Nest of Vipers Read online

  Still Sejanus said nothing, rereading the words.

  Her face was at his knees in his chair. Apicata pressed her cheeks against the flesh of them, holding herself there for a moment, until slowly she felt his legs begin to give. She pressed her face further, her lips and eyelashes brushing his thighs. Apicata began to pleasure him, the movements of her tongue and lips so practised now, so automatic, that she didn’t need to think or feel or plan. Her ears stayed fixed on his response – the gradual quickening of his pulse and breath, the low, guttural moans that slowly grew from his belly and up into his throat. She lived for his pleasure; she lived to love him.

  He gripped her by the hair and tugged her mouth away. She thought it was passion and tried to resist him, clinging with her lips, but he slapped at her head and threw her to the ground. Apicata lay there, dazed, as Sejanus stood up from his chair, twisting the papyrus into a stick.

  ‘Was it bad news, husband?’

  He threw the twisted letter into the air, and then turned and left her to her loom.

  Apicata knew she had covered every inch of the courtyard, crawling on her hands and knees along the paving tiles, feeling under the plants, inside the ivy, reaching into the branches of the low trees. She raked her fingers through the fishpond, dredging through the weed and mud, but still she couldn’t find it. So she began the process again.

  It was long after midnight when she finally located the letter, blown into a corner behind a leafless, dormant rose. She snagged her stola on the thorns, pricking her skin and drawing blood. To retrieve the twisted sheet of papyrus she had to thrust her bare hand into the heart of the plant. But just as she had the thing in her fingertips, a gust of wind took it from her grasp. Apicata forced her hand again and again into the midst of the thorns, but she couldn’t find the letter.

  It was lost.

  The nightmare that tormented him was always the same: the golden-haired man cursed him and beat him viciously with the rod and Thrasyllus could not escape, no matter where he crawled or what he said or what he tried to read in the bowels of the bird. And even when he saw precisely what lay ahead for the man – for this golden-haired king – still he was beaten until his every bone was smashed and he was nothing but pulp and mash upon the ground, like the guts of his pigeons. Then the nightmare would end as the golden-haired king left the place of imprisonment and Thrasyllus would wake up weeping and shivering and calling out for the Great Mother, who never came. But this time when the nightmare ended it was different. The Great Mother was with him, here in the snow.

  ‘Ssh,’ she soothed him.

  His fevered eyes drank in the sight of her. ‘Cybele?’

  ‘Ssh,’ she said. She laid her hand upon his brow and felt how cold he was – as chilled as stone. Her image began to melt and drip in his gaze.

  ‘Are you really Cybele?’

  ‘Ssh,’ she repeated.

  Thrasyllus saw in his mind another mother, one lost in the past – a mother who loved him and suckled him. ‘You killed her, Cybele.’ ‘No.’ ‘You killed my mother … hacked the flesh from her. It was you.’ ‘Ssh.’ Cybele’s touch seeped deep inside him, easing the pain,

  erasing the fear. ‘It was another … I never held the blade. Your mother was taken by another one – look inside my heart and see this is true.’

  Thrasyllus stared into the Great Mother’s eyes, and the rays of perception illuminated what he found there. The goddess spoke the truth. Cybele could not lie to him. His mother had been killed by a lowly slave’s hand.

  Thrasyllus felt his love for the goddess return.

  ‘You must answer me a question,’ Cybele said, stroking his cheek. ‘It is not a painful question – it is the same question the slave claims you have already answered for him. But I doubt the answer, you see – it seems so unlikely to me, so impossible.’

  Thrasyllus waited.

  ‘Who will be the second king?’

  Thrasyllus told her.

  Cybele was visibly shocked, thrown by the news that she, as a goddess, should surely already have known. Yet patently she did not.

  ‘So the child will rule,’ she muttered to herself. ‘The child really will rule.’ She was shaken. ‘What a thing to give to Rome.’ ‘They are not the same,’ said Thrasyllus. The goddess stopped.

  ‘The prophecies, they are not the same. “The child will rule” does not pertain to the second king.’

