The Emperor's Bloody Valentine
"Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar"
-- James Butcher, Dead Beat
Original Fiction by Butch Ekstrom
On the first day of 268 c.e., while some historians of the Empire insist it was 269, Claudius Augustus the Emperor yanked on the wood handles at both ends of a razor sharp garotte. The murderous invention sent a twanging hum throughout the Commander's tent. The garotte had long been a beloved killing tool among Roman officers, since the era of the mighty Caesar, one that could slice viciously in and through a grown man's neck, from one ear to the other ear when he was assailed from behind. On other occasions the garrote could be used to suddenly situate a malicious and resplendent pressure on a luckless victim's frontal protrusion of neck cartilage, fierce and focused to a pinpoint, then twisted from behind by the handles without mercy. This tortuous form of attack perfected by many conscripts in the Roman army and one favored, throughout the land, by common thieves and murderers -- was discovered in the ancient, northern province of Gallia and then again in Apppenine mountain territories in Italy.
Claudius cherished his boundless zeal for killing one-time friends, errable relatives, and outright enemies, real or imagined. He loved the emotional and psychic release that human execution provided -- jets of red plasma splashing on the ground near his feet, a detractor's final gasping breath, the gloomy scent of iron billowing from fatal gashes, the merciless downward slump of a human frame as the life and strength and spirit drain into the crevasses of the Romans' underworld. Claudius lionized, in his mind, his pedestrian methods and skills for bloodshed because so many treasonous dupes -- a revolting stream of fetid quislings -- plotted endlessly to betray him, his family, the military, the sacred Empire: and thus they deserved just and earnest payback. The improved use of the garotte, to Claudius, was a sporting exercise. He enjoyed swordplay, daggers, and spears too. Perhaps this man, he thought irrationally, I, Claudius the Second, will be revered throughout eternity with the same respect and affection as the mighty but murdered Caesar.
But like so many on whom the velvety, flowing, yet skin-irritating pallium of leadership was placed during the pompous, overbearing, and steadily depraved decades of glorious Rome -- similar to a legion of other Roman Emperors -- Claudius Augustus later to be called, Gothicus (the 'slayer of the Goths') too, was a wanton thug and deviant. As a young person, the boyish and tight-lipped Claudius became ensnared -- a fact most shameful to him -- in an imagined snakes' nest of neurotic worries, paranoid assumptions, physical pains -- as if a cowhide vise had been fitted around his anguished skull and pulled more tight by the minute. Some days his neck and shoulders ached to with a tenacity he never imagined possible. The suffering which Claudius sought to repress, led him to a preposterous sensation that his unsound brain would drag him down into a swirling pool of hot oil, a scorching vortex in which to drown, or on many days convinced him it would be his awful fate would have the young warrior traverse an inexorable road, at the end of which soon would lie more pain and perdition and a most unseemly physical and mental demise. His relentless tribulations tore like talons into the Emperor's pompous facade. They made him detest his counterfeit arrogance, and his feelings of inadequacy, yet he was unable to conquer them. Once he got into his 5th decade of life, the revered Roman captain's aging body felt tender, shredded, as savaged as a sapless habitus. As the man on the ultimate throne, Claudius' did what he could to withstand periods of mute panic and wild, daily daydreams about how crippling debility might finish him. In his heart the ruler always sadly knew that he was just one man born into a modest family, in the unremarkable town of Naissus Dardania, north of Rome.
Known widely throughout the capitol city of Rome, and other towns and regions from the year 230 on, among people who willfully did not want to see Claudius' inner flaws and conflicts, physical curses, and emotional vulnerabilities, he was accorded the reputation of being a proud, arrogant and valiant Roman warrior. Galenius and several Roman senators took particular notice. As an Emperor-to-be, General Galenius -- who was a semi-competent army officer and tactician but who came across to influential Roman citizen/powerbrokers as a morally-challenged, bribe-taking, and dictatorial strongman and mass murderer (if need be) -- turned Claudius briskly into a special captain of the Empire's elite cavalry force, the hipparchos. Claudius took the chance, at once, to show what he could accomplish among the Roman troops as a successful upper echelon commander and battle-brave army strategist. Claudius also dared to morph into an edgy opportunist who took risks in political and social circles with the Senate and other upper class Romans in high places. Galenius was never as proficient or so fortunate as his mentee -- the future Emperor Claudius II -- and his modest skills for war-making and peace, and political success, greatly deteriorated overtime. His flaws were intolerable. He grew expendable.
