I quickly turned back to the road, but as I did so the breast shrank and whithered in the corner of my gaze. I jerked my eye back and the breast was round again. I felt like being sick.
Martina cackled. ‘So where’d you throw the big bag of rags?’
‘Not far away,’ I said, refusing to look at her.
‘Not far enough.’ She thumped her knee with her fist to force life into it, and the whole limb jerked. She gave a few thumps to the other and received the same response. ‘Be a time yet before these can carry me anywhere,’ she said. ‘Hope your back’s still up to it, slave.’
‘I’ll follow Plancina’s orders only because of my domina,’ I said. ‘But I take no orders from you.’
‘There’s gratitude,’ said Martina. ‘You were begging me for help before.’
The large bundle of rags came into view on the roadside. I had hastily disposed of them there before I bartered for the cart from a passing peasant and returned to the camp. Martina whooped with delight.
‘What a day of indignities for her.’
I sprang from the seat and rolled the bundle over. Plancina was inside – still unconscious – but in my earlier haste I had discarded her on an ants’ nest. Her face and hair were crawling with a black mass of them.
I slapped and wiped them from her skin, the stink of their acid nearly choking me, while Martina broke into happy song on the cart, just like one of Piso’s trilling household maids.
‘Shut up and help me,’ I yelled at her.
‘Sorry. My legs won’t carry me.’ She spread them on the cart floor in demonstration, reclining while she sang.
Somewhere deep inside Plancina’s gut a rumble of bile from the herb she’d ingested shifted in a ripple that ended with a belch of hot air. It was putrid. I dropped her on the ground again, throwing my hands to my nose. My head ringing like a bell, I wasted no more time and picked her up bodily, throwing her onto the cart in the space between Martina’s spread legs.
Plancina mumbled insensibly and Martina stopped her little song to sit up on her elbows and gaze fondly at the bruised and filthy body of the wife of the Legate of Syria. I cracked the whip on the bullock again.
‘Now, sister,’ Martina said softly. ‘It is clear to me that with the passing of years your nerves are no longer what they were. But I suppose they were never very much. Yet, all that gratitude Livia gave you – all those gifts – you’d think you were special. But really, if our dear friend remembered how much she depended on me for her success, well, perhaps it would have been the real witch who married a senator, not the fake one.’
Plancina uttered a low moan and I stiffened in my seat. Martina spread her legs wider, hitching the borrowed gown up her thighs and cosseting Plancina’s head between them.
‘But don’t worry, sister,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel envy any more. I have a freedom you will never know and I take pleasures you could never dream of. And something tells me that the task you found me in Athens for will be our last together. So it would be sad to rob the occasion of enjoyment.’
She leant back on the cart floor, arching her spine luxuriously. ‘I brought many herbs with me. I will give you brews that will keep you in a dream. Then we’ll finish what must be done – and make it our greatest triumph yet.’
Keeping my eyes determinedly ahead although my head was reeling, I heard Plancina moan in confirmation as Martina stroked her ant-filled hair. ‘There, there. Sister’s here now. Everything’s safe.’
Tears slipped from Plancina’s closed eyes.
‘You must be famished,’ whispered Martina. ‘Why don’t you eat for a while?’ She resumed her happy song and spread her legs to the limit of her aged joints. Plancina lapped at the meal between them like a puppy.
I could stand it no more. ‘What’s this task?’ I demanded of them. ‘What’s this thing you must do? What’s happening?’
But neither heard me – or if they did, they wouldn’t stoop to answer the questions of a lowly slave.
Antonia wrote a letter to her son, Germanicus, expressing great sorrow and dismay. She took many hours to compose it, refusing to dictate it to a scribe, but painstakingly lettering it in her own hand. Three times she penned and then crossed out the word ‘transvestite’. Once she replaced it with ‘perversion’, before crossing that word out too. Then she tried the words ‘effeminate’ and ‘bringing shame upon the fathers’ and decided that their effect was suitable. Then she redoubled her commitment to somehow cure her troubled grandson and added her original words too, realising there was no point in trying to spare Germanicus the disgusting truth. ‘Perverted transvestite’ now stained the very first sentence.
