulus said, and now his voice broke in several places like ice beginning to melt beneath the spring sun. "I remember her smell. I remember her singing. I remember the way she combed my hair with her fingers when I could not sleep. And I remember... I remember her face when she died. Her eyes were open but not seeing anything. And her hand that had been gripping my hand slowly turned cold and I could not let go of her grip because if I let go it meant she was truly gone and I did not want her to go. I did not..."
Romulus stopped. His chin trembled. His lips clamped shut tightly, holding back something pushing from within with a force that was increasingly difficult to resist.
And for the first time in front of anyone other than Spurius, Romulus Augustus cried.
Not a dramatic cry. Not loud sobs that shook the body. Only tears flowing down from those golden brown eyes in two silent lines wetting cheeks still too young to hold this many stories. He did not sob. He made no sound. He merely sat in his chair with his back straight and let the tears fall, as if trying to maintain the posture of an emperor even though his soul was kneeling.
Gelasius was silent. A full silence. A present silence. The silence of someone who understood that these tears were not a weakness that needed fixing, but water that had been held back too long behind a dam built too high.
Minutes passed. The rain at the window grew harder, as if the sky outside wished to accompany the sky inside Romulus's eyes.
Finally, Romulus wiped his face with both hands. Rough. Fast. The gesture of a child ashamed to have cried in front of an adult.
"Sorry," Romulus said. "I did not..."
"Do not apologize for tears," Gelasius interrupted. His voice was firm but not loud. Firm like a hand catching someone about to fall. "Tears are not a weakness, Romulus. Tears are proof that you are still human. And as long as you can still cry, there is hope."
"Hope for what?"
"Hope that you will not become the hard person your mother feared."
Romulus stared at Gelasius. Wet and red eyes met dark and deep eyes.
And in that gaze, without a word, something transferred from one pair of eyes to the other. Not understanding, not yet. But an acknowledgment that there was someone in this room willing to listen without judging and without saving. Just listening.
Gelasius poured water into Romulus's empty glass. Pushed it gently across the table.
"Drink," Gelasius said. "Then tell me about your father."
Romulus drank. His hands still trembled slightly but were more stable than before. He set his glass down.
"My father..." Romulus began, and his voice now possessed a different color. Harder and more complex. Neither hate nor love. Something residing in the painful gray area between the two. "My father was a hard man to love. He loved me I know that. But he loved me the way a farmer loves the seed he plants. Not because the seed is a beautiful seed. Because that seed will grow into a useful tree."
"He trained me. Swordplay, riding, reading, writing, Roman history, military strategy. All of that started since I was six years old. Before my mother died. And after my mother died, his training became harder. Longer. More merciless. Because now there was no one left to protect me from him. No one left to say: let the boy play, Orestes. He is still little."
Romulus wiped his eyes again, this time more out of habit than because he was still crying.
"But he was also the one who taught me to read the stars," Romulus said, and now a small sad smile appeared at the corner of his lips. "On clear nights, he took me to the roof of the house and pointed out the constellations. The Great Bear. Orion. The North Star. He said that if I was ever lost, all I had to do was look for the North Star. Because the North Star never moves. The North Star always points toward home."
The smile vanished as quickly as it came.
"He died in the mud, Gelasius. In the streets of Placentia. Trampled by barbarian forces who did not even recognize his face. His body was found face down in a puddle of rainwater. Naked. They had stripped everything. Armor. Boots. Everything." His voice hardened. "And when I received that news, when the soldier who came explained how they found my father's body, what I felt was not sadness. What I felt was..."
Romulus stopped. His eyes drifted away from Gelasius, searching for something in the corner of the room that was not there.
"Anger," Romulus said softly. "I was angry. Not at Odoacer. Not at the barbarian forces. I was angry at my father. Because he promised that he would return. He promised when he left Ravenna for the last time. He said: I will return, Romulus. I always return. And he lied."
Gelasius felt the weight of that sentence crash onto his chest. A child angry at a dead father because that father failed to keep a promise to return. Grief disguised as anger. Love disguised as betrayal.
