Nest of Vipers Read online

  Sometimes I heard him admonishing Nilla afterwards for the cruelty of her play – something that no other slave would dare do to his mistress without fear of the whip. But Nilla accepted his rebukes respectfully, and this spoke much to the great bond that existed between them. But it only ever altered her behaviour for a few days before she resumed again, and then Burrus would privately admonish her anew.

  Whatever had occurred after they had leaped together from the ship, they barely spoke of it. If Nilla had suffered agonies, she never told anyone, not even her mother. What was known and understood was that Nilla had survived the waves thanks to emulating Burrus’s strokes. When they had made it to land, they had lived as best they could on an unknown shore, catching crabs and oysters. Then they had been found, but not by men who meant them well. These matters were not discussed within the walls of Oxheads, and they were little mentioned outside them either, for all I knew. Nilla’s memorial urn had been removed from its position upon her father’s tomb inside the mausoleum of Augustus. Her reappearance in Rome had been officially ascribed to the benevolence of the gods. People accepted it. No one asked questions about the toeless mangon.

  But little Julilla found a hole in the story and, through this, realised she had a rod with which to beat her big sister. The novelty of the worm turning was so delicious that Drusilla switched sides, and together the younger girls waged a new battle against the elder.

  ‘Why were you found in a slave market, Nilla?’ Julilla asked when the three girls were taking their midday meal.

  Drusilla sat up to see what would happen. ‘Yes – when will you ever tell us, Nilla?’ she echoed. ‘What is your answer for being found like that?’

  Burrus tensed at the wall, but I only yawned. Lygdus was silent beside me. In the months since Castor’s murder he had become somewhat withdrawn but I knew this would pass. I had felt similarly a lifetime ago, when my own first master, Tiberius Nero, had also succumbed to Martina’s brews.

  ‘The correct moment to ask was when your sister was found,’ I offered to Julilla, ‘but time has moved on now and your sister doesn’t wish to be reminded of such unpleasantness.’

  Nilla calmly continued eating.

  Julilla pushed. ‘Was it because you were enslaved like Burrus? Were you two slaves together?’

  Burrus stepped forward purposefully from the wall. I coughed at him in warning, but it was Nilla who held his eye and he stood still.

  ‘Is what Julilla says right?’ Drusilla chimed in. ‘Had you become a slave, Nilla?’

  ‘How shameful!’ cried Julilla. ‘And Iphicles told me you were found in the nude.’

  I narrowed my eyes. I had told the child nothing of the kind. Nilla knew the truth – she saw me as her liberator – yet she felt it was time to confront the incongruities of her disappearance. She stood up and gazed with deceptive calm at her sisters.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said.

  Her sisters gasped, as did the various companion slaves at the wall. Burrus made no sound and I merely studied my fingernails.

  ‘But I was falsely enslaved,’ said Nilla. ‘It was wrong, you see, and that was why I was freed.’

  Julilla found this unsatisfactory. ‘Did you have an iron collar on?’

  Nilla flinched at the memory. ‘Against my will.’

  ‘And you were nude?’

  ‘I’d been forced to undress like all the others.’

  Julilla made a look to Drusilla that shone with scandal. ‘Then you’re a slave no better than Burrus or Iphicles. Or fat Lygdus! A slave!’

  Nilla clenched her teeth and Lygdus opened his eyes a crack, squatting next to me.

  ‘A filthy slave,’ cried Drusilla with glee. ‘She’s right, you know, Nilla. It’s a stink you can’t wash out. The stink of a slave!’

  Julilla giggled. ‘Filthy, filthy, filthy! I’m so ashamed to have you as my big sister!’

  Little Boots entered the children’s suite without the girls realising it and instantly settled on the correct course of action to take. As Julilla and Drusilla shrieked in helpless mirth, he walked swiftly to his youngest sibling and delivered a sharp slap to her cheek. It left Julilla stunned into silence for a moment, allowing him to deliver two more slaps, harder and louder, before her shrieks became those of pain and shock.

  Little Boots turned next to Drusilla. ‘You are very dear to me,’ he told her, ‘but you cannot insult our sister like this.’

