‘Poppaea? You startled me.’
‘I was concerned for you, lord,’ she said with the little girl’s pout she knew made him burn. A gossamer robe of the palest blue did nothing to hide her heavy, pink-tipped breasts or the shadowy secret of her sex. He felt his desire stir. So different from Octavia, who did her duty. She tried to hide it from him, but he knew Poppaea revelled in what other men would call his depravity, but he was moved to call his pleasure. When she offered herself to him the offer was unconditional. Everything she had was his to be taken as and when he desired. He dropped his hand to caress her breast through the thin material and watched the nipple harden, then took the ripening bud between his fingers and squeezed it so she gasped.
‘I wanted a boy today, but I could not have him. It vexed me.’
‘Then punish him, lord.’ Her voice was a husky whisper.
‘I cannot punish him.’ He slipped his hand to her other breast and felt her breathing quicken. ‘For he is a Hero of Rome.’
‘You are the only Hero of Rome, lord.’ Her body moved against his now, soft and urgent.
‘Will you reward your Hero of Rome, Poppaea?’ His voice could have belonged to a ten-year-old. He dropped his head to her breast and she gave a low moan.
‘Yes, lord.’
‘How will you reward him, Poppaea?’ The desire was thick enough to clog his throat. ‘Will you be his boy?’
She turned away hiding her face and dropping the robe so the silken flesh of her body turned silver in the moon-shadow. Slowly she bent forward over the table so he could take her in the way he chose. ‘Yes, lord,’ she whispered. ‘I will be your boy.’
When he moved over her he wasn’t sure whether she cried out in pain or pleasure.
Later, when she was gone but he could still smell the raw scent of her on himself, he stood at the window again.
Was she betraying him?
X
The message contained a time, a place, and a name. Valerius drew breath when he recognized the name. Why should he be surprised? They hadn’t set eyes on each other for at least ten years, but this was a man who had spent more than a decade at the very heart of the Empire, close enough to hear every beat.
Should he go? What did he have to gain? Or lose? The meeting place was convenient enough for his purposes, but they had never been friends. Their short relationship had been closer to master and servant. He remembered feeling used at yet another demand to fetch water from the well or recite from memory a complex argument by Apollodorus of Seleucia, or one of a dozen other wordy, overblown Stoic texts. But he had learned. His mind had quickened and his grasp and understanding of the subjects had grown with each passing day he spent in the great man’s presence. Great? Seneca hadn’t been great then. A few slaves, most of them spying for the Emperor. A trusted servant who no doubt betrayed him to his enemies. His ‘villa’ had been a run-down Corsican chicken farm and the fine court clothes he affected were worn and patched by the time Valerius had been sent to him. Exile had cracked him like one of the eggs his hens laid among the vines, but it had never broken him. Seneca consoled himself with his studies and his teachings and the letters he wrote to his mother, and ignored the heat and the filth.
Strange that a life devoted to logic and forbearance should have been almost destroyed by such an enormous capacity for human recklessness. The irresponsibility which had brought him into conflict with Caligula was bordering on suicidal. A woman had been the cause of it. That folly might have been forgiven, but to argue semantics with an Emperor who thought himself the new Aristotle was perhaps pushing Stoicism beyond its acceptable limits. Caligula’s acerbic dismissal of Seneca’s writings as ‘lime without sand’ had been more painful even than the threat of execution. And how could a man who had fought so hard to resuscitate his career throw everything away for a second time by conducting a flagrant, pointless affair with his new Emperor’s niece? Even benign old Claudius couldn’t allow that to go unpunished. Seneca had been fortunate to escape with nine years’ misery in exile. It had been Agrippina who finally recalled him and saved him from madness, and had entrusted him with her son’s education. His genius had made him first indispensable and then a liability. He was finished, but he didn’t seem to know it. And that made him doubly dangerous.
Of course, there was another possibility. It could be a trap. Valerius smiled at the thought. Proximity to the Emperor was making him paranoid. The writing was in the same firm, controlled hand he remembered.
But why now? This was no invitation to a pleasant afternoon of philosophical debate and discussion. The whole tenor of the note and the way it had been delivered was designed to intrigue him. It was the bait thrown to a hungry carp in a stew pond. Yet the bait was so blatantly presented that there was no disguising it could also be an invitation to put his neck on the executioner’s block.
So he should be suspicious, and he was suspicious, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take the bait.
He went through the arrangements in his mind, aware that the dangers ahead could be as great as anything he had faced in Britain. When he answered Nero’s commission he had laid aside the cosy trappings of civilian life to become a soldier again. He just wasn’t sure yet what he was fighting for.
Valerius rode out early next day through the valley between the Quirinal and Viminal hills and then up on to the Via Salaria, with the winding course of the Tiber away to his left. In the relative cool of the morning even the streets of the Subura proved bearable and once he was in sight of the massive red brick Praetorian barracks he was able to enjoy the prospect of the open road ahead.
Fidenae lay only six miles beyond the city walls, but his father’s estate was tucked in a valley a further three miles to the west of the town, a sprawling untidy mix of vine and olives around a villa that had once been fine but, like the estate, suffered from lack of investment. Still, it would take him only two hours at most and it would be good to see the old man again. Perhaps this time he could persuade him to visit Olivia. The road was one of the oldest in the Empire, the route the Sabines had once used to fetch salt from the Tiber marshes, and later in the day it would be busy with people travelling to and from the city. As he rode past the first of the tombs lining the highway the air grew warmer and he allowed his senses to be lulled by the low buzz of insects, the bittersweet scent of horse sweat and the murmur of the wind in the roadside trees.
It must have been close to the third hour when he reached the gateway to the estate. He experienced a strange sense of wellbeing as he rode beneath the stone arch. This was truly home, though he hadn’t called it that for years; the place where he had spent his childhood, carefree and safe among the hills and the streams. Twelve years earlier he’d been sent away to study, first under Seneca and then in Rome. Apart from a single short visit before he joined the Twentieth, and his mother’s funeral, he hadn’t been back since. He spotted a slave boy in a ragged tunic sprinting through the vines on the ridge above the dirt road and smiled: once he would have been on watch up there.
By the time he turned the corner and saw the familiar low outline of the villa, an elderly man with lined, careworn features and straggling grey hair was waiting to welcome him with a jug of water and part of a loaf. Despite his years, the old servant’s limpid eyes were still sharp and they lit up when they recognized Valerius.
‘Granta,’ the young Roman shouted. ‘You haven’t aged a day.’ He slid from the horse and ran to his father’s long-suffering freedman, stopping short when he remembered he was no longer a child and couldn’t greet him with a hug. They studied each other for a few moments.
‘You have grown into a fine young man, master Valerius.’ Granta’s voice, which could tear a hole in a barn wall if he found a slave shirking, shook with emotion. ‘We were so proud when we heard about your great honour.’ The old man was smiling, but Valerius noticed the familiar shadow that never seemed to be far away whenever he met an old friend. Britain had marked him as surely as if the Iceni had pressed a slave brand against his skin. He saw Granta eyeing his wooden hand.