Nest of Vipers Read online

Nymphomidia took another bite of her pear. ‘What could he do? She caught him, it’s the perfect revenge. She’s still out there now, dragging his dignity through the horseshit while he sits in the Senate blocking his ears.’

  There was a tiny sound from the back of my domina’s throat, barely perceptible, but loud enough for Nymphomidia and me to hear in the brief silence.

  The slave dropped her pear. ‘Did the Augusta just speak?’

  I would have denied it, anxious to cover all evidence of my domina’s returning senses, but the news had unsettled me and I wasn’t fast enough with my reply before the noise came again.

  Nymphomidia peered into my domina’s face. ‘She is speaking. What are you trying to say, Lady?’

  Livia kept her eyes fixed wholly upon me and I felt an old chill grip my spine again. ‘She’s not saying anything,’ I insisted.

  ‘But she is, Iphicles.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ill in my guts. ‘She’s not saying anything … she’s laughing.’

  Livia’s wicked eyes glinted. It was true.

  When Nymphomidia made her hasty excuses to leave, I flew to the chest that held the phallus. ‘Things will be worse with you finding voice again,’ I hissed at Livia. ‘Do you love it that your son Tiberius’s rule brings such shameful things to pass? Do you think it glorifies you all the more with people so debased? I am starting to wonder whether this is really for Rome’s good at all. Perhaps it is time for the second king to ascend. A boy’s rule can only be better than this sort of disgrace – especially if he has wise heads to guide him.’

  I flung the lid of the chest open. It was empty. Livia made the tiny noise again, mocking me from her processional throne. I ripped the linen from her bed to see if I’d left it there in my distraction, but I hadn’t. ‘Where is it?’ I spat at her. ‘I’m going to make you sit on the thing for the whole procession just to punish you.’

  Her eyes flashed fire.

  I ran from chest to chest, flinging them all open. I pulled a tapestry from the wall, exposing the storage shelves of vases and ornaments behind it. There was no sign of the wooden fertility implement anywhere in the room.

  ‘I know what you do with this thing,’ said Lygdus.

  I span around in shock. The young eunuch was lolling at the door, cradling the phallus in his hands.

  ‘I know what you do – you shove it inside her.’

  All words failed me in my exposure.

  Lygdus smirked. ‘You think I just stuff myself with cakes all the time while whining like a brat? I’m studying you, Iphicles, in all the hours we spend together. I study you like a book.’

  I said nothing, waiting for him to make clear his intentions.

  Lygdus placed the phallus tip beneath his nostrils and gave it a little sniff. He recoiled. ‘So is this what her sex smells of? This stinks like poison.’

  My guilty silence was the most the damning noise I could have made.

  Lygdus’s eyes widened. ‘This is poison?’

  The time it took for the breath to leave my lungs was all I had to decide on how to respond. Lygdus wasn’t screaming in horror, or calling me a monster or a wretch. He was staring in shock, yes, but there was something else, too. He was impressed. I saw the merest shadow of my reflection in his eyes.

  ‘It paralyses her,’ I said.

  Lygdus dropped the thing like it burned his hands.

  ‘But it’s failed. She can already see again and now she’s beginning to speak.’

  A wave of thrilled delight washed over the eunuch’s face. ‘You hate the Augusta?’ he whispered.

  Of course this wasn’t true. I loved my domina more than anything and everything there was. But I saw in his smile the answer he wanted me to give, so I said, ‘I hate her with all my soul.’

  Lygdus gave a little giggle. ‘Really?’

  I nodded, solemn.

  ‘Well, I can beat that – I hate them all!’

  I burst out laughing in surprise.

  ‘I want to see them dead. I want to see them nailed to trees. Every last dominus, every domina – they’re all pigs. I want to slaughter them. I want to eat them.’

  I had to steady myself.

  ‘They cut off my balls,’ Lygdus went on. ‘They left me in a sheep’s pen with the blood and the pain, and no one even cared if I lived or died. But I beat them – I didn’t give up. Yet still I swelled like an elephant and my voice stayed like a boy’s.’

  I tried hard not to laugh now.

