Nest of Vipers

by Luke Devenish

  I was hopelessly confused. The sky-blue face of the Temple came into view.

  ‘Yes, the second king couldn’t be more irrelevant,’ Livia declared.

  I snapped. ‘That’s ridiculous, domina! What could be more important than the second king?’

  She smiled wickedly at me. ‘The second queen?’

  I could only stand there with my mouth open.

  ‘All that time worrying about Tiberius’s successor, when really we should have been worrying about my own.’

  ‘Your successor, domina?’

  ‘Indeed. Which descendant from my womb will be Empress of Rome?’ Livia winked at me. ‘That’s the real position of power, of course, and of so much greater interest to the goddess. But you already know that, don’t you, Iphicles?’

  I realised I did. ‘Who is this second queen?’ I whispered in awe.

  She told me.

  We reached the great temple’s steps and Livia began to ascend, with me following her. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she demanded.

  I was still reeling and couldn’t answer.

  ‘I warned you about all this spelling out – I’ve had enough of it,’ she said. ‘For the final time you are no longer Attis, therefore you cannot come in here. The shrine of Cybele is no longer open to you, slave.’

  Crushed, I begged her for final enlightenment. ‘Just tell me who I am, domina. Which temple is my own?’

  She pulled the veil from her face and held it before her, as light as gossamer. ‘The winds will direct you to it,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve lost all patience.’ She turned on her heel, letting the hillside breeze snatch the veil from her hand and take it high in the air. Confounded, I heard Livia laughing at me as I went to run after it.

  Exhausted, I stood staring in dismay at where the veil had come to rest. ‘This is no temple, domina!’ I yelled with frustration. It was Calypso’s Spell, a dilapidated brothel in the Subura. My heart sank as I realised Livia was still playing jokes to torment me. I was indeed cretinous for believing a floating veil could illuminate anything.

  A familiar head stuck out of the brothel door. ‘Gods help me – it’s the ball-less stud.’

  ‘Lena?’ It was the brassy madam from Circe’s Enchantments.

  ‘So, how do I look? Do you like my new wig?’

  I couldn’t muster any comment.

  ‘Charming. It’s a third-rate wig, I admit, but it’s all I could afford.’ She hooked a thumb at the sordid shop front. ‘My circumstances are reduced. I lost my best whores in that cave-in.’

  Too disappointed, I didn’t pay attention to the rest of Lena’s story, even when she offered me a discount for old times’ sake. With the madam still talking at me, I wandered away, leaving the veil where it lay in the mud.

  Veiovis

  May, AD 33

  Eighteen months later: Emperor Tiberius

  Julius Caesar Augustus upbraids the

  Senate for approving the inclusion of a

  newly unearthed book of Sibylline oracles

  in the official prophecies

  Mimicking Agrippina’s inflections perfectly, Little Boots read his mother’s latest letter aloud. It was filled with jokes and asides, Forum and theatre gossip, and plenty of tidbits about Oxheads. Agrippina had proven herself a dedicated correspondent since her apparent release from imprisonment. Reclining on a terrace couch together, with the sisters Drusilla and Julilla nearby, Tiberius and Antonia adored Agrippina’s uncharacteristically amusing communications.

  ‘“And so I can confirm that my life of retirement here is a joyful, if quiet one now,”’ Little Boots read out, coming to the end. ‘“Beautiful Nilla is more in love with her Ahenobarbus than ever, and we all share their hopes for a healthy child to heal the wound left in their hearts from the baby that died.”’

  Antonia nodded. ‘Such a relief about Nilla,’ she said, patting Tiberius’s hand. ‘I had once feared they were ill-suited.’

  Tiberius smiled, benignly, his eyes far away.

  ‘“Until next I write, my dear Little Boots, please give my heartfelt wishes to the Emperor, in whose loving heart I know you prosper. I thank the gods for the role of father he plays in your life. He is our greatest Roman, so just and wise. And I am ever your devoted mother, Agrippina.”’

  Little Boots glanced at his sisters. Their faces held little expression. But Antonia brushed tears from her eyes. ‘So moving,’ she said. ‘And after all she suffered at Sejanus’s hands. Now her life is whole again, and your brother Drusus, too.’

