Masters of Rome (48 page)

Magnus barged an importunate urchin off the pavement, ignoring his shrill protests. ‘You shouldn't do anything that doesn't benefit yourself; however small it may be you should always make a profit or pay off a favour in everything you do.'

‘Exactly. I've just come to realise the absolute truth in that and it's made me feel a lot better. I used to think Rome was great and glorious; well, that was just the naïve idealism of youth. It's no more than an arena in which wild animals tear each other apart for the right to chew on the bone. I've had my first few gnaws on that bone and they tasted good. From now on I'll be supporting whoever can help me get my teeth back into it again. It makes no difference who they are or what they profess to believe in because all they want is what I want.'

‘More bone?'

Vespasian grinned. ‘A lot more bone. And you? Do you get your bone?'

‘Regularly. But then I've never done anything that hasn't involved the prospect of bone.'

‘Then why are you helping me tonight?'

‘Only a beast can't wait for its bone, if you take my meaning?'

Vespasian slapped Magnus on the back. ‘I do and I can see that I'm going to be very busy doing you favours when I'm consul.'

‘Sabinus spent much of his term making sure that I had adequate bone; I don't see why you should be any different.'

‘I'm sure I won't be; I'll never be free from obligation.'

‘Talking of which, my lads who've been keeping an eye on those bearded bastards watching your and Sabinus' houses say that they never report to anyone; no one comes near them and they don't go anywhere other than back to a filthy room to eat and sleep.'

‘So if they're not working for anyone, why are they taking an interest in Sabinus and me?'

‘I've got no idea, but they stopped watching your house yesterday and are now just concentrating on Sabinus; perhaps he's got a bone of theirs.'

‘Then I think that it's time to bring one in for that little hearth-side chat that you so kindly offered to have with them.'

‘My thoughts exactly.' Magnus gave a cheery wave to the two Urban Cohort guards on the gate as they passed through. ‘Evening, lads.'

‘'Right, Magnus.'

Vespasian walked through the gate to see Sabinus with Marius, Sextus and three more of Magnus' brethren waiting with a covered cart, with Marius at the reins, pulled by two mules and with four saddled horses attached to it by traces.

‘Ready, brother,' Sabinus asked.

‘Readier than I've ever been.'

‘Good; up and at them.'

*

Points of flickering light from torches and blazing sconces delineated and filled in the shape of the Gardens of Lucullus as if it were a rectangular constellation consisting of countless stars in an otherwise sparsely populated firmament. The noise of revelry drifted down on the light breeze as Vespasian and his party made their way in the dim light of a newly risen quarter moon along a tomb-lined narrow lane, around the base of the Pincian Hill, approaching the gardens from the east. Slow-beating drums supported by lyres and flutes accompanied singing, both tuneful and discordant, which was regularly drowned by bursts of raucous, alcohol-fuelled laughter, squeals of pleasure, jovial yelps of mock indignation, rising and falling wails and shrieks of ecstasy. A soundscape of carnal gratification.

Passing the occasional building, Vespasian led the group to within shouting distance of the open gates at the centre of the two hundred-pace-long whitewashed wall, grey with the night, ranging along the foot of the hill; a couple of guards leant against the gateposts in pools of light cast from the torches burning to either side. He nodded to Marius who pulled the cart out of the lane and into the precinct of the Temple of Flora so it was hidden from view from the gate.

‘I don't know how long we'll be, Marius,' Vespasian said. ‘Just keep your eyes and ears open; you and Sextus must come at the speed of Mercury as we appear through the gates.'

‘Right you are, sir. Do you want us to do anything about the guards?'

‘No, they're there to stop unwanted people getting in, not out; we'll manage them all right.'

‘Come at the speed of Mercury,' Sextus ruminated aloud, as ever slowly digesting his orders, ‘as they appear through the gates.'

Magnus took a sack from the back of the wagon and hefted it at one of the brothers, who sported a ragged scar along the left side of his jaw that cut through his Greek-style beard. ‘You keep the ropes, Cassandros; Caeso and Tigran, get the two ladders out of the wagon.'

