The Horse Changer (38 page)

There are several great estates in the foothills just west of the city; these enjoy a fine trade in timber, grapes, and olive oil. I was sure one of the wealthy families kept Livia in perfect luxury while she negotiated her return to high society in Athens, presumably through my connections with Antony.

As I rode across the great plain surrounding Sparta, I thought about marriage. Why not? We had not seen one another for five years, but our morning in Livia’s bed still burned in my memory. A divorce for her would present no problem, especially given my contacts with the high and mighty. I was then twenty-six and finally enjoying a handsome income, and though I could not afford to repurchase my patrimony I held a military rank of considerable distinction. Marriage to Livia could only enhance my position in society, for she belonged to one of the most ancient patrician families of Rome. That her fortune was lost mattered hardly at all.

Yes, I told myself, it was time to stop thinking about illicit love affairs and turn instead to the business of an advantageous marriage. All the better with Livia, who had excited passions I had never experienced with others.

The aging freedman Livia had sent to me was happy to talk about his life. He had spent, he said, twenty-five years in the house of Claudius Nero, more than half his life. In fact, he remembered my visit to Campania in the year Antony and Dolabella had served as consuls. He was still a slave at the time.

I didn’t remember him. All the same, I told him I had recognised him without at first being able to recall just where we had met. This of course flattered him, and he proceeded with his story, to which I listened with genuine curiosity. Everything that had happened to him over the past five years reflected some detail about Livia’s life. So when he tried to hurry his tale I pressed for details.

Put simply, he had won his emancipation on the very day Nero won the rigged-election for praetor. Since that time, he had enjoyed command of Nero’s and Livia’s household. After their escape in northern Italy, this fellow alone remained with them. I asked if he had not been afraid for his life; he told me he feared more for Nero’s.

When they were hiding in Campania, this freedman had not only made himself useful by bringing food to the family but he had also made contact with the servants of Nero’s former clients in the area. Most had refused to help. Not a few tried to sell them out for the sake of a reward, but on two occasions they had been given safe passage through the countryside. Finally, in the dead of night, he had rowed the skiff that carried Nero and Livia and their infant son safely across the straits of Messina to Sextus Pompey’s rebel kingdom of Sicily.

Having listened attentively to all this, I finally asked the fellow the question I most desperately wanted answered. ‘So what brings Livia to Sparta?’

‘Domina will want to explain that to you herself, Excellency.’

‘But you are newly arrived in Greece?’

‘We are not three days here. I went into the city yesterday to arrange Domina’s journey to Athens. She hoped to petition Mark Antony, but when I learned you were in Sparta, I returned at once to inform her of the news.’

‘You recognised my name?’ I asked in genuine surprise.

‘Your name is well regarded in the house of the Claudii, Excellency.’

We came to a fine estate in the foothills, about three miles from the city, but after we had passed it and then several more I asked the fellow, ‘Where exactly are we going?’

‘It will be another three or four miles into the mountains,’ he answered. The road was quite ancient and so lacked Roman efficiency, which is to say there was hardly a time when we were not winding about ravines or climbing steep grades. We were in fact quite close to the sea, hardly half a day’s ride to the west. For all that, it was mountain country in every direction. In her letter, Livia had asked me to come alone, but I was suddenly sorry I had not thought to bring along some men as an escort. With only Livia’s freedman for company, I hadn’t much protection if some gang of thugs decided to kidnap one of Antony’s officers.

Finally, we left the main road and followed a lane that had been nearly swallowed up with briars and weeds. I could see nothing in the distance, certainly nothing cultivated, and I began to wonder just what I was riding into. Then, turning one last curve in the lane, I saw the burnt-out ruins of an ancient villa.

I pulled Hannibal to a halt and looked down at the freedman, who had walked. ‘Livia is here?’ I asked. What remained of the main building was uninhabitable. Some walls stood; others had fallen. Elsewhere a column was all that remained of a portico that had once connected various buildings. Most of the property was swallowed up in high weeds if not already overgrown with mature saplings. There was a decrepit well close to the front gate. Otherwise the forest pushed against the main house.

‘She was here when I left this morning,’ the freedman answered.

‘Run forward and have her come outside,’ I told him. ‘I will see her before I take another step.’

‘As you like.’

He trotted easily toward the house. As I waited for the appearance of Livia, I studied the land about me. There was a deep ravine bordering the eastern edge of the property; it seemed to cut close to the main house and then circle behind it. To the west I saw nothing but trees and hills. The forest enjoyed a few old glories, but most of the trees were only a few decades old. There were no other estates about, and I realised this was some lord’s stand of timber.

My chief concern was ambush. I knew of course with perfect certainty that the freedman who had brought me here had been Nero’s servant, but times had changed. For all I knew the fellow might be in business for himself these days. I was still working through these matters when Livia came through the broken-down gate. She was dressed in dark, inexpensive clothes. She looked like a peasant. In fact, I was not sure at first it actually was Livia. Then, as she walked toward me, I recognised the rhythm of her stride and saw at last her dark glossy hair as she pulled away the veil she wore.

At that point, I slipped from Hannibal and led him forward. I could not stop myself from taking Livia in my arms and holding her with the desperate passion of a lover, my lips to her neck, pressing my body to her and recalling as I did every intimacy of our single morning together. It had been five years, but she answered my embrace with the same passion she had shown in her lovemaking.

‘I hoped you would not disappoint me,’ she whispered.

‘How could I?’

She pulled away from me and looked back at the house. That was when Nero stepped beyond the gate.

