The Falling Giant

"A tyrant's end is never sudden; it is a long slow tide, and the sea that takes him has been rising for years in the dark."

Servius Tullo's right hand failed him first, and he was so enraged that he did not notice his mouth had failed too.

It happened at a banquet, in the seventeenth year of his daughter's life, in the middle of a boast. He had been telling the story of the Kavanu again, the old story, the one that he had told so often at so many tables that the younger senators mouthed the words behind their cups: the black general, the iron bear, the white-robed wife with the ivory dagger. He had risen from his couch to demonstrate the stroke. His face was flushed, his eyes bright, a goblet of Falernian lifted in his left hand and the right flung out before him in a fat theatrical arc. And then, in the very centre of the gesture, the arm simply stopped. It hung in the air for a moment, trembling, like a branch in a still wind, and fell to his side like a dead thing. The goblet slipped from his fingers. The words, which had been rolling out of his mouth in a thick wet tide, came apart into sounds that were not words at all. He swayed. He looked down at his own arm in bewilderment. And then the whole vast bloated length of him, in its purple-bordered toga, toppled slowly forward across the table and brought down a silver dish of roast peacock with a crash that stopped the music.

They carried him home on a shutter.

For three days he lay in the great bed beneath the painted ceiling, with his face drawn down on one side like a candle that has been held too near the fire, and Hermes the Greek physician and two Egyptian priests and an Etruscan haruspex took turns at his side with leeches, incense, and a variety of strong opinions. On the fourth day he opened his eyes. On the fifth he spoke. It was a thick, slurred, labouring speech, mangled at the edges, as if his tongue had swollen to twice its size, but the words in it were quite distinct, and the first of them, spoken to the Egyptian who was bathing his forehead, were Get out.

His body had been broken. His mind had not.

…

"You are enjoying this," Servius said.

It was the third week of his illness, and the evening sun fell through the half-shuttered window in slanting bars across the bed. He lay propped against a bank of cushions with his dead arm laid out on the coverlet like a piece of meat, and the left side of his face, still working, twisted into a sneer. Claudia sat at his bedside in a straight-backed chair with a silver bowl on her knee. She had been feeding him barley broth by the spoonful for the best part of an hour. She did not hurry. She raised each spoon to his lips, held it there until he opened his mouth, and drew it away again with a small deft turn of the wrist so that not a drop should fall.

"I am only doing my duty, Servius."

"Liar." The word came out as liah. He glared at her, with a single small bloodshot eye that had lost none of its viciousness. "I know that look. I know that... that face. You think I do not see. Twenty years you have been waiting. Twenty years, like a... like a spider in the corner. Smiling. Waiting for me to be... helpless."

"You are not helpless. You are ill."

"Same thing."

She dipped the spoon. "Open, please."

He did not open. His lips clamped shut, and a tremor of rage ran through the good side of his body so that the bedclothes shook. She watched him calmly. The bowl in her lap was perfectly steady. And she saw it in his face, then, the dark and unmistakable flicker she had been waiting for since the day he fell: not anger, not contempt, but the first sour, creeping, animal flicker of fear.

It was the spoon. He was afraid of the spoon.

He had been afraid of it for days. She had seen it in the way he watched her prepare the broth, in the way his eyes slid to the cup of wine she poured and back to her face, in the sudden sullen refusals, the demands that the food be tasted before him by a slave. She had indulged them all. She had stood beside his bed and sipped from his cup with downcast eyes, and eaten a mouthful of his barley, and said, mildly, that he must feel free to have it tested as often as he liked. She had never given him cause. She had been, since the day they carried him in, the most devoted of wives: the first to rise, the last to sleep, her hands never idle, her voice never raised. And the more tender she was, the more he sweated.

How long did you think I would wait, old man? she thought. Did you think I would not learn from you?

For twenty years Servius Tullo had taught her a single lesson, over and over, with a whip and a cellar and a bed, until it was written in her bones: that the person who holds the power in a house is the one whom no one else dares to refuse. She had been a good pupil. It had taken her a long time to understand how good.

"Servius," she said gently. "You have not eaten since noon."

"I'll eat... when I... when I..."

"When you what?"

His mouth worked. A thread of saliva ran from the dead corner of his lips and she wiped it away with the corner of a napkin, delicately, as one wipes a child's face. He flinched from her touch. His eye was fixed on hers, and in it she saw all the hatred and the helplessness of fifty years of petty cruelty, a deep stagnant pool with something moving at the bottom.

"I know... what you are," he whispered.

"I am your wife."

"You are... his whore. Kavanu's... slut." The words came out like stones, one at a time. "I knew. In the cellar. I always... knew. You think I was... a fool? You think... a man like me... did not see?"

She did not move.

For a heartbeat the room seemed to hang in a kind of frozen light, every grain of dust motionless in the golden air. The bowl on her knee did not tremble. Her face did not change. She had spent half a lifetime perfecting the art of the blank expression, and now she wore it as a soldier wears a breastplate, and in the dim light of the sickroom it was as smooth and still and luminous as the face of a goddess on a coin.

If he knew, she thought. If he had known, he would have killed us. He would have killed the boy.

And then, quite clearly, with a cold and perfect certainty, she understood that he was lying. It was a lie of malice, grasped at blindly in the dark, the last poisoned arrow of a dying man who could no longer use his hands. He had guessed, perhaps, that there was something. He had no proof. And he wished, above all else, to see her flinch.

Claudia smiled.

"You are tired, my dear," she said tenderly. "The fever is speaking. Shall I send for Hermes?"

"I'll... change the will."