  Drusilla covered her cheeks in fear.

  ‘Take your hands away,’ Little Boots ordered her calmly. ‘You must submit to this, Drusilla – you’ve brought it upon yourself.’

  Mortified, she slowly removed her hands and stared at him, trembling. I saw that Lygdus was holding his breath as he now watched.

  Little Boots delivered a blow so harsh that it threw Drusilla to the floor.

  ‘Stop sobbing,’ he told the two of them.

  Drusilla was about to begin, but she bit it back. Julilla ceased at once, too devastated to disobey. As Little Boots went to take his place in his dining seat, he walked past Lygdus and me where we were squatting near the wall. The tip of his hobnailed soldier’s boot struck Lygdus in the leg. It was so fast as to only be accidental, but Lygdus gave a cry of outrage before he could help himself.

  Little Boots stopped. ‘Are you all right, eunuch?’

  ‘Yes, domine,’ said Lygdus automatically, looking to the floor.

  Little Boots gracefully took his place among his sisters, helping himself to a serve of the midday meal I had leaped up to offer him. After a short pause he began a polite conversation. ‘It has been an important morning for our elder brothers,’ he told the girls. ‘Do you wish to know the news?’

  ‘I do,’ said Nilla, smiling at him as if none of the violence against Drusilla and Julilla had taken place.

  ‘I have come from the Senate. I was allowed to listen to the proceedings from an alcove behind a curtain.’

  I chortled to myself. Livia had made judicious use of such alcoves herself, once upon a time. Little Boots saw my reaction and the look he gave me had a twinkle to it.

  ‘Our grandfather Tiberius presented Nero and Drusus to all the senators. He called our brothers his “solace in this time of woes”. It was very impressive. Then he called upon the senators to be our brothers’ mother and father, and to nurture them as the great-grandsons of the Divine Augustus.’

  ‘But they already have a mother,’ Drusilla said in a small, broken voice.

  ‘It’s a symbol,’ said Little Boots. ‘What he was asking was that the Senate joins him in protecting them. He fears assassins.’

  His sisters were quiet.

  ‘I think it’s nonsense, of course,’ said Little Boots. ‘Who’d want to kill Nero and Drusus? Rome loves our brothers.’

  I felt uneasy, reminded once again that Little Boots was still only a boy, prophecies or not. He was treading a dangerous line – in part, I suspected, simply to show off. But I wasn’t sure at whom he was aiming it. When I lifted my eyes from the floor for a second, I realised he was staring directly at Lygdus.

  ‘Somebody killed Father,’ said Nilla, ‘and Father was loved by Rome too.’ Nilla had been missing at the time of their father’s death, and so her grief for Germanicus was still rawer than that of the other children.

  ‘That was Piso and Plancina,’ Little Boots reminded her.

  ‘I don’t see why they murdered Father,’ said Nilla. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Jealousy,’ said Little Boots. ‘Piso was jealous. I was there, remember? I saw it for myself in Athens and Antioch.’

  Nilla’s eyes held a look of great seriousness. She had given her father’s death a great deal of thought. ‘I believe that Piso’s jealousy is a lie put out by our grandfather to cover a truth that is too distressing for Rome.’

  Little Boots paled slightly. ‘And what is the truth then?’

  The younger girls had forgotten that he’d struck them now. They were held by this convers
ation.

  ‘Our father was killed because he was in line for the throne.’

  Little Boots wouldn’t let himself pull away from his sister’s eyes, although he felt an overwhelming urge to do so. ‘Who would have done such a thing?’

  ‘I thought Uncle Castor might have done it,’ said Nilla, ‘but that was before …’

  Little Boots said nothing for several moments, and neither did anyone else. Finally he spoke. ‘Nero and Drusus are in line for the throne now – that’s really what it was all about in the Senate today.’ He glanced across at me again.

  ‘I had already worked that out,’ Nilla said soberly, ‘and so had Iphicles, I’m sure.’

  Little Boots continued his meal in utter silence. Some of the other companion slaves, now very nervous, began making distracting music on the flutes they carried. Little Boots whistled along to the tunes before abruptly standing, his meal done.

