Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  I tapped on the other side of the door. ‘Do you need assistance, mistress?’

  ‘I’ll be with you, shortly, Iphicles,’ Agrippina called out to me, betraying nothing by her voice. ‘Attend to the Senator’s wife.’

  I refrained from revealing that I was unsure where Plancina had taken herself within the temple.

  Agrippina knew that Piso wanted to flaunt whatever advantage he thought he had – and she would not give him satisfaction, though it tortured her. Eventually Piso simply couldn’t stand her silence.

  ‘Well? No interest to know how I’ve been favoured?’

  Her eyes raked his with a blazing hatred but she said nothing.

  ‘You bitch, it eats you alive!’ he laughed. ‘Let me ease your pains, Agrippina: Tiberius asked me to keep my attention on your husband’s performance as he tours his little comedies through the East. I’m to guide him in the Ways of the Fathers.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘No. But perhaps I euphemise?’ Piso shoved his face next to hers to sting her with the very worst he could. ‘He has no faith in your husband’s abilities, you see. More crushing for you still – he knows Germanicus is a fraud. The First Citizenship will never belong to your husband, Lady. Never. Nor will it belong to you.’

  She kicked him viciously in a shin, but he snatched her arm and jerked it so that she span from her balance. Then he pinned her against the wall.

  ‘Please spare us your stinking womb water this time, Agrippina. The temple isn’t as easily scrubbed as a bridge.’

  He released his grasp and she dropped to the floor.

  Plancina emerged, blinking with the shock of sunlight, and in the brief second of shading her eyes Martina escaped her again. The crowd had thinned and Plancina staggered down the temple steps unimpeded and ignored, glaring left and right for any sign of the sorceress. The sudden view of the city below made her dizzy, and the air felt thin in her lungs. She caught her breath.

  The ugly, crowded hill was a clamour of sacred buildings and monuments. Nothing was ordered, nothing was carefully and thoughtfully placed, as it was in the rebuilt Rome of Augustus. The Acropolis rock made everything cling to it at angles, as if whole temples might slide from the edge. For all its high culture, Athens was alien and barbarous; Plancina wanted only to leave. But that couldn’t happen yet.

  She saw the fleeting hunchback some distance ahead, moving swiftly in the direction of the Propylaia, the structure of columns and stairs that took visitors up and down from the high city.

  ‘Stop!’ she screamed. ‘Wait – ‘

  Heads turned, but not Martina’s.

  Plancina ran stumbling to catch up, her sandals skidding beneath her on loose stones.

  Then the hunchback took a lurch to the left that took her into the buildings of the Chalkotheke. Plancina at once felt sick and out of her depth. She was alone. There was egg yolk on her gown and the stink of piss on her person. Men looked at her lasciviously, and Plancina was in terror of the evil eye. Athens was renowned for it. She made finger gestures to ward it off and then heard the worried members of her entourage exit the great temple behind her – and myself just behind them.

  She waved for us to stay where we stood. ‘I’ll return shortly,’ she shouted.

  To my lasting regret I obeyed her. What followed next was told to me much later.

  Plancina was immediately out of sight when she ducked into the Chalkotheke’s main hall. Treasury scribes looked up at her from desks in the public entrance. She was unaccompanied by any male, which was startling enough in Rome, but a scandal in backwater Greece. They presumed she was a prostitute. Plancina had the good sense to throw her veil across her face.

  ‘My good man,’ she said in perfect upper-class Greek to the nearest scribe. ‘I have lost my guide, a devotee of Athena. I believe she came in here – perhaps you’ve seen her? She has a …’ Plancina made the gesture of a hump on her back. There was deep confusion in the scribe’s face. ‘I am a Roman lady of high birth,’ she felt obliged to explain.

  ‘I realise my being here unaccompanied is irregular, but if I could just find my guide …?’ The scribe pointed at another door that led outside again.

  Plancina thought she was being ordered to get out. ‘How offensive! I won’t leave this place. A highborn woman conducting her personal business in Rome without hangers-on is not considered cause for alarm,’ she said untruthfully. ‘You Greeks should advance with the times.’

