The Nero Prediction (34 page)

I shook my head. "Lies, of course."

The senator applauded my effort with a derisive chuckle that wagged his double chin. "Oh, it's true all right. Twice he used Thallus to feed you false prognostications. The second one led to the deaths of Rubellius Plautus and Sulla, patricians who deserved better. You don't look as if you believe me, Caesar. The one who carries Thallus around, that black man, he told me how they stuck needles into the livers of live animals to create ominous-looking lesions. Ask him about it, it's really all quite educational. Unsettling at the same time though, you'll admit."

Nero did look unsettled. "Bring them both in."

It was less than twenty minutes later that the word came back. "They're dead, murdered."

"Dead?" echoed Nero who'd been gazing out of the window in the direction of the Palatine where they were rushing his entertainment complex, the Golden House, to completion.

The colonel was sweating in his armor, he must have galloped all the way back from Subura. "Yes Caesar, the black slave was stabbed to death, the diviner was smothered with a liver."

There was the ring of wonder in Nero’s voice. “Killed by the future! Why that’s exactly what he predicted would happen!”

The senator interrupted the advance of a streak of sweat on his bald temple with a chubby finger. "Well we’re all killed by the future, aren’t we Caesar? But how very convenient the timing of this diviner’s death was – for someone. Beware Augustus, here we have a man who will stop at nothing."

The colonel held out a piece of paper. "We found this letter, it was on a table near the bodies. It’s in the senator’s handwriting. I think it explains what happened."

Nero squinted as he read it. "Will he die tomorrow, yes or no? That is the question. As before, be sure to destroy this letter." His eyes peered at the senator from under heavy brows. "You wrote this?”

"Of course not!" The senator held out his hand. "Let me see it."

Nero gave him the letter.

The senator's russet eyes darted forwards and backwards over the short text. "It's a forgery. Epaphroditus is good at that, I hear. Obviously he’s trying to slough off his guilt onto me."

Nero held up a finger. "Ah-ha! But how do you suppose he knew that you were going to denounce him?"

The senator floundered. "He's been plotting to destroy me for some time now, ever since I summoned him to my villa in Baiae and confronted him with this business about Thallus. I warned him that he'd better stop doing it or I'd have to inform you."

"Hmm, nothing more than a warning. Not even a gentle slap on the wrist? Unusually lenient treatment for an ex-slave guilty of treason, don’t you think? Or is Epaphroditus a lover of yours?"

The senator stuck his nose in the air to indicate that he would never dream of stooping so low. "Certainly not. "

Nero pouted at me. "Not his lover, Epaphroditus?"

I snorted with contempt. "I went to the senator's villa in Baiae, that's true. He said he had something important to tell me. Instead I had to listen to him fuming about that epigram you wrote about him. He said that it had made him a laughing stock. He couldn't go anywhere without hearing some wag reciting it behind his back. I got the feeling he wanted you to apologize."

Nero waved his hand in dismissal. "Take him away and put him somewhere cool. He’s sweating too much for his own good." When the senator waddled out with a Praetorian on each arm Nero breathed a sigh of relief, tilted back his head. "How very kind of them! They're reciting my poetry. That's all that really matters."

Tigellinus blinked like a man who can't believe his eyes are open. "What do you want me to do with him, Caesar?"

"Quintianus? I want this whole thing to be done strictly by the book, no short cuts. We need a second witness to build a case against him, so find me the witness. What about that woman, Epicharis, have you got anything useful out of her?"

Tigellinus inclined his head. "Not yet, she's proving uncooperative. We're going to question her again, first thing tomorrow. We'll have everything she knows by midday."

I went to see her two hours before dawn. She wasn't in prison, I'd seen to that. She'd been returned to the room in an undamaged section of Tiberius's palace where she'd been kept locked up for the nineteen days since our return from Baiae.

Her eyes were shut. "Is she asleep?" I asked the guard.

"If you can call it sleep. She cries out every few minutes." The guard slapped her face. "Wake up."

She sat bolt upright with a cry. "Not yet!"

"You have a visitor."

When the guard left the room she held up her swollen arms to me. "Epaphroditus!"