  ‘I heard they cut off your balls too?’ he said.

  I couldn’t tell him that I had made this sacrifice myself. ‘It’s true,’ I lied.

  The eunuch leaped from the door and threw his arms around me. ‘We’re brothers,’ he declared, kissing my face and hair, ‘brothers in suffering.’

  I could only nod.

  Lygdus stopped his kisses and took a step back to examine my face. ‘Have you ever hurt one?’ he whispered. ‘One of them – have you ever hurt one, Iphicles?’

  I took my final gamble. It was time for the truth again, or at least a version of it. ‘I’ve done more than hurt – I’ve killed one, Lygdus. More than one, actually.’

  Lygdus went white. I felt the back of my tunica belt, letting my fingers rest on the dagger I kept there. I intended killing him if I had misjudged my gamble, and would have to face the consequences later. Everything hinged on what he would do next.

  The eunuch sank to his haunches and started kissing my shoes.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Show me your skills,’ he begged me. ‘Let me learn from your wisdom, Iphicles.’

  ‘Stop that – let go of me.’

  ‘I want to kill them too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trust me, Iphicles – I want to kill them like you.’

  I tried to pull my feet away but one of my woollen house shoes came loose in Lygdus’s hands. The eunuch seized upon my bare foot, plunging his tongue between the spaces and placing my toes within his lips. My repulsion only lasted a few moments. I looked back to my domina, who was watching the whole exchange from her throne.

  I gave her a long, bright smile, showing her every one of my teeth. She could not return the smile, but I wondered then, if she had regained the ability, whether she would have grinned back at me regardless of our differences. If only because I so richly deserved it.

  I looked down at the fawning Lygdus and thanked the Great Mother for the gifts she continued to give me.

  When my domina was nearly smothered in garlands and ready for her procession, Lygdus and I resumed our conversation while we waited for the litter-bearers. I asked the eunuch what he expected to gain from such murderous desires. Lygdus claimed to want nothing. Money had no appeal for him, nor did sexual pleasure, he said. The only things that held his interest were matters of the heart. His greatest desire was to serve a master who loved him. But he had given up this dream as hopeless. None of them would love him. This was why he wanted them dead.

  I suspected the young eunuch was not wholly right in the head, but when I thought of the intense interest he had shown in my feet I could only marvel. Perhaps Lygdus’s ‘deserving master’ could even be a slave?

  It was then that he told me about his thwarted visit to Tiberius. Thrown by this revelation, I went very still. ‘Why did you go to see him, Lygdus?’

  The eunuch told me that he’d wanted to inform the Emperor of the birth of Livilla’s boy. I absorbed this. ‘But Tiberius would have found out himself the same night. Why did he need to hear it from you?’

  Lygdus raised his eyes again and his look was flirtatious. ‘Because I knew what no one else knew, Iphicles, and I still know it now.’

  Although my eyes narrowed, my smile took on a shadow of flirtation too, just to encourage him to tell me. ‘What would that be?’

  Lygdus placed a hand upon his breast to feel the heartbeat fluttering beneath the mound of his flesh. ‘My dominus Castor is not the father of that child.’

/>   After a long moment I said, ‘No one else knows it?’

  ‘No one but my domina, Livilla, and she’ll never dare tell anyone. And the baby’s father knows it too. He’s always known.’

  ‘And how do you know?’

  ‘I overhear my domina’s prayers.’

  The eunuch had greater stealth and cunning than I had given him credit for. All he lacked was execution. There was another long pause as we stared at each other.

  ‘And who is the father?’ I asked at last, my voice the lowest of whispers.

  Lygdus told me.

  I gave a sigh of pleasure as so many things made sense. I fancied I heard Livia make a similar noise, although I’m sure there was little pleasure in it for her. But when I looked to her, she gave nothing away. We heard the litter-bearers’ boots echoing up the corridor towards the suite. Castor’s Forum procession was starting.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time the secret lovers came out into the open?’ I whispered to Lygdus.

  ‘They’ll never do that. It would ruin them both.’

  ‘Perhaps we can do something so that there will be no scandal? Perhaps we can make them see that they have a hope of being happy one day?’

