Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  Fortifying himself with an added cupful, he stole away to the boar-worshipping druid who was the flower’s secret supplier. The boy told of the physician’s demise and explained the problem. He then suffered through a long and violent reply from the Gaul, who was a guardian of sacred secrets. The druid was unable to share his knowledge for fear of the Great Boar’s wrath.

  The boy was patient, suspecting this to be a performance, and indeed, when the display had ended, the druid and the boy shared another draught together and the druid produced a new powder, this time from the West and made from a pungent tuber. The price was prohibitive but the boy would have paid with his body if asked.

  At their dawn departure, Tiberius and the boy swigged from two large cups: the first containing their favoured draught, the second their new brew. The results were as fearsome as they were extraordinary. They felt as if they haemorrhaged serenity, while at the same time they were filled with a soaring resolve, vigorous and uncompromising, for their task.

  They achieved thirty miles on the first day; on the second they neared forty. On the fifth they lost two of the corpse-bearers. The first went down a slope off the side of the road to urinate and was found minutes later dead; the second suffered a seizure during the midday meal and had to be culled when he failed to emerge from it. Tiberius had brought reserve slaves for such an eventuality and two others immediately stepped up.

  By the tenth day, Tiberius had worn through his boot soles but failed to notice until nightfall, when the boy saw his bloodied heels. After bandaging and washing his feet, the boy tried to advise Tiberius against walking on them immediately, but Tiberius wouldn’t listen. He felt no pain. Nor did the boy. His own boots fell apart on the cobbles on the twelfth day.

  On the stretch that took them through a narrow alpine pass, they lost four large food carts and the oxen. The accompanying legionaries tried to apprise Tiberius of the circumstances of the first cart’s loss but he was deaf to their words, never slowing his pace. With the loss of the second, a centurion tried to explain the calamity but still Tiberius would neither see nor hear him. The losses that same afternoon of the third and fourth carts were not reported to him at all.

  By sunset it was clear that there was not enough food for each man. Tiberius roused enough to solve the problem: he wouldn’t eat and neither would the slaves. What food remained was for the soldiers and the boy. The boy refused his. With no way-stations, villages or farms in sight, this situation was unrelieved for two more days, by which time a dozen slaves were dead and the platform bearing Drusus’s corpse was being carried by legionaries.

  As the procession entered Italy, they passed more towns for each milestone. Word of their journey preceded them and crowds began to line sections of the Via Flaminia. With each new town the crowds grew larger. On the second day of this phenomenon, the impact of the watching populace was such that Tiberius actually noticed. He stopped dead in his steps and the following procession nearly ran him down. All around him people cried at the sight of the older brother’s grief for the younger.

  With the compounding effects of the double-draughts he took day after day, and the ceaseless drive they gave him, Tiberius’s mind was flushed of all rational thought. He was a dumb beast, knowing only the road and nothing else. It had been a week since he had even remembered his dead brother. The sight of the weeping people made him turn around and regard Drusus’s corpse with new discovery.

  The bearers had stumbled many times on the journey. With the slaves long dead, the legionaries now organised the task among themselves, no longer even consulting Tiberius. In one fall the corpse’s shattered leg had detached itself again, spilling over a bridge and into the River Arnius. At first the soldiers had attempted to hide the loss by substituting a log in its place. But when a later fall saw the log also lost, they gave up the ruse.

  But Tiberius had known and seen none of this – and he did not see it now. All he could see were the two aureus coins on Drusus’s eyes, each with their profile of Octavian. He placed a hand on his brother’s cheek. The sun had taken the chill from it, but the flesh was hard as wood.

  Tiberius fell into tears. ‘My brother is gone.’

  The crowd had hushed in the moment but now erupted in wails and screams. Divine intervention was begged for, to raise Drusus from the dead. Horses were cursed and struck for their treachery in breaking Drusus’s thigh. Owners of German slaves were denounced as traitors to the house of the Julii.

