Rome 4: The Art of War (10 page)

Pantera eyed me sideways. ‘Are you sure?’

It was well over a decade since anybody had questioned my skills. Tightly, I said, ‘We lived next door to each other as children. My brother was in love with him. It’s him.’

‘So, then, what is an enemy of Vitellius doing watching the house of Vespasian’s mistress? He
is
Vitellius’ enemy?’

‘If
he wasn’t, he is now. A tribune of the Guard drew his name in the lottery two days ago: Juvens.’

‘That should be interesting.’ Pantera whistled, softly, then glanced around the bar. Really, it was barely a look, but he said, ‘I count three men that are yours, plus the boy collecting the empty beakers. Did you pay the tumblers too?’

I could have lied, I suppose, out of professional pride, but why bother?

‘Yes.’ I shrugged. ‘I thought we might have need of them. Zois and Thaïs can provide a distraction that no man will be able to withstand.’

‘And all without losing their maidenhood. Very clever.’ He toasted me, lifting his beaker. He tipped it back, but he didn’t drink.

Two small boys were watching us, round-eyed. For their benefit, Pantera hooked an arm around my shoulders and drew me into the shadows where it was possible to speak almost normally.

‘Tell me about Juvens. I thought Nero had killed him with Seneca and the rest?’

‘He did.’ I rested my head on his shoulder. He held me close, pressed his lips to my head, but he didn’t lose his focus as another man might have done. Did I want him to? I didn’t expect it, he was too professional for that, but I expected … something. Some stirring of the loins or quickening of the pulse to show that I had reached him. There was none of that.

I might have thought he loved only men, but I knew about the healer-woman, Hannah, about the child they’d had, about what she’d meant to him.

What I didn’t know was whether there had been another woman since the night of the fire when he had loved her. The news from the east was limited and it all came from people who knew him, and cared for him. He had that effect on those
he touched: they wanted to protect him because he spent so little effort protecting himself.

So if he had his secret loves, they stayed secret, and he was not about to be seduced by his own spymaster.

I answered his question.

‘Juvens the father is dead. The elder son tried for the consulship and when he failed he fled into exile. This is Juvens the younger. He escaped to the Rhine legions, and was there when they made Vitellius emperor.’

‘And thence to the new Guard. Does Trabo know about the lottery?’

‘If he doesn’t, he deserves to die. If he does, it would explain why he’s made himself into a carter.’

‘But not why he’s watching the home of Vespasian’s mistress.’

I thought about that. ‘He was Otho’s man. He might have the same purpose as us. Your letter was less than explicit, but I am assuming our purpose is to visit Caenis?’

That was a guess, and only recently made. I had ordered her house watched, of course, from the moment Pantera had named Vespasian as his man; information is the currency of a spy and I needed as much as I could get, but nothing had been reported beyond the daily routines of every other woman whose man was away on extended duty, or dead.

Every day without fail, the lady Antonia Caenis rose with the dawn and walked down to the markets that line the Tiber in the company of the retained freedman who kept her accounts, served her at dinner and organized the maintenance of her cottage. She returned to the cool of her atrium before the noon sun roasted the day, and in the afternoon she visited friends, or entertained them, before an early supper and bed.

In the streets around were women whose candles burned long after the midnight hour, but there, in the Street of the Bay Trees, the widows retired at a seemly hour and their
night lamps were rarely lit. There was a brief span of time just before dusk in which the daily household chores were completed, and visitors might approach the house.

Now, in fact.

Pantera said, crisply, ‘My letter was designed to endanger neither you nor the person carrying it if either was stopped and searched. Yes, we are going to visit Caenis, and if Trabo has a similar plan and he’s recognized and taken for questioning before they kill him, we could be finished before we start. We’d better move.’

He leaned back and lifted his beaker. It was almost empty: what little had been in it he had sloshed on the table. Theatrically, he drained the last dribbles, and stretched out his hand.

‘I think it’s time the centurion and his lady paid their respects to Vespasian’s mistress, don’t you? Do you suppose your acrobat friends could be persuaded to create a small diversion?’