"So when you crawled through the sewer that night," Gelasius said slowly, very slowly, arranging these words like an architect laying a foundation stone that if misplaced would collapse the entire building, "when you raised that knife over Odoacer... did you kill Odoacer?"
Romulus turned his head sharply. His eyes narrowed. Confused.
"Of course I killed Odoacer. Who else?"
"I am not asking about whose body you slashed that night. I am asking about who you killed inside your head. Who did you see in Odoacer's face when that knife came down for the first time?"
Silence.
Long. Heavy. Saturated with something that had no name in any language Romulus knew.
Romulus opened his mouth. Closed it. His eyes darted rapidly left and right, like the eyes of a trapped animal searching for an escape route.
"I..." Romulus began. Stopped. Began again. "I do not... I do not know what you..."
But he knew. Gelasius could see that he knew. That truth was already standing at the threshold of his mind, waiting to be invited in, and Romulus had seen it but did not yet dare to open the door.
"It is alright," Gelasius said. "You do not have to answer today. That question will wait. The important questions are always patient."
Romulus exhaled a long breath that sounded like all the air in his lungs had been expelled at once. His tense body slowly relaxed. His shoulders dropped. His stiff back curved slightly forward.
He looked very, very tired. And very, very young.
"May I go?" Romulus asked. His voice was small. The voice of a child asking permission to leave the dinner table.
"Certainly."
Romulus stood. He walked to the door. His steps were slower than when he entered, as if this conversation had added an invisible weight to his shoulders.
At the threshold, he stopped. Without turning around.
"My mother said do not let them make me hard," Romulus said to the air in front of him. "But this world... this world does not give me many choices other than being hard, Gelasius."
"Or," Gelasius said from behind his desk, "perhaps the choice is not between hard and soft. Perhaps there is a third choice your mother meant but did not have the chance to teach you."
Romulus turned his head slightly. Not completely. Only enough for his voice to reach Gelasius.
"What is it?"
"Strong," Gelasius said. "There is a difference between hard and strong. A hard stone will shatter if struck hard enough. But strong iron will bend, absorb the blow, and return to its shape. Your mother did not ask you to be weak, Romulus. She asked you to be the kind of strength that does not require cruelty to prove itself."
Romulus was silent. Seconds passed and the rain outside grew heavier.
Then he exited without saying anything. The door closed softly behind him. His footsteps faded down the corridor. And Gelasius, alone in the small library that smelled of old books and swamp dampness, closed his eyes and leaned his back against the chair.
The clay is soft, he thought. Softer than I imagined. But within that softness is a depth that makes me tremble. This child harbors an ocean behind a seemingly small puddle.
And he still has his mother in his heart. Even though his mother died six years ago, her voice still lives in his head. Do not let them make you hard. That sentence is an anchor. Perhaps the only anchor still keeping this boy from drifting to a place I cannot follow.
I must be careful. Very careful. Because this clay is no ordinary clay. It is clay that has already been burned and still endures. And the hands that shape it must be more patient than the hands that burned it.
Gelasius opened his eyes. Stared at the cracked and moldy ceiling. Then, slowly, he smiled. Not a joyful smile. The smile of a man who had just realized how massive the task entrusted to him was, and who chose not to run from it.
He took the book of Marcus Aurelius and opened a new page. Preparing tomorrow's lesson. Because tomorrow Romulus would return. He always returned. And every time he returned, he brought a little more courage to open the doors he had kept tightly locked.
Somewhere outside, Romulus's footsteps turned toward the stairs leading down. Into the darkness. Into the cell where someone keeping her own secrets waited with a blanket and an empty soup bowl and eyes that saw Romulus without a mask.
Two people who needed each other without fully understanding why.
And above them, an Archdeacon and a Praefectus Praetorio who each bore half the burden of guarding a child carrying too much burden.
Rain continued to fall in Ravenna.
Rain that soaked the swamps, that filled the sewers, that tapped on the underground cell window where two young voices spoke in whispers of fear and courage and the meaning of the word worthy.
Rain that, like tears, was never in vain.