The Nero Prediction (38 page)

Only then did the Pythia find her tongue. Once again her voice was strangely distorted, but this time it was possible to understand every word. "Nero, Orestes, Alcmaeon, all murderers of their mothers."

Nero's foot lashed out at the legs of the tripod. It toppled, dropping the Pythia into the fissure. When she was pulled out, unhurt except for a few scratches, we found this mysterious aperture which was supposed to reach into the bowels of the earth was in fact quite shallow. We also found the source of the sacred vapors: brass censers placed at intervals along its bottom. It was in these they burnt the amalgam of incense and rotten eggs that had for centuries substituted for the sacred vapors which had long since disappeared, if they'd existed at all.

Precisely at this moment of discovery I heard it for the second time: a cry in the sky high above Delphi. This time it wasn't an eagle. It was the chief prophet leaping to his death and taking the name of his mysterious benefactor with him.

Nero was working on compositions with which he was going to conquer Athens and Sparta when Secretary of Protocol Helius, in desperate haste, arrived towards the end of November. He'd covered the distance from Rome to Corinth in an incredible seven days.

Nero eyed him coldly as Helius smothered his seal ring with kisses. "What brought you here so quickly, Mercury's sandals?"

The freedman imparted one last kiss on the ring's gemstone that had been carved into a likeness of its wearer. "Rumors dominus. Dreadful, persistent rumors. Omens: your colossus has several times been struck by lightning. Prophecies: the latest one to circulate predicts that Nemesis is about to confront you."

Nero yawned for it was already late at night. "Rubbish. That must be a reference to the return of Saturn, earlier this month, to his position at my birth. Balbillus told me it was going to happen, warned me not to sing because transit Mars would be in a discordant square with my Venus, so I didn't. Helius, you really shouldn't pay any attention to idle gossip. I'm going to live at least until seventy-two, or is it seventy-three?"

Helius, doing his best not to whine, sounded pompous instead. "I pray to the gods that you do, dominus, but that isn't what is believed in Rome. Even the Nymphidius is uneasy."

Nymphidius Sabinus was the Praetorian Guard officer whom Nero had raised to the rank of co-Prefect with Tigellinus for supporting him during the great Piso conspiracy that we put down two years ago.

"Nymphidius uneasy? I wouldn't have thought that possible."

"Return Caesar, I implore you, before New Year. Crush these rumors with the might of your presence. Find out who is behind them because someone is, I can sense him, a malevolent presence who is plotting your downfall, someone whose identity is so secret that it defies the lash and the rack."

Nero frowned as he looked at me. "A malevolent presence. What do you think, Epaphroditus?"

"Dominus, I've sensed him too. It may have been his name that the chief prophet of Delphi took with him to Hades."

Nero yawned again. "Let me sleep on it."

A dream woke him, that recurrent nightmare. The Furies were pursuing him with whips and burning torches. Leading them to him, her hair still wet from the sea, was his mother.

In the morning he packed Helius off with the news that by popular demand he would be in Rome by New Year.

Nemesis

December 26, 67 A.D. – March 7, 68 A.D.

As a magnificent parting gift, Nero gave Greece its freedom and we were in Rome with five days to spare. It seemed to be snowing, so thickly the ribbons and sweetmeats thrown from the buildings along the triumphal route rained down on us. Nero drove Augustus’s creaky triumphal chariot, a hundred years old by now. He wore a Greek cloak decorated with stars over his purple triumphal robe and a laurel wreath on his head that told the world he had been a victor in the Olympic Games. In front of the chariot prowled Spiculus followed by the Germans of the personal bodyguard. Behind the chariot marched Nero’s long haired Augustiani, chanting their slogans and clapping in their elaborate rhythms. “We are the champions of the world,” they kept repeating. The shock troops of musical war. It seemed that Nero had succeeded in uniting both Augustus the politician and Marc Anthony the public reveler, his great-grandfathers, into one man. The adulation buried my anxieties.

Twenty-two days later they burst grinning from their grave.