  The goddess stared at him. ‘Not the same?’

  Thrasyllus shook his head. ‘The reign of the second king will be brief.’

  ‘But he is not the child who will rule?’

  The haruspex shook his head again, saying nothing, assessing her. That she was divine, he did not doubt, but that she was not the Great Mother – at least not yet – he was now becoming certain. But what was she, then? Who was she?

  She was devastated. ‘This child who will rule is not one of the four kings?’

  ‘No, goddess.’

  ‘From whose womb is it born?’

  He told her.

  The anxiety left her face again and she placed her hands upon her belly in reverence. ‘Yet how could this be? How could this possibly be?’

  ‘Because the child will be queen, not king.’

  The goddess closed her eyes and a single tear rolled from her lids, slipping down her cheek.

  ‘Are you unhappy, goddess?’ Thrasyllus asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ she replied, her voice growing more distant. ‘I don’t think I have ever known such profound happiness in my life.’

  ‘Good,’ said Thrasyllus. ‘When you are ready, I will tell you more of your prophecies.’

  ‘There are more?’

  ‘Many more. They come in echoes of whispers.’

  ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘It is not time, goddess.’

  ‘Of course it is. Tell me now – I insist upon it.’

  ‘But you are sleeping.’

  She looked incredulous. ‘Are you blind? I’m wide awake!’

  I woke gasping from my dream, sweat coursing down my back. The linen was glued to me and my thin pallet was sodden with perspiration.

  ‘Domina.’

  Lying next to me, Lygdus awoke with a start. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘The domina –’ I stammered. My limbs wouldn’t work; my blood was sluggish in my veins. ‘Help me stand, Lygdus.’

  Confused, Lygdus heaved his bulk from the floor and pulled me upright. I tried to walk but my legs buckled beneath me.

  ‘The domina – take me to the domina.’

  Lygdus picked me up in his arms and carried me to Livia’s great bed in the centre of her sleeping room. ‘See?’ he whispered. ‘It was just a bad dream, Iphicles. The domina is safe.’

  Livia slept, seemingly unchanged in any way from when we had placed her upon her pillows at sunset. Then we saw the slow movement beneath her linens. I flung back the sheets just as the viper emerged from her sex.

  ‘It’s inside her!’ Lygdus screamed.

  The serpent saw us and tried to return to my domina’s warmth, but in my terror I was too quick for it. I seized it by the head, pulling it out and flinging it into the air. The viper fell to the floor and tried to slither into the shadows beneath the bed, but Lygdus had the presence of mind to snatch up a stool. He crashed it onto the serpent’s back, breaking its spine, but still the creature moved. Lygdus brought the stool down hard again, and then again and again, until the snake was bloody and crushed and still.

  We stared at it together, our heartbeats racing, panting like fearful dogs.

  ‘It was inside her,’ Lygdus said. ‘Inside her hole. Living inside her.’

  I could only nod, as sick to my stomach as he was.

  Agonalia

  January, AD 26

  One year later: Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus

  begins a suppression of rebellious

  Thracian mountain tribesmen

  The shock was so great that Apicata didn’t even fe
el it. She heard the terrible words and then she heard her daughter screaming out her name from somewhere deep within the house, but the chill wind blew everything away from where she stood dumbly facing her own front door. Along with the words went her response to what the man – this unknown Praetorian – had told her. She stood mute.

  ‘Lady?’ said the Praetorian at her door.

  She managed to find something to say to him. ‘It is so cold here.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then the Praetorian repeated exactly what he had said only a minute previously when she had returned from the baths. He repeated the words to the very letter – he had rehearsed them, clearly – but Apicata still felt nothing. They were too unreal, too horrific. In her mind’s eye she saw the same words being ripped away by the wind again, carried far beyond her comprehension.

  ‘Lady?’ said the Praetorian. ‘Do you understand what I am telling you, Lady?’

  ‘Yes … I’m not sure.’

  ‘For the reasons I have told you, I cannot admit you to your home. It is no longer your home. Those are Prefect Sejanus’s orders.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, now I see.’ But she could not see anything. Apicata sensed the Praetorian standing aside to let the last of her bewildered maids file into the house. The wind was arctic. She heard her daughter’s broken sobs.

