Nest of vipers eor-2

by Luke Devenish

  My own head span in the haze and I felt like weeping in frustration. Yet I could think of no other way to achieve our mission, so we had to go on. We had a goal, a vital plan, but we were still too ill-equipped to commence it. The only way we could obtain what we needed was by reaching a vantage point where we could see everyone present at the gladiators' public feast. If we could survey the whole crowd, I reasoned, perhaps I would somewhere see her, the woman whose skills were essential for the success of our scheme. In my gut I knew she was present.

  'Keep going!' I yelled to Lygdus over my shoulder. 'We can do this!'

  Those we kicked and struck were doing the same to us and to everyone else besides. Sexual invitations and lusty cheers were flung at the gorging gladiators, merging with cries of pain and outrage as the crowd thrilled and brawled. We were in a scene from a nightmare, beyond our depth in a putrid pool of scratching, spitting, stamping ghouls. Fist blows rained upon me. Hair was yanked from my head and my eyes were blackened. Two of my teeth had already been loosened by a fuller armed with a club — a man I knew well and usually admired, because he washed my domina 's linen. But like everyone else, the excitement of the games had made him lose his mind. I was in danger of losing my own.

  'Move forward, Lygdus!' I yelled. 'I think I can see the Thracians up ahead!' Indeed, I could just see a glimmer of the Balkan warriors' gilt crowns.

  The noise around us was like the pits of Hades as we forged forward. The gladiators stuffed themselves as if reclining on Olympus. Still, the crowd's din was nothing to the noise they would make tomorrow when the same idols would be let loose upon each other for the games. The gladiators would savour hell tomorrow, and the mob's turn would come to sit high above and watch the spectacle of death. But neither Lygdus nor I gave a fig for the games. Like most slaves, we found the idea of fellow men of servitude going to such bloody deaths repellent. And today's traditional 'last feast' we thought equally as vile. We were only among them at all because I clung to such a slim hope.

  'I'm dying!' cried Lygdus from somewhere behind me. 'Iphicles!'

  I turned and managed to locate him. He was poking the eyes of a youth he was gripping by the throat. 'You're not dying,' I yelled. 'You're showing him who's boss!'

  The youth tore himself from Lygdus's hands and managed to lurch away. Lygdus struggled through the seething mass of men and women to reach me.

  'Can you see the gladiators?' he shouted above the din.

  We strained to see above the heads in front of us and caught a clear view of a table of Thracian fighters, and behind them a group of Celts, all gorging on platters of food.

  'How will they fight tomorrow with their bellies so full?' Lygdus wanted to know.

  'We need to get on those platforms,' I yelled at him.

  'Where the dining couches are? The gladiators will do you in for it!'

  'I'll pretend I'm a serving slave.'

  'They'll kill you, Iphicles.'

  'I have to be able to see the whole crowd,' I insisted. 'We've waited months for the Ludi Romani to begin. She loves them too much to resist returning to Rome.'

  'I still don't understand. Just who is this "she"?'

  'I told you.'

  'Not very well,' Lygdus muttered.

  I stared at the massive Thracians. Lygdus was right. They would kill me if I dared to mount their platform. 'There are other platforms, further forward,' I shouted, 'with different men — not so fierce.'

  Lygdus was doubtful. 'This woman you seek — why do we need her at all?'

  'For what she can give us. Now follow me.'

  'But what about the stuff you've got for Livia? Can't some of that be spared?'

  'No, it cannot!' I cried. 'She's a threat enough already. I need every last smear. What we need for our new plan is a very different kind of poison. One that doesn't just incapacitate — we need one that kills.'

  Progress became easier once we made it closer to the dining platforms. The gladiators were protected by bodyguards, and the presence of so many armed men — the gladiators included — made the spectators with the clearest view of the feast suppress their violence. The brawls were confined only to the middle and the back.

  We wove through the tightly packed youths and women who ogled their idols with such unwholesome glee. I heard an offer of marriage made by a widow — and the acceptance of it given by a laughing gladiator, should he survive tomorrow's butchery. Among the gladiators were groups of free men, 'volunteers' who had sold themselves into fighting at the games because of hard times. We saw one of them freeing his own household slaves in a theatrical act of manumission.

