A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  Now I never studied philosophy Best I can ever hope to be is an enthusiastic amateur. But there are times when I seem to visualise the great, all-spanning arch of Being as a big brown cow; and this cow wanders along through Time, munching bits out of the Past, digesting them in her double-chambered gut (which we call the Present) and finally shooting them out her rear end in the form of enormous, squidgy cowpats, which is to say the Future; and we blind mortals, straying haphazardly along life's path and seldom looking where we're going, will sooner or later put our boot right in the middle of one of these cowpats — namely our Past, transfigured into the shit we find ourselves in, in the Future.

  I guess Plato would've come at it from a different angle. But Plato, and the rest of that crowd, probably never had to put up with the kind of rubbish that I've always seemed to end up with, by way of a life. When you've lived like I had, with a fair proportion of your meals coming at you through a hatch in a cell door, it's not surprising if you find yourself trying to make sense of the workings of the cosmos in terms of huge steaming cowpats made up of all the really dumb things you did twelve months or five years earlier.

  That's by the by After my run-in with helmsman Tityrus, I made a real effort to watch my step along life's highway As far as I was concerned, I never wanted anything to do with my past life ever again, or any part of it. The way I saw it, everything that had happened to me up to the moment when I scrambled into the floating coffin was all horrible garbage, and no good could possibly come from having anything to do with it. Here I was, Farmer Galen of Phyle, with everything a man could reasonably want, so long as I put the time in behind the plough and the shovel. I had a roof over my head, food to eat, clothes, somewhere dry to sleep. Anybody who wants more than that is like someone who tries to fish a honeycake out of the mouth of a crocodile; what you stand to gain is never worth the risk.

  Which is a roundabout way of saying that when Lucius Domitius failed to get in touch with me, I didn't go looking for him. Screw him, I thought; he's got a new friend now, he seemed happy enough, and I sure as hell didn't need him. I mean to say, what good would he be, in my new life? The Syrians and me could handle all the work about the place, with a little help from hired men in the season, which I could well afford to pay for. He'd just be a complication, a nuisance, in the way and not needed on the voyage, as they say in the navy He always did have this knack of attracting hassle, the way a magnet draws filings. Proof of that: since we'd parted, when the ship went down, pretty well everything had gone right for me, or at least nothing had gone badly wrong. While we were together: ten long years of hardship, danger and filthy rotten luck, and bugger all to show for it. As time went by, I found myself starting to believe the tale I'd been telling ever since I got back, that I'd spent the last twenty-four years in the army Might as well have done. After all, I did all the things people do in the army — sleeping rough, eating crappy food, wearing damp, raggedy clothes, constantly having people trying to kill you or capture you.

  The only part of the army experience I'd missed out on was killing other people; and if I'd done my time as a cook or a muleteer, I'd never have done any of that stuff anyway And, of course, for ten of those twenty-four years I'd been principal bodyguard to my emperor, so my little white lie wasn't so far off the mark, at that. Anyhow, I thought, there's nobody who's going to contradict me, and it's nobody's business but my own.

  So, best part of a year went by and the seed I'd sown grew into barley, and the shoots I'd planted turned into vines, and my beans survived the dry season, and my olives didn't get the blight or the canker or the rot; and if my dear mother was still alive, well, you learn patience when you're a farmer. The flipside of that, of course, is that you start putting down roots of your own. You wake up each morning with a pretty fair idea of where you're going to sleep that night, and what you're going to eat. In other words, you lose your edge. Then, when a celestial cowpat pops up in your path, you aren't ready for it. Bummer.

  I don't know why I was having dinner in the house that night, instead of over in the bunkhouse where I belonged. I seem to remember Blandinia was sick in bed with the guts ache, and Mum yelled at me across the yard to fetch her in some charcoal, and when I brought it she said she was all alone, and surely it wouldn't kill me to spend an evening with my old mother once in a while. So there I was, perched awkwardly on a stool while she sprawled on the couch, playing cottabus. (Don't know if you're familiar with the game. It's where you try and flick the dregs out of the bottom of your winecup so as to hit a specified target, like the vinegar jar or the fire dogs or the flute-girl's left nipple. My mum loved playing cottabus, goes without saying.) Time went on, and Mum got more and more plastered; to start with, it improved her aim, and then her shots began to get a bit wild, and then the handle came off her cup and it fell on the floor and smashed, and I had to go to the chest and get her out a new one. It was that sort of evening. Crazy fun.

