Nest of Vipers Read online

  Then the son dug inside again to see what else he could find to offer. He found his own children there, two of them – a boy and a girl. The girl had known misery. He gave her to his father in the hope that he’d cure her. Then he gave his precious son too. But the father remained indifferent.

  In despair the master fled from his father’s sight. Weeping overtook him, both in his dream and in his sleeping chamber, where I recorded everything among the fearful slaves. He fell to wrenching sobs that saw him curl up like a foetus in his bed. But still he didn’t wake. Then abruptly he stopped. In his dream he had glanced over his shoulder to his father in the distance. The old man was no longer alone – the master’s brother had joined him – a rival for their father’s love. But now the father was laughing, his face softened with affection and joy. He was kissing the rival brother’s hand.

  ‘He is no son to you, Father,’ the master called out in his sleep. ‘I am your son – it is me.’

  But the father was deaf and the master couldn’t be heard. The brother heard him perfectly, however, and turned to sneer at him, as he always had from the very first day they had met. The brother dismissed the master, pronouncing him inferior, ill-born and weak. ‘You’re just a slave,’ the brother taunted him.

  The master was consumed with rage. ‘I’ll kill you for this!’ he called out. ‘I’ll kill you for it!’

  In the room some of the listening slaves gasped with shock to hear their sleeping master shouting this from his bed. But others looked grimly at each other, knowing better what this dream was about. ‘What else can he do?’ one of them muttered. ‘He does in his dream what he should do in life.’

  But in the dream the master’s courage failed him. He called out for his wife.

  In the sleeping room the slaves jumped with fear and ran about to ensure the doors were closed. When they were sure their mistress couldn’t hear, they crouched at the walls to observe what would happen next. The master’s wife came to him in his dream and his sobbing resumed. The brother was right to call him weak and inferior; the sobbing was shameful. But the most loyal of the slaves in the sleeping room begged in whispers to the others that they remember this was only a dream, not life. The others nodded, echoing his words. Their master was a man they admired. After the Emperor, he was the highest man in Rome. The Empire would be his one day.

  The dream wife comforted the master, nursing him like a boy. She dried his tears with her veil and told him that his father’s love would soon be his, but only if he honoured his threat. He must kill his brother. There was no other way. Then he would be rid of him forever. Then his father would give him back his heart and his hopes and his children. Then he would win back his future.

  The master vowed that murder would be his tool; it would serve him as his slaves. It would empower him. It would make him a king.

  The dream wife offered him some wine. He took it from her, brushing his fingers against her hand as he did so. She laughed and tossed her hair free of its ribbons. The long, dark tresses tumbled to her bare shoulders. He drank deeply from the cup and whispered his desire that she release her breasts for him. She did so, gently lifting them from where they rested, letting the sun kiss her milky skin. The master moaned with pleasure as he saw them. He drank deeply from the wine again, and then cupped his wife’s breasts in his hands, cradling the full, round weight of them. He lightly gripped her nipples between his fingertips, and then pressed his mouth to them, suckling.

  He pulled his lips away only to drink the last of the wine as his dream wife slipped out of her garments, letting the silk slip slowly down her thighs to the ground. She asked him to enter her and he rose in his dream to comply. Listening inside the sleeping room, the youngest slave couldn’t hide his own arousal. The oldest slave struck him in the loins with a spoon. As he prepared to mount his dream wife, the master sat upright in his bed, still asleep, his eyes still closed. His brow was slick with sweat; the fabric of his tunica was dark with moisture at his chest and armpits. A slave crept forward to mop his master’s head, but I shot my arm out to stop him. Nothing must wake the master, I knew. The true meaning of the dream was nearly here – the message from the gods.

  In the dream the master’s loins went slack and cold. He could not rise; his wife’s nakedness enflamed his heart but nothing else. His legs and arms went cold – his torso, too – and then his hands. In the sleeping room the master’s teeth began to clash together as he continued to speak the vivid scene in his mind. The slaves looked at each other in increased alarm.