  'He'll regret that if he wins,' Lygdus proclaimed.

  I saw a familiar face weaving through the crowd in front of us and let out a cry of surprise. Lygdus saw who it was. 'It's the dominus..'

  Castor was approaching, flanked by the stoutest men of his retinue.

  'We'll be caught!' Lygdus wailed.

  'We're doing nothing wrong,' I hissed in his ear. 'Half of this rabble are slaves just like us.'

  'Do you want him to see us?' Lygdus asked, incredulous.

  In truth, I didn't. 'Duck down,' I spat. We dropped like stones as Castor and his friends passed perilously close to where we hid. They were heading for the gladiators' platforms. Crouching in the dust gave the crowd around us license to kick and stamp upon us. We didn't dare cry out. After several minutes of this torment I struggled to my feet again, delivering blows to the worst of the jokers. My body was bruised and aching.

  'Can you see him?' Lygdus croaked from the ground.

  I was staring Castor directly in the face.

  'Iphicles?' said Castor in surprise.

  Guilt made me tremble like a kitten.

  'You're a follower of the gladiators too, are you?'

  'Yes, domine,' I stammered, 'when permission is given for me to attend the games.' I prayed to the Great Mother that he wouldn't ask whose permission I had sought today, given I hadn't sought it from anyone.

  'Who is attending my grandmother?'

  I felt Lygdus quaking at my feet. 'The eunuch,' I lied. 'He is more than capable, domine. And he has come to love her too.'

  Lygdus buried his face into my sandals in terror that Castor would see him. But the crowd around us was so thick that Castor couldn't see anything below my shoulders. Yet, he sensed that something was being hidden from him. I tried to summon a smile of reassuring innocence as a trickle of urine ran down my leg. A man from his retinue caught his attention.

  'They await you on the platform.'

  A path had been cleared through the throng for him.

  Castor shot me a warning look and then moved on. I gave a sigh of profound relief, and then realised that Lygdus was lapping the pooled urine from between my toes. 'Stop it,' I said, pulling my feet from his grip.

  'Is he gone?' Lygdus simpered.

  'Yes — get up.'

  He heaved his bulk upright as Castor shouted words of enthusiasm to the same gladiator who had been freeing household slaves.

  'We've got to move further on,' I said, propelling Lygdus in front of me. 'We'll go where Castor can't see us but where we can see everyone.'

  We took a different route through the stinking mass of street scum, attempting to skirt Castor and his men. All around us the beggars, pickpockets, prostitutes and mercenaries yelled in united devotion to men who would be dead before tomorrow's nightfall.

  'Don't they see how doomed this all is?' Lygdus shouted above the din. 'Their love is so wasted.'

  'They live in hope,' I replied. 'Everyone believes their favourite will survive, beating all the others to fight another day.'

  'And when their favourites don't? Aren't they broken by it?'

  'No, they simply find a new favourite. No one takes it as seriously as you think, Lygdus.'

  Lygdus covered his ears to the hysteria, finding this hard to believe.

  We neared another platform, where a group of Greek fighters were making emotional farewells to th
eir friends. 'I hate all this killing!' Lygdus screamed at those around us, without a breath of irony. I didn't remind him that we were here so that we could obtain the very means to kill.

  I saw the platform I needed. A wretched group of men, sickly and weak, were slumped on ill-cushioned couches without a canopy to protect them from the sun. These were the condemned men, criminals from the equestrian class to be put to the slaughter in the opening minutes of the games. Badly armed and little trained, their purpose was to provide quick and easy deaths at the hands of the favourites in order to raise the crowd's excitement for blood. If they'd been born of the lowest orders, they would have been fed to the beasts. But as knights it was considered fitting that they be given a chance to save themselves from execution by fighting for it. This was another of Rome's shams. They were as doomed as the guiltiest slaves thrown to the jackals. The faces of these men were stark and haunted by their imminent deaths. The food sat untouched before them. Their mouths and bellies were empty with fear. There was only one bodyguard assigned to these accursed men and his attention was elsewhere.

  I pinched Lygdus. 'This will do.'