  ‘I feel like going to the baths.’

  ‘Let me escort you, domine,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I would like that.’ But he moved to join me just as Lygdus was heaving his bulk upright. Little Boots’s heel landed squarely on Lygdus’s hand. He put his full weight upon it, unaware, he wanted us to believe, that he was standing on anything other than the floor. ‘I should like to visit the markets, too. Bring coins with us, Iphicles.’

  ‘Yes, domine,’ I said.

  He rocked back and forward on Lygdus’s hand. ‘And I think we shall visit a brothel. Perhaps that one you like so much in the Subura?’

  ‘You have not yet received your toga virilis,’ I reminded him. ‘You are too young to visit such places.’

  Lygdus gave a whine and Little Boots stopped, saying nothing. Then he deliberately pressed his boot heel into the eunuch’s hand as hard as he could. ‘I permit few people to tell me what I can and cannot do, Iphicles.’

  ‘As should be so,’ I murmured. ‘You have the blood of the Divine Augustus in your veins.’

  He lifted his foot from Lygdus’s hand and the eunuch gave a tiny sob of relief. But before he could shift it, Little Boots stamped on him savagely again. ‘I only allow my wisest friends to instruct me, because of the love they show.’

  I bit back my anger. ‘Your wisest friend’s love is unwavering, domine.’

  Little Boots smiled his cupid’s smile and released Lygdus’s hand. ‘I have never doubted it.’ He looked at Lygdus as if seeing him for the very first time. ‘Why don’t you accompany me to the baths instead, fat Lygdus? Iphicles can attend to the Augusta. It would be nice to have you with me at the baths. I feel as if we hardly know each other.’

  Whatever it was that Lygdus felt at that moment, he hid it well. I felt proud of him. ‘It will be an honour, domine,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, it will be,’ said Little Boots.

  Once he had left the room, I saw the confusion on the younger sisters’ faces.

  ‘What have you done to make him mad, fat Lygdus?’ Julilla asked.

  ‘It is a matter between Lygdus and your brother,’ I said hastily, answering for him. In truth I had no idea at all of what had prompted Little Boots’s treatment.

  Nilla gave me a penetrating look. ‘I think it is a matter between Lygdus and our brother and Iphicles,’ she said. ‘And perhaps one day we will learn exactly what it is all about?’

  Unnerved by the child, I was lost for a reply.

  The widow Livilla’s first public appearance following Castor’s death was an attempt to gauge Rome’s reaction to her loss. She decided to journey to the Baths of Agrippa to see what sort of reception she might receive. She anticipated a bleak silence – which would not have been at all dismaying – and perhaps some weeping from the bath slaves. Livilla had little expectation of much beyond that, but it would still have pleased her.

  She well remembered the public mourning that had dragged on for months and months for Germanicus, fanned by Agrippina’s wails. Her sister-in-law’s excessive grieving had made such a profound impact upon the city that a benchmark had been set for all widows. But Agrippina had been aided by a dead husband who had been adored by Rome, and Livilla knew that Castor had not been quite so revered. This had nothing to do with his character – he had been a kind-hearted and generous man – but he was impeded by his lack of high achievement. Everything Castor had done had been on a governmental level, away from the battlefield, with the sole aim of glorifying Tiberius. This meant he had never received credit where it was due to him. Livilla felt sad that his memory would soon dim, yet in truth her tears had long ceased flowing – if they had ever genuinely flowed at all. But Rome remained of the belief that the Lady Livilla was inconsolable.

  The red-painted litter with the leather roof and feather-filled bed was new, a purchase Castor had made shortly before his death. The bearers that carried it were new too – paid freedmen, not slaves – and were dressed in bright-red tunicae with thick leather pads on their shoulders where they supported the poles. It was difficult for Livilla to suppress her sense of self-importance at being borne in such a fine transport. Hers was surely the best in Rome. But the progress she and Tiberia, her daughter, made down the Via Sacra – the Sacred Way – towards the Forum was slow. Travel through the city’s heart was never rapid at the best of times, but this was somnambulistic.

