It was drawn to reveal Rutilia.
Perhaps only two or three years older than his own seventeen years, she was vulgarly voluptuous, with bulbous breasts and thighs, spread-legged and nude upon a dining couch. I saw her too and forced my face to betray nothing. The giant had shown a slave’s flattery when declaring her beautiful.
Tiberius Nero was at a loss for words. ‘Well then … Indeed.’
‘I have been widowed two months,’ Rutilia began. Her voice was thick with intoxicants. ‘Two wasted months when no man has taken me. I can’t stand it any more.’
Tiberius Nero was riveted, although he suspected her claim unlikely with the youthful gladiator in the household. She sprawled onto her belly and raised a soft and yielding rump to him. ‘I have a pain – deep inside me,’ she said. ‘Won’t you give me a cream to soothe it?’
Tiberius Nero bit his cheeks to stop from laughing at the ham-fisted seduction. Yet his own period of unwanted abstinence had stretched longer than the widow’s. His needs were as great.
‘You speak your wants very clearly. It is good to be sure of such things.’
‘Just fuck me,’ said Rutilia.
He found her not in any way enticing but still managed to achieve arousal and placed himself between her porcine buttocks. Rutilia reached ecstasy at once and, by all appearances, stayed there while Tiberius Nero spun her like a sow on a spit. A sustained performance was unnecessary in the circumstances, yet Tiberius Nero was unable to release. His thrusting took him to the edge and pitched him back again, not letting him cross the precipice. The engorged widow slapped her palms on the couch in fever.
Tiberius Nero tried to remember Livia when she had first been given to him. She had been so beautiful: slim-hipped and graceful, chaste in the intercourse he was eventually able to achieve; her eyes had been closed when he first eased her apart like a bean pod. From then on he had felt heated desire for his wife and had always reached a climax with her.
It was a shock to Tiberius Nero when he saw my domina herself in the shadows. He cried out in alarm, but Rutilia only echoed it with a yell of her own, sweat slicking from her back. I glanced to where he stared but didn’t react. Tiberius Nero squinted into the gloom and saw that it was not his former wife standing there at all, but an attractive slave-girl who bore a strange resemblance to Livia – at least in the half-light. She held his gaze, smiling in a knowing way as Tiberius Nero focused on her semi-clad body. The sight of her renewed his intensity and in a piercing surge he spent himself.
Exhausted, he fell among the cushions, avoiding the widow’s arms. He kept his eyes upon the slave-girl. ‘She’s a fine ornament to your home,’ he said. ‘Did you find her here or in Rome?’
‘Neither. She was a gift from a friend. I like beauty, you see.’
‘Yes, I do see …’ Tiberius Nero threw his arms wide in a stretch and was shocked anew to strike the wide-eyed face of a child. ‘I had no idea we’d been entertainment to so many,’ he exclaimed.
Rutilia sat upright. ‘Plancina! This is mother’s private time. How dare you spy on me?’
‘How else am I expected to learn?’ the girl whined, rubbing her cheek. She was exceedingly plain.
‘Take her to her sleeping chamber and bolt the door,’ Rutilia ordered the watching slave-girl. If Tiberius Nero hadn’t lost himself dreaming of Livia again, he would have found the child’s intensity disturbing, just as I did. Plancina’s eyes bore into him as she was led away, a look of such grim enthusiasm to them as to make her even less endearing.
Tiberius Nero felt no desire to service the widow a second time, and Rutilia made no overtures to achieve it. But he couldn’t take his thoughts from her slave-girl. He sent me to Rutilia with a hopeful note: Does the girl have a sister?
He received her reply: She is an orphan without siblings.
He sent me with another message: I am very taken by your slave. Would you consider selling her?
The reply was slow in returning: She is far too precious to me.
Tiberius Nero mulled over the words and decided they didn’t constitute an outright refusal. He tried again: Precious jewels demand a lofty price. What is yours for the girl?
He was answered with silence.
