Nest of Vipers

by Luke Devenish

  With his goblet in one hand and his coins in the other Tiberius made an endearing sight for those who saw him smiling down upon them from his throne. He reminded some wags in the crowd of the doddering old uncle from an Oscan farce, being carried off to his wedding to a blushing teenage bride. But in the pretty hills, when Tiberius halted his procession in order to climb down and walk, I was shocked to see that the joke was actually near the truth. Tiberius was sexually aroused. His purple robes couldn’t hide the erection he had achieved beneath their folds. Plenty among the crowd saw it too and hooted their approval. Quite without shame, Tiberius strode about like a cockerel, still tossing his coins, while Sejanus smiled indulgently from his horse.

  But something in the crowd made Tiberius stop abruptly. His good mood vanished, as did his erection. He rushed back to his throne.

  ‘Caesar?’ said Sejanus.

  Tiberius would not answer, or even look at him.

  ‘What is it, Caesar?’

  Tiberius signalled the men who carried his throne to make haste.

  From where I stood among the retinue of household slaves, I craned my neck to see what Tiberius might have been upset by in the crowd. But there was nothing strange. Just a sea of happy faces, some clutching flowers, others babies, and even, here and there, domestic pets. One woman held a puppy in her hands for Tiberius’s blessing. Another held a piglet. And one, right at the very back of the crowd, held up a honking goose. Frustrated, I decided that the Emperor was as unknowable as ever.

  When we reached our destination for the day, I realised why Tiberius had been engorged – at least until his mood had changed. It was from anticipation. Circe’s Enchantments, while running plenty of whores to keep the rabble happy, also provided rarer gems, girls and boys of breathtaking beauty, who were kept in reserve for the best clients. No client was better than Tiberius; for many years, he’d had his pick of them. And so, to provide the Emperor with some holiday amusement, Circe’s had set up temporary shop in a unique country villa known as the Cave. This house was built into a cliff-face, and its celebrated banquet room, a magnificent cavern, gave the villa its name.

  My reaction upon entering this establishment was not apprehension at finding myself in a vast hole in the ground; instead, I was mortified by Lena telling all and sundry that she had remembered to pack the girl who most enjoyed being pleasured by me. The other slaves found this riotous, and I blushed furiously.

  Tiberius made his way quickly through the Cave’s warren of rooms, and so determined was his progress that Sejanus lost sight of him. Looking faintly perturbed, the Praetorian Prefect went in pursuit of the Emperor, while we slaves were left to amuse ourselves as we liked. Lena made it clear that none of us were getting free rides. Behind patchwork curtains expectant whores waited, and Lena read out the day’s ‘specials’, which were pinned to each curtain.

  Just as I was steeling myself to duck off with my favourite, I heard the deep, guttural groan of the subterranean beast. I froze, looking about wildly. Lena was holding out her hand for payment for services soon-to-be rendered when the echoing tremor, far below in the ground, tossed me off balance. I fell face-first onto her little table by the door, and my fistful of coins flew high into the air, raining on our heads. Several coins rang dull and hollow as they hit, revealing that they’d been clipped. As if that wasn’t enough to leave Lena speechless for a moment, another tremor threw me to my feet again.

  ‘He’s having a fit!’ Lena screamed in the direction of the cubicles.

  ‘No!’ I started to explain. ‘It’s not that –’

  Lena tried to pull me out of the room. ‘No fits in here – it’ll kill us.’

  ‘I’m not fitting,’ I said, dragging myself from her grip. But I knew something was very wrong – or was about to be. I rode out the next tremor that boiled beneath the ground just as the brothel’s boy returned breathless and panting from the fountain. He had a full pail of water in his hand.

  ‘Throw that on Polyxena,’ Lena told him.

  The boy raised the wooden pail to toss the water over one of the patchwork curtains when a fourth tremor pitched me backwards and into his splash. I fell hard, striking my head on the floor.

  I must have lost consciousness because I found myself outside in the villa’s grounds. Lena was bending over me, clucking sympathetically. ‘Sorry, love,’ she said. ‘I can’t have that sort of thing inside – it brings too much trouble on us.’

