Luke Devenish - Nest of vipers

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…'

'Then 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.

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.

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.