Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  The older midwife gave Plancina a slap so vicious it sent her sprawling into the wash of Julia’s birth blood. Then, as though beating time on a drum, the old woman used the same hand to slap the sapphire-coloured boy upon the buttocks.

  Julia’s will left her; she could feel herself slipping into nothingness at the sight. The baby hung in the old woman’s hands inert. The older midwife slapped him again, harder – her aged flesh upon skin that was barely formed, an obscenity in the hush that fell over them. Plancina was frozen. The older midwife raised a hand to strike a final time when the younger midwife stopped her.

  There was nothing to say. The baby was laid gently upon a table.

  Julia observed the scene like some play at the theatre where she had been given seats in the back tier. She couldn’t hear the words because of howling wind, and the expressions on the actors’ masks were reduced by distance to simplistic smiles or frowns. She tried to tell them to speak up, to make things clearer, that she couldn’t understand the story. But the words wouldn’t form in her mouth.

  Then she saw an action that she did understand, that was unmistakable to her. She groaned with the words, unable to spit out a sound or a syllable that meant anything. Then they all saw at once what she was telling them: The blue little boy was breathing.

  Everything that follows of the story of Drusus I learned at the death bed of Apicata. She has not entered this history yet, but she will.

  At the moment Tiberius’s new son was ushered into the light, Drusus was taken towards the shades. Returning across the Rhine from an offensive against the Marcomanni tribe, Drusus’s horse lost its footing on a slope and fell heavily on its flank, crushing its rider beneath. The news was taken at once to Tiberius, who was leading an offensive elsewhere on the Rhine. He left his troops to the second-in-command and galloped for a full day and night, replacing his horse four times at the changing stations, until he came to Drusus’s camp.

  There his younger brother embraced him from his bed, and Tiberius saw how truly broken Drusus’s body was. His left leg had shattered at the thigh, the bone too splintered to be reset or braced.

  The physician led Tiberius aside. ‘I believe we can save him if we amputate the limb, Lord.’

  Tiberius was distraught. ‘It’s a death warrant. No-one could survive that.’

  ‘It’s been done in the arena; there are new procedures. I’d like to try.’

  ‘But the pain – why subject him to that only to have him die of it anyway?’

  The physician lowered his voice further. ‘I have a draught, Lord, made from an Eastern flower. It has … laudable qualities.’

  In the hard silence that followed the physician feared for his own life. He had overreached himself – he knew that as soon as he’d spoken – and now he waited for the sword-thrust or the blow to the head that would take him for so offending Tiberius. He glanced towards his assistant, a mere boy of eleven, who looked back at him with courage while fully understanding how their lives now hung in the balance. Then they both heard the faint murmur of the elder brother’s voice. Tiberius had his eyes closed and was praying to Mars.

  The physician made to excuse himself, stepping tactfully away and pushing the boy ahead. But Tiberius grasped him by the shoulder. ‘We’ll try it then.’ The physician’s relief was incalculable. Then it was replaced by a dread at having spoken so confidently. He had never performed this operation, only witnessed it.

  ‘Rome wants my brother to live,’ said Tiberius. ‘And I want it too – more than you can understand. Fail and both you and the boy will join him on his funeral pyre.’

  The physician struggled to keep his morning meal in his stomach, though his young assistant showed no reaction at all. ‘Prepare your draught then,’ said Tiberius.

  He returned to his brother. ‘This Greek can save you, Drusus. He’s a great physician. He has experience in the arena.’

  ‘Rest is all I need,’ said Drusus.

  Tiberius pressed a hand to his brother’s forehead. ‘Hasn’t the Greek told you of the state you’re in?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve told him how much better I feel too.’ Drusus motioned conspiratorially, ‘He wants to hack it off, you know.’

  ‘It’s a procedure that’ll save you. If it stays it’ll rot on you.’

  ‘Fuck him. It’s staying on. I feel exceptional.’ Drusus tried to rise and Tiberius saw the obscene bend in the upper leg, like a second knee, and heard the scrape of bone on broken bone. Drusus fell back on his bed, unable to get leverage.

  ‘You feel no pain?’