  Tiberius’s tears, now they were flowing again, could not be stopped. His weeping continued as he left one town and entered another. He wept without sobbing, without a tremor in his voice; only his eyes showed the grief, streaming and dripping with tears.

  The boy begged Tiberius to drink more water in addition to the draughts. Crying was causing him to dehydrate faster than he had been with just his sweat. But Tiberius refused the water and his head began to throb as if struck by hammers. He relished the pain – it was the first he had felt since starting his journey. The draughts removed all other feeling, but the throes of his head wouldn’t cease. He clung to them as something dimly remembered from a time long past, something real.

  On the final day of the journey Tiberius awoke before dawn to find himself alone. He reached for the powder purse at his waist. It was gone.

  He flew into a rage and stumbled from his tent, wanting nothing except his draughts. There was not a living man to answer to him. All around him were corpses. It took Tiberius many moments to comprehend that they had been set upon by bandits. The broken men had been unable to defend themselves, felled in a ring around Drusus’s platform. The few items of value they still had with them had been looted, and with them the purse. The bandits had thought Tiberius already dead as he slept. The aureus coins had been snatched from his brother’s eyes.

  When the boy found Tiberius, his strange weeping had long ceased. Wanting only to take his mind from the draughts, Tiberius had tried to fashion new coins from metal, but could find no metal or any implements to shape it. The boy poured the powdered flower into a cup, added wine, and then added powder from the druid’s tuber. Once he’d gulped it down, Tiberius’s mind knitted back together well enough for him to see this for the miracle that it was.

  The boy explained: when the bandits came, like Tiberius, he’d been so fast asleep that they thought him dead. But unlike Tiberius, he’d awoken when one of the attackers stole the purse. He followed the thief in darkness and eventually found the man tentatively sticking a wetted finger into the pouch; he was all alone and had lost his colleagues.

  The boy knew he could persuade the man that the powder had no value – or failing that, he could beat him in one-on-one combat. But Tiberius stopped the tale before it reached its unlikely climax. He knew it for the lie it was. The boy had stolen the purse as soon as he heard the attack start. Exposed, the boy again begged for his life, and again Tiberius was forgiving. He needed the boy to help him complete what he had begun.

  When the two of them reached the outskirts of Rome, the cheering began. Cradling Drusus’s corpse between them on a stretcher, they pounded the road with all the vigour the remaining powders provided. They left nothing in the purse, it was all inside them. As they neared the first fields of ancestral tombs, they saw that the people were standing on top of the monuments. The road took them past hovels and huts, and the occupants threw spring blossom.

  As they entered the Servian Walls, the crowd swelled to a mass and the cheers to a roar. Though they were only two, covered in filth, bleeding, bruised and unrecognisable with the waxy corpse carried between them, they were titans in the eyes of Rome, their journey legend already.

  Tiberius and the boy reached their journey’s end at the golden milestone at the base of the Temple of Saturn – the start and end point for every Roman road. They placed Drusus gently upon the flagstones, acknowledged the crowd and then embraced each other. As he held the boy tightly, Tiberius believed he saw the face of graceful Vipsania smiling at him from among the thr
ong. The roar dropped away until there was no sound at all.

  ‘I still love you,’ Vipsania said, clear and true in the silence, ‘and I always will.’

  ‘I left you for Rome’s sake,’ answered Tiberius. ‘There was no love in it. I’ll always love only you, my sweet.’

  The crowd’s roar returned and Vipsania vanished in the clamour. Tiberius turned back to the boy and knew that his young body was once again craving the draughts beyond measure.

  ‘We’ve enjoyed the last of the flower,’ said Tiberius.

  ‘I’ll find more for us, Lord,’ the boy vowed. ‘It’ll not be hard. Leave it to me.’

  But Tiberius stopped him. ‘My dependency upon you and the powder now ends.’

  The boy paled, then buckled at the knees. He tried to right himself but could not. Instead Tiberius helped him to his feet. ‘You’re a lad of great courage and resourcefulness, a pride to any father. But it’s wrong for a man of my position to rely upon you as I have.’

