Piso was emptying his bowels in virtual darkness, wondering just how he would get home to his wife again, when he realised he wasn’t alone.
‘Had your wine unwatered, did you, Piso?’
Piso’s heart sank. This was just what he needed – someone to prick at his dignity. He took refuge in umbrage, his best Senate weapon. ‘I did not. I had my wine thoroughly watered, as any decent Roman who upholds the Ways of the Fathers should do.’
The other man laughed. ‘Then you must have drunk a vat of it – you were snoring on your back for hours.’
‘You offend me, sir. It was the couch.’ Piso knew the voice from somewhere, but in the darkness he couldn’t place it. ‘Degenerate and stuffed with goose-down, it was.’ He fumbled for a latrine sponge to wipe himself but there weren’t any. ‘I only laid on it with sufferance, yet I felt like a Parthian queen. The Julian house is corrupted by luxury.’
This made his companion laugh more. ‘If you can’t be Roman enough to admit to your drunkenness, Piso, then don’t accuse others of debasing you.’
‘I was not drunk! And we will take this to a more seemly place, sir, so that I might slap some respect into you.’
The other man laid a reassuring hand on Piso’s toga. ‘I’m only joking. I, more than anyone, admire your devotion as a Stoic and the example you set of the worth of the Ways of the Fathers. You are a paragon.’
This went some way to easing the affront to Piso’s dignity.
‘And that is why I’m so glad you sought to relieve yourself in my latrine …’ said the man.
It was a measure of Piso’s stoicism that he didn’t empty his bowels again upon realising who his companion was. ‘I didn’t choose this toilet because it was yours, Caesar, I chose it because it was near.’ He added a qualifier, ‘But I think I took a wrong turn somewhere.’
Tiberius was all chumminess. ‘Let me show you a very discreet little exit I know about, and give you a Praetorian to guide you home.’
Piso let the First Citizen guide him back to the portico and together they started walking towards a torchlit corner. Piso became aware of two Praetorian Guards who simply materialised from the shadows, and he wondered where they had been hiding before.
‘So, Piso,’ said Tiberius, in a chatty mood now. ‘You’ve been made Legate of Syria. Lots of fun there. You’ll be heading off soon?’
‘In a month or so,’ said Piso with dignity. ‘Plancina has been unwell and I have been reluctant to leave her.’
‘Ah yes, your fine wife.’ Tiberius privately recalled the unlovely Plancina with distaste.
It was from her that I much later received the detailed account of this exchange, of course.
‘Your devotion to Plancina is as strong as your Stoicism,’ said Tiberius.
Piso felt no need to comment; he worshipped his wife. After a few more paces Tiberius added, ‘Germanicus will also be heading East in due course.’
Piso was brought up short. His prized Legacy of Syria had been hard-won and badly wanted. His family coffers had lately taken a savage blow from property speculation. He had a sudden fear that the Emperor’s adopted son was about to usurp him.
Tiberius read his mind. ‘Don’t worry, Syria is safely yours. Germanicus will be acting in a diplomatic role. There is trouble ahead for us in Armenia and Commagene.’
Piso felt relieved, but not entirely. His profits might be safe but he wouldn’t have minded some glory in the East either. The First Citizen seemed to sense this in him as well. ‘Germanicus is perhaps the brightest light in the Julian house,’ he began.
‘Next to Caesar himself,’ Piso added automatically – and then, with an afterthought, ‘And Castor, of course.’
‘Of course, of course, but Germanicus’s future will be very great,’ said Tiberius. ‘He has enormous vigour, people love him …’
Piso sensed there was a ‘but’ coming.
‘… but his talents are embryonic. He needs guidance from those of experience.’
‘Who could be more experienced than Caesar?’
‘True. But Caesar must stay in Rome, sadly.’
Piso hadn’t drunk so much that he couldn’t see where this was leading. He knew the end but he wasn’t sure that he liked it.
