Sejanus (Marcus Corvinus Book 3)

by David Wishart

  'Look, Corvinus,' he said, 'I haven't got either the time or the inclination for badinage. Just make sure that you and that she-cat wife of yours stay out of my life while you're here, okay?' I grinned: the last time we'd seen Crispus Perilla had almost got him blackballed from his exclusive gentlemen-only club. Evidently he hadn't forgiven or forgotten. 'And you haven't answered my question. What brings you back to Rome?'

  I hesitated: information is Crispus's stock-in-trade, the more shop-soiled the better. His next question would be what was I doing up at the Treasury, and that was the one I really didn't want to answer: give Crispus the ball – any ball – and he'd run with it, straight to where he thought he could make most profit. And that could be dangerous.

  'I thought you'd know,' I said at last. 'An important guy like you. My father died. I'm here for the funeral.'

  'Oh.' He put on his pious expression, the one that made him look like a sick duck. 'Oh, yes, of course, I forgot. The ex-consul Messalinus. My condolences.'

  I could see the next question already forming in his eyes so I got in first.

  'Dad left some letters in his will to be delivered to the senate archives. Connected with the Pannonian revolt.'

  Without making it obvious I showed Crispus the sheaf of documents I was carrying in my mantle-fold. I wasn't lying. The bit about the will had been true enough; the Pannonian revolt, when Dad had been provincial governor, had been his finest hour, or maybe finest five minutes, and being Dad he didn't want posterity to overlook it.

  Crispus grunted, satisfied. He was already moving off. 'Archives is along the west corridor, third on your right,' he said. 'Sorry again about your father, Corvinus. I'll see you around.' He paused. 'Or perhaps not.'

  'Yeah. Right.'

  The shifty bugger had wilfully misdirected me before. This time I checked with a slave pushing a broom around, but west corridor third on the right it was. Archives was a huge room filled floor to ceiling with creaking bookshelves and smelling of musty paper and old glue, and Rusticus was already there waiting for me.

  From Livia's letter I'd been half-expecting a little mousy guy of about ninety, with inky fingers and dust in the folds of his mantle, but the senate's archivist suited his name: a big, beefy countryman in his late fifties, with a florid face and eyebrows like overblown caterpillars. We shook hands over the cramped reading desk.

  'My condolences on the death of your father,' he said. 'A fine man. He'll be sorely missed.'

  'Yeah. Yeah, he will.' Unlike Crispus, Rusticus sounded like he meant it. Maybe he did. I gave him the Pannonian letters, which he pounced on.

  'Excellent,' he said. 'They'll add greatly to our knowledge of the revolt.'

  'You're a historian?'

  'Not a true one. I have an interest in history, but I don't write. It's why I took this job. Not the most popular senatorial position, even although vital. I'll look after these, don't worry.' He called over one of the clerks and gave the letters to him. 'Now, Corvinus. Everything's ready for you, in accordance with the Augusta's instructions.'

  'Uh...just what were these, exactly?' I said cautiously. Livia was thorough, I'd give her that. I just hoped she hadn't been too thorough. Rusticus sounded the keen, talkative type, and if he enjoyed his work that much I might be able to cut a few corners.

  'That you be shown and given access to the senatorial records from the eighth year of Tiberius's reign up to the present, whenever that was. With no comment and no further guidance on my part.'

  Shit. There went that idea. 'Is that so?'

  'That is so. "Tell the young puppy to look for himself. It's all there."' He smiled. 'Her words, not mine.'

  'Uh huh.' Bugger the old bitch sideways, she really was determined to make this difficult, wasn't she? 'And you're going to do just exactly what she told you?'

  The smile faded. 'I am. Even although I could do more, I won't.'

  Well, that was frank enough. 'You mind telling me why?'

  'Not at all. I had and have a great deal of respect for Livia. She was a very clever woman, Corvinus, and I know her reasons for making the stipulation, whatever they were, would be good ones. Especially since she insisted I carry it out to the letter.' He looked me square in the eye. 'Don't mistake me, please. I can guess her intentions, and I'd help you gladly if I were free to do so. I've been waiting two years for this, ever since the emperor sent Agrippina and young Nero into exile and confined Drusus to the Palace.'

