Nest of vipers eor-2

by Luke Devenish

  It fell to me — and my new 'apprentice', Lygdus — to coordinate these processions. I tied Livia's neck and torso to the back of the throne, then draped her in concealing robes and placed a diadem on her head. Lygdus made a contribution to these preparations that could only be described as token. It became clear to me that he was lazy and offensive and showed no talent for work. All he did was eat, sleep and complain. Yet still I had to suffer his daily presence along with the nagging certainty that he was Castor's agent. This meant I couldn't slight him, or — which would have been more deserved — strike him in the teeth and push him down the stairs. And the stealth required to employ the phallus under these circumstances was exhausting in the extreme. Lygdus was my millstone.

  I carefully watched my domina 's eyes during these preparations, as did Little Boots whenever he was present. If Livia had any objection to being exhibited, we saw no sign of it in her. To the people of Rome who witnessed her passing by in the canopied throne, she seemed regal and worthy of awe. They were glad she was back. Castor's public dignity increased tenfold when people saw that she was with him. The fact that she neither spoke nor moved but only stared fixedly into the middle distance seemed to strike no one as odd. But this was no surprise. In her days as the wife of Augustus she had rarely spoken in public; more often, she'd been seen exactly as she was now.

  On one occasion, in glorious spring, when the streets and temples were vivid with flowers, the domina 's processional preparations took longer than usual. In addition to her diadem and robes, I was attempting to hang garlands on her person, Castor's order being that she should remind the people of the goddess Flora. But various slaves had been in and out of the suite since dawn, filling me in on a developing morning of scandal in the Forum. Burrus's mother Nymphomidia stole in, eating pears from a bowl.

  'Have you heard about Annia Rufilla?'

  This was a notorious widow whose financial improprieties had brought her before the courts. 'She's been convicted of fraud,' I said. 'That's old news, Nymphomidia.'

  The slave's lips peeled into a smile. 'You haven't heard then?'

  'I've been hearing it all morning.'

  'Sounds to me like you've been hearing the old news, Iphicles. Oh well, I won't trouble you,' said Nymphomidia, crunching a pear and making to go.

  I saw that listening Livia was keen for the next instalment and decided to allow her this pleasure. 'Tell me, then — what's happened now?'

  Nymphomidia had become used to speaking to me as if Livia wasn't even in the room. 'Annia's been screaming in the Forum that Gallus is a cunt. She called him a boy-lover, too, and said he took it up the arse.'

  I guffawed and Livia's eyes shone with mirth. 'She can't say that sort of thing in the Forum! Gallus is a senator.'

  'And he's also the magistrate who convicted her.'

  'Has Gallus found out?'

  'She was on the Senate steps. It was hard for him to miss it.'

  I laughed again. 'I suppose she's been arrested?'

  'Guess again,' said Nymphomidia. 'Gallus sent the lictors out with their rods raised ready to give her one, but they stopped in their tracks when she pulled a surprise out of her palla.'

  'A knife? Why would they care if she killed herself?'

  'It wasn't a knife — it was a bust of Tiberius.'

  I felt a twinge of dread and caught my domina 's eye again. Her look of amusement had turned malicious. 'What did Annia mean by doing that?'

  'To have Gallus accused of treason.'

  'That doesn't make sense.'

  'If the lictors had beaten her, she would have dropped the bust — it would have smashed on the ground. Gallus would have been seen as the one who had caused it.'

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. 'People are being accused of treason for breaking busts of the Emperor now?'

  'Where have you been, Iphicles? It's very lucrative for those who make such accusations. They get a share of the traitor's estate.'

  That was the first time, I think, that I questioned the wisdom of Cybele. It had been the Great Mother's prophecies that I had dedicated my life to fulfilling, and this had led me to commit many crimes. But everything had been necessary for the greater good of Rome, I had always told myself, and for the greater glory of my domina, Cybele's mortal manifestation. And without this certainty, how else could I have continued with so many innocent dead around me? Yet, hearing the news of Annia's shameless behaviour, I wondered whether the actions of Tiberius, the prophesied first king, could also be called for the 'glory of Rome'. Tiberius's vanity had allowed this travesty to happen — and it opened the door for so much more.

