Nest of Vipers

by Luke Devenish

  We wove through the tightly packed youths and women who ogled their idols with such unwholesome glee. I heard an offer of marriage made by a widow – and the acceptance of it given by a laughing gladiator, should he survive tomorrow’s butchery. Among the gladiators were groups of free men, ‘volunteers’ who had sold themselves into fighting at the games because of hard times. We saw one of them freeing his own household slaves in a theatrical act of manumission.

  ‘He’ll regret that if he wins,’ Lygdus proclaimed.

  I saw a familiar face weaving through the crowd in front of us and let out a cry of surprise. Lygdus saw who it was. ‘It’s the dominus …’

  Castor was approaching, flanked by the stoutest men of his retinue.

  ‘We’ll be caught!’ Lygdus wailed.

  ‘We’re doing nothing wrong,’ I hissed in his ear. ‘Half of this rabble are slaves just like us.’

  ‘Do you want him to see us?’ Lygdus asked, incredulous.

  In truth, I didn’t. ‘Duck down,’ I spat. We dropped like stones as Castor and his friends passed perilously close to where we hid. They were heading for the gladiators’ platforms. Crouching in the dust gave the crowd around us license to kick and stamp upon us. We didn’t dare cry out. After several minutes of this torment I struggled to my feet again, delivering blows to the worst of the jokers. My body was bruised and aching.

  ‘Can you see him?’ Lygdus croaked from the ground.

  I was staring Castor directly in the face.

  ‘Iphicles?’ said Castor in surprise.

  Guilt made me tremble like a kitten.

  ‘You’re a follower of the gladiators too, are you?’

  ‘Yes, domine,’ I stammered, ‘when permission is given for me to attend the games.’ I prayed to the Great Mother that he wouldn’t ask whose permission I had sought today, given I hadn’t sought it from anyone.

  ‘Who is attending my grandmother?’

  I felt Lygdus quaking at my feet. ‘The eunuch,’ I lied. ‘He is more than capable, domine. And he has come to love her too.’

  Lygdus buried his face into my sandals in terror that Castor would see him. But the crowd around us was so thick that Castor couldn’t see anything below my shoulders. Yet, he sensed that something was being hidden from him. I tried to summon a smile of reassuring innocence as a trickle of urine ran down my leg. A man from his retinue caught his attention.

  ‘They await you on the platform.’

  A path had been cleared through the throng for him.

  Castor shot me a warning look and then moved on. I gave a sigh of profound relief, and then realised that Lygdus was lapping the pooled urine from between my toes. ‘Stop it,’ I said, pulling my feet from his grip.

  ‘Is he gone?’ Lygdus simpered.

  ‘Yes – get up.’

  He heaved his bulk upright as Castor shouted words of enthusiasm to the same gladiator who had been freeing household slaves.

  ‘We’ve got to move further on,’ I said, propelling Lygdus in front of me. ‘We’ll go where Castor can’t see us but where we can see everyone.’

  We took a different route through the stinking mass of street scum, attempting to skirt Castor and his men. All around us the beggars, pickpockets, prostitutes and mercenaries yelled in united devotion to men who would be dead before tomorrow’s nightfall.

  ‘Don’t they see how doomed this all is?’ Lygdus shouted above the din. ‘Their love is so wasted.’

  ‘They live in hope,’ I replied. ‘Everyone believes their favourite will survive, beating all the others to fight another day.’

  ‘And when their favourites don’t? Aren’t they broken by it?’

  ‘No, they simply find a new favourite. No one takes it as seriously as you think, Lygdus.’

  Lygdus covered his ears to the hysteria, finding this hard to believe.

  We neared another platform, where a group of Greek fighters were making emotional farewells to their friends. ‘I hate all this killing!’ Lygdus screamed at those around us, without a breath of irony. I didn’t remind him that we were here so that we could obtain the very means to kill.

