happiness in my life.'
'Good,' said Thrasyllus. 'When you are ready, I will tell you more of your prophecies.'
'There are more?'
'Many more. They come in echoes of whispers.'
'Tell me now.'
'It is not time, goddess.'
'Of course it is. Tell me now — I insist upon it.'
'But you are sleeping.'
She looked incredulous. 'Are you blind? I'm wide awake!'
I woke gasping from my dream, sweat coursing down my back. The linen was glued to me and my thin pallet was sodden with perspiration.
' Domina.'
Lying next to me, Lygdus awoke with a start. 'What's happened?'
'The domina — ' I stammered. My limbs wouldn't work; my blood was sluggish in my veins. 'Help me stand, Lygdus.'
Confused, Lygdus heaved his bulk from the floor and pulled me upright. I tried to walk but my legs buckled beneath me.
'The domina — take me to the domina.'
Lygdus picked me up in his arms and carried me to Livia's great bed in the centre of her sleeping room. 'See?' he whispered. 'It was just a bad dream, Iphicles. The domina is safe.'
Livia slept, seemingly unchanged in any way from when we had placed her upon her pillows at sunset. Then we saw the slow movement beneath her linens. I flung back the sheets just as the viper emerged from her sex.
'It's inside her!' Lygdus screamed.
The serpent saw us and tried to return to my domina's warmth, but in my terror I was too quick for it. I seized it by the head, pulling it out and flinging it into the air. The viper fell to the floor and tried to slither into the shadows beneath the bed, but Lygdus had the presence of mind to snatch up a stool. He crashed it onto the serpent's back, breaking its spine, but still the creature moved. Lygdus brought the stool down hard again, and then again and again, until the snake was bloody and crushed and still.
We stared at it together, our heartbeats racing, panting like fearful dogs.
'It was inside her,' Lygdus said. 'Inside her hole. Living inside her.'
I could only nod, as sick to my stomach as he was.
Agonalia
January, AD 26
One year later: Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus begins a suppression of rebellious Thracian mountain tribesmen
The shock was so great that Apicata didn't even feel it. She heard the terrible words and then she heard her daughter screaming out her name from somewhere deep within the house, but the chill wind blew everything away from where she stood dumbly facing her own front door. Along with the words went her response to what the man — this unknown Praetorian — had told her. She stood mute.
'Lady?' said the Praetorian at her door.
She managed to find something to say to him. 'It is so cold here.'
There was a moment's silence, then the Praetorian repeated exactly what he had said only a minute previously when she had returned from the baths. He repeated the words to the very letter — he had rehearsed them, clearly — but Apicata still felt nothing. They were too unreal, too horrific. In her mind's eye she saw the same words being ripped away by the wind again, carried far beyond her comprehension.
'Lady?' said the Praetorian. 'Do you understand what I am telling you, Lady?'
'Yes… I'm not sure.'
'For the reasons I have told you, I cannot admit you to your home. It is no longer your home. Those are Prefect Sejanus's orders.'
'Yes. Yes, now I see.' But she could not see anything. Apicata sensed the Praetorian standing aside to let the last of her bewildered maids file into the house. The wind was arctic. She heard her daughter's broken sobs.
'I must go to her.'
The Praetorian stopped her. 'You said you understood me, Lady.'
'Yes, I do, but — '
'Your daughter is no longer your concern.'
'Of course. Yes, now I see.' But Apicata could not see anything.
The young maid Calliope pretended to take an offering to the street Lares in order to slide past the Praetorian standing inside her master's door. The soldier showed more interest in her budding breasts beneath her tunica than he did in her slim reason for leaving the house, and the girl was happy only that she'd managed to fool him. She had no intention of visiting the Lares 's shrine, although she did conceal an offering of a different kind in her earthenware bowl. When the front door slammed behind her, she looked up and down the narrow Palatine street, trying to guess which way she should head first. Then the decision was made for her when she glimpsed her mistress slumped in the doorway of a house across the road. Calliope ran across, praying she was not being observed by the Praetorian through the peephole.
' Domina.'
Apicata stirred from her state of bewilderment.
' Domina — are you all right?'
'Calliope?'
'It is me, domina, yes,' the maid said, crouching next to Apicata and clutching at her hands.
'I am waiting here until my husband returns,' said Apicata, trying to summon her dignity. 'He'll avenge this insult to me. He'll have the man who refused me admittance to my home crucified.'
Calliope slipped the little oblong box into her mistress's hands.
'What is this?'
The young maid began to cry. 'I found it under your bed months ago, domina, but it frightened me, so I kicked it under there again. I didn't want to be the one who brought it to your notice — I thought you would accuse me of being the enemy who had placed it there. But when this terrible thing happened at the front door, I knew I must show you this evil, because there might be answers inside as to who caused this dreadfulness.'
Apicata went very still.
' Domina?'
'Did you open it?'
'I did,' said Calliope.
'Open it again.'
Calliope hooked her fingernail under the slot in the box and the lid fell free. Her lip curling in disgust, she placed the wax doll's torso and its severed head in Apicata's cupped palms. Her mistress rolled them in her fingers, detecting the absence of eyes in the head. She brought the head to her nose and smelled it. She recoiled. Bewilderment left her face, replaced by a dull rage.
'What else is in the box, Calliope?' she asked slowly.
'Just a tiny piece of rag.'
'Is something written on it?'
'There is a single word, but I cannot read it, domina.'
'You know your letters. You're not an ignorant girl. Read them out to me one by one and I will tell you what it spells.'
Calliope struggled to determine what was there. 'It starts with a V,' she began.
'Yes?'
'Then an E, I think.'
'Good.'
Calliope squinted. 'The next letter is I, then an O.'
