She yanked up hard and the lid pulled open enough to let her have a good look inside.
Micaela was on her feet again, hands on her hips. ‘So what is it, what do you see?’
The light was dim but Elisabetta could make out the contents.
In a way, she wasn’t surprised by what she saw.
The crate was filled with red tuff dirt and human bones.
There were two complete skeletons, maybe three. The one on top had an articulated tail the length of her hand. And the face – she recognized his howling expression. She easily spotted the gold pendant in the ribcage because the light glinted off it. It was heavily incised with star signs, the exact same zodiacal ring from the fresco and from Faustus’s magic circle.
She transferred all the weight of the lid onto one hand and reached in with the other, ignoring the gold disc and going instead for the smaller silver object among the finger bones. She pulled it out. A pretty little chi-rho medallion.
‘What is it?’ Micaela called out. ‘What have you found?’
‘It’s them,’ Elisabetta called down. ‘The skeletons of St Callixtus.’
TWENTY-SIX
Rome, AD 68
AT THE AGE of thirty, pudgy and balding, Nero no longer looked anything like his ubiquitous image on statues and coins. The years since the Great Fire had taken their toll.
In the hours of the day when he was sober he had obsessed and labored over every detail in the construction of his Golden House. The Domus Aurea wasn’t so much a palace as a statement. A vast tract of burnt-out Rome was now his and he could shape the land at will into his golden image. When it was done, a flabbergasted visitor would see a vista of open countryside filled with woods, pastures, exotic animals and grand buildings surrounding a lake, all set in a valley surrounded by hills.
The main residential complex dazzled the eye because its 360-meter south-facing facade was built so that its gilded surface caught and reflected the sun throughout the day. Its vestibule was tall enough to house a colossal effigy of Nero, the largest statue in Rome. There were dining rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory and with panels that could be opened by slaves to shower his guests with flower petals. There were pipes for sprinkling guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and set on a revolving platform that slaves slowly rotated throughout the day and night to mimic the earth moving through the heavens. His heated baths were supplied with sea- and sulphur water.
Its construction greatly enriched a bevy of Lemures corporations but drained the coffers of the empire. But Nero felt wholly entitled. When it was sanctified and dedicated he would say that finally he could live like a human being.
As he moved from room to sumptuous room, from one debauchery to another, the empire groaned under his profligate rule. The Roman statesman Gaius Calpurnius Piso had tried to unseat him a year after the fire before Nero got wind of the affair and slaughtered the multitude of plotters and all their blood-kin. The following year there was a Jewish revolt in Judea which required Nero to implore his esteemed general Vespasian to come out of retirement.
Cost overruns at the Domus Aurea and other Roman building projects and the massive expense of keeping order within his far-flung empire led Nero to bleed more taxes out of the provinces.
‘Get me more money!’ he was always bellowing to Tigellinus who would oblige as best he could, carving out his personal take from every transaction. He’d grown used to Nero’s increasing demands. More money, more food, more wine, more spectacles, more orgies, more blood – especially Christian blood.
None of this bothered Tigellinus in the least but he and the leading Lemures families were growing worried about losing the control they had enjoyed since the days of Caligula. How they wished that Balbilus were still among the living to read the star charts and tell them what was due.
A new and serious threat had emerged in the form of Gaius Julius Vindex, the over-taxed governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, and Gaul was in open rebellion. True, Nero’s legions had defeated Vindex at the bloody battle of Vesontonio but, far from continuing to fight for Nero, the victorious Praetorians promptly proposed their own commander Verginius as the new emperor. He refused to participate in treason but support was growing across the empire for Galba to seize power from the fat, crazed lyre-player in the Golden House.
Yet whatever adversity befell him during these troubled times Nero could always find escape in a jug of wine and solace in the arms of Sporus.
In the summer of 65, Nero, who was immune to the notions of regret and remorse, committed the one act he would have taken back if he could. In a drunken rage brought on by something he couldn’t even remember the next day, he stomped his wife Poppaea Sabina and her unborn child to death. When he awoke the next morning, bilious and hungover and saw her broken carcass on the marble floor and her blood on his hands and feet he wailed like a child.
He’d killed his own mother, he’d raped a Vestal Virgin, he’d committed countless unspeakable acts but none of them had ever stuck with him like the murder of Poppaea. After she was gone it occurred to him that he missed her terribly. An emptiness gnawed at him and he attempted to fill it as quickly as he could. Every time he heard of a woman who looked like Poppaea he had her brought to him and if the likeness was appealing enough he kept her as his concubine. But none met his expectations like a boy, a freedman named Sporus, who bore an uncanny resemblance. Nero took to him immediately and rewarded the lad with castration to seal the deal.
When his wounds healed Nero had him wigged, gowned and made-up like Poppaea and married him in a formal ceremony where Tigellinus held his nose and gave the ‘bride’ away. He took him to his bed every night and told him he’d slit his throat if he ever whispered about his tail. And while tongues wagged all over the city, Nero perpetually pestered his Greek surgeons about some way of turning the eunuch into a proper woman so he could kiss his face while they fornicated.
In June the gardens of the Domus Aurea were at their most fragrant but the only ones who seemed to notice were the slaves who tended the flower beds and fruit trees. Nero and his court were otherwise occupied with news of the traitor Galba who was gaining steam as the summer heat began to bear down.
Nero had briefly rejoiced at the defeat of Vindex weeks earlier, not for least because he’d heard the Gallic governor had called him a bad lyre-player, but Galba had taken up the mantle of rebellion and was rolling his legions towards Italy. It reassured the court not a bit when Nero had announced his mad plan for defeating the insurrection: he would travel to the advancing legions armed with wagons laden with theatrical props and water organs accompanied by concubines who would be given masculine haircuts and dressed as Amazonian warriors. When he met Galba he would, at first, do nothing but weep. And thus, reducing the rebels to penitence, he would stage a grand performance for them with songs of victory he was composing.
After dark one day, a messenger arrived at the Domus Aurea with a message for Tigellinus. He read it and shook his head. The time had come for him to leave. He’d been expecting the news and his slaves had already cleaned out his villa and loaded the carts and wagons. General Turpilianius, the last of the loyalists commanding the advance force against Galba, had defected. Tigellinus had no desire to die for Nero and despite the riches that had accrued to him over the years he still had a bitter taste in his mouth over Nero’s torching of his precious Basilica Aemilia. No, he would decamp to his estate in Sinuessa and keep a low profile there among other Lemures families. They would find a way forward. They always did.
‘What is it?’ Nero drunkenly asked Tigellinus when he entered the dining hall.
‘A dispatch from the field.’
Nero put his arm around Sporus and knocked over a precious glass goblet in the process. ‘Well, tell me what it says then! I’m busy, can’t you see?’
‘Turpilianius has gone over to Galba.’
Nero stood wobbly on his feet. His secretary, Epaphroditus, ran to his side to steady him.
‘What shall we do?’ Nero demanded.