‘Germanicus will benefit from the wisdom of a man who has long served Rome,’ Tiberius offered. ‘A man who has learned many lessons in life’.
‘What are you asking of me, Caesar?’
‘Very little, as it happens.’ Tiberius put a friendly arm around Piso’s shoulder. They had reached his secret exit. ‘I would simply like you to watch over my son. He is extremely capable and I know he will succeed with the Parthians. But should you feel at any time that he may do well for being reminded of the Ways of the Fathers, then you will make your First Citizen grateful …’
Piso found himself in the fresh night air, with the sounds of the horse-drawn carts that were only allowed in the streets after sunset. Tiberius had gone, replaced by the promised Praetorian. Piso felt a little dizzy and, taking a seat in the gutter, he asked the Praetorian if he was dreaming.
The surly youth offered to pinch him.
The Kalends of July
AD 17
Three months later: Consular Senator
Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso prepares to
depart for Syria
The following words of graffiti appeared on walls throughout Rome in the summer:
Who is the real First Citizen of Rome? Is it the one who calls himself Emperor but whom the People call King? Or is it his mother, with her apron strings of iron? Or is it another, a real man, unlike these false two, who will give Rome back to her people and restore the Republic once more?
I didn’t know it then, but this treasonous campaign was conducted by agents belonging to one person only: Agrippina.
The haruspex’s opiate lulled him not into happy dreams but terrors – half-glimpsed, ill-defined, yet very real. This he saw: these terrors would be visited upon Rome.
And then there was a boy standing in front of his bed, silent and staring, with no terror of his own. If there were a message to be read in this, then Thrasyllus knew it must be sought at once. The boy was upset by the needed death, but the haruspex calmed him – it wasn’t really a bird, it was a letter, Thrasyllus told him.
The pigeon’s organs were inconclusive until the boy snatched up the heart – a shocking sacrilege in any other instance. But Thrasyllus’s opiate surged within him, opening the door to visions more profound, more intense than any he had ever had for Tiberius. ‘I see the very gods …’
‘Where?’ asked the staring boy without a whisper of surprise.
‘All around you, child. And within …’
The boy digested this startling information, and then asked other questions, all of which Thrasyllus answered without disguise. The visions dipped his tongue in candour; the careful words he used with his master were made entirely beyond him here.
In plain speech he told the boy exactly what he saw. Then the child vanished.
Nilla was pulled from her cot without being asked.
‘I’m asleep!’
‘You’re awake now. Don’t you want an adventure?’ Little Boots held her by the arm and stole out the door of the nursery while Nymphomidia snored. He cast a wary eye at Burrus – but the slave-boy was asleep too.
‘Where are we going?’ Nilla complained. ‘It’s cold.’
‘Stop being a toad – you’ll be glad I woke you up when I show it to you,’ whispered Little Boots.
‘What’s it?’
He didn’t know the right word for what he had already glimpsed in the dark. ‘Mysteries,’ he said evasively.
They stole along towards the Tiberian wing. But Nilla’s sudden fear made her shake off the dreams. ‘Grandfather’s rooms – we’re not allowed near here.’
But Little Boots pulled her forward. Frightened himself – but for different reasons – he had an answer for this. ‘In the daytime we’re not allowed. But this i
s Concubia. No-one said we can’t be here at night, did they?’
This was confusing logic for Nilla but it silenced her. They turned a corner and saw the Praetorian who stood at the end of the torchlit corridor. He guarded the great bronze door to the First Citizen’s suite and was already well aware of them.
Little Boots’s courage left him. ‘He wasn’t here when I came before.’
The guard was armed, and Nilla was breathless with terror. ‘Will he kill us?’
The foolishness of her question reminded her brother that he was the older of the two, and therefore the smartest. ‘Of course he won’t – he’d be crucified for doing that.’
‘Let’s go back to bed.’
‘No.’ He gripped her hand tighter and marched towards the Praetorian. Rules or not, they had every right to be here – they had the blood of the Divine.
‘Stop,’ said the Praetorian, not bothering to raise his voice.
