“He is not so insensate as he seems,” warned Mother as we strolled together. She had suggested we walk around the Palatine. It was less that she wished to view gardens than that she wanted to escape the listening ears within the palace walls.
“He certainly gives a good imitation of it,” I said. Every night he fell asleep (the charitable interpretation) or passed out (the reality).
Far beneath us the Forum was swarming with people. Even in this heat, lawsuits would go on, vendors would sell, messengers would dart about, and the brothels would advertise. We looked down upon it from our rarified perch, Mother fanning herself.
She was, as always, fashionably turned out. While she looked down on the Forum, I studied her profile, her golden earrings swinging against her cheeks. It was rare that I had an opportunity to look at her without her eyes catching me. She was not beautiful but her features were what people called “handsome”—even, strong, and unblemished. Oddly enough, her neck was her best feature—it was long, sweetly curved, and carried her head proudly. Artists do not give enough credit to necks, for our whole impression of someone’s bearing rests on the neck. A bowed one, a short one, a fat one, ruins the whole.
Suddenly she turned and caught me. Instead of asking why I was looking, she smiled slyly and cocked her head, her eyes locking on mine. “I am flattered,” she said, “that you find me so absorbing.”
“Always, Mother,” I returned. She had lost the ability to embarrass me; I could answer her on equal ground. “Shall we continue?” I held out my elbow and she looped her hand through.
“I am concerned,” she said. Now the real reason for the walk emerged, as I’d known it would. “Claudius frightens me. Lately he has been talking of revising his will. Worse than that, he harps on Britannicus and what a fine young man he is growing up to be. I overheard him saying, ‘Soon things will change for you, dear one.’ And now that Britannicus’s voice has started changing, he doesn’t seem like a child any longer. What if Claudius decides to advance him before you? He has never formally designated you as his heir.”
An elderly couple approached us, shuffling painfully along. After they were safely past, Mother said, “It is only natural to prefer your own flesh and blood to an adoptee. He is heading in that direction. Every day that Britannicus grows up before his eyes is a day when you diminish.”
She was right, of course. I had thought of that myself. But we had done everything possible to put me first, and if nature had overtaken us, there was no remedy. I said as much.
“Do you feel ready to take that place, if it is offered you?”
“I am too young yet,” I said. “How could I possibly be emperor? We need more time.”
“You are sixteen,” she said. “Almost old enough.”
I laughed. “Yes, if I were Alexander the Great.”
“Perhaps he did not feel ready, either. His father’s death was unexpected.”
But suspicious. And eerily like my situation. Philip had just taken a young bride and had a new son, whom Alexander’s mother feared would supplant her son. His timely assassination pointed to her.
“But not unwelcome, surely,” she added.
I did not dare ask her what she was thinking. Kill Britannicus? I did not want to know. Knowing would mean I must either acquiesce to it or try to stop it. If the latter, I would be honest but empty-handed; if the former, a murderer—but an emperor.
“Seneca says there is no one—no one—whose death is not a relief to someone,” I admitted.
“Wise man,” she said. “I knew he was the right tutor for you.” She sighed. “The heat is too much for me. I will return to the palace and sit by the shaded fountain. Now that we have decided what to do.”
I turned away and continued walking by myself. Now that she had decided what to do—oh, gods. I had not agreed, but I had not said no. I had left it all in her hands, as she had managed my entire life up until now, maneuvering and plotting and murdering. Never had I actually asked myself whether I wanted to be emperor. I had assumed when the time came I would know, that I would have a wisdom beyond what I had then, so I needn’t think about it. Now I must.
Walking farther down the hill I left the area, skirting the Forum. The heat rose in waves, the damp smells of wilted flowers, overcooked meats, and human sweat smacking me in the face.
The men milling in the area barely looked at me, and when they did, what did they see? A youth with passably pleasing features—not an emperor. An invisible youth, a youth with freedom to pass through them unnoticed. A youth with freedom to go anywhere and leave no trace. If this youth were suddenly transformed into an emperor, his face would be recognizable from one end of the empire to the other, if not in person then on coins.
Did I want to be emperor? Could I be emperor? The questions were not the same.
I stumbled along, only half seeing where I was going. Around the base of the Forum rose the Caelian Hill, the one nearest the Palatine. Its gentle slope beckoned to me, and I began to climb it. In spite of the heat, the olive and cypress trees offered shade, and the walk up was not taxing. There were not many people about, for which I was grateful. Think. I needed to think. Emperor, emperor, emperor kept spinning around in my head. The houses on each side were ample, luxurious but not in the manner of mansions, a place where one could be more than comfortable but not ostentatious. Here lived the magistrates, wealthy merchants, retired generals. One did not need to be emperor to live well. As I was lost in my thoughts, I heard a crowd of people approaching, coming down the street. They were dressed in mourning, and suddenly I realized how familiar this street looked. I had been here before—the ocher walls, the cypress tree—when, when? I kept walking, walking upward toward the direction of the procession. Just as I reached the end, pallbearers emerged from a house, bearing a coffin. The house—the house—yes, Anicetus had taken me here. It was the house of Alexander Helios. I stopped and bowed my head in respect as the coffin passed.