  ‘I must go to her.’

  The Praetorian stopped her. ‘You said you understood me, Lady.’

  ‘Yes, I do, but –’

  ‘Your daughter is no longer your concern.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, now I see.’ But Apicata could not see anything.

  The young maid Calliope pretended to take an offering to the street Lares in order to slide past the Praetorian standing inside her master’s door. The soldier showed more interest in her budding breasts beneath her tunica than he did in her slim reason for leaving the house, and the girl was happy only that she’d managed to fool him. She had no intention of visiting the Lares’s shrine, although she did conceal an offering of a different kind in her earthenware bowl. When the front door slammed behind her, she looked up and down the narrow Palatine street, trying to guess which way she should head first. Then the decision was made for her when she glimpsed her mistress slumped in the doorway of a house across the road. Calliope ran across, praying she was not being observed by the Praetorian through the peephole.

  ‘Domina.’

  Apicata stirred from her state of bewilderment.

  ‘Domina – are you all right?’

  ‘Calliope?’

  ‘It is me, domina, yes,’ the maid said, crouching next to Apicata and clutching at her hands.

  ‘I am waiting here until my husband returns,’ said Apicata, trying to summon her dignity. ‘He’ll avenge this insult to me. He’ll have the man who refused me admittance to my home crucified.’

  Calliope slipped the little oblong box into her mistress’s hands.

  ‘What is this?’

  The young maid began to cry. ‘I found it under your bed months ago, domina, but it frightened me, so I kicked it under there again. I didn’t want to be the one who brought it to your notice – I thought you would accuse me of being the enemy who had placed it there. But when this terrible thing happened at the front door, I knew I must show you this evil, because there might be answers inside as to who caused this dreadfulness.’

  Apicata went very still.

  ‘Domina?’

  ‘Did you open it?’

  ‘I did,’ said Calliope.

  ‘Open it again.’

  Calliope hooked her fingernail under the slot in the box and the lid fell free. Her lip curling in disgust, she placed the wax doll’s torso and its severed head in Apicata’s cupped palms. Her mistress rolled them in her fingers, detecting the absence of eyes in the head. She brought the head to her nose and smelled it. She recoiled. Bewilderment left her face, replaced by a dull rage.

  ‘What else is in the box, Calliope?’ she asked slowly.

  ‘Just a tiny piece of rag.’

  ‘Is something written on it?’

  ‘There is a single word, but I cannot read it, domina.’

  ‘You know your letters. You’re not an ignorant girl. Read them out to me one by one and I will tell you what it spells.’

  Calliope struggled to determine what was there. ‘It starts with a V,’ she began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then an E, I think.’

  ‘Good.’

  Calliope squinted. ‘The next letter is I, then an O.’

  Apicata stopped breathing as realisation hit her. She recalled the warning words of Thrasyllus, overheard so long ago in Tiberius’s garden while she waited for her daughter’s wedding to begin.

  ‘Domina?’

  Apicata stood up.

  ‘There’s another V.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ said Apicata. She began staggering down the street, her hands stretched out in front of her for protection.

  ‘I haven’t read you all of the letters!’ Calliope called out.

  Apicata lost her footing on the cobblestones, crashing hard to the ground. But she righted herself at once and continued fumbling blindly forward.

  Calliope rushed up and snatched her arm. ‘Stop! Where are you going, domina?’

  ‘To defy the one who has done this to me.’

  ‘Then let me help you – let me guide you there.’

  ‘Go home. I am marked by the god of lies.’

  ‘I don’t care. I will not leave you.’

  Apicata clutched the girl to her, kissing her wet cheeks. ‘Then be my eyes and read me what is written on another thing. Can you do that for me?’

  ‘I will try, domina.’

  Apicata began pulling Calliope along with her.

  ‘What am I to read?’

  ‘We haven’t reached it yet.’

  ‘But what will it be?’

  Apicata’s heart was in her throat as she told her. ‘A curse tablet.’