  I saw the platform I needed. A wretched group of men, sickly and weak, were slumped on ill-cushioned couches without a canopy to protect them from the sun. These were the condemned men, criminals from the equestrian class to be put to the slaughter in the opening minutes of the games. Badly armed and little trained, their purpose was to provide quick and easy deaths at the hands of the favourites in order to raise the crowd’s excitement for blood. If they’d been born of the lowest orders, they would have been fed to the beasts. But as knights it was considered fitting that they be given a chance to save themselves from execution by fighting for it. This was another of Rome’s shams. They were as doomed as the guiltiest slaves thrown to the jackals. The faces of these men were stark and haunted by their imminent deaths. The food sat untouched before them. Their mouths and bellies were empty with fear. There was only one bodyguard assigned to these accursed men and his attention was elsewhere.

  I pinched Lygdus. ‘This will do.’

  ‘Iphicles, don’t –’

  I stole forward so I could clamber onto the platform. The lone bodyguard saw me.

  ‘Get off!’ He drew his sword.

  I took a chance on my lie. ‘I’m the serving slave,’ I claimed.

  He creased his brow.

  ‘I have to pick up the fallen food. If I don’t, then how will it be burnt in offering to the gods?’

  The guard had never seen me before but I kept a look of such pathetic certainty on my face that he gave me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s a waste of time offering food from these bastards,’ he said. ‘Their throats are cut already.’

  One of the wretches broke into sobs.

  The guard held out his arm to hoist me up to his level. Lygdus stared up at me in amazement. I winked at him. Then I looked at the faces of the doomed men on the dining couches. Would any of them register that I wasn’t their serving slave at all? They seemed to look at me without seeing me. I couldn’t risk exposing my lie, however, so I fell to all fours and began crawling around the table and couches, ostensibly picking up scraps. There was nothing to be found – the food hadn’t been touched. After several minutes I saw that Lygdus was following my progress carefully. His face was at the platform’s side, not far from mine, where I kneeled behind the rear couch.

  ‘Tell me when the guard is distracted again,’ I hissed.

  Lygdus craned his neck to see where the guard was. ‘He’s distracted now. He’s jumped off the front of the platform.’

  I stood upright to see. The guard was in the midst of the crowd, looking out at the people and not back at his doomed charges. Suddenly I saw a face I knew – but it was not the one I was looking for. Golden-haired Flamma sat upright in a chair on a platform he shared with no one else. If a couch had been offered to him for the occasion, he had clearly spurned it, choosing a simple, rough-hewn chair and table at which to eat his meal. He glanced in my direction without registering that we had met each other under less exultant circumstances. No emotion showed in his face. The oldest fighter by far, he was also the calmest. Flamma acknowledged no one in the crowd, and few acknowledged him. He lacked celebrity. He was a nonentity in this throng. That he was also a violent brute, I had no doubt. He could likely dismember a man with his bare hands. Yet I still felt compassion for him, and I muttered a little prayer to Cybele that he might be permitted to win this last time.

  ‘Can you see her anywhere?’ Lygdus appealed to me from the ground. ‘Can you see the woman we need?’

  I dismissed Flamma from my thoughts and peered into the boiling sea of Romans. ‘Sorceress Martina,’ I whispered into the wind, ‘I know you’re out there somewhere – you must be. I need your magic – I need your poison. Please, just make yourself seen …’

  Lygdus lacked my patience. He threw a sticky plum pit at me, which bounced hard off my head. ‘I’ve had enough â€
“ do you hear me, Iphicles?’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I replied, glaring at him. ‘There’s only one path open to us now and this is it. Since Aemilia of the Aemilii’s demise, there’s been a distinct lack of reliable poisoners in Rome. So we’ve got no choice but to keep searching for our unreliable one: Martina.’

  He popped another plum between his lips.

  ‘Perhaps you’re not suited to this work, Lygdus,’ I said. ‘Best be on your way, then. See you at Oxheads.’

  I turned on my cushion to look down at the stage and Lygdus’s fury escalated. I heard him sucking his plum, planning to pelt me with a second pit. He swallowed the pulp and spat the missile into his hand.

  ‘Throw a pit at me again and you’ll regret it,’ I said, my eyes on the musicians far below.

  Lygdus stood up and let fly. I caught the pit in my fingers without even needing to see it. He was astounded. ‘How did you …?’

