subterranean beast. I froze, looking about wildly. Lena was holding out her hand for payment for services soon-to- be rendered when the echoing tremor, far below in the ground, tossed me off balance. I fell face-first onto her little table by the door, and my fistful of coins flew high into the air, raining on our heads. Several coins rang dull and hollow as they hit, revealing that they'd been clipped. As if that wasn't enough to leave Lena speechless for a moment, another tremor threw me to my feet again.
'He's having a fit!' Lena screamed in the direction of the cubicles.
'No!' I started to explain. 'It's not that — '
Lena tried to pull me out of the room. 'No fits in here — it'll kill us.'
'I'm not fitting,' I said, dragging myself from her grip. But I knew something was very wrong — or was about to be. I rode out the next tremor that boiled beneath the ground just as the brothel's boy returned breathless and panting from the fountain. He had a full pail of water in his hand.
'Throw that on Polyxena,' Lena told him.
The boy raised the wooden pail to toss the water over one of the patchwork curtains when a fourth tremor pitched me backwards and into his splash. I fell hard, striking my head on the floor.
I must have lost consciousness because I found myself outside in the villa's grounds. Lena was bending over me, clucking sympathetically. 'Sorry, love,' she said. 'I can't have that sort of thing inside — it brings too much trouble on us.'
I tried to sit up but my head was throbbing violently. 'You dragged me out?' I asked, dazed and angry.
'What if you'd died? You're an Oxheads slave — people would start yelling murder.'
'They would not! I'm nobody.'
She just looked at me as though the blow to my head had reduced me to a state of childishness, and I saw that some of the brothel's girls were crowded around me too. 'I gave you my money,' I said. 'I want what I paid for.'
'Some of those coins were hollow,' said Lena.
'Then I want what I paid for with the coins that weren't. Help me up,' I pleaded.
Lena and the girls hauled me to my feet. 'How do you feel, love?'
I sensed the violent buckling of the earth again but managed to stay upright. 'I feel… better,' I lied, closing my eyes against the movement in an effort to keep from being ill. When I opened them again, I saw the pallor that had suddenly flooded Lena's face. 'It's all right,' I said. 'I won't vomit on you.'
'The ground — ' said Lena. Around her, the girls began to scream.
'What's wrong now?' I said.
'The ground,' said Lena again, pointing at the fissure that had opened in the earth and was now streaking towards the villa like a lightning bolt from Jove. 'Look at the ground!'
My domina endured it.
The long, slow barge up the Tiber she endured, all the way unable to swat the flies and mosquitoes that bit at her face as she sat unattended in her throne, forgotten by the eunuch in his happiness at being free of me. She endured the maddening itch, unable to lift her hands to scratch or signal for her great-grandson Nero to notice her and respond.
The indignity of her arrival at Fidenae she endured when the litter-bearers showed a lack of care in lifting her throne from the barge, letting her jerk and jolt and suffer her diadem falling across her eyes, all the while unable to steady herself, unable to right herself in any way.
The sight of the amphitheatre she endured, wholly made of wood and left unpainted in the haste to have the thing upright in time for the games. She endured its raw, unfinished ugliness and the nasty stink of its sap. She endured the stale, unhealthy air — the amphitheatre stood in an ill-drained swamp. She endured her head being struck upon a crossbeam when her throne was carried up the narrow stairs. She endured the cries of dismay when people saw the blood the blow had drawn. She endured the eunuch's clumsy hands as he smeared the blood from her brow with the hem of her very own stola.
Her sodomite great-grandson she endured, while he looked genuinely surprised, then delighted and then moved by the cries of the sixty thousand spectators crammed into every tier of the amphitheatre, its structure groaning with the weight of them. She endured the shame of even having such a great-grandson, aware but quite unable to denounce him for his trysts with buggers. She endured the eunuch's starry-eyed staring at Nero, as idolatrous as all the rest, as Nero slowly raised the handkerchief to begin the games.