  ‘We have so much to be grateful for, Grandmother,’ Little Boots nodded. ‘But Drusus has been tardy with his own letters this month.’

  ‘Perhaps one will come from him tomorrow,’ suggested Antonia.

  Little Boots smiled, but avoided his sisters’ eyes. ‘I can almost feel it.’

  Tiberius’s glassy smile shifted. ‘Well, now, perhaps a stroll, dear friend?’ he said to Antonia. Stretching his withered limbs, he got up from the couch they shared. ‘After all this happy news, shall we digest it in the sun?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Antonia, linking her arm in his as she stood.

  Tiberius took a cup from a tray. ‘I’d better carry this foul stuff with me,’ he grimaced. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

  At the terrace periphery the physician Charicles bowed.

  ‘It smells so disgusting.’ Antonia wrinkled her nose with a dark look at the obsequious Greek. ‘You are very cruel to your Emperor to insist he drinks such a brew,’ she admonished Charicles.

  ‘For Caesar’s weak lungs,’ the physician murmured, bowing again. A trickle of urine ran down his leg. Charicles read the pointed look that Little Boots gave him and he hobbled away. Oblivious, Tiberius and Antonia strolled among the early spring blooms.

  As Little Boots returned to the villa, he heard Drusilla behind him.

  ‘I am so grateful that our mother is free and well again,’ she said. ‘And our brother, too.’

  ‘We have much to thank the gods for,’ Little Boots agreed.

  ‘Even though, hurtfully, they write only to you …’

  Not for the first time, Little Boots sought to hide his dreadful secret by making excuses for the apparent neglect. But Drusilla stopped him. Her look was bold and direct. ‘Would I be right, brother, in guessing that the brew for our grandfather’s “weak lungs” contains the strange draught that once so altered his mind?’

  ‘Drusilla!’ Little Boots’s attempt to look shocked was so unconvincing that his sister only laughed at him.

  ‘Just as I thought – he’s pathetic,’ said Drusilla. ‘And that pants-wetting doctor is in on it too.’

  Little Boots squirmed.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Drusilla. ‘I know you’re up to something, but I won’t tell anyone – especially Grandmother Antonia.’

  Little Boots narrowed his eyes at his sister. ‘What do you want, Drusilla?’

  She parted her lips, running her fingers across the fabric of her stola bodice. ‘I want to drink it again – I so enjoyed it last time.’

  Her brother was stripped of words for some moments. ‘You remember it from last time?’

  ‘Of course I do. Bits of it, anyway. And what I do recall … well, it was really rather nice. Wasn’t it, brother?’

  Little Boots vowed to obtain Drusilla some more of the draught – and more again, if she wished for it.

  Through the grate in the cell door, I watched with dispassion as the transvestite Drusus went mad.

  ‘They were trying to starve me, Iphicles – or that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Starve you? Surely not, domine,’ I said, making notes on a tablet with my stylus.

  He was naked, caked in filth, his young bones sharp against his skin. He could no longer see, so I had lied to him, claiming it was night. ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘No food had come for days. I feared they wanted me to die in here for the lack of it.’

  ‘But that seems unnecess
arily cruel, domine,’ I said, thinking of how his aunt Livilla had been found dead with her face missing, chewed off by Scylax.

  ‘But I was wrong,’ Drusus laughed, ‘wrong all along. There was a wonderful meal in my cell the whole time.’ He put another piece of mattress stuffing into his mouth. ‘Delicious,’ he declared.

  ‘Very good, domine,’ I smiled at him. ‘Shall we return to the story of your life now?’

  ‘Why not?’ Drusus replied, swallowing.

  Not feeling any need to inform my domina, I had taken it upon myself to record the condemned young man’s memoirs before he expired, just as I had already recorded, with no real purpose in mind, the memories of a number of others who also feature in this history. And I would do so again, with quite a few more.

  I looked down at the words I had written and felt doubly privileged to have been the scribe. Drusus had told me that when his hunger pangs had been at their most unbearable, he had heard a persistent voice in his ear.

