I Am Livia (15 page)

So we went to Sparta. Tiberius Claudius Nero and the daughter of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus received a warm welcome. The Claudians had been associated with this city for generations, protecting Spartan interests in the Senate of Rome. A man named Cadmus made a house available to us without charging any rent. It was a good house, with a roof of red tile and a fig tree in the garden. Other Spartans gave us food and clothing.

The Spartans’ charity could not go on forever. I foresaw a time when I would have to sell my jewelry so that my family could eat. Nevertheless, when I put my son in his little bed at night and saw that he was healthy and safe, life did not seem too terrible.

Little Tiberius was two years old now and talking volubly. Sometimes he seemed overly serious for a child so young, and I wondered if what we had suffered through in his short life had somehow marked him. But then I would watch him happily playing and feel relieved.

For some time, Tiberius Nero and I had felt so harried, we rarely coupled.
We had become friends, though, true comrades in adversity; and one night in Sparta my husband did desire me, and that night I opened to him in pleasure, as I never had before. Still, I did not love him. And yet, in that little house in Sparta, for the first time I found a measure of delight in his arms. I think it was on that night—or other nights like it, soon afterward—that I again conceived a child.

We heard from travelers passing through Sparta that Caesar’s sister Octavia had been widowed and that Antony had married her. Not long after we learned about the marriage, Tiberius Nero received a letter from Pomponius, saying there had been a realignment of the borders between Antony’s territory and Caesar’s. Antony could have warned Tiberius Nero of this, but he hadn’t chosen to. “Caesar gets Sparta,” my husband told me. “His soldiers are on their way here now.”

We fled, with our son, and with the ever faithful Rubria, and with the new baby in my womb. Cadmus told us about a dwelling in the woods he used when he went hunting. It was only a two-room shack, situated in a small clearing.

When I looked at the shack in the woods for the first time, I remembered my home in Rome and wanted to burst out in hysterical laughter. To come down in the world was one thing—but to come down as far as this? Who had ever heard of such a descen
t
?

A stern voice in my mind reminded me that even now things could be worse. After all, we were alive.

We deposited our possessions in the shack. It was what you would expect a hunter’s hut to be, furnished with a few cots. I asked Cadmus, who had led us through the woods to our new home, “Are there wolves in this area? Any beasts we need to fear?”

“So close to the city? I don’t think so.” Cadmus had white whiskers and shining dark eyes. His face was scored with wrinkles, especially when he smiled.

“Those caves we passed. There are no bears in them?”

“No bears,” he said.

“Well, then all is well,” I said.

“Is there a source of water nearby?”
Tiberius Nero asked.

“There was a stream near here,” Cadmus said. “But we’ve had so little rain lately it might have dried up.”

We walked to the stream—or rather, to the place where the stream had once been. It no longer existed. Tiberius Nero cursed.

“There’s a lake a couple of miles away,” Cadmus said. “Anyway, you don’t plan to stay here long, do you?” Friendship was friendship, but he would have been a fool if he had not been thinking of whether his association with Tiberius Nero could endanger him.

“No, we won’t be here long,”
Tiberius Nero said.

We walked back to the hut, where Cadmus took leave of us. Tiberius Nero went into the back room of the shack. I followed after him. He sat on a cot, his head in his hands.

“I think we should go far, far away, forget Rome, and start a new life,” I said.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is Antony failing to warn me that Caesar’s soldiers were coming. Antony knew I was in Sparta. He was the one who suggested I go there.
What would it have taken for him to send me a message? If Pomponius weren’t my friend, I would be dead.”

“Forget Antony.”

Tiberius Nero nodded. “Antony has abandoned me. Caesar has seized my property and wants to kill me. Sextus Pompey—well, we’ve seen how little we can expect from Sextus’s goodwill. The three of them have divided up the world, and there is no place for me in it.”

“Not the whole world,” I said.

“Very nearly.”

I could not dispute what he said. In most of the world—in all the world that mattered to us—there was no place for him, and therefore none for me and my son and the child to come.

Tiberius Nero rubbed the side of his face. “Where should we go? Go running back to Sicily, so Sextus can ship us somewhere else? Go and clasp Antony’s knees? I almost think the best thing would be to march into Sparta, present myself to Caesar’s men, and say, ‘Here I am.’ I am a Roman citizen, after all; they would not crucify me. I think death at their hands would be quick and relatively merciful.”

“That last thing you must not do,” I said. “There is always a way to survive.”

“No,”
Tiberius Nero said. “You are showing how young you are when you say that. Believe me, there is not always a way to survive.”

“There is for us,” I said. “Look, we have shelter, we have food. We have freedom of movement. Who knows? Perhaps Caesar’s soldiers will leave and it will even be possible for us to go back and live in Sparta.” Returning to that little house in Sparta would have given me the greatest joy.

We settled into the hut. Days passed. We got water from the lake every morning for ourselves and our horses, and every day Tiberius Nero went to the edge of the forest to meet Cadmus. He brought us both food and information. Yes, he said, Caesar’s soldiers were in Sparta and seemed likely to stay.
Where exactly were the new boundaries of Caesar’s domain? Where would we be safe? Cadmus said he would try to find out for us.

As time went by, Tiberius Nero’s meetings with Cadmus began to worry me. The man had been nothing but kind to us, but I imagined betrayal. What if his association with Tiberius Nero seemed a liability now, and he sold him to Caesar’s soldiers? I brooded about this. And yet Cadmus was our one link to the outside world.
We could not sever ties with him.