My domina was able to endure it all. She had already endured a lifetime's worth of suffering, and this was nothing compared to what had come before. She endured it because she knew there was an end in sight. She could feel it. She could smell it in the air before any of the cheering sixty thousand, none of whom stayed still long enough to feel the ground move beneath them. She endured the laughter of the fools in the Imperial box as they pointed at the rippling earth in the centre of the arena and marvelled at what they thought was the latest stagecraft. She watched as those same fools saw the tiers around them start to buckle and bend and then fall inwards, all the while thinking it was part of the entertainment.
At last, when the crowd's screams had turned from joy to terror, my domina felt the relief of needing to endure no longer. Her throne pitched forward and she fell with it, smiling, laughing, her eyes closed in pleasure as she plunged through this thing that was an amphitheatre no longer, but only a sea of splinters.
Our fingers shredded raw, we slaves and whores worked side by side, weeping as we clawed at the rocks and bricks and building rubble, screaming out the names of those who were trapped somewhere within. As each one was found — sometimes alive, but more often not — the joy grew greater inside my heart, although I continued to weep as the others did. The further in we went, the worse the injuries of the victims became — severed limbs and shattered skulls — and the greater the number of dead among them.
The Cave's collapse had crushed the villa utterly, flattening every pretty room and trapping all those who cavorted inside. My premonition had saved me from the cataclysm; more than that, it had warned me that the thing I had wanted for so long had now been placed in my grasp. The Emperor was dead. The throne belonged to Little Boots.
True to form, Tiberius had taken his lusts to the farthest corner of the cavern, sheltered from the eyes of all who had not been bought and paid for. He was ashamed of what he did and hid it from everyone except those whose task was to be subjected to him. None saw what he indulged in, none knew of his true obscenity, and now his filthy secrets were crushed along with his bones. It was fitting. But the excitement was too great in me and I found myself laughing at the thought of the broken corpse we'd soon be exposing. I hoped we'd find him taken at the moment of his greatest depravity. I tore at the debris, giggling with glee, smearing tears from my eyes, and the slaves and the whores looked at me like I had become unhinged. It seemed pointless to tell them otherwise.
'Go and rest,' said Lena. 'Sit down — you're in no state for this.'
'I want to find the Emperor,' I wailed.
'He'll be found whether you're here or not. You're too old for this. Go and sit.'
Happy to spare my bleeding hands, I broke away from the throng of clawing survivors and emerged from the ruins into the sunshine again. I felt the warmth on my face — the warmth of a new day. The old day hadn't actually ended yet, but it seemed done with to me. The despised first king was as flat as a papyrus sheet, and his prophesied heir would soon ascend in his place, with his loyal slave Iphicles offering steadying guidance.
All the doubts and niggling fears I'd had — some planted by Lygdus and others wholly my own handiwork — seemed to vanish in that moment. I had no idea actually how I might 'steady' Little Boots, with his growing rebelliousness and unpredictable temper, yet it seemed a trifling concern, such was my relief. The pleasure of the sun on my skin and the earth under my bare toes filled me with more elation than I could remember in years. I picked up my heels and began to dance. What did it matter who saw me? I didn't care. I would claim it was a grieving dance to anyone who challenged me. I kicked my feet high, I leaped on the spot. I bounced like a harpastum ball tossed by carefree youths. I began to sing. I had no words to offer, only tunes, a collection of snippets from theatre songs that I hummed and la-la-la — ed in my spiralling, giddy delight.
The cry of many voices from the ruins of the Cave made me spin around. I heard the voice of Lena, bell-like above them all. 'It's the Prefect!' she cried. I remembered Sejanus — they must have found his corpse. In my joy at the Emperor's demise I had flushed Sejanus's whole existence from my mind. All my covert assistance of his deluded plans, my endless labours and stealthy schemes to aid him in the work that was really my own, had been rendered unnecessary. I felt a moment's sadness. Then I hurried back to the rubble so as not to miss the pleasure of seeing his shattered face.
