Second Act

Sixteen

In his office covered with hunting trophies and memorabilia, Sextus Valerius Cotta looped his thumbs into his belt and stared across the peristyle, listening to the orchestral sounds made by the rain. The drumming as it landed on the large leaves of the castor oil plants. A tinkling as it hit the ivy on the trellis, the percussion as it bounced off fan palms and the lavender, the deeper plopping noises as it dripped from the bare branches of the pomegranate tree.

With space on the Palatine at a premium, his house was smaller than many of his colleagues’, who preferred the grandeur of the Esquiline-the garden poky, if you like, in comparison. But prestige is measured in quality, rather than quantity, and Cotta’s bronze discus thrower and rearing marble horses, like the furniture in his house, were prized antiques and the craftsmen he employed were the finest in Rome. The artists, for example, called every March to perforate the stems of that tinkling ivy to release a gummy sludge which they’d mix with wine and urine then boil to produce the blood-red pigment used to colour the walls of Cotta’s office. There was, he decided, no substitute for detail. None whatsoever.

It was this attention to detail which had won him his victories in Cisalpine Gaul, among others, and had later honed his skills as a tactician in the Senate. He thought about the boar that had terrorized the Umbrian hills and whose head still snarled in defiance, only now it did so above his office chair. He recalled riding out across the Syrian desert to spear the panther whose glistening pelt he wore home as a cloak, like Hercules, and whose fangs hung round the neck of his youngest son. He remembered the lion he took on single-handed and whose skin made a nice warm rug on his floor, its head a comfy footrest beneath his desk. Attention to detail. Without it, the boar would have sunk its tusks in his belly, gutted him like a sardine. Every victory, every triumph, from Gallic uprisings to the guile of the panther, had been engineered through painstaking plotting. Even in emergencies, Cotta hadn’t rushed into anything, but had pored over the plans, rethinking, redevising, unafraid to scrap previous strategies and start again.

It would be the same when he blew up the Senate.

He opened the lime-wood box with an ornately carved hinged lid that sat on his desk. The box had belonged to his father, and Cotta had lost count of the number of times he’d praised the old man’s good sense in keeping it in his bedroom rather than taking it to the west wing when he’d conducted his final experiment in the search for immortality.

Lined up side by side within the box, like dolls in a cot, lay several kid-skin pouches, separating the ingredients for the fabled elixir. Cotta untied the string from one of the pouches, dipped his finger in the ruby red powder and examined it in the light. Realgar. What the Arabs who fetched it up from the bowels of earth called Fire of the Mine. He sniffed carefully, but did not make the mistake of licking his finger, instead wiping it clean with a cloth. Realgar was a form of arsenic.

He retied the pouch, opened another and tipped out a series of opaque yellow crystals, each forming a perfect metallic cube. A third pouch contained crystals of a much brighter yellow. Needle-like, these crystals were sulphur, while yet another pouch kept separate the gritty, vermilion-coloured cinnabar, which the old man had insisted was essential. The final pouch contained the most precious ingredient of all. A substance known as Poseidon Powder.

Poseidon was the name the Greeks gave to the God of the Sea, who conjured up storms and cleaved the land with his trident, sending waves three storeys high to devastate the land after he’d shaken it. Fine and chalky, white as flour, Poseidon Powder was only found in a handful of secret places in the world, one of which lay close to the rose-red city of Petra in the Jordanian desert.

These nitre beds were formed from camel dung from the huge caravans that used to camp outside the city in the old days, before the sands-and the caravans-shifted. Over time, the dung reacted with the salty soil and the moisture in the air to form crystals that dissolved in rain then dried into a fine, white powder on the surface. To the Arabs who guarded these precious nitre beds, the powder was known as salt of Petra. Saltpetre.

For Cotta’s father, this substance was the key to eternal life.

For Cotta, it was the key to releasing the eagle.

In its present form, the powder was not dangerous, but when mixed with other substances, it was-as his father discovered-highly combustible. What Cotta needed to know was the precise formula the old man had worked to.

Only one other person knew the answer. The servant who had helped the old man with his fatal experiment.

A servant who had apparently vanished into thin air.