  The scribe pointed more forcefully. ‘Do you want to find her or not? She went through there when you came in.’

  Plancina dashed for the open door – and then froze as she was about to cross the threshold. Martina was pressed flat against the wall immediately outside. Plancina could see her bare feet and hear her laboured breathing.

  Plancina readied herself, then marched confidently out and turned. ‘You try to run from me, sister – ?’

  She froze a second time. The temple devotee had no mouth, no eyes and no nose – just a smooth mask of leathery skin. Plancina stumbled backwards with a retch, and as she nearly lost her balance, the faceless vision vanished into the haze. Plancina threw her hands to her mouth, choking.

  Then a hand tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Run from you, sister? When it’s been so many years since we last laughed together?’

  Plancina span round and was face-to-face with the same slender hunchback she had seen before she had even entered the Parthenon. ‘But you’re not Martina! You’re too – ‘

  ‘Ugly?’ The hunchback cackled happily.

  ‘You’re a crone. Get away from me.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you from leaving.’

  Plancina threw the veil to her face and made to flee for the safety of her entourage. But just as the hunchback left her line of sight, Plancina was compelled to turn back again.

  The woman’s features seemed to melt and liquefy; the pockmarked ugliness slipped from her skin and evaporated, leaving a face of splendour. Plancina would never forget such a face because it had already haunted her dreams for years. ‘You’re a vile witch, Martina,’ she whispered in recognition of who it was.

  ‘And with a few more tricks in my bag too,’ the sorceress laughed.

  My knowledge of the following events came from Claudius, a dominus I served in both our later years. What Claudius didn’t tell me, the young Drusus did, when his life was drawing to a close.

  For the period of Germanicus’s and Agrippina’s absence in the East, Claudius had been appointed guardian to their children left in Rome. Only Little Boots had gone with his parents. Keen for his nephews’ education to extend beyond the magistrates’ courts and the gymnasium, Claudius was nothing but enthusiastic when Drusus declared a desire to build his own theatre at Oxheads. Knowing that Germanicus would approve while Agrippina would more likely take issue, Claudius thought of the perfect counter-measure for maternal disapproval and hurried his scribes to the Temple of Saturn. Forbidden to return until they unearthed Agrippina’s late father’s original plans for the Theatre of Marcellus, the dusty scribes finally reappeared the following morning, successful.

  Claudius was exultant and the plans were fascinating. He spent the remainder of the day marvelling at them, first boring his long-suffering steward with their details and then assaulting Castor with breathless explanations of the theatre’s scenery-lowering mechanisms and hidden stage trapdoors.

  Then Antonia heard of it. ‘A filthy theatre? No, I’m sorry, Claudius, but you will not indulge that boy.’

  ‘But it’s what he asked for, mother, and it will not be filthy. It will enable Drusus to study the greatest dramatists.’

  ‘The greatest pornographers, you mean,’ said Antonia. ‘And he’s never even seen a play – how does he know what carnality goes on there?’

  As it happened, Claudius himself had taken Drusus and his older brother, Nero, to what he thought was a performance of Aeschylus’s Bacchae. But he’d misread the words on the ‘forthcoming’ hoarding. The boys were among th
e raucous audience for Plautus’s Bacchides, which had certainly been filthy, and also very funny. Claudius laughed louder than anyone but the whole escapade was not to be made known to Antonia.

  ‘Drusus hears the adults discussing new performances,’ he said. ‘It’s only natural for his young mind to enquire.’

  But Antonia was so strident in her condemnation that she failed to make sense to Claudius at all. The clearest she could articulate was that she feared for Drusus’s ‘perception of himself’ and that a theatre of his own would ‘further corrupt him’.

  With twenty-eight years of bowing to his mother’s directives, the dutiful Claudius agreed to keep the boy focused on equestrian skills. Claudius then secretly spent all the hours from Concubia to sunrise transcribing Agrippina’s father’s plans to a scaled down replica that he knew Drusus would adore. Once he’d rushed through the tedium of the dawn’s salutatio clients, Claudius hobbled at pace along the corridor towards the boys’ suite, his scribes carrying the collected mass of the old plans and new. He proclaimed with joy that he had a great surprise for the lad.