They did as he asked.

At my nod, they danced out of the courtyard, across the road and into the Street of the Bay Trees. The crowd followed, as goats follow the herd boy.

Caenis’ house was halfway along on the right. We staggered arm in arm towards it, laughing, carousing, waving our wine beakers with the rest.

Near the house with the oak leaves carved above the lintel, Pantera bellowed a laugh, threw a coin at Zois – he missed – and leaned in to kiss me, fumbling at his toga, as if unfamiliar with the raising of it. By happy fortune, we fell up against the door with the oak-leaf carving. It was unpainted and otherwise unembellished, but new, of strong, green timber; someone had spent gold on it, recently.

Pantera thumped the heel of his hand once above the latch.
Footsteps padded close and presently the door cracked ajar.

‘Leave,’ said the little Hebrew freedman. He was bald, with a small pointed beard and sad eyes. He was already closing the door.

Pantera jammed his foot in the doorway to hold it open. Through the gap, he proffered Vespasian’s ring; the big, heavy one, of poor gold, with the oak leaves on it. ‘Your mistress will want you to let us in.’

The little man knew that ring. The colour leached from his face. ‘What news?’ His voice was hoarse.

‘Nothing bad,’ Pantera said. ‘The general is well. But in his name, we must speak to your mistress. We are only two. And you should lock the door after we enter.’

The door swung back, letting out a whisper of cool air, scented with lilies. Beyond was a small vestibule and beyond that a modest, four-pillared atrium with an angled roof open to the sky and a pool below the centre that reflected the few clouds left over after all the rain.

Plaster busts of past emperors and their women – mostly their women, when I looked more closely – were set in niches along the walls. Between them, curtained doorways led off. From one of these a melodious voice, light and true as a flute, asked, ‘Matthias? Who comes?’

‘Two persons, lady, with news of the master.’

Sober now, stripped of pretence, we followed him in.

We were left to wait in the atrium, where couches were set about the central pool. Behind, a small garden was alive with lilies and citrus trees. The late afternoon sun lay low in the sky. The shadows had clear-cut edges. I watched Pantera move to the place where light and shade combined to make him least visible.

As I said earlier, his instinct is to cleave to shadow, whereas I have always thought that there is an advantage to being in good light;
I can learn as much from a person’s reaction to me as I can from seeing them.

So we were there, him half hidden, me in the last light of the sun, and both watched a curtain slip aside from a doorway on the far wall.

How shall I describe her, Vespasian’s love?

Like her freedman, Caenis was small and slightly built, and she had an easy grace. Olive-skinned, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, she was Greek, I thought, although Greeks are not often enslaved these days, so perhaps she was at least partly Dacian; that would have accounted for her oval face and green-brown eyes.

And she was sharp; already her gaze had glanced past me and found Pantera. I should have expected that: for many years she was amanuensis to Antonia Tertia, known as the Younger; the elegant, cultured woman who was daughter of Marc Antony, niece of Augustus, mother to Claudius, grandmother to Caligula.

Which means that, while still a slave, Caenis had been clerk and confidante to one of the empire’s most powerful women; she was always going to look first into the shadows, and only afterwards study what was in the light.

More important, she was loved enough in her youth to have been freed by her mistress, and she was loved enough in her later years to have been installed here, in the widows’ quarters, where few men’s attention fell.

And her lover had sent Pantera to see her safe.

Rome, 3 August
AD
69

WE HAD HEARD
the tumblers in the street outside. My lady was writing a letter to the master, I think; she wrote him a great many letters through that summer. She was his eyes and ears in Rome. Did she send them? Some – not most, but enough – made their way east with messengers she could rely on.

The evening in question, the first we knew of anything amiss was the sound of the crowd surging past, raucous, crude, boorish, loud; all that my lady least liked about Romans en masse. It’s true that she was born here and she had only once been outside Rome and that was to the island of Kos, lately, with her lord, but she had Greek blood in her veins and that is always more civilized, don’t you agree? We both knew that Athens bore herself with a dignity that Rome could never match. That night was proof in point.