  ‘We must wake him now – look at him,’ one of them whispered at me.

  But I willed them to silence, for suddenly the dream’s truth was speaking to me and me alone. The message from the gods was for Iphicles, not the master. They spoke to me as one of them – their equal. They saw my nascent divinity, earned in sacrifice, and they welcomed me. They promised me the joys that would come once I had served the great prophecy to its very end – once I had crowned the fourth king. And with this promise came their assistance. They would aid me in my plans. And I realised they were aiding me at that very moment.

  The master lurched forward in his bed and then threw himself back against the pillows. ‘I cannot enter you. I cannot have you,’ he shouted to his dream wife.

  And in his dream she began to fade away, her breasts still bare, her cleft moist and waiting for him. But he was unable. He was unworthy. He was not a man.

  The master screamed with terror and all the slaves shook where they crouched at the walls. They began to weep, but still none woke him. The master screamed again – a dreadful howl – then tore his tunica from his throat. The fabric ripped, revealing his chest livid with sores.

  ‘Look at him! Look at him!’ cried the youngest slave.

  The others slapped the boy hard, but nothing would wake the master now, I knew. No noise could bring him back. Froth bubbled from his lips, first white and then pink, as blood began to rise in his throat. The scarlet phlegm spewed through his lips.

  The slaves were in terror. ‘Master!’ they screamed. ‘Master, please wake up!’

  Livilla threw the chamber door wide just as Castor opened his eyes and saw her. Then he saw Lygdus, the slave that had been posted to wait by his wife’s door, and he saw the flash of unspeakable guilt that filled the eunuch’s face. I saw Lygdus, too, and I expected him to throw me a smile of triumph at this heady victory, a grin of joy at this job well done. But he showed me nothing of the kind. Castor’s eyes bore into him and the eunuch knew that his master realised how totally he had been betrayed. Castor looked to the uncomprehending Livilla, standing with her mouth wide and her long hair loose upon her shoulders. He tried to warn her – to tell her what a viper Lygdus was, coiled inside their home.

  ‘My wife …’

  But she didn’t understand.

  Castor’s last breath bubbled from his lungs. The final words he heard were the echo of a whisper in his ear.

  ‘The son with blood, by water’s done, the truth is never seen …’

  Suddenly she was aware of his absence. Her husband’s space in the bed was warm, the scent of him was strong and reassuring upon the linen – and yet she was alone. His side was empty. Apicata lurched awake and ran her hands beneath the covers to make sure it was true. He was gone. She sat up without making a sound and let her toes rest upon the mat. In her nakedness she felt the cold, but she wouldn’t risk the moment’s ignorance that would come from putting on garments and distracting her ears.

  She strained to determine the noises of her sleeping house. She heard the gentle rise and fall of her daughter’s chest as she slumbered in her room across the peristyle. She heard the louder snores of her gangly son. She strained to hear the breathing of the sleeping maids upon their pallets outside her own door and realised there were none. The slaves must be awake – or they had been moved. Then she heard the low murmur of her husband’s voice in his study.

  Apicata felt for her
tunica at last and pulled it on. Then she found her woollen palla and wrapped it tightly around herself. She felt for her shoes next to the bed but her foot only found one. Perhaps Sejanus had kicked the other in accident as he left? She felt under the bed to see if she could find it and instead connected with something she didn’t recognise: a small, oblong box, less than the length of her hand. Her senses told her it was nothing to be alarmed by, and yet it perplexed her by being there. It was smooth to the touch. She shook it and something rattled. It was sealed tightly and her fingers couldn’t open it. But the absence of her husband was more pressing, so Apicata left the little box on the bed, intending to prise the thing open when she returned.

  Barefoot, she crept to the door and listened. Sejanus’s voice grew louder – he was questioning someone. She stole into the open hallway, where the row of chambers ran along one side and the courtyard of the peristyle along the other. There was a chill breeze; an owl hooted as it saw her from where it was perched upon the gutter. There was a good omen in that, Apicata thought, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She stole towards the study, but before she had gone more than a few paces Sejanus emerged and saw her in the shadows.