  I tried to sit up but my head was throbbing violently. ‘You dragged me out?’ I asked, dazed and angry.

  ‘What if you’d died? You’re an Oxheads slave – people would start yelling murder.’

  ‘They would not! I’m nobody.’

  She just looked at me as though the blow to my head had reduced me to a state of childishness, and I saw that some of the brothel’s girls were crowded around me too. ‘I gave you my money,’ I said. ‘I want what I paid for.’

  ‘Some of those coins were hollow,’ said Lena.

  ‘Then I want what I paid for with the coins that weren’t. Help me up,’ I pleaded.

  Lena and the girls hauled me to my feet. ‘How do you feel, love?’

  I sensed the violent buckling of the earth again but managed to stay upright. ‘I feel … better,’ I lied, closing my eyes against the movement in an effort to keep from being ill. When I opened them again, I saw the pallor that had suddenly flooded Lena’s face. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t vomit on you.’

  ‘The ground –’ said Lena. Around her, the girls began to scream.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ I said.

  ‘The ground,’ said Lena again, pointing at the fissure that had opened in the earth and was now streaking towards the villa like a lightning bolt from Jove. ‘Look at the ground!’

  My domina endured it.

  The long, slow barge up the Tiber she endured, all the way unable to swat the flies and mosquitoes that bit at her face as she sat unattended in her throne, forgotten by the eunuch in his happiness at being free of me. She endured the maddening itch, unable to lift her hands to scratch or signal for her great-grandson Nero to notice her and respond.

  The indignity of her arrival at Fidenae she endured when the litter-bearers showed a lack of care in lifting her throne from the barge, letting her jerk and jolt and suffer her diadem falling across her eyes, all the while unable to steady herself, unable to right herself in any way.

  The sight of the amphitheatre she endured, wholly made of wood and left unpainted in the haste to have the thing upright in time for the games. She endured its raw, unfinished ugliness and the nasty stink of its sap. She endured the stale, unhealthy air – the amphitheatre stood in an ill-drained swamp. She endured her head being struck upon a crossbeam when her throne was carried up the narrow stairs. She endured the cries of dismay when people saw the blood the blow had drawn. She endured the eunuch’s clumsy hands as he smeared the blood from her brow with the hem of her very own stola.

  Her sodomite great-grandson she endured, while he looked genuinely surprised, then delighted and then moved by the cries of the sixty thousand spectators crammed into every tier of the amphitheatre, its structure groaning with the weight of them. She endured the shame of even having such a great-grandson, aware but quite unable to denounce him for his trysts with buggers. She endured the eunuch’s starry-eyed staring at Nero, as idolatrous as all the rest, as Nero slowly raised the handkerchief to begin the games.

  My domina was able to endure it all. She had already endured a lifetime’s worth of suffering, and this was nothing compared to what had come before. She endured it because she knew there was an end in sight. She could feel it. She could smell it in the air before any of the cheering sixty thousand, none of whom stayed still long enough to feel the ground move beneath them. She endured the laughter of the fools in the Imperial box as they pointed at the rippling earth in the centre of the arena and marvelled at what they thought was the latest stagecraft. She watched as thos
e same fools saw the tiers around them start to buckle and bend and then fall inwards, all the while thinking it was part of the entertainment.

  At last, when the crowd’s screams had turned from joy to terror, my domina felt the relief of needing to endure no longer. Her throne pitched forward and she fell with it, smiling, laughing, her eyes closed in pleasure as she plunged through this thing that was an amphitheatre no longer, but only a sea of splinters.

  Our fingers shredded raw, we slaves and whores worked side by side, weeping as we clawed at the rocks and bricks and building rubble, screaming out the names of those who were trapped somewhere within. As each one was found – sometimes alive, but more often not – the joy grew greater inside my heart, although I continued to weep as the others did. The further in we went, the worse the injuries of the victims became – severed limbs and shattered skulls – and the greater the number of dead among them.

  The Cave’s collapse had crushed the villa utterly, flattening every pretty room and trapping all those who cavorted inside. My premonition had saved me from the cataclysm; more than that, it had warned me that the thing I had wanted for so long had now been placed in my grasp. The Emperor was dead. The throne belonged to Little Boots.

