I Am Livia (42 page)

And yet, afterward, Tiberius lapsed back into being a sad, rather difficult little boy. I had him and Drusus now under my own roof, and that was a thing for which I had never even dared hope. But in small ways Tiberius could irk me as no one else could. Once he saw me when I came home from helping people at a fire. I had a smudge of soot on my cheek. “Mama,” he said, “your face is dirty. I don’t think you should go to fires. It’s unseemly for a lady.” I nearly clouted him on the head.

Drusus and little Marcus were easy children to raise. My stepdaughter, like Tiberius, was quite another matter. I don’t think she was more than five years old the first time Tavius sighed and said, “I have two spoiled daughters—Rome and Julia.” He spent little time with her but was generous with presents. If I scolded her, she complained about me to her father, and he would tell me I expected too much of a child her age. Now that my sons shared my home, Julia and Tiberius decided to warmly dislike each other, and had to be disciplined for quarreling. It grated on my nerves. Meanwhile I was sick every morning, and often later in the day too. This continued even after I felt my baby’s first kick.

About that time, one of my informants brought me a tale being told in the marketplace, a little ripple in the river of gossip that engulfed the great in Rome.

People told ugly stories about me because they thought of me as powerful. They certainly never gossiped in the same way about poor, mistreated Octavia.

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this, Lady Livia,” my informant said. He was a butcher who had a stall in the marketplace, a gregarious man in whom other people confided. He would come to see me in surreptitious ways, never letting anyone know that he had my ear.

We sat in my study. I had a huge pile of work before me that morning. I tapped my stylus impatiently on the edge of my writing table. “Tell me,” I said.

“There are people who say you poisoned Tiberius Nero because you wanted your boys back.”
The butcher rolled his eyes. “They say you are adept with herbs, and you were seen going into his house with a potion.”

“What fools some people are,” I said. “If I brought Tiberius Nero anything, it was for his good.”

“Lady Livia, I’m sure of it.”

This story, a mere bubble of conjecture, did not matter. Not then, not ever. And if it made me feel sick inside—well, I was having a difficult pregnancy and felt nauseated a good part of the time anyway.

I put the butcher’s tale out of my mind, and concentrated on my work and on the future. I looked forward to two events, one with trepidation, one with great joy: the time when Tavius’s alliance with Antony would officially end, and the birth of my child.

W
hen I felt the first pains, I told one of my maids to summon the midwife, and was struck by the calm sound of my own voice. I wonder sometimes, if the whole world went up in smoke, would I speak in just that steady tone?

Mathematics is a cold art. Numbers are unyielding as stone. You can beg and weep all you want, but that will not change them. The number of soldiers on each side of a battle is a matter of life and death. So, too, the number of months a child is in the womb.

The midwife crouched at my feet. I sat on the birthing chair, my hands gripping its mahogany arms, knowing the time was wrong, that the child should not be born for another three months. I prayed for my labor to stop, for my baby to stay warm and safe within me.

“What will you name him?” I had asked Tavius as we lay in each other’s arms after I told him I was pregnant.

“What do you think?”

“Tell me.”

“Gaius Julius Caesar.” His adoptive father’s full name.

“What a name for a little mite,” I said.

“He’ll grow into it. It will make him strong.”

The baby was perfectly formed and male. But tiny. I heard the midwife say, “It’s still alive.
We should wrap it in something.”

It.

“Give me my baby,” I said.

“Wait. The afterbirth is coming.”

They put me to bed finally and placed the infant in my arms. “Lie down. Rest, please,” the midwife said.

I sat up in bed. I did not want to lie down, because if I did perhaps I would go to sleep, and when I awoke, my son would be past needing his mother. I held him close. Tavius’s son and mine. Gaius Julius Caesar. He had no weight. His eyes were shut. His skin looked as delicate as flower petals.
When he turned his head, I could see tiny blue veins near his temple.

I did not notice when Tavius came into the room. All of a sudden he stood over me. His expression was what I imagined it would be if he ever suffered a mortal wound in battle.

I flinched away from the sight of his face and gazed down at the baby. The child’s eyelids kept fluttering, as if he were trying to open his eyes and look at the world.

“Livia,”
Tavius said.

“Don’t try to find comforting words,” I said. “There is no comfort.”

“The midwife asked me to tell you to rest. You shouldn’t be sitting up. You ought to sleep.”

I raised my eyes from the baby and looked at Tavius. “Acknowledge him.”

He shook his head. “He can’t live.”

I held the baby out in my arms. Tavius did not want to take him. He stood there, avoiding my gaze. I just kept holding the baby out to him
.
W
e remained in those poses, like statues, for what seemed a long time.

Finally, he took the child and said, “Let him be called Gaius.” I could hear how close he was to tears. But he never looked down at the baby, just quickly gave him back to me. After that, he went away.

The midwife entered and said I should let her have the baby, so I could rest. “You called him ‘it,’ ” I said. “Go home. I have no need of you.”

Later a physician came. “Rest is what you want,” he said. “You’ve been sitting up for hours.”

Really?
I thought.
Has it been hours?

“Now, let your maids take the baby, and you go to sleep,” the physician said.

I did not pay any attention to him.

When the baby’s eyelids stopped fluttering, I slipped my hand inside the blanket and felt his tiny chest. “Breathe,” I whispered. I remembered saying that to little Tiberius when we hid from the forest fire in the cave.
Breathe. Live
. I thought of how unappreciative I had been when my other sons were born. I had been young. It had never occurred to me what a blessing it was that life should arise within my womb. I only saw that miracle for what it was, now when it failed.

