Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

At last, when Livia reached a climax that felt as if she’d split herself in two, she sank deep into the cushions and sleep, her bed now a paradise that she never wished to leave. Only then did Sejanus spill his seed, letting it rain upon my domina like a warm summer shower.

  Then he winked at Plancina where she stood at the door, her hands clawing at her hair, her mouth wide open like a wound, her tears streaming down her cheeks and throat. Then he dipped a thumb in his seed and licked it for her, smiling.

  It struck Piso that something was wrong. The maids had stopped singing.

  The abrupt, empty silence from inside the house was something he experienced only in his sleepless hours. From dawn to dusk, the servant girls had orders to sing their hearts out, sweet and pure, through all their household tasks. They were purchased at the auction block for their voices. Piso loved singing; he needed it. So why then, he wondered, for the first time in years of endless song, was he being disobeyed?

  He raised a staying hand to his scribe, but the Egyptian boy had already stopped writing. ‘I will return to the library, I think.’

  ‘Yes, domine.’ The boy was uneasy now too.

  Piso stood up from the fountain-side, stretched his limbs and cast four quick glances in a circle around him. He could see no-one through the columns of the peristyle. Making a show of bending to touch his toes, he snatched up the dagger he kept stashed in a crevice in the brickwork – one of many such weapons hidden here and there. Two decades in the Senate had taught him that a man could never take enough precautions. Though he feared it wouldn’t save him now.

  The house had been taken by assassins.

  The Egyptian boy saw his master find the weapon but said nothing.

  ‘Let me lean on you, Tuthmoses – my joints are stiff.’ They were not stiff at all but the boy took the weight of his master’s arm on his shoulders, and they stole along the garden path and up the wide steps to the dining room.

  The room was empty.

  The sounds of their careful footsteps were magnified as master and servant made deliberate progress through the austere rooms of the house. In his racing mind, Piso hoped he still had a chance of escape. He made a voluble show of ‘failing health’.

  ‘This may be my last summer, Tuthmoses,’ he declared weakly. ‘The years have rushed upon me. I’m old and spent. Still, what a rewarding life it’s been in service of Rome.’ His eyes darted into shadowed corners and down passages. When the assassins attacked he planned to surprise them all with a sudden show of strength. He’d take at least one of them down with him for certain, he thought; maybe two.

  Then they entered the atrium and saw. The maids had stopped singing because they were all standing together in mute shock.

  Plancina was sprawled on her back on the tiles. Her feet were black from the street, her sandals gone, her hair wild and tangled, this morning’s elaborate style destroyed. Her gown was streaked with blood – her own. She had gouged her face with her nails.

  To all appearances, I was kissing her passionately.

  Piso’s rage engulfed him. ‘Get off her!’

  He drove the dagger at my throat but I grabbed his wrist just as it pierced me. I twisted it from his grasp and flung the thing away with my other hand. Piso was even more shocked by how strong I was. My grip remained on Piso’s arm as a dribble of blood ran down my neck.

  ‘I found the Lady outside Oxheads in such a state as I have never seen,’ I told him. ‘She was ashen-faced, bleeding and unable to speak a word to me. I carried her home to you but she fell upon the floor in a stupor. She won’t breathe.’

  Piso was so shocked he couldn’t see past the outrage. ‘But you were kissing my wife – you’re a slave …’

  ‘I was forcing air into her lungs – it could save her.’

  Piso stared at his wife, unable to fathom that he could lose her just as his star was in its final ascendency. ‘Plancina, wake up! I have two weeks until my departure for Antioch!’

  I took as much air in my lungs as I could and placed my mouth upon Plancina’s, exhaling with such force that her upper body rose from the floor.

  ‘The indignity,’ Piso wailed. ‘You’re witnessed by the servants, Plancina. Cease this display!’

  I forced air into her again.

  ‘Please,’ I begged her. ‘Come back from the dead.’

  But Plancina stayed still.

  I propelled great gulps of air down her windpipe, again and again, until I turned and saw the dagger returned to my throat. Piso had retrieved it. I didn’t fight it this time but stood up dutifully from the limp body.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Piso’s grief came in tears, but his voice betrayed nothing. ‘You’re obscene to me. You’ve defiled my wife. You’ll be crucified for what you’ve done.’ He looked to the other slaves. ‘Seize him. He must be taken to the Via Turbino.’