  Yeah. That little nugget of information I did have, courtesy of an army pal with a penchant for booze and current affairs who'd stayed with us en route for Asia. As soon as Livia was cold Tiberius had banished his dead stepson Germanicus's widow and her eldest son. Drusus, the second son, had disappeared from public life shortly afterwards, leaving only the sixteen-year-old Gaius. Agrippina and Nero had been exiled to separate islands off the Italian coast. Nero, so the official version had it, committed suicide a year later; believe that, as my tribune pal said over the third jug, if you like. Sure, from what I already knew of her Agrippina had deserved all she got; but the Wart's treatment of the old imperial family – or Sejanus's – still left a bad taste. Rusticus obviously agreed, and I'd bet that he was that rare thing now in Rome, a Julian sympathiser. It surprised me that Livia had trusted him enough to count on his help, especially given her own track record where the Julians were concerned; but then maybe an interest in history encourages a certain degree of Olympian objectivity.

  'Okay.' I shrugged. 'So give me whatever you can.'

  'Willingly.' Rusticus stood up. 'If you'll follow me I'll show you the relevant shelves and leave you to it.'

  There were four of them, long ones, crammed solid with papyrus rolls in their heavy protective cylinders. Good sweet Jupiter in a G-string! My jaw dropped and I could almost hear the old harpy chuckling all the way from the shades.

  'You're sure that's all there is, pal?' I said at last.

  The sarcasm went straight past Rusticus's head; or maybe he just wasn't rising to the bait.

  'Yes, that's all,' he said. 'Proceedings of the senate, Tiberius Eight to current. Ten years’ worth. Make all the notes you want, but don't take anything away and put things back as you found them, please, otherwise you'll cause no end of trouble and my clerks will have both our guts for label-ties.'

  At which point he shook hands, wished me luck and left. I felt like crying.

  Okay. So I had to start somewhere. Wishing I'd had the sense to sneak in a jug of Setinian, I pulled down the nearest roll. Half a dozen others came with it, plus several pounds of dust, a dead mouse and a colony of live spiders. I checked the labels: only four months' worth, September to December, six years back. Shit. This was going to be a long hard slog. A long, hard, dry slog.

  I took the rolls down and laid them in rows, earliest to latest. Then I started at the beginning and worked my way through, replacing them on the shelves as I went. Trials, Livia had said. There were plenty of these. The trouble was I had to skip through screeds of other stuff to get to them: debates on clearing waterways and repairing roads, appointments to committees, proposals, counter-proposals, counter-counter-proposals. Yard after yard of carefully-recorded hot air that no one, ever, would want to read again. Gods, how did anyone stand it without dropping dead of boredom ten times over? I felt sorry for the guy who'd taken the minutes, too. It must've been bad enough listening day in day out to this slop without having to write it down as well.

  By the time the slaves finally threw me out the lamps were lit. I was just about gibbering, but I'd filled a good few sheets of my own: paper sheets, not tablets, because I would've needed a mule to carry that weight of wood and wax home. As it was, they filled the good-sized bag which I filched from Rusticus's head clerk when his back was turned. The notes weren't all that detailed, but I had the essentials, and that was enough to get me started. Rusticus surely couldn't object if I came back to check finer points where necessary.

  Most of the names mentioned had been just that, names: big
ones, sure, because not everyone gets the privilege of a trial by the senate; but they didn't mean a lot at present outside the social register, and anyway I'd tried not to get sidetracked into thinking too much about what I was writing. Nevertheless by the time I'd shoved all the roll-cases back where they belonged, cursed Livia to ten different kinds of hell and staggered out in the direction of the nearest wineshop the hairs on the back of my neck were bristling fit to bust.

  Livia had been right: the records had made instructive reading. One word had kept reappearing again and again, so often that it had to be what the empress was pointing me towards.

  The word was 'treason'.

  4.

  I wasn't tired when I got back, at least not sleep-tired. I shoved my head round the bedroom door, but Perilla had given up on me hours ago and was flat out, her hair a tawny cloud across the pillow: she never got her maid to bind it up at night, which was okay by me. Bathyllus was still padding around bright eyed and bushy tailed, as I knew he would be: Bathyllus takes his responsibilities seriously, and he can always find a table to straighten or a spoon or two to buff up. I sent him for a jug of Setinian and lugged it and my bag of notes into the study. Then I got down to serious work.