The midwife entered the room. She had disobeyed me and had not gone home. “Please, give me the child,” she said, and I let her take him
.
W
hen she told me to lie down, I obeyed. I might as well obey
.
W
hat difference did it make what I did?

I fell into a fever. I remember the heat, and maids wiping my face with cool cloths.

Once Diana came to me, her eyes shining like stars. She stroked my forehead. “Child, you are burning up.”

“The baby…I want my baby.”

“Hush,” she said.

“Apollo loves you, doesn’t he? Better than anyone. You’re his twin. Mother could never give Father a son. She had babies who died too. But Father loved her anyway. I want my baby. You’re a goddess. Can’t you make them give me back my baby?”

“My poor daughter.” Diana looked at me with sadness and went on stroking my brow with her cool hand. “Did you think there was no price to pay?”

I opened my eyes. Tavius sat beside me. “Try to be still,” he said.

“Why?”

“You need to sleep.”

“Aren’t I sleeping?”

“You keep thrashing around. They’re afraid you’ll throw yourself out of bed.”

“I’m thirsty…Where are you going?”

“To get you water,” Tavius said.

“No, don’t go. I have to tell you
.
W
e’re cursed. Diana as much as told me. This is how we will pay. Through our children.”

He said, in a cool, remote voice, “What have we done to deserve a curse?”

“You know. You know as well as I do.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not well. You have a fever. You’re raving.”

“Is the baby really dead?”

“Yes.” His voice was clotted with grief.

“Why did he die?”

“He was born too soon. Don’t you remember?”

“I lost my baby…I’ll lose you too, won’t I? Tavius—”

“Livia, you must hush now, because you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Help me! The fire is faster than I am. I don’t see the cave.
Where is my son?”

Tavius’s face seemed to fade away. Someone bathed my face with cool water, but it was not my husband.

Of course I recovered. I have always been strong.

My life continued much as it had been. I was busy with political work, and with my charities and business ventures. Though Tavius spoke gently to me, for a time it was hard for him to look at me. I believed there would never be a child now. I think in his heart Tavius also believed that door had been shut forever.

What is a wife for,
I asked myself,
if not to bear children? If not that, first and foremos
t
?

Tavius had his daughter by Scribonia, but no son, no heir. I had my boys. How strange, we could have beautiful, healthy children by other mates. But our love would be fruitless. So the gods decreed
.
A
re the gods unjust?

One night, before we slept, I whispered to Tavius, “No one will ever love you as much as I do.”

“I know that,” he said.

Did I only imagine that I heard regret in his voice?

Great affairs did not pause for our private grief. The term of the alliance between Tavius and Antony ended. Tavius, Maecenas, and I crafted the speech that Tavius delivered to the Senate, to explain why the alliance had not been renewed. “You have the best sense of the three of us of what the nobility wants to hear,
”
T
avius said to me. “For that matter, of what the people of Rome want to hear.”

I was surprised that he admitted it so baldly. “What they want to hear is that you and Antony are still allies, because that assures peace,” I said. “But we can’t tell them that, can we?”

“No,” he said flatly.

“Then speak with as little personal animus as you can. Talk about how Antony has succumbed to…not a woman other than your sister, but foreign influences. He is the puppet of a foreign ruler.”
There was a carving of a war galley on one of the shelves in Tavius’s study, accurate in every detail, a long-ago gift from Agrippa. I found myself staring at it. “Tell them that despite this, you don’t want war.”

“Truthfully, Antony is hardly Roman anymore,”
Tavius said.

I thought of how the common people loathed and distrusted anything and anyone that was not Roman. Even the nobility shared much of this feeling.

“Foreign influences.” Maecenas nodded. He began scribbling a speech on a waxed tablet.

“If I understand the people, it is because I am like them,” I said to Tavius later. “They do not want their sons to die in another civil war.”

“Do you know that Antony is building up his navy?”

“If he didn’t at this juncture, he would be a fool,” I said.
And yet,
I thought,
war is not inevitable.

Tavius went to the Senate the next day and delivered a fairly moderate speech. “I slipped once,” he told me. “I called Antony a drunkard.”

I knew he had wanted to call him far worse names. “The point about foreign influence—how did the Senate respond to tha
t
?”

Tavius gave me a satisfied smile.

Antony wrote a savage letter in answer to Tavius’s speech, and he made it public. His agents distributed numerous papyrus copies in the Roman streets at the same time that Tavius received the original. In a one-hour period, four of my informants brought me copies of the letter they found in the Forum.

This letter’s insults were comparable to those Cicero had once aimed at Antony—insults for which Antony had cut off his head and his hand
.
A
ntony called Tavius a “puny, sickly, limping cripple.” He said he was a coward, afraid to face the enemy at Philippi, leaving Antony to do his bloody work, then unable to even rise from his bed in Sicily, hiding in fear while Agrippa went to confront Sextus Pompey’s fleet.

Antony said Tavius’s father had sprung from a line of manual laborers. His father had been able to marry a daughter of the Julii only because he became rich and that noble family was desperate for money.
Why, Tavius’s great-grandfather had actually been a former slave, a rope maker. Antony traced out Tavius’s descent from this slave down three generations. Reading that family tree—noting the detail, the naming of people and places—one sensed that it was probably accurate and that Antony had been investigating Tavius’s background for a long time.