By the beginning of 268, at the age of 58, Claudius seized viciously -- with political and financial backing -- the revered title of Emperor Claudius Gothicus, or Claudius the Second, among his troops and the populace. With a band of loyal conspirators from the elite Roman legion, those angered in particular over Galenius' failure to maintain power and position over the territory of Milan, the heartened opportunist effected a hasty mutiny within the Imperial Army and conducted a devastating swoop -- looking like the spangled image of a proud, wide-winged eagle sporting deadly razor-claws -- that landed Claudius on the lofty Emeror's throne. As the new despot in town, a man who sat in judgment above all others, Claudius and a small band of ruthless sentinels had committed the gruesome murder of aging Galenius. The troubled Claudius obtained ascendancy over the vast natural resources, the powerful Roman military, and a loyal people who wished to deify him: these factors would constitute the brief but sturdy backbone of the glorious reign of the Gothicus. Yet that time on the loftiest perch would be brief. Some of Claudius' most terrifying premonitions had veils of truth and irony draped across them. This he would not see until a fateful campaign into Moesia.
Months later, for a few days close to the end of 268, as Claudius the Second and his hand-picked pack of Roman guards were encamped during a hasty sojourn to the village of Naissus (where the Emperor was born and now needed to resolve some family relationship concerns), in order to forget significant new worries cropping up throughout the Empire, the violent and hungry hordes of heathens that threatened a variety of Roman borders without shame or hesitation, the greedy requests by the starving and sick in his people, and the throbbing pains associated with his lack of self-esteem and his tortured cranium, the Emperor had devoted lengthy skeins of words -- exclaimed to civilian insiders and sentinels alike -- that heaped the ugliest scorn and disparagement onto one guilty person. To Claudius, he was a perfidious apostate, a seditious colluder, one who sullied the present and future of the holy empire, who had sinned grievously, though this criminal had been ordered to stop. Now he deserved to die.
But the Emperor exaggerated. The renegade religionist, Valentinius di Terni, was an object of heated hyperbole and criminal arrest but not the wort of offenders.
He was to be a patsy for the sick ruler's horrible attention and the need to prove that he still had it when it came to upholding Rome's ruthless moral standards. So it would be off with his head. Valentine's extensive criminal guile, his evil misdeeds, were to help shelter underground some -- ten or twenty -- dubious Christians and also preside over at least a few marriages while away from Rome.
'Not so bad to be truthful, but more marriages! He will not stop? -- Just when all able-bodied males are needed as perpetual sacrifices on our righteous battlefields,' Claudius thought derisively.
Valentine had been captured by accident, by an Empire scouting party, on a road north of Rome. This was close to Naissus. He had been transported upon Claudius' order to the jail there.
The morning had arrived on which the two would meet.
'This should be interesting,' Claudius said to himself. It was already getting warm in the bright sunshine around his opulent tent.
* * *
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| The Emperor Claudius II |
Known widely throughout the capitol city, Rome, and other regions, among those who did not suspect his inner conflicts and vulnerabilities, Claudius long bore the reputation of being a proud, arrogant and valiant but bloodthirsty Roman warrior. The Emperor Galenius -- a sterotypical but not extremely crafty Roman strongman and mass murderer -- appointed him to be the captain of the Empire's elite cavalry force, the hipparchos. Claudius was at once a successful officer and battle strategist, but Galenius was not so skilled nor so fortunate. Claudius also became an experienced opportunist as his years of military service ticked by. By the beginning of 268, at the age of 58, he appropriated the revered title of Emperor Claudius Gothicus, also Claudius the Second, among his troops. With a band of loyal conspirators from his Roman legion, angered by Galenius' failure to maintain power over the territory of Milan, he effected a hasty mutiny within the Imperial Army and conducted a devastating swoop -- in the spangled image of a proud, wide-winged eagle sporting deadly razor-claws -- that landed him on the Emperor's lofty, unassailable throne. As the new despot above all others, Claudius and a small band of his ruthless sentinels committed the gruesome murder of bloody Galenius and obtained ascendancy over the vast natural resources, the powerful Roman militia forces spread around the world, and a loyal people who wished to deify him: these factors would constitute the sturdy backbone of his glorious, omnipotent, unending reign.