I was with Phaon, forever in favor for his discovery of the boy Sporus/Poppaea Sabina. A fervent believer in Fate who knew a lot more astrology than I did, Phaon was examining the planets suspended from the revolving dome in the Golden House complex when he frowned. “There’s something wrong,” he said and told me what it was.

 I scowled at the resident astronomer when they brought him in, convinced that he richly deserved a fright. "I'm sure you realize how much pride the emperor takes in the accuracy of the planetary positions on the dome," I told him. “Thousands of people come to marvel at it every day. However I've noticed that recently you haven't bothered to move Saturn forward at all, and now some fool who deserves a whipping has gone and moved Saturn backward. Don’t you take any pride in what you do?"

The astronomer, who'd been rudely hustled out of his observatory, looked relieved. "There is no error dominus. Saturn ceased his forward motion six days ago. Tonight he begins to move backward, exactly as indicated on the dome."

Saturn, also known as Kar-Knum, Karknoumis, Kronos, Nemesis.

Nero frowned at Balbillus although he looked hurt rather than angry. "You didn't warn me that Saturn was about to go backward."

 There were deep shadows in Balbillus's eyes and his tone even more measured than usual. "As you know it's the nature of the planets to move backward from time to time, Caesar, except for the Sun, that is. As always, the significance of the retrograde motion is determined by the aspects the retrograde planet makes with the others. At this moment in time transit Jupiter, in your House of Entertainment, is in a fortunate trine with your Venus. This means that your singing will be well received, which of course is exactly what has happened."

"Then how do you explain the prediction that Nemesis is stalking me?"

"That isn't for me to say, Caesar, although you mustn't discount the envy aroused by someone upon whom fortune so continually smiles."

Nero sighed. "Yes, I suppose that's all it is."

A month later we left on our annual pilgrimage to Baiae, a little earlier than usual because this time the Moon of the Year fell on March 7. Usually Nero slept especially well on the road, but now he was plagued by nightmares, two of which recurred night after night.  

 He was steering a ship when a hooded figure tore the tiller from his hands. Or Octavia, his first wife and Messalina's daughter, dragged him down into a dark pit where hordes of winged ants swarmed over him. Even their recollection, as he repeated them to me, had him breaking out in a sweat.

The Bay of Naples, serene under a cloudless sky, calmed him. He slept better, worked hard at mastering the new and much expanded keyboard he'd designed for the pipe organ, an improvement which made it possible for a single musician to produce the variety of notes which previously had required several organists and as many instruments.

I could hear his playing a mile from the shore as my boat approached the jetty of his villa: great surges of exquisite sound leaping across the waves as elegant as dolphins, as brilliant as the burnished path the setting sun was beating across the water.

I knew that the Moon reading was due to take place precisely at sunset and that the Moon would once again be ominously full. Foreknowledge did nothing to prepare me for what sprang into the sky from behind Vesuvius. The Moon wasn't bloated or bloody but vast and unflatteringly clear, flaunting every blotch and blemish: the face a man sees in a mirror when time has worn him, bruised and wrinkled him. It was the face I'd seen in my barber's mirror a few hours earlier, which I recognized as the boy whom Agrippina found twenty years ago in Alexandria only in the tight smile that tugged at my lips.

The circle of time: gazing out over the bay with Nero and Balbillus at my side, the last of the Sun on my right, the first of the Moon on my left, waiting for the trumpet to signal the birth of the ancient sacred year, the beginning in which was planted the seeds of all that was to grow from them, or so the gullible believed.

Somewhere, out of sight, one of the astrologer's assistants signaled the trumpeter to announce the instant of perfect opposition, the syzygy. A moment of silence for its last plaintive note to dissolve in the thickening gloom. Then the crystalline voices of a boys' choir singing the Hymn to Apollo as I watched Balbillus's face out of the corner of my eye. It kept its secrets like the tomb.

"Well Balbillus, you know you have to give me good news, don't you?" said Nero. "Otherwise I won't let you go."

This was a reference to Balbillus's request to leave shortly after the Moon reading to attend to business in Alexandria, a request that had been granted.

Balbillus unrolled his charts and I got ready to take down his babble in shorthand for Nero to mull over later. "The presence of Mars in your second house, which of course determines your financial affairs, is worrying. He's square your Jupiter which indicates that your munificence will lead to a conflict with the Senate."

