Nest of Vipers (30 page)

Sosia screamed again and continued running. Death had her in its scent. It must come for her now – she had forced its hand. I was only death's tool. But it gave me no pleasure to be so – no pleasure at all.

Seven months later: the historian
Aulus Cremutius Cordus succeeds
in starving himself to death midway
through his protracted treason trial.
His books are burned in the
Forum

Tiberius sat on his favourite chair in his favourite corner of his garden, rugging himself up against the chill. The winter sun would hit him shortly, as soon as the first rays cleared the top of the garden wall. He was happy to wait until it shone; he wanted the warmth to lick his bones. He made himself comfortable on the cushions and pulled his fur-lined cloak tight around his throat.

'Tiberius . . .'

He started at the voice, recognising it.

'Tiberius . . .'

He looked about the garden around him. 'Is that you, Antonia?'

'Are you in good health?'

'I am. Such a fine winter's day.'

'I would like to see you. To talk about things.'

Tiberius was confused. 'Aren't you seeing me now?'

'You know I'm not.'

Tiberius's mind was always slow to work while the sun's rays remained hidden.

'I am on the other side of this wall.'

Tiberius got up from his chair in wonder and made his way towards the garden's edge. 'On the other side?'

'Yes.'

There was silence while Tiberius ran his palms across the cold, stone surface.

'Why won't you let us visit you?' Antonia asked, after a moment.

'Who?'

'Your family, who loves you.'

Tiberius tried to recall the reason.

'Why won't you let me visit you, at least?'

'You are welcome any time.'

'The guards turn me away. They turn us all away – on your orders, Tiberius.'

'Absurd. I'll have them flogged for it. Come and see me today, Antonia. It would be so nice to have some wine with my old friend.'

He heard Antonia start weeping.

'Yes. It would be very nice. There are so many things I would like to talk to you about.'

'Then I look forward to it.'

He started to turn away.

'Do you remember when your brother died, Tiberius? My husband? Do you remember when he died?'

A stab of pain brought ugly memories back.

'We grew so close, you and me. No one else ever understood the depth of the loss we felt.'

Agonising grief creased his face. He remembered his brother. Then he remembered his son. Then he remembered why it was easier to keep his family at bay. He felt cold. 'I don't think I can see you today, after all.'

'Tiberius?'

'No. Now go away.'

'Please let me see you.'

'I said go away.' He hurried back to the comfort and safety of his chair. If Antonia had remained behind the wall, she said nothing else and was as good as gone. Soon her intrusion began to recede as Tiberius resumed his wait for the sun. His grief was forgotten.

There was movement among the denuded winter shrubbery and he saw that Thrasyllus was curled in the snow.

'You are naked,
haruspex
?'

The soothsayer said nothing.

Tiberius waved for an attendant slave; it took a long time for one to come because so few were allowed to attend him. When one at last arrived, crawling on his hands and knees, Tiberius pointed at the
haruspex
. 'He is naked. Where are his clothes?'

'You ordered us to strip him, Caesar.'

Tiberius considered this, and then dismissed it as ridiculous. 'That's a bald lie.'

The slave remained on his hands and knees.

'Take off your clothes and give them to him. He is too valuable to waste in this way.'

'Yes, Caesar.' The slave began to undress in the snow, tossing his clothes at Thrasyllus's frostbitten feet.

'Put them on him – can't you see he's ill?'

The slave did his best to fit the clothes to Thrasyllus as Tiberius clapped his dry, cracked hands with a noise that barely rose above the winter birds. But the choirmaster was tuned to him. The man straightened from where he had fallen against the steps, waving his shattered hands towards where he hoped the children would still be. He had lost his sight with so many beatings, but his hearing remained sound. The children saw him and picked themselves up from where they huddled in groups in their soiled and ragged clothes; many were ill. Their memories of mothers and fathers and happy homes had dimmed, so that these things seemed like dreams to them now. Some could not remember when they first came to Oxheads – or when they had been told that they would not be returning home. Out of habit and fear, they began the morning's first song.

