“Let’s hope the redemption lasts,” said Livia. “Caesar is a capricious lover, sister. He plays games but bores of them quickly.”
“Then you must find a way to make the game last,” Claudia replied, “or to at least come out the winner.”
A chorus of shrill barks suddenly echoed off the lavishly frescoed walls, and both sisters jumped. Perseus the little white dog was yipping and squirming wildly in the arms of Caesar’s sister Octavia while the Vestal Pomponia pulled her head back from it.
Octavia called out to her new sister-in-law. “Livia, come meet Perseus,” she said. “You can say hello and goodbye at once.”
“Why is that, dear sister?” Livia asked sweetly as she joined them.
“Because Perseus is moving out of my brother’s house on the same day that you are moving in,” she said. “I am sending him to live at the House of the Vestals. And look, Lady Pomponia, he is already dressed in white to serve the goddess.” Octavia laughed at Pomponia’s curled lip.
“He will lift the spirits of the high priestess,” Pomponia said, “and for that I give thanks. But as you know, Octavia, a Vestal has her hair cropped when she enters service. We shall see how Perseus likes temple life when he is pink to the bone.”
Tuccia took the little dog from Octavia’s arms. “Oh, Pomponia,” she said, “we all know your heart is as soft as a lamb. You will be cutting up Perseus’s food for him by the Lupercalia.”
Livia laughed along, all the while assessing the company she now found herself in.
Her sister-in-law, Octavia, was the quintessential Roman matron: well mannered, pious, and devoted to her husband, Marc Antony. In fact, she was already pregnant with their first child together. No surprises there. She knew what her powerful brother needed her to do, and she was
doing it.
The Vestal Tuccia was also what one might expect. She looked to be the same age as Livia and was by far the prettiest of the priestesses, although she appeared guileless and oblivious to anything other than the ugly little dog that flopped around in her arms and talk of the chariot races.
The Vestal Pomponia was more interesting.
When Livia had left Rome for Greece some four years ago, the Lady Pomponia had been a subordinate Vestal, but it was clear that the priestess’s status had grown while she was away. From Caesar to the house slaves, everyone seemed to regard her more highly than the others.
Pomponia scratched the little dog’s head, strategically dodging its efforts to stuff its nose into her palm. “Excuse me, ladies,” she said. “You know that my former slave Medousa now serves Caesar. I wish to speak with her before I leave.”
As the Vestal walked away, Claudia whispered in her sister’s ear. “You must befriend that priestess,” she said. “You will gain a virtuous reputation merely by association. The people are easily swayed. They will see you with a Vestal and forget your past life.”
Livia nodded and watched the Vestal cross the triclinium to speak privately with Medousa. The slave greeted her former master with more familiarity than Livia thought appropriate.
Then again, there was much about the slave named Medousa that Livia didn’t approve of. That included Caesar’s preference for her.
“Domina, you are looking well.”
“Medousa,” Pomponia began. She looked worriedly at the slave’s dress—the white stola and the head-covering veil—and pursed her lips in concern. “Why are you . . . ?”
“All is well, Priestess.” Medousa ran her fingers down the white veil on her head and spoke discreetly. “It is not as it seems. Do not worry about me. I made an oath to you as a child, remember? It was an oath to the goddess, as well. I can honor that oath still, even from Caesar’s home.”
“Now I know something is not right,” Pomponia said flatly. “It’s not like you to be so sacrificial.”
“Then repay me for my sacrifice,” Medousa said, her voice taking on a harder tone. “Stay away from Quintus Vedius Tacitus.”
“I have petitioned the goddess to forgive me,” said Pomponia. “He played me like a lyre, and I was too womanish to stop the music. Fear not, Medousa, I shall not let him play me again.”
“It’s not him I fear,” said Medousa. “Have you seen the Lady Valeria lately? I can’t tell if there’s a child in that belly or she swallowed the Trojan Horse. She’s huge. She’s a wreck at the best of times, but this pregnancy has made her even madder. Gods, what does Juno do to a woman’s mind when she’s with child? Do not give Lady Valeria any reason to speak against you, Domina.”
“I will not live in fear of a common woman, Medousa.”
“It’s not fear,” replied the slave. “It’s prudence.”
“Enough, Medousa. Now tell me, how is life under Caesar?”
Medousa huffed. “You hit the mark. I live under Caesar. Life is very different than it is at the temple, but the food and wine are just as good, and he is not a vicious master.” She pointed her chin at Livia. “It has been better since he took up with that one. He is tiring of me, but she is still new.”
“I am sorry he has dishonored you, Medousa.”
“A Caesar cannot dishonor a slave, Domina.” Medousa laughed and Pomponia saw a flicker of her former impishness. “Anyway, Spes looks over me. Caesar says that I remain your property. Once your thirty years of service to the goddess are over, you can reclaim me. If you choose to stay with the Vestal order, I can live in one of your villas in the country.”
“It will be so.” Pomponia took Medousa’s hands. “Only fourteen years to go until you and I walk through the green fields of Tivoli together.”