into the immortal emperor's chair was a consequence and spoil of the the gruesome, unspeakable murder of his predecessor, a true and sterotypical Roman strongman, named Galenius. , the immortal and omnipotent ruler of Rome, had grabbed control of the Roman Empire's almighty vastness -- rich lands, wealth beyond measure, and inlaid natural resources -- just months before. His hasty swoop, like a proud and wide-winged eagle, into the immortal emperor's chair was a consequence and spoil of the the gruesome, unspeakable murder of his predecessor, a true and sterotypical Roman strongman, named Galenius.
Claudius had orchestrated Galenius' demise like a mad music conductor. Many pieces, many players, and many themes were brought to bear in harmony. But like many frighful bullies, Claudius refused to kill Galenius with his own hands. A trio of henchmen supplied the cold and callous script and the muscular emphases to assure the aging Emperor's homicide.
Claudius indulgently and psychotically saw his ascent to Galenius' throne as his divine right. But despite his bullying rages, petty paybacks, bitter recriminations, impetuous plans, and political machinations what the haughty Claudius could not foresee, through an illusory and razor thin sheen of supposed omniscience, was that his personal, volcanic symphony was playing crazily toward an unforetold conclusion too. Claudius Gothicus was marked by fate to die in a strange and hostile manner, as the assassinated Galenius had been, as many of the once-glorified and self-glorying Roman Emperors eventually were. On this morning though, during the dawning of 268 or 269, while gray, streaky clouds and the first red spatters of sunlight arched over the eastern boundaries of his vast temporal holdings, Claudius' birthright, the anxious Roman leader was already terrified that his mighty hold empire might never be fully his own.
During dark nights, Claudius suffered painful premonitions. In the rust-hued and spackle stained tableau of early morning, he worried as perspiration dampened his clothing and pulled him down onto this bed. Since becoming Emperor, Claudius' focus had been on one man in particular, a particularly annoying Upstart who often centered his work among the rabble in the town of Naissus. And no surprise, the outskirts of Naissus was the place where the Emperor's grand army was presently encamped. The troublemaker pained the great Claudius like a festering burned patch, an aching albeit temporary tattoo from hot food, on the tip of his royal and tender tongue. Claudius marked this man from Naissus, now his prisoner, for execution once the late afternoon hours of this day. Happy new year, dead man, he thought scornfully. He whispered the offender's indecent name, which began with a V.
The Emperor's field surgeon, a lifetime army veteran, who served tactfully also as his personal barber, had just wielded with ease and confidence a sharp and deadly straight razor across Claudius' face and neck. Unwanted whiskers were scaped off and thrown into the nearby camp fire. The skilled razor work had drawn no blood and caused no nicks. Perhaps this charge acts with with too much assurance, Claudius thought in his paranoid manner. His quickly graying beard was now shaped perfectly around his handsome face, long aquiline nose, and pointed chin. As the grooming session came to an end, Claudius stood and his face reddened. He felt perplexed, annoyed, itchy to pick a fight. The Emperor pushed the quiet field surgeon aside.
'Hand me that,' he ordered.
Claudius the Second studied his deified face in a reflective glass.
'By the gods almighty, I begin to look old,' the Emperor lamented. 'I am worn thin from too many duties, too many affairs of state. Can't you all see how many demands are made on me? I must respond to them all. It is my duty. The end for me must be nigh. Yes, old face, that's what you tell me.'
He examined the long and deepening worry lines that horizontally cut across his forehead.
Though he would never admit it, Claudius dreaded the specter of death. As the powerful Emperor, no man or woman should know, not even Claudius himself, of his ponderous frailties and fears. His infallible will and granite resolved were to be perfect at all times, immutable, a living symbol of his strength and immortality. He was not married at this time. Claudius had condemned each of his wives to dark and mysterious deaths. Rumors of blood-running suicides trickled through each case and caused gossipy whispers. A faithful conscript's blade, a straight razor again, had sliced each woman's arteries once Claudius suspected, then became convinced without evidence, that each had gained insight on his deeply rooted fears of inadequacy.