  ‘It’s the wine the lad gives me,’ said Drusus, pointing at the boy assistant. ‘You should try a drop. Nectar of the gods.’

  Tiberius wanted to knife the physician in his rage but didn’t for his brother’s sake. ‘You’ve doped him then already, Greek?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘It takes all pain away, Lord,’ the physician tried to explain.

  The boy chipped in. ‘He was in agony. We wanted to help him.’

  Tiberius ignored the child, rounding only on his master. ‘These indulgences are prohibited by the First Citizen. They destroy a man’s will. Those who swallow them never stop swallowing them. Don’t you know that?’

  The physician said nothing and Tiberius guessed a further truth. ‘You swallow them yourself.’ The drug alone, not the physician’s will, caused the Greek to beam happily in answer. But the boy remained serious and unsmiling.

  Tiberius breathed slowly for some more minutes. Then he said, ‘Give him more of the stuff. And give me some too. I want us all laughing like hyenas while you cut him.’

  Unwitting Drusus drank another cup and Tiberius sipped at his own. The wine almost overpowered whatever it was in the Eastern flower that took pain away, but in the aftertaste Tiberius detected something of its sickly sweetness. It was not unpleasant. The physician instructed the boy to prepare straps to restrict the blood while Tiberius sat and talked with his brother.

  For all the world they were back in Rome. The drug seeped deep into Drusus’s being, erasing his inhibitions and granting him the candour of a child. Tiberius felt a wave of uncharacteristic honesty washing over him too. He felt the need for a conversation he had never had with his brother, or indeed anyone, in his life.

  ‘Do you love our mother?’

  Drusus showed no surprise at the question. ‘Like I love no other woman.’

  Tiberius swilled the answer in his mouth with the wine. ‘Well, I hate her.’

  ‘That’s a very shocking thing to hear.’

  ‘Because of her contingency plans.’ Tiberius tried not to watch as the physician began to sharpen the blades of his amputation knives.

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Drusus.

  ‘You’ve never followed me. We’ve always walked side by side.’

  ‘That we have.’

  Tiberius looked at him with grim intensity. ‘But only by our mother’s design, Drusus. We’re her two contingency plans, both with the same purpose but always with the other in readiness if one fails. I mean, think about it – how can there really be two kings at once?’

  Drusus found this revelatory. ‘I’ve never looked at things in that way.’

  ‘Then you’ve had your mind on the German tribes too long. She’s thought of everything. If you come to a bad end, then I’ll take over, easy as can be. By the same degree, if my life string gets snipped sooner than I’d like, then you’ll be there to keep her happy.’

  The physician made the first deep slice in the flesh of Drusus’s thigh and the two brothers watched with complete detachment, as did the boy. Then something surged in Tiberius – an emotion he couldn’t name – feeling like it was happening in some other place. He took Drusus by the hand, drawing his attention from the physician’s sawing. ‘And what if there’re still the two of us when the time finally comes for action?’ he asked his brother. ‘What’s her plan for that?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Drusus. Then after a time he added, ‘I’d want yo
u to be chosen, I think.’

  Tiberius said nothing, but his face showed the profound resignation he had never allowed himself to express on this subject before.

  ‘What’s wrong? That doesn’t please you?’

  ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ said Tiberius. ‘I don’t know how I feel now I’ve drunk this wine and I didn’t know how I felt before it. I’ve never known. I’ve never questioned. Our mother’s plan has simply been a given in my life for as long as I can remember. Since the day the lightning bolt struck Jupiter.’

  The physician cut through the last of the flesh and Drusus’s leg came away in his hands. The boy quickly wrapped it in cloth, taking it aside, and Tiberius thought in passing how little blood flow there was from the stump. While the physician prepared to cauterise the wound by holding a torch to the raw flesh, Drusus seemed unaware, his attention solely on his brother. ‘But you must want it. It’s right to want it. It’s in our blood to want it,’ Drusus said.

  ‘Our blood is Claudian – the oldest house in the Republic. We toppled Rome’s kings. The Julians are upstarts next to us.’

  ‘The Julians are the future,’ said Drusus, and the smell of his searing flesh filled their nostrils. He gave a cry and the physician fell into Tiberius’s line of sight for the first time in what seemed like hours.