  'You know,' she was muttering — I was trying not to listen, but it was like when you're lying awake in the wee small hours, and however hard you try, you can't help but listen to the sound of the rain dripping in through the hole in the roof. 'You know, it's really nice having a quiet evening alone with my little boy Really nice. God knows why it's got to be only once a bloody year. You'd think you hated me or something, and you don't, you're a good boy really, just fucking selfish, that's all. Rather sleep out in the bunkhouse with a couple of dirty wogs, instead of here with your own flesh and blood. Disgusting, I call that; but still, on the whole you're a good boy, and I forgive you.'

  Gee, thanks, I thought. 'It's not as bad as all that,' I was dumb enough to say 'I mean, you've got Blandinia for company 'That stinking little whore?' Mum spat, and knocked over the oil jar. She could spit straighter than a Persian shoots an arrow when she had a mind to. 'God only knows why I let her in the house, filthy bitch. Oh, I've seen her, smirking at me out of the corner of her eye, when she thought I wasn't looking, like she's saying, I know all about you, you old tart, you were no better than me in your day I mean,' she snuffled, 'what kind of a son do you call yourself, letting a filthy whore look like that at your own mother?'

  I shrugged. It was late, and I'd far rather have been mucking out the pigs.

  'What does she know, anyhow?' I said.

  'Oh, she knows,' Mum sighed. 'Because I told her. God only knows why Subject came up, so I told her all about it. And now she's taken to coming on all superior, when she thinks my back's turned. Well, she's got no call, and that's the golden fucking truth. I mean, there's no comparison, none at all. She was just a halfpenny tart in a funhouse.' She straightened her back a little.

  'Nothing like me. I was a Roman general's special mistress. There's a difference, you know. A difference. But can she see it? Can she hell as like.'

  I really didn't want to hear this. 'Go on,' I said.

  'Oh, that's all there is to it,' she said. 'Nothing to tell. Here, this jug's empty. Are you just going to sit there, or are you going to make yourself useful for a change?'

  I got a fresh jar from the corner and broke off the gum. 'You're right, of course,' I said, casually as I could manage. 'Her trying to make out she's anything like what you were. Damned cheek, if you ask me.'

  'That's right.' She banged the table with her fist. 'When I took up with Gnaeus Domitius, I was just fifteen, never been with a man, never been away from home before, and everybody said, I was as pretty as a picture. And wasn't he ever a splendid man, in his armour, sat on his big black horse. And so kind, such a gentleman, not like these fart-arse types that call themselves gentlemen these days. Oh, he had a temper—'

  'Mum,' I tried to interrupt, but she wasn't listening.

  'He had a temper,' she went on, 'he could be a vicious bastard when he'd a mind; but that's gentlemen for you, real gentlemen, they don't have to bow down and lick shit like ordinary folk. Never paid his debts if he could help; and there was one time, we were in Rome, this fat old knight came up to him in the market
square whining for money, like some pissant little Greek. So he grabbed him by the scruff, stuck his thumb in the fat man's face and popped out his eye, just like podding a pea. Oh, he was a fine man, just like a great lion. I loved him, Galen, God's honest truth. I loved that man like I've never loved anybody before or since.'

  'What did you say his name was?' I asked. 'Gnaeus something?'

  She ignored me. 'Proudest day of my life,' she went on, 'when our son was born.

  It was just after his wife had their boy little Lucius. He picked up our son and took him across the courtyard. I said to him, Where are you going? He said, I'm going to introduce our boy to his brother. Just like that. My little Callistus, and his own honest son; he didn't care, they were both the same, far as he was concerned, his boys. He loved me, you see, just like I loved him. And it was all my fault.'

  I frowned. 'What was your fault?' I said.

