The Nero Prediction (5 page)

Messalina’s voice reminded me of Chinese silk. "Oh mother why is it taking so long? His messenger should have been here by now. He wouldn’t see me but he will read my letter. He'll read it and then he'll understand."

The older woman's voice was perfectly calm. "Whether he reads it or not, whether he spares you or not, you have to pull yourself together, my child. The blood of heroes runs in your veins. You must not shame it."

"But I must live for my son's sake, Venus has promised me that I shall."

"My daughter, take a hold of yourself, you must-"

"No!" Messalina took two steps towards the open window and gazed with a melting expression at the evening star, already astonishingly bright, riding high in the sky. "Look, there she is, my protectoress. Last night she saw Mars strike my Sun."

"Messalina, she is setting -"

"Petra's dream in which he saw Claudius wearing a wreath of withering vine leaves, my astrologer's confirmation that Mars striking my sun presaged evil for my husband: both indicate that it's my husband who must die, not me. Claudius has killed Silius so the prediction is fulfilled. Claudius is safe now. I have saved his life!"

"My child, you are grasping at straws. I have known for some time that this is the day and this the hour."

"What? No one besides for my astrologer, not even Claudius, knows my horoscope."

"How could your mother not know the date and time of your birth?"

There was a sudden rasp in the silky voice. "Whom did you consult about my stars?"

A moment's hesitation, enough to admit an indiscretion. "Ptolemy, some time ago."

"Ptolemy Seleucus! Mother, you know perfectly well that he keeps no secrets from Agrippina!" A moment of realization, a strangled little cry. "Oh! Agrippina was the one who told me that my husband was doomed, she was the one who suggested I marry Silius to save Claudius! She used the birth time you gave her. You betrayed me mother!"

This statement was followed by a torrent of tears that Domitia did her best to wipe away with a handkerchief. There was the sound of clanking metal behind us. I turned. A column of Praetorians was approaching lit by torch-bearers on either side. The shiny steel column crested with purple horsehair looked like a monstrous caterpillar. Euodus took a long look at Venus as if he were calculating her position. Then, grinning with malicious joy, he kicked the door three times in mock imitation of destiny's knock. Messalina smothered her scream when she saw the Praetorians through the window.

Without even deigning to look towards the door, Domitia Lepida held out a jeweled dagger to her daughter. Her voice became as hard as the marble statues of her ancestors. "Valeria Messalina, you bear the proud names of mighty consuls and triumphant generals who have not hesitated to lay down their lives for their honor. Now it is time to lay down yours."

Since the door was locked and neither of the women showed any sign of opening it, Euodus broke it with two lunges of his brawny shoulders.

The soldiers coming out of the night filed past him.

Domitia Lepida ignored them. "Valeria Messalina," she intoned, "your time has come."

Messalina took the dagger from her mother, cradled it to her breast. "Is this why you are here?" she asked the guard colonel in a little voice.

Euodus answered for him. "Come on whore, he jeered, “you have the stomach for sperm, let's see if you have the stomach for steel."

Messalina's fury gave her the courage to make a little nick in her throat. Crying now, she stabbed at her breast and sank to her knees. This time the dagger had gone deeper and blood flowed freely but it clearly wasn't a mortal blow.

For the first time Domitia Lepida acknowledged the presence of the soldiers. "Help her," she said to the colonel.

He did.

Near dawn I dreamt again in my cubicle. I was on a flat, desert plain walking towards a man with a long white beard and a pointed Phrygian cap. I felt my eyes brim with tears. It was Phocion. He was sitting at the center of a spoked circle, clearly a horoscope. He looked at me with his last, loving gaze but he spoke with Agrippina's voice. "One final, fateful act,” he said.

A persistent knocking woke me. The door was opened by a ten-year-old boy with blue eyes and reddish blond hair. It was Agrippina's son Lucius, I recognized him instantly from the statue his mother had caressed when she'd talked about Fate.

"Good morning," he said very brightly. "Mother tells me that when I grow up and go to war you're going to carry my shield and defend me. Is that true?"

A Stellar Trap

October 16, 48 A.D. – February 49 A.D.

