Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [112]
Nicolaus reached out to grasp the scroll, but Virgil held it back.
“I have a price.”
“I have no money,” Nicolaus said, frustrated. “Perhaps you misunderstand my position here.”
“There is a request for a forgery, from high up in Rome, and if I value my life, I cannot do it.”
“Why should I be capable of something you are not?”
“You are dead already,” Virgil said simply.
The Sibylline Books, Virgil explained, were a complicated fiction: The original texts, purchased by Tarquinius from the Cumaean Sibyl, had been destroyed in a fire at the Temple of Jupiter fifty years before, and since then, Rome had searched the world to replace them with copies. Naturally, it had quickly become clear that the copies might be edited to reflect favorable omens for Rome. The Sibylline prophecies were now largely, albeit secretly, the work of hired scholars pretending to be longdead prophetic priestesses. They were consulted whenever Rome’s rulers wished to justify something with an ancient prophecy. This forgery, however, was a delicate assignment.
“A group of senators desire a doomsday prophecy relating to the rise of Cleopatra and the fall of Augustus’s Rome. They wish to sway the public’s opinion of Augustus. It seems that the facts support them,” said Virgil.
“To what end?”
“The story you will write might aid them in restoring the republic. It might create a revolution against Augustus. It might merely make for entertaining reading. I cannot tell the future, Nicolaus, but a story like this is difficult to resist, even for a man like me. Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote what I pleased.”
“You do not miss those days much,” Nicolaus said, snorting. It felt as though they were scholars debating in a courtyard, and for a moment, Nicolaus forgot that he was behind bars in a dungeon and that Virgil stood at liberty, the richest poet in Rome.
“True,” said Virgil, and smiled. “I will visit Augustus when I am finished here. I have become the emperor’s lullaby singer, but he pays me in Egyptian gold.”
“What am I to write?” Nicolaus asked.
“And you were once such a promising scholar,” Virgil said. “Can you not guess? The texts are kept under key in the Temple of Apollo, and everyone claims they’re incorrupt, but every leader has commissioned his own version of the prophecies, dependent on what he needed the world to believe. The Sibylline prophecies are a creation of convenience and full of lies. You, on the other hand, will write the truth. The emperor has employed some sort of witch to steal the memories of those who witnessed the chaos in the Circus Maximus, and the senators fear that the stories will not travel as easily as they need them to.”
“I want to write to Augustus,” Nicolaus insisted.
“He reads the prophecies,” Virgil said.
“Augustus has put Rome in danger. He has put the world at risk by capturing her.”
“Then write that,” Virgil said. “Terrify him. Terrify Rome. Make them think their doomsday is coming, and all because of what Augustus has done. Is that not what you believe? This is an opportunity. Didn’t you dream of becoming a historian? This is a history, though it claims to be prophecy. Tell them what they have done, and if it serves the senators, it serves you, too.”
Thus it was that Nicolaus the Damascene began to write prophecy, passing each page to a bribed guard as he finished it. His mind was vague and scattered, but writing kept him from falling over the edge of sanity. He wrote the truth, or at least as much of it as he could, in the guise of a sibyl, thinking back on the various books he’d scanned in Virgil’s library and the tone of the prophets’ voices.
“Then shall all declare that I am a true prophetess, oracle-singing, and yet a messenger with maddened soul. And when thou shalt come forward to the Books, thou shalt not tremble, and all things to come and things that were, ye shall know from our words,” he wrote, pretending that these same words had been written centuries before.
The prophecies would be published as newly discovered, unearthed from an ancient ruin, scrolls found