Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  ‘Have you been crying, Hebe?’

  ‘With hope,’ she told me. ‘I was crying with hope.’

  I put my arm around her, squeezing her with affection. ‘What sort of hope can make you cry?’

  She smiled, embarrassed. ‘I was thinking of how wonderful it would be to dance.’

  In the street outside, the crone’s withered limbs and leather skin seemed to shimmer and melt as she moved from light to shade, passing the grand Palatine houses. And by the time she reached the Steps of Cacus for the steep descent towards the Circus Maximus, she’d lost all hint of what she had seemed to be as she spoke with the little slave-girl.

  Martina melted into the Lupercalia crowds looking as young and beautiful as she had ever been. Her only ugliness was on her back behind her, but by the time people saw it she had already passed them by.

  Cerealia

  April, 39 BC

  Two months later: Antony’s forces achieve

  their first victory in the war against the

  Parthian invaders of the East

  My domina knew that her father’s place of rest was not to be found among the tombs of the Claudii beyond the city’s great Servian Wall. Yet still she walked among the pyramids and grave monuments of her ancestors as if it could be. I trailed her, watching for others who might see and recognise my domina and object to her presence. Walking ahead, she painfully remembered how inclusion in the Claudian tombs had been denied to her father – and a grieving daughter’s voice had held no sway. Tiberius Nero had forbidden it; it was one of his few decisions that, in hindsight, Livia had come to be glad of, although she’d been shattered by it at the time.

  Marking a clear separation between the surviving Claudians and the stain of Marcus Livius was wise. It kept them distanced too from any whispers there might be of the disgraced man having talked of prophecies. Rome was to be ruled by a strong and just Triumvirate, who were guided by the wisdom of the Senate. This was what Livia would answer to anyone who asked her of it. Rome would always be ruled in this way, she would tell them. There would be no more kings.

  But in her heart she heard the words of the haruspex. Or at least those words she liked.

  The basket heavy on her arm, Livia waved off my requests to carry it for her. Instead she found a little path that led away from the splendours of the Claudii and towards the outer regions of the necropolis. Relieved again that this path was much less travelled than the others, Livia followed the winding route, passing lesser tombs for lesser men. Some were adorned with the simple stone altars known as cippi. Others had the elaboration of a stone pillar, the top of which was rounded on one side, like a head cut in half.

  The lesser tombs thinned out after a few minutes’ progress, making way for more of the wattle-and-daub huts that occupied unused space in the city of the dead. Livia ignored all the huts but one, slowing her pace as she passed it and turning her head for a moment longer than could be thought of as casual interest.

  Livia knew how badly I wanted her to tell me what she sought on this visit, but she would not do so. I had sworn that I would withstand torture to keep her secrets, but she now doubted any slave could last for long if it ever came to that. The risk was too great. What I didn’t know then but would come to know fully by the time the day was done was that she sought to know Rome’s future. This was a crime against Rome that, had it been discovered, would have seen her flesh fed to the beasts.

  A gust of breeze blew a dozen feathers across the dusty yard. There was no birdsong to be heard in the trees. The hut was silent. Livia peered into the dark beyond its open door, wondering if this could be the place where the boy was kept. If it was, there was no sign of him. All she knew was what the letter in the temple had told her. Thrasyllus could be found in her father’s ‘dead house’.

  A short distance further she reached the low gabled wall that marked the perimeter of her father’s grave monument. She pushed open the little barred gate and stepped inside to the cool ustrina – the courtyard where her father’s pyre would have been lit, had she been granted his body.

  Livia placed the basket on the paving stones and moved to the alcoves on the far wall. There she kissed the bust of her mother, Aufidia, who had died during Livia’s girlhood. Then she bent to the bust of Marcus Livius that stood next to his long-dead wife’s, and ran a hand across the chiselled inscription in the marble plaque.

  This is the tomb of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, a man who soiled the honour of the Claudii by one foul deed: he was among those who took up knives against Caesar. This man robbed Rome of the greatest man of all. His legacy to descendents is shame and sorrow, and all that was lost in the face of Octavian’s vengeance.