It was out before he could stop it. She saw him realize it. The good eye widened, and then narrowed, in sly, savage triumph. "Tomorrow. I'll send... for the notary. The estate... goes to Decimus. My brother's boy. A Tullo. A man. Not... not that... that pale... changeling of a girl. She'll get a dowry, and you'll get... nothing. A pension. A room in the country. And you'll rot there."

"Servius."

"Tomorrow."

"Yes, my lord," said Claudia. "Of course. Tomorrow."

She rose, and set the bowl on the table, and drew the covers up over his shoulders with a gentle hand. Then she stood for a moment looking down at him, a tall slender woman in a dark blue gown with the last of the sun in her hair. He lay glaring up at her out of the sagging half of his face. She saw that his lip was trembling, and that on the pillow beside his cheek a single tear of pure impotent fury had run down into the creases of his neck, and she felt, in her own breast, absolutely nothing.

"Sleep well," she said. And went out.

…

It was Decimus Tullo who was the danger, and she knew it.

He was a loud, tall, handsome, thickly-muscled man of forty, the son of Servius's younger brother, who had come to Rome from the family estates in Umbria on the day he heard the news and settled himself in the guest wing with a retinue of eighteen slaves and an air of grim proprietary expectation. He was perfectly civil to Claudia. He kissed her hand. He brought gifts for Livia, a little silver bird on a stand, a bolt of Syrian silk, and talked to the girl with a heavy, hearty courtesy that made her stiffen with unease. But he walked about the villa as a man walks about a field he intends to buy. He counted the silver in the dining room. He asked the steward, over wine, how many slaves were on the register and what sum the household accounts showed for the past three years. And in the evenings he sat in the atrium with a group of the Senator's oldest cronies, Pollio, and Lucius, and the grey-bearded Metellus, talking in low voices, with his big hands folded on his knees, and falling silent whenever she passed.

She did not fear him. She had met his like before. They were men who believed that power was a matter of blood and volume, who strode through a room as if it owed them money, and who had never in their lives been obliged to wait.

But she knew, with the cold exactness that came to her in all things, that she had perhaps a month.

So she waited, and watched, and went to work.

It was the quiet kind of work, the kind that never appears in histories. She called in Quintus Aelius, who was grey now and stooped, but who still carried in his battered satchel the neat, patient, indispensable records of twenty years. They sat up through whole nights over the lamp, and the cedar table in the library vanished under scrolls, and the ledger that Claudia had been keeping in her head since the age of sixteen was transferred, name by name, line by line, onto papyrus. She knew, by now, the vices of half the Senate. She knew who owed whom. She knew which of the grim old men on the benches had sold grain to the army at triple the price, and which had a mistress, and which a catamite, and which had signed his name to an edict while privately funding the people it forbade. She knew General Marcus's old traffic in weapons through the Levantine merchants. She knew Senator Lucius's failing fortunes. She knew who had been at the dinners where words were spoken that would not look well in the light.

And one by one, over the next four weeks, she began to collect.

She did not do it crudely. There was no blackmail, no threat, nothing so vulgar as a spoken price. She sent a basket of fruit. She called, in her litter, on a wife in distress, and sat for an hour holding her hand, and mentioned by chance, as one mentions the weather, a certain scroll that had come into her possession. She dropped a word in a banker's ear. She wrote a gracious note. She invited General Marcus to dine, alone, and over the honeyed dates said how much she had always admired his campaigns in Cappadocia, and how sad it was that a man of his talents had been so ill-served by the quartermasters; and General Marcus, who had been looking at her bare neck for some minutes with an expression of unholy appreciation, went suddenly quite white, and put down his cup, and asked her, rather hoarsely, whether there was anything she wished.

"Only your friendship, General," said Claudia, with a smile like an open hand. "And perhaps, in a certain matter of the will, your voice."

He gave it. They all gave it, in the end. She had known they would.

It was a web, finely spun, and it took her the whole of four weeks, working in silence by day and by night, to lay the last thread. By the end of it she could have said, if asked, who in the Senate House would vote at her word, and who would look away, and who would be somewhere else on a particular morning. She had made no enemies. She had made forty creditors. And on a cold grey dawn in the first week of February, as she stood on the terrace of the villa in her woollen cloak with her breath smoking in the air and watched the pale sun come up over the Esquiline, she felt something she had not felt since the arena: the dark, exhilarating, intoxicating thrill of a game almost won.

…

"I tell you, there is something wrong in that house," said Senator Lucius.

He said it in a low voice, on the steps of the Curia, on the morning of the Ides, to the old Metellus, who was leaning on his ivory-headed cane and wheezing. A thin cold rain was falling. The senators went up in twos and threes, dripping, their togas clinging to their thighs, and the steps were slick as glass. Lucius drew his companion a little to one side under the portico.

"What do you mean?"

"The Tullo woman." He lowered his voice still further. "I have been to the house three times this month. And I have never seen anything like it. The old man lies like a log in his bed, and the slaves do not so much as look at him. Everything goes to her. Every key. Every seal. Every question. They go to her as water goes to the sea. And she sits there in that dark blue gown, with her hair coiled, and that sweet face, and that voice, so very gentle. And she has the whole of the Senate in her pocket."

"Nonsense. She is a woman."

"So was Livia, Metellus. So was Agrippina."

The old man grunted. "She is a good wife. She has nursed him like a saint."

"A saint," Lucius said, in a curious tone, "would not have General Marcus eating from her hand." He glanced over his shoulder, down the length of the wet marble steps, to where a single curtained litter was moving slowly along the Via Sacra between the pillars, with its eight bearers in dark livery. "I have thought about it a good deal. I do not believe she is waiting for him to die."

"What else would she be waiting for?"

Lucius watched the litter until it dipped around the corner of the Basilica and was lost to sight. His narrow, intelligent face was very pale.

"She is counting down," he said.