A Song For Nero Read online

  A SONG FOR NERO

  TOM HOLT

  ONE

  So there we were in the condemned cell in Damascus — which is in Syria, and believe me, you don't want to go there, it's scalpingly hot and the people are not friendly — waiting for the soldiers to come back and take us off to be crucified.

  I tapped him on the shoulder (he was huddled in the corner, sulking) and I said to him, 'Lucius Domitius, can I ask you a question?'

  'Piss off,' he grunted, so I tapped him on the shoulder again.

  'Look,' I said. 'We've been going around together now for, what is it, seven years or is it eight, I lose track, and all this time I've been wanting to ask you—'

  'Ask me what?'

  I shrugged. 'Well, it's a bit personal and you know how uptight you get talking about the old days. But any minute now they're going to take us out and kill us, so I thought, it can't do any harm. So?'

  'Do you mind if I ask you a question?'

  He didn't turn round, but his shoulders sort of wobbled. 'Yeah, why not? What did you want to know?'

  'Is it true you murdered your mother?'

  'For God's sake, Galen.' This time he did turn round. 'Of all the things to come out with at a time like this.'

  'Yes, all right,' I said. 'Keep your hair on. I'd just like to know, that's all.'

  He sighed 'You'd just like to know.'

  'That's right. Come on, just to please me. Like I said, we've been friends a long time now.

  He was wearing that words-fail-me expression. 'No,' he said. 'No, I didn't.'

  'Ah, right,' I said. 'Only, everyone says you did.'

  'Then everyone's wrong,' he replied. 'Not for the first time,' he added. 'You don't want to believe everything you overhear at the bathhouse.'

  'Fine,' I said, holding up my hands. 'I believe you. If you say you didn't do it, you didn't do it. Only you must admit — killing your own mother, it's not the sort of thing people make up out of their heads. Usually, when people say things like that, you generally find there's a grain of truth in it somewhere.'

  He scowled at me. 'Ah,' he said. 'You mean, probably I murdered her just a little bit?'

  I sighed. 'There you go again,' I said, 'being hostile. Every time I ask you about the old days, you get hostile. You know, a lot of people would be offended by that. Lucky for you I'm hard to offend.'

  'I know,' he said, in a funny sort of a way.

  'Well, there you are. And if you're telling me you didn't kill your old mum, I believe you, not a moment's hesitation. So, what about your wife?'

  He stared at me as if I wasn't making sense. 'What about my wife?'

  'Did you kill her?'

  'No I bloody well didn't,' he snapped. 'Either of them,' he added.

  I peered in the water jug, just in case someone had crept in while our backs were turned and filled it up since I last looked, two minutes before. Let me tell you, Syrian prisons are the worst place on earth, hot as hell and they give you one piddly little jug of water to last you all day. 'Thank you,' I said, 'that's all I wanted to know Only, you do hear all those stories, and you can't help wondering. Well, you know.'

  'No,' he said, 'I don't. What's the matter, does the thought of being locked up with a psychotic killer bother you?'

  I laughed. 'Never has in the past. And you think I'm kidding, I was in a cell with a murderer once. Real nasty piece of work he was, stole a slave boy from a barracks on one of those big country places, cut him up into little bits, fried him in oil and ate him. Said he was hungry, apparently, and he didn't have the price of a plate of whitebait. Anyway, I was in this cell with him — Beneventum, I think it was, or maybe it was Ancona , anyway, it doesn't make any odds — and a nicer man I never spent time with. We scratched a chequers board on the floor and made the pieces out of little pellets of bread from our rations.'

  He frowned, like he was thinking about something. 'So what happened to him in the end?'

  'Oh, they executed him,' I replied. 'Well, you can see their point. Can't have a vicious bastard like that roaming the countryside. But he was really pleasant to me.

  He turned round again and faced the wall. 'I'd like it if you'd shut up now We're going to be dead soon, and it'd be nice to take a little time to compose my thoughts.'

