The Nero Prediction (2 page)

“No sir. Perhaps to see a friend. He used to work there.”

The Copy Master raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, because of course he knew that. He and Phocion had worked together for years. “Yes he did, didn’t he? Tell me Epaphroditus, when were you born?”

“I don’t know Master.”

“But you are sixteen, aren’t you?”

“I think so Master, more or less.”

His quick, greedy eyes narrowed. “Interesting. You’ve heard about this search for sixteen-year-olds? They’re offering a huge reward. A thousand tetradrachmas. Have they questioned you yet?”

“No Copy Master.”

For a few moments he seemed deep in thought, working his jaw like a ruminating ox. Finally he said, “If you are questioned be very careful to say nothing of the little… assignments you do for me. If you’re foolish enough to let anything slip I’ll brand you a liar and you might be unlucky enough to lose your right hand. It’s the penalty for forgery, did I ever tell you that?”

He had, more than once, to make sure I kept my mouth shut. More than once, also, I had told myself not to take the meager coppers he gave me for my work which was making facsimiles of famous originals which he secretly sold to booksellers for a small fortune. Letters mostly, written in Latin and Greek, by people like Julius Caesar, Cicero and Cleopatra. Library treasures. Copies so exact that once he’d distressed the papyrus they were almost indistinguishable from the originals. But it was not as if I had any choice in the matter. I was a slave and he was my overseer, a man who had the right to insist on absolute obedience.

“You did, sir.”

He smiled, exposing his yellow, well-used teeth. “And do wipe off that ghastly expression! You look as guilty as sin. Well, I’d better get back to work. The Romans are ransacking the Records Office. They’ve asked me to give them a hand.” 

The Copy Master waddled off but my fear stayed with me, I could feel it weighing on my cheeks like a lead mask. I was sure I couldn’t lie to the Romans. If they asked me about the “assignments” the Copy Master gave me, I would have to tell them the truth. I examined my right hand, trained by the Copy Master himself. It was so slender and clever, I wasn’t going to lose it. I decided to take Phocion’s advice. Escape.

Trying not to hurry I made for the north exit of the complex, heading for the harbor, a short walk away, where hundreds of ships were docked, loading and unloading produce going as far as India. I was hurrying down a narrow alley towards the fish emporium when a small man with a huge tawny beard blocked my way. Mark the Lion who had stayed on in Alexandria after Peter had gone elsewhere to preach the end of the world. The way Mark stood, legs spread, arms folded, it looked as if he’d been waiting for me all day.

“Epaphroditus,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  I felt a flash of terror. How did he know my name? Phocion must have told him. I scrambled for a lie as I brushed past him. “The fish market. We’re running out of ink. They sent me to buy octopus. Excuse me, I’m late.”

“Don’t be afraid, boy,” he called after me. “You’ve been chosen.”

I hurried through the busy market, the fish reeking already because it was well past noon, heading for the docks. My thoughts whirled about as madly as feeding bats. Why did Mark says I was chosen? Chosen for what? Phocion had cast my horoscope. Had Phocion showed mine to Mark? Had Mark shown Christ’s horoscope to Phocion? Were the Romans somehow connecting the two?

“Hey you!” It was a familiar voice. I turned. I was the Museum’s chef buying mullet, no doubt for the director’s table. “What are you doing here?”

Pan took possession of me. I found myself sprinting towards the docks, Phocion’s money jingling loudly in the pocket.

“Stop! Runaway!” called the chef. 

Someone in front of me, white haired, wide eyed, tried to block my way. I dodged around him. Another man, much younger, tripped me as I tried to flee past him. I hit the pavement hard. Someone was on top of me with a knee rammed into my spine.

“What’s going on here?” asked a voice that had the ring of authority.

“A runaway,” said the man pinning me down.

“He’s a Museum slave,” said the chef, indignant and out of breath. “Trying to sneak on board a ship, probably.”

“Thank you. We’ll take it from here.” The harbor policeman grabbed me by my hair, pulled me to my feet. “What’s your name?”

I told him, my voice shaking.

“Why did you run?”

“I panicked.”

“Why?”

“Because the harbor is off bounds for me.”