"Munificence? Nonsense, they're upset because I was forced to devaluate the currency. But how else was I supposed to pay for the rebuilding of Rome?"

"The planets once again appear to smile on your music," Balbillus went on, "because transit Jupiter is simultaneously in a fortunate trine with your Venus on his right and your Saturn on his left. If you are able to overcome your problems with the Senate, this will undoubtedly be a wonderful year both for your music and for you."

Nero's sigh of relief was profound as the sea.

The astrologer held up a finger. "However there is unfortunately a period which stretches from the end of April to June 13 when it's possible that your artistic inspiration will fail you."

Nero frowned. "Why's that?"

"Venus will be in your House of Pleasures but on April 30 she begins to move backward in the Zodiac. This strongly indicates a temporary lull of your musical fortunes."

Nero's groan was not mere theater. "Oh mother Venus! For how long?"

Balbillus dropped his eyes to his notes in a way that made me suspect that he already knew what he pretended to look for. "She begins moving forward again on June 12. If you are planning a substantial artistic enterprise that's the day to begin it because by then Saturn will be moving forward as well."

How far does Saturn move backward?

Balbillus had already gone when I realized that he hadn't raised the question. I put it to one of the astronomers who attended us in Baiae, stood over him as he checked his almanac.

"Saturn re-enters Virgo on the last day of March and then continues his retrograde motion until May 29 when he comes to a complete stop."

"What will his position be then?"

"Twenty seven degrees of Virgo."

I knew what that meant from my interview with Ptolemy when the great comet first appeared. Twenty-seven degrees of Virgo was within a degree of Saturn's position at Nero's birth! The circle of time was about to close but Nero's astrologer hadn't even mentioned the fact. Why not?

So Nero would let him escape to Alexandria.

The full Moon shrieked at me through the mouths of the cicadas as I hurried to Balbillus's villa. There were footfalls behind me but I didn’t have time to confront my follower. I kicked at the astrologer’s door until my feet hurt.

The doorman didn't recognize me. "What do you want?"

"Balbillus."

The door began to close in my face. "He's not here."

I stopped it with my foot. "Imperial business."

His eyes dropped. "He left already."

I tucked up my toga and ran to the docks. I saw my follower, dressed in black, once in the bright moonlight. Torches illuminated the gangplank, which led to a fast seagoing galley. Two sailors guarded it.

"Balbillus," I shouted, my chest heaving.

"Too late, we're about to cast off."

I tried to force myself between them, nearly fell when they shoved me backward. "Balbillus!" I yelled, "Balbillus I must speak with him or this ship will never reach Alexandria."

More sailors, eventually one of Balbillus's clerks. "What can I do for you?"

"Balbillus and if I don't get him a naval galley will."

Balbillus came down the gangplank, his way lit by the clerk who held a torch and two scrolls. Where was the gravity of the man who'd so often made me feel as light as a feather? The flesh under the traveling cape had turned to straw. The face that frowned at me was drawn, the gray eyes were dull and hidden deep in their sockets. There was something quite new about them: yes, they were furtive.

He said, "What do you want from me?"

"The truth. Why didn't you tell Nero that Saturn was re-entering Virgo and returning to his birth position? You know very well what everyone will make of that."

There was sweat on the astrologer's forehead. "Because he doesn't have the temperament to prepare himself for his end."

"What? Are you saying he's finished?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so."

"Because Saturn has returned? How preposterous! You don't believe that and neither do I. Transit Saturn overtook Nero's Saturn in Greece. Instead of being his Nemesis he went happily on his way. How many predictions of Nero's fall have there been? Fatal, all of them, fatal to those who believed them. This time it may be fatal for you."

A narrowing of the astrologer's eyes acknowledged my threat. He took a scroll from the clerk, unrolled it. "This is Nero's chart," he said, "the light is bad, come closer."

The ink on the wheel was faded. I could see nothing, sinister or benign, in the transiting planets, faint pencil marks, that Balbillus had drawn in around its perimeter. "I see transit Saturn conjunct his natal Saturn, so what?"