  ‘One brother’s crime sees him dine at leisure of his bed …’

  But now that he was eating again, Drusus had told me, the voice had gone away.

  Feeling Death’s wings beating close, Agrippina slipped in and out of consciousness. The gladiator was in her cell, bending to kiss her lips.

  ‘Flamma,’ she whispered.

  ‘The afterlife awaits you, Lady,’ he said, his hair golden in the light from the open cell door. ‘We will live there as lovers.’

  ‘But I can’t go yet, Flamma. Tell them –’

  ‘The decision isn’t yours, Lady,’ he smiled. ‘When Death decides, you must go.’

  ‘Please … Not while my children’s fates are unknown.’

  Flamma was reassuring. ‘Nero and Drusus have already passed and are waiting there for you.’

  A tear fell from her ruined eye. ‘It is so unjust for them.’

  ‘Ssh, now,’ Flamma comforted her. ‘It could not be helped. But Drusilla and Julilla are alive and safe, with their brother Little Boots to protect them.’

  She held this to her heart. ‘What of Nilla? I fear her fate in such a marriage.’

  Flamma assuaged her. ‘Nilla has two more marriages ahead of her, Lady, and each union will be more auspicious than the last. Ahenobarbus’s time will be forgotten.’

  She sighed, relieved.

  ‘But you must know,’ Flamma added, ‘that the men who will love her most will not be her husbands. Yet they will never leave her side.’

  ‘Not her husbands? How can it be?’

  ‘Because they are her slaves, Lady. Yet not slaves at all. One is the lost grandson of Augustus.’

  She was awed. ‘And the other?’

  Flamma said my name.

  Hearing Death’s wings directly above her now, Agrippina kissed the gladiator’s hands. ‘Have the gods spoken to you of these things?’

  ‘A goddess has. Cybele …’ His image began to melt in her fading vision. ‘She told me what you must know about Nilla’s golden future.’

  When Flamma had told her everything, he spoke words she had heard once before: ‘One would-be queen is one-eyed too until the truth gives comforts.’ It all made sense to her now, and she was comforted truly.

  Flamma kissed her a final time, before turning to leave. ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered. But as he stepped into the light that streamed through the cell door, his softening, shimmering appearance dissolved into Livia’s.

  ‘You?’

  My domina looked humble.

  With her final moments ebbing, Agrippina found she wasn’t shocked to see her enemy. With all she had been told of the golden future, she realised now why her father and mother, her brothers and husband had all had to die at my domina’s hands.

  ‘I am no longer filled with rage for their deaths,’ she said, closing her eyes.

  Livia left the prison cell behind her, serene in all she had achieved. She hoped this might be the moment when the tiny voice would come to her ear. She had been expecting it and the timing seemed right. She was not disappointed.

  ‘Your work is done, it’s time to leave – the sword is yours to pass …’ the voice told her.

  She corrected it. ‘My work is almost done,’ she said. ‘I must retain my sword a little longer.’

  Macro was standing near her litter in the square, and Livia’s demeanour changed as she approached him.

  ‘I am tired of this waiting,’ he announced.

  ‘Too bad,’ said Livia. ‘Find patience.’

  ‘My patience has expired. I want to put things into play with Little Boots before we die of old age.’

  Livia was stern. ‘He is nowhere near ready, and he will not be ready until he realises the move for himself.’

  ‘The stupid boy hasn’t the head for it.’

  Livia stepped into her litter. ‘Well, of course he hasn’t – yet. But he will, I can promise that. When he does, your time will also come, my lover, but not a second before.’

  Macro chewed at his lip, bristling.

  Livia went to flick the curtains closed against him but then thought of something. ‘There is another plan you can put into play.’

  ‘For your great-grandson?’

  ‘For my great-granddaughter, Nilla.’

  ‘She’s a recluse. She never leaves her house.’

  Livia’s look was cynical. ‘I see threats to us in the girl. Her life of seclusion and grief is an act.’