  ‘Careful, Greek,’ warned Tiberius.

  ‘Drink your wine, Lords,’ said the physician to both men, taking another sip himself. ‘It’s an excellent vintage. It comes from Chios, you know.’

  ‘Good Chian wine is not this sweet,’ said Drusus, ‘though I agree this stuff is glorious.’

  The torch had done its work, closing the wound and halting what little bloodflow there had been. In the trance of the Eastern flower, Tiberius’s thoughts wandered to Julia’s frantic acrobatics in the bedroom, her desperate desire to please him and his own selfish compliance. He thought of Vipsania’s approach to the marital bed; how she’d chastely lie with her legs apart, a cushion beneath her rump, staring intently at the ceiling, waiting without words for him to mount her. He thought of Julia’s appetite for exotic intercourse and her willingness to try anything and everything that he might find even fleetingly enticing. He thought of Vipsania’s quiet abhorrence of anything other than plain penetration, how her sex rose from the cushion as his intensity grew, how her legs rested upon his shoulders, the single sigh of pleasure she gave when he came. He thought of both women and knew beyond question which one he missed, and would always miss, until the day arrived when he drew his final breath.

  Drusus was speaking to him from somewhere far away – from another land, it seemed – a distance of such greatness that Tiberius couldn’t hope to traverse it in a lifetime. His brother was a tiny dot; a star in the sky, a grain of sand on the ground while he stood on top of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. He cupped his ear and tried to hear his brother. Drusus’s words bounced and fell, missing him entirely, their meaning lost in air. Tiberius studied the landscape all around him, which was not, he realised, a landscape at all but Drusus’s face, and his own face was only inches from his brother.

  ‘Our mother has another plan,’ said Tiberius, as a new thought filled his mind with such stunning clarity that it shone like gold. ‘This is the plan she’s never told us of, but it’s the plan of what must happen should the time for action come and we’re both still here.’

  Drusus was keen to hear it.

  ‘One brother must kill the other,’ said Tiberius.

  Drusus looked at the blanket the physician had placed over him to block his leg from view, but he could see that the shape of him was suddenly so wrong. He didn’t want to dwell on that now; his brother’s words were far more interesting. ‘Of course, that’d be it,’ he said. ‘What other way could there be?’

  ‘None,’ said Tiberius. ‘There can’t be two kings. It’s either that or civil war.’

  Drusus marvelled at the capacity of his mother – a mere woman – to think only of Rome.

  ‘Do you still want me to be chosen?’ asked Tiberius quietly.

  From the corner of his eye Drusus saw the fleeting figure of a girl. He spun his head towards the shadows of the tent to see who or what she was, but saw nothing. But when he turned away again she flitted to other edge of his peripheral vision, her bare feet not even touching the floor yet leaving earthy footprints as if she had.

  ‘Who are you?’ he called out.

  ‘You haven’t answered me, brother,’ said Tiberius. ‘Our mother’s plan can only be as I describe it. Do you still want me to be the one?’

  Suddenly the girl was with them, yet not with them, shrunken tiny as a bird behind Tiberius’s shoulder. Yet the older brother saw nothing. The smell of moist, rich soil was strong in Drusus’s nostrils, tinged with something unpleasant. Sulphur.

  ‘I’m Proserpina,’ she told him, and her tone was neither sombre nor embarrassed. Although she had a job to do, she was pleased to be doing it. Drusus was a handsome and noble prince of Rome, a welcome charge.

  ‘You must kill me,’ said Drusus to his brother.

  Tiberius shook his head. ‘No. I can never do that.’

  ‘Kill me if the time comes. If there’re still two of us, kill me. It’s what you must do to stop a civil war.’

  ‘I’d rather kill myself!’ shouted Tiberius, angry with him. ‘I love you more than anyone. I’ve prayed and prayed for your success. I’ve longed in my heart for you to achieve the greatness Rome can give you. I’ve begged the gods to let you outshine me in every way.’

  Drusus stared only at the tiny floating girl. ‘I thank you for that, brother, though I’m not sure if your prayers were answered. I’ll also thank you when I kill you for cowardice.’