The week ran its course from the day of the Moon to the day of the Sun, and Tiberius Nero clung to hope. But by the day of Venus in the second week he was in a welter of sexual frustration. ‘Could this girl really be beyond purchase?’ he asked me.
I replied that I couldn’t imagine how any servant could be beyond the reach of another master’s money.
‘Can this widow be so rich that she would refuse any offer?’ Tiberius Nero asked me next.
I offered no further opinion.
All Tiberius Nero knew was that he must own the lovely girl – for then he would own a new Livia. On the subsequent day of the Sun he penned a begging letter to Rutilia for me to deliver: I am bewitched by your slave. I abandon dignity and beg you to name your price. I am a wealthy man. My funds are unlimited. Just as he was sealing the shameful papyrus, I ran into his study to announce that the widow’s messenger had arrived. Tiberius Nero flew to the waiting ex-gladiator, stashing the letter inside his toga.
‘You have a reply for me, Kitten?’
The giant did: Please visit me today at the fourth hour. I will be enjoying the newly ripe figs from my garden. Perhaps you will come away with new fruit of your own?
Tiberius Nero threw his begging letter to the kitchen fire, relieved he hadn’t been so reduced as to send it.
At the fourth hour we walked to Rutilia’s home, Tiberius Nero feeling youthful and enlivened in the mid-morning sun. At the door we were greeted again by the ex-gladiator, who, for the first time yet, had a smile for Tiberius Nero, not as slave to master but as man to man.
‘You are fond of me today, Kitten?’
‘I am happy that you will also be happy today,’ the giant replied. But only I saw that the lad’s smirk was sly and knowing. Tiberius Nero rejoiced in his heart that success was clearly so imminent.
We were led through the house to the widow’s garden. As promised, she was arranged upon a chair with a long length of cane, pointing individually to the drooping fruit of her fig tree. Two boys with ladders duly plucked the selected fruit and placed them in a bowl before her.
‘Ah, Tiberius Nero,’ said Rutilia. ‘You’ve been so persistent. All last week I was fearful you would fall into a decline with this request of yours. I was unable to reply. I hope you didn’t think I was tormenting you.’
Tiberius Nero was happy to play any little game of her choosing. ‘My decline was very threatening but your letter this morning saved me. I’m here to discuss a sale, Rutilia.’
‘I’m glad.’
Movement behind the potted trees at the garden’s edge drew our attention to the watching slave-girl. She was moving with stealth, a smile flicking across her lips, of which her mistress was apparently unaware. Falling into a shaft of sunlight through the leaves she flicked the shoulder of her gown and her breasts were revealed in splendour. At once she was covered again as she faded into the shade.
‘How much?’ asked Tiberius Nero, impatient now.
Rutilia tossed a fig to him, so ripe and full that it split in his hands. ‘Why don’t you taste it?’ she suggested. ‘You’ll be amazed. I bought this house purely because they told me it grew the best figs in Campania. I wasn’t lied to.’
Tiberius Nero popped the luscious pulp in his mouth. It was true. It melted on his tongue, slipping down his throat like sweetened wine. She tossed another to him.
‘Your price, if you please,’ he said with his mouth full.
Rutilia looked with affection to the boys picking fruit. ‘One hundred thousand sestertii.’
The fig stuck in his throat. The price was exorbitant, though he had half-expected as much. ‘Seventy thousand,’ he replied, bargaining as he would at the marketplace.
The widow stayed gazing at her boys. ‘One hundred and fifty.’
The breath left him. ‘Are you unfamiliar with the process of haggling?’
‘Not at all,’ said Rutilia, licking fig juice from her fingers, ‘I am also very knowledgeable on supply and demand. One hundred and eighty.’
Tiberius Nero knew then that for every counter offer he made she would only raise her price further. In the garden shade the slave-girl stood as still as the statues, her gaze fixed upon him, her eyes blazing bright with the promise of carnality. She wanted to be bought by this dominus.
‘Worth every coin,’ said Tiberius Nero. ‘You have a sale.’
The widow glowed with pleasure and Tiberius Nero saw again that her unlovely daughter was among us, standing just behind the slave in the greenery. He felt compassion for the child.
