The Nero Prediction (12 page)

"Look at me."

Fortunately by this time I'd cooled down a little. She was sitting in her chair between Chronos and Isis, her black eyes smoldering in the dreadful calm of her face. "You will be escorted directly to your quarters by a man who will kill you if you attempt to leave. At no time speak of what you have heard tonight. Understand?"

I nodded because I did understand. She was about to destroy her own son.

A man whose scars told me that he'd earned his freedom in the arena escorted me to my quarters and posted himself outside my door. I thought about making a bolt for it but there was something about the way the man moved which persuaded me I wouldn't get far before he broke my neck. Not far enough to reach Nero. I lay on my bed listening to his boots creaking as he shifted his weight outside my door. By the second hour call after midnight apprehension was beginning to transmute into nightmare. I was being shaken awake. A colonel of the guards stood over me. He smiled while he searched me for weapons as if he were searching for the point of a joke. Behind him was Spiculus, whose quick gray eyes saw everything. It was his speed that had given him his nickname, he stung like a bee.

“Come."

Nero was in his study, dressed in a tunic, plucking irritably at his kithara. More Germans stood against the walls, the blades of their spears twinkling ominously in the torchlight. Something awful had happened.

He struck a discordant key when he saw me, and then another. "Epaphroditus, I've heard the most disturbing rumor. Mother has dictated a book to you in which she says terrible things about me. Is that true?"

Thank the gods he knew! It meant he probably already had the situation under control. "Yes Caesar, you commanded me to do it."

He raised an eyebrow, weighted his words with irony. "It must’ve been dull reading though, the way it put you to sleep." 

"No dominus, she calls for revolution. A courier comes for the manuscript at dawn. He mustn’t leave with it."

Now Nero sounded hurt rather than angry. "Epaphroditus, the stars say that you're destined to be my shield and lucky charm, mother told me that and I've always believed it. So why didn't you come to me immediately. You of all people?"

"The Augusta had a gladiator escort me to my quarters. He stood guard outside my door with instructions to kill me if I tried to leave."

Nero turned to the colonel. "He was guarded?"

"We didn't see anyone."

A suspicious squint. "What's in the book?"

"Everything, Caesar. It's for your ears only."

Nero sent the colonel out of the room and I told him what was in Agrippina's memoir.

When I finished he gave the colonel his orders. "Between now and first light someone will go to my mother's quarters to fetch a document," he told him. "I suspect that he will come through the rear entrance. When he emerges he must be taken."

The red tide of dawn had barely lapped the beaches of the eastern horizon when the dying night disgorged a figure outside the rear entrance to Agrippina's wing of the palace. He knocked on the door twice, then twice again. It swung open and a hand, it looked like a woman's, passed him a scroll.

The door shut and the bolt was driven home.

"Now!" yelled the colonel.

Four Germans sprang from the oleanders and pounced on the courier, huge, powerful men, veterans of dozens of bloody battles in the amphitheater.

There was a flurry of movement, the thud of blows, curses and the cracking of branches as they were sent flying back into the hedge. A figure hurtled away from us in the dark with two of the Germans, the first to recover their feet, a few yards behind.

The courier.

"Stop him!" Nero howled.

"Use your spears!" bellowed the colonel.

The courier began to run zigzag, swift as a bat. A spear flew past his left shoulder. The second imbedded itself in his back. Without even breaking stride he reached back and plucked it out as if it were a straw.

Two Germans who had been watching a side exit rushed into the road ahead of the courier, uncertain what to do. One was knocked flat on his back but the other managed to get in a stab with his sword before he was brushed aside.

Spiculus pounced out of a shadow. There was a flash of steel, fast as a cat’s paw, a lethal sting. The courier went down. A single cough and the ragged breathing stopped.

Nero was calmer now. His voice had regained the ring of authority. "Search him," he said to me.

I squatted next to the body. The face was scarred, you could see them under the short beard, the nose broken. It was the face of a professional pugilist. But that wasn't why I was staring at it. I'd seen it before, a vague memory but one that filled me with unease.

"Get on with it man," Nero said.

