B007IIXYQY EBOK (159 page)

As the August heat grew fiercer and the mounting tension made them feel they were being broken slowly on a wheel, the thought recurred insistently—
and why should this attempt succeed
? How swiftly and savagely their still-loyal colleagues would turn on them if they knew.

By tomorrow morning all of us could be in line for the block.

A hasty trumpet fanfare signaled that their Lord and God approached the Palace from the more private Forum entrance, and was moving now through the grand vestibule. Many felt a private throb of despair. They had hoped Petronius would fail to draw the Emperor away from the amphitheater, and that would be the end of it. In an hour their watch would end; they would go quietly back to their barracks and not another word would ever be spoken of this.

Then came a disciplined tramp of feet. Domitian’s twenty-four lictors strutted into view, bearing the
fasces,
the ancient symbol of unlimited power on earth—and the men found themselves transfixed by the dully gleaming axes put in with each bundle of birch rods—symbols of the Emperor’s power to execute. Next they saw Petronius, who walked at Domitian’s side. Petronius’ complexion was the color of freshly kneaded dough; this did little to still their fears. But it was the sight of Domitian that overcame them to a man.

Somehow, perversely, never had Domitian appeared so imposing. Their fright rendered his height heroic; he seemed to move through clouds with Zeus-like indifference. That formidable brow was unforgiving as death. A direct look from those eyes could roast them to ashes. He looked neither left nor right; their existence was utterly beneath his notice—they might have been a row of columns.

Many believed the Emperor with his divine senses could smell the odor of treason on them.
This is folly and blasphemy. He cannot be killed. For Petronius’ greedy ends, all of us will die.

They felt like foolish servants tempting the wrath of the father-god. The same thought formed in many minds: We must move swiftly—we’ve but one hour to alert the loyalists.

But as the Emperor’s entourage passed on, there came from the amphitheater a series of dull, rumbling explosions of noise, like a mountain erupting with fire. Finally the cries melted into a continuous din, and they knew the bout had ended. Oddly, they heard but several halfhearted attempts to ignite the chant
“Aristos Rex”—
then nothing more. What in the name of Mars were they crying out instead?

Finally they heard it unmistakably—
“Aurinia Regina!”

It could not be. This was some elaborate jest. Again and again the mob cried the woman’s name, and gradually they had to believe. For long moments they were suspended in baleful confusion, not knowing whether to count this violent upset of natural law for good or ill. Then one of their number spoke up with authority, whispering loudly, “The divine will’s never been clearer—this is the hour for the weak to strike down the strong.” Within moments this interpretation was passed down the line, and it had a wondrous effect. Through the victory of the barbarian woman, their god-filled universe had given them an answer and a blessing.

The plot would succeed. Those who had thought of defecting swiftly changed their minds. Each fresh cry of
“Aurinia, Regina”
further fired them with boldness.

When Domitian heard the cry, he halted in midstride. Petronius saw his features soften into an incongruous look of childish confusion.

“What
do they shout?” Domitian whispered in a tone close to begging. The Emperor seemed dwarfed suddenly by the size of his Palace. His expression became one of reflective horror, as if he discovered he had been sleeping in a haunted room.

A Guard was dispatched to the streets to drag in one of the ragged boys who cry out tales of events in the city in exchange for a few copper coins.

“Horrible,” Domitian whispered when he had heard it all, including the strangling. “Aristos deserved a better death. She is a putrefying serpent in our midst.”

The third omen had stolen up behind him as quietly as an assassin in a midnight-dark street. He felt like a condemned man who is set free—and then realizes his reprieve was a dream.

Aristos, fool, you were to give me an omen of life. And now she has killed me, surely as if she ran me through herself.

