Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  ‘I will better understand desire on my marriage night, Father,’ Livia said. ‘It will be my duty to understand it.’

  But her onyx eyes rested on mine for the briefest instant, and for the second time I knew her for a liar. She knew what desire was exactly. She had already known it for years. I confess I trembled before her eyes released me again.

  ‘And what about love?’ Marcus Livius asked her, oblivious.

  ‘I have my father’s love,’ Livia replied without hesitation. ‘It’s enough for me.’

  The emotion caught in Marcus Livius’s throat. ‘You’re a treasure to me, child.’ Then he stood and defiantly faced Claudius again.

  ‘You would really do this to us, cousin?’ Claudius said with loathing. ‘You would marry your daughter to a bastard? You would soil seven hundred years of Claudian honour with this act? I beg you, find another soothsayer. Find another cave.’

  Marcus Livius was immovable. ‘The haruspex’s final words were timely. For the promise of power we must destroy those who would keep it from us.’

  Claudius paled. ‘You’re reckless,’ he hissed. ‘You’ll lead us to disaster …’

  Livia refused to see her father insulted. ‘Tell us what the next course will be, Father,’ she said to Marcus Livius, blocking Claudius out. ‘What should we do to fulfil these new prophecies?’

  ‘It’s obvious, daughter,’ he replied, smiling at her.

  Sick to his stomach, Claudius knew what was intended. ‘I beg you as your cousin who has supported you in everything until now, Marcus Livius – you will ruin us with a path like this.’

  ‘It is the will of the gods,’ said Marcus Livius simply. ‘And now it is the will of the Claudii.’ He touched the hilt of his sword, daring Claudius to challenge him any further.

  ‘He’ll learn of it, you know.’ Claudius was bleak. ‘You might read the will of the gods down here but the gods are still his ears.’

  ‘Who is “he”? Who is he talking about?’ asked Tiberius Nero.

  ‘Tell my bastard son, Marcus – why shouldn’t he know too?’ spat Claudius.

  ‘It’ll mean nothing to him – he’s only a boy,’ said Marcus Livius. ‘He’s too young and sheltered to know anything of Rome’s politics yet.’

  ‘But your daughter knows – she knows more of this than is natural.’

  I once more saw the flash of mockery in Livia’s eyes. The claim was patently true.

  Marcus Livius didn’t deny Claudius’s claim, but remained impervious. ‘He’s still an innocent – and we’ll keep him that way.’

  ‘Well, I won’t,’ said Claudius, and suddenly pushing Marcus Livius aside he gripped Tiberius Nero hard between his hands and shook him. ‘Look at me, boy, and listen – listen hard.’

  But his words were never said.

  The violence of the earthquake threw every person from their feet. The thrashing beast beneath the ground had warned me of its growing rage but I hadn’t known to flee until it was too late. I crashed hard onto the stones with Tiberius Nero beside me.

  The second spasm in the earth cracked the natural ledges loose. Glistening edifices smashed to the floor, shattering like glass. Eunuchs rushed from the recesses only to be crushed by the cascade of rock, screaming in death to Cybele. I saw the fleeing form of the cowled hermaphroditus, the haruspex clutched tight to his breast.

  ‘Run!’ Marcus Livius yelled. Grabbing Livia’s hand he pulled her towards the tunnel. With his other hand he dragged Tiberius Nero to his feet. ‘Run ahead!’ he screamed at them both. ‘Run to the surface.’

  Another terrible buckling of the earth threw them both forward like cloth dolls. They found themselves running in air until they landed on their feet again and rushed through the hole to escape. The noise of the cavern collapsing behind them burst their eardrums, robbing them of the rest of Marcus Livius’s words.

  It would be another seventy-three years before I fully learned what happened to Livia next. She only told me the truth of it when her life’s end was near and she knew she had nothing left to cling to. Her life’s end was very near too on that day in the cave, when she was still little more than a child. The gods wanted her just as badly then, desired her, just as they would seventy-three years later. But they did not claim her in the cave. Instead they did something else entirely.

