The Nero Prediction Read Free Page A

For a moment I thought my time had run out. “Come. Let me show you something,” he said evenly, rising to his feet and walking to a wall hung with a large painting of a chariot race in Rome's Circus Maximus - I recognized it from cheap sketches they sold to tourists in the marketplace. For a long moment he gazed at the picture with its the electrum-coated obelisk that Augustus had taken from Heliopolis and set up in the middle of the central divider. He spoke without turning around.
    "There it is, the microcosm of the universe. See, the course is oval because the universe is an egg. The track is the earth and the moat between the track and the seats is the sea. The Circus is the circular year, its twelve doors are the twelve months and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Each race consists of seven laps just as the astrological week has seven days and the universe has seven planets. Twenty-four races are held each day to correspond to the twenty-four hours its takes the Sun to circle the earth. Did you know that, Epaphroditus?"
    "No sir,” I said, as astonished as I was relieved by this sudden digression. “Although it all makes sense to me now."
     "It's why being banished from Rome is like being banished from the world itself.” He faced me and again I felt the numbing power of his velvet eyes. “You do know who I am, don't you?"
    "Yes, yes of course," I said because I had heard of Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, things said both loudly and in whispers. He was famous for his chariot teams and was making a fortune in the hippodrome. He wasn’t in Alexandria by choice, the emperor Claudius had banished him from Rome when he discovered that he was having an affair with his niece, Agrippina, Caligula’s sister.   
    "Did you know that I was close to Caligula?” Tigellinus went on, reading my thoughts. “Fortunately for me, as it turned out, it wasn’t a political relationship at all, our mutual passion was horses, I supervised his personal stables. You must have heard the joke that he was going to make his favorite horse a Consul? It was a horse I trained for him. That’s how I got to know his sister Agrippina, when we were both quite young. A remarkable woman, Agrippina, born to be empress some day. Would have been emperor by now if she’d been a man. I performed little services for her, when she needed them, nothing more. Unfortunately friends of someone I had to … take care of for her, convinced Claudius otherwise. That’s why I remain confined to the eastern provinces, breeding horses for the Circus Maximus but not allowed to watch them race there."
    Tigellinus's head tilted in a listening posture as if he could somehow hear the distant roar of that mighty Roman crowd, a quarter of a million voices, through the shriek of the Egyptian cicadas. "The day before yesterday I received a letter from her, from Agrippina. She said she’d had a dream that I would find someone with the birth time she was interested in here in Alexandria. Certain matters are coming to a head in Rome. Agrippina needs help immediately. She needs it from you, she needs it from me also. I need eyes and ears in the imperial palace. Your eyes, your ears. As long as I have them I will say nothing about what you and the Copy Master were up to and all the interesting possibilities that raises. You will be treated like a visiting prince in Rome. Betray me …” His tone became almost loving. “But I don’t think you will betray me, will you?”
    I was gaping with astonishment, giddy, my life had been turned on its head so quickly. I stumbled over my words. “No sir … never … I will never -”
    Tigellinus gestured briskly to the freedman who’d been standing just inside the door. “You leave immediately. Euodus will travel with you. He will keep in touch with you daily. Obey him without question because his instructions will have come for me."
    Although I knew that this man had just sunk a hook into me, I blurted out my thanks.
    Tigellinus