Avenger of Rome

XX

Rome

Everything was on fire. Everywhere he looked the flames crackled and roared and consumed: apartments of wood and wattle, warehouses filled with oil and wool and timber, even the great marble temples which had seemed so solid and safe and invulnerable had burned. And flesh. So much flesh. The smell of roasting meat filled his nostrils in the same way the screams of the doomed filled his ears. He tried to shut it out, but it was as if the screams were inside his head. He saw a gap and ran for it, but before he could reach safety a wall of fire blocked the street. He could feel himself burning.

‘Mother! Make it stop.’

But Mother couldn’t stop the flames even if she had wanted to. Because Mother was dead. At his hand. Or if not at his hand, by his will; like so many. They came to him now, all those he had called friend and lover and, yes, even brother. One by one they pierced him with their accusing eyes and he did not know which was greater, the pain of their contempt or the agony of the fire that was melting his flesh from his bones like wax dripping from a candle. He remembered a pillar of writhing flame, a blackened skull with burning eyes, and a name: Cornelius Sulla. So this is what it had been like.

He opened his mouth to scream and flames filled his mouth and his nose and he felt them flash down his throat, incinerating his lungs and exploding his heart. He raised his arms to the heavens in a last despairing gesture and before his eyes shrivelled in his head he looked out over the Rome he had created, the sea of fire that was his gift to his people, and saw a fiery orb arc across the sky, leaving a trail of sparks in its wake. A falling star? No. A fallen god.

‘Tigellinus!’

He shot bolt upright with the sweat dripping from his face as if he’d just emerged from the baths. ‘Tigellinus!’ The waking scream echoed the unanswered one from the dream. The dream which had seemed so real that he could still feel the raw agony of the flame shooting down his throat. Running feet. Not Tigellinus, but the slaves who served his bedchamber. For a moment he wondered why Poppaea wasn’t at his side, then he remembered that she was dead. Dead more than a year, along with the child.

‘Send for my Praetorian prefect.’

By the time Tigellinus arrived Nero was curled in a ball on top of his bed, his whole body shaking as if he was suffering from a fever. The Emperor’s personal physician stood by the doorway with a look of perplexed anxiety on his face.

‘Is he sick?’ Tigellinus asked the Greek. The physician shook his head and the Praetorian sighed. He had grown accustomed to late night summonses to heal crises of the body or the mind, to interpret dreams which promised triumph or disaster, to praise ideas of such genius no mortal man could turn them into reality, or simply to hear a song which had fixed itself in his master’s head and must be heard before it disappeared for ever. Just lately it had been the dreams.

‘Caesar?’ He approached the bed.

‘It is finished.’

The three whispered words sent a stream of ice water down Tigellinus’s spine. In the past there had always been doubt. Here there was only certainty.

‘No, Caesar.’

‘I watched a burning god fall from the sky.’

‘Falling to smite your enemies.’

‘No, I was on fire. The whole city was on fire.’

‘A memory. Remember how you fought the flames and saved your people.’

‘I saved them?’

‘You were everywhere,’ Tigellinus assured him. ‘Directing the rescue, organizing the water supply. Without Nero there would be no Rome.’

Nero opened his eyes. It had been almost three years earlier. He remembered a burning glow on the horizon. The smell of smoke. Ashes. Perhaps it was true. But the certainty was clouded by the fact that he had wanted it, and when he wanted things they tended to happen.

‘The followers of Christus, Caesar,’ Tigellinus pre-empted the next question. ‘Vile creatures who sought to destroy Rome, and through Rome, you. Fanatics and purveyors of lies.’

‘Yes, the Christus followers. They admitted their guilt under question.’

‘Each one bore the mark of the fire.’ The Praetorian commander remembered the careful selection. The refinements necessary to ensure that each confession should be exact in every detail. Yet still one had duped him.

‘But the man Paulus claimed it was a portent of the end. He said Rome was the great whore.’ The young Emperor reached out and gripped Tigellinus’s hand with surprising strength. ‘It must not happen. You will not allow it to happen.’

‘No, Caesar.’ Tigellinus’s voice was soft and reassuring. ‘Your agents are in place with the German frontier legions and in Hispania and Lusitania. The traitor Vinicianus will soon be in our hands. Thus far he has not implicated his father-in-law, Corbulo, and there has been a delay in my agent’s reaching Antioch. But if he is guilty I will know it within the month.’

‘Find them for me. Find my enemies. Hunt them down. Show them no mercy.’

‘At your command, Caesar.’

‘For Rome.’

‘For Rome.’