With each season that passed, Claudius the Roman Warrior, then Gothicus the Omnipotent Ruler, became more obsessive, additionally compulsive, and cruelly impotent. Most of the soldiers, sentries, and servants in his camp, family members, vendors from Rome, even the quiet field surgeon urgently wished he would atch an errant arrow in battle, happen upon an enemy's sword point, or otherwise expire forthwith. When by himself, Claudius often thought about Julius Caesar, so far gone from this realm, so deeply buried. Claudius grunted impatiently. He imaged a large stone, carved to resemble his magnificent warrior's frame, lying supine, without feeling above his mortal remains in Rome. The Emperor rubbed his sleep-starved and rheumy eyes. Let no one see you are having second thoughts, he told himself anxiously. The hour to go to the makeshift, stone jailhouse on the cusp of his army's encampment, little more than a rockpile cabin with a moldy and muddy floor, had arrived all too soon.
'Hand me that,' he ordered.
Claudius the Second studied his deified face in a reflective glass.
'By the gods almighty, I begin to look old,' the Emperor lamented. 'I am worn thin from too many duties, too many affairs of state. Can't you all see how many demands are made on me? I must respond to them all. It is my duty. The end for me must be nigh. Yes, old face, that's what you tell me.'
He examined the long and deepening worry lines that horizontally cut across his forehead.
Though he would never admit it, Claudius dreaded the specter of death. As the powerful Emperor, no man or woman should know, not even Claudius himself, of his ponderous frailties and fears. His infallible will and granite resolved were to be perfect at all times, immutable, a living symbol of his strength and immortality. He was not married at this time. Claudius had condemned each of his wives to dark and mysterious deaths. Rumors of blood-running suicides trickled through each case and caused gossipy whispers. A faithful conscript's blade, a straight razor again, had sliced each woman's arteries once Claudius suspected, then became convinced without evidence, that each had gained insight on his deeply rooted fears of inadequacy.
With each season that passed, Claudius the Roman Warrior, then Gothicus the Omnipotent Ruler, became more obsessive, additionally compulsive, and cruelly impotent. Most of the soldiers, sentries, and servants in his camp, family members, vendors from Rome, even the quiet field surgeon urgently wished he would atch an errant arrow in battle, happen upon an enemy's sword point, or otherwise expire forthwith. When by himself, Claudius often thought about Julius Caesar, so far gone from this realm, so deeply buried. Claudius grunted impatiently. He imaged a large stone, carved to resemble his magnificent warrior's frame, lying supine, without feeling above his mortal remains in Rome. The Emperor rubbed his sleep-starved and rheumy eyes. Let no one see you are having second thoughts, he told himself anxiously. The hour to go to the makeshift, stone jailhouse on the cusp of his army's encampment, little more than a rockpile cabin with a moldy and muddy floor, had arrived all too soon.
Claudius thrust the shard of looking-glass roughly into his field surgeon's right hand. The surgeon accepted the affront without comment and gave it to a young male attendant.
'Withdraw, all of you, on my command,' he spoke up boldly, but still much too self-centered, haughty and assertive for this private situation. Adrenaline had rushed into his system. Will I never learn to do things right, like my father, like Galenius and impervious Caesar did?, he wondered.
'Withdraw, all of you, on my command,' he spoke up boldly, but still much too self-centered, haughty and assertive for this private situation. Adrenaline had rushed into his system. Will I never learn to do things right, like my father, like Galenius and impervious Caesar did?, he wondered.
Lately the Emperor had begun to talk very loosely -- sometimes carelessly and maniacally when coaxed on by goblets of wine -- about The Upstarts. He talked to his best officers, his army valets, his very few personal confidantes, and the field surgeon, a lifelong friend from Rome. Each person to whom he spoke during one of his rants could only nod silently and ponder how deeply the disintegrating Emperor Claudius was descending into a personal exile of obsessions and psychotic meanderings.
