Lindsey Davis - The course of Honor

The lad Titus had become brick red with defiance, bursting with the indiscretion of youth. One leg was bent beneath him on the couch; he was struggling to break free. With any luck he would collapse.

"With permission, lord," Caenis asked the Emperor, though she did not care whether he gave permission or not, "as a client of your family I will attend to the funeral."

"Tonight," Nero said, in his brash voice. "Hasty deaths should be hastily removed."

Titus gagged. The Emperor turned upon him his bloodless gaze.

"Too much wine!" Caenis uttered with contempt. "The young fool's drunk."

Moving with that disgusting cormorant strut, Nero then left his family's female client to tidy up death and drunkenness together.

* * *

Caenis sprang to life. "Demetrius, close the door!" She was already setting down her pointless burden gently and squirming to her feet. "Hot water and salt!" she barked to her slave. "Not from the dining room; be quick, but be discreet. Demetrius, run!"

As she reached him Titus began to slither toward the floor. She caught him under one armpit—this was the moment when all her future nightmares would begin: that painfully familiar Flavian face slipping past her knee, with chaos all around them, while she heard her own voice appealing to him not to die. He was a well-made chunky young man, gripping his stomach in obvious agony. He was too heavy; she had to let him slide to the ground, where she knelt, gathering him against her knees, with one hand supporting his warm head.

"I drank—"

"I know."

He was flopping, semiconscious; in a moment he would be gone. She began to shake him like a maid plumping a pillow; she slapped him; she shouted his name. "Titus! Come along, now; this won't do. Wake up; Titus!"

Demetrius was at her side. Thankfully Aglaus chose his subordinates for their quick response in a crisis. Caenis herself mixed a strong emetic, while Demetrius began the desperate process of hauling Titus upright again. Seating him on the couch seemed to revive him to some degree. He was white-knuckled with pain. His eyes looked opaque. "Come along; drink. Titus, you know you must!"

She held his head, gripping the curly hair at the back of his neck, forcing him to swallow the warm brine. He drank it all. He wanted to live; he was a fighter in the stubborn Flavian mold, and he trusted her instinctively.

"Demetrius, find my litter; bring it in here. Say I'm ill if need be. Nothing to do here until I get him to vomit the poison."

Titus was changing color even as she spoke, from his hectic flush to a dreadful doughy gray. Demetrius met her eyes. She nodded; her slave slipped away.

"Britannicus—"

"Britannicus is gone. I'm so sorry. I know you were his friend. Save your energy; Titus, do try to throw up." He would not need much trying; he had that worried look. "One day," Caenis promised him grimly, "all this will be stopped. One day, Titus; you and I will see a better world."

Then Vespasian's son was violently sick all over her feet.

He was mortified. "Oh, lady, I'm so sorry—"

Her new sandals! But he looked better. "Thanks, sweetheart. Come on; try again. I don't think I liked them anyway, and I certainly don't like them now."

Behind her, she suddenly heard the wailing of the slaves who attended a death to clamor in case there was a hope that the victim might after all wake. People had no sense of discretion. This was the ritual, so they performed it mindlessly. Nobody murdered in this palace was required to be revived. People had no sense.

No one paid any attention to Titus and herself. Just as well. Too close an association with this poisoning would do the Flavians no good.

She had been prepared to thrust chicken feathers down the boy's throat, but by now he was being helplessly ill. Caenis talked to him, willing him through, holding him more kindly now. He no longer seemed conscious of his surroundings, but she tried to make her voice reach his brain and drag him back. She was losing him; she could see that.

" Titus! Titus, come on, my Flavian; you can do better than this."

He groaned. Still talking, she massaged his limp, sweating hands. "What a truly awful banquet; I don't know why I came. Abandoned by my host—Titus, make an effort, please!—the floor show was deplorable, and I had to leave before the decent drinking got under way. . . ." He had nothing more to bring up. Wiping his face, she let him rest with his poor fevered head against her upper arm. Tears splashed onto his cheek; her own tears. "Oh, my darling; don't die, Titus! I can never tell Vespasian that I let him lose his son."

Demetrius was back with her litter and its two frightened bearers. She gave them quiet instructions. They were to take the boy to his father's empty apartment; Demetrius would go to explain, or if there were no servants there he would fetch Aglaus instead to look after the boy.

Titus was wrestling against unconsciousness as they lifted him inside the chair. Just before she closed the half-door Caenis leaned in to tuck her shawl around him. He was shivering uncontrollably; she had never seen anyone so white.

He opened his eyes in a moment of puzzled lucidity. "Do you know my father well?"

"Not anymore," stated Caenis tersely. "And you can tell him from me, I can manage without his offspring being sick in my best new shoes!"

Yet she kissed him, before the bearers began to move off—that old social gesture of affection, the light touch on the cheek. So once again, Titus felt the lady's tears.

Perhaps he had glimpsed that a little of the love she once gave to Britannicus had transferred in that dreadful hour to him. Perhaps, too, he recognized the shadow of another kind of feeling. Within the soft folds of that lady's shawl he shuddered, for as he was carried away from the Palace to the safety of his father's house he understood that he had trespassed among the secrets of a grown-up world. Unimagined aspects of his own existence faced him. With the heartrending clarity of someone who was dangerously ill, he was viewing not merely his father, with whom he had always been on the best of terms, and his mother, whom he loved as he should, but also this lady with whom he was sharing the loss of his friend. Love of Britannicus seemed their special interest, a bond even more private than the fact that she had just saved his life.

But there was something else between them too. She had called him her darling. Then, with a flood of sensation as intense as biting on an unexpected clove, Titus Vespasianus understood her warning and her plea. He realized exactly why, when they spoke about tonight to other people, they would have to make such a joke about him ruining her shoes.

TWENTY-EIGHT

They buried Britannicus in the pouring rain.

Someone with enormous forethought had provided a pyre. Slaves must have been building it before the banquet even began. So a small group of friends cremated the son of Claudius on the Palatine that same night, while Nero watched from his dining room, much as Caligula had once watched Antonia's funeral. It was raining from the start, but when they brought the boy's ashes to the Mausoleum of Augustus in the north of the city, all the heavens opened, and this was taken for a sign of the gods' wrath. For Caenis, the filthy weather merely matched the filthiness of life.

It was a pitiful group that trailed out to the Field of Mars, then through the sodden public walks to the Mausoleum. As they approached, the weather was so bad they could barely make out the exterior, mounded with earth in the Etruscan style, though massively terraced and planted with cypress trees. The bronze statue of Augustus that surmounted the great circular tomb was quite invisible in the murk.

The wind keened eerily in the trees. It was night, the company sparse and deeply depressed. When lightning flashed off the obelisks that guarded the entrance to that dark place, those who had been brave enough to attend the cremation understood that all the new optimistic order was now quite lost. Their unexpected Emperor Claudius had been decreed a god; as they brought his murdered son to the family tomb, that was the final irony.