  Livia wept then, as she always did, at the cruelty of this inscription. But this time it strengthened a newly formed resolve.

  She moved through the doorway to the covered room beyond, taking the basket with her. This was her father’s crypt. She brushed away the dust from the carvings: the image of her father in his chair, scroll in hand, dictating to a scribe. My domina wiped the grime from her own carved image and that of Tiberius Nero, too. Her father’s desire to show faith in her husband had been such that he had wanted Tiberius Nero’s portrait to stay with him in death, along with his daughter’s. Even from the afterlife Marcus Livius wanted the prophecies to be perpetuated.

  Livia took out a jug of wine from the basket and placed it on top of the sarcophagus. She did the same with an earthenware jar of olives and two loaves of still-warm bread. Then she looked behind her to see whether I had followed her inside. I was standing at the barred gate to the ustrina, but I was watching her without flinching. She held my gaze, expressionless, but I didn’t pull away from her eyes.

  After a moment Livia decided it didn’t matter – which heartened me. She slid a folded sheet of papyrus from her cloak and opened it. The first sentence read: Two houses joined. Though the letter was in her handwriting, it was unsigned. She folded it twice more and placed it under one of the loaves.

  On the return journey, when Livia again walked past the hut that had held her interest on the way to the tomb, she saw that its door was now closed. I commented on how appropriate it was that men who were great in life should continue to be fed as great men in death. Livia looked sideways at me to see if I was mocking her, but of course I was not. She was pleased that I had chosen to express her strange actions in this way. And she decided to tell me the truth of them.

  When she had done so – and I had not looked shocked – Livia gave me a task that would prove my great love for her beyond question.

  The hermaphrodite clutched the basket under his arm in his haste to return to the hut, his finger hooked protectively around the little amphora of wine. He stopped and vigorously shook it – the amphora was full. The child would have no need for the wine, the hermaphrodite told himself, and wouldn’t know if a little was sampled now.

  He plucked out the stopper with his teeth and tipped his head back to pour a slug of the harsh, red liquid down his throat. It was disgusting and he gulped down more. Wiping his lips on the back of his hand, he felt calmer.

  Hearing a twig snap behind him, the hermaphrodite turned around with a start. But there was no-one there.

  ‘Strong wine,’ he muttered. ‘I’m hearing the Great Mother creep up on me already.’

  He continued to weave through the paths of ivy-covered tombs, changing direction every few dozen steps out of habit. He never trod a direct route if he could take a circuitous one, having long stayed alive by taking his enemies by surprise and never facing them head-on. He turned a corner and stopped at the tomb of one of the Gracchi mothers – the tomb he used for sending and receiving the signal.

  The hermaphrodite listened. There were no birds, only the rustle of the spring breeze in the poplars. Carefully leaning the open amphora against the tomb, he made the short, sharp kak-kak call of a jackdaw.

  There was no reply.

  Waiting several seconds, he made the kak-kak a
gain. The jackdaw sound was echoed back to him from the wattle-and-daub hut that stood behind a shielding row of grave monuments. It was the signal that all was safe to proceed.

  Then he heard another jackdaw’s call just behind him. The hermaphrodite turned with a start. There was no sign of any bird. There was no sign of anything.

  But feathers floated on the breeze.

  ‘The wine …’ he said, and took another good swig from the amphora.

  He scuttled the rest of the way to the hut and pushed open the rough-hewn door. Little Thrasyllus was inside, waiting patiently for him.

  ‘Look,’ said the hermaphrodite excitedly to the boy, showing him the contents of the basket. ‘She has come looking for us at last and even brought us treats. Two loaves of warm bread, a jar of olives, and there are dried figs in here too.’ He held up the amphora. ‘And some wine. It’s not for children to drink, but I may give you some to taste if you are a good boy today in what you learn from the goddess.’

  Thrasyllus’s expression changed and he pointed in front of him to where the hermaphrodite stood at the door.