  I was the largest slave among them and the others, mostly girls, had no idea how to respond. With humility I held out my hands. ‘Bind me first. It’ll make the task easier.’

  ‘Bring me chains then!’ Piso ordered them. The other slaves fled in all directions and Plancina remained grotesque upon the floor.

  Then she drew in a rattling breath.

  Piso flew to her. ‘Breathe, my love, breathe!’

  Plancina gasped with sudden consciousness, spluttering phlegm and snot.

  Piso clung to her. ‘You’re alive! What happened to you? What went wrong?’

  She stared into her husband’s eyes, barely seeing him, her mind frozen in the horror of her hour at Oxheads.

  ‘How did they know – ‘

  ‘Know what? Tell me, Plancina.’

  ‘Who told them? How did they know such things?’

  ‘What are you speaking of?’ Piso floundered. ‘What happened when you saw the Augusta?’

  Plancina burst into tears. ‘I had to wait … And then, when I did see her … Spiteful gods, how did they know …’

  A maid reappeared with chains she had found in the forge. Having soiled herself in the crisis, she was once again singing at the top of her voice. Piso looked at the maid – then looked at me.

  ‘Carry my wife to her bed chamber,’ he said to me. ‘We’ll not speak again of what has happened here today.’

  Plancina was settled upon her couch; her black feet washed and her scratches tended. Piso dismissed the singing slaves and shut the door behind them.

  But I was compelled to know what on earth had befallen her, and felt I had earned the right to eavesdrop from the other side. It didn’t matter to me that this wasn’t my own household.

  I could hear Piso crouched by his wife. ‘Please, my love, it is only us two here now. You keep Oxheads things from me, you always have, but now it must stop. Tell me what happened to you. I must know. You’ve given me too much of a fright.’

  If I had seen her face I would have guessed the truth from it at once. But to my frustration then, I couldn’t see her, and therefore I didn’t know what her expression held in the long silence.

  It was guilt, of course – Plancina’s guilt at her deeds from the past. And the task she’d been blackmailed to do in return for tongues being held was something she had gladly done, and done easily, so many times before. She blinked away the hot, stinging tears of her hell.

  ‘Take me with you to Antioch, Piso,’ she wept. ‘I’ll die if I’m left here. I’ll die.’

  And, not for the first time in their marriage, Piso felt sick with despair at her sheer unknowable mystery.

  Lupercalia

  February, AD 18

  Eight months later: Germanicus Julius

  Caesar organises Cappadocia

  and Commagene as

  Imperial provinces

  It is always a pleasure when far away from home to unexpectedly encounter old friends. But the pleasure I felt at spotting Piso and Plancina among the crowd at the Acropolis was shortlived.

  Piso was livid with disgust. ‘This is offensive to me. How dare a boy address this cr
owd?’ From his poor vantage point, not far from my own at the side of the Parthenon stairs, the audible snatches of Little Boots’s oration above the city’s din were an affront to his ears.

  ‘His parents should be censured,’ agreed Plancina, ‘and the boy beaten. What precociousness.’

  I saw her eyes raking the crowd. Somehow she missed me. I know now that this was because she was looking so desperately for someone else. But then I was only puzzled by it.

  ‘That child has been coached by his father,’ Piso decried, oblivious. ‘Look at Germanicus feigning surprise at the boy’s “great gift”.’

  ‘It’s all a shameful theatre,’ said Plancina, not watching.

  ‘And this rabble is lapping it up. They’ve been bought off by sentiment!’

  A slender woman in Grecian dress, her features hidden by a veil, broke through the crowd – and into Plancina’s eyeline. When the woman turned in profile Plancina saw what it was that marked her from the other slender women of Athens.

  She was hunchbacked.

  I watched in fascination as Plancina fought a sudden impulse to faint. ‘Let’s go closer,’ she managed to say.

  ‘My love, I have indulged you in sightseeing enough,’ Piso replied. ‘Surely you agree that Athens is foul-aired, effeminate and extortionate.’