  She stopped, caught out. ‘Has something happened, husband?’

  There was shock in his voice – but excitement too. ‘Castor is dead.’

  She held her hand out to steady herself against a pillar.

  ‘He died of a fever – he was raging in nightmares.’

  ‘But … I could have helped you in this, as I have with all the other things we’ve planned together. Why didn’t you let me know it was coming so soon after Germanicus? Why didn’t you share it with me, husband? Couldn’t I have made the task easier in some way?’

  Sejanus was as ignorant of Lygdus and the poisoned footbaths as his wife was, but Apicata assumed that it was her husband who had somehow brought on Castor’s death. He didn’t want her to know that he had been thrown by the sudden development. ‘I was protecting you,’ he said eventually.

  There was a tone to his voice that she couldn’t identify; it sat oddly in her ear. ‘I didn’t need protecting with Germanicus.’

  ‘This was different. We … we had no agent to do our work for us this time.’

  She found his face with her hands. ‘You did this alone?’

  He avoided answering. ‘I have to leave,’ he said, taking her hands from his cheeks. Apicata heard the unmistakable noise of a dog’s claws clicking on the floor tiles. Although she couldn’t see it, she heard and smelled the presence of a large hound emerging from Sejanus’s study and brushing its snout against his hand. Apicata recoiled, frightened, but didn’t ask where this beast had come from or why it was there.

  ‘I have to leave,’ Sejanus said again, moving past her to their sleeping room.

  The dog’s breath was strong and rank in her nostrils. ‘I’ll never betray your secrets – your secrets are mine,’ she whispered after him.

  Sejanus snatched at a cloak and began pulling on his boots. From the corner of his eye he saw the little oblong box that Apicata had left on the bed. It took his curiosity for only a second before he dismissed it.

  Apicata was standing where he’d left her when he came out again. ‘Congratulations, then,’ she whispered as he went to pass her.

  For a moment he felt the old emotion that always confused him. He had not felt it for some time – several years, in truth – but it was with him now, as it sometimes was when she became like this: pliant, vulnerable and so full of love for him. Was it love he felt in return, however small? He could never determine it. All he understood was that it was an emotion, but it was different from love as he felt it for others. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘You’ve taken another step closer to your great destiny,’ said Apicata. ‘The destiny that Fortuna chose when she gifted you Julia’s letter.’

  He grunted an acknowledgement. The dog panted at his side. ‘It was you who killed Castor, wasn’t it, husband?’ Her voice held an unmistakable note of doubt. ‘Who else could it be?’ he said over his shoulder as he left her, the dog at his heels.

  The temple sacristan was disturbed in his dreams by a scratching at the door. This was not the night when he habitually left the keys in the hands of others and sought out a tavern to sleep in. This was his free night, and his bed was just that – his own. He tried to dream on but the scratching continued, steady and persistent.

  ‘Go away,’ the old man muttered from his cot, not allowing himself to wake.

  ‘Sacristan!’ the scratcher whispered.

  It was her, although it should not have been. ‘It is not your time to use the temple,’ he answered. But already his dreams were melting away into the shadows.

  ‘Let me in,’ she whispered into the door’s crack. ‘I need it now.’

  Sleep left the sacristan and he sat up in his cot, feeling his old joints ache as he sought his woollen shoes. It was cold. The air around him wouldn’t warm until the morning. Somewhere in the distance he heard a sentry call the watch of Gallicinium, the second hour past midnight. This was very late, even for her.

  ‘Hurry,’ she whispered from the other side of the temple’s bolted front door.

  ‘Concordia hurries for no man or woman,’ was his reply as he pulled a cloak around his shoulders. He emerged from his little sleeping chamber to enter the hall of the ancient temple, and the rats fled from the goddess’s statue, where they’d been gorging on the fruit in her cornucopia. The sacristan hated that the late-night visitor would see this sacrilege – it was his job to keep the goddess free of vermin – but a man could only do so much. This was another reason why he made all nocturnal worshippers stick to prearranged bookings.

