He felt Seneca freeze. ‘I don’t understand.’ The hint of pleading in the philosopher’s voice told Valerius that he understood very well. Seneca gave a little squeal as the knife point drew blood.
‘How you must have rejoiced when the surveyor handed over the report about the marble deposits on the border of your estate. You would keep it close. You never were trusting, Seneca, and I doubt you have started to be now. Tell me where it is or I really will have to kill you and find it myself.’
A shaking arm pointed in the direction of a nearby cabinet. Valerius drew the other man to his feet, never relaxing his grip. Together they walked until Seneca was close enough to reach the polished wood. The cabinet had two doors, but Seneca ignored them. Instead, he reached below the top on the left-hand side and worked his fingers until Valerius heard a distinct click and some internal mechanism sprung the lid back to reveal a pair of scrolls.
‘Pick them up.’ The philosopher did as he was told and they worked their way together back to the couch. ‘Unroll them.’
With his left hand Valerius took the papers. The first was the surveyor’s report on the hills to the south. Valerius gave a low whistle as he read the sums involved. ‘Congratulations, master Seneca. It appears you have substantial deposits of marble beneath your property, with a conservative value of tens of millions of sestertii and a possible value of hundreds of millions. But what is this? By some misfortune the bulk of the deposits, enough to make a man as rich as Crassus and Pompey combined, lie beneath your neighbour’s land. Oh, what a temptation that must have been for a man who has never known the meaning of the word enough. That was when you saw the opportunity to ensnare your friend Lucius, and, when his trusting son naively followed him into the net, you had exactly what you wanted. As soon as Petrus was taken, the father and the son were to be denounced, the one as a Christian, the other for failing to report him.’ He dropped the survey and picked up the second document. ‘How fortunate, then, that trusting old Lucius has already mortgaged the estate to his old friend Seneca. See, he has even signed it, although the signature is a little blurred and shaky, but then he is an old man.’ He threw the second scroll beside the first. ‘You even made common cause with your worst enemy to ensure Nero did not snatch it away from you. Does Torquatus know how much it is worth? Of course he doesn’t. If he did both estates would be confiscated by the state and Torquatus would already be sleeping in your bed. But did you really think you could trust him?’ Let Seneca think the Praetorian prefect had betrayed him. The truth was that Torquatus liked to boast, even to a woman he believed he owned body and soul.
Seneca was too astute to deny the fraud. He knew the two papers screamed his guilt as clearly as a written confession. All that remained was the court’s sentence. ‘It would be a pleasure to kill you, old man. A little more pressure and you will lose consciousness; then it would be a simple act to drag your carcass through to the bath and slit your wrists and allow the Fates to choose whether you drown or bleed to death.’
The philosopher bridled. ‘If I am going to die,’ he spluttered, ‘then at least do me the courtesy of making it look like murder. Thrust deep and let no man believe Lucius Annaeus Seneca took his own life in despair.’
‘I have a friend who would beg me to take that advice, but I have another use for you.’ He loosened his grip and Seneca collapsed forward, coughing. Valerius showed him the dagger to let him know the respite was purely temporary and produced another pair of scrolls from inside his tunic. He picked up a block of wax from a table at Seneca’s right hand and allowed it to melt over an oil lamp so it would drip on the top scroll. ‘Your seal. Quickly now.’
Seneca frowned, but complied. He tried to read what was written on the parchment, but Valerius whipped it away before repeating the process with the second.
‘Two scrolls,’ he explained. ‘Both witnessed by you and two others, both recounting the tale of your deceit, including the parts played by Saul of Tarsus and Torquatus, commander of the Praetorian Guard. Enough to have all three of you executed. If anything happens to me or my father one scroll will go directly to the Emperor, the other to the Senate.’
Seneca flinched, but a surge of relief made him feel quite giddy. He was going to live.
Valerius picked up the geologist’s report and the forged transfer paper and held them over the candle, only dropping them when the flames reached his fingers.
The philosopher watched with a puzzled frown. ‘What will you do now, Valerius? You are a rich man, or at least a rich man’s son. The money that lies beneath that hill would guarantee you a place in the Senate. With your intelligence, money and the right friends who knows what you could achieve? A consulship, given time, certainly.’
Valerius marvelled at the conceit of the man. ‘I will do what Nero has commanded me to do. I will find Petrus and I will deliver him to the Emperor.’ He saw the disbelief in Seneca’s eyes. ‘Not for you, or for him, but for the twenty thousand innocents who will die if I do not deliver him. Do you think he would count it a good bargain, your Christian? His life for twenty thousand others. Would that not place him even above his master, the Messiah?’
‘Yes, he would count it a bargain.’ The deep voice came from behind them. How long had Saul been listening? Had he been prepared to watch Seneca die without calling for help? Valerius decided he had never met anyone quite so ruthless.
The Cilician continued: ‘Of course Petrus would welcome the opportunity to give his life for others. My brother in Christus has so much to atone for, after all. But Jesus died for all men, my young friend, not for a mere twenty thousand. If you can find him, Petrus will be a willing sacrifice. But first you must find him.’
XXXVII
The earth was angry today, snorting steam like breath from a hard-ridden horse.
Quintus Corbo often rode out to the little height two miles from Neapolis to gaze across the garlanded crescent of the Campi Flegrei. Perhaps great Homer had stood here looking out to Puteoli and beyond, over the glittering expanse of emerald and blue waters to the pretty little harbour town of Baiae and the naval base at Misenum. Certainly the poet had known of the Phlegraean Fields, because he had written of them in his Odyssey, where they had provided the inspiration for the forbidding lair of Polyphemos the Cyclops. More recently Puteoli had known fame as the harbour from which the Emperor Gaius Caligula had built his three-mile bridge of ships in a show of manic extravagance that had done as much as anything to bring him to his just and painful end.
Emperors and their peculiarities were on Corbo’s mind today, but that was not what brought him here. He regarded himself, perhaps unjustly, as little more than an enthusiastic amateur in the science of natural phenomena, but the gods had placed him in the best position in the entire Empire to witness it, here in the gigantic boiling pot of the ash fields. Epicurus of Samos had first expounded the theory that the explosive underground activity in and around the Mare Nostrum was a direct effect of air penetrating deep into the earth and taking on a new and ferocious energy which made it more dangerous than any other element. The only reason the entire world did not explode was because of the phenomenon he was witnessing at this very moment. When a certain amount of violently disturbed air had amassed in cavities below the surface, the earth allowed it to escape through fissures and boreholes, thus relieving the pressure. He had walked in the foul-scented hills behind Baiae and seen the hundreds of hot springs and sulphur pools where the escaping gases created great jets of super-heated steam that dotted the landscape, which the uneducated sometimes mistook for giants. Normally this manifested itself in a low fog, but today it appeared the entire peninsula was on fire.