  ‘But we came here to see the great temple.’

  Piso pointed. ‘And there it is. We now return to our ship. This entire detour has added unnecessary weeks to our journey.’

  Plancina welled with tears. ‘How was I to know that Germanicus would be here, Piso? I came to enter the great temple and pray to Minerva.’

  ‘Athena,’ corrected Piso. ‘Even the goddesses are un-Roman here.’

  But she released a wracking sob and Piso gave in.

  Little Boots’s closing words rang clear in the still air of the assembly as Piso and Plancina’s party forced their way towards the steps – with me following them unobserved.

  ‘Though only six years old, I say this to the city of Athena,’ shouted Little Boots, pausing long for breath and delivery as his father had shown him. ‘As son of the Julian house, grandson of First Citizen Tiberius and great-grandson of the Divine Augustus, I promise to protect this hallowed birthplace of Law, Art, Medicine, Architecture and …’ Little Boots dried as the fifth great humanity lay trapped in his memory.

  ‘Thought,’ whispered Germanicus.

  ‘… and Thought,’ cried Little Boots. He crooked his arm and held his hand aloft, summoning the city’s great goddess to witness him. ‘With my dying breath I will defend the greatness of Athens and honour the spiritual debt to this city that is held by Rome.’

  Piso’s cry of rage at this was drowned by the bellowing crowd of Athenians. Purple with fury and unnoticed by Germanicus’s party among so much adulation, Piso kicked those in front of him in his attempt to ascend. But Germanicus and his son turned and entered the great temple, unaware of the outrage.

  ‘Let me pass! This is an insult to Rome! Alert Germanicus to my presence!’

  Those suffering the kicks expressed offense of their own.

  ‘Leave, Roman – you can’t address this city!’

  ‘Leave this place! You’re jealous!’

  ‘You’d rather some brat harangued you?’ Piso screamed back. ‘I am Consular Senator Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Legate of Syria.’

  ‘Aren’t you lost, then?’ The Greeks laughed at him.

  ‘You will let me ascend so that I can right an offence made to Rome,’ Piso demanded.

  ‘Piss off! We’ve never heard of you!’

  An egg struck Piso hard on the head and another hit Plancina in the eye.

  ‘I’m blinded!’ she shrieked, but her other eye combed desperately for the hunchback. The woman had vanished.

  As one, Piso’s attendant slaves drew knives and the crowd’s derision became panic. Men flew without a drop of blood being shed and Piso charged up the steps, Plancina stumbling behind him. At the top he turned to consider addressing them, but there was so much chaos that his words would have been wasted. He threw himself through the great temple’s doors and fell panting in the shadows.

  But Plancina didn’t follow. The hunchback was advancing slowly up the steps towards her.

  I scooped Plancina to her feet just as her bladder popped. I dragged her through the door squirting piss. Plancina threw her face back to look again just as the scene outside was shut behind us.

  The hunchback looked with amusement at the puddle of urine.

  She was not Martina. She was hideous.

  On the other side of the door, Plancina was in such a fragile state of mind that she barely had a comment to make about me manhandling her.

  ‘Iphicles … it’s you …’

  ‘I’m here with Lord Germanicus and his family,’ I told her. ‘I’m their slave now, remember.’

  ‘Yes, yes …’ said Plancina.

  ‘Is something wrong with you?’ I asked. It was very clear to me that something was.

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, lying. She quickly left me and vanished into the temple’s interior.

  Piso, too, was at a loss for words, his disgust so loud inside him that he couldn’t even verbalise it. He was oblivious to his wife. Deep in the cavernous hall beneath the towering golden Athena, Germanicus and Little Boots paused in their libation, their faces mirrored in the water pool. They showed only brief confusion before returning to the pouring of oil.

  Piso was insulted anew. ‘How dare you ignore me!’

  Sacristans flew at him from the shadows. ‘Lower your voice in the presence of Athena,’ hissed the first man who reached him.

  ‘I will not,’ Piso raised his voice further. ‘Germanicus! I demand a word with you, sir.’