  ‘Hurry!’ she whispered again.

  A single oil lamp was still alight and he adjusted the wick so the flame grew brighter. Then he pulled back the door bolt. ‘I did not expect you tonight, Lady.’

  Livilla slipped inside and the sacristan saw that her hair was undressed, flowing loose to her shoulders. She had dressed with haste too, throwing a rough cloak over a stola that was meant for the bedroom, not the streets.

  ‘Are you unaccompanied, Lady?’ He didn’t like this.

  ‘A friend is delivering a message for me.’

  ‘But where … where are the gentleman’s slaves? The men who usually bring you here?’

  She held him with a piercing look. ‘I have come alone.’ She dug into the purse knotted at her wrist and pulled out some aureus coins. They shone in the dim light of the oil lamp as she counted them – six in all. ‘Is this enough?’

  The sacristan had to lean upon the doorjamb for a moment. ‘More than enough, Lady.’

  ‘Good. Leave me with Concordia.’ She held out her hand for the keys.

  Sejanus took them.

  Livilla cried out with the shock of seeing him appear behind her so suddenly. She hadn’t heard him approach. Sejanus poked his finger into the pouch inside his cloak and pulled out some more aureus coins – another six.

  ‘Take these,’ he said to the sacristan.

  The old man shot Livilla a look, fearful she’d reveal she’d just paid him. But Livilla held her tongue.

  The sacristan hurried down the temple steps, hoping he’d make the tavern without harm. The streets were full of thieves, and he’d be lucky if there was anything better than sacks to sleep on when he got to the tavern. But it didn’t matter. He had more gold in his possession than he’d ever known. He was only vaguely aware of the huge, lean Laconian dog that lurked in the shadows as he passed. The loyal dog Scylax placed his head upon his paws, having retrieved Sejanus for his mistress.

  Inside the temple Sejanus and Livilla stared at each other for a long moment before either dared to speak. Each tried to read the other’s thoughts, and each believed they had underestimated the other in ways that both excited them and made them wary. But each was burdened by a misconception.

  It was Sejanus who spoke first. ‘
Our day is here, then?’

  Livilla’s heartbeat was deafening in her ear, but she smiled – a slow, feline curl that played upon her lips and had everything of her grandmother Livia’s allure to it. ‘It is here – thanks to my king.’

  Sejanus was tripped up by her words. He believed it was Livilla who had found the means to bring them closer to their dream. Who else could have brought on Castor’s death so suddenly? ‘Thanks to my queen,’ he replied.

  Livilla felt a moment’s confusion too, but she quashed the doubt from her mind. Of course it was Sejanus who had killed Castor. No one else could have done it. No one else could have been as skilful and bold. She dropped the coarse woollen palla to her feet and let Sejanus run his hands along the thin fabric at her belly and then to her breasts. The night air was chill but she didn’t care. Her nipples were hard for him already – and Sejanus, she saw, was hard for her too.

  He spread her eagerly, his fingers at her cleft, and the pungent, fetid juice of her was slick inside her sex. The stink of her arousal filled the stale temple air. She moaned for him.

  ‘Castor is dead … Now I’m wholly, truly yours, my god.’

  His hands cupped her mons, his fingers pinching at the shining jewel that was her bead. He tossed her into the air like a cloth doll, catching her in his long, sinewy arms before he tore the stola from her breasts with his teeth. The fabric fell about Livilla in shreds as he heaved her rump onto Concordia’s altar, parting her legs once more and revealing her fully in the golden light of the oil lamp. His fingers, hands and mouth were at her sex and she arched her back, panting with pleasure, raising her lips to meet his flicking, darting tongue.

  Sejanus lapped at Livilla, drinking from the fountain of her womanhood, while Livilla’s thoughts were only of her son. The grieving boy Gemellus was being comforted by his wet nurse at Oxheads. He believed his father was dead, but soon Livilla would tell him the truth of the matter: his father was very much alive. His father was Sejanus. His father was the real heir to the throne of Rome.