Saturnalia

XLVI

The Alban Hills enclose two inland lakes known as the mirrors of Diana – the Lakes of Nemi and Albanus. Of these, Lake Nemi is famously the more isolated, beautiful and mysterious. When the country road brought us three miles from Aricia along the upper ridges, nothing prepared us for what would lie below. That frosty December morning, mist writhed like abandoned laundry on the silent forest trees and hung over the lake basin in a suspended white canopy. The shrine of Diana was set apart from the world, within a perfect circle of volcanic peaks. The enclosed lake gave the impression it might be as deep again as the surrounding hills are high. Tangles of age-old vegetation clothed the steep interior slopes, ancient holm oaks and ash, thriving amidst head-high brambles and ferns; yet somehow a road had been hacked out down inside the ancient crater. Even the presence of Julius Caesar's enormous villa, sprawled in ugly splendour at the southern end of the lake, could not spoil the remote perfection of the scene.

The narrow road led us fairly gently through the deserted woods via overgrown hairpin bends. As we descended, we passed little fields and market gardens, clearly benefiting from fertile soil, though most looked abandoned and some gave the impression they had been frozen in time since our primitive rural ancestors. There were occasional tiny dwellings, more like cowsheds than homes, with no sign of occupants. We lost our way a couple of times, but then a man in a cart came racketing around a corner and nearly ran into us. He had the haunted gaze of a husband who thought his wife was cheating on him, an obsessed cuckold who was gallivanting up the hill in the hope of catching the culprits at a tender tryst in Aricia. I bet they knew he was coming. I bet it happened every week, and they always eluded him.

Despite looking unreliable, he gave us accurate directions. We took a side road we had already passed twice, that had looked as if it led nowhere, and soon came out in a flat area close to the water, just below the levelled terraces upon which the sanctuary was built.

We were in a deep basin the eye could only take in if you turned on the spot. Ahead of us stretched the limpid waters of the lake, unmarred by fishing boats. All around, striking hills rose steeply to a sky that seemed so far away we felt like moonstruck rabbits at the bottom of their burrow. 'This place would make poets wet themselves.' 'Ever one for the fluent phrase, Falco.' 'I'm not happy. It's too sure of its own magnificence.' 'You just hate seeing that a local landowner has selfishly scarred the vista with an ostentatious holiday home!' Helena was glaring angrily down the lake to the abomination that disfigured the southern shore. She was no supporter of Julius Caesar or his great-nephew Augustus, with their boasts and empire-building machinations, let alone their crackpot, incestuous, empire-destroying descendants, Caligula and Nero.

'You said it. Filthy-rich monsters with brazen ambitions… Also, fruit, 1 am sneering at this so-called isolated shrine, which has cynically attracted shoals of elite – and loaded – so useful in gynaecology women, whose real reason for failure to conceive is that they are all inbred to buggery -'

'I don't believe buggery would help,' Claudia Rufina murmured sweetly, as if 1 might not know its definition. The tall young woman (provincial, but substantially loaded herself) rearranged a stole over one shoulder, gazing around as if she feared to meet her destiny in this near-perfect place. They were all subdued. Entranced by the wild beauty of the setting, young Albia turned on me an expression she saved for when she knew indelicate issues were being discussed by adults who preferred her not to listen. Then she lost interest in being precocious and went back to admiring the grove-covered hills and the lake.

Any religious nymph from the endless forests of Germany ought to feel at home close to these graceful trees and the water. 1 finally began to believe that Veleda might be here.

Helena had a vague recollection of some story about horses being banned within the temple precincts. 'Wasn't Diana's hunting consort, Virbius, a manifestation of Theseus' son Hippolytus, who was torn apart by horses for rejecting the adulterous advances of his stepmother, Phaedra?' 'Sounds like a load of old myth to me…' 1 grinned. 'Families do have their troubles.' 1 listened to Helena. Our purpose today would hardly be welcomed. We could not march in and demand that a priestess who had been granted sanctuary be handed over to us. So rather than offend even more, we left our carriage and horses, and continued unobtrusively on foot. The shrine lay above us. Its main rites were in August, the birthday of the huntress goddess, when crowds of women came from Rome to celebrate the compassionate patroness of midwives, lighting up the whole area with torches and lamps. Today, we passed nobody as we walked.

We clambered uphill on a short roadway to a large walled enclosure. Albia skipped on ahead, though Claudia was breathing hard so Helena and I slowed our pace for her. Inside the walls, the sanctuary was planted with gardens. Even in December this was a pleasant place to stroll among the topiary, quiet arbours and statues, and the fine lake view beyond. Around the fane were other facilities, including an empty theatre.