  True to form, Tiberius had taken his lusts to the farthest corner of the cavern, sheltered from the eyes of all who had not been bought and paid for. He was ashamed of what he did and hid it from everyone except those whose task was to be subjected to him. None saw what he indulged in, none knew of his true obscenity, and now his filthy secrets were crushed along with his bones. It was fitting. But the excitement was too great in me and I found myself laughing at the thought of the broken corpse we’d soon be exposing. I hoped we’d find him taken at the moment of his greatest depravity. I tore at the debris, giggling with glee, smearing tears from my eyes, and the slaves and the whores looked at me like I had become unhinged. It seemed pointless to tell them otherwise.

  ‘Go and rest,’ said Lena. ‘Sit down – you’re in no state for this.’

  ‘I want to find the Emperor,’ I wailed.

  ‘He’ll be found whether you’re here or not. You’re too old for this. Go and sit.’

  Happy to spare my bleeding hands, I broke away from the throng of clawing survivors and emerged from the ruins into the sunshine again. I felt the warmth on my face – the warmth of a new day. The old day hadn’t actually ended yet, but it seemed done with to me. The despised first king was as flat as a papyrus sheet, and his prophesied heir would soon ascend in his place, with his loyal slave Iphicles offering steadying guidance.

  All the doubts and niggling fears I’d had – some planted by Lygdus and others wholly my own handiwork – seemed to vanish in that moment. I had no idea actually how I might ‘steady’ Little Boots, with his growing rebelliousness and unpredictable temper, yet it seemed a trifling concern, such was my relief. The pleasure of the sun on my skin and the earth under my bare toes filled me with more elation than I could remember in years. I picked up my heels and began to dance. What did it matter who saw me? I didn’t care. I would claim it was a grieving dance to anyone who challenged me. I kicked my feet high, I leaped on the spot. I bounced like a harpastum ball tossed by carefree youths. I began to sing. I had no words to offer, only tunes, a collection of snippets from theatre songs that I hummed and la-la-la-ed in my spiralling, giddy delight.

  The cry of many voices from the ruins of the Cave made me spin around. I heard the voice of Lena, bell-like above them all. ‘It’s the Prefect!’ she cried. I remembered Sejanus – they must have found his corpse. In my joy at the Emperor’s demise I had flushed Sejanus’s whole existence from my mind. All my covert assistance of his deluded plans, my endless labours and stealthy schemes to aid him in the work that was really my own, had been rendered unnecessary. I felt a moment’s sadness. Then I hurried back to the rubble so as not to miss the pleasure of seeing his shattered face.

  Lena saw me running towards her. ‘There’s nothing more to do, Iphicles.’

  ‘Terrible. Terrible,’ I said. ‘They’ve found Sejanus?’

  ‘Buried in the rubble. Curled on his hands and knees.’

  ‘Shameful.’ I peered through the rows of diggers, trying to catch a glimpse.

  ‘There’s nothing shameful about it – he’s a hero.’

  I still couldn’t see. ‘Curled on his hands and knees? He must have been cowering like a dog to have died in a pose like that.’

  ‘But he’s not dead.’

  I went white. The Fates chose that moment to part the throng of slaves in front of me. Sejanus had been found in the very position he had adopted just as the cavern roof collapsed. He had not been cowering – far from it. As the boulders had begun to fall, he had flung himself across the Emperor, protecting him. Tiberius came to consciousness before my eyes. He looked up to see Sejanus still above him. Both were unscathed.

  ‘You saved me …’ Tiberius whispered.

  Beside them were the ruins of a meal: a honey-glazed roast goose stuffed with dormice. The stones had flattened it, splitting the goose wide open. A dozen little dormice spewed from its behind.

  ‘My son,’ Tiberius breathed.

  The tears Sejanus wept were like those of a lover.

  The Fates were mocking me – and there was a crueller joke to come.

