Free Tales of Ancient Rome by S. J. A. Turney Page B

bitterly at the thought as he rounded another corner, slapping along into a wide corridor with bright windows that dazzled with sunlight, fading the beautiful painted griffins on the far wall.
    One of the prized suilli, coated with his special sauce of mixed garlic, sea-salt, black pepper, reduced cream and crushed poppy seeds, rolled off the pile and, with a move that took more dexterity than any gladiator could ever hope to achieve, Melicos dipped and came up running still, the precious cargo rolling back into place, caught once more by the silver dish.
    Claudius had always loved his suilli, but since that day that Melicos had perfected his sauce recipe, the emperor had refused to eat them in any other fashion, demanding the dish at least three times each week. It had become a little repetitive and dull for the head chef, but now, with his three sauciers, he could farm out the most irritating tasks, and the pride in his famed dish made any trouble worthwhile. Claudius had forbidden the staff from allowing the recipe out of the Palatine kitchens, and visitors were rarely treated to the delicacy, unless the emperor wished to tease someone.
    The meal had been in progress for almost half an hour. Melicos redoubled his speed. He just simply had to get the dish there in time!
    Another door opened in response to a shout, and he pelted into the main residential area, the sounds of muffled conversation drifting back through the doorways, backed by the music of a masterful trio.
    Melicos pinched the bridge of his nose as he ran. He couldn’t afford to mess this up. The emperor wasn’t a person given to extremes of violence, unlike his predecessor, but even he would have trouble here, and Agrippina would be harsh to say the least.
    Her attitude toward the kitchen staff had been made abundantly clear in her first month on the Palatine, following her wedding and accession. It had come to her attention that rats had been spotted in the kitchen and stores of the palace. Her violent outbursts and rabid demands that every brick of the kitchens, stores and servants’ quarters, well over a hundred rooms and passages in all, be cleaned by hand and washed down with vinegar and exterminators be brought in to deal with the vermin.
    Ridiculous. Rats were ever present. The lady of the Palatine could demand whatever she wished, but there would always be rats in the lower levels. They were a fact of life, like birds or sunsets or slaves.
    And thus, inadvertently, it had been Agrippina that had caused all of this, thought Melicos as he ran, gritting his teeth. Years now of scrubbing damp, decayed brick, and leaving out traps, hiring burly charlatans who would come with a box, display a dead rat they probably brought with them, collect their cash and leave. All because the lady Agrippina detested rodents so much she would turn the Palatine inside out to deal with them.
    And in those years it had become apparent that she held the staff in little more esteem than she did the rats, though this disgust and enmity was mutual, he had to admit. Whatever the emperor saw in her, none of the staff could understand. And as for her obnoxious brat of a boy…
    The voices were loud now and the music almost present. Melicos came to a halt in the vestibule and paused to recover his breath. No matter the urgency, one did not burst into the emperor’s presence at a run, heaving in gasps of air. A half minute would be enough to compose himself, straighten his tunic, and round the corner to present the dish to Claudius and his guests.
    He could only hope he was still in time.
    The dish of suilli smelled succulent and appetising, much as the last one had.
    The one that had been delivered half an hour ago.
    The one with the ‘special sauce’.
    There would be an investigation as to how the rat poison ended up on the delicate mushrooms. Melicos could trace the chain of events in his mind clearly enough. The last exterminators they had in were a real haphazard lot with no