Just five days before this fateful dawn, on an otherwise uneventful Saturday, Claudius rashly judged that the last moments of The Upstarts should be identified. He had fantasized about this possibility for weeks. Without a warning about the prejudicial strike to come, he would preside over a bloody show-and-tell pummeling, in the districts that Upstarts frequented. Such a hammering would again demonstrate to all that he was supreme. He thought greedily and sentimentally about crashing his implacable sword down, from atop his powerful steed, upon surprised victims as if he were Death incarnate. But when the actual clash of metals, bleating horses, protective shields, leather straps, and bleeding human flesh took place, once the Emperor became trapped amidst the embattled, the brave, and the dying, he would quickly become nauseated, vomit violently from the putridities of open wounds and the iron smells of blood and decay, and bolt crazily, fearsomely, atop his chosen steed to some safer patch of earth adjacent to the killing fields. Only when his men had secured victory and sounded the horns would the emperor feel vindicated, again thrilled in by the ideas of darkening blood, lifeless bodies, and fallen horses -- his immutable proof that Claudius Gothicus alone reigned supreme.
He thought he knew them, the unwanted and unwashed of Naissus and other towns and villages, the bothersome and crafty Upstarts, who seemed to be popping up from untilled ground, a toxic crop, just about everywhere. But the Emperor was mistaken crucially. Still little pockets of these trouble-causing crazies were digging in in virtually every neighborhood of Naiissus now. Spreading on the wind like bad seeds from the east, worming in their sneaky way, like disease spots, under the epidermis of his princely, gleaming empire they had to be stopped viciously because they were the vicious force, Claudius wrongly believed. An imposing and magnificent army, full of savvy and skilled swordsmen, spear throwers, and other muscular specimens, who propelled well-aimed and deadly arrows from powerful bows, served every moment at his fingertips. The diseased parties, with the Upstart sickness, must not be allowed to affect his loyal charges. That might bring down his rule, his plans to conquer and subdue the known and unknown worlds, thus spreading the peaceable empire of faithful Romans.
Claudius Gothicus suspected that each of the Upstarts wished him dead. He had no rational cause to do so. To his troops in the field and his wise officers these others seemed quite docile and unpretentious, but most of them unwilling to cower before the Empire, even when they were locked into the harsh, accusatory, and at times bludgeoning, grips of Claudius' ubiquitous lieges. The persistent but lowbrow lifestyle and fervor of the Upstarts were rocking the Roman world. To complicate matters, the Emperor was also experiencing major difficulties with the vermin-bearing, hard charging, horn-blowing rebels called Goths on the margins of civilization -- and recently a bloodthirsty, new wolfpack, the hellacious Vandals, had popped up to worry him from the opposite direction. Claudius secretly admired them all for their unabated dedication to slaying and conquering Romans. But he Upstarts, Goths, Vandals -- semi-human, barbaric tribes marauding, raping, pillaging, murdering, conspiring, and worst of all senselessly willing to battle his conscripted legions before succumbing valiantly.
'Perhaps we approach a tipping point this afternoon,' Claudius whispered.
To find and capture the notorious Valentine on the previous Sunday, the Emperor sent a large contingent of soldiers to search several extended-family clans of Upstarts inside various houses. They were easily caught, marched into the town square of Naissus and, then, vigorously cut down by whooshing, deathly-sharp knives, swords, and spears. It was a shocking and wretchedly bloody scene for all to behold, including even the Roman charges. Claudius had thrown up violently while still astride his white horse at the bitter scene. Later, he explained to his muscular bodyguards and closest officers that he his supper had made him feel sick.
It cheered the Emperor slightly to learn that there was good news emanating from the horrors of the evening of horror. All of the known Upstarts within Naissus had perished ignominiously. Except the crucial one they had sought. Nevertheless, Claudius hoped that this town at last was buttoned-down, safer and more secure, a place from which Marcus Aurelius Valerius Claudius, the most magnificent of all Roman leaders, better than the legendary Julius Caesar, and his battalions of fighting, fearless red-uniformed army goon-squads could soon move on to deal with the Goth barbarians huddled in the north and the unexpected Vandal bands slicing in from somewhere out west. He puzzled about what had happened to the once rapidly advancing, rapacious War-Queen, Zenobia of Palmyra, and her homicidal armies in brown and green from the east.
'Where did she go?' Claudius, a very poor tactician, wondered aloud one day to his field surgeon and friend. He wagged his well-barbered head and aquiline features with abject self-pity. 'The ruling Emperor must be vigilant on all sides.'
Claudius felt sad that he would not live forever. At an opportune moment, someone will step up to do me in, he thought -- one firm, deep, and bloody slice with a well-honed blade that will glide across this holy and esteemed neck. It told his wary onlookers around the ruler's tent that homicidal daydreams and blackened pits of psyhotic need were as ever on his mind.