  I punched him hard in the groin and then remembered that, like me, he didn’t have all that much left to harm down there. He went to slap me but I snatched his hand and sank my teeth into it.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sit down and stop acting like a baby,’ I said.

  He plopped onto his cushion, nursing his hand. ‘We’ve been to every event at the Ludi. Days and days of it, and never any sign of this woman.’

  ‘Not quite every event,’ I said, staring at the stage again. ‘We haven’t seen the pantomimus yet. So why don’t you shut up – it’s about to begin.’

  ‘She won’t be here. She’s not even in Rome.’

  ‘I said shut up.’

  ‘These seats are terrible – we can barely see the stage.’

  ‘We’re here to see the audience, idiot.’

  ‘All I can see are the backs of heads.’

  ‘She’s a freedwoman. If she’s here, she’ll be sitting in the seats directly in front of us slaves.’

  ‘At least give me a better idea of what she looks like.’

  What could I tell him? I had no concept of what Martina’s appearance might be. In the many decades I had known her, she was either a ravishing beauty or a hideous crone. She was both, yet neither. She could change before my eyes. Sometimes the look of her shimmered like the haze on a distant road, making her features melt and fade. Sometimes, if I looked at her closely, she seemed to have no face at all. The only way to get a clear picture of Martina’s appearance was by squinting at her from the corner of my eye, and even then this was unreliable. She was a sorceress, as ageless as my domina and me. She was an unknowable creature of our peripheral vision.

  ‘Martina has a hump on her back.’ This deformity was the only thing I could guarantee in her.

  In truth I was beginning to despair. I feared I’d been wrong in imagining what would lure her back to Rome. In my heart I dreaded that with so much of the Imperial family’s blood on her hands, Martina’s desire for self-preservation might outweigh her love of entertainments.

  ‘We were lucky not to be killed at that terrible feast,’ Lygdus whined anew, ‘and then we had to endure the games themselves and all that noise and smell, and then you made me attend the chariot races.’

  ‘I didn’t make you attend anything.’ I pointed at the steps that would take him down and out of the Theatre of Pompey. ‘That’s the way out. Go.’

  But he stayed where he was, settling in for a session of complaints. ‘I should return to Castor,’ he said, ‘and beg him to let me wash his feet again. Week after week he’s tried to get me to tell him the secrets I’ve learned about you – and week after week I lie that I’ve discovered nothing.’

  I felt very uncomfortable. The fear of Castor exposing me was real. Lygdus held power over me and I had allowed this in the spirit of friendship. Still, I longed to corrupt him with crime so that he would become as guilty as I was and be as keen to hide it. But without Martina’s magic I was stymied.

  ‘My time spent with you has not served me well,’ said Lygdus, resorting to his most well-worn phrase.

  ‘It’s starting.’

  Far below us on the stage the musicians’ warm-up notes ceased, and the audience took their lead. A hush of expectation fell across the huge open-air space.

  ‘I’m bored already.’ Lygdus’s voice carried like a bird’s cry.

  I would have hit him but several freedwomen turned around to glare. I searched their faces. None were Martina. ‘It’s his first time at the musica muta,’ I whispered to them in apology. Looks of superiority crossed the freedwomen’s faces and they turned around again.

  On the distant stage a single flautist among the musicians began to play the notes of a haunting tune. Then the eight men of the chorus came on from their side entrance and the crowd made polite applause. The men wore half-masks, obscuring their eyes and heads but leaving their mouths exposed. When they were arranged in their places, one of the chorus men produced a scabellum – a wooden clapper board – and held it high in the air.

  The flautist stopped. The chorus spoke in one voice: ‘Presenting Echo and Narcissus!’

  The freedwomen swooned in front of us.

  ‘That old story?’ said Lygdus.

  The chorus man with the clapper board began a rhythmic beat, keeping time like a water clock, opening and closing the arms.

  The star pantomimus leaped onto the stage from the entrance at the opposite side and the crowd burst into cheers. His entire head was covered by a blank mask that removed all hint of his features. And yet it seemed that he owned the most desired face in the world, so expressive was his body in conveying exquisite beauty and grace. His limbs and torso suggested youth – perhaps he was no more than fifteen. His limbs were lean, yet muscular. His feet were brown and bare. His tunica was yellow, feather-light and brief, floating around his hips as he danced.