'y ou look too virile,' Helena told me. 'We can't take you. They will know I spend a lot of time fending you off and trying not to conceive.' I raised an eyebrow silently reminding her that there had been no fending off last night. Helena blushed. 'Jacinthus will be acceptable as our bodyguard.' Jacinthus was tiresomely excited; he was hoping that a wild boar would thrust its snout from the undergrowth – not so he could turn it into escallops and terrine as he should do, but so he could fight it. 'He can find you when we're finished. Go and amuse yourself somewhere, Marcus, and we'll meet later.' 'How long will you be?' 'Not long.' 'Any husband knows what that means.' We could see that there were pilgrims in the sanctuary. I reckoned there would be a slow queue at the fertility shrine. The priests would keep everyone waiting, to unsettle them and make them suggestible – or as they would say, to allow the shrine's calming influence to soothe them.

'Oh don't make a fuss. Go and play in the woods, Falco – and take care!' Woods did not frighten me.

I walked about for several hours. I searched all the small shrines, temples and recreational facilities, a task which was as tedious as I expected, then I strolled down weedy paths among the trees. Scowling with cold and boredom, I listened to the rustles and sighs that nature devises to unnerve town-dwellers who find themselves out in the open. I remembered this from Germany. We had spent weeks trailing through miles of forest, growing more and more leery; I knew how it felt to be quite alone in the woods, even for a short time. Every crack of a twig makes your heart bump. I hate that smell of old animal trails and suspicious fungi. I dread that sense, every time you enter a clearing, that somebody or something rank has disappeared on one of those damp paths moments before you – and is still close by, watching with hostile eyes.

I could understand how dark legends about Nemi had sprung up in Rome's prehistory. This spot had been sacred for centuries. In times gone by, there was always supposed to be King of the Grove, a chief priest, who came here first as a runaway slave; he plucked a golden bough from a special tree, which would only yield to the true applicant. He would find and kill in single combat the previous King of the Grove. Then he could only wait anxiously for the next runaway to arrive through the spectral mists and kill him… Those bloodthirsty days had supposedly been ended when the Emperor Caligula casually decided that the current incumbent had been in post too long, so he sent a tougher man to depose him and make rex Nemorensis a civic position, presumably with the normal terms and conditions.

Public service has its dark side. The pay is always meagre and the pension rights are rubbish. Do your job well, and some mediocrity always gets jealous, then you end up being shifted sideways, to make way for a half-baked management favourite who cannot remember the old days and who has no respect for the gods…

Caligula liked Nemi. He used the place as a decadent retreat. He had two stupendous barges built to float on the lake, floating pleasure palaces. I had heard that those barges were larger and even more extravagantly decorated than the gilded state barges used by the Ptolemys on the River Nile; their fabulous on-board accommodation included a full suite of baths. They had every kind of top-flight nautical equipment too, some specially invented. In the polite version, these great ships were created so that crazy Caligula could partake in the rites of Isis. The better story says that they were intended for imperial orgies.

I made my way to the shore, where I found a man who claimed he had once worked aboard the vessels. The old whelk now spent his days dreaming of past glory. He had the sense to dream out loud, in order to receive charity from visitors. Even more bored than I was, in return for half a sestercius in a rather fine bronze bucket he just happened to have handy, he was happy to talk. He admitted he had stolen the bucket from on board. He spoke of triple lead-sheathing on the hull and heavy marble cladding on cabins and the poop; lion headed bollards; revolutionary bilge pumps and folding anchor stocks. He swore there had been rotating statues, powered by fingertip bronze bearings on secret turntables. He told me how these great ceremonial barges had been deliberately scuttled, once Claudius became emperor. I had heard about plenty of bad behaviour under Claudius, but the elderly ruler had at least claimed to clean up society. During his early days of promise, he had ordered the symbols of his predecessor's luxury and decadence to be destroyed. The Nemi barges were sunk. And then, like any King of the Grove knowing himself to be doomed, old Claudius settled down to wait for Nero's ambitious mother to serve him with a fatal dish of mushrooms. The nutty old emperor is dead; long live the even nuttier young new one.

The thought of the lost ships depressed me. I went back to walk in the woods. I wandered about despondently. Suddenly a man wielding an enormous weapon ran out from behind a nearby tree and rushed me. My assailant had a crude approach to fighting, but he was sturdy, fired up, and as he swung his big sword, I saw the panic in his eyes. I was in no doubt: his one idea was to kill me.