He too dressed as a peasant, his tunic long, in the Greek style. It was filthy as well and without any mark of his patrician status. His hair was longer than a Roman usually wears it, and there was even a bit of a white beard. At the sight of Nero, I could not help myself. I pulled entirely away from Livia. I felt betrayed and of course quite foolish. ‘What is he doing here?’ I hissed.

‘Dellius!’ Nero called. His tone was cheerful, as if he had just encountered an old friend. It was, I believe, only the second time he had ever addressed me. The first had been when he threatened my life should anything happen to Livia.

I was obliged by law to take Nero’s life the moment I saw him, that or make haste to report him to a local magistrate. Anything short of that amounted to giving aid and comfort to an enemy of Rome. ‘You risk my life inviting me here!’ I whispered to Livia. I was angry at her and at myself too.

‘We have news for Antony,’ she told me.

Despite my fury, I was curious. ‘What news?’

Before she could answer, Nero walked toward us, calling out to me, ‘You are looking well, my friend.’

Nero was not at all like the dull blade I had observed in Campania. Perhaps revolution suited him or he had learned a few social graces after a year of depending on the kindness of others.

‘You as well, Excellency,’ I answered, taking his hand as he extended it.

‘We have news for Antony, Dellius.’

‘So Livia tells me.’

‘Come inside. I don’t care to conduct my business in the open. Besides we are famished.’ He turned and walked back to the house.

I brought Hannibal as far as the well, where I looped his reins over a post. ‘What is this place?’ I asked Livia, who had stayed with me as we walked.

‘One of my father’s properties,’ she explained. ‘Antony’s estate now, I suppose. The house burned down the year I was born, almost twenty years ago. We still use the house to dry timber over the winter. Or did until my father’s death.’

‘But you can’t be living here?’

‘For the past two nights we’ve had no choice.’

We passed through the gate and came to a vestibule filled with debris from the collapse of its roof. Beyond that we entered a very large atrium which scavengers had stripped bare of its tile and marbles. The freedman had already set out olives and bread and a sack of wine. All of this he had brought with him from Sparta. Young Tiberius was already eating a piece of the bread. He was a large boy but hardly more than two or three years old. Curiously, he had the same dull expression his father wore: a look of bafflement, as if nothing in the world quite made sense to him.

The pool in the atrium was empty, but its size and the fragments of the mosaic that remained here and there hinted at the grandeur the place had once enjoyed. Further on, the house seemed already to have been overtaken by the forest. The roof had collapsed in every room for as far as I could see. The porticoed garden at the back of the house seemed already to be a part of the forest.

For all that, with the light breaking through the treetops and vines reclaiming the rooms, the effect was quite beautiful, though hardly a domicile anyone might willingly choose. No, this was a bandit’s hideaway.

‘Will you join us for a meal, Dellius?’ Nero asked.

His remark that they were famished had seemed the usual hyperbole from one who has not eaten for a few hours, but I suddenly knew how utterly desperate their situation was: chased constantly by bounty hunters, they were probably half-starved most of the time. I was not even sure if the food their servant had brought with him was purchased or stolen.

I was hungry and all the more so once I tasted a piece of bread. I hesitated taking more of their food than that, but once I realised that the freedman had begun piling dried wood on the family’s campfire in preparation of baking fresh bread, I helped myself to another piece. As I watched them eat, I could not help recalling our feasts in Campania. There we had meat of six or seven varieties and always fresh fish, though it had cost a fortune to stock the ponds where they were kept. I must say, for all the arrogance of the old boy in former times, I was not happy to see Nero ruined. Still, the sight of him so impoverished did give me some hope of persuading Livia to leave him and marry me.

Before we got down to Antony’s business Nero asked about my life; he had some general idea of what had occurred but seemed genuinely anxious for details. This seemed quite strange to me; it had not previously been in his nature to care about others. I suspect now he was only anxious to flatter a man whose help he needed.

Soon enough I was telling them about the battle at Philippi. Livia’s father had been one of the legionary commanders there and had in fact been executed in the aftermath. That they might know what sort of villain chased them I described the games of chance Caesar had played with some of the young tribunes. When I saw Livia’s expression grow pale I hastened to add that the legates had been given a chance to speak before their executions. ‘None were mocked or teased; the games of chance were only for the lower ranking officers.’

Livia was not sure I was telling the truth; to be honest, I had no idea if Caesar had mistreated the legates. They were at the front of the line, first to die; I had been standing a few furlongs behind them waiting my turn.

After my description of events at Philippi, Nero described the uprising in northern Italy. According to him, he was the one who had encouraged Antony’s wife and brother to resist Caesar’s tyranny. He assured me that while Antony knew nothing about their plans, all three of them had intended for Antony to be the sole beneficiary of their actions.

‘When it was clear the city was about to fall, Livia and Tiberius and I made our way into the forest.’ I noticed the freedman at the fire turn to look at his master, but he did not speak. It must have wounded him terribly to get no mention when Nero told the tale.

‘You were at least safe in Sicily,’ I told Nero when he had finished his story. ‘Why come here and risk everything? Whatever news you had, you might have sent to Antony by courier.’

‘Caesar is preparing to betray Antony, Dellius.’

‘How?’ I asked. Even though I did not suspect Nero of deep intrigues, I was not ready to believe Caesar was so foolish as to risk war with Antony.

‘Caesar has been carrying on secret negotiations with Sextus Pompey. He intends to announce their alliance the moment Antony sails with his army to Syria.’

‘You know this as a fact?’

‘I was to be turned over to Caesar as part of a goodwill offering from Pompey. When Livia found out about it we escaped before Pompey could lay hands on me.’