‘I will not. Let us through the doors.’
‘I will not. What are you doing here, boy?’
‘Visiting our grandfather.’
‘Who would that be?’
Even Nilla found that question offensive. ‘The First Citizen,’ she informed him.
This gave the guard pause.
‘Don’t you know who we are?’ demanded Little Boots. ‘I am Lord Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, and this is Lady Agrippina the Younger.’
The children were tiny but the boy was arrogant, and the guard knew that any misplaced discipline on his part could well return on him badly.
‘Have you been summoned by the First Citizen?’ he asked them somewhat more politely.
‘Of course,’ Little Boots said. ‘Hours ago. But I was asked to fetch my sister and I have done so. When I left to find her you were not here and the door was unguarded. If you had been here I could have told you where I was going.’
The brat had caught him for breaking orders and relieving his bladder in the gardens. There was a long silence.
‘Please pass,’ he said at last. The bronze door was swung open and the children rushed inside. Once closed behind them again, Nilla was wild-eyed with excitement.
‘Why did Grandfather want you? Why does he want me?’
‘He doesn’t,’ said Little Boots, now heady with the success of his operation. ‘He doesn’t even know we’re here.’
This was too much for Nilla. ‘We’ll be whipped. Why are we breaking the rules?’
‘Stop blubbing, toad,’ said Little Boots smugly. ‘Don’t you want to hear the will of the gods?’
Burrus lay mute and still on his pallet, his eyes wide. His Lady had not returned and it was making him apprehensive. That she had been taken from her bed by Little Boots was something that the slave-boy could neither halt nor object to. But he didn’t like it all the same. No-one knew as well as an Oxheads slave that the halls held danger. But just as Burrus was hoping he had allowed them enough of a head start to let him trail them unawares, Nymphomidia threw a broad arm across his shoulders, trapping him.
Burrus dared not manoeuvre himself and risk waking her. If Nymphomidia knew they were gone, his Lady would be beaten.
The honey-skinned Nubian muttered passionate words in her sleep – sweet nothings to Burrus’s father. Nymphomidia had never told her son a single fact about his parentage – not in her waking hours. But when it was just the two of them in their corner on the floor at night, Nymphomidia spoke of much, lost in her dreams. And what she didn’t say, Burrus conjectured.
He knew she was his mother, of course; she was far too attentive for him not to have worked it out. But he maintained the façade of ignorance, just as she did. He also knew his father was a great man. This greatness was Burrus’s as a birthright; he believed he would some day be a hero. All that was needed was for his master to grant him freedom.
But Burrus was far too young to be manumitted by Germanicus – so many other slaves were better placed when the master’s favour came. But Burrus knew that one day he would be given to one of Germanicus’s children when they attained adulthood. And Burrus intended to be given to Nilla. This was why, he told himself, he must be the bravest slave his young Lady knew. When he found her in the dark, he would be that step closer to one day being freed by her.
Nymphomidia shifted in her sleep and released Burrus. In a breath he was up and alert to all movement around him. There was nothing. Beyond the covered windows, the night birds called. He could hear the distant clatter of the market vendors’ carts. But from within Oxheads’ walls there was only slumber.
Burrus pulled on his tunica and left his house shoes next to his pallet. They would make a noise – better to trust his bare soles. He crept to the bronze doors but left them locked, opening instead the tiny hatch within the right-hand door’s bottom panel. It was a door within the door, a means for items to be retrieved and ejected without disturbance. Burrus knew that Little Boots and Nilla had already crawled through it.
Once on the other side, Burrus scrutinised the corridor. There was no-one. Only one of the wall lamps remained alight, and there was too little illumination to tell if anything lurked in the shadows.
Yet his instincts told him that something did. ‘Lady?’ he whispered.
A door opened and closed somewhere further down the corridor. He waited for footsteps but there were none. Burrus quickened in the opposite direction, but realised he had no idea of where Little Boots and Nilla might be. As he ran he tried to think what Little Boots might have meant by the notion of an ‘adventure’ in the depths of night.