Tiberius regarded his morning correspondence. Direct contact with his person had been banned in favour of written petitions, and the sense of liberation this gave him hadn't faded. No longer were his mornings wasted with people he despised; he could sit in the sun and force anyone who wished for his guidance to write to him – and write prettily too. He enjoyed laughing at what they requested from him, but as an unspoken rule he only read letters from people who pleased him; he returned letters unopened to those who didn't. The morning's scrolls were bundled in canisters. He took a quick look at the contents and then kicked the lot aside. They were all too long – and boring. He wanted diversion. Other letters, written on folded, flattened papyrus, had been placed in a pile. Presuming these missives to be briefer than the scrolls, he began to examine them. The first two were immediate rejects. He scratched a cross on them in black ink and threw them to the ground.

The next letter was from Sejanus.

Tiberius smiled. With the children's hoarse, broken voices ringing pleasantly in his ears, he began to read.

Caesar,

It has become my habit to confide my hopes and wishes to your ears as readily as I do the gods. Since the days of our Great Walk together, I have asked for nothing more than to watch you and protect you and to serve you as a common soldier. That you have rewarded me with high distinctions is something I treasure, Caesar, but have never craved. The most glorious honour I have won is the reputation of being worthy of your friendship.

Moved, Tiberius closed his eyes for a moment as the sun's rays began to glow at the top of the wall. He reached his hand along the seat until his goblet was slipped inside it, placed there by the shivering, naked slave. He sipped, and the Eastern flower kissed him just as the sun did. He opened his eyes again and read on.

The tragedy of the boy Hector's choking will never leave me, but the honour of the union between he and my girl only grows, despite his premature death. I have heard that the Divine Augustus, when seeking a first marriage for his daughter, even entertained some thoughts of worthy men drawn from the Equestrians. If this is so, and if a husband is sought for a widow of Caesar's family, then I will make the first request that I have ever made of my Emperor. Please think of a friend who finds his reward simply in the glory of friendship.

Tiberius stopped reading in surprise. Then he carefully reread the sentences. He reached for his goblet as the children reached the end of their song. 'Again,' he commanded them, his eyes on the letter and his voice already slurred with the draught. He tried to free his mind of its clouds, hoping the sun's rays would help him, but the struggle was too much. He let the pleasure claim him and turned his energies to recalling who the widows in his family actually were. His mother was one, he knew; Antonia was another. Were there more?

He returned to the letter.

If Caesar grants my request, know this: his family will
be made all the safer against the unjust displeasure of
Agrippina.

Sejanus

Tiberius frowned. Or rather, he thought he should frown, but when the impulse came to do so, he found that his face remained placid in the dawning sun. Yet still the thought to frown was there; something stirred deep within him to prompt it – was it a warning? He couldn't be sure. It wasn't the same as the reactions he had to the long lists of citizens accused of treason; those merely sickened him. This was something else, a feeling far darker. He was reminded of the honk of the sacred geese from the summit of the Capitoline. Those famous noisy geese had once saved Rome from the Gauls with their alarm.

What were
his
geese telling him, Tiberius wondered. Where, if anywhere, was the threat?

'
The matron's words alone are heard
. . .' said a tiny voice in his ear.

Tiberius turned to Thrasyllus in the snow. 'I no longer like you in my garden,
haruspex
. I no longer like you here at all. What you say has become meaningless. Do not let me find you here when I return to my chair tomorrow.'

Apicata knew the sound of crisp, smooth, quality papyrus when it rubbed against the skin of her husband's rough hands. It was the sound she heard now and it meant he had a letter. There was no other noise to be heard but the dry, soft rustle as he clutched it, worrying the surface with his fingertips. The letter consumed him utterly.

Apicata waited patiently at her loom, her own hands smoothing and tightening the yarn with the bar, crushing it in. She reached for the weights, adjusting them. 'Is there news, husband?'

She sensed his eyes on her briefly before he returned to what he read. Apicata's patience was her strength. After another minute or so she tried again. 'Is it the Emperor who writes? Is he happy with you?'

