Parthenius, his several chins quivering, stooped to gather the dishes. He had raised self-abasement to an art. “Cocceius Nerva could be removed, Master. It only takes a word.” “And seven more will spring up in his place. I’m fighting a hydra. They all hate me.” “No matter, you saw their fear, Lord of the World. Recall the words of Caligula, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’” “Yes, and look what happened to him, you donkey!” The Lord of the World squinched his tired eyes, then opened them again. Parthenius’ smile never faltered, though the pain in his belly was excruciating.
“Don’t stand there, grinning like an ape, pour me more wine, and put a drop of laudanum in it. You know I don’t-don’t sleep well lately.”
“Of course, Master.” Parthenius extended a pudgy hand with the goblet. “Will you require anything else tonight?”
“Ah, what would I do without you, my friend. Who else can I trust? Come here, kiss me.”
The chamberlain bent awkwardly to comply, and Domitian struck him across the mouth with his open hand. “Get away, you disgust me, you’re too fat.”
Parthenius, his face a frozen mask, bowed himself out the door and sagged against the corridor wall. With a perfumed handkerchief from his sleeve he dabbed at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He remembered that Epaphroditus had been summoned one night to Domitian’s bedroom. The emperor had made love with him, had dined with him, sent him away with every sign of affection, and the next day signed an order for the man’s crucifixion. Parthenius sighed as the spasm of pain passed off. He smoothed his gown, took a deep breath, and went unsteadily down the hall.
Ever since Augustus Caesar had made himself Rome’s first emperor a century ago, it was the freedmen of the imperial household who made the wheels of government turn. Senators and magistrates, for all their wealth and pretensions, were really no more than the ornamental detritus of the vanished Republic, honored in inverse proportion to their relevance, or terrorized, depending on the emperor’s whim.
But the imperial freedmen, too, lived lives of constant dread. Without family, without inherited wealth or status, they were all caught in the hollow of the emperor’s hand. One misstep and it was back to the gutter, if they were lucky. Parthenius had a wife and a small son, born without the taint of slavery, who might make him proud one day if the chamberlain could stay alive long enough. And, if Fortune favored him, he hadn’t long to wait until there would be an end to fear and humiliation, to the stomach aches and the bile rising in his throat. He shook himself and straightened his shoulders. After tonight’s events he and the others needed to talk. ???
“It wasn’t you, was it, Stephanus?” the empress said. “With your dagger?”
They sat on delicate-legged chairs around a rosewood table inlaid with ivory. Each had come stealthily along a different corridor to Parthenius’ office in the working wing of the palace. It had taken time to arrange. It would be dawn soon. Entellus was there. He was the freedman who received petitions to the emperor; his favor was worth a fortune. Titus Petronius, the commandant of the Praetorian Guard, recently appointed and already insecure in his post. Stephanus, still with his left arm in the sling. He was fiercely loyal to Domitilla and her family and ready for anything. And finally the empress, herself, who hated Domitian perhaps more than any of them. They all deferred to her.
Stephanus was a lean, olive-dark man of about forty, with greasy black hair. He shrugged noncommittally. “You wouldn’t expect me to admit to murdering a Roman senator, a low-born fellow like me?”
“Well, if it wasn’t you who stabbed him, then who in the name of thundering Jove was it?” This was Petronius, the Guard commandant, blustering as usual.
“And does his death solve our problem or compound it?” asked Entellus in his quiet, precise way. The man of letters. “We must assume that Domitilla’s letter and her husband’s imperial horoscope are still in Verpa’s house somewhere. What if someone else finds them? Someone more loyal to the emperor than Verpa was-this fellow Pliny for instance? He’ll have the run of the place.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Parthenius said. “A pettifogging lawyer drafted into a police job that he clearly has no relish for.
“You should’ve seen his face when Fulvus proposed him. Still I’m concerned for the Purissima. We’ve had no news of her yesterday or today through the usual channel. What is she thinking of? I was against this in the first place…”
The empress raised a finger and Parthenius instantly shut his mouth. “That woman will decide for herself what’s best to do. She always does. We will leave it to her.”
“Of course, empress, as you say.”
“And now, my friends,” said the empress, “we had best go to our beds. Tomorrow will be a long day.” ???
While Pliny tossed in his bed and Domitian brooded in his; while others worried and fretted, Lucius Ingentius Verpa, son of the late Sextus, eased open the door to the family tablinum. Feeling his way in the dark, he located the lamp stand beside his father’s desk and struck a spark. By the lamp’s wan light he pawed through a thick sheaf of papers that lay scattered on the desk. Tossing these aside, he scooped up another batch from the table by the wall, and riffled through them. If only he knew what he was looking for! But he would recognize the papers when he found them; his father had waved them under his nose. The recollection of that scene churned his stomach. What could have made his father so mightily pleased with himself?
With heaps of papers and scrolls still unexamined, Lucius sank down on his father’s chair and, as he did, heard the scuffle of footsteps by the door. He dashed across the room but found no one. But it could have been only one person: Turpia Scortilla. I’ll see her dead before I’ll let her have them! He thought of chasing her, allowed his imagination to play with the thought of beating her face in. Not a good idea-not yet. Doggedly he returned to his search.
Chapter Five
The Nones of Germanicus. Day one of the Roman Games.
The second hour of the day.
In the early morning haze a holiday crowd was already gathering in the Forum Romanum, elbowing the homeless who huddled there nightly.
In Pliny’s mansion on the fashionable Esquiline Hill, the atrium was empty of clients; no time for them today. Instead, slaves tugged and pulled at the buckles of his cuirass while he sucked in his stomach, obedient to the prefect’s orders to appear in full fig. A civilian to his fingertips, Pliny hadn’t worn the loathsome thing in a dozen years and knew that he looked ridiculous encased in those sculpted bronze muscles. When he had served his military tribunate as an army accountant he had never drawn his sword in anger. He finally had to banish Calpurnia from the room when her praise of his dashing figure became too much to bear. ???
The Roman Games, inaugurated five centuries earlier, were the most ancient festival in the sacred calendar. Amid clouds of incense and the wailing of flutes the procession wound its stately way through the Forum and up the steep slope to the top of the Capitoline Hill and the triple temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Near the head, Pliny, puffing and sweating in thirty pounds of burnished bronze, struggled to keep step with his chief and the other prefects, vice prefects, magistrates, and ex-magistrates of the Populus Romanus who trooped behind the imperial family. Following these worthies marched, or in some cases danced, the priestly colleges: the college of Pontifices, whose chief was the emperor himself; the Fifteen Sacrificers, who interpreted the Sibylline Oracles; the Seven Banqueters; the Bird-Watchers; the Brethren of the Soil; the Leaping Priests of Mars, brandishing their spears; the Etruscan Gut-Gazers; and the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of the sacred flame, their faces shrouded by their long veils.