  'Fair enough,' I said. 'And I hope you don't mind me asking, it's just curiosity. Are you sure about the wives, by the way?'

  He made a funny noise; I couldn't quite make it out. 'Pretty sure,' he said.

  'Only,' I went on, 'your first wife — gods, what was she called?' Memory like a colander. Olympia ? Orfitia?'

  'Octavia.'

  'That's right, Octavia. Wasn't she executed or something?'

  'Yes.'

  'Oh, so you did—'

  'No, I did not.' He was rubbing at his eyes with his thumbs. He tended to do that when he was upset about something. 'She was found guilty of adultery and the court sentenced her to death. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact, I was horrified when they told me. All right? Or do you want me to swear an oath or something?'

  'No, no, I believe you,' I told him. 'After all, why would you lie to me?

  Especially now, when we'll both be dead in two shakes. I mean, what'd be the point?'

  Anyhow, that's what he told me, and like I said, why would he lie? It's not like I'm anybody, and God knows, he had enough dirt on me to have me hung, drawn and quartered a dozen times over, even if we weren't both of us about to die as soon as the sergeant got back from lunch, so he couldn't have been afraid I'd blackmail him or anything; and if I'd wanted to blackmail him — well, you get the idea, I'm sure. So yes, I believe him. Liars can't fool liars, my old mother used to say, and in all the time we were going around together, I can't remember him lying to me once. Not that I ever found out about, at any rate.

  Well, you can believe me or not as you like, and there's magistrates and city prefects and watch captains from London to Babylon who'll tell you they wouldn't believe me if I told them fire was hot, and fair enough, since they only ever knew me in what I'd call my professional capacity. Even so, it comes down to what I said to him — why would I lie? I've got nothing to gain, except maybe looking after the good name of my friend, except he hasn't got one. Doesn't matter. As far as I'm concerned, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus Nero Claudius Germanicus Caesar Augustus didn't murder his old mum, or his first wife, or his second wife; and I don't think he did half of that stuff they say he did, like burning down the city on purpose or things like that. Not the man I knew, anyhow And when you've been through good times and bad with a person, sleeping in ditches and under carts and in and out of dungeons and prisons and condemned cells and gods only know what else, I reckon you get to know a man fairly well.

  So there you have it, and whether you want to take my word for it or not is up to you.

  And anyway, even if he did do some of those things — and you never hear the full story, only what they want you to hear; for a start, his mother was a vicious old bitch by all accounts and I don't suppose his wives were much better, all the nobility are savage as fighting cocks and three parts off their heads because of the in-breeding and stuff like that — even if he did do what they say he did, I can't judge him on that. After all, I'm no vestal virgin myself, I'd be the first to admit it. All I can go by is how he treated me, and my poor brother, rest his soul. And on that score, I'm going to stick my neck out and say no, he wasn't a villain or a monster or any of those other things they call him. He was all right.

  In case you were wondering, we got out of that condemned cell, no bother at all.

  It was a stroke of luck, I won't argue about that —another quarter of an hour and we'd have been dead men. But just before the sergeant was about to collect us — he told me afterwards, he had
the keys in his hand, if he hadn't stopped for a quick shit he'd have been right there and we'd have been crowbait — up turns a herald from the governor's mansion saying His Excellency's wife had just had twins after twelve hours' labour, and he'd promised Our Lady Diana (that's Artemis to you) that if she came out of it all right he'd set free all the prisoners who were due to die that day. So there we were, and that was all right. You know, when you stop to think of it, it's amazing how often things like that have happened to me over the years. The gods must like me, or something.

  Well, if you want an example of that, there's the first time I ever set eyes on Lucius Domitius, and that was a close thing, I'm telling you. There we were, Callistus and me, they'd tied us to the crosses and hoisted us up, and I was saying to myself, Galen, this time you're really in the shit. And the crowd was yelling at us and throwing things — why have they got to do that? it's none of their business — and the watch sergeant was grinning nastily at us and he'd got that big wooden mallet they use for breaking your legs so you can't push yourself up to breathe, when suddenly there's this movement in the crowd, like everybody's getting out of the way in a hurry, and this covered chair appears, with four enormous Germans carrying it, and a dozen guardsmen trotting alongside, and the chair stops suddenly and a face shoves through the little window and asks what's going on.