Messalina was Agrippina’s niece by marriage and her son Lucius’s first cousin by blood, so it was proper for both of them to withdraw for a period of mourning. Of course Agrippina didn’t mourn, she exulted, but she did so in the privacy of her study, poring over horoscopes of Rome’s power brokers, calculating what they were destined to do next.

My next two nights were plagued with horrible nightmares that I would like to have had interpreted. But I didn’t know who to go to and had nothing to pay him with if I did. The palace swarmed with courtiers, capped freedmen, thousands of slaves in livery that identified their line of work. They greeted me politely, exchanged pleasantries willingly enough, but avoided conversation. It seemed that everyone knew I had something to do with Messalina’s death. Shunning me was the safest thing to do. Although they kept their distance, they watched me. But then I was used to that.

I explored the vast palace complex on my own, admiring its population of statues, the astonishingly lifelike paintings that hung on the walls mostly depicting Tiberius’s victories as the emperor Augustus’s greatest general. My favorite was at least twelve feet tall. It depicted twenty-two-year-old Tiberius, bloody from battle and his face flushed with victory, holding aloft the standards of long lost Roman legions he’d just recovered from the Parthians. The glorious moment made my heart leap with the pride. I had an imperial destiny, my stars foretold that, and I was already at the center of the dizzying grandeur of the empire. It was possible that I too, even though I was still a slave, was fated to be a hero.

More often I was assailed by doubt. I was afraid of Tigellinus and the hold he had over me. I didn’t want to lose my hand like the Copy Mater had. I was also deeply unsettled by Agrippina’s hubris. How long would Isis tolerate her arrogance? My gut churned as the tall marble walls seemed to rush inwards upon me. At moments like these Rome’s grandeur threatened to crush me like a fly.

I fought for equanimity by focussing my eyes on the future. I needed to find out as much as I could about the woman who had gone to such lengths to find me because that might help me unveil the mystery of that “final, fateful act” she believed I was destined to perform.

Young Lucius helped me. On the morning of the third day after Messalina’s death he woke me. “Good morning, Epaphroditus, do you always sleep so late? It must be a lazy Egyptian habit. Everybody gets up at the crack of dawn around here.”

“Dominus,” I said, wiping a nightmare out of my eyes, “I haven’t been sleeping very well.”

His bright face darkened. “I don’t suppose I can blame you. You were there when they…” He wasn’t able to go on. “Did she die bravely?

“Yes dominus, very bravely.”

“Well, that’s the main thing, I suppose. Look, mother gave me permission to take you on a visit, to show you who I am. Do you want to come?”

I was already pulling on my tunic. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

A bodyguard of ten gorgeously uniformed Praetorians surrounded us as we heading north down the slope of the Palatine. It was already after sunrise and so wheeled vehicles were banned from the city (they were only allowed to operate at night, Lucius explained to me) but the streets were jammed with pedestrians, most of them in a hurry, and litters bearers, led by armed slaves, barging their way through the mob.

“Here it is, the Forum of Augustus!” he announced as we entered a splendid rectangle which looked like it was at least 130 yards by 100. Running along its long sides were colonades two stories high that housed hundreds of niches, each one populated by a larger-than-life statue, every one painted in the vibrant colors of life. At its center there was a huge statue of a man riding in a triumphal chariot, no doubt Augustus himself.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Splendid, dominus,” I said and meant it. “The statues, are they all your relatives?”

He frowned because he thought, correctly, that I was teasing him. “No, not really, although in a sense they are. I’ll explain.” He pointed at a statue, larger than the rest that occupied a niche near the top end of the structure. “Here’s the man who began it all, Romulus, founder of Rome.”

The figure, dressed in a rustic robe, carried a spear. At his feet were objects that were painted the color of gold and jewel ornaments, vases, plates, ornamental weapons – anything worth stealing. “What’s all that stuff around him?” I asked.

Lucius frowned again, this time at my stupidity. “His loot of course. He killed an enemy commander in man-to-man combat. That’s his reward.”

Opposite Romulus was another large statue dressed in robes a Greek prince would wear. He was carrying an old man on his back and leading a boy by the hand. He and Romulus seemed to be staring each other down with their glassy eyes. “Who’s that?”