  'What did Gallus do?'

  Nymphomidia took another bite of her pear. 'What could he do? She caught him, it's the perfect revenge. She's still out there now, dragging his dignity through the horseshit while he sits in the Senate blocking his ears.'

  There was a tiny sound from the back of my domina 's throat, barely perceptible, but loud enough for Nymphomidia and me to hear in the brief silence.

  The slave dropped her pear. 'Did the Augusta just speak?'

  I would have denied it, anxious to cover all evidence of my domina 's returning senses, but the news had unsettled me and I wasn't fast enough with my reply before the noise came again.

  Nymphomidia peered into my domina 's face. 'She is speaking. What are you trying to say, Lady?'

  Livia kept her eyes fixed wholly upon me and I felt an old chill grip my spine again. 'She's not saying anything,' I insisted.

  'But she is, Iphicles.'

  'No,' I said, ill in my guts. 'She's not saying anything… she's laughing.'

  Livia's wicked eyes glinted. It was true.

  When Nymphomidia made her hasty excuses to leave, I flew to the chest that held the phallus. 'Things will be worse with you finding voice again,' I hissed at Livia. 'Do you love it that your son Tiberius's rule brings such shameful things to pass? Do you think it glorifies you all the more with people so debased? I am starting to wonder whether this is really for Rome's good at all. Perhaps it is time for the second king to ascend. A boy's rule can only be better than this sort of disgrace — especially if he has wise heads to guide him.'

  I flung the lid of the chest open. It was empty. Livia made the tiny noise again, mocking me from her processional throne. I ripped the linen from her bed to see if I'd left it there in my distraction, but I hadn't. 'Where is it?' I spat at her. 'I'm going to make you sit on the thing for the whole procession just to punish you.'

  Her eyes flashed fire.

  I ran from chest to chest, flinging them all open. I pulled a tapestry from the wall, exposing the storage shelves of vases and ornaments behind it. There was no sign of the wooden fertility implement anywhere in the room.

  'I know what you do with this thing,' said Lygdus.

  I span around in shock. The young eunuch was lolling at the door, cradling the phallus in his hands.

  'I know what you do — you shove it inside her.'

  All words failed me in my exposure.

  Lygdus smirked. 'You think I just stuff myself with cakes all the time while whining like a brat? I'm studying you, Iphicles, in all the hours we spend together. I study you like a book.'

  I said nothing, waiting for him to make clear his intentions.

  Lygdus placed the phallus tip beneath his nostrils and gave it a little sniff. He recoiled. 'So is this what her sex smells of? This stinks like poison.'

  My guilty silence was the most the damning noise I could have made.

  Lygdus's eyes widened. 'This is poison?'

  The time it took for the breath to leave my lungs was all I had to decide on how to respond. Lygdus wasn't screaming in horror, or calling me a monster or a wretch. He was staring in shock, yes, but there was something else, too. He was impressed. I saw the merest shadow of my reflection in his eyes.

  'It paralyses her,' I said.

  Lygdus dropped the thing like it burned his hands.

  'But it's failed. She can
already see again and now she's beginning to speak.'

  A wave of thrilled delight washed over the eunuch's face. 'You hate the Augusta?' he whispered.

  Of course this wasn't true. I loved my domina more than anything and everything there was. But I saw in his smile the answer he wanted me to give, so I said, 'I hate her with all my soul.'

  Lygdus gave a little giggle. 'Really?'

  I nodded, solemn.

  'Well, I can beat that — I hate them all!'

  I burst out laughing in surprise.

  'I want to see them dead. I want to see them nailed to trees. Every last dominus, every domina — they're all pigs. I want to slaughter them. I want to eat them.'

  I had to steady myself.

  'They cut off my balls,' Lygdus went on. 'They left me in a sheep's pen with the blood and the pain, and no one even cared if I lived or died. But I beat them — I didn't give up. Yet still I swelled like an elephant and my voice stayed like a boy's.'

  I tried hard not to laugh now.

  'I heard they cut off your balls too?' he said.