I sat on the bed and embraced her. She reeked of acrid sweat. "Is he going to put me back on..." she couldn't say the word, "that thing?"

The word "yes" wouldn't leave my throat.

She was crying. "Epaphroditus, you must help me, you promised to, remember? I was on the point of telling Tigellinus everything yesterday, everything about you, when he stopped."

"Why are you trying to fight him?"

Her lips curved downwards, her misery compounded by my inane question. "What will they do to you if I don't?"

"Epicharis, I know that I'm not the one you're trying to shield. Who did you give Nero's birth time to?"

"I told you, no one."

"Tell me the truth. I can only help you if you tell me the truth."

"How? How can you help me?"

"I've brought you something to take it all away. I got it from Lucusta, for myself."

Somewhere a cock crowed. Her eyes widened in relief. "Give it to me," she hissed.

"First the truth. They'll be coming for you soon and then I won't be the only one you'll betray to Tigellinus."

She turned her face away from me. A heart-rending sob. "Plautius Lateranus, the consul-designate, oh such a proud, handsome man. When he petitioned Nero for money in the Circus Maximus during the games of Ceres he was going to throw him to the ground for the others to stab. He loves his country. He wants to stop Nero before he makes Rome the laughing-stock of the world." A long pause. The cock crowed again. "We were lovers."

I should have seen that by the reluctant way she'd detached herself from his arm at the reception at Baiae where Seneca and everybody else had snubbed me. "Was he the man who was blackmailing me?"

She shook her head. "Lateranus wouldn't blackmail anyone, that would be beneath him. He doesn’t know that Nero’s birth time came from you. That hairy animal Volusius Proculus, the naval officer, he's the one who told Euodus that you took papers from Agrippina's desk but he still doesn’t know what they were. I was the one who guessed they were horoscopes, because that’s what I would have been consulting if I were Agrippina. When I'm gone your secret will be safe. Now give it to me."

I unwrapped it for her, my extract of sea-hare.

"Water." There was a mug on the table beside the bed. She washed down the powder, sank back onto the straw cushion. "You'd better go."

The expression on her face told me that she'd discarded the fiction of our love affair. Her last thoughts were for consul-designate Lateranus.

I lent over and kissed her anyway, out of respect. It was then that she vomited and immediately began scooping frantically at the slime, forcing it back into her mouth. There was the sound of approaching steps, the jingle of armored men. This time she would break. We were about to sing duets on the rack. 

"Epaphroditus, my breast girdle. Quick help me loosen it."

I'd done so once before, on that day in the yacht off Agrippina's villa when she'd sucked Nero's birth time from between my lips.

The Praetorian colonel, the same man as the day before, was frank about his surprise at finding me there. "Getting an early start, I see."

I made a show of slapping my note pad shut. "She's all yours, colonel. Didn't get a thing out of her. Tight as a clam."

He smiled at the innuendo. "Don't worry, we'll pry her open."

A soldier lifted Epicharis out of bed. She looked like a broken doll. Outside they loaded her into a litter. At no time did she look at me. It was then that I realized that she'd been using me even when she was under the whip, using me to help her concentrate on Lateranus.

I walked behind the curtained chair to the city jail, just down the hill from the Palatine. Freshly shaved clients in spotless togas hurried past grim-faced with determination to beat the lines already forming outside their patrons' doors. Although they jostled each other and the eight-legged creatures that carried their betters, everyone shrank from the chair flanked by Praetorians, the one I followed.

The colonel's curse as he swept open the chair's curtains in the prison courtyard confirmed that the breast band had held. I turned my back on the body lolling at the end of the noose to look at the dying Moon which had wasted away to a slender sickle, sharp as the sword that cut Epicharis down.

She'd been looking at Lateranus.

 No embracing of friends and relatives for him, no farewell speech, hot bath or surgeon's razor. Whatever it was that Lateranus the ladies’ man knew about me he was going to take with him across the Styx.