The scroll, which the courier had tucked inside his tunic, was soaked with blood. Nero broke the seal, began unrolling it. I brought him light.

He read rapidly, in an undertone loud enough only for me to hear. "Dear friend. I hope that by now you have looked at the little memoir which I sent to you at midnight and that you agree urgent action must be taken to ensure that the succession of Britannicus proceeds with the least possible damage to the health of the republic.

"As agreed, if you do not hear from me to the contrary today, by early evening copies of the manuscript must be placed in the hands of the Consuls and both Praetorian Prefects so that the revolution proceeds with the minimum loss of life.

"I know you realize how much it grieves me to turn against my own flesh and blood, but Rome is great is because throughout her history her citizens have always put her interests before their own.

"I remain your friend, Agrippina."

Nero crumpled the scroll in his fist. His voice had an eerie calm about it. "That herbalist, you know the one mother says in her book gave her the poison she used to kill Claudius?"

"Lucusta," I said.

"Yes her. Find her and bring her to me."

That evening, at dinner, Britannicus collapsed shortly after his mead was cooled with a draft of water containing an extract of sea-hare. By midnight his funeral pyre was waiting for him in the Campus Martius.

"Go with him Epaphroditus," said Nero, "I'm going to have a talk with mother."

 In Rome rumor travels as fast as thought. The streets were lined with hastily attired people, many of them weeping as they paid their last respects to the young prince who had born his reversals of fortune with such touching fortitude.

I wept with them.

The resin-soaked wood of the pyre was a roaring inferno that illuminated those who stood close almost as bright as day. My attention was attracted by two figures who were looking in my direction. Neither of them showed any sign of grief. One was Euodus who smirked as he beckoned. His companion, the handsome one with the wry smile and the compelling violet eyes, nodded his head approvingly as if commending me for something remarkably well done. It was Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus. I remembered where I'd seen the courier before. He’d been with Euodus when he’d fetched me from the Castellum prison in Alexandria, he was the man who had run ahead to tell Tigellinus that they had found me. From somewhere deep in the shadows Tigellinus had helped Agrippina kill Britannicus. The man who thought he owned me, the man I most feared, was back in my life.

"Congratulations Epaphroditus!" he said with a dark smile, "victorious again! You've exceeded my wildest expectations but not Agrippina's. She sent us to take you to her immediately, to thank you in person. Afterwards we'll talk."

Agrippina was in her chair flanked by her closest friends, Isis and Time. Nero paced up and down in front of her. Neither of them noticed me hovering at the door.

Nero wasn't angry. He sounded appalled. "Mother, you even accused me of buggering Britannicus!"

"I merely repeated the rumors that I had heard. Should you have been not enough of a man to strike down Britannicus, I would have believed them to be true. Now I know that they are not."

"What about all those murders you confessed to? Messalina, Lollia Paulina and then Claudius ... they were not your doing?"

"My son, everything that happened was destined to happen, we mortals are merely Fate’s hands.”

"And you have confessed to everything?"

"I have confessed to nothing."

"So you never actually sent your confession to anyone?"

"No, it never left my room."

Nero's voice fell to a whisper. There was disbelief in it. "But if Britannicus hadn't died you would have murdered me with it, your own son, and made Britannicus emperor?"

A whisper answered him. "It is Fate that decides, not I."

"How can you say that! It was you who forced me to kill Britannicus, not the stars!"

"Nero, my son, how do you suppose that Fate imposes its will upon earth if not through the control of natural forces: winds, floods, earthquakes, animals and, yes, people? What I did was surrender my will to the stars and in that emptiness the pure thought of Fate formed itself like condensing vapor in my mind. You do understand, don’t you?"

Suddenly Agrippina's anger seemed far less dreadful than her approval. I dismissed myself and fled as if pursued by the Furies.

Perhaps I should have stayed because Nero ended his little chat by asking Agrippina to make her departure from the Palatine immediate. A few days later she left, grim faced, at the head of an enormous wagon train of personal effects. It ought to have been a big relief to me, finally seeing her off. The fly in the ointment was that no sooner had the last of her wagons cleared the palace gates than a racing chariot pulled by four beautiful horses came in.