“Aeneas. That’s where I come into it. He’s the Trojan who fled to Italy. That’s his father he’s carrying his father on his back, you must know the story. He founded my family,” Lucius said very matter-of-fact. “See those statues all the way down from him? Those are all my ancestors in order of succession.”

Instead of colonades with niches, the top end of the rectangle, where we were standing, was a garish temple decorated with red marble and battle scenes carved in high relief and covered with gold leaf.

“What on earth is this?” I asked.

“Why? Don’t you like it? It’s the temple of Mars the Avenger, celebrating the revenge Augustus took on the assassins of his father Julius Caesar.”

“I thought Augustus was Caesar’s grand-nephew.”

Lucius frowned for a third time and I decided I better stop teasing him. “Of course, but Caesar adopted him so he was his son, even you should know that.”

Careful to sound more respectful, I pointed at the figure in full armor, flanked by two women, who stood guard in the pediment, the 20 foot high triangle created by the pitched roof and the top of the purple, fluted pillars supporting it. “Dominus I know that’s Mars. But who are the ladies?”

The boy squinted and for the first time I realized that he was nearsighted. “Mars was the father of Romulus, Remus too, of course, but he doesn’t matter. The one on his left is Fortuna, goddess of fortune and the other one’s Venus, or it could be the other way around. Doesn’t matter, Fortuna is there because we’re very fortunate. Venus is the ancestor of my family, the Julian family, and therefore she’s my great-great - oh, I’ve forgotten how many greats there are – grandmother. Come, let’s go see my great-great-great-, whatever, uncle Julius Caesar.”

There he was, the butcher who murdered a million Gauls in his quest for plunder, lean and hungry still. Somehow the sculptor had captured Caesar’s ruthlessness and his restlessness. It seemed that he was itching to come alive and kill millions more.

Slowly, reverentially, Lucius led me into the upper branches of the Julian family tree. Augustus who had fed Cleopatra to her asp and murdered her boy Caesarion, Julius Caesar’s only son. Julia, Augustus’s disgraced daughter who died in exile. Steel willed Agrippina the Elder who elected to spend most of her life in distant military camps with her husband Germanicus. Insane, homicidal Caligula. His sister Agrippina, my Agrippina, I recognized her instantly. She was leaning back in a chair with a triumphant smile on her face, pointing with the index finger of her left hand directly at the head of the boy kneeling at her feet. Mars, Venus, Aeneas, Romulus, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Agrippina and her son, the next in line. I glanced at the blue robed figure who was staring up at the statue of Mars, pretending not to watch me. I’d seen him several times since we left the Palatine, always keeping his distance. I felt my hair stand on end.

I needed some answers. Euodus, whom Agrippina had quartered with horse trainers for the Greens faction, the imperial favorites, knew at least some of them. I found him sitting on a lower tier that was so close to the Circus Maximus track that you could hear the horses grunt as they charged past, four abreast. Directly opposite, built on the divider, was the temple of the Sun topped with a statue of Sol driving his gilded chariot.

“Anything to report?” was his greeting.

“Agrippina’s in mourning, she isn’t seeing anyone.”

“And Lucius?”

“I think he’s upset.”

“Messalina was his first cousin, his father’s sister’s child. Even though she was older, he adored her.”

The name Messalina reeked of the delicious and the forbidden. I remembered the whip scars on Euodus’s back. “Is it true,” I asked, “the things they say about her?”

Again the quick green glance. “What things?”

“The orgies, did she really have those?”

“Oh yes.”

“What did she do?”

“I told you she enjoyed giving pain.”

“Your back.”

“Yes. But the orgies. They were religious.”

This surprised me. “How could they be religious?”

“It’s a mystery,” he said with that sharp, curious smile of his.

“You mean a mystery cult?”

“Yes. The Syrian goddess, Atargatis, fish from the waist down. She’s the sign Virgo. Messalina was born when Virgo was rising. She identified with Atargatis, became Atargatis during the orgies. Mnester the dancer, he was one of her worshippers, told me you could see her eyes change color when she became Atargatis. First she used the whip. Then she gave herself to the men she whipped. The emperor’s wife drenched with sperm from head to foot. Quite a thought.”