  The first to see who it was that was standing among them in shock and incomprehension at the magnitude of what the gods had caused to happen in Fidenae were the town’s slaves. Ever watchful, ever expectant, always anticipating blows and curses, the household slaves of Fidenae saw Tiberius first, as the shattered remains of his retinue carried him through town on the road back to Rome from the ruined Cave.

  Every door in the street had been flung open on its pivot, every atrium within had its artworks and treasures and ancestral masks unguarded, exposed. Every slave in Fidenae had rushed from these doors when the earthquake had happened, and they didn’t stop rushing as far along the shattered, twisted, buckled street towards the amphitheatre as they dared, before running back hopelessly, wailing, and then trying again. But they stopped in this tumult, one by one, and their eyes like slits in the dust opened fully in childlike amazement. They knew him from his face. They knew him from his coins. They knew the Emperor as they knew their own hands.

  Tiberius moved among them, and we moved with him too, along the palsied street, the looming catastrophe before us. More people saw him, and yet more still. Masters and mistresses, merchants and legionaries. Those who kissed the lips of their dead loved ones saw him, while they pulled and tore them lifeless from the ruins. Those who fought like wildcats and jackals saw him, brawling over the faces of their still, grey children in the rubble. Even those who had been crushed in the very first moments of the earthquake saw him, their eyes like glass where they lay, seeing nothing and yet seeing all. Those whose suffering was unendurable saw him, as their limbs were hacked free, sawn from their joints by people only wishing to save them. Those who could hear the tormented cries of wives and husbands and parents and lovers saw him without seeing anything more, their loved ones lost and unreachable in the amphitheatre’s ruin.

  So many people saw their Emperor: some living, some dead; some mutilated, some whole; some with minds and lives in pieces at their feet; some with courage and nobility that would make their forebears proud. When the amphitheatre of Fidenae – so hastily planned, so cheaply assembled, so inadequately, obscenely ill-designed – when this shoddy place of fun and spectacle and Roman entertainment had been filled beyond capacity by greedy ticket-sellers eager to exploit the stark lack of entertainments in Rome, when this ignoble, shameful, calamitous structure had been struck by the thrashing of the beast that had nearly cost us our own lives back in the Cave, the amphitheatre had fallen inwards on itself.

  Fifty thousand people had been killed.

  As we stood in the middle of the very worst catastrophe that anyone could remember, I saw with even greater shock w
hat further miracle the mocking Fates had shown me. I remembered the portent I had seen so long ago at the slave market: the thrashing of the beast; the broken, bronze hair; the slave in the hands of the carnifex. With her face triumphant, her valour glorious, Livia turned in freeing her great-grandson Nero from the morass. Her youth had returned – her eighty years were no more. She was exquisite, all-conquering. She was a goddess.

  My domina looked to her son Tiberius and smiled at him with an old affection – a mother’s love. She looked to Sejanus next, and the smile she gave him spoke of secret things, of a lover’s words.

  Then she looked to me.

  ‘Ah, Iphicles,’ Livia said. ‘My most loyal of slaves.’

  IS IT WRONG

  YOU ARE NOT

  QUEEN?

  The Kalends of October

  AD 26

  One week later: the Senate decrees that no

  one with capital of less than four hundred

  thousand sestertii may exhibit a gladiatorial

  show, and no amphitheatre may be

  constructed except on ground of proven

  solidity

  The temple attendants tried to assist my domina into the pit but she waved away their hands.

  ‘I can get in myself.’

  She stood at the edge and inhaled the rich smell of it. ‘So intoxicating,’ she murmured. ‘It’s a scent I can never forget, you know. How wonderful to be back.’

  The temple attendants bowed and Livia raised the hem of her stola and stepped lightly down the steps until she was fully inside. She seated herself upon the little ledge. Already the walls pressed their juice into her clothes. She dabbed at the growing stains with her fingertips, licking them. ‘So intoxicating,’ she repeated.

  The attendants appeared above with the heavy iron grate, ready to position it over the pit.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ said Livia.

  ‘Augusta?’

  ‘I don’t want it. It’s used to stop novitiates from running away – I am not a novitiate, I promise you. I was inducted into the Great Mother’s rites many, many years ago.’