  'Just an execution, Caesar,' one of the guardsmen told him. Bloody silly thing to say I mean, he could see that for himself. But he beckoned the man over and whispered to him, and the man went and whispered to the watch sergeant, and he goes over and talks to the man in the litter.

  'What have they done?' the man in the litter asks.

  'Very serious crime, Caesar,' replies the sergeant.

  'Really? Murder?'

  'Worse than that, Caesar.'

  'Good heavens. Worse than murder? That's pretty bad. So what was it exactly?'

  'Impersonating you, Caesar.'

  For a moment nobody says anything, then there's this extraordinary noise from the litter, which of course is Lucius Domitius laughing. 'Is that so?' he says.

  'Quite so, Caesar.'

  'Oh, I think I'd better take a look at this,' he says. So the Germans lower the chair and the door opens, and out he gets. And you know, even though I was hanging off two bits of rope by my wrists and couldn't hardly breathe, I forgot all that for the moment, because the man in the litter — and I'm not stupid, I knew very well who he was by then — well, it's not every day you get to see the emperor of the Romans. And besides, he was the spitting image of my brother Callistus.

  I say spitting image: actually, seeing them together you could tell them apart all right. For one thing, Callistus' hair was dark and he wasn't so jowly or thick round the neck. But there was one hell of a likeness, and when he saw it, Lucius Domitius was obviously tickled pink. 'Get him down this instant,' he said. 'It'd be a crime to execute such a good-looking fellow'

  Of course, everybody laughed like the pantomime had come to town, and to this day I'm not sure whether Lucius Domitius really meant for the watch sergeant to let us go, or whether he was just being funny. But the sergeant wasn't taking any chances, not when the emperor of the Romans had just given him a direct order. He was up that cross like a polecat up a drain, and they were helping Callistus down like he was made of Chinese pottery.

  Which was all very well, but it wasn't doing me any good. 'Hey,' I shouted out.

  'What about me?' And I guess I must've sounded pretty comical because everybody burst out laughing, and Lucius Domitius looked up at me and said, 'Who's he? The little rat-faced chap, there on the left. He seems very upset about something.'

  'That's the impersonator's brother, Caesar,' someone said, and Lucius Domitius shrugged and said something like it'd be a poor show to save one brother and leave the other one up there for the crows, and the next thing I knew, I was standing on the ground on my own two feet, which I'd never expected to do again, that's for sure. Bloody terrible pins and needles I'd got, of course, after dangling up there by my wrists, but I decided I'd keep my face shut and not mention that. Luck is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't want to be pushed if you can help it.

  We Greeks talk a lot. We're famous for it. If you've been to Greece , you'll know why. If you haven't — well, it's quite simple, really Greece is a few patches of flat dust wedged in between far too many mountains. The soil is thin and it never rains. If you spend all day every day bashing baked clods with the back of your mattock head, you can just about scrape a living. So when it comes to things — nice things, like gold and silver and furniture and clothes and bread that isn't hard enough to sharpen chisels on — we've never had very much.

  Now, when you've got nothing worth having, life can be pretty miserable, unless you take your mind off it by being sociable. Outside of an anthill, you can't get more sociable than a bunch of Greeks. One of my earliest memories is walking from our village to the next village down a straight, dusty road with dozens of little tiny fields on either side. In each field there's a shrivelled little man, leaning on his mattock or his hoe while he chats over the boundary wall to the shrivelled little man on the other side. I promise you, the sound of Greek farmers nattering is like the hum of bees: you hear it long before you see them, and it's all round you wherever you go.

  Ask anybody who knows about these things, they'll tell you that the Greekest Greeks in the world are my lot, the Athenians. You name a typically Greek thing, you can bet we do it or we've got it in Athens , twice as much as anywhere else.