The soldier moved his hard face close to mine. I could smell cloves on his breath. “But the Castellum isn’t.”

They pushed me in a cell already crammed with the sweepings of the city. Perhaps ten feet wide and twenty long, it held over a hundred miserable people. All the spaces against the walls were already taken. A woman cradled a crying infant in her arms. I wondered what she’d done. I sat on the slippery stone floor near a slender young girl with a painted face and large, frightened eyes. A young man with a ring through his nose, also heavily made up, wrapped his arm protectively around her bony shoulders. They looked like prostitutes. When darkness seeped in through the high barred window they began to make love with increasing abandon. No one complained. The sobs of pleasure were a welcome distraction from the horror of the place. After what seemed like hours they exhausted their passion. But the infant didn’t stop crying and I didn’t sleep.

A man who’d been beating his head against the wall since first light screamed when they came for him at sunrise. The warders laughed as they used their whips to drive him out the door. I was sure he was going to be crucified. A man I’d known had been crucified, a slave who’d run away from the Library. They made all of us watch. It took him four hours to die. For some reason what horrified me most was the swarm of wasps that fed on his oozing lash wounds. Although it was suffocatingly hot in the foul cell, a wind, cold as the winter sea, blew through my bones. Christ, the other one with wonderful stars. The Romans had crucified him.

Shortly afterwards they came for me. Numb with terror, dead already, I went quietly. They tied my hands behind my back and led me upstairs. Four men waited for me. One of them was barrel chested with powerful, hairy forearms. His round skullcap told me he was a Roman freedman.

“This the one you want?” asked a jailer.

“Epaphroditus?” asked the freedman.

“Yes sir,” I said. “I wasn’t running away. I was running back to the Museum.”

There was a sly light in the freedman’s small green eyes. He seemed to find me amusing. “Although headed in the wrong direction.”

The jailer handed the freedman Phocion’s money bag. “He had this on him. Exactly a hundred silver tetradrachmas in there. Count them yourself. Must have stolen them.”

“Thank you,” said the freedman, weighing the bag and giving me a sideways smile as if we were somehow in collaboration.

“Want me to leash him?” asked one of his attendants who had the battered face and broken fists of a pugilist.

“No, he doesn’t look like a fool. Untie his hands. But watch him anyway.”

The streets were already bustling with early risers. My escort was alert, eerily silent.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked the freedman. He ignored me. A few minutes later we passed out of the city through the Canopic Gate.

The freedman broke his silence. He told the pugilist, “Run ahead. Tell the master we have him.” The man took off at a brisk trot. The Sun was already high in the east when we reached a horse farm near the hippodrome.

The pugilist, his face still running with sweat, waited at the door of a modest villa. “He says bring him straight in.”

Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus was standing at the window of his study, hands clasped behind his back, watching the early Sun burnish the hippodrome perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The walls of the room were decorated with paintings of horses, some of them so life-like you could hear them snort. 

I had the distinct impression that he took a deep, quiet breath as he turned. His shoulders were broad, his waist tapered, his clean-shaven face elegantly chiseled, his velvet blue eyes large and compelling. There was an iron ring on his finger that told me he was a Roman citizen. He examined me from head to foot as if I were a statue he was appraising. I certainly stood as still as one, my eyes riveted to his, like a cornered mouse stares in fascination at the cobra that has trapped him in a corner.

“He’s not quite what I expected,” he said in a calm pleasant voice.

The freedman flashed his strange smile. “He’s had an uncomfortable night.”

“Lovely,” the citizen said. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Dominus?” I squeaked because I was unsure whether he was calling me lovely, because that is what Epaphroditus means in Greek, or just calling me by my name.

“They tell me you tried to run away. Why did you do it?” he asked, very cordially.

I couldn’t lie to this man, no more than the paralyzed mouse can flee from the snake. “I was told I was going to be killed.”

“Who told you that?”

“An astrologer, dominus.”

“Really! What was his name?”

I swallowed hard but it wouldn’t stay down. “Phocion.”

“Phocion.” Tigellinus seemed to relish the word as if it were a particularly savory oyster. “Why did Phocion think you were going to be killed?”

“Because the Romans were looking for someone with my birthday, sir.”

“You told him your birth date?”