  I couldn't tell him that I had made this sacrifice myself. 'It's true,' I lied.

  The eunuch leaped from the door and threw his arms around me. 'We're brothers,' he declared, kissing my face and hair, 'brothers in suffering.'

  I could only nod.

  Lygdus stopped his kisses and took a step back to examine my face. 'Have you ever hurt one?' he whispered. 'One of them — have you ever hurt one, Iphicles?'

  I took my final gamble. It was time for the truth again, or at least a version of it. 'I've done more than hurt — I've killed one, Lygdus. More than one, actually.'

  Lygdus went white. I felt the back of my tunica belt, letting my fingers rest on the dagger I kept there. I intended killing him if I had misjudged my gamble, and would have to face the consequences later. Everything hinged on what he would do next.

  The eunuch sank to his haunches and started kissing my shoes.

  'What are you doing?'

  'Show me your skills,' he begged me. 'Let me learn from your wisdom, Iphicles.'

  'Stop that — let go of me.'

  'I want to kill them too.'

  'What?'

  'Trust me, Iphicles — I want to kill them like you.'

  I tried to pull my feet away but one of my woollen house shoes came loose in Lygdus's hands. The eunuch seized upon my bare foot, plunging his tongue between the spaces and placing my toes within his lips. My repulsion only lasted a few moments. I looked back to my domina, who was watching the whole exchange from her throne.

  I gave her a long, bright smile, showing her every one of my teeth. She could not return the smile, but I wondered then, if she had regained the ability, whether she would have grinned back at me regardless of our differences. If only because I so richly deserved it.

  I looked down at the fawning Lygdus and thanked the Great Mother for the gifts she continued to give me.

  When my domina was nearly smothered in garlands and ready for her procession, Lygdus and I resumed our conversation while we waited for the litter-bearers. I asked the eunuch what he expected to gain from such murderous desires. Lygdus claimed to want nothing. Money had no appeal for him, nor did sexual pleasure, he said. The only things that held his interest were matters of the heart. His greatest desire was to serve a master who loved him. But he had given up this dream as hopeless. None of them would love him. This was why he wanted them dead.

  I suspected the young eunuch was not wholly right in the head, but when I thought of the intense interest he had shown in my feet I could only marvel. Perhaps Lygdus's 'deserving master' could even be a slave?

  It was then that he told me about his thwarted visit to Tiberius. Thrown by this revelation, I went very still. 'Why did you go to see him, Lygdus?'

  The eunuch told me that he'd wanted to inform the Emperor of the birth of Livilla's boy. I absorbed this. 'But Tiberius would have found out himself the same night. Why did he need to hear it from you?'

  Lygdus raised his eyes again and his look was flirtatious. 'Because I knew what no one else knew, Iphicles, and I still know it now.'

  Although my eyes narrowed, my smile took on a shadow of flirtation too, just to encourage him to tell me. 'What would that be?'

  Lygdus placed a hand upon his breast to feel the heartbeat fluttering beneath the mound of his flesh. 'My dominus Castor is not the father of that child.'

  After a long moment I said, 'No one else knows it?'

  'No one but my domina, Livilla, and she'll never dare tell anyone. And the baby's father knows it too. He's always known.'

  'And how do you know?'

  'I overhear my domina 's prayers.'

  The eunuch had greater stealth and cunning than I had given him credit for. All he lacked was execution. There was another long pause as we stared at each other.

  'And who is the father?' I asked at last, my voice the lowest of whispers.

  Lygdus told me.

  I gave a sigh of pleasure as so many things made sense. I fancied I heard Livia make a similar noise, although I'm sure there was little pleasure in it for her. But when I looked to her, she gave nothing away. We heard the litter-bearers' boots echoing up the corridor towards the suite. Castor's Forum procession was starting.

  'Perhaps it's time the secret lovers came out into the open?' I whispered to Lygdus.

  'They'll never do that. It would ruin them both.'

  'Perhaps we can do something so that there will be no scandal? Perhaps we can make them see that they have a hope of being happy one day?'

  'Will we kill someone to do it?'