  We've got more mountains per square mile, and our mountains are drier and rockier. We're the best at trading and doing deals. We're the cleverest, and the too-cleverest-by-half. We'll go to greater lengths than anyone else to get out of having to scratch dirt for a living. We talk the most. And we have the most glorious and fascinating past of any Greek city in the world. No future worth spit, on account of trying to be way too clever for our own good for far too long, but a great past, which we're extremely proud of.

  Take our family, for instance. Nowadays we aren't anybody, but we can trace our ancestors back hundreds and hundreds of years, right back to the incredibly famous and astoundingly wealthy comic poet Eupolis of Pallene. It's been downhill all the way since his time, of course, and the astounding wealth got mislaid over the years, along with the social position and the respect and all that. But it's one of the laws of nature that fathers are better men than their sons, and that year by year in every way everything gradually gets shittier and shittier, so we've never been ones to go round sulking and whining about our lost heritage and stuff.

  When I was a kid we lived with my grandfather in the ward of Phyle, which is about as far as you can get from the city and still be Athenian. He had a grotty little farm, twelve acres or so scattered right across the ward, and he also kept an inn. Besides him there was my mother, my brother Callistus and me, and our cousins Therion and Plutus, the sons of our uncle Adrestus who joined the legion and never came back. All the time I was growing up I always knew there was something not quite right about Callistus and me, because we stayed at the inn and peeled the onions and saw to the horses, while Therion and Plutus went out to the fields with Grandad. We accepted it, of course, the way kids do when they don't know any better — besides, it was far less work peeling onions than growing them, so we didn't care. But it was always understood that when Grandad died, we'd be out on our ears and have to go and make our own way in the world, while Therion and Plutus sorted out between them who got the farm and who got the inn. Luckily for us, Grandad managed somehow to keep going till he was an old man of sixty-five, by which point Callistus was seventeen and I had turned sixteen. When Grandad finally turned up his toes — I always liked him, though he had a filthy temper — Therion got the land and Plutus got the inn, and we each got a pair of sandals, a cloak, a loaf of bread and directions to the city.

  Mother cried a lot when we left home, but that didn't really mean much coming from her, and off we went to seek fame and
fortune in Athens .

  Fortune was out when we got there, but we quickly made ourselves very famous, mostly with the watch sergeants and the market stewards. I'd always had the rather naive idea that I had a talent for thieving. I don't know where this notion came from — some vicious bastard of a god with a warped sense of humour, probably — but it wasn't long before I had to face up to the fact that I'd been sadly mistaken. Truth is, I'm not a naturally gifted thief. If anything, I'm two or three notches below average. It's a great shame, and I wish it wasn't so, but you've got to face facts in this life.

  It's not even as ff1 started off too ambitious and got cut down to size. The first thing I tried to steal was an apple. I can picture it to this day in my mind's eye. It was small, wrinkled, a bit waxy from being stored over the winter, and it was sitting on the edge of some vendor's stall in the main marketplace in Athens on the day Callistus and me first hit town. We'd finished off the last of our food the night before and we didn't have any money or any practical ideas about how to get any, and suddenly there was this apple, just lying there. Nobody seemed very interested in it. The stallholder was having a row with some woman about a duff pomegranate and the people standing around were earwigging on the argument, the way Greeks do. The way I saw it, all I had to do was lean nonchalantly up against the table with my hands behind my back, grope around with my fingers till I connected with the apple, then walk slowly and casually away. Piece of cake. Child of three could've done it.

  Yes, but I wasn't a child of three. Kids can get away with murder in the thieving line, because they look all sweet and innocent and nobody suspects them. But my face is against me, for one thing. I look like a thief— loads of people have told me this over the years, and I expect it's where I got the idea from in the first place — and I was nervous as hell, this being my first attempt outside the family circle, as it were. Upshot was, no sooner had I got my little clammy digits round that apple when a great big hand, frying-pan size, clamps down on my shoulder and some clown starts hollering for the market police.