  ‘I understand,’ said the boy, struggling to show that courage again.

  ‘It’s better fitting that you rely upon me – at least until you become a man.’

  The boy was confused, so Tiberius was kindly. ‘You’ll join my household. Not as a slave, but as a free child. You’ll continue your education in medicine, or any other art you might choose in its place. You’ve earned this.’

  The boy was overwhelmed but managed to keep his wits about him. ‘I want to follow in your footsteps, as I already have on our long walk together.’

  Tiberius was moved by this and finally thought to ask the question that he had never bothered asking the boy before. ‘What is your name, lad?’

  ‘Sejanus,’ the boy told him.

  Fordicia

  April, 9 BC

  One month later: Pannonia is subdued and

  incorporated into the Roman Empire

  Tiberius fell into an illness that was protracted and agonising. His symptoms were widely and correctly reported as excessive sweating, seizing chills, stabbing pains and fits of ranting followed by days on end of shallow slumber. Throughout his suffering Tiberius received not a single visit from his wife or mother. Only Castor, his son, was his constant companion. But the first-born child was bothered by the presence of the strange boy that his father had brought home on the heroic walk with him.

  Stranger still to Castor was the knowledge that his father and this boy shared the same malady. Their symptoms were identical, yet not contagious, for none of the slaves or even Castor himself developed them. Furthermore, Tiberius refused the advice of any physician, claiming that Sejanus alone held knowledge of the sickness and its cure. But it seemed to Castor that there was no knowledge and certainly no practicable cure. His father and the boy ate little food, drank only water, and never left his father’s suite to see the sun, the city, or any member of the family. They took no medicine or exercise, and made no sacrifices to gods.

  There were important developments in Rome that Tiberius needed to be apprised of, and it worried Castor that it had fallen to him, only a boy, to bring matters to his father’s attention. Yet no-one else seemed to care. On the occasions when Castor tried to tell his father what he must be told, Tiberius could not be reached, though Castor sat facing him directly. His father seemed lost – in some other land.

  Part of the purpose of Castor’s daily visits was to give his father letters, always from the same person. Drusus’s grieving widow, Antonia, sent long missives to her brother-in-law that sometimes sent Tiberius into tears, and other times into peals of laughter. Castor knew that Antonia was shut away in her rooms too. He hoped that her letters to his father also held good wishes from other family members.

  The morning came when Castor knew that his father must be made to hear the news, no matter what. It would be all over Rome by the end of the Festival of Tellus. As pontifex maximus, Octavian was already at the Temple of Vesta sacrificing a pregnant cow to the earth deity, and he would then supervise the burning of the calf foetus. With the ashes to be combined with the dried blood from the tail of last year’s Equirria horse, Castor expected his grandfather to be occupied for only a narrow window of time. Then the announcement would be made.

  To Castor the news was good, and he was happy for those who would benefit from it. But he couldn’t guess his father’s reaction. He might be pleased, he might not. Regardless, Castor knew that Tiberius must be informed ahead of the world, and he arrived at his father’s suite at the second hour after sunrise to do this.

  The boy Sejanus was returning from the lavatory. This was a sign of improvement; Tiberius and the boy had previously emptied their bowels and bladders in the very beds they lay in. Sejanus nodded respectfully to Castor and attempted to return to the suite. But Castor blocked him.

  ‘We haven’t spoken much since you joined my father,’ said Castor.

  There was an edge to the son that Sejanus didn’t like. He was older than Castor by several years, although they were similar in build and height. But Castor had every other advantage. ‘If we haven’t spoken it wasn’t meant as some insult,’ said Sejanus. ‘I’ve been ill.’

  ‘Are you better now?’

  ‘I feel today that I am,’ said Sejanus, honestly.

  ‘Good. And what about my father?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  Castor gave him nothing, looking on coldly. ‘And what about your own father, Sejanus? Where is he?’

  Sejanus wouldn’t give Castor the pleasure of seeing him look shamed by this question. ‘I have no father,’ he said.