  ‘Why are we taking so long?’ she asked no one in particular.

  Tiberia made to lift the curtain and see.

  ‘Don’t you dare look out,’ Livilla snapped at her. ‘People are not to glimpse our faces.’

  Tiberia tried to determine what she could through the fabric without raising it. ‘It’s impossible to see what’s delaying us, Mother.’

  Livilla called out to the lictor whose job it was to clear a path. ‘What’s going on out there? Why are we so slow today?’

  ‘It’s the mob, Lady,’ the lictor called back. ‘There’s more of ‘em here than usual.’

  ‘Is there a criminal being whipped?’

  ‘No, Lady. There’s another litter trying to head in our direction, but that’s all.’

  ‘Then why so slow – why so many people?’

  ‘I think they are here for you, Lady.’

  Livilla felt a sudden thrill. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It is your first appearance on the streets. People are here to honour you.’

  Livilla and Tiberia exchanged looks of amazement. Then Tiberia found herself crying. ‘It’s all because of Father. They’re here because of our love for him.’

  Livilla patted her daughter’s hand consolingly, but her heart was soaring.

  ‘Do the people wish to speak to me?’ she called out to the lictor. She heard him conversing with some of the mob. He came closer to where she and Tiberia reclined behind the litter curtain.

  ‘I think they would, Lady,’ he whispered into the fabric. ‘Some of them have even torn their clothes for you. Many of them are weeping.’

  Livilla felt so excited she was short of breath. ‘I will then,’ she managed to reply. ‘Pinch me,’ she hissed at Tiberia.

  ‘What, Mother?’

  ‘Pinch me – pull my hair or something.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  Livilla tried to slap her own face. ‘I need to make my eyes water.’

  Tiberia picked up her mother’s other hand and sank her teeth into it.

  ‘Ow!’ Her eyes moistened with the pain. ‘Good girl.’

  Tiberia looked at her oddly. ‘I don’t think you should leave the litter, Mother – you’re not recovered at all.’

  Livilla felt very much recovered but didn’t say so. ‘They want me to speak to them. I must do so for your father’s sake.’

  Tiberia began to softly cry again and Livilla again patted her hand. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  She drew her veil across her face so that only her eyes could be seen and then raised the litter curtain. Distressed and haggard faces stared back at her. Livilla felt as if her heart was beating i
n her throat. Her eyes stayed moist on their own account. She was humbled. The litter-bearers lowered her transport to the flagstones. The lictor had already placed a stool for her and she rested her slippered feet on it. Then she stood fully upright to give her a more appropriate height. She looked down at the plain and simple faces of the ordinary Romans – the plebeians, the freedmen and the slaves. Some of them she even recognised. They were Castor’s former clients, bereft without their patron. She stood on her toes and craned her neck to see beyond the first few rows. The mob was easily twenty deep, stretching up and down the Via Sacra. There were more people crowded into the entrances of the expensive shops that lined either side of the street. All in all, there were several hundred people waiting to hear her address them.

  Livilla’s tears flowed down her cheeks without any need for inducement – tears of pride. As a woman, she had never had reason or permission to speak in public in her life. And yet a large crowd had now assembled to hear her. She readied herself to speak.

  ‘Sister!’

  Livilla turned in shock. The occupants of the litter that had been approaching from the other direction had alighted and were now forcing a path through the crowd towards her. Three women.

  ‘Sister!’

  It was Agrippina with her friends, Sosia and Claudia.

  Heads began to turn from Livilla towards the one true widow of Rome. Livilla’s moment was being snatched from her.

  ‘My friends,’ Livilla began. ‘Dear friends of my poor husband …’

  Agrippina pressed her way forward, her face set in such an expression of determination that the rest of the words died on Livilla’s tongue. Then Livilla’s face flashed with a sudden and terrible fear, something that Agrippina didn’t register, nor her friends. But I certainly saw it, being the first slave among Agrippina’s trailing retinue. I read the stark terror in Livilla’s look and it was obvious to me that she thought Agrippina was about to accuse her.