  Tiberius was as hurt as a child and Proserpina chuckled at Drusus’s cleverness, winking at him – if only others could steer the future with such care in their final minutes.

  ‘What are you if you’re not a coward, Tiberius?’ Drusus asked. ‘Fate will hand us greatness – and hand greatness to the Claudians. Ours is the house that deserves it more than all of them – and you’ll shame seven hundred years of noble fathers by quailing. I’ll hack you into stewing meat and sing and dance while I do it.’

  The clouds cleared in Tiberius’s head. He lifted the wine cup to his lips but found it empty. More clarity was rushing in, though he tried to force it out again. It was not the inspired kind, the kind that gave the world new meaning. This clarity held only grim truth. Drusus’s voice had faded to a rasp; his skin was bleached of colour. His wound had barely bled because there was so little blood left within him. Why hadn’t Tiberius seen this as it was happening before his eyes?

  ‘Please, brother,’ Drusus murmured. ‘Promise you’ll kill me. When the time comes, kill me swiftly and with honour. Then claim your glory for Rome.’

  ‘I promise then,’ wept Tiberius at last.

  He needn’t have made the commitment.

  Drusus had already given himself to Death’s pretty queen.

  The boy assistant’s execution was postponed. First, Tiberius vowed that Drusus’s funeral pyre would be lit in Rome, not the Rhine; therefore the lad couldn’t be thrown on top of it to burn just yet. Second, Tiberius craved more of the Eastern flower and only the boy knew how to acquire and prepare it.

  In the first hours after Drusus’s death, the physician’s immediate supply was given over to Tiberius at the point of his sword. He was so distraught in his grief that the sword slipped and the physician’s throat was slit at the collar bone. No arteries were severed but the physician faced the horror of sewing up his own flesh. He fled into Gaul. Tiberius sent a brigade in pursuit and the physician was found shivering in a haystack by week’s end. If he had faced Tiberius’s wrath, as the boy had, then his death might also have been postponed. But he had chosen to run and for that he was crucified.

  In the initial period of the physician’s disappearance, it became apparent that the boy was also a taker of the draughts. Whether the physician h
ad been aware of this or not was unclear, but regardless, Tiberius cared nothing for anyone else’s need. The Eastern flower was no longer the boy’s to depend upon and that was the end of it. Tiberius consumed his own draughts slowly while watching the boy twist and sweat in front of him, his pathetic pleas at first whispered, then shouted as the hours went on.

  But the boy found relief when Tiberius finally fell asleep after a full week’s wakefulness. He stole the powdered flower from the purse that the grieving brother wore. But the effects were ruined for the boy by the fear of Tiberius examining the purse and seeing the tiny decrease in its contents. Paranoia consumed him so utterly that when Tiberius awoke the boy confessed everything. He was more relieved by unburdening than he had been in drinking the draught.

  The powdered flower had made Tiberius nothing if not unpredictable. Rather than maiming or blinding the boy, as would be expected, Tiberius doled out portions to him and clasped him to his chest as a friend.

  The draught intensified Tiberius’s emotions. His grief indescribable, with the powder it was all-consuming. So much did it fill him that he rode it for hours at a time like a wave, cresting it; he could view the world clearly from its zenith. Though the goal thrust upon him was unwanted, he was now his mother’s lone future king. This made him a man above others. And as much as Drusus would be honoured by a funeral in Rome, Tiberius himself would have to be recognised for who he now was. This required a considered approach.

  When the embalmers had finished their work and Drusus – with his leg re-attached – was ready for transportation, Tiberius contrived a solution. He would accompany Drusus’s remains entirely on foot, a distance of well over a thousand miles. The boy applauded this noble gesture of mourning with enthusiasm, and was only slightly less vociferous when Tiberius insisted he join him.

  As they settled into sleep the boy expressed his one reservation: the Eastern flower was celebrated for its relaxing effects upon the body. Such a journey would be made doubly arduous by continuing to consume the draughts. But Tiberius would not hear of discontinuing his consumption, and well remembering the agony of being denied the draughts himself, the boy couldn’t bear the idea either.