Luke Devenish - Nest of vipers

'My son,' Tiberius breathed.

The tears Sejanus wept were like those of a lover.

The Fates were mocking me — and there was a crueller joke to come.

The first to see who it was that was standing among them in shock and incomprehension at the magnitude of what the gods had caused to happen in Fidenae were the town's slaves. Ever watchful, ever expectant, always anticipating blows and curses, the household slaves of Fidenae saw Tiberius first, as the shattered remains of his retinue carried him through town on the road back to Rome from the ruined Cave.

Every door in the street had been flung open on its pivot, every atrium within had its artworks and treasures and ancestral masks unguarded, exposed. Every slave in Fidenae had rushed from these doors when the earthquake had happened, and they didn't stop rushing as far along the shattered, twisted, buckled street towards the amphitheatre as they dared, before running back hopelessly, wailing, and then trying again. But they stopped in this tumult, one by one, and their eyes like slits in the dust opened fully in childlike amazement. They knew him from his face. They knew him from his coins. They knew the Emperor as they knew their own hands.

Tiberius moved among them, and we moved with him too, along the palsied street, the looming catastrophe before us. More people saw him, and yet more still. Masters and mistresses, merchants and legionaries. Those who kissed the lips of their dead loved ones saw him, while they pulled and tore them lifeless from the ruins. Those who fought like wildcats and jackals saw him, brawling over the faces of their still, grey children in the rubble. Even those who had been crushed in the very first moments of the earthquake saw him, their eyes like glass where they lay, seeing nothing and yet seeing all. Those whose suffering was unendurable saw him, as their limbs were hacked free, sawn from their joints by people only wishing to save them. Those who could hear the tormented cries of wives and husbands and parents and lovers saw him without seeing anything more, their loved ones lost and unreachable in the amphitheatre's ruin.

So many people saw their Emperor: some living, some dead; some mutilated, some whole; some with minds and lives in pieces at their feet; some with courage and nobility that would make their forebears proud. When the amphitheatre of Fidenae — so hastily planned, so cheaply assembled, so inadequately, obscenely ill-designed — when this shoddy place of fun and spectacle and Roman entertainment had been filled beyond capacity by greedy ticket-sellers eager to exploit the stark lack of entertainments in Rome, when this ignoble, shameful, calamitous structure had been struck by the thrashing of the beast that had nearly cost us our own lives back in the Cave, the amphitheatre had fallen inwards on itself.

Fifty thousand people had been killed.

As we stood in the middle of the very worst catastrophe that anyone could remember, I saw with even greater shock what further miracle the mocking Fates had shown me. I remembered the portent I had seen so long ago at the slave market: the thrashing of the beast; the broken, bronze hair; the slave in the hands of the carnifex. With her face triumphant, her valour glorious, Livia turned in freeing her great-grandson Nero from the morass. Her youth had returned — her eighty years were no more. She was exquisite, all-conquering. She was a goddess.

My domina looked to her son Tiberius and smiled at him with an old affection — a mother's love. She looked to Sejanus next, and the smile she gave him spoke of secret things, of a lover's words.

Then she looked to me.

'Ah, Iphicles,' Livia said. 'My most loyal of slaves.'

The Kalends of October

AD 26

One week later: the Senate decrees that no one with capital of less than four hundred thousand sestertii may exhibit a gladiatorial show, and no amphitheatre may be constructed except on ground of proven solidity

The temple attendants tried to assist my domina into the pit but she waved away their hands.

'I can get in myself.'

She stood at the edge and inhaled the rich smell of it. 'So intoxicating,' she murmured. 'It's a scent I can never forget, you know. How wonderful to be back.'

The temple attendants bowed and Livia raised the hem of her stola and stepped lightly down the steps until she was fully inside. She seated herself upon the little ledge. Already the walls pressed their juice into her clothes. She dabbed at the growing stains with her fingertips, licking them. 'So intoxicating,' she repeated.

The attendants appeared above with the heavy iron grate, ready to position it over the pit.

'I don't want that,' said Livia.

'Augusta?'

'I don't want it. It's used to stop novitiates from running away — I am not a novitiate, I promise you. I was inducted into the Great Mother's rites many, many years ago.'

The attendants stood looking at each other.

'I said remove it.'

With his eyes closed, slumped against the great alabaster statue of the goddess, the withered husk that was the haruspex Thrasyllus made a gesture with his hand. The attendants saw this and took the grate away. Livia waited inside the hole. After a moment the chief attendant held his face over the side to peer down at her. He was apologetic but felt it was possible the Augusta might have forgotten the other purpose for which the grate was required. She had been so long 'asleep'.

'It is for the sacrifice to stand on, Augusta,' he reminded her.

Livia did not need reminding. 'I wish there to be nothing between myself and the beast,' she told him.

The chief attendant was confused. 'What if the beast falls inside?'

'Then let it.'

This was highly dangerous, but the chief attendant could see no other course. Having removed the grate, his assistants waited with the tethered black bull. The beast was docile and silent. The chief signalled for the proceedings to begin.

Ringed at the dark periphery of the temple's hall, a group of eunuchs began to strike upon the drums they wore on long strings around their necks. Their rhythm built slowly in pace and noise until they began to sing to it.

Inside the pit Livia knew the words. The assistants led the huge black bull to the edge while she sang with gusto, reaching inside her gown. Just as the chief attendant raised his knife to strike at the bull's throat, Livia pulled out a blade of her own, sprang to her feet and plunged it deep into the bull's soft flesh before whipping the blade in an arc, slicing the creature's throat open. The chief attendant dropped his own knife in shock. Thick, rich blood gushed onto Livia as she continued to sing, filling her upturned mouth. She lost her footing and slipped in the gore, just as the dying beast fell forward into the hole, landing on top of her. Her face was pressed hard against the wound she had made, the blood gushing from the bull's throat into hers.

Yet she knew she would not drown. She knew her bones would not be broken. She knew this was how Cybele would re-enter her, empowering her once again for the tasks ahead.

Livia came to consciousness to find she was lying on the temple floor before the great alabaster statue of Cybele. The eunuchs and the attendants were gone. She was slick with the bull's blood; she had been retrieved from the taurobolium pit with great difficulty. The only way to reach her was by dismembering the bull, and every last drop of the creature's blood had drizzled onto her while they hacked away before she was finally pulled free. This was wholly as Livia had intended.

Reorientated as to where she was, she at once sat up. The withered haruspex was slumped in his place at the statue's base, but now he held the guts of a pigeon in his fists. There was not another living thing inside the temple with them. Livia and Thrasyllus were entirely alone.