Something shot out from an alcove and caught his hand. The shock of it was so sudden that Burrus yelled. But a hand was slapped across his mouth before anyone heard it.
Thrasyllus slit the pigeon’s throat and drained its life-blood. The dish already held the souls of three other birds. He opened the gut and pulled out the organs with his fingers. They steamed on the tray.
The haruspex spread the mess out evenly so that everything could be clearly seen. The liver he lanced – then pressed the bile out with his thumb. The intestine he treated similarly, disgorging undigested seed and slop. The heart he lifted and placed aside. The stomach, when he handled it, made his own organ tighten again in a knot.
The signs were all the same.
The tiny children at his side stared fascinated at the gore. But this time Thrasyllus planned to steer skilfully between the rocks …
He had already told the boy far too much when Little Boots had found his way into Thrasyllus’s chamber an hour before. The child could become unhinged by it. Briefly, Thrasyllus had tried to comfort himself that the cause could never be traced. Who would believe the ranting of a boy? But the child’s unnatural presence of mind gave Thrasyllus a fear that discovery was inevitable. The child had the blood of the Divine in him – the visions had confirmed that. And the boy’s iron-hard surety of self – like that of the greatest of warriors – was miraculous in one so young, further proof that the child was marked. The boy would not become unhinged, Thrasyllus knew – he would talk. And in a city full of ambitious men he would be believed.
Thrasyllus’s only hope had been to find the boy and attempt to steer him. But just as the haruspex tormented himself with the impossibility of the search, Little Boots had reappeared with his tiny sister.
Now, peering at the fourth bird’s entrails, Thrasyllus planned how to rudder the boy on a course he would stick to. Completion would ensure Thrasyllus’s own survival. The visions had been deeply personal, as much as they also concerned Rome. His fate and boy’s were intrinsically linked.
From his childish perspective, Little Boots knew enough about adults to assume that when seeking dangerous answers he should shroud the questions behind others. ‘Some have said that the destinies of my brothers will be greater than our grandfather’s,’ he said. Little Boots hid that this had been his mother’s promise. ‘Is this treason or truth?’
The haruspex said nothing for the moment, reading the bird.
&n
bsp; The hand that clamped across his mouth was tiny; a girl’s.
‘Please attend me.’
She pulled Burrus into the shadow where she’d been hiding, but kept her hand on his lips. In the gloom, Burrus realised she was far smaller than him and no older. Her manner was highborn.
‘I need assistance. Will you help me?’ she asked.
Clamped, Burrus could only shake his head. Affronted, she took her hand away.
‘I asked you nicely – and you are a slave here, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Lady.’ Burrus whispered. His mind raced, trying to place who she was.
‘Then you will attend me. I’m in trouble.’
Burrus had no choice but to lie. ‘I’m completing a task for my mistress. I can’t be waylaid.’
In the dim lamplight he saw the glistening of tears in her eyes.
‘Go, then.’
Compassion made him stop. ‘Tell me your trouble, Lady. I can carry out two tasks.’
The tears fell down her cheeks. ‘She betrays him. She betrays my father.’
‘Who does?’
But she clamped her hands on his mouth again with a force that pulled him nearly on top of her. Burrus struggled, trying to right himself, but she shot an arm around his waist and squeezed him tightly into the dark. A woman suddenly loomed in the lamplight, barefoot like Burrus and shrouded in a half-veil. She was heavily perfumed. In one hand she held silken slippers and in the other a weighted little bag. She wore no jewelry and had nothing on her person that would risk making sound.
It was Livilla.
Burrus realised that the child who held him tightly in the shadows was her daughter, the young Lady Tiberia. Neither child breathed until Livilla passed them, unaware of their presence. Tiberia took her hand from Burrus’s mouth again.
‘I hate her,’ she said simply.
It was not Burrus’s place to ask why. ‘Does she know you are not in your bed?’ he ventured.
Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves Page 45