When the papyrus was filled, she folded it and sealed it with wax. Then she handed it to Nymphomidia, who had no idea of its contents, only its addressee.
‘Shall I have this sent to Antioch, domina?’
‘No. You shall give it to my grandson Drusus. He will deliver it to his father himself.’
Nymphomidia nodded and bowed. Then, as she left, she tripped over a woman who was seated on the floor outside Antonia’s room. It was almost as if the woman intended for Nymphomidia not to see her. Everything the honey-skinned slave carried flew from her arms and Nymphomidia would have lost her temper if she hadn’t recognised the woman as Prefect Sejanus’s wife.
‘Forgive me, Lady, I didn’t see you sitting there.’
‘I’m so sorry – have I hurt you?’ Apicata asked.
It was so rare for a highborn lady to be worried for a slave’s welfare that Nymphomidia forgot her annoyance. ‘I’m all right, Lady.’
‘I was feeling a little faint,’ Apicata tried to explain. ‘I just couldn’t help it – I had to sit down …’
Nymphomidia felt sorry for her and her sightless eyes. ‘No harm done.’
But Apicata was still concerned for the items Nymphomidia had been carrying, and helped her pick them all up, despite her eyes.
Once Nymphomidia had managed to retrieve an apple that had rolled into an awkward spot under a chair, Apicata handed the folded papyrus back to the slave, the final item to be recovered. ‘You wouldn’t want to lose this letter,’ she said. ‘It feels important.’
Nymphomidia agreed and thanked the kind lady for her help.
Once the slave had gone, Apicata pondered whether to take the letter she had replaced with a substitute back to Sejanus. The simple plan had been achieved and Nymphomidia would now be delivering a very different letter to Drusus than the one Antonia had intended. What use did the original letter have? It was superfluous. Then Apicata decided not to be wasteful and tucked it carefully inside her stola. She was sure that Sejanus would find something of use in its contents, no matter how small.
With Claudius declared incompetent as a guardian, the children were bound for Syria. It was Antonia’s will. She declared they needed the guidance of their father – particularly thirteen-year-old Nero, who was now a year from commencing public office. Antonia was apprehensive of Agrippina’s influence upon them but knew that Germanicus’s hand would override his wife’s. Besides, given that Little Boots was already with his parents, it would be bad if he outshone his older brothers in international affairs.
Antonia escorted them to Syria herself; at fifty-five, this was her first voyage in decades. The sea was kind and the wind consistent, but she never travelled easily and spent the days in her cabin, requiring the children to visit her at hourly intervals.
As the only passengers, apart from their slaves, Nero, Drusus, Nilla and three-year-old Drusilla enjoyed life on the trireme at first. On the first morning they saw porpoises. On the second they saw a dead man adrift on a raft. On the third they saw nothing at all, a disappointment that continued for every day afterwards. Two and a half weeks into the voyage, they were quarrelsome, bored and disturbed to find bugs in their beds.
‘What’s in Grandmother’s letter?’
Drusus ignored Nilla. She asked this question of him daily.
‘Why do
you have to deliver it to Father?’
‘Because Grandmother said so,’ Drusilla answered for him, although she was just as intrigued.
‘Did she say that you had to hold on to it day and night?’ Nilla asked him.
Antonia had said exactly that, but Drusus didn’t confirm it.
‘What’s in it then? What does she say?’
Nero had a theory. ‘It says that Drusus is a prissy little maid and Father is to cut off his prick and sell him as a eunuch.’
The girls squealed but Drusus stayed cool. ‘You piece of turd. That’s not what it says.’ Yet he feared that was what it did say – or something like it. Drusus had been told he must present the letter in person, and Germanicus would know if he didn’t because Antonia would tell him to ask for it. This elaborate ritual would be completed only to humiliate him. The letter would be read out publicly in some way, and Drusus dreaded the likely words within it. They would all presume that the compounding shame would stop him from yielding to his inner wants again.
But they would presume in vain. Drusus now harbored a hatred of the family that gave him such shame. He planned one day to obey his desires in defiance.