It was early in the month of Julius. The heat was intense, and the land was dry, parched.
Vegetation crunched under my feet as I walked. I noticed how yellow the grass was, how leaves hung limply from the parched trees. One morning, Tiberius Nero went off as usual to meet Cadmus. Rubria took little Tiberius to pick berries. She carried a large sack of rough cloth, the only container that was handy, to hold the berries. I meanwhile, in my third month of pregnancy, felt familiar nausea. I went behind the hut to the ditch that served us as a latrine. The sun was hot, and the stench was overpowering. My head swam. I vomited again and again.

Often I felt the need to maintain a façade of strength for the sake of my husband and child, but now, all alone, I cried. I wanted my father and mother, and I wanted the life I had once had.

Eventually, I wiped my eyes and returned to the front of the shack. Our two horses, which were hitched to a post there, started to snort and rear for some reason. Maybe Cadmus had been wrong, and wolves
did
stalk these woods? I looked around, but I could see no threat. I was afraid to approach the horses when they seemed so wild.
While I looked on, they broke free of the post and went racing off in the direction in which Rubria and my son had gone.

Another disaster. Would we ever get those horses back? The idea that our already miserable existence had become worse almost made me burst into tears again. Then I smelled smoke.

I looked in the direction from which the odor came and saw a glint of red, up in the trees. I whirled and headed down the path Rubria and little Tiberius had taken. Remembering stories I had heard of how quickly forest fires could move, I began to run.

In the distance, down the path, I saw Rubria hand in hand with little Tiberius. I cried, “Rubria!” She spun around. I saw horror in her face and knew she saw the fire. “Take the baby! Run, run!” I screamed. It was unnecessary. She had scooped up my little boy and was already running.

I sprinted after her, the smoke already thick around me. “Diana, save me!” I cried. I ran so fast my heart felt as if it would burst, gulped for air, and breathed in smoke. Smoke burned my eyes. The fire was so fast, much faster than I was. I could feel heat on my back and knew I was about to be burned alive.

“Here, here!” Rubria shrieked. I could not see her. I ran in the direction of her voice. Then I did see her, through a haze of smoke. She stood in the entrance of one of the hillside caves in which I had feared there might be bears. I dived for the cave entrance and fell in the dirt screaming.

“Roll in the dirt, roll in the dirt!” Rubria cried. “You’re on fire!”

I rubbed my body on the ground and threw dirt on myself. Rubria beat at my hair and my tunica with the sack she had brought for berries, beating out the flames. As she did it, I heard her crying out—surely with pain.
Was she burning hersel
f
? I felt no pain, just unimaginable terror. Rubria stopped beating out the fire, and I crawled deeper into the cave.

“Your hair was on fire, your hair and your clothing,” Rubria said, sobbing. “Oh, my hands, my hands…”

She had burned her hands putting out the fire. I threw my arms around her neck and began to cry.
We clung together. Then I heard my son crying and reached for him. I could hardly make out his face in the smoky darkness. His little body trembled.

We went as deep into the cave as we could go. The entrance filled with smoke. Outside, the fire raged. I remembered my unborn child, and clutched at my belly.
Are you all right, little one? Are you all right?
Rubria, little Tiberius, and I stayed huddled together, coughing and choking. The smoke burned our eyes and our throats. “It hurts, Mama,” my son sobbed.

I held him close and told him he was my brave boy and he must breathe, keep breathing what air there was. I was in terror for him. What if he succumbed to the smoke, passed out, and smothered? “Breathe,” I whispered. For what seemed like hours, the three of us sputtered and coughed and did our best to inhale air.

Finally, the air cleared, and we ventured out of the cave.
We saw no fire, just what the burning had left behind, scorched land, trees reduced to charcoal. I looked at Rubria, who was in tears because her hands were so painful. They were deep red, the skin peeling. “I owe you my life,” I said.

She whispered so that my son could not hear her, “Mistress, you were truly on fire.”

“I’m not burnt,” I said.

“Look at your tunica.”

I followed her eyes and gazed down at the tunica’s hem. It was burnt black.

“And your hair,” she said. “Your hair is singed.”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“The gods must love you,” Rubria said.

Little Tiberius clung to my hand, his eyes wide as he gazed at the desolation around us. Ashes covered the ground under our feet. The three of us walked back toward where the shack had stood, not knowing where else to go. It was gone, of course, and everything inside gone with it. “You have to go back into Sparta to get salve for those hands,” I said to Rubria.

“I think we should both stay here until the master gets back,” Rubria said.

“Your hands—”

“I’ve been burnt before.”

I looked at her in surprise and remembered that her husband and child had perished in a fire. “When you lost your family?”

“Oh, no, another time, when I was a girl. The tenement I lived in burned to the ground. Many people died that time too.” She gave me a smile laced with pain. “I know these burns are not very serious. I will recover.”

My life had been hardship only lately, but she was used to nothing else.

We walked back to the cave—it was shelter, at least—and sank down on the ground.

Rubria’s face mirrored my own exhaustion. I lay with my head cushioned in the crook of my arm. My son cuddled next to me, his head on my breast, and Rubria sprawled beside us. “From life in a mansion on the Palatine Hill to living in a cave,” I said to her. “And you think the gods love me?”