Second Act

Twenty-Six

The baths were just opening when Sextus Valerius Cotta arrived. Divesting their master of his heavy striped toga, his luxurious woollen tunic, his soft undershirt and helping him into thick-soled wooden sandals so his feet would not burn on the hot mosaic floors, his slaves then handed over his valuables to the attendants for safe-keeping and took themselves off to the gymnasium.

‘You’ll be the only one in the sweat room, Senator,’ the usher apologized, leading the way through the thick, swirling steam.

‘Good.’

The handsome mouth of the Arch-Hawk pursed in approval. He couldn’t cope with chit-chat and gossip today. His mind was reeling from the devastating news he’d received from Frascati. Choosing a seat in the corner, he leaned his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands.

Dead? Sonofabitch, she couldn’t be dead. Not the girl who knew the formula to make saltpetre explode.

‘Boy!’ He snapped his fingers and an attendant materialized out of nowhere. ‘Hot room.’

The baths were filling up fast. Vaulted halls rang with grunts of massaged pleasure, the slap-slap-slap of pummelled flesh, the clomp of wooden clogs as attendants puttered back and forth with linen towels and strigils, scented massage oils and tweezers for plucking eyebrows and unwanted hair. Along the lofty promenade, lined with works of art looted from Greek temples, a group of youths had organized a raucous competition rolling iron hoops with hooked sticks round the twenty-foot-high marble statues, first one past the Minotaur is the winner.

‘Will you be wanting a shave after the massage, sir?’

‘What?’

His mind was still in Frascati. Had somebody killed her for the secret of the saltpetre?

‘Oh, shave. Yes, and I’ll have bergamot in the rub.’ ergamot oil was renowned for its uplifting properties and Jupiter alone knows, he needed a boost at the moment. Had it really all come to nothing? The Arch-Hawk closed his eyes as the attendant scraped his back with the bronze strigil. He might not have the backing of the Senate, but for many months, he’d been cultivating support among the plebeian community. With the working classes and the gods behind him, he had truly expected to see the eagle soaring to its true heights. But now…?

Cotta flipped over to lie on his back. Tense, he was no better than useless. He needed to clear his mind. Think. Rethink. Then think again. As the massage relaxed the knots in his muscles, his mind drifted back to his visit to Cumae.

Had he been ruthlessly conned by that shrivelled old crone sitting on her throne in the half dark surrounded by swirls of evil-smelling smoke? Or had he really looked into Hades? Spoken with the shades of his ancestors?

In truth, he hadn’t held out much hope when he set out after the funeral, but hope was all he had left. The servant girl who had the formula for the explosion had run away and this time the Senator’s men couldn’t find her. Now, of course, he knew why. Some bastard had caved her skull in with a shovel. But he hadn’t known that at the time, and in any case it didn’t make a scrap of difference. What mattered was that he had the chemicals and no formula, and desperate times require desperate measures.

Cotta knew he had to try everything in his power-everything-to get his hands on the formula, and he’d heard the Oracle put people in touch with their ancestors. Ludicrous? Maybe. But the Arch-Hawk had nothing to lose.

Had the priest added drugs to the smoke, or slipped them in the wine he had given him? Cotta didn’t know, but with music coming from nowhere then fading again, he had felt strangely disconnected from reality when the white-robed acolytes guided him along the eerie corridor of light and shadow that led to the Sibyl’s dark lair. Black eyes glittered from the ancient face as she considered his request. Finally she agreed, and huge sums of gold were handed over before he was led outside, blindfolded, and taken on a short overland chariot drive to the black mouth of a tunnel.

‘This way,’ lisped the priest, removing the blindfold.

Cotta was still cynical at this stage. Wary of theatricals and vast sums of money. But it was so bitterly cold inside the rock, and the tunnel was blacker than jet and after four hundred paces of stumbling behind the priest in a hillside that resonated with sighs and moans, and following a sharp bend in the tunnel, which suddenly dropped a hundred, maybe two hundred feet, to a great chamber through which oily waters gurgled and swirled, Cotta’s doubts vanished. There was no uncertainty at all in his mind that what he was looking at here was the River Styx.

‘Do not be afraid,’ the priest intoned solemnly, and his voice was brushed by a thousand whispering echoes.

Fear was not an emotion the Arch-Hawk recognized, yet the skin on his scalp prickled.

‘You must wait in the Hall of Destiny,’ the High Priest announced, ‘while we appease the shades with the blood of bullocks, oxen and lambs.’ Black-hooded acolytes magicked out of the shadows. Holding boughs of mistletoe over his blond head, they led him through a door into a decorated chamber.