'Let us go, my friends,' the Emperor commanded. He fingered his ruler's sword, then his breastplate of gold absentmindedly. He called impatiently for his royal helmet. It was placed upon his head.
'Life's journey is brief. The door is ajar. This is going to be gruesome," Cladius Gothicus counseled them. While this unanticipated prisoner, in serene possession of the unquenchable and valiant heart of a great Upstart, did not know it yet, the murderous villain and Emperor was about to declare this Valentine's Day.
The Emperor and His Daughter
His name was Valentine, patterned after his father's, which was Valerian, a physician and compassionate healer. While pinned under the repressive and cruel hands of the demagogic Emperor, and his hopeless, homicide-happy troops, it was better to have a worthy Roman name. Both Valerian and Valentine were ones that many Romans could accept as normal, unexciting, not subversive.
Valentine was a physician like his father. He had a gift. On Sunday while the sun was still rising, he had laid his hands on a beautiful blind girl, the jail warden's daughter, before the army raided the Upstart fraternity's meal. The herbs that Valentine had prescribed for her to take, each day, in hot water, were beginning to take effect. Mysteriously, the bright girl, Jana, who was still blind by all known standards, began to describe some of Valentine's facial features in particular and poetic detail. A healing some began to declare happily, a miracle inspired by God. Fortunately, the girl, Jana, and her Upstart-curious father, the Romans' warden, had crept out of the secret meeting house to the presumed safety of their home just seconds before the bloodthirsty onslaught. As an old Roman tradition went, Miracles are for those who believe in them.
Valentine surrendered on the day after the raid. He did not want anyone else to suffer as the authorities searched for him. Months before, Valentine (though truly young in years, about age 35) had been identified by the local commune of Upstarts as a presbyter, an elder. He had spent his years trying to live up to his legendary name: strong, worthy, powerful. He felt that he might be succeeding but slowly.Valentine was granted the distinctive honor of presiding at one of the Sunday underground enclaves. The time together always lasted for hours and centered on eating and storytelling and moral support for his world-weary compatriots. Valentine was the sole survivor of the raid by Claudius' men. Somehow he had dodged the flashing swords and outlandish swipes of pointed daggers.Valentine was notorious among some Romans (and of course Claudius) for baptizing converts and witnessing many marriages of army-ready young men and young women who fast became reluctant to give their lives for the Empire. Valentine was now in the clutches of the Roman god-on-earth right and was right where Claudius wanted him to be.
The holding cell he was in was dirty, damp, and the foulest. Valentine tied to be calm. But during the last hour he had started breathing quite nervously. During the morning, Claudius had given him a terrible choice.
'Should I cut your head off? Or should I have you pinned to this cell's wall like a butterfly, pierced by hundreds of sharp arrowheads? Perhaps I ought to have you dragged to death behind the teams of wild white steeds who charge before our chariots? Which do you want?'
Valentine, with faltering bravado, chose the arrows. A reluctant but unbowed dead man he would become.
'Pierce my heart. Make it bleed like a river. I defy you. I am ready to walk toward my last breath. You cannot extinguish my immortal spirit,' the physician said, his voice a bit shaky. His demeanor to all who looked on seemed firm, unbowed, uplifted.
Claudius believed he detected a flicker of weakness and indecision, in his opponent's response.
'Very well. This afternoon. It is Valentine's Day, everyone. Face justice, traitor' Claudius bellowed with a bitter sneer, again too haughtily for the moment. He turned and left the makeshift stone jail quickly, along with his contingent of bodyguards.
Valentine begged his jailer for something to write a note on. In gratitude for Valentine's valiant and healing care for his blind daughter -- even though he was absolutely petrified by the Emperor's -- the warden granted Valentine's last wish.
Sitting on a small stone bench in the damp darkness, as Roman centurions erected a tall wood wall which would serve as the backdrop to his swift and brutish execution, Valentine wrote his note. He told Jana that all would be well. And he asked her to care faithfully for her careful, Upstart-curious but ailing father. Valentine cautioned Jana, a true beauty, not tell anyone about the hidden cell of rogue upstarts who gathered secretly in some caves during weekends out in the hills.
As the last minutes of his life ticked away, Valentine finished his secret message. He wrote a portion of a tiny poem he had been made to memorize as a child. Then he added his name.