  There were too many names. That was the problem. In the ten years I'd been away Rome had seen twenty-three trials before the senate, for everything from treason through adultery to a guy who'd pushed his wife out the window and claimed he'd been sleepwalking at the time. Yeah, well, as a defence I supposed it'd been worth a try, but he must've been desperate, and it didn't say much for his powers of imagination. Some of the names jumped off the page straight at me, as they'd done when I first read them; Suillius Rufus's for one, Perilla's ex who I'd run foul of in Antioch. They'd nailed Rufus seven years back for pocketing bribes as a city judge, and he'd been exiled at the Wart's insistence to a flyspeck off Sicily. Sometimes emperors do get things right, and I raised my cup to the old boil-encrusted bugger's sense of justice. Calpurnius Piso's brother Lucius was there, and Junius Silanus, whose brother Decimus had once thrown me out of his urban villa for accusing him of not screwing Augustus's granddaughter. Old friends all. Others I'd never met but were familiar from the social register: the young Quinctilius Varus's wife Claudia Pulchra (adultery); Gaius Silius and his wife Sosia Galla; Titius Sabinus...

  The rest were a blur. This needed method. Order. Good old Roman thoroughness. Setinian. I reached for the jug and filled my wine cup.

  Taking up my biggest wax tablet I drew my pen down the middle. Dates to the left, names and charges to the right. I started with the big one, the obvious one. Treason.

  When I counted down the list four cups later I had seven names in chronological order. Caesius Cordus, senatorial governor of Crete and Cyrene: treason and extortion. Decimus Silanus's brother Gaius, the Asian governor, ditto. According to the charge sheet he'd also been found guilty of ‘offences against the divinity of Augustus and the majesty of Tiberius’, which reading between the lines meant he'd let his hair down at the wrong party or opened his mouth too wide in the wrong person's hearing. Third, a guy I'd never heard of but who sounded a real pea-brain, Lucius Ennius, accused of melting down a statue of the Wart and using the bullion to make dinner plates. Big league stuff. Tiberius had quashed that one himself.

  The fourth name on the list was Gaius Silius. Silius's case had been more serious. Governor of Upper Germany ten years back, he'd been accused of connivance in the Gallic revolt and of profiteering after the event. He'd killed himself before the verdict was given, and his wife Sosia, who was also implicated, had been sent into exile. This one smelled like a month-old anchovy. I'd known Silius vaguely from his visits to Dad about the time he'd got his first Eagle, and although I'd only been a kid at the time frankly I couldn't believe the charge. Sure, he'd had an ego the size of the Capitol – he'd have to, to get where he was – but he hadn't been traitor material. He'd kept his troops loyal to the Wart when the Rhine frontier blew up after old Augustus died, and he was army to the bone. That didn't sit well with the connivance business: for a dyed-in-the-wool army man like Silius, consorting with rebels ranks with screwing goats and taking orders from civilians. The profiteering, sure: Silius was as human as the rest of us, and once the Gauls were beaten they were fair game. But not the treason. That stank.

  Fifth was Lucius Piso, 'my' Piso's elder brother and one of the defence lawyers at his trial. Charged with treasonable conversation about the Wart, possessing poison and wearing a sword to meetings of the senate. I discounted the last two items for what they were: malicious ballast, to give the case extra weight. No traitor is that crazy, and whatever else he might be the guy wasn't stupid. The first charge, though, made me think. The case had never come to trial; he'd died a natural death (precise nature unspecified) before the first hearing, which was, if you like, pat. Maybe too pat. Sure, Lucius was no youngster, and he could've eaten a bad oyster or caught something nasty in the woodshed, but I couldn't forget how his brother had gone four years previously. I wondered what the 'treasonable private conversation' was, although I suspected I knew already: 'my' Piso had certainly had secrets to spill that the Wart would give his best boil plaster to keep under wraps. I'd bet good money that Lucius had been another sucker who'd opened his mouth too wide in the wrong company.