  Macro raised an eyebrow as the bearers lifted the litter, bringing Livia’s face level with his. She leaned in close to him, her lips brushing his. ‘Nilla has a hold on Little Boots that could destroy everything we’ve achieved so far.’

  Macro considered this. ‘Do you want me to kill her?’

  Livia made a show of pondering his offer before coming to a ‘decision’.

  As the litter carried her away, Livia was surprised to hear the whispered voice once more. ‘The end, the end, your mother says – to deception now depend …’

  This annoyed her. ‘I have never depended on anyone more than Deception,’ she replied. ‘And yes, I will continue to depend upon him once I am gone,’ Livia added, silencing the insistent voice.

  Lena placed a veil across her face and stepped out the door of Calypso’s Spell, looking up and down the street for a public litter. She spied one at the place where the road turned at a sharp angle. The bearers swilled honeyed wine at a tavern, waiting for trade. Lena whistled, catching their attention. In no great hurry they drained their cups and ambled towards her brothel with the transport.

  ‘I’m going to the temple,’ Lena yelled behind her to the whores.

  ‘Which one, Lena?’

  ‘None of your business.’ She patted the contents of the little bag she carried and fired a parting shot. ‘Wash all your damned holes in salty water while I’m gone, and try to stay away from the wine.’

  ‘Screw you.’

  She moved well away from the shopfront, not wanting the girls to hear the destination she gave to the litter-bearers. When she had said it, the bearers weren’t bothered, merely naming their price. Lena felt deflated. ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Like a bell,’ said the leader.

  Dignified, she climbed into the litter.

  A new friend she had made in recent weeks had assured Lena that this temple offered exactly what she needed. But with the bearers’ lack of surprise, Lena hoped she had not been lied to. Yet, considering again the arts that this friend, Martina, seemed to know, Lena felt sure the visit would prove profitable.

  She arranged herself comfortably in the transport for the trip across the city. A gust of wind blew the curtains aside just as the litter reached the Forum; Lena clung to her veil, not wanting anyone outside to recognise her. She didn’t fear they’d guess her purpose, only that they’d laugh and point at her. Who was she, after all, a rotten old whore, to go around Rome in a litter? People would call her Cleopatra if they knew, or worse, the Augusta Livia.

  Flicking the curtains closed, Lena c
aught a glimpse of someone she knew would never laugh at her. She waved without thinking. Startled in the midst of an errand, I waved back. But my jaw had dropped. Lena drew the curtains shut then, but it occurred to her that I may not have recognised her at all. She was wearing a veil.

  It was gloomy beneath the trees as Lena paid the bearers and waited until they had gone, nervous of being observed. When she was quite sure she was alone, she took a long, uneasy look up the slimy, crooked steps and told herself she had no other option but to go inside. Skill and endeavour had failed her. She needed the help of the god to rebuild herself now.

  The scurry of vermin when she pushed open the door was unnerving, but Lena had encountered worse in brothels and bravely stepped inside. Having come so far, she was determined to go through with Martina’s plan. She reached the plinth gingerly and took the hammer, nail and tablet from the bag. She held the lead in her hands and felt the surprising weight of it.

  ‘May disaster strike my competitors worse than every disaster I’ve known,’ she read. She chortled at the curse and then felt a twinge of fear that perhaps it wasn’t brutal enough. Should she have defined the disaster? A ruinous fire? Or an outbreak of plague? She banished the thought. Losing whores beneath the avalanche was a disaster worse than any she could think of. To somehow top it with one greater still was a god’s work, beyond mortal imagination. This was what she was here for, after all.

  With three swift blows of the hammer, Lena nailed the curse tablet to the plinth, where so many others already hung. She sighed at the sheer number of them. Would the god even notice hers? Looking up at the deity’s great statue to beseech him, she was suddenly struck by how familiar the god’s face was.

  A noise behind her made her start. ‘Iphicles!’

  ‘Where did you obtain your veil from, Lena?’ I had followed her all the way from the Forum.

  She was too shocked to answer me for a moment.

  ‘Your gossamer veil,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it, Lena?’

  She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘I found it in the street. Someone must have lost it. It was too nice to throw away, so I took it.’