Nilla and Drusilla went below to see their grandmother, leaving the brothers on deck. The slave-boy Burrus – he who told me, along with Drusus, of what happened on this voyage – was occupied in mending a pair of Nilla’s shoes.
Drusus twisted the feared letter in its pouch, yet Nero was too bored for the effort of taunting him with it and stretched out on the deck in the thin October sun.
‘Why don’t you just open it? Then we could both read it and decide what to do as a plan.’
‘There is nothing we could do,’ said Drusus sullenly.
‘You don’t know that. Maybe it could be reworded. Forged even. Grandmother would never know.’
‘She’s sealed it with wax. Father would know if it was broken.’
‘We could reseal it. She’s always asleep. We could re-melt the wax and stick her ring in it while it’s still on her finger.
Drusus saw a door to wield a secret weapon against his brother. ‘I’m a boy. I don’t have the courage for something like that. That’s a man’s task …’
He waited, but Nero had his eyes closed, enjoying the sun.
‘You’ll be a man before I will,’ Drusus continued carefully. ‘You could do it. You’re a man already. Everyone says.’
‘Do they?’ Nero was pleased.
‘Everyone …’
Nero considered this – then rejected the idea. ‘It would dishonour our grandmother to trick her like that. You have to face whatever it says.’
‘You’re right.’
Nero closed his eyes again, blind to his brother’s loathing, and Drusus’s gaze settled on Burrus. The slave-boy nodded in subservience and averted his eyes, but was well aware of the younger lord’s demons. Drusus was afflicted in his mind, his thoughts were unclean. He was dangerous. Nero was stronger and a bully, but was simple in his heart and didn’t have the talent to scheme. Burrus didn’t worry about Nero, but he had made a habit of keeping his distance from Drusus unless summoned.
He was too far away to hear Drusus whisper in Nero’s ear, ‘Burrus looks at you in a strange way.’
Nero opened his eyes a crack. ‘When?’
‘Just then. You didn’t see him.’
‘You’re stupid – he’s just a slave.’
‘I’ve seen him do it before.’
‘He’s just a slave.’ Nero turned onto his front, prone on the deck, and slid his limbs and belly up and down against the timber, feeling stiff with growing pains. ‘Burrus has only one look, just like all slaves,’ he said. He made an exaggerated expression of craven acceptance.
‘Now he stares at your arse,’ Drusus whispered.
Nero sat bolt upright and shot a shocked look at Burrus.
‘He hides it from you. He doesn’t want you to know. He’s ashamed.’
Nero said nothing for a moment, watching Burrus like an eagle. ‘He’s seen my arse a thousand times, seen it shitting even. Why look at it now?’
Hardly daring to breathe with the thrill of playing puppet-master, Drusus knew that silence was the best response he could give. Nero already feared the answer.
‘Why do you look at me, Burrus?’ Nero called out.
Burrus was confused. ‘I look at you when I am summoned, young domine.’
‘But you look at me when I have not summoned you.’
This was true, but not in the way Nero worried about. Burrus was unsure of the right reply. ‘How should I atone?’
Uneasy in himself, Nero wasn’t sure now. ‘Don’t do it again.’
‘No, young domine.’
Nero turned to reclaim his spot in the sun, but the second his back was to Burrus again, Drusus pointed a sharp finger at the slave, outraged. ‘He desires you!’
Flushing, Nero leapt up and seized Burrus by the tunica, pulling him to his feet. ‘You little cunt – you think I’d let you do that to me?’
‘Do what to you?’
Nero struck him. ‘You want me to demonstrate, you filthy dog?’
Burrus was three years younger than Nero but equal to his height and size. Only rank gave Nero the advantage. ‘I am sorry,’ Burrus tried to say. ‘I don’t know what angers you.’
Nero struck him again in the mouth, wanting blood, and was maddened not to draw any. Engrossed, Drusus put on a dramatic performance. ‘My brother is dishonoured!’ he shouted. ‘My brother’s dignity is insulted!’
‘Please, Master …’
Nero hit him over and over, willing blood to spurt but getting only spittle. Straining his arms, he hauled Burrus to the ship’s side and forced him to lean over the edge to the waves.