“Curses on those criminal children and their rejoicing,” Domitian sputtered, his wrath turning suddenly on the mob. “For the rest of the games they shall have no awnings. Let them roast in the sun and soak in the rain. I’ll give them acrobats and monkey races until they shout themselves dead. Let them have their frolics, the vermin, the sewage—”

Servilius appeared in the vast corridor, advancing on them purposefully with his underconfident strut. At a respectful distance he halted before the imperial party.

“Your Excellency, I have a—a most strange thing to report,” Servilius began, his head bowed as though for the convenience of an imaginary executioner. “You ordered us to bring out your former First Advisor, and we could not, at first, find him. That is, he was not in the cell to which the day guard recorded he’d been brought. I found him finally—in the interrogation rooms. He apparently was taken by mistake—”

“What chicanery. Do not those addlepates know him?”

“My question, too. I know not how it happened—I mean to fully investigate the matter,” Servilius continued, his voice wobbling like a wheel loosened on its axle. In fact he knew precisely how the mishap had occurred, but meant to cover any appearance of incompetence. The Emperor was a stern but just god who could be placated with good deeds and right action. And he had failed miserably. “It is unpardonable. I will resign my office—”

“There’s much you do not say. Nothing happens with that man by accident. If he was taken, he wanted to be taken. Did you ask him what sort of mischief he was involved in?”

“He would not speak to
me
, my lord. And…there’s not much life left in him.”

A glint of realization flashed in Domitian’s eyes. “If you lie, I’ll know it.
Who did he say he was
?”

“A—a man named Bato, your excellency.”

“A plague on you buffoons. Did it occur to you that this
Bato
is the man we want—that our canny Julianus meant to stop him from spewing out under torture something he did not want revealed?”

“I—yes, I did think of it. Yes, right away. As a matter of fact, just before I came to you now, I ordered Bato brought out. He—he died. Under torture.”

“So soon? You had better explain that.”

“He was so frightened. He died of terror as soon as they put him on the rack…. Weak heart, I think.”

“My dear Servilius, why won’t you look at me? You look like you fell into a vat of white lead. How convenient for Marcus Julianus. Perhaps for yourself as well?”

Servilius vigorously shook his head. “No, my lord. Of course not!”

Servilius had actually slain Bato himself. When he learned that Marcus Julianus was shielding the man, likely explanations sprang to mind, including the correct one, but terror for his own life overwhelmed all other considerations, for he knew Bato was one of Julianus’ many spies among the Guard. And Servilius had much to hide—there was the cousin he helped escape to Caledonia after he deserted the Tenth Legion, and the heavy bribes he took from his men for extra leave-time. Under Domitian such misdeeds brought much harsher penalties than loss of promotion. It had been a simple matter for Servilius to steal into the interrogation room and finish Bato with his dagger before the torturer began his work.

“I am your most loyal of servants!”

“The sad truth is, you probably are. It’s an eternal pity that loyalty of canine proportions and good, common human intelligence never seem to go hand in hand. You are dismissed.”

Domitian added happily to Petronius as they continued on their way to the prisons. “Perhaps Julianus will prove more sociable with me.”

Curses on Nemesis, Petronius thought. If Julianus dies I will charge it to myself—for I let Bato into the plot. All comes apart. We’ll end taking our places beside Saturninus and all the others who tried to throw off Domitian and died for it.

In the octagonal bedchamber Domitia Longina hesitated before the imperial bed in its grand niche adorned with a temple roof and pilastered columns of serpentine. Her heart felt like a swallow trapped in the eaves as she drew back the heavy Oriental coverlet and exposed the checkered pillow with its tassels of gold.

Coward. Do it now
!

Her hand slid cautiously beneath the goose-down cushion. Her finger was nicked by steel. Startled, she withdrew it and slowly, sensuously, licked the blood, imagining it her husband’s. Then she drew out the short sword always concealed there.

Now, monster, you’ll have no way to defend yourself. Just as I never did
.

She was to conceal the sword beneath her palla, then calmly depart. The timing was close—loyalist Guards had just completed an inspection, and within the quarter hour Domitian was to be here, questioning the suspected traitors. But she found herself bewitched by the sight of that implacable blade, emboldened by the feel of that deadly weight in her hand.