Nero, who looked a little tearful as he waved his mother good-bye from the palace steps, brightened when he saw the horses. "Look at them Epaphroditus!" he said, squinting at them, "Aren't they beautiful? Arabians, all the way from Alexandria. The chap who brought them for me, an old friend of mother's actually, swears they're the fastest team in Rome and he ought to know, he made the Greens top dogs in Caligula's time. Promises he can do the same for me. Also, he’s going to be giving me driving lessons, they say he’s the best trainer in the empire. Why are you looking so glum? C'mon man, spit it out!"

I wished I could but my tongue had turned to lead. It was Tigellinus driving the chariot, Tigellinus once more hoping to ride into favor on horseback.

That evening Euodus took me to him in the suite of rooms Nero had given him near the stables on the south side of the Palatine where he wouldn't be far from the horses. Earlier I'd seen the congratulatory squeeze he'd had given the imperial shoulder after Nero had driven his Egyptian team around the Palatine track at break-neck speed. With a sinking feeling I'd watched him monopolize Nero's ear with horse talk at dinner. He’d moved to southern Italy shortly after Claudius’s death, Tigellinus said. Bought some property there where he was breeding champions with Arabians he’d brought from Alexandria.

The spider moving ever closer to the center of the web.

Tigellinus was out on the balcony gazing at the vastness of the star-lit Circus Maximus, merely a picture no longer. “Well done Epaphroditus, I’m proud of you. Splendid job you've done over the years. It’s almost as if you really do have extraordinary stars, instead of…”

I felt my forehead crease in a frown. “What do you mean?”

Tigellinus took a heavy bag of coins out of his pocket and dangled it in front of me like bait. I hadn’t seen it for more than six years. Phocion’s old moneybag, wrinkled as his face was, marked with the astrological X, the intersection of the Zodiac with the celestial equator, I knew that now. “Here’s the key.”

“The key to what?”

“The key to your success.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You soon will. First a question. Was your astrologer friend a wealthy man?”

“No. As I’m sure you know Phocion was an ex-slave who had a small stall in the market where he read tourists’ horoscopes for coppers.”

“Then why was he carrying a small fortune in his pocket when he met you shortly after leaving the Records Office?”

“It must have been everything he owned.”

“You think he earned enough to save this much money?”

“Possibly. Over the years.”

“And he just happened to be carrying his life savings around with him in his pocket?”

I could feel myself beginning to sweat. “He must have brought the money in case he couldn’t find my certificate before someone else did because then I’d need cash to get away.”

“Exactly one hundred tetradrachmas?”

“I never had time to count them.”

“The Copy Master did.”

“What?”

“That’s the advance he paid Phocion for the work of discovering the birth time of the boy Agrippina was looking for. Phocion didn’t go to the Records Office to steal your certificate. He went there with the auspicious birth time he’d discovered, to collect the balance of his commission.”

The cry sprang from my heart. “No!”

Tigellinus smiled coldly. “Then all the Copy Master had to do was write the birth time on someone’s certificate of ownership, someone who was more or less sixteen and then claim the reward for himself, a thousand tetradrachmas, a small fortune, minus a small commission for his pet astrologer.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense. Why would Phocion invent my horoscope, sell it to the Copy Master then tell me to run for my life?”

My bold language didn’t ruffle Tigellinus’s chilling calm. “Tell me, Epaphroditus, was Phocion a vain man?”

“No.”

“Even about his astrological skills?”

“He was proud of them but admitted that there were astrologers who knew more than he did.”

“I’ve kept it to myself, of course, but shortly after you sailed one of my men told me that early in the morning of the day that Phocion went to the Records Office he visited Phocion in that market stall of his. Thought Phocion might have done horoscopes for a few sixteen-year-olds born in July. Fortunately for you my man went a little too far. He told Phocion the actual day in July on which the boy was born. Since he knew the day, all Phocion had to do was find the lucky time, took it as a challenge, perhaps. There’s only one time that jumps out at you and he probably found it within a few minutes. He rushed it to his old friend the Copy Master.”