‘Wait!’ Tiberius shouted. ‘Who is this?’ He pointed his finger at Magnus. ‘I haven’t seen him before; he must be an intruder, perhaps even another fisherman. Clemens, have your men throw him off the cliff.’
‘Nuncle, that is Magnus, he’s a friend of my friend; he’s been with us all the time.’
‘I’ve not spoken with him, I don’t know him; Clemens, do as I command.’
Caligula signalled them to remain silent as Fulvius and Rufinus grabbed Magnus’ arms and pushed him forward. Magnus looked beseechingly at Vespasian as he struggled in their grip. Vespasian and the rest of them watched aghast as Magnus was forced towards certain death.
‘I knew there was a reason for coming here, my sweet,’ Tiberius crooned in pleasure. ‘I do so enjoy the look of terror in a man’s eyes just before he flies through the air.’
‘Yes I know, Nuncle,’ Caligula replied as Magnus was nearing the edge, ‘but you also like to hear them scream as well; this one’s a brave one, he’s not screaming or pleading.’
‘You’re right, my sweet, he’s not.’
‘But I know one who will.’
‘Then we should throw him over.’
‘That’s a good idea, Nuncle. Clemens, have your men fetch that priest immediately,’ Caligula ordered.
Clemens understood. ‘Fulvius, get the priest right now.’
Fulvius and Rufinus let go of Magnus, who was left shaking on the brink of the cliff, and ran back towards the villa.
‘I’ll say goodbye to my friend whilst we wait, Nuncle; he should go and take all his companions with him, to get your message to Antonia as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, yes, my sweet,’ Tiberius replied absently, his attention back on the gulls. ‘And then we can play with the fishies.’
‘Good idea, Nuncle,’ Caligula said, whilst hurriedly pulling Magnus back from the edge. ‘I’ll see you there once they’ve gone.’
Caligula led them swiftly back up the path, past the romping fishies. Screams had started up inside the villa.
‘Clemens, take them out through the main gate, they’ll never get over the wall unseen in daylight,’ Caligula said as Fulvius and Rufinus appeared with a screaming Rhoteces between them hopping on his remaining foot.
‘Thank you, my friend,’ Vespasian said with heartfelt gratitude, ‘I don’t know how you manage to live here.’
‘It’s not all bad.’ Caligula grinned. ‘The fishies are fun.’
As they passed Rhoteces, Vespasian took a last quick look at his revolting weasel face and felt a huge surge of satisfaction.
‘That’s a fair swap,’ Magnus said, still looking very pale, ‘him for me. I’d take that any day.’
‘It could have been any one of us,’ Sabinus observed as they climbed the steps.
‘Or all of you,’ Caligula pointed out, stopping at the top. ‘I’ve seen it happen. Pallas, tell my grandmother that I’ll try and keep Tiberius focused on Sejanus.’
‘I will, Master Gaius,’ Pallas said with a bow.
‘And don’t worry about Thrasyllus, the old charlatan will declare it an auspicious time to make changes once I tell him that one of them is that his son-in-law is going to become Praetorian prefect. Now go quickly before he decides that he’d rather spend the rest of the morning throwing people off the cliff instead of playing with the fishies.’
Vespasian clasped Caligula’s forearm and, as he turned to follow Clemens, he heard the sound that he had been looking forward to: a scream, long and shrill and gradually fading until it was abruptly curtailed.
PART VI
CHAPTER XVIII
‘The Senate are in a state of total confusion,’ Paetus declared, throwing a heavy stuffed leather ball at Vespasian. ‘One day Tiberius sends them a letter complimenting Sejanus for his loyal service and then the next he intervenes in a court case that Sejanus has brought against one of his many enemies, ordering it to be dropped.’ He grunted as he recaught the ball and threw it back again, hard, at Vespasian. ‘And not just dropped but also granting the defendant immunity against further prosecutions.’
‘Yet he’s conferred a priesthood on Sejanus and on his eldest son, Strabo,’ Sabinus said, straining as he lay on his back on a wooden bench exercising his arms and chest by lifting two large, round lead weights above his head.
‘Yes,’ Vespasian agreed, throwing the ball so forcefully at Paetus’ midriff that it almost knocked him over, ‘but at the same time he conferred a more prestigious priesthood upon Caligula.’
‘And now the latest rumour is that Tiberius is going to give Sejanus tribunician power,’ Paetus said, throwing the ball violently at Vespasian’s head and grinning as its velocity toppled his opponent, ‘which would then make him inviolate even though he’s resigned his consulship.’ He walked over to Vespasian and pulled him to his feet. ‘My game, I believe, old chap; two-one. Let’s take a bath.’
They collected their towels and walked across the huge, echoing, domed atrium of the Baths of Agrippa, built fifty years previously by Augustus’ right-hand man, outside the city walls on the Campus Martius. It was full of men, young and old, exercising, relaxing, conversing or having their bodies scraped and plucked within its circular confines, under the staring eyes of the lifelike painted statues that resided in semi-circular or rectangular niches embedded in its curved, glaze-tiled walls. The most famous of these, Paetus had told Vespasian upon their first visit there together, the Apoxyomenos by Lysippos of Sikyon — a four-hundred-year-old, beautifully proportioned image of a naked athlete removing the oil from his right arm with a strigil — had so enamoured Tiberius, ten years earlier, that he had it removed to his bedroom, leaving a copy in its place. He had been shamed into returning the original by chants of ‘Return to us our Apoxyomenos ’ during a bad-tempered demonstration as he visited the theatre a few days later.
The noise in the atrium was deafening, amplified by the circular construction and the dome above: grunts of exertion from wrestlers cheered on by enthusiastic onlookers; laughter at a well-told, pithy joke; exaggerated but good-humoured howls of pain as men had their underarm-, chest-, leg- or groinhair plucked by expert tweezers- wielding slaves; shouts of vendors selling food and drink; the pummelling and slapping of teams of masseurs toning the bodies of their masters: the citizens of Rome.
‘So the end result is that no one knows any more whether to cultivate Sejanus or avoid him,’ Paetus told them as they passed through a high door into a quieter, more relaxing square room lit by shafts of sunlight flooding in through windows high up in its frescoed walls. Here men dozed on couches or had a less frantic massage, having been through the bathing stages from the warm tepidarium, on to the hot caldarium, followed by the even hotter laconicum and rounded off with a plunge into the cold waters of the frigidarium.
‘Perhaps that’s what Tiberius wants: confusion, so as to isolate Sejanus without provoking him into rebellion because he too is unsure whether or not he remains in the Emperor’s favour,’ Vespasian suggested, wondering whether the bewildered old man was capable still of such a strategy.
Another set of doors took them out into the warm, mid-afternoon October sun, to a huge bathing pool — eighty paces long and forty wide — surrounded by a colonnaded walkway lined with stone benches crowded with men chatting, gossiping and rumour-mongering. On the far side of the pool, beyond the colonnade, rose the Temple of Neptune, built by Agrippa in thanks for his great victories at sea, firstly against Sextus Pompeius and then at Actium; however, this grand building was dwarfed by the dome of its neighbour towering over it: Agrippa’s Pantheon.
‘You saw him, brother,’ Sabinus said dismissively, ‘he wasn’t capable of two relevant consecutive thoughts.
