The risk seemed to work, for the officers clapped me on the shoulder and bought me a drink in return, and I had that giddy feeling of unnatural luck, as if the gods had cloaked me in more than simply four months’ growth of beard and a worn leather hat. I accepted the beaker of raw wine that was pressed on me, though I spilled more than I drank, and I used the centurions as a shield while I kept my eye on the oak-leaf door halfway along the widows’ street; I could just see it from where I stood without straining.
Presently the centurions went on their way. I was heading back to buy another drink when a hand caught my wrist.
‘Do you dream of oak leaves, carter?’
It was the dream-teller. Small, dry, with a face like old driftwood crusted with salt-white hair, the man was impossible to age. I shook his hand off my arm and would have struck him, but I remembered who I was: a drunken carter.
‘I dream of wine,’ I said, thickly, ‘and then women.’
‘Do you so?’ Sharp eyes stitched across my face, pinning the lie. ‘When you are ready to dream of oak leaves, come and find Scopius and he’ll tell you the fortune they bring.’
I was a carter; my only need for fortune was in good sales. Tugging on my hat, I forced a grin.
‘I’ll be gone before that, old man, while you’ll be lucky if you’re still alive. All soothsayers are to be out of the city by the first of October, or they’ll sew you in a sack with a snake and a dog and throw you in the Tiber.’
‘They won’t sack me.’ Scopius had the gaze of an owl, if an owl had eyes the colour of a dusk sky. ‘I’m a dream-teller, not an astrologer. I know nothing about the stars, only about the dreams that grow beneath them. Come back when you’re ready, carter.’
It was the edge he put on that last word that destroyed my evening. If he knew, who else?
Alert now, with an itch between my shoulder blades, I turned away and pretended a fascination with the acrobats.
In the short time I had been distracted, they’d stretched a tightrope across the street from one wall to the other, and now they were dancing along it, leaping up on to each other’s shoulders, building a six-man pyramid with the lower three all balanced on the rope.
I thought at least the small one on top and definitely the blonde one in the middle row were girls. Looking more closely, I became sure of it; their tunics were short about the thigh to let them move freely, and belted tight. Their breasts were not full, but they were there, pliable, and firm and lovely.
The top girl, a dark-haired androgyne, leapt high into a neat-tucked somersault and I don’t think I was the only man suddenly to think of bedding her. It was five months since I last had a woman and here was one, near naked, athletic as you like, almost within reach. I thought of the gold in my belt, and what it might buy me. There were houses in Rome, one on the side of the Capitoline in particular, that I had heard of, where you had to show your fortune even to get into it, but once in… there was nothing you couldn’t do, if you were prepared to pay for it.
I had to think of the war and Otho’s death to drag my mind away from that and from the acrobat girls. I got myself another drink and sat down at the entrance to the courtyard to watch the door with the oak leaves carved above the lintel.
It was a lifetime’s instinct, I think, that told me I was not the only one interested in it.
Chapter 8
Rome, 3 August AD 69
The lady Jocasta Papinus Statius
I saw Trabo before I saw Pantera, and yes, I knew him. We had played together as children, my brother had been in love with him for years; I recognized him immediately. He didn’t recognize me.
I was in the courtyard of the Inn of the Crossed Spears. Pantera had sent a message to say he was back in Rome, and that we needed to meet.
How well did I know him? Did anyone claim to know that man? I had met him twice before that I knew of. Seneca did his best to keep his better pupils apart so that none of us, if taken, could reveal the identities of the others, so we only met after his death. The meetings hang in my memory, all of them.
The first was in spring, the bright time of flowers, in Nero’s reign, soon after Seneca’s forced suicide. Gone with him in the same failed conspiracy were Lacan and Piso and Piso’s wife and fifty other good men and women who had cared about the future of Rome. The city was brittle as winter ice with the shock of it. Men talked in whispers, women planned for widowhood and everyone crept from dusk to dawn like mice under the eye of a starving cat, wondering where Nero’s paranoid gaze might fall next.
Pantera had been in Judaea. At my summons, he came to the house of Seneca’s widow, the small, quiet woman who had been restrained from killing herself alongside her husband and now walked in the misery of the recently bereaved. She opened the door to him and then went outside, to see who might be watching, and to give us privacy to talk, that she might not hear what we had to say about her late husband. He had shared many things with her, but even so, there were some matters she was better off not knowing.
So we were alone in Seneca’s spare, quiet house and I’m sure I was not the only one for whom it was full of memories.
The small central atrium had no columns, and only four shuttered windows to the outside with two rooms off. I had arrived first and arranged the room as I needed it, then gone to stand by the window, with the morning sun coming in over my shoulder.
That day, when he walked over the threshold, I saw what he wanted me to see: an unremarkable nobody with a stiff left ankle. I knew from what I’d been told that he had been questioned in Britain and had more scars about his body than you could count, but they were all hidden under a tattered tunic. He was clean, he was presentable, and you wouldn’t have noticed him if you’d passed him in the street.
He stopped in the doorway and I watched him make the same assessment as me. Seneca always taught us it was best to stand in shadow, but if that was impossible, then to keep ourselves in bright light: each allows you the advantage of seeing before you are seen.
Pantera was of the shadows, I was of the light. That has been true all along. My feeling is that if you can’t be invisible, or don’t want to be, then you do everything you can to draw attention to yourself. That way, people see those things to which you guide their eyes, not the things that you wish to keep hidden.
With that in mind, knowing the importance of a first meeting, I was dressed in fine white linen, and my hair was bound up on top of my head. The three gold pins that adorned it bore butterflies jewelled in scarlet and amber, lapis and green. I wore no other jewels, nor any make-up; on walking into the room, his gaze and his attention were caught by the glitter of those pins.
Any normal man would have seen them first, and then the shape of my body beneath my shift. Later, when asked, he’d have said I was tall and dark-haired and wore gold pins with butterflies on my head. He would have described my figure in detail. If he was particularly attentive, he might have said that my shift was white.
Pantera was not a normal man. He glanced once at the pins and then his eyes stripped me from head to toe and back again. You might think that was nothing extraordinary, but the point is he wasn’t looking at my body, rather at what my shift might conceal, and when he was done he let his gaze rest on my face, on my eyes, whence danger might first be signalled.
He, too, had been asking around the city for information about me, and because I was… who I was I had been able to control what he had heard, and those bits I could not control I at least knew about.
He knew, therefore, that I was considered attractive, but was too wilful to be truly beautiful; that my brother was famous for his poetry but I believed myself the better writer and passed off my own work as his — that’s true, by the way; that I was a widow and childless, although nobody knew the cause of my husband’s death. Bloody flux, poison and a dagger in the night had each been mentioned, at which Pantera had remarked that any man would have to be particularly unlucky to fall foul of all three. None of his informants had laughed.