  ‘Will we kill someone to do it?’

  The eight litter-bearers entered the room and took their positions under the poles that ran along each side of my domina’s throne. I saw the glint of what I thought were tears in her eyes. Tears of what, I wondered. Horror? Misery? Or, perhaps – dared I allow myself to hope it – even excitement? I knew she had heard every word we’d spoken. The bearers lifted her and I saw her eyes no more. I turned back to Lygdus.

  ‘Yes, we will,’ I whispered. ‘We will kill someone very soon. And not long after that, we will kill again. And then again.’

  Lygdus laughed with delight and we took our places in our domina’s wake, trailing among the other household slaves who streamed from all corners of Oxheads as Livia’s throne was borne along the great halls. We crossed the front threshold and left the grand house, stepping into the golden light of day. Livia looked resplendent as Flora. The eunuch basked in her reflected glory as the mob in the street began to shout and cheer the sight of their Augusta. Lygdus preened as though the cries were meant for him. I indulged him in this folly of youth. In my state of advanced years the love of the mob meant very little. Too often I had seen it turn.

  ‘Why do you kill them?’ he whispered to me once we had begun our progress down the Palatine. ‘Is it for vengeance?’

  I could have lied and claimed this to be true. Looking back on it now, I see how much less painful it would have been if I had. But in my happy realisation that I had found in Lygdus not only a kindred spirit and an ally, but also that very rarest of things in Rome, a friend, I chanced the greatest risk I had taken in my life.

  ‘I do it all for Cybele,’ I said.

  He blinked at me in confusion. ‘For the Great Mother?’

  I nodded, my eyes shining with joy. Then I told him everything about the prophecies and divinity, and how Cybele gave her greatest gifts to her eunuchs. We had reached the Forum by the time I was done, and hundreds of people trailed behind and around us, screaming my domina’s name. Lygdus was bewildered by what I had told him, the glories of the procession forgotten. His heart burned with new hope and possibility.

  I pointed to the head of the procession, where Castor walked like a prince, his baby son in his arms and his three fine nephews by his side. ‘See,’ I said, ‘see up there? There he is – our second prophesied king.’

  Lygdus struggled to comprehend it all. ‘My dominus Castor?’

  ‘No, not him …’

  ‘Then the second king is Nero …?’ he said in wonder.

  I shook my head, still smiling, and showed him who it really was that Cybele had ordained.

  ‘Little Boots?’

  I closed my eyes, nodding. ‘And what a king he will be.’ I was enraptured. But when I opened them again, my spirits soaring to the skies, I saw the look of utter confusion that remained upon the eunuch’s face. I guessed why he was so puzzled – Little Boots was still a boy, after all.

  ‘The Great Mother is unknowable,’ I said. ‘We cannot understand all that she commands. All we know is this: everything she does, she does for Rome.’

  Lygdus nodded slowly, and for the remainder of the procession, for the full duration of our long, magnificent path, he repeated all that I had told him, whispering it under his breath, telling himself to believe.

  Dazzled by the possibilities that his once bleak future now held, Lygdus wanted nothing more than to find the comfort that was mine in holding so much deep certainty in my heart. He wanted to achieve the blissful ignorance that I nursed in the blindness of such faith.

  I would not discover it for many years, but Lygdus tried and failed, and tried and failed, and tried that much harder again that day to achieve these things that were mine. And when the tiny, nagging doubts flared up in his heart, biting, gnawing and grinding against his conscience, Lygdus beat them back, enraged that comfort and ignorance were denied to him. He would achieve all that I had achieved, Lygdus told himself violently.

  As all the gods were his witnesses, he would achieve what was mine.

  MY SOLACE IN

  THIS TIME OF

  WOES

  Ludi Romani

  September, AD 21

  Five months later: the rebel forces of

  Sacrovir occupy Augustodunum, Gaul,

  taking the sons of the Gallic nobility

  hostage

  We elbowed and kicked against the surging mass of gawpers, trying to force our way through to catch a glimpse of the gladiators’ banquet. The size of the crowd was impossible to measure, as was the distance to the raised dining couches on the other side of the Forum that held the leading gladiators of the Ludi Romani – the Roman Games. They could have been twenty feet away, or a hundred. The monuments of the Forum seemed to bend and recede beyond the heads of idolatrous fans.