The slave squeezed her mistress’s hands. “Stay away from him, Domina,” she repeated, “or we shall be walking through the green fields of Elysium together instead.”
Chapter X
Plutoni Hoc Nomen Offero
This name I offer to Pluto
rome, 39 bce
Later the same year
Valeria felt the familiar cramp of pain deep in her belly. Blood trickled down the inside of her legs, but she didn’t stop. She gripped the handle of the lash whip more tightly and struck the slave again on her back.
Good. Now she wasn’t the only one bleeding.
Quintus walked into the room and casually bit into a pear. “Why are you beating her?” he asked his wife. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“The sheets look worse than they did before she washed them!” howled Valeria. “They’re ruined. She didn’t get any of the blood out!”
“Jupiter gives a shit about the sheets,” Quintus replied. He turned to leave, but Valeria threw down the whip and scurried after him.
“Where are you going?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m going to the Tabularium.”
“Let me guess, husband. You’re going to pass by the Temple of Vesta on your way.”
Quintus threw his pear on the floor and the slave with the bleeding back crawled over to dispose of it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then pointed to a blanket-covered basket in the corner of the room.
“If that thing isn’t gone when I get home, I’ll throw it in the Tiber myself. And you with it, gods help me.”
“Yes, throw it in the river, Father.” Their seven-year-old daughter, Quintina, shuffled into the room, half-carrying and half-dragging her little sister, Tacita, along the expensively tiled floor.
Valeria pointed at Quintus. “Do you see, daughters, how little your father cares for his children?” Her hand trembled as she wagged her finger at him. “We shall have to find you husbands soon so that you may leave his house.”
“I don’t want a husband,” said Quintina. “I want to be a priestess like my great-aunt Tacita. I want to guard the sacred fire and go to parties at Caesar’s house.”
“Do not talk to me of the sacred fire!” Valeria stomped acros
s the room and spat into the flame of an oil lamp.
Quintus turned to the slave. “Mind the children,” he said. “Don’t let her see them today.”
“Yes, Domine.” The slave ushered the girls away.
“You cannot keep me from my children, Quintus. You may not care whether they live or die, but I do!”
Quintus shook his head and walked away. Only the crash of the oil lamp breaking against the wall made him stop and turn around.
“I piss on the sacred flame,” said Valeria.
A moment later, she found herself on the floor. Her jaw ached and her eyes streamed with tears. She blinked to clear the blurriness from her eyes and tried to get up, but the room was spinning so she sat back down and stared up at her husband.
“Get rid of that wretched thing today,” he said, pointing angrily at the basket. “It’s been dead for a week. The rats will be at it soon.”
“That thing is your son!” screamed Valeria. “Come back here!”
But it was too late. His back was already to her, and he was gone from the house before she could get to her feet. She moved across the floor on her hands and knees until she reached the basket. Slowly, she pulled back the blanket.
The baby was gray now and his face was sunken, although his neck and body were bloated. The smell made her stomach rise. She touched his hair and recoiled as the soft skin of his scalp sloughed off under her fingers. She couldn’t wait any longer. She had to send him to Pluto.
Gently, she placed the blanket back over his small body and tucked the corners into the edges of the basket. She looked at the broken oil lamp on the floor.
This was the fault of Priestess Pomponia. She knew it. The priestess had cursed her child. She had called upon Vesta to destroy Valeria’s home because of the lust she had for Quintus.
She had sacrificed to the goddess, and Vesta had answered by keeping the child, the son Quintus so desperately wanted, too long inside Valeria’s womb. When the child did not come at the right time, Quintus had grown suspicious. He claimed it was not his.
He also blamed Valeria for its death. The midwife had told him that excessive drink had caused the child to wither and weaken, and he foolishly believed her. Valeria had tried to tell him that it was Pomponia—she had killed their son by some black magic!—but her only answer from him had been yet another blackened eye.
His perversion for the priestess ruled his mind. Something had to be done.
She looked around the room. The slave, the one she knew Quintus regularly bedded and ordered to spy on her, was elsewhere in the house with the children.
Quickly, she wrapped herself in a palla, gathered the basket in her arms, and slipped unseen from the house. Quintus had left on foot for the Forum. He would be easy enough to follow.
Well, on a normal day he would be easy enough to follow. Today, however, her belly cramped and the dried blood on the inside of her legs pinched her skin as she trailed behind him along the cobblestone streets.
Valeria darted, unseen, in and out of porticos. She ducked behind the columns and stately trees that stood before the fine homes along her street, and then, as she followed him still further, she hid behind the laundry that hung down from insulae windows above, all while tightly clutching the death basket in her arms. She gritted her teeth through a cramp, pausing only a moment to let the pain subside and to catch her breath before hurrying after him again.
She was confused, though. Quintus didn’t seem to be headed for the Roman Forum. That meant he wasn’t going to the Temple of Vesta either. Perhaps he was meeting his lover somewhere else. Somewhere secret, maybe a brothel or a rented apartment. Many men of class carried on illicit affairs in such places.