  The woman who gently called Livia to awake did so with a voice that had her mother’s music to its tone; the same softness and lightness. The woman’s voice caressed Livia where she lay, smoothing the hair from her face, taking away the agony of the terrible tapered pillars that had pinned her to the floor when they fell and impaled her.

  But it wasn’t Livia’s mother; it couldn’t have been. Her mother was long dead.

  As a little girl Livia had been too broken with grief to watch the funeral flames that had consumed her mother’s grey limbs. She had turned her eyes away from her mother’s beautiful, stone-still face; she hadn’t let herself see the fire perform its purification upon her mother’s silken lips that had kissed her so many times and told Livia she was loved. With her weeping father at her side Livia had thrown handfuls of spice wrapped in cloth upon the pyre and smelled what death was like when those left living choose to make it fragrant. It smelled of temples. It smelled of gods.

  ‘Awake, child,’ said the voice that was her mother’s all the same.

  Livia believed she was already awake, yet somehow she knew that she was not awake at all. She existed in two states of being. ‘Am I dead like you, mama?’

  Her mother’s voice laughed. ‘I am never dead.’

  ‘Then I am alive?’

  ‘If I choose it, child, yes.’

  Livia looked for comfort in those words but there was none. ‘Have you chosen yet?’

  ‘Not yet, but I will. It depends on whether you’ve earned it. Have you earned death, child?’

  Livia tried to open her eyes to see this woman who spoke with her mother’s voice but found she could not. ‘I’ve earned nothing. I’m just a girl.’

  Her mother’s voice laughed again. ‘You have earned something, child. You have earned my attention. You did not have that before you entered this cave. And as “just a girl” you hold the whole earth in your hands now. How does that feel?’

  Livia thought then that she knew who her mother’s voice really belonged to, but when her mind went to announce it the name slipped from her grasp. ‘What did I do to earn so much?’

  ‘You bathed in blood.’

  Thrasyllus’s words echoed in the cave somewhere, lost in the whistle of the wind.

  ‘I am going to let you live today, child,’ said her mother’s voice, kindly.

  ‘Thank you, I am grateful for it.’

  ‘I am glad, but will you always feel this way?’

  ‘Life is precious,’ said Livia, ‘I will treasure it for as long as I have life within me.’

  ‘I wonder if you truly will …’ said her mother’s voice, musingly, ‘when you face the very worst that life can bring. Well, we shall see.’

  ‘I will,’ Livia said passionately. ‘I always will.’

  Her mother’s voice laughed again. ‘Good, child, what wonderful spirit you have. I am going to present you with gifts.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘You will know them in time.’

  Livia felt a pair of soft, smooth hands envelope hers – her mother’s hands – and found that her own two hands now obeyed the will to move. She used them to pull her mother’s palms to her lips and kiss them. But still her eyes wouldn’t open. ‘Thank you, mama’

  ‘But I can’t be wholly generous. You understand that, don’t you child?’

  Livia wasn’t sure that she did.

  ‘Do you remember what your father asked in his prayer? When you crouched in the pit waiting for the blood? Do you remember what he asked?’

  Livia strained to recall. ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Of course you do. You’re a clever girl. You have a healthy memory. If you concen
trate you will hear his words …’

  Livia’s mind cleared as if an awning had been pulled aside to let in the sun. She focused on the image of herself in the hole; the heavy grate being lowered over her head; the breathless seconds before the blade slashed the bull. Then she heard her father’s song. She heard the prayer he made to the Great Mother.

  ‘O Holy Mother, Dindymus’s Queen, grant that these children’s house, the House of the Claudii, will never know the madness thou can send …’

  ‘You’ve remembered it now, haven’t you child?’

  ‘Yes, mama,’ said Livia, ‘now I have.’

  ‘I will not grant your father’s wish that I spare your house madness. But I am sorry for it, child. Truly I am.’