‘Will little Plancina miss her friend?’ he asked.
Plancina was of no consequence to her mother. ‘I’ll give her the giant,’ said Rutilia.
Tiberius Nero ran home through the streets of the resort town with an energy that had not been his since before the proscriptions. I barely managed to keep up with him; lust fuelled the speed of his steps. The slave-girl would be sent within the hour in exchange for the money. Rutilia had insisted he take her remaining picked figs, so they were placed for him in a basket which he swung by his side as he ran, caring nothing for whether he looked foolish carrying a slave’s item.
He reached his front door and shouted over his shoulder to me that his son was to be taken to visit Quintus’s boy for the afternoon. Tiberius Nero wanted the house to himself so that his new possession could shout loud and long in her passion. I dutifully took little Tiberius to play with his friend in the house next door, but I didn’t stay. I returned and waited quietly in the atrium, staring at the Timanthes.
Tiberius Nero emptied his treasury and was relieved to find he had just enough cash to cover the payment. It would have been humiliating to delay proceedings while he went to obtain credit from a lender.
The drips of the water-clock were unendurable to him as he waited for the slave-girl’s arrival. With no window to the street or any other vantage point to see the slave approaching, he could only wait for her knock, eating the widow’s figs as distraction. His belly grew tight as a drum with them, and he was just on the point of dozing in the warmth of his heated dining room when the pounding on the door came.
A rush of anticipation made him lurch upright, but immediately his head swam. Then his balance quaked and he tried to steady himself. The sharp return of the palpitations threw him back in the couch. Dismayed, he clutched at his chest – he had thought he was free of this weakness. Tiberius Nero told himself that if he just lay still, the irregularity would pass, as it always did. The pounding on the door came a second time. Tiberius Nero had told the other slaves that he alone would answer the expected knock – but now he feared what would happen if he tried to stand up again.
‘Answer the door!’ he yelled. ‘Send the visitor through to me.’
I was the slave who obeyed his order.
With every shred of his will Tiberius Nero forced himself to sit upright, pulling cushions behind his back as props. Then he scoured a napkin across his brow and tossed it, pasting on a smile that he hoped was confident.
A waft of orange blossom reached his nostrils as she entered. ‘My beauty …’ Tiberius Nero was awed. He felt his penis thickening beneath his tunica – but with it came the terrible beating in his chest that made his eyes lose focus.
Behind the slave-girl followed the giant youth holding a box intended to contain the purchase price. And behind him came the child, Plancina. The slave-girl’s form shifted and shivered like a ghost’s. Her face was lost, just a smudge beneath her veil.
‘You have come to say goodbye to your slave?’ Tiberius Nero tried to be polite with the strange child.
‘No,’ Plancina replied. ‘I have come to see how it happens.’
‘It?’ said Tiberius Nero. ‘What is it, girl?’
‘You’ll know.’
The thumping of his heart was in his head now, his skull ringing, his eyes filling with running perspiration. ‘The money is there,’ Tiberius Nero said to the giant. ‘I’m sure your mistress wouldn’t wish you to insult me by counting it.’
‘No, domine.’ The gladiator scooped the mass of coin into the box he’d brought.
‘Kiss your slave goodbye now,’ Tiberius Nero said to the child. But Plancina didn’t move a muscle. ‘And now, my love,’ he turned to the slave, ‘it is time to unwrap my purchase.’
Though he didn’t know it, his voice had grown so faint that they couldn’t hear him. But the slave knew his intention and, slowly teasing him, she unwound her veil and dropped it to the floor.
‘The rest of it,’ said Tiberius Nero – in his mind alone.
Martina unfastened her gown and let it fall with her veil. She was displayed for him; she was his new Livia – yet so much more beautiful and devotedly loving, and with so much more desire for him in her eyes. Tiberius Nero took a painful, rattling breath – the croak of a toad in his lungs – and flicked his hand at the wrist, unable to ask her to turn around with his voice.