  'Oh.' She spat again, though there wasn't anything left to aim at. 'Your bloody father, that's what. God only knows how I could've been so stupid, when I had everything I could ever want: a man like that, and living in a fine house, like a princess. I was free and clear, no more troubles; and I had to go and fall for your stinking bastard father, who was just a servant; not even that, a dirty slave. When he found out, I was so ashamed; I really wish he'd killed me too, it was only what I deserved. But no, he said, he wasn't going to do that; for baby Callistus' sake, he said. You see?' She was crying, fat salt tears plopping into her drink. 'He saved my life, my darling little boy; and you fucked it all up, you and your dirty bastard father. Threw me out, that same day, me and Callistus — and you, of course, you weren't born yet but you were there inside me, like a bad splinter. If only he'd killed me too, my baby would've been all right; he'd have looked after him, brought him up decent, he'd have been a fine gentleman, like he deserved. But now he's dead — he's dead and you're alive, you little shit — and I'm here with you and that whore. What the hell kind of a life do you call that, then? What's the point of being alive, like that? Oh yes, sure, I brought it on myself, I deserved to come back here, with a fatherless kid, another on the way, and my dad yelling at me, calling me filthy names and making me scrape cowshit in the yard. But there was a time.' She emptied the winecup, and dropped it deliberately on the ground, where it broke. 'He loved me, and I loved him, and I threw it all away 'What was that name again?' I asked. 'Gnaeus..

  'Gnaeus Domitius.' She was staring straight ahead, like I wasn't there. 'Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, grandson of Mark Antony, father of Nero Caesar; Nero Caesar, my little boy's brother. He introduced them to each other, you know, the day Callistus was born. I wish I could've seen that. It must've been something to see.

  'Right,' I said. 'And my father,' I went on, 'the one Gnaeus Domitius killed.

  What was he called?'

  'Him? Oh,' she sneered, 'he was just a Greek, or a Thracian, something like that. A slave, anyhow, answered to anything anybody cared to call him. Didn't deserve a name of his own. Gnaeus Domitius hit him so hard with his sword, he damn near cut him in half. Served him right, too. He was strong, my Gnaeus, like a bear.'

  'Excuse me just a moment,' I said, getting up. 'I just want to nip out for a while and throw up.

  So I did that, and it made me feel a bit better, but not much. And all the while, at the back of my mind, a little voice was saying, Well, that accounts for it, how come Callistus and Lucius Domitius looked so much alike, always knew there had to be a perfectly simple explanation. Probably my dad had a sharp, pointy nose, like a rat or a weasel. Marvellous thing, heredity.

  When I went back inside she was fast asleep on the floor, where she'd slid off the couch. I looked down at her, and at the sharp shards of the winecup, and it crossed my mind that it might not be a bad idea to do what Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had neglected to do all those years ago, with a quick flick of the wrist, like podding a pea. (Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Lucius Domitius' old man — what would he be to me, I wondered. Stepfather? Was there a term for it in heraldry? Bound to be, it's such a fussy science.) But I decided not to bother.

  Not the sort of thing I do, and besides, she wasn't worth getting lumbered with the Furies for. So I left her lying there in her muck, trudged back across the yard and went to bed.

  Now you wouldn't have thought I'd be able to sleep, not after all that lot. But it'd been a long day, out in the hot sun, and I'd glugged down a certain amount of wine that evening, just to be sociable. So I fell asleep; and I dreamed that I was back in the Golden House, in the small courtyard with the five small pear trees, and I was sat on an ivory stool while Seneca explained to me, with the help of some complicated diagrams scratched in the dirt with his stick, how it all balanced out in the end: Mum and Gnaeus Domitius loved each other, but so did Lucius Domitius and Callistus. Gnaeus Domitius had killed my father, but I'd killed Callistus, to save Lucius Domitius. I'd loved Lucius Domitius but he'd left me for a flute-player, so it was quite right and mathematically necessary that I kill Lucius Domitius; which left my mother over, like the bit you carry when you divide and the first number doesn't go exactly He tried to prove it for me with calculus, and he'd got as far as explaining why Lucius Domitius raping Blandinia when she was a little girl was the product of me and Gnaeus Domitius, minus Callistus, squared, when suddenly a giant cowpat dropped out of the sky and buried him completely, with only the tip of his ratlike nose showing. And then my mother called us all in for dinner, and I woke up.