This time she didn't even sense him looking up at her. The letter held him totally. Apicata rose to her feet and stood still for a moment. When Sejanus made no comment, she crept towards him across the courtyard, knowing where the earthenware pots stood in her path and gliding around them, never missing her step. She reached him and kneeled. 'Is it bad news?' she whispered.

Still Sejanus said nothing, rereading the words.

Her face was at his knees in his chair. Apicata pressed her cheeks against the flesh of them, holding herself there for a moment, until slowly she felt his legs begin to give. She pressed her face further, her lips and eyelashes brushing his thighs. Apicata began to pleasure him, the movements of her tongue and lips so practised now, so automatic, that she didn't need to think or feel or plan. Her ears stayed fixed on his response – the gradual quickening of his pulse and breath, the low, guttural moans that slowly grew from his belly and up into his throat. She lived for his pleasure; she lived to love him.

He gripped her by the hair and tugged her mouth away. She thought it was passion and tried to resist him, clinging with her lips, but he slapped at her head and threw her to the ground. Apicata lay there, dazed, as Sejanus stood up from his chair, twisting the papyrus into a stick.

'Was it bad news, husband?'

He threw the twisted letter into the air, and then turned and left her to her loom.

Apicata knew she had covered every inch of the courtyard, crawling on her hands and knees along the paving tiles, feeling under the plants, inside the ivy, reaching into the branches of the low trees. She raked her fingers through the fishpond, dredging through the weed and mud, but still she couldn't find it. So she began the process again.

It was long after midnight when she finally located the letter, blown into a corner behind a leafless, dormant rose. She snagged her
stola
on the thorns, pricking her skin and drawing blood. To retrieve the twisted sheet of papyrus she had to thrust her bare hand into the heart of the plant. But just as she had the thing in her fingertips, a gust of wind took it from her grasp. Apicata forced her hand again and again into the midst of the thorns, but she couldn't find the letter.

It was lost.

The nightmare that tormented him was always the same: the golden-haired man cursed him and beat him viciously with the rod and Thrasyllus could not escape, no matter where he crawled or what he said or what he tried to read in the bowels of the bird. And even when he saw precisely what lay ahead for the man – for this golden-haired king – still he was beaten until his every bone was smashed and he was nothing but pulp and mash upon the ground, like the guts of his pigeons. Then the nightmare would end as the golden-haired king left the place of imprisonment and Thrasyllus would wake up weeping and shivering and calling out for the Great Mother, who never came. But this time when the nightmare ended it was different. The Great Mother was with him, here in the snow.

'Ssh,' she soothed him.

His fevered eyes drank in the sight of her. 'Cybele?'

'Ssh,' she said. She laid her hand upon his brow and felt how cold he was – as chilled as stone. Her image began to melt and drip in his gaze.

'Are you really Cybele?'

'Ssh,' she repeated.

Thrasyllus saw in his mind another mother, one lost in the past – a mother who loved him and suckled him. 'You killed her, Cybele.' 'No.' 'You killed my mother . . . hacked the flesh from her. It was you.' 'Ssh.' Cybele's touch seeped deep inside him, easing the pain,

erasing the fear. 'It was another . . . I never held the blade. Your mother was taken by another one – look inside my heart and see this is true.'

Thrasyllus stared into the Great Mother's eyes, and the rays of perception illuminated what he found there. The goddess spoke the truth. Cybele could not lie to him. His mother had been killed by a lowly slave's hand.

Thrasyllus felt his love for the goddess return.

'You must answer me a question,' Cybele said, stroking his cheek. 'It is not a painful question – it is the same question the slave claims you have already answered for him. But I doubt the answer, you see – it seems so unlikely to me, so impossible.'

Thrasyllus waited.

'Who will be the second king?'

Thrasyllus told her.

Cybele was visibly shocked, thrown by the news that she, as a goddess, should surely already have known. Yet patently she did not.

'So the child will rule,' she muttered to herself. 'The child really will rule.' She was shaken. 'What a thing to give to Rome.' 'They are not the same,' said Thrasyllus. The goddess stopped.