  ‘Do not get upset with me, Thrasyllus – wine is for men, not boys.’

  Thrasyllus kept pointing, his mouth opening and closing, trying to make a word.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘A man.’

  The hermaphrodite turned to look just as my heavy wooden cudgel crashed against his skull. He pitched backwards into the dirt, screaming at the top of his voice and trying to scramble to his feet again. A second blow from my weapon knocked him into oblivion. Then, when I saw the cracked, stretched breast nipples that were exposed, I laid several more blows on his vile, unmoving form.

  I turned towards Thrasyllus as the haruspex wept with fear.

  ‘Soldier,’ he blubbered.

  ‘I’m not a soldier, I’m a slave,’ I told him.

  ‘Soldier.’

  ‘I serve another,’ I said. ‘Someone who wants to hear your special words without your mama getting in the way.’

  ‘Soldier,’ wept Thrasyllus for the third time.

  The cudgel that crashed onto my own head came down with such force that my arms wouldn’t respond. I heard myself yelling at my limbs, demanding that they defend me with my own weapon. But they hung uselessly by my side. I realised I was lying down, not standing at all, and my arms were pinned beneath me. Then I knew nothing more as the legionary that had trailed us all the way from the Servian Wall now advanced upon the screaming little haruspex.

  When I came to consciousness again I found my surroundings changed. I was no longer outside in the open air but in a small room with brightly painted scenes from the theatre on the walls. It was another tomb. My domina held my bleeding head in her lap.

  ‘The child. Where is the child?’ I asked her.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Livia, stroking my cheeks. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘But it does. Where has he gone?’

  ‘He is lost to me,’ she whispered tenderly. ‘You failed, Iphicles.’

  But she said those chilling words so lovingly that I didn’t guess then how much was lost to me, too. I would learn it well in time.

  The big door to the street opened and my domina stepped briskly from her home to the paving stones outside. She pulled her palla up onto her head and drew it into a veil that she pinned on the opposite side, so that only her eyes were visible. The comely shape of her body was more than apparent under the layers of thin white fabric. She was no longer ‘penitent’ when travelling the city streets – now she aimed to be ‘modest’. This she affected for Octavian’s benefit alone, but her stolae had become tighter and closer-fitting now, no longer flowing and voluminous. In her hand she held a new jug of the drugged wine.

  The warm spring air was filled with happy shouts and laughter from those rushing in excitement and fright from the climax of the Festival of Ceres in the Forum. The first and fastest of their number rushed up the street, dressed in the tatters of white robes.

  ‘I’d look out if I was you, Lady,’ the man shouted at Livia good-naturedly. ‘You know what’s coming!’

  Livia smiled and waved a thankyou for the warning. The six hired litter-bearers waiting for her stood stiffly to attention.

  ‘Where to this evening, Lady?’ asked their leader.

  ‘The Temple of the Great Mother.’

  The bearers raised the covered platform from the ground to the level of their knees, so that she could climb inside to recline for the short journey. But as Livia went to get in, a cowled beggar stepped out from the shade of a yew tree.

  ‘Alms for a forgotten man?’

  She froze at the thick, slurred voice of a drunkard, but managed to make a civil reply. ‘I haven’t forgotten you – and you’ve already known my charity.’

  The hermaphrodite kept his voice low. ‘You brought me charity, but you left me mystery. What was the meaning of your letter?’

  Livia had almost forgotten the letter by now, so disappointing was the day of the tomb. But now she wondered whether the hermaphrodite had since uncovered the vanished haruspex and was here to taunt her with it, so she didn’t flee from him or scream. There was still hope of finding the answers she sought. The hermaphrodite lifted his cowl so that she could see his broken, bloody face – and so he could see her flawless countenance in turn. He searched her shifting expression until Livia settled on one of polite bemusement.

  ‘I thought the meaning was very clear,’ Livia replied. ‘I have questions that I wish you to forward to the boy – if it’s true that you harbour him at all. I’m starting to doubt it.’

