‘I think it’s a message from Petrus to his followers. Leave Serpentius here and tell him to watch for anyone who comes along to take a look, then follow them.’
Marcus nodded. ‘And us?’
‘Lucina Graecina.’
The gladiator looked as if he’d just bitten into a lemon. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I knew this was going to be trouble.’
Lucina Graecina: Rome’s empress without a throne. The woman rumoured to have been Claudius’s lover before he had been seduced by Agrippina. The woman who despised Nero more than anyone in the Empire.
‘Is it true Nero only keeps her alive because he’s worried she’ll be waiting for him on the other side?’
Valerius nodded. ‘That and the fact that her husband is the man who conquered Britain. Aulus Plautius and Lucina have ample reason to hate Nero. Lucina blames the Emperor for killing their son.’
Lucina seldom showed her face in the city, preferring to travel in a closed litter carried by six British slaves. The original bearers had been members of King Caratacus’s personal bodyguard captured by her husband in the great battle which had won Britain for Rome twenty years earlier. Lucina was said to have worked them to death in three years. Since then she’d replaced them several times, always from the same tribe, the warlike Catuvellauni. Naturally, Rome being Rome, the gossips whispered that it wasn’t only carrying her that had worn the muscular Britons out.
Valerius had seen her only once, when she had been forced from the litter at a Praetorian checkpoint. He remembered a narrow, glaring face masked by the white powder of mourning; a tall, bony woman of late middle age with a back as straight as a cavalry spear. They couldn’t have been more different in appearance, but her bearing had reminded him of the Iceni queen, Boudicca. He told Marcus: ‘I want a watch on her house day and night and a report of all her movements.’
For the next two days Valerius barely left Olivia’s side, listening to the sound of her shallow breathing as she fought whatever demons were consuming her from within. Since Lucius had abdicated responsibility for her, it had fallen to Valerius to take over his sister’s guardianship. In theory, according to the Twelve Tables, the rules that were the very foundation of Roman law, he had the power of life and death over her, even though she was a respectable widow who had run a married household for five years. The thought made him shake his head. If he truly had power he would use it to save her from this insidious living death: which brought him to his dilemma.
Whether as Petrus, the Rock, or Joshua, the physician, the Judaean’s skills were Olivia’s best, perhaps only, chance of salvation. Yet Valerius was under orders from Nero to deliver him for torture and execution, and under obligation to Seneca to do the same. When he found him he would have a decision to make. But first he had to find him. What made a man like the Judaean leave everyone dear to him to follow a charlatan like this Christus? He remembered the intelligent eyes and the ageless, worn-out smile; taut self-control and a well of inborn compassion. A good man, by anyone’s definition of good. No hint of insanity or covetousness or ambition. Valerius had heard of men who could control the minds of other men through drugs or by weakening them with deprivation. Could that be Christus’s magic? Yet the mystic had died thirty years ago on a cross; how did it explain Petrus’s continuing to risk his life to spread the man’s words? It seemed absurd. And yet Petrus had believed. Valerius shivered. The room seemed to have gone cold. If a man like Petrus could be convinced, then perhaps dead Christus and the men who followed him truly were the great danger Nero imagined.
XIII
It would be the glory of Rome. Nero stood over the table and the familiar seven-hilled landscape filled with intricately carved wooden houses and temples. Today there was a difference. In the area between the Palatine and Esquiline hills now stood a structure so magnificent it gave him a feeling of almost sexual pleasure. A single, monumental building on a scale with the hills that flanked it, which dwarfed every other surrounding construction. Three hundred rooms, miles of lakes and parklands. He would fill it with the wonders of the world and cover it with gold and men would come to marvel at it from the ends of the earth. Aegyptus, Babylon, Troy and Sumeria had nothing to compare with it. This would be his legacy. This would be his triumph. His and his alone. Within it would be a great artistic and cultural centre where he would entertain and mesmerize those worthy of his talent. Music would soothe the blood of his enemies. Fine words would seduce those who opposed him. In this house there would only be harmony.
Of course, he thought, remembering the hundreds, perhaps thousands of wooden dwellings scattered across the mosaic floor, there would be obstacles. But a good workman could clear away any obstacle if he had the tools. He would allow nothing to obstruct his dream. They would thank him in the end, all those small people who would have to make way for it; the people who lived in the cramped dunghills beneath the terracotta tiles amid the oppressive, swirling miasma of corruption. Seneca had taken him there once, disguised in the clothing of the common man, to let him see his people. People? Animals fighting and rutting and squatting in the mud and the straw and the filth. The stink had almost made him faint. He had as little in common with his people as he had with cows in a field or the monkeys in the Palatine menagerie. Let ugliness make way for beauty, ordinariness for elegance, mediocrity for magnificence. He ran the last thought over his tongue, testing it for quality and rhythm. Yes, with a little polishing he could include it in a song or a poem.
He picked up his harp and strummed through the scales, smiling as the hundreds of songbirds in the cages by the window reacted to his notes. Here at least he could always find an audience who truly appreciated his music. The cage was not their natural element, just as the barless cage of duty he inhabited was not his. Sometimes he longed to fly free and when that melancholy took hold he would open the cages and watch the birds stand nervously on the threshold before taking to the skies; trilling blackbirds and song thrushes, pink-cheeked goldfinches and drab, honey-voiced skylarks, the robins and wrens and redstarts. Sometimes they would die in their cages and he would mourn them.
Lately, he had been pondering his own mortality. Torquatus had tried to explain to him the tenets of the Christus religion, but he did not fully understand it. In fact, he was fairly certain Torquatus didn’t understand it either. He frowned. This was when he needed Seneca’s genius. Seneca could take a subject and peel back the layers until a child could understand its meaning. But Seneca was old and defeated and had taken to disagreeing with him at the end. He could not even outwit a man as dull as Torquatus, so how could he guide his Emperor? As he saw it, in simple terms, a man could achieve immortality only after submitting to the indignity and inconvenience of death. To do so, he needed to have believed, in life, that Christus truly was the son of the Judaean god Yahweh. But, and this was what made it all seem so unlikely, how could someone of even average intelligence be convinced of the authenticity of a man who had been dead for almost three decades? He had considered having the body of the Galilean exhumed. Surely it would show some signs of his god-like capacity; a lack of mortification of the flesh or an ability to speak from beyond the grave? He fully expected to become a god himself. After all, if old Claudius could be declared divine, surely he, of all his line, could take his place beside Augustus and Caligula. But he had the blood of gods running through his veins. To believe some foreigner born by a muddy puddle in the desert could stand at his side was an insult. It was like suggesting a beggar from the slums should have a temple dedicated in his honour. The Judaeans believed in the same god, and he was one of the reasons they despised this Christus, but they accepted the authority of the Emperor, which was why, for the moment, he tolerated their barbarities. Surely the more gods a man worshipped the better? Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Minerva had all come to Rome’s aid in times of drought and famine and war. What could a single god do that many could not do better? If one god failed a man he was within his rights to sacrifice to another and another, until he found the god who could help him.