Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  ‘How can there possibly be no other slaves?’ Tiberius Nero marvelled.

  ‘At least Antony’s sent her something useful from Egypt in the old woman,’ Livia replied dryly.

  ‘Not very useful – the house is disgusting! There’s no-one cleaning it.’

  ‘Tiberius Nero, are you really so stupid?’

  My young master opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again.

  ‘Do you think all of this is real?’ Livia asked him.

  ‘What are you talking about? Of course it’s real – it’s a stinking Greek hovel.’

  ‘Designed to make anyone think she’s broken and ruined – especially Octavian.’

  Tiberius Nero then saw what Livia had concluded. ‘This is all a deception?’

  ‘It’s theatre …’

  Tiberius Nero caught the twinkle in her eye and gave a little giggle. ‘She’s quite brilliant, isn’t she?’

  Livia laughed too – and even I placed my hand over my mouth in amusement. ‘She must have a real house hidden somewhere else,’ Livia said, ‘and all her money and slaves too – and probably her new army. This is all to fool Octavian that she’s powerless.’

  They both succumbed to fits of laughter.

  ‘She’s awake now,’ said Hebe.

  The amusement froze on their lips. The little girl had reappeared again.

  ‘My Lady’s eyes are open.’

  Tiberius Nero prepared himself to enter and Livia fell into respectful silence.

  ‘Shall I undress you, Marcus Antonius?’ Hebe asked him.

  ‘What – ‘

  ‘Don’t you wish to mount her?’

  Tiberius Nero’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and it was all he could do not to start laughing again.

  Livia took control, assessing her husband’s dust-covered limbs and refocusing herself on their seduction plan. ‘Is there a bath?’ she asked Hebe.

  ‘There is water over there.’ Hebe pointed to a wide, shallow tub that had been hauled across the floor at some point. There was an ankle’s depth of relatively clean water inside.

  Tiberius Nero snapped into action, not wanting to waste time. I didn’t need to be directed either and followed him, first pulling his boots from his feet, and then lifting the soiled tunica over his head. Because of the dust and heat, he hadn’t bothered to wear any other layers of clothes. He unwound his loincloth himself and stepped into the tub. There was no sponge or strigil, nor even any oil, so I just rubbed him with handfuls of water, attempting to wipe off the sweat and grime. Livia regarded the process dispassionately.

  When I had made him as clean as could be achieved in the circumstances Tiberius Nero stood dripping on the earthen floor, flapping his arms to dry them and disliking the fact that soil now stuck to his wet soles.

  ‘She won’t be looking at your feet,’ said Livia.

  Tiberius Nero took several deep breaths. ‘I am ready,’ he said, trying to sound as virile as he could for the task ahead.

  ‘No, you’re not – look at you,’ said Livia, pointing at his manhood. It was tightly clustered among his pubic hair and testicles to form a little pink bunch of grapes.

  ‘The water was cold,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘She’s expecting Antony.’

  I looked discreetly away but little Hebe certainly didn’t as Tiberius Nero manipulated himself for a moment until he achieved a somewhat more impressive display.

  Livia stepped forward and kissed him on the lips in a way that I had never seen her kiss him before. This finished Tiberius Nero’s work on his manhood.

  ‘The power will be yours,’ she whispered.

  Tiberius Nero strode naked into Fulvia’s darkened room.

  Left alone, Livia didn’t know what to do with herself. Then she realised that Hebe was now watching her with a very different look upon her little face than the expression she had held in Tiberius Nero’s presence.

  ‘Is something wrong, Hebe?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ the girl muttered.

  Livia was unsettled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Hebe repeated. ‘I knew it when I saw you. Don’t think you can trick me.’

  I shared my domina’s sudden anxiety that the child had recovered from her misconception about Tiberius Nero.

  ‘I’m with Marcus Antonius,’ Livia insisted.

  ‘I know you are,’ said Hebe, ‘but you shouldn’t be. Why don’t you just go home again? He won’t want you now anyway.’

  Livia floundered. ‘Who do you think I am, girl?’

  Hebe spat on the floor. ‘Cleopatra, the queen of shit.’

  Livia was so startled that she didn’t hear Tiberius Nero’s scream until I shook her.