Valentine silently handed his last little testament, a love note, to Jana's father. His final declaration -- though no human but Jana and her parent ever beheld the prisoner's actual note -- read simply, "With love, from your Valentine."
When Jana heard the conclusion of this note, she was taken aback. Her heart raced. She lost her breath. She raised her eyebrows in alarm. For it looked, on the parchment, like Valentine had attempted to crudely draw an archer's bow, with a convex line that traced to the bow's top and bottom. She looked bewildered for a time. Then she turned it sideways. A smile creased her saddened face. The one who sketched this for her had depicted a set of lips -- a lasting kiss that could not, would not, ever be erased by villainy or time's travails.
Those were Valentine's last known sentiments. No one knew they might have immortal, legendary, or lasting consequences. Valentine closed his bone-dry lips once he finished writing and drawing. Resigned and regretful, he never parted them again.
Amidst the savagely dark and brutal Roman culture of the 3rd Century, Valentine's ravaged body was tossed out of the stone jailhouse. No one there or anywhere had heard of cinnamon hearts, Whitman samplers, Flowers Express, wax Valentine lips, or Hallmark moments. Cupid -- the giddy son of Venus and Mars, or so it was taught -- was to all Roman citizens a spurious little sylph, a goofy and playful presence from Mount Silvanus. Yet things would changewith time. Life is a flowing river. The door was ajar . . .
The Vandals Covet the Empire
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| Coins from the Reign of Claudius the Second |
Before his sudden death, the Emperor Claudius, who envisioned himself as more noble and powerful than the sum of all Caesars, who ruled over the vast Roman Empire for a mere two years, not long before the game-changing Peace of Constantine, commissioned a metal coin in his own honor. It depicted the depicted the regal bearing of the Emperor on front and back. Coins from that time can still be examined. They are valued at $50 to $200 in the United States. Claudius paid a horrific price for his hubris and stupidity, his tainted glory, as did many others. Yet discriminating coin collectors and history mavens covet the ancient Roman tribute pieces to Claudius Gothicus.
By mid-270, there were frightening rumors circulating among the Emperor's soldiers, their spouses, and their families. These centered on the Emperor's distemper, moral weakness, and paranoia. When the specially-constructed wooden backdrop was finished, the gold-breasted and zealously guarded Ruler crept circumspectly into the cell beside his coveted prisoner, Valentine. The successor to the much villified and imperial Galenius smirked. He stuffed bits of fabric in his royal ears. The screams of the dying victim rocked him back on his heels and made him sick (and now often woke him up in the middle of bloody dreams). So, the great Claudius did not linger. He swung hastily on his paranoid heels and departed as Valentine the Physician and Healer's was still breathing. Valentine had just glared at him contemptuously before any arrows flew. He produced no last statement, or so it seemed. Just outside the stone jail, Claudius haughtily ordered that his bowmen do more: one sharp arrow should pierce the Upstart's left eye, a second should crash through his right. A third should smash with no mercy into his nose, then one to his mouth, and a final one was to cut open his wicked heart.
'But wait, fools,' the Emperor barked. 'Let the condemned linger a bit. Maybe he will still feel some flicker of life for some time. I swear by all the gods about his heart, Make it bleed.'
As the sun went down, Claudius ordered that Valentine's pierced and dead body should be wrapped in a plain and inexpensive cloth and laid on the ground (not buried) beyond the town's western border. Packs of wild dogs roamed that territory. No foot travelers or stray items left outside of Naissus residences were safe from them. The hungry, homeless canines soon smelled and then feasted voraciously on Valentine's mouldering body and blood. A red-stained metal coin, bearing a clumsy image of the great Claudius, slipped out of each clenched, rigor-hardened palm on Valentine's body. The rounds of metal were soon covered with dust and buried by winds that blew aimlessly back and forth, obscured and lost forever perhaps.
Someone had affixed to the humble shroud of Valentine, in darkness, right after his gruesome death, a little note written in his blood. It read simply, "To my Valentine, with everlasting love." An imperfect shape of a human heart was traced, again in a bloody red hue, below these words. An arrow bisected the crudely formed heart.
