The Kingdom of the Wicked Read Online Free Page A

from, fish and all. Then report to your commanding officer for disciplinary action. No — wait. For me, you say? A gift from Neptune? Strange that he doesn't deliver it personally.'
           And he took from the arms of the fisherman the huge fish, staggering under its weight but, despite his age, strong enough to bear it. He smiled, and the fisherman smiled back. Then Tiberius took the fish by its tail in his hands like a flexible club and began to lash the man with it. Sharp scales struck his face like flakes of flint. He screamed, he was wearing blood like a moving mask.
           'If fishermen can get in, so can hired murderers.' He threw down the battered fish, panting. 'What's he saying?'
           'He's saying, sir,' said one of the guardsmen, 'that he's glad he didn't give you his crabs as well.'
           'Take him,' Tiberius ordered, with a promptitude that bespoke well the imperial gift of swift decisions, 'to the fish tanks and set all the crabs upon him. Then throw him back the way he came.' Curtius held on to his stoicism and his breakfast. So, howling, the fishgiver was hauled off. Tiberius sat. Curtius remained standing. A servant came on flat bare feet bearing a black snake from Sabatum on a velvet cushion. 'My darling Columba,' cooed Tiberius, taking it to his bosom. 'My little pet. The only living creature I can trust. She's hungry, Metellus. Bring some frogs and mice. Make sure they're properly alive.' The snake hissed happily.
           Having hurled the screaming fisherman over the rocks, the crabs clinging to his face and head in indifferent viciousness, the two guardsmen reported to their centurion, Marcus Julius Tranquillus. He was a young and decent man, his family of the plebeian branch of the Julian line, in the army as a career, like his father before him, a junior centurion on detachment from the Praetorian Guard. He listened gravely to what they told him and delivered judgment.
           'He expects me to order your execution,' he said, 'so we will take it that this has already been done and that your bodies have been at once buried in the communal dump because of the great heat. Take over guard duty near the beach. I will arrange your immediate replacements. You realize, I hope, that you were very foolish.'
           'We knew the man, sir. Drunk with him in the bars. Not an ounce of malice in him. Climbing up those rocks at his age with a struggling fish on his back. Out of respect and love for the Emperor, as he put it. It strikes me nobody can do right these days, sir.'
           'That's how it strikes you, eh? So that's how it strikes you. Strikes you that way, does it? All right, dismiss.'
           He was a lonely and troubled young man, well built and not unhandsome. He had tried, throughout his brief career, to hold on to certain principles of virtus. A congenital incorruptness had brought few rewards. He had been fortunate enough to be one of the first to pick up certain hints that Sejanus had been responsible for the murder of Drusus, despite Sejanus's own eager prosecution of a case that at first proferred no solution — the Emperor's son hacked to pieces and found, a feast for flies, in an alley near the Tiber. Well, great men always had enemies. Farcical trials and executions, no shortage of informers and perjurers. And then a slave had said something to another slave — slaves, having nothing else, had become depositories of honesty; being in theory insentient machines, they heard and saw more than was available to free men — and a love note from Sejanus to the Lady Livilla had been found crumpled under the pillow of a bed that a slave was making, and one thing had led to another. Julius, as acting mess secretary, had been offered this note by a slave in the officers' kitchen for a hundred sesterces. One thing had led to another, including the rape and execution of an innocent child. The whole of the Praetorian Guard had been rewarded —