A sign. It was a sign. What could be plainer? How did it happen I was walking here this very day? One era had finally ended. The last of Cleopatra’s children had gone. But did I not have Antony’s blood? Their story had not ended, no. Or rather, it would begin anew.
I still had the coin he had given me, her coin. But his words were what came back to me now, his words I would never forget: I surrender her and her dreams and ambitions into your safekeeping.
What would Cleopatra do? Would she hesitate even an instant to become emperor, if fate offered it to her?
XXVIII
Between the first mention of the possibility of the deed and its enacting, I entered into a strange world where everything was suspended, interrupted by brief periods of normal life. I would lie awake possessed by trepidation and suspense, only to awaken to forgetfulness, until the memory rushed on me like a wild beast, tearing at me. I would jump up and make haste to dress, as if daylight and clothes would banish the nightmare.
In the meantime a semblance of normality hung like a pall over us. The family dinners continued. My instructions with Seneca continued. My excursions with Tigellinus continued, although they had lost their flavor for me. My chariot-driving practices continued. The music lessons halted, as I did not want to desecrate the beauty of them with this tainted time.
Mother summoned me for other unpleasant tasks and I dared not disobey. At this point I honestly did not know if she would destroy me as well. Such was my confusion and lack of understanding. I found myself standing before her in her opulent Augusta quarters, a place I had seldom ventured into. The walls glittered with gold inlays, reflected in the black marble floors. She had an unusual number of couches in a variety of styles—ivory legs, carved wooden backs, high ones that required a step stool to mount, low ones where one could faint without much of a fall. It was a long way from her austere hut on Pontia.
“Yes, I enjoy being Augusta,” she said, reading my mind. This unnerved
me even further. “People say possessions and honor are meaningless. Those are the people without them.”
“I can verify that,” I said. “My bed here is more comfortable than the one at Aunt Lepida’s.” But I had slept better there.
She smiled, the curve of her lips animating her entire face. Her eyes shone. “You read my mind,” she said, echoing my own thought moments before. “But then, we have always had an extraordinary communication. We barely need words, you and I. We are almost one person.”
Then why am I afraid of you? Is it of myself that I am afraid? And why do I dream shameful dreams about you, dreams that haunt me even in daylight, dreams so real I can feel your warm flesh beneath my hands? No, we are separate, as separate as two people can be.
She came over to me, handed me a cup of fresh grape juice. Of course it was in a heavy pure gold vessel. “It is about your aunt Lepida that I want to speak.”
I felt relief flooding me. It wasn’t Britannicus; it wasn’t Claudius or Octavia. “What about her?”
“I need you to testify against her in a trial I am bringing against her.”
“A trial! Whatever for?”
She turned away in that graceful way she had, swishing her gown out to one side, then turning to look at me over her shoulder. “She is dangerous. She is plotting against me, and Claudius. She has never forgiven him for executing her daughter and husband. She must be stopped.”
I had long wondered why she had not turned on Claudius, even though Messalina had deserved her fate. A daughter is always innocent in a mother’s eyes.
I almost laughed, though, at Mother pretending to be Claudius’s fierce protector. Perhaps she didn’t want anyone to have the honor of murdering him but herself.
“How do you know this?”
“There is nothing that happens that I don’t know about.” She looked at me tellingly. “You needn’t bother with the details. But they will call you as a witness.”
“What are the charges?” I would not lie. I would not! And how could I be a witness to anything in her house when I had left it over a decade before?
“Using magic,” she said. It was a capital crime. “I know you saw it when you were there.”
A sickening remembrance raced through me . . . the session with the magus, when they tried to infuse a dream into me that would beam itself to Claudius and save Silanus.
“We have the magus. He has confessed. All you need to do is confirm what happened.”
But it was innocent. Lepida was only trying to save her honest husband, who had acted honorably in rejecting Messalina’s vile approaches, and now this was her reward.
“Even if it was true, it has nothing to do with plotting against anyone now.”
“I don’t care what’s true; I care only for what can be made to look true. The fact that she once practiced magic is enough.”
“You are monstrous.” There, I had said it. “I won’t do it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, yes, you will. If you don’t, I will ruin you.”
“That would hurt you far more than me, Augusta. All you have worked for all these years, destroyed?”
“I have other arrows in my quiver,” she said. “Do you think you are the only one?”
“I am your only son, that much I know.”
“In nature, yes, but the law is not nature. Now, let us not fence and quibble. You will witness against Lepida, and you need speak only the truth. The truth will condemn her. I am not asking you to lie, only to tell the truth. Why are you balking at that?”