It hadn't been difficult to persuade Nero that someone perfidious enough to attack the man from whom he was pretending to beg a favor didn't deserve an honorable death. I accompanied the cohort of Praetorians sent to arrest him, having made it clear to them that they were in no way to hint to Lateranus what was in store for him. On my instructions they hurried him out of his house without allowing him to say a word to anyone. Outside his brawny arms were chained and he was bundled into a litter. I drew the curtains myself.

When I swept them open it was to reveal the crosses of the place of execution outside the city wall. 

Lateranus blue eyes widened and his handsome face blanched noticeably as he watched the slow writhing of a criminal, gasping for breath and very near death, who was black with the ants eating him alive. "Surely Nero isn't insane enough to attempt to crucify a member of the Senate?"

This time it was my grin, not his, that was spiced with contempt. "Quite a thought, isn't it?"

Lateranus's eyes narrowed. "Why have you brought me here? Why was I not allowed a few moments with my family and friends? This disgraceful haste, it was your idea!"

"Disgraceful? How interesting to hear the man who plotted to bite the hand he begged from complain about disgraceful conduct!"

Lateranus bellowed at the Praetorian colonel. "Statius Proximus, how can you stand there and listen to an ex-slave insult a consul-designate?"

The soldier shifted his weight awkwardly. "The sooner we get this over with the better, for everyone's sake."

It took a soldier two blows to slice through the thick neck but only when the Lateranus’s handsome head rolled in the dust at my feet did I take my eyes off him.

Another Finger Of Fate

April 65 A.D. – February 20, 66 A.D.

My triumph.

Togas white as fresh bone lead the procession: senators disgusted to the man that Rome's highest honors were being showered on an ex-slave. Behind the senators walked the guilty men loaded with chains, their execution not far ahead.

Directly in front of me marched the twelve red-jacketed lictors carrying the laurel-wreathed fasces, that symbol of ancient kings. The reigns of the triumphal chariot were in my left hand, the spears-of-honor in my right. On my head were the gold crowns, my reward for saving a Roman emperor's life.

A statue of Tigellinus in triumphal robes had joined the ranks of Rome's victorious generals in the Forum. Others had been honored as well. But I was the one who rode with Nero in the triumphal car, who shared with him the focus of the adulation, for whom the brazen harmonies of cornu and tuba sounded, those harsh voices of the Etruscans, heavy with blood, cruelty, vainglory and death.

Our chariot turned onto the

Sacred Way where Nero's colossal new statue, a hundred-and-twenty feet high, guarded the portal of the Golden House. It was that gigantic presence, the serenity of the gaze it directed over the Forum, which brought the idea haunting my mind came to life.

Astrology didn't predict the future, it created the future.

Agrippina believed that I was fated to bring down Messalina. Because of this belief she acted boldly and Messalina was brought down. Agrippina believed that I was fated to murder Claudius. She thrust poison into my hands and Claudius died. Nero was so confidant that I was his predestined shield that he used me to ensnare his mother. What was so special about the stars of the man I pretended to be that led people by the nose? I needed to know so that I could do the leading. It was time to consult Balbillus.

The taste of victory had sweetened the astrologer's lips. All of Rome now hung on the prognostications of the man who'd warned Nero to beware of April 17. No astrologer had done anything like that since the one who’d warned Julius Caesar of the Ides of March.

"Congratulations Epaphroditus,” he said gravely. “A consul would be flattered by the honor done you today."

"But I wouldn't have succeeded without your prediction."

A nod that repeated itself like the slow bobbing of a boat on the Nile until his hand reached up and steadied the chin. "I believe that you don't come to me as a functionary of state."

"No. Nearly twenty years ago, when they delivered me to her,  Agrippina warned me not to have my stars read. It's time to know why."

"One reads the stars so that one can prepare oneself for the future. There were events in your future for which you were too immature to prepare yourself."

The elation of my triumph was with me still. Although the astrologer was referring to the past I was irritated by the word immature. "Am I mature enough now?"

Balbillus unrolled a sheet of paper and weighed it down with gold crescents. "Yes, I think you are. This is your horoscope."

I’d often wondered if the astrologer knew that my stars were a lie. Perhaps now was the time to find out. “I thought it was Agrippina’s creation.” I said, feeling him out.