Once the brothers, a young lad and a bearded, trouser-wearing easterner, had done as they had been told, Vespasian
and Sabinus pulled up their hoods, flitted across the lane and began to make their way, over rough ground, up the hill at an angle heading for the three hundred and fifty-pace-long ascending wall. Magnus and his brethren followed.

Coming to the approximate middle of it he halted. ‘Up you go, Tigran, and keep low.'

The ladder fell a couple of feet short of the wall's full height, but Tigran managed to get astride of its terracotta-tiled summit, lying along its length, and within a few moments had placed the second ladder on the other side and disappeared from view. Vespasian went next and quickly found himself in an aquatic area of the gardens scattered with ponds. Gravel paths wound between them upon which slept scores of wildfowl with their heads tucked under their wings to shield their eyes from the torchlight. Fewer people within the gardens were singing now; the music played on but could barely be heard over the growing cacophony of pleasure.

Within a hundred heartbeats they were all over the wall with Magnus bringing up the rear and pulling up the outside ladder after him.

‘Have the lads bring the ladders with us,' Vespasian whispered in reply to Magnus' questioning look, ‘just in case the gate is not an option after all.' With that he turned and began to make his way up towards the villa, keeping as far as possible to the shadows, and following the intensifying sound of hedonists at play.

Passing through a bed planted with shrubs trained together into the shape of the sphinx, Vespasian came to a ten-foot-high miniature pyramid and halted suddenly at the sound of a loud, grating exhalation of breath. Raising his hand to stop his companions he crept forward along the pyramid as the breath was drawn in with a long rumbling snore. Vespasian eased his head around the far corner of the pyramid to see a small figure lying on his back, dressed in a Thracian cap and a very short tunic from under which protruded, vertically, an artificial phallus almost as tall as the wearer; a spilled cup lay by his side.

Magnus moved up next to him. ‘What is it?'

‘Judging by the size of the false penis it's a dwarf dressed as Priapus.'

‘He seems to have overindulged somewhat in the juice of Bacchus as any self-respecting Priapus ought to.' Magnus pulled a knife from his belt. ‘Let's find out if it's affected his memory.' He eased around the corner of the pyramid and, bending over, clamped his hand over the sleeping dwarf's mouth whilst holding the blade in front of his eyes, which snapped open in alarm; very quickly they registered terror.

Vespasian knelt down, grasping the over-sized phallus and leaning on it so that its base pushed into the flesh and blood original. ‘Yes or no: has there been a wedding here this evening?'

The dwarf's eyes now registered pain as he looked from Magnus' blade to Vespasian and back; he nodded.

‘Messalina and Silius?'

The dwarf looked confused.

Vespasian eased the pressure on the phallus and then jammed it back into the dwarf's genitals. ‘Do you know who was married?'

The dwarf exhaled in pain through his nose, shooting a globule of mucus over Magnus' hand, and shook his head with his eyes squeezed shut.

‘Nice!' Magnus hissed.

‘Send him back to sleep, Magnus; he's no good to us. He's just a slave who's got no idea what's going on.'

Magnus pulled the dwarf's head up and cracked it back down onto the pyramid, knocking him out cold, and then wiped the mucus from his hand on the miniature Priapus' hair.

Vespasian moved on across another pathway to an area of lawn bordering the apricot orchard, strewn with statues of Gauls in defeat. Creeping by a wounded warrior, naked save for a neck torc, pierced in the chest and sitting on the ground clutching his bleeding thigh, Vespasian darted across the lawn and took cover behind a substantial pedestal. He looked up to see a statue of a Gaul standing proud, and looking over his shoulder whilst supporting the slumped body of his dying wife and plunging his sword vertically down past his collarbone and on into his heart. Vespasian could not help but contrast the honour of the Celtic
warrior with the debauchery of the power that had defeated him. What would Caratacus make of Messalina's behaviour? The answer was obvious.

The orgiastic uproar was close now; he edged his head around the pedestal and peered through the apricots towards the villa at the heart of the gardens.

Vespasian drew breath.