  The smooth, soft hands gently lifted to touch Livia’s eyes. She felt the heat of the caress and opened her lids at last. The woman smiled sadly before her; every feature as her mother’s face had been on the day they had laid her on the pyre. But Livia realised that while she could see, her mother could not. Two aureus coins blocked the sight from her mother’s eyes. From behind each coin fell a tear.

  For the brief moment left to this experience – for the time it took for this woman to make a final promise to Livia that was as strong as any prophecy – Livia understood who really spoke to her. And then it was washed from her memory, never to return in anything more than fragments until the day of her death. On that day she remembered everything.

  I clawed the last of the rocks from Livia’s body with my bleeding hands, only to find her unscathed. Not a single bone was broken; even her flesh was unbruised. It was as if she had fallen asleep while the rubble of the cave had fallen around her like feathers.

  She opened her eyes and stared at me in horror, her lips trembling, trying to put something into words. Then the emotion passed, and with it the memory of why she had been so frightened. Although I knew nothing of the divine promise the goddess had made her, I still anticipated the first question Livia would ask me.

  ‘I am Iphicles,’ I said gently. ‘I am only your slave.’

  MURDER

  BRINGS THE

  PROMISE OF

  POWER

  The Ides of March

  44 BC

  One month later: the Liberatores prepare

  to enact their plans

  The point of the spear pricked Livia’s scalp, drawing a tiny drop of blood. She bit her lip but made no noise as I drew the sacred weapon sharply across her crown, marking her scalp in halves. Two of the six tonsores slaves took her sectioned hair in their fingers. I drew the spear point again, from Livia’s left temple to the right, and the same two tonsores released part of the tresses to let two others take the front sections of Livia’s hair into their fingers. Then I marked her scalp a third time, across the rear of her crown, behind the left ear to her right. This sectioned hair was taken by the final two tonsores.

  Livia was dignified in the few sacred preparations for her wedding day she’d been permitted. Although many other rites were not being observed due to the haste, at least her bridal head was divided according to tradition, and the six tonsores began the laboured process of constructing the bridal hairstyle.

  My own small role completed, I attempted to stand back unassumingly, but Livia was not content to treat me as invisible. The look she cast me was blank, the mask of a pliant bride; but behind her eyes I saw her dull anger. Under the preparations of confarreatio – the patrician wedding ceremony – the bride’s hair should have been parted by a matron close to her family. But none had been sought or even informed of the marriage. At Marcus Livius’s request, I – the timely slave who had pulled his daughter from the cave – performed the ritual. But Livia felt shamed by me, and more shamed still at being wed in such speed and secrecy. I should have apologised or made amends in some way, but in truth my sense of self-importance had shot to dangerous levels for a young slave. This would certainly come back to punish me.

  Aside from the spear, few other confarreatio traditions were being bothered with. The spear itself had been procured without thought, and no effort had even been made to find the blood of a gladiator to dip it in for good luck. But Livia stuck to her secret knowledge that she was pivotal in a conspiracy that would atone for the depressing nature of her nuptials. So did I, although I had no idea then what the conspiracy was.

  There was a scuffle among the tonsores and Livia looked away from me to see her father appear at the door of her sleeping room. It was just before the first hour, close to dawn in Rome. Outside the shuttered window the Anna Perenna worshipers were leaving their homes to make their way to the ancient crone deity’s shrine on the via flaminia – the old Priests’ Road. It would be a happy day for them and some were singing popular theatre songs already. Once their sacrifices to the crop-protecting goddess were made they would spend the rest of the day getting steadily drunk on the banks of the Tiber. For once I didn’t envy them. I was very happy here.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ said Marcus Livius to his daughter, after a moment of listening to the worshippers. Livia smiled but said nothing.

  Marcus Livius clapped his hands together and two of his young slave-boys appeared giggling behind him, carrying an object wrapped in silk. It was shallow and rectangular, a foot and a half wide by two feet long.