  ‘You are a bastard, then?’

  ‘I’m alone. I don’t know who my parents are or were. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I do,’ said Castor. ‘You’re a slave.’

  Sejanus didn’t show the deep anger he felt. ‘I’m not a slave,’ he said finally. ‘I was an apprentice to the Greek physician as a freeborn child. I’m Italian. My status has been recognised by your father. I’m free – I’m no-one’s slave.’

  Castor had flaunted his supremacy and needed nothing more now. ‘My mistake,’ he said. He could afford to be welcoming – or rather, he could afford to make a show of it. ‘We’ll be friends then, Sejanus? What do you say to that?’

  Sejanus said what he could only say. ‘I’d like that.’

  As Castor let Sejanus enter the room ahead of him he felt a stab of guilt. It was not in his nature to treat another person cruelly. The boy had endured a great ordeal with his father, and for all Castor knew, Sejanus had enabled Tiberius to complete it. It was wrong to dislike the boy. Castor promised himself he would make a genuine effort to befriend Sejanus when this crisis had passed.

  They found Tiberius awake.

  ‘Father, you look much improved,’ said Castor brightly, ‘Sejanus is improved too.’

  Tiberius tried to focus on the boys, each a mirror of the other in their encouraging expressions.

  Castor smiled to Sejanus, ‘There is news I must tell my father, important news. Would you leave us for a while?’

  Sejanus flicked his eyes at Tiberius. ‘If your father wishes it.’

  But Tiberius hadn’t heard. ‘Why is there no sound of the baby?’ he asked his son.

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Your brother, the new baby. Why have I heard nothing from him in all the days I’ve been inside here?’

  Castor paused and cast his eyes at Sejanus again, who was now looking at Tiberius intently, equally as interested in the answer. ‘Would you like to see my new baby brother?’ Castor asked his father.

  Tiberius thought about it for a moment or two. ‘Yes, I would. I’ve not seen the child at all.’

  ‘Neither have I, Father.’ Castor decided not to risk summoning the slaves to dress Tiberius because it would give him too much time to change his mind. ‘He’s being nursed in Grandmother Livia’s rooms. That’s probably why you haven’t heard him.’ Castor guided his father’s right arm into a robe, and tried to hide his discomfort when Sejanus assis
ted Tiberius’s left. All that mattered was that Tiberius was leaving the room at last – it would make him more receptive for the news.

  Tiberius tried to place his baby son’s location in some kind of perspective. ‘Why isn’t he with your stepmother, Julia? Why does your grandmother have him?’

  This was something Castor didn’t know. His assumption had been that Julia was in fragile health following the birth. Besides, today was a day when she’d be preoccupied with other matters. ‘Come and see him,’ Castor said, sidestepping the whole issue. ‘Grandmother will be so happy to see you well again.’

  Tiberius allowed himself to be led along the corridor by the two boys. Sejanus had no idea of the route but was at pains to make it seem that he did. Castor wanted to push him aside, or at least order him to walk behind them, but he was wary of doing anything that might cause Tiberius to change his mind and return to his rooms. And it was clear that Tiberius found the boy’s presence calming somehow, although that in itself was very irksome to Castor.

  ‘I should’ve heard him wailing even if he was inside my mother’s room,’ Tiberius mumbled. ‘Have I been so ill that I was deaf too?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ said Castor simply. But with the doubt planted in his head, he now realised that he had never heard the baby crying either. He wondered why.

  They reached the guarded doors to Livia’s suite and Castor waited for his father to say something to gain them admittance. But he didn’t say anything – he simply stared at the panelling.

  ‘The Lord Tiberius is here to see my brother,’ Castor said to the Praetorians after a moment. One of the guards slipped inside the door without response, leaving the other standing there awkwardly.

  ‘Is my grandmother not receiving visitors?’ Castor asked, confused.

  ‘Just a moment, Lords,’ said the guard apologetically.

  But Tiberius didn’t even seem aware of him. ‘Mother?’ he called inside. He pushed open the door.