  ‘Domina – ‘

  Tiberius Nero screamed again and we ran into the darkened bedroom. He was naked in the middle of the floor, leaping from foot to foot and clutching his privates, unable to get his words out.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ Livia stubbed her toes on upturned stools and chests. Then she saw the shadowy form of Fulvia lying prone on pillows in the centre of a huge, canopied bed.

  ‘My Lady,’ Livia cried, falling to her knees. ‘Forgive us the misunderstanding. The girl wouldn’t believe us – she wouldn’t listen to us when we told her who we were.’

  Fulvia said nothing.

  ‘Her mouth – look at her mouth!’ Tiberius Nero spluttered.

  Fulvia’s eyes were open to slits, peering fixedly at us. Her long auburn hair was spread about her head in a downy halo. Her hands lay loosely at her sides, not touching her body, but pushed away from herself and resting on top of the sheet that covered her body below her shoulders. Her chest rose and fell with a barely perceptible breath. Her skin was pale.

  As our eyes adjusted it became clear that Fulvia’s arms and linen had been disturbed by the actions of Tiberius Nero’s knees. Having stolen into her room and believing himself desired, he had announced his real identity to her. When she had given him no reply – despite gazing openly at his nakedness – Tiberius Nero had mounted her bed, straddling her with his knees placed either side of her breasts. This allowed her to appreciate fully what she had once desired.

  When she made no movement to receive him, Tiberius Nero delighted in her show of modesty and took control of the seduction process, easing his erection between her lips. It was then that shuddering convulsions seized Fulvia. She clamped down and chewed upon Tiberius Nero as he tried to pull himself from her jaws in agony. It was only by the will of the gods that he wasn’t castrated.

  Fulvia’s convulsions had ceased by the time we entered in our panic but her mouth was now a death’s head grimace. Her tongue protruded between her clenched teeth, shredded into pulp, her own blood mixed with that from Tiberius Nero’s foreskin.

  Fulvia’s chest rose and fell one more time before it stilled forever. She was dead.

  ‘It was a sudden illness,’ said a thin voice behind us.

  We all turned in shock except Hebe, who couldn’t pull her eyes from her departed mistress. A stooped crone stood at the door to the sleeping chamber, her face hidden by shadow. She was the Egyptian slave.

  ‘A sudden illness,’ the old woman repeated. ‘That’s what took her. Very sudden.’

  ‘But she was alive when I came in here,’ Tiberius Nero managed to get out, bleeding into his hands. ‘She was breathing – she was looking at me with desire in her eyes.’

  ‘As I said, very sudden,’ muttered the old crone sadly. ‘These things can come on before a person even knows about it.’ She turned to make her exit again.

  Of all of us in Fulvia’s sleeping chamber, only Livia saw what it was about the aged, stooped Egyptian that defined her as something monstrous: a slave unnatural, an abomination in the eyes of all gods. The old woman’s ‘abhorrence’, as I later came to call her disfigurement, would one day come to visit us all again.

  Livia gathered her wits and ran after the crone through the filthy megaron to
the entrance yard. But any trace of the old woman was gone. She had vanished into air.

  Livia came back to find Tiberius Nero seated at dead Fulvia’s feet as I attempted to bathe his bitten genital and wrap a strip of linen around it. His wounds were unsightly but not life-threatening. The damage to his dignity was worse.

  ‘Octavian …’ he whimpered, white-faced and shaking. ‘It was Octavian – he had Fulvia poisoned by that slave.’

  Livia had already guessed it; Fulvia had indeed been poisoned some time before Tiberius Nero had entered the room. He had tried to entice her to fellatio in the midst of her death throes. But Livia was under no illusion that this was Octavian’s work. It was obvious to her that the powerful and courageous Fulvia of the Antonii had fallen victim to a different enemy entirely.

  Octavian was innocent. Cleopatra was to blame.

  Despite everything, Livia couldn’t quite hide her admiration.

  The Kalends of October

  40 BC

  Six months later: the signing of the Treaty

  of Brundisium and the resumption

  of uneasy peace between murdered

  Caesar’s heirs

  ‘Will you move, you stupid child? Help the others for once; you’re not just a jewel here.’ Tiberius Nero, now Hebe’s new master, was upon her, then running past her through the shabby study that was the tablinum, carrying an armful of scrolls.