‘You dirty cunt, I’m going to wash you good for what you’ve done to me in your head,’ said Nero.
Nilla suddenly rushed from below. ‘Nero …’
Drusus was on her in a flash, holding her back.
She screamed at her brothers. ‘Let Burrus go! What has he done to you?’
Drusus went further still. ‘He told Nero he wanted to enter him! He said Nero wasn’t a man!’
Nero howled and punched and Burrus knew that his death was here in the young lord’s hands. He had not seen it before but had lived his slave’s life always expecting its arrival. Death gave him two choices: welcome the release or refuse to accept it. The second choice was unthinkable for a slave, yet Burrus chose the second.
A savage smash in the guts made Nero sprawl to the deck. Burrus leapt on top of him and drove his fists hard into Nero’s mouth. The young lord spat blood and tears, screaming for his brother’s help. Drusus dropped Nilla and flung himself at Burrus, twisting the slave’s head in a lock while Nero kneed his groin. But Burrus flipped the younger brother over and sprang to his feet again, kicking Drusus in the kidney, and then delivering a crueller blow to Nero in the balls.
The brothers screamed to the sailors, and those who had gathered to enjoy the show saw their error in not intervening before. But Burrus had refused death already and swung his legs over the ship’s side.
‘I’m accused of unmanly desires towards my young master,’ he shouted to them all, ‘but I’m innocent. Nero is tricked by his brother’s lies.’
‘They’re your lies, slave!’ cried Drusus in outrage.
Nilla saw the slave’s intent before the others did. ‘Burrus – please. I’ll protect you.’
Burrus’s heart melted with the tiny girl’s regard for him. But he couldn’t let himself think of her words as love. ‘It is my life’s purpose to protect you, Lady. Forgive me for failing. I promise I’ll return to you and complete my task.’
‘Stop him!’ bawled Nero. ‘He’s going to drown himself!’
The sailors rushed forward but Burrus let go of the rail, dropping clean to the sea.
Drusus vomited with the shock of it and the sailors shouted to the water, but no-one watched Nilla. In a single motion she ran across the
deck and leapt high into the clear air, before plopping into the waves like a pebble.
I pounded on the door with all the strength I had within myself. I didn’t care who heard or saw. Shocked palace servants ran to the top of the stairs to berate me. Others materialised from nearby rooms and begged me to stop. But I wouldn’t be told and I wouldn’t cease my din. No-one had the courage to kill me or drag me away and until someone did I intended to stay there. I was a fearsome sight in my rage.
Then the door to Plancina’s chamber finally opened.
The other slaves stared at the strange, dishevelled look of her and then vanished to wherever they had come from, frightened.
But I was unafraid. ‘Who is it, Plancina?’ I asked her. ‘Who is that you’re planning to kill?’
Her eyes were unfocused; she couldn’t even see me. She was drugged.
I shook her by the shoulders. ‘Plancina, you’re being tortured – you’re being blackmailed by someone. Let me help you, let me fight him for you. But tell me who is marked for death so I can save them first.’
Plancina released her grip on the door and let it slowly swing back to reveal who else was in the room with her. The sorceress Martina smiled at me, tending a pot of liquid that boiled on an open fire. ‘Come in and join us, slave,’ she purred.
I stepped past Plancina just as Martina produced the ingredients for her soup. She held them above the fire teasingly, letting me gaze at the shameful sight of them.
‘Remember these?’ she said.
They were Clemens’s severed hands and genitals.
She dropped them in as Plancina pressed a knife against my guts.
‘Who will die?’ I begged them.
‘You, slave.’
Then Plancina stabbed me.
Burrus was bewildered when Nilla flung herself into the water after him. And then, when the shock passed along with the cries from the receding ship, he was overwhelmed with such an intensity of feeling that he wept with the pain of it. But with the sea all around them, she didn’t realise. Nilla’s fury at his actions had blinded her to it anyway.
‘How dare you try to take your own life, Burrus – that’s a crime!’
That she could still know such volcanic anger in the circumstances suddenly made him laugh.
Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves Page 50