Yet Martina understood him, and as she slowly began to spin, the final sound that Tiberius Nero heard was the giggle of the child Plancina, followed by his last ever intake of breath. The slave that he had purchased for one hundred and eighty thousand sestertii was misshapen, deformed. Between her shoulderblades arose a hairy, blackened mound the size of a loaf of bread, cracked and dry like the skin of a bladder left to rot in the sun.
Martina’s foul and disgusting abhorrence was fully revealed at last.
It should have fallen to me, as Tiberius Nero’s closest slave, to begin the conclamatio. I should have wailed and wept, and blown upon horns, announcing my dominus’s death to the world. I should have given him my extremum vale – my final farewell – before washing and anointing his corpse and dressing him in fine silk clothes. I should have placed my dominus on a bier and seen that he was carried to his final resting place. I should have hired a procession of actors and torchbearers, all wearing the wax masks of his famous Claudian ancestors. I should have sacrificed a pig and offered purifying prayers as I lit my dominus’s funeral pyre. And afterwards, I should have gathered up what remained of his bones and buried them, so that Mother Earth could once again embrace his ashen body.
But I did none of these things.
As Tiberius Nero’s corpse began to bloat and stink in the dining room I stared at the Timanthes and thought of how I could prove to my lost domina that I was truly sorry for ever having failed her.
I stared at the mother. I stared at the son. I had long realised that they were Cybele and Attis, of course. And now I knew what had to be done.
The little boy Livia clutched to her chest was her own, yet not her own, for he had grown so much in the months since my domina had last kissed him that his features had changed. His face had character now; the soft unformed dough of him had hardened into someone new. She gazed at little Tiberius and saw a glimpse of the man he would one day become; the man who would always love her; the son who would thank her for all she had risked for him.
Tiberius gazed back, and although Livia thought she saw the truth of him emerging on his face, she was blind to what was growing in his heart. He was his mother’s son – she just didn’t know how much so yet.
‘Where is my father? Where has he gone?’ he asked.
Livia wrestled with a choice of lies, and then discarded them when she saw the way her son’s eyes narrowed. He already expected bad news.
‘He has died,’ she said simply.
He fought it manfully until his little face creased and then split, letting out tears. Livia held him to her chest again and felt the pain of his grief. She reflected on her own lack of emotion and congratulated herself on it, until a wave of deep feeling took her unawares. She gasped with it, surprised, and then succumbed to tears of her own. It wasn’t grief for the death of her former husband – it
was sharp-edged guilt at the pain she had brought to his son. Tiberius had lost a father who loved him and had gained another who, at best, could only ever view him with affection.
When their emotions had ebbed a little, Livia stood and held Tiberius by the hand. She took a final look around the interior of the Herculaneum house, which she had never much liked. She wouldn’t miss it. She turned towards the front door and saw the silhouette of a man watching her. She smiled respectfully.
Quintus stepped forward, allowing her to see his face now.
‘Well then,’ Livia said. ‘I must return to Rome now.’
Quintus said nothing and she saw the deep loathing that he struggled to conceal. But she wasn’t bothered by it. ‘Is that hatred on your face for me, Quintus?’
He didn’t compose himself.
She studied him. ‘I don’t think it is – not most of it, anyway. A tiny bit of hatred you hold for me, but the larger amount is all for yourself. Am I right, Quintus? You hate yourself for false friendship? Those lies you told to make him visit “Rutilia”? In case you meet her in the street, you should know that her real name is Lollia. She’s a great friend of mine.’
Still Quintus said nothing, but Livia was moved to see how accurate she was. ‘It lessens in time, they say, but I believe it never does. How can it? We’re not monsters. What we do, we do for our children.’
A tear slid down Quintus’s cheek. Livia stepped forward and wiped it away with her fingers for him. ‘Find what comfort you can elsewhere,’ she whispered. ‘Your little boy will be glad of the value this house will bring to his inheritance. That brings me comfort too – he is a beautiful child, a credit to you – I’m happy that I can give it to you as thanks.’
Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves Page 19
