Luke Devenish - Nest of vipers

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.