  Claudia Pulchra stared from the edge of the blackness. It wasn’t large, this hole – no more than the span of a man’s arms, perhaps – and yet it yawned far wider than Agrippina’s beautiful friend and cousin had ever imagined in childhood’s nightmares. It was called the Tullianum – the Cistern. It was older than anyone knew and fouler than the worst pits of the Underworld. It haunted the dreams of all Romans, and when Claudia had been a little girl she had been threatened with this hole by her wet nurse – she’d been told she’d be tossed into it for her wickedness. Claudia had claimed not to believe in it – but she knew in her soul, as did everyone in Rome, that wickedness truly led to this place. The Tullianum was real, inescapable. The nightmare was true.

  The Tullianum had two levels. The first, where Claudia stood, was where wretches were chained before trial. The second, the subterranean level, was a cavern where water had once pooled after rain. There was one entrance only – the hole in the floor. What lived within it was unknown. To enter it as a prisoner was final.

  ‘What can you see?’ Sejanus asked her.

  Claudia could see nothing – nothing at all.

  ‘Lean forward. Look into the hole.’

  Claudia went to struggle but Macro had tied her hands too securely. His face splitting into a grin, he pulled hard on the rope from the other side of the chasm. Claudia staggered forward, her toes inches from the lip. The Tullianum yawned before her.

  ‘See anything now?’

  ‘Please –’

  ‘Please what?’

  ‘Please don’t do this!’

  ‘You’ve brought it on yourself,’ Sejanus said. ‘It needn’t have been this way.’

  ‘I am a highborn woman, and this … this –’

  ‘Prison?’ Sejanus suggested.

  ‘It is for men – it is for lowborn men.’

  ‘They threw King Jugurtha down there. And the Cataline conspirators. They were highborn.’

  ‘I am a woman,’ said Claudia.
‘This is wrong!’

  ‘What’s wrong is treason,’ said Sejanus. He looked to the grinning Macro and nodded. The Tribune tugged again and Claudia’s arms flew out before her.

  ‘I’m innocent.’

  ‘That is unproven.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing.’

  ‘Your accusers say you’ve used spells and poisons against the Emperor.’

  ‘I am not a witch – it’s insane.’

  ‘Times have changed,’ said Sejanus. ‘Witches are all around us now. Look how many lie hooked on the Gemonian Stairs.’

  Claudia began to sob. ‘Please spare me …’

  Sejanus took his place carefully behind her, the tips of his boots snug against her bare heels. He hooked his chin over her slender shoulder, nuzzling her beautiful hair as he placed his arms tight around her belly. She felt the heat of him in the small of her back, pressing against her. He stared into the blackness with her.

  ‘What’s inside it? Are there others down there? Or will it only be you when you hit the bottom?’

  In the heart of the gloom something slithered. Pinpricks of gold glittered in reflection, caught and held in the blackness.

  ‘Do you see them, Claudia?’ She couldn’t pull her eyes from what was down there. He kicked his boot against the heel of her left foot and she lost hold. He clutched her to him, not letting her fall. ‘What do they eat, do you think?’

  ‘Have mercy!’

  ‘Spare yourself by serving Rome.’

  ‘I can’t – it is a betrayal of her …’

  Sejanus looked to the Tribune and Macro gave a final, vicious pull to the rope as Sejanus released his hold. Claudia plunged forward, tumbling and twisting, her screams just a crack in her throat as her breath was ripped from her. Her arms snapped taut above her head as she reached the rope’s length, her shoulders pulled from their joints. She swung in the void like a bough.

  Macro secured the tether to a hook, spitting on his rope-burned hands.

  Pinpricks of gold glittered from all sides within the blackness. Broken, naked, starving men crawled on their bellies towards her.

  ‘What do they eat?’ Sejanus whispered from above. ‘What do they eat, do you think, pretty Claudia?’

  Calliope’s shrieks at the rats were like vicious little knives stabbing in her mistress’s ears, and for once Apicata was glad to be blind, if only to be spared the sight of the temple’s vermin.