  ‘How shall I help?’ she cried in his wake.

  Tiberius Nero directed his wants to the old janitor slave, Polidarius. ‘The letter from Rome – it has brought us great news. Great news! Help load the valuables onto the carruca so that we can return at last, Polidarius. What do you think of that? Start with the busts and masks in this room.’

  ‘The gods be praised,’ murmured the old slave.

  Hebe fell into Tiberius Nero’s sight again. ‘How should I help? What should I do?’ she pleaded.

  ‘You frustrate me, Hebe! Isn’t it enough that you still won’t shit in a hole? Help throw the unwanted things from the house into the olive grove. And start earning your keep or we’ll leave you behind with the rubbish.’ Yanking aside the room curtains that made the study a separate space from the front half of our rented villa, Tiberius Nero ran through the neglected atrium and was gone.

  The little girl looked for something to give to the pile. ‘I am not a slave,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I am my domina’s pet. I am not supposed to work.’

  I heard her private words as I emerged from the kitchen carrying some pans. ‘But dogs are pets, piss-drip – is that what you are too?’

  My now ugly face, throat and bony limbs were all speckled with scars from where the furnace sparked at me as I turned the meat spits. When we had taken the villa I was chained to the kitchen, my star in decline since my doubts had proved correct about the naïve seduction plan. ‘Dog or not, he still thinks you’re less than nothing,’ I said bitterly. ‘No better than the rest of us.’

  ‘That’s not true; the domina keeps me for her affection.’

  I leaned towards Hebe, menacing. ‘That’s how the dominus kept me once. Now look at me. I even pulled the domina from a cave when rocks fell on her. Still they sent me to the furnace.’

  ‘That’s because you’re still a slave,’ said Hebe defiantly. ‘But I’m not one of you – I’m a pet.’

  I lowered my voice to something softer – while making my resentment of her even more naked. ‘Think about it, piss-drip. You’ve got no mama, no papa, no blood to care if you thrive or die. You’ve got no memory of living any other way than how you do now, yet you know you must have once, for some woman gave birth to you, didn’t she?’

  Hebe tried in vain to force me aside, but I was immovable.

  ‘She calls you her pet when she kisses you,’ I whispered, ‘just like Fulvia did. But behind your back you’re not loved here at all – only “treasured”, just like me.’

  ‘I hate you, Iphicles! Get away!’

  I straightened again, laughing, and sloped out the heavy front door with the pans.

  Refusing to let my cruel words sway her from what she clung to in her heart, Hebe’s eyes found something she knew would not be wanted – the blackened remains of the wall torch. She climbed onto a high backed chair to reach it just as old Polidarius returned and tried to pull the means out from under her.

  ‘Get off, you silly child – the master wants this good cathedra chair.’

  ‘But the torch – I want the torch,’ she tried to tell him. ‘I have to help.’

  ‘You’re too useless – get off.’ He shoved her from it and took the study chair in his withered hands, stumbling into the light outside, just as I returned to collect more kitchen things.

  Hebe remembered the pole used to lower the shade awning in the villa’s peristyle. She found it there in the dry, dead courtyard. Running back into the study with it, she knocked a painting from its hook, flinging the artwork face-first onto the floor.

  Hebe bit her lip until it bled. She looked around to see if I had noticed. But I had not, being then in the kitchen.

  Polidarius returned limping through the atrium just as she stooped to pick up the painting. She sprang away.

  ‘Why aren’t you helping us then, you idiot child?’ He didn’t see the fallen art treasure.

  ‘I’m trying. The torch – ‘

  Polidarius plucked it from its clasp on the wall and threw it at her. ‘Put yourself on the pile too. You’re a useless girl.’

  He limped towards the alcoves that held our young master’s funeral masks and began to pile the waxen visages onto a tripod table, one on top of another. Those belonging to Claudius and Drusus, our master’s murdered father and brother, Polidarius put aside to be wrapped in silk. Hebe fled outside with the torch. ‘I’ll come back for the painting,’ she told herself, ‘and the pole too; the domina will want them both in the carriage. And then they’ll all see how useful I can be.’