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During the waning days of his second year over Roman Empire, Claudius Gothicus and his minions rode toward Upper Moesia. The barbaric Goths were swooping toward the Emperor's chair again, like gloom-filled waves on a prehistoric sea, craving an encounter with the better organized Romans. Paranoia and loathing increased by the hour in Claudius' camp. His soldiers all suffered from pangs of worry and self-doubt.
But other priorities soon pulled Claudius far away, no surprise. The 'sum of all Caesars and more,' as he referred to himself, could still not face full-on war's bloody gushes, mess and mayhem, and death throes. Claudius handed the campaign to subdue the Goth hordes to his general, Aurelius, on the road outside of Upper Moesia. Claudius wheeled his white steed around, ordered his well-polished bodyguards to follow him very closely, and headed post-haste to the sheltered village of Sirinium, his newfound 'strategic defense point' for Roman officers.
A bitter and deadly surprise awaited Claudius around the Sirinium sanctuary. Borne by black-mouthed and ravenous rodents, plague swept overland in the backpacks and food stores of both Vandals and Goths. It lurked, like a hidden avenger behind palace curtains, for the arriving Romans. The disease was quick acting, painful, and merciless. It targeted the rich, the poor, the powerful, and the powerless. Word of this crisis zipped throughout the Empire like a sharpened spear racing through the sky. Then shocking news spread that the terrible sickness had poisoned and struck down the Emperor Claudius, two short years after his ascent to his throne.
In a vain attempt to acknowledge with respect the passing of the bloodthirsty and cowardly paranoid, commoners, military conscripts, and even the Roman Senate extolled the reign of Claudius the Emperor. His successor dedicated himself to the gods and the challenges faced by the Empire.
It's Not Easy to Be King
Stories about the legendary Valentine were circulated and repeated, and embellished in primitive Upstart communities throughout the Empire. The memory of Claudius the Second faded quickly among the righteous, then disappeared, like the blood-tarnished and buried coins that fell from a corpse's clutches back in 269. The Peace of Constantine during 313 altered the ruthlessness of Roman culture toward Upstart beliefs and practices in significant ways. Tall tales and mythical episodes, and historical accuracies, could be shared openly. Long, consoling household suppers for those attracted to the Upstart way, family style affairs, now in above-ground settings, featured prayers to their deity, ritual. and ever-evolving verbal accounts of great deeds from the past that inspired. Some stories centered on the brave Valentine and the horrible one who had consigned him to a painful death..
As new voices and earnest preachers passed on accounts of Valentine's heroism, some were eventually recorded. One mystery Valentine was a promising and valiant physician and was convicted for the crime of sedition at the stern command of Claudius. Another was a courageous priest early in the 4th Century who staunchly refused to stop initiating Upstarts and stop witnessing marriages underground in defiance of strict Roman decrees. He suffered execution. Another legend, largely detail free, taught that a noble and holy bishop named Valentine from the early 400s ran afoul of unfriendly Roman authorities and was hanged when he would not renounce his faith.
During the year 496, Pope Gelasius recognized religious promise of a particular day of the year: the 14th of February. Long before the ancient Romans had embraced a pagan holiday -- a middle February celebration dedicated to the Roman god Juno. The utilitarian pontiff, Gelasius, opportunistically declared February 14 to be forever and unquestionably the Feast of Saint Valentine, a hero who died with courage in response to pagan persecution.
Perseverance and commitment, and transcendent bravery, were the hallmark spiritual values of the Valentine lesson originally, not romance, not erotic love. Persistent though, among believers in the dark centuries when the distinct Valentine legends were molded, were compelling rumors about a mysterious love note carried secretly by a jailer to a young girl from a dank prison cell long ago. The simple note, a paradigm for modern valentines, declared 'With everlasting hope and love, from your Valentine.' The crude and bloody image of the writer's heart, pierced by a soldier's (not Cupid's) arrows, still causes heartbeats to flutter around the world to this day.
Of course, the evil and paranoid, most wicked small man, Claudius Gothicus, a vicious coward and murderer, is an historical footnote. He is remembered at times as a monster -- but not as the glorious ruler whom he dreamed that he would be. Sometimes, even for living legends, it is not good to be the king.
Power is a drug. Time is a raging river. Each moment presents a tipping point. The doorways to hope, love, and tomorrow remain ajar.
Soundtrack for this Story:
Gotye, "Somebody That I Used to Know"
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