  Sixth, Votienus Montanus, someone else I didn't know. Not a Roman, with a name like that. Maybe a Gaul, a Spaniard, or a Lusitanian; the records didn't show. In any case Montanus was accused of slandering Tiberius, and condemned to death. That made me pause, too: the Wart may have his faults but he isn't thin-skinned, and simple slander goes straight past him. There'd been instances in the past when he'd been bad-mouthed in private or public, but when a prosecutor tried to get up a case he'd quite rightly laughed it out of court. This time he hadn't laughed. Instead, he'd taken this guy's head. So what made Montanus special? So special that the Wart made sure he was chopped, or at least stood aside and let the senate chop him?

  Last and not least came Titius Sabinus, charged with straight treason. Reading between the lines, it was obvious that he'd been set up six ways from nothing by a gaggle of informers and his hide very carefully nailed to the senate house floor. We'd never met, but I knew of him. Although he came from a good family, like me he was a political nobody: no consulship, not even a city judgeship. No military command. A narrow-striper, not a senator. Hardly, in other words, the usual traitor material. He wasn't all that rich, either, by aristocratic standards, which since the successful prosecutor usually gets a large slice of the cake is a common reason for starting up a case. What did make him stand out was that he'd been a close friend of Germanicus's and – gossip said – an even closer one of Agrippina's after the Caesar's death. Scratch the obvious implication: Agrippina wasn't the type for affairs, casual or otherwise. Also, the records showed that when charges were brought the Wart had written personally to the senate demanding a conviction; which, for the Wart, was queer as a five-legged cat. Sabinus had been condemned nem. con. and strangled the same day.

  Interesting, right?

  I sat back and took a sip of my wine. At my elbow, the reading lamp guttered. It'd been full when I'd started, and I hadn't realised how long I'd been lying here. It must be almost dawn.

  So. Where to now? Sure, there were plenty of other names in my notes, and I wasn't fool enough to believe they weren't important, maybe even more important than the ones I already had. When you get right down to it treason's only a word; the charge itself doesn't matter if the result's the same. As I'd found years back with sweet little Julia, a prosecution for adultery can cover a multitude of sins. Then there were the off-the-wall cases. Like the sleepwalking murder, or the hack poet prosecuted for publishing a premature lament for Tiberius's son Drusus. Bad taste, sure, since Drusus had recovered; but hardly worth garrotting the poor bugger for. Or was it? I could be missing something there or in half a dozen other places. I probably was.

  I needed expert help with this. So who could I ask
?

  I took another mouthful of Setinian and considered the options. A broad-striper like Arruntius or Lamia would've been perfect, but senators were too high profile to be safe and I doubted anyway if when push came to shove that there was one of them I could trust. Dad might've helped this time; but Dad was dead. Of my other relatives Priscus would be about as much use as a eunuch in a brothel, and I didn't consider Cotta for one second. So who did I know who had both ears to the ground, more inside his skull than feathers, and a low enough profile not to run the risk of going down with me if the shit hit the shovel?

  Lippillus, that was who. Flavonius Lippillus.

  I'd met him over the Germanicus business, and we'd kept in touch off and on since. When I was back in Rome he and his stepmother had come round for dinner a few times. Forget every stepmother story you've ever heard. Marcina Paullina was a honey: a tall, willowy African with sleepy eyes, not five years older than he was. Yeah. Lippillus would do very well. In fact, he was perfect.

  Something was going squeak squeak in the lobby outside. Either we'd got a ghost in a new pair of sandals or...

  I got off the couch and opened the study door. Bathyllus was polishing the bronze statue in the alcove.

  'You not in bed yet, little guy?' I said.

  'No, sir.' He breathed gently on the dryad's toenails and gave them another rub.

  I felt guilty as hell. When I'd taken the jug into the study I should've told him I'd finished for the night. He probably wouldn't've taken any notice, but at least I'd've salved my conscience.

  'Then go now,' I said. 'Okay?'

  'Yes, sir. In a moment.' He moved on to the left ankle. Ah, well. I'd tried. I paused, my hand on the doorknob.

  'Hey, Bathyllus. You happen to know if Flavonius Lippillus is still in town?' One thing I learned early in life: assume your slaves know everything. They usually do, and it saves endless hassle.

  The little guy's rag didn't pause. 'Yes, sir,' he said. 'He's a district commander now, I believe. Of the Racetrack and Public Pond regions.'