  'Iphicles, don't — '

  I stole forward so I could clamber onto the platform. The lone bodyguard saw me.

  'Get off!' He drew his sword.

  I took a chance on my lie. 'I'm the serving slave,' I claimed.

  He creased his brow.

  'I have to pick up the fallen food. If I don't, then how will it be burnt in offering to the gods?'

  The guard had never seen me before but I kept a look of such pathetic certainty on my face that he gave me the benefit of the doubt. 'It's a waste of time offering food from these bastards,' he said. 'Their throats are cut already.'

  One of the wretches broke into sobs.

  The guard held out his arm to hoist me up to his level. Lygdus stared up at me in amazement. I winked at him. Then I looked at the faces of the doomed men on the dining couches. Would any of them register that I wasn't their serving slave at all? They seemed to look at me without seeing me. I couldn't risk exposing my lie, however, so I fell to all fours and began crawling around the table and couches, ostensibly picking up scraps. There was nothing to be found — the food hadn't been touched. After several minutes I saw that Lygdus was following my progress carefully. His face was at the platform's side, not far from mine, where I kneeled behind the rear couch.

  'Tell me when the guard is distracted again,' I hissed.

  Lygdus craned his neck to see where the guard was. 'He's distracted now. He's jumped off the front of the platform.'

  I stood upright to see. The guard was in the midst of the crowd, looking out at the people and not back at his doomed charges. Suddenly I saw a face I knew — but it was not the one I was looking for. Golden-haired Flamma sat upright in a chair on a platform he shared with no one else. If a couch had been offered to him for the occasion, he had clearly spurned it, choosing a simple, rough-hewn chair and table at which to eat his meal. He glanced in my direction without registering that we had met each other under less exultant circumstances. No emotion showed in his face. The oldest fighter by far, he was also the calmest. Flamma acknowledged no one in the crowd, and few acknowledged him. He lacked celebrity. He was a nonentity in this throng. That he was also a violent brute, I had no doubt. He could likely dismember a man with his bare hands. Yet I still felt compassion for him, and I muttered a little prayer to Cybele that he might be permitted to win this last time.

  'Can you see her anywhere?' Lygdus appealed to me from the ground. 'Can you see the woman we need?'

  I dismissed Flamma from my thoughts and peered into the boiling sea of Romans. 'Sorceress Martina,' I whispered into the wind, 'I know you're out there somewhere — you must be. I need your magic — I need your poison. Please, just make yourself seen…'

  Lygdus lacked my patience. He threw a sticky plum pit at me, which bounced hard off my head. 'I've had enough — do you hear me, Iphicles?'

  'That's too bad,' I replied, glaring at him. 'There's only one path open to us now and this is it. Since Aemilia of the Aemilii's demise, there's been a distinct lack of reliable poisoners in Rome. So we've got no choice but to keep searching for our unreliable one: Martina.'

  He popped another plum between his lips.

  'Perhaps you're not suited to this work, Lygdus,' I said. 'Best be on your way, then. See you at Oxheads.'

  I turned on my cushion to look down at the stage and Lygdus's fury escalated. I heard him sucking his plum, planning to pelt me with a second pit. He swallowed the pulp and spat the missile into his hand.

  'Throw a pit at me again and you'll regret it,' I said, my eyes on the musicians far below.

  Lygdus stood up and let fly. I caught the pit in my fingers without even needing to see it. He was astounded. 'How did you…?'

  I punched him hard in the groin and then remembered that, like me, he didn't have all that much left to harm down there. He went to slap me but I snatched his hand and sank my teeth into it.

  'Ow!'

  'Sit down and stop acting like a baby,' I said.

  He plopped onto his cushion, nursing his hand. 'We've been to every event at the Ludi. Days and days of it, and never any sign of this woman.'

  'Not quite every event,' I said, staring at the stage again. 'We haven't seen the pantomimus yet. So why don't you shut up — it's about to begin.'

  'She won't be here. She's not even in Rome.'

  'I said shut up.'

  'These seats are terrible — we can barely see the stage.'

  'We're here to see the audience, idiot.'

  'All I can see are the backs of heads.'

  'She's a freedwoman. If she's here, she'll be sitting in the seats directly in front of us slaves.'