  The acknowledgement the pantomimus gave the crowd was heartfelt, given with the simplest gestures to make him seem humble and moved. There wasn’t a theatregoer in Rome who disliked the musica muta. Its players were adored celebrities. They expressed actions, feelings and passions more beautifully and intelligently than was possible with the spoken word. They never uttered a sound. Instead their audiences projected the most alluring words imaginable upon them, wholly within the mind. The great stars of Augustus’s day – Bathyllus, Pylades, Hylas – had all retired, but a new generation of mimes competed in their wake, fighting for the fame and wealth that came to the very best of them. Yet they were not without controversy. Women were feared susceptible to the sensual dances and mythological themes – not that it stopped them attending. Some mimes had been known to perform at private dinner parties and intimate engagements hosted by patrician wives. Some were even said to perform naked.

  As the pantomimus finished his gestures of thanks, the rest of the musicians joined the flautist in resuming the opening tune, filling the theatre with a lush, evocative score. The chorus began to recite the canticum – the text of the play. ‘When Narcissus, the son of Cephisus, reached his sixteenth year,’ they announced, ‘he seemed both man and boy.’

  The mime began to dance as the mythical youth.

  ‘Many boys and many girls fell deeply in love with him,’ said the chorus, ‘but his beautiful body held a pride so strong that none of his suitors dared touch him.’

  The commotion at the side of the auditorium caught Lygdus’s attention before it caught mine. He made a little cry.

  ‘See, you’re enjoying it now,’ I said, my eyes on the stage.

  Lygdus pointed. ‘Guards.’

  A dozen Praetorians were flooding the stage from the wings.

  ‘This isn’t in the play,’ I said.

  A hobnailed boot connected with the backside of the dancing pantomimus and sent him sprawling, mask first, on the hard marble floor. He grazed the skin from his knees. Several of the musicians cried out. The guards turned their attention to them and plucked the instruments from their hands.

  ‘Don’t break it!’ one of them c
ried. The guard who had the musician’s cithara gave a questioning look to a superior officer. I felt sick when I saw who it was.

  ‘Sejanus!’ Lygdus said. ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’

  Sejanus nodded and the guard with the cithara dropped the instrument to the ground with a clatter. The other guards did the same. By now the chorus had stopped the canticum and joined the bewildered musicians staring at the pile of instruments. All of them took off their masks except one – the man who held the clapper. The humiliated pantomimus remained where he had fallen, his own mask still in place. He didn’t move.

  Sejanus walked to the front of the stage and, ignoring the mime, took a long, solemn look at the faces of the bewildered audience. It took a moment for fear to strike some of them, but when it did they began to cover themselves under veils and shawls. Sejanus smiled. ‘Yes, hide yourselves if you like,’ he addressed them, ‘hide your shame.’

  There were howls from some of the senators’ seats.

  ‘The shame is yours! You have interrupted the musica muta, Prefect!’ one senator shouted. ‘What is the meaning of it?’

  ‘Explain yourself, man!’ demanded another.

  Sejanus cleared his throat, his smile vanishing. ‘Performances of the musica muta are now banned from the Ludi.’

  A terrible quiet fell upon everyone, on and off the stage.

  ‘Banned,’ Sejanus repeated.

  People began to look at each other in fright, but the senator who had first spoken stood up in his seat so the audience could see who he was. Lygdus and I craned our heads to look. ‘It’s Silius,’ I said. ‘Sosia’s husband. He’s a friend of Agrippina’s.’

  Dignified and impressive, Silius addressed Sejanus without deference. ‘A ban of this nature would surely come from a senatorial decree, Prefect?’ he called out. ‘Yet I can’t remember any such decree being passed. How could that be?’

  Sejanus kept his eyes upon Silius for what seemed like minutes before he deigned to respond. ‘Also forbidden is the attendance of senators at private homes that host the musica muta. Senators are similarly forbidden from visiting the homes of artists who make a living from these entertainments. Walking down the street with these artists, or engaging with them in any other way, is also forbidden.’