‘Once the Oracle has summoned the shades of your ancestors, we shall return,’ the priest said.

Minutes passed like hours, days like weeks, and all Cotta had to live on was bread, herbs and some strange-tasting wine. Bizarre paintings on the walls of the chamber depicted men and women in the throes of terrible disease, and for a time he feared he was going insane. When he tried to escape, it was to find the door had been locked, and the only sound inside the chamber was the babble of distant water-and whispers. Soft, sibilant whispers that came and went without warning.

Eventually the door opened, the black-hooded priests chanting as they led him through the tunnels to where a coracle bobbed on the water. Cotta could not see the Ferryman’s face, but from one long, tattered sleeve, a skeletal finger crooked in a gesture of beckoning.

‘Come,’ the Ferryman rasped, and goose pimples rose on the Senator’s skin. ‘There are those who wait to greet you.’

‘You will need this.’ An acolyte handed him the mistletoe branch, a gift for the Queen of the Underworld. ‘And this,’ he added, placing a coin on the Senator’s tongue. In the distance, three dogs started barking. Or, rather, one dog with three heads. Cerberus, the guardian of Hades. The Hound of Hell.

At surprising speed, the coracle was swept downriver and the temperature grew warmer. Steam rose from the water in places, which bubbled wildly in others. Finally, the little boat put into the side.

Wordlessly, the Ferryman held out his hand for his fee.

Struggling out of the bobbing boat, Cotta handed over the coin then laid the mistletoe in a special niche for Persephone. When he turned, the coracle had gone, though the sound of baying still echoed through the dark caverns. His mouth was dry. He had crossed the Styx and paid the Ferryman. Was there any way back? Spluttering torches cast strange shadows on the rock face, and a lyre was strummed by invisible fingers.

He waited, unsure what to expect. Then his brother appeared. Veiled, but still in full dress uniform, he floated in and out of Cotta’s vision on the far bank of the river, the wound which killed him still gushing blood. A female voice called across the hot underground springs.

‘Greyhound, is that you?’

‘Mother?’

It was the nickname she’d given him as a child, because even as a small boy, he could run like the wind. But as much as he loved his mother, he didn’t know how long he’d have and it was imperative he spoke to his father. He called him. Heard the hammering of his own heart. Suppose he had come all this way, paid all that gold, for the old man not to appear? But the old man did appear. Not quite as tottery on his legs, but still bent and needing the help of another veiled ghost to lean on.

‘Father.’ He could scarcely breathe. ‘I must know the formula of the potion you mixed.’

A harsh laugh floated across the bubbling waters of the River Styx. ‘I am dead, my son. I hardly achieved the immortality I sought for so long.’

‘I know.’ Cotta had to guard against impatience. If he offended the shade of his father, the old man would never return and Rome’s expansion would be set back for years, maybe for ever. He bent his fair head in reverence. ‘You don’t know how sorry I am, sir. We’re all sorry. Shocked that it happened like that, too.’

‘It was a quick end, son. I didn’t suffer, if that’s what you wanted to know.’

It wasn’t. Although he was glad. ‘The formula, father. I need to know what adjustments you made to the elixir when you-when it exploded.’

There was a long pause, and a rustle as though pages of notes were being scrolled through out of sight. Whisperings.

‘My box survived the fire,’ the quavering voice replied at last. ‘You possess all the ingredients for the Elixir of Immortality.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Cotta said patiently. ‘But I’m not seeking immortality. The west wing blew up. I need to know how you did it.’

This time the silence was longer, the rustlings more intense, the whisperings harsher.

‘Father, please. I need your help.’

The ghost supporting the old man muttered something in his ear. The old man nodded. ‘You don’t need my help, son,’ he replied. ‘The gods smile on your destiny.’

‘They do?’ Cotta blinked. ‘You mean…on the whole expansion programme? Including my plans to blow up the Senate?’

‘Of course, my boy! Jupiter, King of the Immortals and Bringer of Justice, gives you his blessing in all your endeavours. Success, my son, will be yours.’ And in a sudden swirl of smoke, they were gone. All of them. His brother, his mother, his father-even the whispering voices fell silent.

Now, in the bathhouse, as the barber rinsed off the last of his whiskers and rubbed balm of Gilead into his chin, that rare and precious oil that the Queen of Sheba presented to Solomon, Cotta regrouped.

Not all facts could be taken at face value, but he had no doubts whatsoever that he had sailed the River Styx, stood at the mouth of the Underworld, spoken with the shades of his kinfolk. By default, then, if he believed in the Oracle’s powers, he must also accept his father’s assurances that Jupiter himself blessed Cotta’s plans.

One way or another, that Senate House was going to blow.