  The eight litter-bearers entered the room and took their positions under the poles that ran along each side of my domina 's throne. I saw the glint of what I thought were tears in her eyes. Tears of what, I wondered. Horror? Misery? Or, perhaps — dared I allow myself to hope it — even excitement? I knew she had heard every word we'd spoken. The bearers lifted her and I saw her eyes no more. I turned back to Lygdus.

  'Yes, we will,' I whispered. 'We will kill someone very soon. And not long after that, we will kill again. And then again.'

  Lygdus laughed with delight and we took our places in our domina 's wake, trailing among the other household slaves who streamed from all corners of Oxheads as Livia's throne was borne along the great halls. We crossed the front threshold and left the grand house, stepping into the golden light of day. Livia looked resplendent as Flora. The eunuch basked in her reflected glory as the mob in the street began to shout and cheer the sight of their Augusta. Lygdus preened as though the cries were meant for him. I indulged him in this folly of youth. In my state of advanced years the love of the mob meant very little. Too often I had seen it turn.

  ' Why do you kill them?' he whispered to me once we had begun our progress down the Palatine. 'Is it for vengeance?'

  I could have lied and claimed this to be true. Looking back on it now, I see how much less painful it would have been if I had. But in my happy realisation that I had found in Lygdus not only a kindred spirit and an ally, but also that very rarest of things in Rome, a friend, I chanced the greatest risk I had taken in my life.

  'I do it all for Cybele,' I said.

  He blinked at me in confusion. 'For the Great Mother?'

  I nodded, my eyes shining with joy. Then I told him everything about the prophecies and divinity, and how Cybele gave her greatest gifts to her eunuchs. We had reached the Forum by the time I was done, and hundreds of people trailed behind and around us, screaming my domina 's name. Lygdus was bewildered by what I had told him, the glories of the procession forgotten. His heart burned with new hope and possibility.

  I pointed to the head of the procession, where Castor walked like a prince, his baby son in his arms and his three fine nephews by his side. 'See,' I said, 'see up there? There he is — our second prophesied king.'

  Lygdus struggled to comprehend it all. 'My dominus Castor?'

  'No, not him…'

  'T
hen the second king is Nero…?' he said in wonder.

  I shook my head, still smiling, and showed him who it really was that Cybele had ordained.

  'Little Boots?'

  I closed my eyes, nodding. 'And what a king he will be.' I was enraptured. But when I opened them again, my spirits soaring to the skies, I saw the look of utter confusion that remained upon the eunuch's face. I guessed why he was so puzzled — Little Boots was still a boy, after all.

  'The Great Mother is unknowable,' I said. 'We cannot understand all that she commands. All we know is this: everything she does, she does for Rome.'

  Lygdus nodded slowly, and for the remainder of the procession, for the full duration of our long, magnificent path, he repeated all that I had told him, whispering it under his breath, telling himself to believe.

  Dazzled by the possibilities that his once bleak future now held, Lygdus wanted nothing more than to find the comfort that was mine in holding so much deep certainty in my heart. He wanted to achieve the blissful ignorance that I nursed in the blindness of such faith.

  I would not discover it for many years, but Lygdus tried and failed, and tried and failed, and tried that much harder again that day to achieve these things that were mine. And when the tiny, nagging doubts flared up in his heart, biting, gnawing and grinding against his conscience, Lygdus beat them back, enraged that comfort and ignorance were denied to him. He would achieve all that I had achieved, Lygdus told himself violently.

  As all the gods were his witnesses, he would achieve what was mine.

  MY SOLACE IN THIS TIME OF WOES

  Ludi Romani

  September, AD 21

  Five months later: the rebel forces of Sacrovir occupy Augustodunum, Gaul, taking the sons of the Gallic nobility hostage

  We elbowed and kicked against the surging mass of gawpers, trying to force our way through to catch a glimpse of the gladiators' banquet. The size of the crowd was impossible to measure, as was the distance to the raised dining couches on the other side of the Forum that held the leading gladiators of the Ludi Romani — the Roman Games. They could have been twenty feet away, or a hundred. The monuments of the Forum seemed to bend and recede beyond the heads of idolatrous fans.