We ignored the commotion until we heard someone come close,
heard the slurred words and the splash of urine as they pissed on the side of the house, and then they knocked.

My lady would have gone to the door right then – she has the courage of a lion – but I persuaded her to step back and let me answer.

I opened to a man of no consequence and was closing it again when I saw the ring: the oak leaves in gold. I could not turn away any man who bore that. And so I invited them in and took them through to the atrium, where were the couches for visitors. My lady called out and I answered and she came to meet them.

She saw the lady Jocasta first, of course. She was breath-taking, if your mind turns that way, the kind of woman some men lose their heads for: tall, elegant, very graceful in a composed way. She had the true patrician gaze of the noble woman, the one that disdains everyone below them, although I am pleased to say she had the good breeding not to turn it on my lady Caenis.

In looks, she had a neck like a swan, a high, arched brow, and her hair … in years to come, men will take out the poems they wrote to her hair, and re-read them and remind themselves of their fecund youth.

It was raven black, with the blue-brilliant sheen of a perfect feather, and as she walked she pulled out the garish pins that had held it up and let it fall back and back and back past her shoulders, until it swayed halfway down to her waist. Even I, who have never looked on a woman as more than a friend, could not help but imagine her naked. Even my lady was struck by her beauty; I heard the suck of her breath.

But Jocasta was right in what she told you; my lady had been trained by the best. The lady Antonia taught her long ago that the stranger standing in the shadows is always more interesting – and far more dangerous – than whoever is in the light, and nine times out of ten she was right.

I had
signalled her with my eyes, but she was already looking towards Pantera. She knew there was a man, you see; she had heard him at the door and so she was looking for him as she walked out of the side room, and, after that one striking moment of looking at Jocasta, she found your Pantera.

He was by the pool, a little back, where the reflections from the water wrought ripples in the air, making of him a shimmering shadow, an almost-not-there spirit. Their eyes locked for a moment, and he gave a small bow. Then my lady spoke.

‘He is alive?’ No name was mentioned. Caenis glanced meaningfully back to the blue silk curtain that blocked Domitian’s doorway; the young lord, you understand, lived with the lady when his father was away.

He was safe with us, and kept himself to himself, but the one thing guaranteed to draw him out of his studies was his father’s name, and I could tell she didn’t want him to come out yet; not until she knew why these two had come. He’s a sensitive boy, and there’s no saying how he would have taken bad news of his father.

Jocasta understood at once. She said, ‘My lady, he is alive and well and sends you his earnest regards. Is there somewhere we may speak in more detail?’

Her necklace was gone with the hair pins and she had wiped the paint from her lips. Without them, she was a different woman. Caenis took her at her word and led them through to the garden.

Here, songbirds, tame to my lady’s hand, followed her about. The small fountain, barely up to knee height, shaped like a rising carp, spilled water into the central pool, making sound enough to cover a quiet conversation from all but those engaged in it.

My lady put her back to an olive bough, seeking the security of its strength as
she often did in those early days. ‘Swiftly, then, what brings you here? Is he wounded?’

This time, Pantera answered. ‘My lady, he was in good health when I left him. He was injured in the knee by a sling-stone while assaulting one of the minor cities of Judaea in the winter, but you know of that.’

Caenis did know of that; it didn’t prove that Vespasian had sent this pair, but it was at least a step in the right direction.

‘Then why has he sent you here to—
Oh!
’ Her hand flew to her mouth. She is so fast; she thinks things through in a flash. I could tell that even Pantera was impressed. He tipped his head in invitation to her to continue.

She put her fingers together, as she does when she is marshalling an argument. ‘For reasons that will be obvious to you,’ she said, ‘I cannot leave Rome, nor can Sabinus, nor Domitian. You know this: to be safe, we must continue to declare our support for the emperor Vitellius. If we are seen to run, it will be taken as a sign of disloyalty and our lives will be forfeit. This is obvious, and he for whom we care most would not ask you to take us away from Rome. Therefore, he has sent you to offer us protection: he would do that.’