  Then he learned that Drusus had already constructed a makeshift theatre two days earlier, using appropriated furniture, props and costumes from his father’s Triumph. Hurt, Claudius left him to it.

  Undisturbed among the cast-off costumes, eleven-year-old Drusus resumed picking up items, examining them closely and discarding them in a pile. None possessed what he was seeking. Drusus’s memory of the Triumph was hazy now, even though it had occurred less than a year ago. His one vivid memory was of the beggar’s head getting cut off – that and Agrippina’s words to him and Nero when the Triumph was all over. He hadn’t seen most of the parade, stuck at the rear, and for this reason he was in the dark as to what the women participants had worn.

  Drusus pulled out a promising costume of diaphanous fabric, pale green. It was plain, unadorned, but holding it up he saw that it wrapped around its wearer as a robe and secured at the waist with a tie. Ensuring again that he was wholly alone, Drusus slipped off his tunica and felt an exciting anticipation. Heady with it, he peeled down his loin garment too and placed his arms in the sheer material and pulled it tightly around him, securing it with the belt. Warmed by his body, the remains of a fragrance rose from the material as Drusus strode to the makeshift stage and adopted poses.

  But more was needed.

  From another chest Drusus rummaged through lengths of hair until he found a stark blonde horsehair wig. He placed the scratchy thing on his head, ignored the stink, and instead relished the weight of the tresses on his shoulders and neck. Then Drusus recalled his great-grandmother Livia’s unnaturally imposing height as she stood on the Senate House steps in her platformed boots. Such wonderful items as those must be here somewhere too, Drusus hoped.

  He searched another chest and found it full of helmets and wooden swords. Another chest held large, curved phalli. Drusus immediately forgot about platform boots and tentatively rubbed one of the knotty wooden pricks. His own prick became hard and curved too, and he found that it fitted nicely inside the base of the wooden one, which attached to his body with leather straps.

  It was in this rampant state that Nero found him. ‘What a joke! Look at the little street whore. How much for a ride, Ganymede?’

  The crushing blow from the shame of being exposed robbed Drusus of his voice. Nero pulled his own prick out and flicked it at his brother in his fingers. ‘Answer my question, Ganymede, how much for a ride?’

  That Nero’s penis was bigger than Drusus’s made the younger brother’s shame all the worse.

  ‘Ride yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I’m studying theatre. Uncle Claudius said I could.’

  ‘You little cocksucker – I know what you’re studying.’

  Drusus flung the phallus, striking Nero on the head. Then he took flight, pulling the robe from his shoulders and trying to unknot the belt. He tripped hard on the folds, knocking the wind from his lungs as he hit the edge of the stage rostrum. Nero was on his back in an instant, his breath hot in his brother’s ear.

  ‘Cocksucker,’ he taunted. ‘I see your jealousy when you look at me. You wish you had what’s mine. The first born always gets the biggest one, you know.’

  Winded and pinned, Drusus couldn’t draw breath as the long, hard nail of Nero’s thumb stabbed him in the flesh between his buttocks. ‘I’ll do to you what Tiberius does to his choirgirls,’ Nero sneered.

  A shift in the older brother’s weight let Drusus suddenly pull his arm free. He flailed about wildly and connected with a silken chord that he yanked hard. The tall, bronze lampadarium it was connected to held a bowl of burning lamp-oil that toppled towards the boys.

  In a second that lasted hours in his mind, Nero forgot his contempt and felt only a binding love for his sibling, hugging him and rolling him away from the point of impact. He saved them both.

  But the flaming oil splashed every other item in the vicinity. The terrified brothers clung to each other as Drusus’s makeshift stage, scenery and properties ignited. Knowing that death was upon them before any of their mother’s promises had come true, it was as weeping, screaming wretches that Antonia found them and rushed to their aid, calling slaves bearing pails of sand.

  Once the fire was extinguished, their gratitude was pathetic. But Antonia’s incandescent anger showed itself regarding the state in which Drusus had been saved. He was stark-naked except for the torn green gown and the horsehair wig worn by a slut who played a chieftain’s wife in Germanicus’s Triumph. What an insult to his noble father.