  'At least give me a better idea of what she looks like.'

  What could I tell him? I had no concept of what Martina's appearance might be. In the many decades I had known her, she was either a ravishing beauty or a hideous crone. She was both, yet neither. She could change before my eyes. Sometimes the look of her shimmered like the haze on a distant road, making her features melt and fade. Sometimes, if I looked at her closely, she seemed to have no face at all. The only way to get a clear picture of Martina's appearance was by squinting at her from the corner of my eye, and even then this was unreliable. She was a sorceress, as ageless as my domina and me. She was an unknowable creature of our peripheral vision.

  'Martina has a hump on her back.' This deformity was the only thing I could guarantee in her.

  In truth I was beginning to despair. I feared I'd been wrong in imagining what would lure her back to Rome. In my heart I dreaded that with so much of the Imperial family's blood on her hands, Martina's desire for self-preservation might outweigh her love of entertainments.

  'We were lucky not to be killed at that terrible feast,' Lygdus whined anew, 'and then we had to endure the games themselves and all that noise and smell, and then you made me attend the chariot races.'

  'I didn't make you attend anything.' I pointed at the steps that would take him down and out of the Theatre of Pompey. 'That's the way out. Go.'

  But he stayed where he was, settling in for a session of complaints. 'I should return to Castor,' he said, 'and beg him to let me wash his feet again. Week after week he's tried to get me to tell him the secrets I've learned about you — and week after week I lie that I've discovered nothing.'

  I felt very uncomfortable. The fear of Castor exposing me was real. Lygdus held power over me and I had allowed this in the spirit of friendship. Still, I longed to corrupt him with crime so that he would become as guilty as I was and be as keen to hide it. But without Martina's magic I was stymied.

  'My time spent with you has not served me well,' said Lygdus, resorting to his most well-worn phrase.

  'It's starting.'

  Far below us on the stage the musicians' warm-up notes ceased, and the audience took their lead. A hush of expectation fell across the huge open-air space
.

  'I'm bored already.' Lygdus's voice carried like a bird's cry.

  I would have hit him but several freedwomen turned around to glare. I searched their faces. None were Martina. 'It's his first time at the musica muta,' I whispered to them in apology. Looks of superiority crossed the freedwomen's faces and they turned around again.

  On the distant stage a single flautist among the musicians began to play the notes of a haunting tune. Then the eight men of the chorus came on from their side entrance and the crowd made polite applause. The men wore half-masks, obscuring their eyes and heads but leaving their mouths exposed. When they were arranged in their places, one of the chorus men produced a scabellum — a wooden clapper board — and held it high in the air.

  The flautist stopped. The chorus spoke in one voice: 'Presenting Echo and Narcissus!'

  The freedwomen swooned in front of us.

  'That old story?' said Lygdus.

  The chorus man with the clapper board began a rhythmic beat, keeping time like a water clock, opening and closing the arms.

  The star pantomimus leaped onto the stage from the entrance at the opposite side and the crowd burst into cheers. His entire head was covered by a blank mask that removed all hint of his features. And yet it seemed that he owned the most desired face in the world, so expressive was his body in conveying exquisite beauty and grace. His limbs and torso suggested youth — perhaps he was no more than fifteen. His limbs were lean, yet muscular. His feet were brown and bare. His tunica was yellow, feather-light and brief, floating around his hips as he danced.

  The acknowledgement the pantomimus gave the crowd was heartfelt, given with the simplest gestures to make him seem humble and moved. There wasn't a theatregoer in Rome who disliked the musica muta. Its players were adored celebrities. They expressed actions, feelings and passions more beautifully and intelligently than was possible with the spoken word. They never uttered a sound. Instead their audiences projected the most alluring words imaginable upon them, wholly within the mind. The great stars of Augustus's day — Bathyllus, Pylades, Hylas — had all retired, but a new generation of mimes competed in their wake, fighting for the fame and wealth that came to the very best of them. Yet they were not without controversy. Women were feared susceptible to the sensual dances and mythological themes — not that it stopped them attending. Some mimes had been known to perform at private dinner parties and intimate engagements hosted by patrician wives. Some were even said to perform naked.