  TWENTY

  Everybody, my old mother used to say, is good at something; and by and large, I'm inclined to believe she's right. For example, I once knew a bloke who was as thick as the plaster on an Italian cheese. Ask him what two plus two came to, and he'd stare at you helplessly; it was a miracle he ever learned how to talk, he was that dumb. But give him a chisel and a hammer and a saw, there wasn't hardly anything he couldn't do. Or take Lucius Domitius; generally a waste of space and provender, and a trial to everybody who ever knew him, but he could play the harp pretty well.

  Or take me. The list of things I'm useless at goes on for ever, but though I say it myself as shouldn't, I'm quite a dab hand at ploughing. Shouldn't be, of course, I'm short and skinny and light, so I have to keep one foot on the shaft to keep the share in the dirt, which means I hop along on the other foot like a dainty little thrush pecking worms, but I can hold a straight line, and lay down the next furrow level with it, as well as any and better than most. I've had old-timers in Phyle come up to me and say my ploughing's pretty near as good as they could've done it when they were my age, and that's praise.

  So, the morning after my visit with Mum, I yoked up the mules (did I mention I hate mules?) and set off to do the half-acre down the end of our lane. Funny little field, that. Far as I can gather, we've always owned it, right back to old Eupolis' time. It's surrounded on all sides by other people's land, so you've got to traipse round their headlands to get to it, and it's a long, long way from any of our other bits and pieces. But it gives back five to one even in a bad year, and once when we were kids my grandfather got eight to one out of it, God only knows how It's a long, narrow terrace, with a steep old drop, so you've either got to waste a good quarter of it at the end, or else go at it fairly steady if you don't want to find yourself lying on your face under the plough, trespassing on the next terrace down.

  But that was fine by me, because it meant I was going to have to concentrate like mad, a good thing when I didn't want there to be any danger of my mind wandering off and worrying away at what I'd learned the previous night, like a bad dog chasing hares.

  So I ploughed all morning, taking each furrow right up to the edge, making sure they were all arrow-straight, doing the best job that I possibly could. Then, when I'd done, I took the plough and team home, fetched a hoe out from the barn, and went back to bust up the clods and generally get it ready for sowing. The Pleiades had set several days before, and I was behindhand as it was, what with stopping to get the olives in and press them before they st
arted weeping.

  As I may have told you before, clodbusting isn't my favourite occupation; and it didn't help that I'd taken on Smicro's hoe by mistake. Smicro's hands were much bigger and wider than mine, and I could hardly get my fingers to meet round the handle. As you'd expect, this made the job a whole lot more awkward, and pretty soon my wrists and forearms were starting to ache like buggery A sensible bloke would have stopped, gone home and fetched his own hoe, but not me. I just stuck at it, as though for some reason I reckoned the pain served me right. Come nightfall, when I'd managed to get about a third of it done after some fashion or other, I decided I'd had enough for one day, and started off back to the house.

  Halfway along the headland of my neighbour Aeschines' top two-acre, there used to be a funny little fig tree. I was tramping along past it when it suddenly called out my name in a sort of shouted whisper.

  I'm not used to having trees talk to me in that tone of voice, so I stopped and looked back. 'Galen,' the tree repeated. 'Over here.' And who should walk out from behind it but Lucius Domitius.

  Put yourself in my position, will you? Truth is, all the thoughts going through my head right then were just too complicated for me to handle. I hadn't got a clue where to begin, it was like trying to unravel a horribly tangled piece of rope. And what the hell was I supposed to say to him? On top of all that, I was still mightily pissed off with him for dumping me and going off with his new flute-playing chum, dropping me like I was something he'd been tracking round on the sole of his boot till at last he'd had a chance to stop and scrape me off.

  What with that, and the stuff Mum had told me, I think I did pretty well choosing my words. I said, 'Hello.'

  'Shut up and listen,' he replied, looking over his shoulder. 'I don't know if I've been followed here; it's only a matter of time. Look, I need a place to hide, and you've got to find a ship that'll take me to Hiberia, soon as possible.'