  In the bright Greek sun she found the pile of rubbish among the olives. Perched high in the mess was her little wooden doll.

  ‘That’s mine,’ she said in surprise. ‘Clio’s not rubbish.’

  She looked around for someone else who shared this outrage, but all the slaves, myself included, were now occupied with the carruca at the far gate from the villa’s yard.

  ‘Who threw Clio on the pile?’ she shouted at us. ‘Don’t you know she’s mine?’

  We did not acknowledge her.

  Hebe dropped the torch stub in the long dry grass and looked for a way to reach her doll. Broken crates, cart wheels and horsehair mattresses made a daunting mountain.

  ‘Don’t cry, Clio,’ she called to the toy. ‘I’ll get you down.’

  She made to climb the thick spokes of a big wooden wheel, found that it supported her, and used it to gain a footing on one of the crates. Her doll was wedged by its arm between broken corral timbers from the stable. Just able to touch the feet, she tried to pull the doll free.

  ‘Don’t shame yourself, Clio – tears are for babies.’

  She tugged with all her strength and the doll came loose, sending Hebe backwards. She just managed to right herself but the doll’s arm was left behind, torn from its pin.

  ‘You stupid girl,’ Hebe scolded the toy. ‘That’s a deserved torture for what you’ve done.’ But she hated the look of Clio with this amputation and tried to reach for the wooden limb. ‘Come here,’ she begged of it, ‘just come here …’

  A sharp crackling sound made her look back to the ground. The little stream of flame that led from the torch she had thought was extinguished shot through the long grass towards the villa. She dropped her doll in the shock of it and cried out again to the rest of us.

  But none of us could see where she had placed herself in the rubbish. All we saw was the fire.

  Crippled and confused, old Polidarius staggered from the villa to see a sheet of flame rushing at him through the weed. The smoke and fear made him drop the tripod table he carried. Blinded, he did
n’t know which way to escape and tripped over, striking his head on the sharp marble edge of the table. Blood gushed from the wound; he was not unconscious, yet he couldn’t move his arms and legs for the blow. When the wall of fire reached him the clear Grecian air still allowed Polidarius to breathe while he felt every blister from his fresh burning.

  Then the shock of it all took his life.

  Livia was beyond the villa’s gate with her baby, walking doggedly towards the track that led to Corinth, trying to catch up to Tiberius Nero. In her clear determination, my now eighteen-year-old domina could hear nothing of the crisis behind her; the uncompromising instructions she gave to herself in her head were too deafening. Having grown into a siren of a young woman – with raven hair streaming, her breasts full and free of undergarments so that she could feed her young son – Livia’s nature was as passionate as it had been when she was still a child at her father’s side. But since the failure of her seduction scheme for Fulvia, she had dropped greatly in her young husband’s eyes. She fought to regain her superiority but it was a lost cause.

  ‘Please wait for me – I want to know your plans,’ she called after him.

  Tiberius Nero scanned the dusty road, his back to her, looking for other carts or oxen he could commandeer. ‘Just go back to the packing, Livia – you have no need for plans.’

  ‘Yes I do. Of course I do,’ Livia insisted. ‘He’s declared an amnesty – it’s unheard of. Our fate should have been that we baked away down here like oven stones but now you’ve been given a second chance. I want to know why – and I want to know your plan.’

  ‘Octavian’s seen sense at last, hasn’t he? Realised he can’t run Rome without friends. We don’t need a plan for that.’

  Livia was appalled. ‘If you truly believe that, then we should flee even further to save ourselves from your blindness, Tiberius Nero. What if he has called you back simply to execute you? What if it’s a trick?’

  Her young husband’s flash of dread was unmistakable.

  ‘And you already fear it too? This is why you must tell me your plan.’

  He pulled at his hair in frustration. ‘I have no plan, Livia!’ His beautiful wife was just a finger’s width taller than he was – and she always would be, he knew to his dismay. ‘I’ll return to Rome and throw myself on Octavian’s mercy.’ ‘You’ll shame yourself like that? You’ll accept any humiliation that he chooses?’