He had witnessed some of the worst of Caligula's sexual excesses as the libidinous young Emperor had publicly displayed his sister, Drusilla, in obscene acts with multiple partners, but what he beheld now took wild abandonment a stage further. Knot after knot of entwined bodies in various states of undress, some in couples but most in groups, heaved and rubbed against each other; on couches and tables, balanced on or over the balustrade surrounding the terrace and spread up and down the steps to it as well as in large tubs filled with freshly harvested grapes that turned skin red. Men on women, boys or other men; women, draped in animal skins, with phalluses strapped to them using other women, men or youths; all both gave and took as fancy would have it as the sexual free-for-all raged. In amongst the writhing mass, drinkers tottered, raising their cups with wine sloshing over the rims, toasting Bacchus, Priapus, Venus or just the act of copulation itself as musicians strummed, blew and beat their instruments in an improvisation that pulsed with the rhythm of sex. A couple of dwarves dressed as satyrs sporting goat-like phalluses cavorted and danced to the sound, adding to it with shrill sequences from pan pipes.

Silent around the edge of the terrace, naked slaves, both male and female, stood holding torches to illuminate the carnality. With blank expressions they watched their masters, the élite of Rome, pay homage to the gods of excess; uncomplaining if bent over and taken against their will or forced to kneel and languish before one of their betters, they endured the decadence of the race that had conquered their peoples.

Naked at the centre of it all, astride a seated man, with her back towards him as she rode his lap as if galloping a stallion, Messalina howled with a pleasure so intense as to be just a fraction away
from agony. Her hair had fallen loose and swung in great sweeps as she tossed her head back and forth, back and forth; then it arced back, spraying droplets of sweat glowing golden in the torchlight. Her spine arched and her face turned to the sky and she released a cry to the heavens so piercing that those around her paused in their exertions and turned to see Messalina juddering, her whole body in spasm; and then the cry broke and the muscles in her back released, sending her falling forward to slump exhausted on her partner's knees and revealing Silius' exultant face and the ivy crown set on his head.

‘Well, that would seem to make their intentions clear,' Sabinus observed, as he and Magnus joined Vespasian behind the pedestal.

Magnus stared at the scene, his eye agog. ‘They certainly know how to enjoy themselves.'

The revellers burst into cheering as Silius rose to his feet with Messalina still hanging off him, her chest heaving as she sucked in huge gulps of air. Wearing only his ivy garland and a pair of high boots, he capered with one arm waving free whilst the other held Messalina in place, her fingers trailing the ground, as she swayed to and fro with his movements, like a rag doll.

Vespasian studied the faces that he could see and recognised many of them: senators, equestrians, actors and Praetorian Guardsmen along with rich matrons – mostly unaccompanied by their husbands – courtesans and, most scandalously, unmarried daughters of the élite. ‘Somehow we've got to get a couple of them away from here without anyone noticing.'

‘I don't think that'll be a problem,' Magnus said, shaking his head in awe. ‘If I was in the middle of all that I reckon that you could slit my partner's throat and I'd carry on tupping her without a care until she was cold, and probably after that too.'

‘Thank you for that image.' Vespasian pressed closer to the pedestal as a young man staggered down the steps supported by a couple of equally tipsy women, all singing a paean to Bacchus and covered in the juice of red grapes. Behind them, Messalina eased herself off Silius and picked up a
thyrsus
, a staff of giant fennel, wound in ivy and topped with a bulbous pine cone.
Brandishing this symbol of fertility in one hand and grasping Silius' still erect penis with the other she looked about in triumph. ‘I am Gaia to his Gaius; with the gods' help, tonight I have conceived and will bear the child of my new husband.'

Silius rolled his head, bellowing incoherently, and her guests roared their approval of this piece of news as the young man reached the first of the apricot trees and began to climb it, leaving his companions leaning against its trunk, giggling and rubbing the sticky juice of Bacchus' fruit into each other's bodies.

‘What do you see, Vettius?' one of the women called, glancing up in the direction of the man's buttocks.

‘I see all things, Cleopatra; but most clearly, to the southwest, I see a great storm coming to hit Ostia. The Emperor is in its path.'

‘Pray that it doesn't pass over Ostia and come to strike us.'

‘We'll have plenty of warning if—' With a loud crack followed by the rustle of leaves accompanied by a brief yell, Vettius plummeted to the ground, landing on his shoulders and cracking his head on a tree root; he made a weak effort to rise before slumping back to lie motionless.