Eventually, she found herself tracking him through the newer streets of the Forum of Julius Caesar, the smaller forum that the dictator had started to build a few years before his assassination. The new Caesar was improving it, and construction was underway on a number of projects.
Quintus weaved through the scaffolding, dodged falling hammers, and stepped carefully to avoid the nails that littered the construction-filled streets.
Gritting her teeth through another cramp, Valeria hobbled behind at a safe distance and then retreated into a portico when Quintus stopped in front of the high steps to the Temple of Venus Genetrix.
He looked up thoughtfully at the statues that stood on either side of the temple’s entrance. One was of Venus blessing a child. The other was of Julius Caesar.
Valeria’s heart leapt up. Venus Genetrix, goddess of motherhood and domesticity: Quintus was there to pray for the health of his wife and the soul of his son.
Yet instead of climbing the steps to enter the temple, Quintus turned to walk down a side street where a number of shrines to Venus had been erected against the marble exterior of the massive temple.
He stopped before one of them. Valeria hid behind a shoddy scaffold from which some workers had hung their dusty cloaks. She was closer to Quintus than was probably prudent, but she needed to see what he was doing. She needed to hear what he was saying.
The shrine consisted of two marble pedestals supporting a thick, carved wooden altar, its surface inlaid with gold. Bunches of dried myrtle and roses had been fastened to the pedestals. A lifeless swan had been affixed to the wall in front of the shrine as a sacrifice to the goddess. The taxidermist had replaced its eyes with ocean-blue beads to symbolize Venus’s birth from the sea. Several large scallop shells adorned the top of the altar and a tall candle burned within each one.
A man dressed in a white tunica with a blue cloak bowed deeply to Quintus as he approached the shrine. They exchanged a few words before Quintus passed the man some coin.
Quintus knelt before the altar. He placed his hands upon it and looked into the ocean-blue eyes of the lifeless swan.
“Venus Dea,” he said. “You will not have had occasion to know me, but I am Quintus Vedius Tacitus, former loyal soldier of your progeniture Julius Caesar and priest of mighty Father Mars. Hear me now, goddess. I offer this fine sacrifice to you in exchange for the heart of the priestess Pomponia.”
Quintus took hold of a dagger that lay on top of the altar. As he did, the man in the blue cloak reached into a cage that sat on the ground and pulled out a plump white dove. With his head lowered in solemn respect to the ritual, he passed the dove to Quintus.
“Venus, I make this offering so that her affection for me will live as embers in the sacred fire until we can be together.”
Quintus drew the blade across the dove’s throat in one move, and the bird’s tiny head collapsed between his fingers. Its blood trickled down his arm to form a small pool of red on the cobblestone.
Valeria gripped the scaffolding beside her. In all her years of marriage to Quintus, she had never seen him humble himself so. She had never known him to show any softness, and certainly never anything resembling love. Not to her. She took a final look at him—his head lowered in prayer and blood running down his arm—before she turned and walked away.
She walked for a long time. She walked until the cobblestone streets of the Forum Julius became the cobblestone streets of the Forum Romanum, and then she kept walking. She walked, drained of emotion but full of purpose, until she reached the Shrine of Pluto, god of the underworld.
A thin woman with blood painted on her cheeks and a black palla around her shoulders eyed Valeria and the basket she carried.
“Domina,” she called out. “Come.”
Valeria obediently followed the woman to a row of wooden shop fronts adjacent to the shrine and into one which was heavily draped in purple and black cloth.
As she entered it, the light of day faded into a space that was dimly lit with oil lamps and that smelled strongly of incense.
Without a word, the thin woman took the basket from Valeria’s arms and set it on a table.
She lifted the blanket and l
ooked at the dead baby underneath it without any discernable reaction—or rather, with the reaction of someone who was accustomed to looking at dead babies.
Valeria reached into the basket to remove a small purse of coins buried under the blanket. She pressed a few pieces of bronze into the woman’s palm and then placed a shining gold coin—an aureus—into the baby’s gummy mouth to pay the ferryman for his passage to Hades.
“It won’t take long, Domina,” said the thin woman as she gently removed the baby’s body from the basket. “And, of course, all is done with the utmost respect.”
She carried the baby away, waiting until she had safely passed behind a black curtain to remove the gold coin from the child’s mouth and replace it with a bronze one. Surely Charon didn’t charge that much for something so small.
Feeling detached from reality, Valeria sat down on a chair to wait for her child’s ashes. As she stared into the flame of an oil lamp, her thoughts wandered to her life with Quintus Vedius Tacitus.
She had been given to him as a bride when still a teenager. It had taken him months to couple with her. Even then he had preferred his slaves to his wife, although she had never understood why. Everyone said she was the most beautiful woman to be born to her family in generations. She had performed her duties as his wife with devotion and diligence. She had given him two perfect daughters. Yet when she dared ask why he felt no love for her or for them, his answer had come in the form of his fist.
But now all was clear as glass. His obsession with the Vestal had taken hold of him before they had even married, when he and the priestess Pomponia were still children. He had fallen in love with her inside Rome’s marble temples as they learned to perform their sacred duties to Mars and Vesta.
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