“She was kind to me. I have no wish to cause her any sorrow.”
“So you side with someone who is plotting against me?”
“So far you have given me no evidence that she is plotting against you, only that you claim she is. You will have to do better than that.”
“I don’t have to do anything. You are not the judge, only a witness.” Now she turned wheedling. “Come, come, be reasonable. We must eliminate all enemies. What was it Augustus was told, to justify his killing Caesar’s son by Cleopatra? ‘It is not good to have too many Caesars.’”
“Hardly the same situation.”
“My, what a stubborn lad you are. So argumentative.”
“A novelty for you, I am sure. No one else would dare.”
“A novelty I only applaud coming from my son. It means—it means—that when you take power, no one can sway you. You are your own man.”
And in mentioning that, she cinched her case. I would have to testify; she had dangled what we both knew was the ultimate end of it all.
Still, I found it anguishing to testify; I hated every moment of it. Afterward I went back to my room and wept.
Lepida was found guilty and executed. On the day she died, I fasted and asked her forgiveness.
• • •
For a great while after that—or so it seemed, for time had taken on phantasmagoric aspects for me—nothing happened. Gradually my apprehensions subsided. Perhaps it had all been talk on Mother’s part, like her threat to ruin me, to destroy her handiwork. The weather turned; autumn arrived. Somehow that convinced me that our talk in the searing summer heat had not been real, as if one season canceled out what happened in a previous one. Perhaps I myself believed in magic—that cool air could erase what had come before.
Then I saw her. Hurrying out of the Augusta’s apartments, her head covered by a shawl but her face visible. Locusta. Then I knew. I knew the instrument she had chosen, the means she would use.
XXIX
LOCUSTA
I stood stock-still. There he was, staring at me. Agrippina had assured me he never came to this section of the palace. But now he was here, blocking my path.
I had not seen him in seven years, but I would recognize him anywhere. He had distinctive eyes, blue-gray, that seemed to see right through a person. He was almost a man now, grown tall, with broad shoulders and strong legs. The timorous child was no more. There was no escape; I would have to face him.
“It is, I believe, the prince Nero,” I said. I smiled. Perhaps he did not remember me.
“It is, I believe, the poisoner Locusta,” he replied. His voice was an adult’s, cold and deep.
I was undone. Agrippina had miscalculated. I thought, fleetingly, of pretending I was someone else, but he was too intelligent for that ploy. I would have to honor that, meet intelligence with the respect it deserved. “Yes,” I admitted. “That has been my calling. But I have paid for it. I have spent the past few years in prison.”
“How did you get out?” he asked warily.
“Your mother sent for me.”
“Of course.” He motioned to me. “Let us find a place where we can talk.” He nodded toward the Augusta’s apartments. “Away from here.”
That was fine with me. If Agrippina saw what had happened, she would have blamed me for blundering, not herself for making a mistake.
He led us to a bench on the far side of the palace gardens. There were only a few gardeners about, clipping and pruning. We made sure to sit far from them. A fountain splashed noisily nearby, masking our conversation.
“You killed my stepfather,” he said. His tone was one I hope never to hear again from another human being—hard, pitiless like the gods. “You pretended to comfort me, all the while taking him from me.”
“I was hired to do so,” I said. “I had no choice in the matter.”
“You could have refused the assignment.”
“A tradesman cannot refuse assignments.”
“And now you are here to take someone else from me. Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? How can you not know?”
“I mean, the poison is generic. It can be used on anyone. She did not tell me who. Perhaps she felt it was safer that way.”
“Can’t you force her to tell you? A
sk for particulars so you can tailor the potion?”
“Have you ever tried to force the Augusta to do anything? It is impossible for someone like me. And my, you seem to be knowledgeable about the way poisons work yourself.”
“Mother takes antidotes, that I know. That way she feels she is protected.”
“Perhaps everyone should.” I laughed. “But I will tell you a secret. They don’t work. People imagine they do, it gives them security, but they are living in a fool’s paradise. They are easier to poison because their guard is down.”
For some reason this softened him, made him smile. A funny little secret smile. “What does it feel like, having power over life and death? Knowing you can erase someone’s future with one swallow? How do you feel when you look at us? Amused? Sorrowful?”
I looked him straight in the eyes. Oh, those eyes, penetrating, knowing. “When you are emperor, you will know how it feels.”
XXX
NERO
I was shaking. The encounter was traumatic, blending the past—the aching loss of Crispus—with the present and its swirling fears. The proof was Locusta here: Something was going to happen. Someone was going to die. Soon.
Or, I assumed soon. Perhaps Mother would keep the poison for future use. How long did it retain its potency? I should have asked. Oh, what thoughts were these? How much had she concocted? Enough for several people? Who was the intended victim? Could it be, might it be possible, that I was the target, and Mother’s threat to me was no idle one?