  My own head span in the haze and I felt like weeping in frustration. Yet I could think of no other way to achieve our mission, so we had to go on. We had a goal, a vital plan, but we were still too ill-equipped to commence it. The only way we could obtain what we needed was by reaching a vantage point where we could see everyone present at the gladiators’ public feast. If we could survey the whole crowd, I reasoned, perhaps I would somewhere see her, the woman whose skills were essential for the success of our scheme. In my gut I knew she was present.

  ‘Keep going!’ I yelled to Lygdus over my shoulder. ‘We can do this!’

  Those we kicked and struck were doing the same to us and to everyone else besides. Sexual invitations and lusty cheers were flung at the gorging gladiators, merging with cries of pain and outrage as the crowd thrilled and brawled. We were in a scene from a nightmare, beyond our depth in a putrid pool of scratching, spitting, stamping ghouls. Fist blows rained upon me. Hair was yanked from my head and my eyes were blackened. Two of my teeth had already been loosened by a fuller armed with a club – a man I knew well and usually admired, because he washed my domina’s linen. But like everyone else, the excitement of the games had made him lose his mind. I was in danger of losing my own.

  ‘Move forward, Lygdus!’ I yelled. ‘I think I can see the Thracians up ahead!’ Indeed, I could just see a glimmer of the Balkan warriors’ gilt crowns.

  The noise around us was like the pits of Hades as we forged forward. The gladiators stuffed themselves as if reclining on Olympus. Still, the crowd’s din was nothing to the noise they would make tomorrow when the same idols would be let loose upon each other for the games. The gladiators would savour hell tomorrow, and the mob’s turn would come to sit high above and watch the spectacle of death. But neither Lygdus nor I gave a fig for the games. Like most slaves, we found the idea of fellow men of servitude going to such bloody deaths repellent. And today’s traditional ‘last feast’ we thought equally as vile. We were only among them at all because I
clung to such a slim hope.

  ‘I’m dying!’ cried Lygdus from somewhere behind me. ‘Iphicles!’

  I turned and managed to locate him. He was poking the eyes of a youth he was gripping by the throat. ‘You’re not dying,’ I yelled. ‘You’re showing him who’s boss!’

  The youth tore himself from Lygdus’s hands and managed to lurch away. Lygdus struggled through the seething mass of men and women to reach me.

  ‘Can you see the gladiators?’ he shouted above the din.

  We strained to see above the heads in front of us and caught a clear view of a table of Thracian fighters, and behind them a group of Celts, all gorging on platters of food.

  ‘How will they fight tomorrow with their bellies so full?’ Lygdus wanted to know.

  ‘We need to get on those platforms,’ I yelled at him.

  ‘Where the dining couches are? The gladiators will do you in for it!’

  ‘I’ll pretend I’m a serving slave.’

  ‘They’ll kill you, Iphicles.’

  ‘I have to be able to see the whole crowd,’ I insisted. ‘We’ve waited months for the Ludi Romani to begin. She loves them too much to resist returning to Rome.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Just who is this “she”?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Not very well,’ Lygdus muttered.

  I stared at the massive Thracians. Lygdus was right. They would kill me if I dared to mount their platform. ‘There are other platforms, further forward,’ I shouted, ‘with different men – not so fierce.’

  Lygdus was doubtful. ‘This woman you seek – why do we need her at all?’

  ‘For what she can give us. Now follow me.’

  ‘But what about the stuff you’ve got for Livia? Can’t some of that be spared?’

  ‘No, it cannot!’ I cried. ‘She’s a threat enough already. I need every last smear. What we need for our new plan is a very different kind of poison. One that doesn’t just incapacitate – we need one that kills.’

  Progress became easier once we made it closer to the dining platforms. The gladiators were protected by bodyguards, and the presence of so many armed men – the gladiators included – made the spectators with the clearest view of the feast suppress their violence. The brawls were confined only to the middle and the back.