This is what my life has been lacking. A weapon
.

And her patched-together calm blew apart. That rage, so long tamped down, was volcanic. Savagely she whipped back the embroidered coverlet. With the sword held clumsily in both hands, she began slashing the undercovers, making horrible wounds, imagining she mangled her husband’s body.
This, for the pleasure you took in my mock execution.

This, for your bloody murder of Paris, who loved me.

This, for every time you made me watch while you depilated your concubines.
For long moments she continued her joyous mutilations. Soon undercovers and coverlet were heaped in a shredded mass at one end of the bed.

Finally the sound of fast, stuttering whispers—soft, urgent, persistent as a moth—penetrated the veils of her rage. It was Carinus.

“My lady! Stop! Please. Suspicions will be raised. Servilius is somewhere padding about, I saw him in the corridor not a moment ago!”

Domitia Longina slowed long enough for reality to overtake her, then slumped into passivity, cheeks flushed like a maiden’s. Perspiration matted her amethyst silk stola to her deeply heaving breast. She surveyed the damage with dismay.

“What will we do? Carinus, I have destroyed us!”

Carinus loved her too much to condemn her, even in the privacy of his mind. His sole thoughts were of means of remedying the situation.

“I’ll set it all to right. First, get safely off, and take the sword. We must make the bed look as before, that is all. Still your fears. In the Venus bedchamber off the East Garden is a tapestry made of the very same cloth and pattern. I’ll fetch it.”

She stared at him, her terror unabated. The Venus bedchamber was a quarter mile and a maze of passages away.

Carinus sprinted off like a youth in a footrace.

CHAPTER LXI

T
HE TORTURER PROSTRATED HIMSELF BEFORE
D
OMITIAN.
He was as free of fearful awe as an obedient beast, as though the long habit of numbing himself to the sight of human suffering had taught him to deaden every other emotion as well. Those muscular hands had learned to operate the pulleys of the rack with the same indifference with which he fastened his sandals. Slowly his bald head came up—a barren moon in the twilight of the small torchlit chamber—and he gazed with inscrutable complacency upon nothing. He was a slave who had himself been tortured once—he had had the misfortune to have been the key witness in an important murder case—and he had as a reminder six missing front teeth, prized out by an inventive interrogator. The vacant places made a checkered pattern as he smiled.

“He lives?” Domitian asked.

The torturer gave a furtive nod of assent, unwilling to meet his august visitor’s eyes. He put Domitian in mind of a shy nocturnal animal.

Domitian gave a soft grunt and gestured sharply toward the inner room. The torturer led him past a smoking brazier, and through a passage hung with the implements of his trade—brands of various shapes, whips of different weights, some with thongs fitted with steel balls; a row of sinister pliers in graduated sizes. There were pincers, thumbscrews, foot-crushers, and vises, all as neatly cared for as if this were a carpenter’s shop. On the floor at his right loomed a rack, a complicated set of ropes and pulleys set on a wooden trestle, designed to wrench bone from bone. They stepped over a rusted drain set in a depression in the passage so the chambers could be washed clean of blood, then entered a second chamber where the reek of sickness prompted Domitian to whip out a cassia-scented handkerchief and hold it to his nose.

Chained to the wall was a man stripped to the waist. Domitian forced down the errant stirrings of arousal caused by the sight of that smoothly muscled, well-formed body, utterly at his mercy—he did not want this man to have even
that
power over him. Julianus was unconscious; his head rolled to one side. His face was so misshapen from blows that Domitian could not have positively identified him at first. But from long experience in such matters, he knew precisely what the torturer had done. The vicious scarlet ruptures along the spine proved the brand had been applied; the purple-black welts, oozing red sap—beautiful, in their way, Domitian thought—were evidence he had been beaten with iron rods.