Misery? Or, perhaps — dared I allow myself to hope it — even excitement? I knew she had heard every word we'd spoken. The bearers lifted her and I saw her eyes no more. I turned back to Lygdus.
'Yes, we will,' I whispered. 'We will kill someone very soon. And not long after that, we will kill again. And then again.'
Lygdus laughed with delight and we took our places in our domina 's wake, trailing among the other household slaves who streamed from all corners of Oxheads as Livia's throne was borne along the great halls. We crossed the front threshold and left the grand house, stepping into the golden light of day. Livia looked resplendent as Flora. The eunuch basked in her reflected glory as the mob in the street began to shout and cheer the sight of their Augusta. Lygdus preened as though the cries were meant for him. I indulged him in this folly of youth. In my state of advanced years the love of the mob meant very little. Too often I had seen it turn.
' Why do you kill them?' he whispered to me once we had begun our progress down the Palatine. 'Is it for vengeance?'
I could have lied and claimed this to be true. Looking back on it now, I see how much less painful it would have been if I had. But in my happy realisation that I had found in Lygdus not only a kindred spirit and an ally, but also that very rarest of things in Rome, a friend, I chanced the greatest risk I had taken in my life.
'I do it all for Cybele,' I said.
He blinked at me in confusion. 'For the Great Mother?'
I nodded, my eyes shining with joy. Then I told him everything about the prophecies and divinity, and how Cybele gave her greatest gifts to her eunuchs. We had reached the Forum by the time I was done, and hundreds of people trailed behind and around us, screaming my domina 's name. Lygdus was bewildered by what I had told him, the glories of the procession forgotten. His heart burned with new hope and possibility.
I pointed to the head of the procession, where Castor walked like a prince, his baby son in his arms and his three fine nephews by his side. 'See,' I said, 'see up there? There he is — our second prophesied king.'
Lygdus struggled to comprehend it all. 'My dominus Castor?'
'No, not him…'
'Then the second king is Nero…?' he said in wonder.
I shook my head, still smiling, and showed him who it really was that Cybele had ordained.
'Little Boots?'
I closed my eyes, nodding. 'And what a king he will be.' I was enraptured. But when I opened them again, my spirits soaring to the skies, I saw the look of utter confusion that remained upon the eunuch's face. I guessed why he was so puzzled — Little Boots was still a boy, after all.
'The Great Mother is unknowable,' I said. 'We cannot understand all that she commands. All we know is this: everything she does, she does for Rome.'
Lygdus nodded slowly, and for the remainder of the procession, for the full duration of our long, magnificent path, he repeated all that I had told him, whispering it under his breath, telling himself to believe.
Dazzled by the possibilities that his once bleak future now held, Lygdus wanted nothing more than to find the comfort that was mine in holding so much deep certainty in my heart. He wanted to achieve the blissful ignorance that I nursed in the blindness of such faith.
I would not discover it for many years, but Lygdus tried and failed, and tried and failed, and tried that much harder again that day to achieve these things that were mine. And when the tiny, nagging doubts flared up in his heart, biting, gnawing and grinding against his conscience, Lygdus beat them back, enraged that comfort and ignorance were denied to him. He would achieve all that I had achieved, Lygdus told himself violently.
As all the gods were his witnesses, he would achieve what was mine.
MY SOLACE IN THIS TIME OF WOES
Ludi Romani
September, AD 21
Five months later: the rebel forces of Sacrovir occupy Augustodunum, Gaul, taking the sons of the Gallic nobility hostage
We elbowed and kicked against the surging mass of gawpers, trying to force our way through to catch a glimpse of the gladiators' banquet. The size of the crowd was impossible to measure, as was the distance to the raised dining couches on the other side of the Forum that held the leading gladiators of the Ludi Romani — the Roman Games. They could have been twenty feet away, or a hundred. The monuments of the Forum seemed to bend and recede beyond the heads of idolatrous fans.
My own head span in the haze and I felt like weeping in frustration. Yet I could think of no other way to achieve our mission, so we had to go on. We had a goal, a vital plan, but we were still too ill-equipped to commence it. The only way we could obtain what we needed was by reaching a vantage point where we could see everyone present at the gladiators' public feast. If we could survey the whole crowd, I reasoned, perhaps I would somewhere see her, the woman whose skills were essential for the success of our scheme. In my gut I knew she was present.
'Keep going!' I yelled to Lygdus over my shoulder. 'We can do this!'
Those we kicked and struck were doing the same to us and to everyone else besides. Sexual invitations and lusty cheers were flung at the gorging gladiators, merging with cries of pain and outrage as the crowd thrilled and brawled. We were in a scene from a nightmare, beyond our depth in a putrid pool of scratching, spitting, stamping ghouls. Fist blows rained upon me. Hair was yanked from my head and my eyes were blackened. Two of my teeth had already been loosened by a fuller armed with a club — a man I knew well and usually admired, because he washed my domina 's linen. But like everyone else, the excitement of the games had made him lose his mind. I was in danger of losing my own.
'Move forward, Lygdus!' I yelled. 'I think I can see the Thracians up ahead!' Indeed, I could just see a glimmer of the Balkan warriors' gilt crowns.
The noise around us was like the pits of Hades as we forged forward. The gladiators stuffed themselves as if reclining on Olympus. Still, the crowd's din was nothing to the noise they would make tomorrow when the same idols would be let loose upon each other for the games. The gladiators would savour hell tomorrow, and the mob's turn would come to sit high above and watch the spectacle of death. But neither Lygdus nor I gave a fig for the games. Like most slaves, we found the idea of fellow men of servitude going to such bloody deaths repellent. And today's traditional 'last feast' we thought equally as vile. We were only among them at all because I clung to such a slim hope.
'I'm dying!' cried Lygdus from somewhere behind me. 'Iphicles!'
I turned and managed to locate him. He was poking the eyes of a youth he was gripping by the throat. 'You're not dying,' I yelled. 'You're showing him who's boss!'
The youth tore himself from Lygdus's hands and managed to lurch away. Lygdus struggled through the seething mass of men and women to reach me.
'Can you see the gladiators?' he shouted above the din.
We strained to see above the heads in front of us and caught a clear view of a table of Thracian fighters, and behind them a group of Celts, all gorging on platters of food.
'How will they fight tomorrow with their bellies so full?' Lygdus wanted to know.
'We need to get on those platforms,' I yelled at him.
'Where the dining couches are? The gladiators will do you in for it!'
'I'll pretend I'm a serving slave.'
'They'll kill you, Iphicles.'
'I have to be able to see the whole crowd,' I insisted. 'We've waited months for the Ludi Romani to begin. She loves them too much to resist returning to Rome.'
'I still don't understand. Just who is this 'she'?'
'I told you.'
'Not very well,' Lygdus muttered.