  His eyes bore into her but there was no evidence of either victory or guilt in my domina’s look; there was nothing to confirm that she knew the boy had gone missing.

  ‘You have a husband who has received a second chance with Octavian,’ the hermaphrodite said. ‘You have a duty to support him in his new rise.’

  ‘I’m here to greet him when he returns in the afternoons,’ Livia said. ‘How much more support could he need?’

  ‘You’re flippant with me – and offensive, girl.’

  ‘It’s not my intention.’ She made to get inside the litter as more of the white-robed Cerealia revellers rushed up the street from the Forum.

  ‘Look out – it’s coming this way!’ the women shouted.

  The hermaphrodite ignored them, focusing only on my domina. ‘Your letter was insolent.’

  ‘Why? I’m honouring my dead father’s wishes.’

  He gripped her hard by the shoulders, and the litter-bearers dropped the transport with a clatter, drawing short swords from their belts.

  ‘Who is this bastard, Lady?’ their leader demanded.

  But Livia waved them down. ‘I asked you to take my questions to the child,’ she whispered politely to the cowled one. ‘Have you done that for me yet?’

  The hermaphrodite’s breath was sour with wine. ‘The prophecies? Have you forgotten them now?’

  ‘I’ll never forget them. Now, answer my question.’

  ‘Why undo what the child foresaw?’

  ‘I undo nothing. My father is dead, and so is his interpretation of Thrasyllus’s words, that’s all.’

  ‘Thrasyllus named Tiberius Nero as the sire.’

  Livia gave that no acknowledgement. ‘Clearly you haven’t taken my intentions to the child at all. That disappoints me, but it’s your decision. Our renewed acquaintance is now ended, I think.’

  ‘There is no other interpretation to the boy’s words,’ the hermaphrodite rasped. ‘He spoke the Great Mother Cybele’s will.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true, then,’ Livia said, climbing into her litter as the bearers lifted it to knee-level again. When she was comfortably settled inside, they raised it to the height of their shoulders, and somewhere further down the hill panicked shouts erupted with the clatter of goods being upturned along shopfronts. Before Livia drew the curtain against the noise, she made a smile to the hermaphrodite as if the whole matter
was of no importance now. ‘I know nothing of all these things. I’m only a woman, remember.’ She couldn’t have been more defiant.

  Unable to do more, the angry hermaphrodite watched her litter ascend the Clivus Palatinus – the Palatine Hill Road. Preparing to steal down the hill again himself, the hermaphrodite suddenly saw what was causing the commotion. A terrified fox ran towards him with a flaming brand tied to its tail. The hermaphrodite shrieked in fright and looked for an escape, but the desperate creature saw only darkness and refuge beneath his voluminous robes.

  ‘Get it away!’ he screamed, flapping his arms to ward it off, but the flaming fox dived between his legs, only to emerge immediately, confused and no safer, on the other side of his robes.

  The joy of Cerealia was doubled for the already happy revellers when two blazing creatures ran together all the way to the Tiber. Afterwards, witnesses differed about whether the hapless beggar in black had actually been a man or woman.

  Swaying with the rhythm of six pairs of feet trudging perfectly in time, Livia sat upright in the litter with her knees drawn close to her chest. Her defiance with the cowled one had been for show; in truth, she was sick to her guts with the need to know whether the new path she had chosen was indeed the right one – the path that would lead to four mighty kings being born from her womb.

  Livia’s need to know was desperate now, with what the midwife had confirmed. Octavian’s child was growing inside her belly.

  It was not for many decades that I learned who actually took the haruspex. When it was revealed to me I was indeed surprised.

  With the sounds of Cerealia dying in the evening streets, a pigeon flapped desperately against the bars of the high, narrow window near the ceiling of little Thrasyllus’s cell. Then it fell back towards the floor where it hit the straw, exhausted. The pigeon flew up at the barred window again, as if noticing the possibility of escape for the very first time. Then it repeated the fall. Thrasyllus watched the panicked bird in its cycle of hope and despair. It wanted to escape this terrible place as much as he did. But that would only happen if the man allowed it.