  Once Drusus had been thrashed until he was unable to sit down, Antonia told the slave not to wipe the blood spatters from the whip. She would be using it next on Claudius.

  Banished to his room, with nothing to fill the days except his own dark thoughts, Drusus dwelled upon Nero. He wondered what his older brother’s own weakness might be, sure that there was one to be found.

  Then he found it.

  Drusus was amazed that he’d not seen it before, illuminating as it did Nero’s own secret inner life. It hit Drusus as an undeniable vulnerability above all other Achilles’ heels in his brother. Why else the ‘thumb torture’ to Drusus’s arse? And why else Nero’s stiff prick when it happened?

  His older brother had desires for boys – something that Drusus didn’t share.

  With Nero set to wear the toga virilis in less than a year and convince Rome that it was merited, Drusus now had a thorn to stick in his brother’s confidence. He planned to wield it carefully.

  The Kalends of July

  AD 18

  Six months later: Germanicus

  Julius Caesar crowns Artaxias III as

  King of Armenia

  I wrote a letter to my domina expressing my unease. I was vague in what I said, for I had little to base my feeling on then, but I knew that something was wrong with Plancina and that my domina must be told of it.

  Livia’s reply, when it came, was succinct and unambiguous, as I expected it to be. ‘Watch her,’ it read.

  I obeyed.

  The Kalends of October

  AD 19

  Sixteen months later: Chieftain Arminius

  of the German Cherusci tribe is murdered

  by his own men

  I planted myself in a comfortable position beneath a tree at the entrance to the baths. The autumn sun still had a satisfying bite to it and I shifted myself several times to place my limbs in just the right place to catch the rays through the leaves of the tree.

  Antioch was utopia.

  I opened my eye a crack. The last of Plancina’s retinue had entered the building, in excellent spirits to match their mistress. I was assured of at least a good two hours’ snoozing time before they’d troop out again, clean as polished marble and stinking like a flower stall.

  Very shortly I was snoring, and soon after I was strolling gently in a dream of meadows. All around me were little white flowers, tiny. One sprang to my hand without me even having to pick it. I inhaled
its scent – it smelled of the bathhouse. I discarded the little flower, and immediately another leapt to my hand. This one smelled of roasting pork. I discarded it too, hoping for another. The most perfect little white flower of them all appeared in my hand and I knew the scent before I’d even held it to my nose – it was freshly washed skin, the smooth, tender flesh of a girl’s inner thigh. I peered at the little flower and its petals peeled back to expose a tiny pink vulva; perfect. Then I looked down and saw that I was hard – and still intact.

  A voice whispered in my ear. ‘I have letters for her.’

  I was far away.

  ‘I have letters from Rome. For Plancina.’

  The vulva flower was fading in my hand and I begged it to stay alive.

  The slave from the Legate’s palace studied my loins with detachment. ‘You wanted me to tell you what she receives, didn’t you? That’s what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s in the letters. Probably news of someone dying. There’s a little wooden box too. It’s a gift from someone.’

  I fought to stay inside my dream. ‘Just take them inside. Give them to one of her maids.’

  ‘So you don’t even want to look at ‘em yourself?’

  ‘Not today. Take a coin from my pouch.’

  The slave helped himself to hush money and left me to my erotic snooze. But just as he approached the doorkeeper to the baths, my voice called back to him, although I was still asleep for all appearances.

  ‘Have you opened the wooden box?’

  ‘Of course. It’s protocol.’

  ‘It contains nothing that will risk her?’

  The slave knew this was very unlikely. ‘That’s why we opened it. Enjoy your nap. It’s just some funny present.’

  As I enticed the vulva flower to bloom again, somewhere on the far horizon of the meadow I wandered in, the echo of an unexpressed thought died inside me.

  Should I have asked whom the present was from?

  *

  Entering the vast hall of the Antioch baths, the slave nodded cheery greetings to the doorkeepers and cast an eye around the cool, airy atrium. It was the women’s hours, so he could progress no further, which presented a problem in handing over the mail.