  ‘I have a gift for you,’ he said.

  The boys brought it closer. I should have taken the opportunity to press myself into the tapestry on the far wall and tried to stay unobtrusive, but I stepped nearer to see.

  ‘What is it?’ Livia asked her father, very aware of me.

  ‘Something you might like. Untie the string,’ Marcus Livius instructed the boys.

  Smiles threatening to split their faces, they placed the gift on the ground and tried to tackle the knot. After a short while it defeated their stumpy fingers and they tried to pull the string over the object’s corners instead.

  Marcus Livius bent down and cuffed them both until they stopped smiling. He picked the present up and placed it carefully in Livia’s lap. She studied the string for a moment and then dug her hard little nails into the central knot. She creased her brow, causing the tonsores to pause with their fingers in her hair before the string finally loosened and she pulled it away.

  ‘Take off the silk,’ said Marcus Livius.

  I peered as Livia did so. It was an artwork: a painting on thin planks of board, fastened together to make a rectangular surface and framed with ornate carvings. It was very fine and very old, Greek in style. The subject was a mother and her adolescent son. Their faces were extraordinarily lifelike, their expressions complex and mysterious behind their surface serenity – just like Livia’s.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said automatically. ‘Thank you, Father.’

  ‘Look at it closely,’ said Marcus Livius.

  She did as he said. The son was seated in a humble chair, while the mother stood behind him beneath a bower of roses. The youth was at the peak of his beauty, dressed in a long embroidered tunica that was exquisitely rendered by the painter’s brush. The fabric covered the son’s limbs, yet allowed the form of them to be imagined; it clung to him like a woman’s stola. The mother wore the simpler kind of robe favoured by wealthy Greek women, the drape and fold of the garment expertly suggested by the artist. She was tall and impressive, the boy somewhat smaller in stature. Her look towards the viewer was maternal, loving and something else besides: proprietorial. She was affectionately possessive. The son’s face held no hint of a boy’s natural opposition to a strong-willed mother; he was calmly accepting and happy with it.

  I was utterly held by this double portrait. I glanced at Livia and saw that, now, she was too.

  ‘Why is she standing?’ Livia asked her father after some minutes. ‘She is his mother; shouldn’t she be sitting down while he stands behind her?’

  ‘What makes you think she is his mother?’ asked Marcus Livius.

  ‘She is older.’

  Marcus Livius suggested no alternative poss
ibility for the relationship between these two figures, although it was clear that he imagined one. ‘The painting is by Timanthes, a master Greek. It was painted over four hundred years ago.’

  ‘Thank you, Father.’ Livia truly meant it. ‘It must have cost you so much money.’

  ‘It is priceless,’ said Marcus Livius. And that was all he was prepared to tell her. ‘Never let it leave your possession – it will protect you like an amulet.’

  ‘How can it do that?’

  ‘It is more than you know. One day you will come to understand it. Never let this treasure leave your house unless you can swear that your life will end if you fail to retrieve it. This great artwork belongs to the Claudii. It is has been ours since the Republic began. It will be ours when the Republic ends.’

  It was then that I saw the shape of the hidden sword that he wore beneath his toga. Livia had already seen it.

  ‘It is my wedding day, Father,’ she said.

  ‘And you make me proud.’

  ‘But you wear a sword under your clothes.’

  He straightened himself. ‘Nothing escapes you, does it?’ He held an air of certainty and higher purpose – a purpose that Livia already understood of course.

  ‘When are you going to kill Caesar?’ she asked then.

  The six tonsores faltered for only a second in their hair-twisting before resuming their soundless rhythm again. I was as deeply shocked as they were but forced myself to betray nothing of it.

  ‘At the very moment you marry Tiberius Nero and set the prophecies on their course,’ Marcus Livius replied.

  Livia studied her father carefully. If she had any reaction to this of her own, she did not show it.

  ‘You’re not disappointed that I will miss the ceremony?’ her father asked.