  It was Germanicus’s turn to be angry, but he kept to the libation, having no conception of how or why Piso was in Athens making this scene. The priestesses didn’t break a note of their low chant and the piping oboists increased their intensity. Germanicus turned Little Boots’s head from the distraction, and father and son joined the trance. But a hooded woman fell soundlessly away from the devotees, pulling a shroud tight across her shoulders and revealing her disfigurement.

  She was also hunchbacked.

  Seeing this from the shadows, the gorge sprang to Plancina’s throat. There was no mistaking her this time.

  Heavily pregnant, Agrippina appeared at Piso’s side from an anteroom. ‘Senator – has something distressed you?’ she whispered.

  Piso was thrown, having had no idea she was here too. ‘I am – I am …’ He lost his thoughts, gawping at her huge belly. ‘You are not in confinement?’

  ‘I was,’ Agrippina said. ‘But today was too great a day. Did you see Germanicus’s son in his first public oration?’

  The gall of this robbed Piso of his words again and Agrippina seized the advantage, taking him by the arm and leading him away. I was in the dilemma of whom to follow – Plancina or my mistress? I chose Agrippina.

  ‘The Greeks are far more devout than we patrician Romans,’ she whispered to Piso as she walked him. ‘They call off whole ceremonies for interruptions we wouldn’t even blink at.’

  Piso cast around for sight of his wife but couldn’t see her now. He withdrew his arm from Agrippina’s hold. ‘The sensibilities of these dregs don’t mean two figs to me, Lady. Rome has been offended today – insulted by your child.’

  Agrippina’s eyes narrowed, but her voice remained sweet. ‘I am shocked. How could my child have offended Rome?’

  ‘By exalting these Greek pigs. Does your husband seriously credit this stinking race with having one drop of blood from the conquerors of Troy? These Greeks are slaves and the sons of slaves. But the fathers of the humanities are a lineage long absorbed into Rome’s. Your boy was wrong to ascribe the legacy of greatness to this rabble. That legacy is Rome’s now – Rome’s alone.’

  Agrippina stamped on his toe.

  Piso yelped in pain before she slapped a palm to his
lips. She saw my own astonishment and shot me an apologetic whisper. ‘The senator has stubbed his foot,’ she said. ‘I’ll take him to the anteroom. Continue your worship, Iphicles.’

  Piso found himself bundled from the main temple hall with surprising force. I stayed just close enough to be of assistance if required, without being visible.

  ‘Stop disgracing my husband in this manner,’ Agrippina said viciously when she had propelled him into the little room. Piso tried to leave but she blocked the closed door. Triply shocked, he realised he would have to wrestle her.

  ‘You forget yourself, Lady – ‘

  ‘I forget nothing. And I won’t forget the insult you have just given my family.’

  ‘But the insult to Rome!’

  ‘Do you know anything of diplomacy, Piso? Is this the reason your career has been at such a standstill for years – your ignorance of these matters? Of course the Greeks’ legacy is Rome’s alone. Of course they are inferior to us in all ways. But to say so to their faces is madness. My husband will be loved by these Greeks, and loved by all the peoples of this world – and you will not impede.’

  Rage coursing through him, Piso slapped her so hard his fingers stung – the first time he had struck a freeborn woman in his life. I heard the blow from outside the door but froze, unsure whether to intervene. My eye still searched the great hall for Plancina.

  Inside the anteroom, Agrippina was immovable, the raw red print of Piso’s hand on her cheek. ‘You hit a pregnant woman,’ she said slowly. ‘Rome must be grateful that a man of such honour would defend her.’

  ‘Your foul, naked ambition should be struck from your hide,’ Piso hissed. ‘If I had a rod I’d use it on you too, pregnant or not.’

  She spat in his face.

  ‘What dignity,’ Piso laughed. ‘Tell me, would you be queen, Agrippina?’

  In her anger Agrippina went a step too far. ‘My husband will be First Citizen,’ she said, ‘and you will be ashes on a pyre.’

  Piso reeled at how much she had shown of herself. ‘Your smug surety is as shocking as it is comical. Have you told Tiberius of your plans? My guess would be no, in light of my own instructions …’

  He waited. She would have to beg him for the rest and he relished it.