“No sir, I don’t know when I was born. But Phocion said he knew the very hour.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Since I was a child, sir. He was a friend of my mother’s when she was alive. She died at my birth.”

“Amazing! He knew you all those years and he didn’t tell you your own birthday. Why?”

“He said … he said something about forbidden knowledge.”

Tigellinus sat on an Egyptian chair that was carved with gilded hieroglyphics. His voice remained calm, faintly bored even, but it had an undercurrent that frightened me. “What else did he tell you about your horoscope?”

“Sir, he said it foretold astonishing things.”

The Roman raised both eyebrows, glanced at his freedman who stood behind me. “Astonishing things, fancy that! A sixteen-year-old pen pushing slave is destined for astonishing things!” He took Phocion’s well-worn money bag out of his pocket, I recognized it instantly from the large X that had been embossed on it, bounced it in his hand so it jingled. There seemed to be shards of ice in his dark blue eyes when he looked back at me.

 “A hundred silver tetradrachmas. A lot of money. Where did you get it?”

“Phocion, sir. He gave it to me so I could buy passage on a ship.”

The Roman looked up at the ceiling painted with joyful scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, papyrus marshes teeming with wildfowl, fat cows, years of plenty without end. “Would you have any idea why Phocion hanged himself from the rafters of his room?”

Grief gripped me by the throat. If it were not for the dispassionate way Tigellinus was looking at me, as if he were waiting for me to break down, I think I would have. “No sir I don’t,” I managed to get out.

“Are you sure you didn’t get this from the Copy Master?”

“No sir, Phocion gave it to me.”

“We questioned the Copy Master, you know. Eventually he told us that he was giving you money for forging famous documents that he then sold as originals. Forgery, you should lose your hand for that.”

“The Copy Master forced me to do it, dominus. He used his whip. He only gave me a few coppers.”

Tigellinus tapped his fingers on his thigh as if he were keeping track of the seconds. “The Copy Master knew Phocion.”

It wasn’t a question but I answered it anyway. “Yes sir. Phocion used to work in the Records Office.”

Tigellinus’s tapping on his knee stopped abruptly. For a moment I thought my time had run out. “Come. Let me show you something,” he said evenly, rising to his feet and walking to a wall hung with a large painting of a chariot race in Rome's Circus Maximus - I recognized it from cheap sketches they sold to tourists in the marketplace. For a long moment he gazed at the picture with its the electrum-coated obelisk that Augustus had taken from Heliopolis and set up in the middle of the central divider. He spoke without turning around.

"There it is, the microcosm of the universe. See, the course is oval because the universe is an egg. The track is the earth and the moat between the track and the seats is the sea. The Circus is the circular year, its twelve doors are the twelve months and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Each race consists of seven laps just as the astrological week has seven days and the universe has seven planets. Twenty-four races are held each day to correspond to the twenty-four hours its takes the Sun to circle the earth. Did you know that, Epaphroditus?"

"No sir,” I said, as astonished as I was relieved by this sudden digression. “Although it all makes sense to me now."

 "It's why being banished from Rome is like being banished from the world itself.” He faced me and again I felt the numbing power of his velvet eyes. “You do know who I am, don't you?"

"Yes, yes of course," I said because I had heard of Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, things said both loudly and in whispers. He was famous for his chariot teams and was making a fortune in the hippodrome. He wasn’t in Alexandria by choice, the emperor Claudius had banished him from Rome when he discovered that he was having an affair with his niece, Agrippina, Caligula’s sister.   

"Did you know that I was close to Caligula?” Tigellinus went on, reading my thoughts. “Fortunately for me, as it turned out, it wasn’t a political relationship at all, our mutual passion was horses, I supervised his personal stables. You must have heard the joke that he was going to make his favorite horse a Consul? It was a horse I trained for him. That’s how I got to know his sister Agrippina, when we were both quite young. A remarkable woman, Agrippina, born to be empress some day. Would have been emperor by now if she’d been a man. I performed little services for her, when she needed them, nothing more. Unfortunately friends of someone I had to … take care of for her, convinced Claudius otherwise. That’s why I remain confined to the eastern provinces, breeding horses for the Circus Maximus but not allowed to watch them race there."