Rome 4: The Art of War (28 page)

‘Lucius thinks you poisoned Valens, but he doesn’t know how. He knows for a fact that you are sending out forged letters that purport to come from Vespasian. He believes you were in the guise of a date-seller, and that you are endeavouring to seduce the gladiators to treachery. He thinks he is blocking you at every path.’

Pantera leaned on the balcony’s iron railing and looked out and to the side and down. Any other man might have been taking in the view. Pantera, if he had not changed, was planning eight different routes of escape in case he were ever cornered here.

He said, ‘He may be right. We have to wait and see. In the meantime, I need to send a message to Vespasian.’

Why else had he come? I indicated a cage on the left, big enough for perhaps eight birds, if they lived closely. ‘I have three birds remaining that will fly to him. No more after that and no chance of getting any before the spring. You can only send three messages between now and then; is this one so important that it must be one of them?’

‘If you had only one
bird left, this is the message it would carry.’

‘You have it ready?’

‘Not encrypted. I need your day codes for that.’

‘Wait.’

In a shimmer of beads and roses I was gone, and swiftly back with the tools of our trade: a sheaf of message paper, fine as onion skin, bought from Egypt at a price far beyond its weight in gold; a slate with what looked to the careless eye like a shopping list written on it, but was in fact the day codes that I had set with the dove-keepers in Alexandria; and a wax tablet on which to make the transitions that turned a sentence into gibberish for those who did not have the means to turn it back again.

‘Your message?’ I held out my hand, so different from his. Mine are manicured three times in a month; his, never.

‘I didn’t write it down.’

‘Of course not. Here.’

The wax was perfect; just warm enough to take the mark readily, not so warm that his words smeared out of recognition before he was done.

Pantera wrote,
To the emperor Vespasian, from his servant, greetings. Your kin are well. Caecina leads Vitellius’ forces against Antonius Primus who marches five legions in your name. Both naval fleets will soon be ours: Ravenna within days, Misene within a month if all that we attempt bears fruit. Rome will be yours by Saturnalia.

Discretion personified, I fed the birds, holding out my cupped palms with handfuls of crumbled nuts. Doves and finches clung to my fingers and pecked freely. I didn’t look up until the transcription was done and the upper half of the wax tablet wiped clean of the original message.

‘Will you write it for me?’ Pantera handed him the tablet. ‘My script is not small enough.’

To be carried
by a dove, the script must be tiny or the message short. I can write letters so small they look like ant tracks across a page, and only the best-eyed scribes can read them. I can make and break these straightforward ciphers as fast as normal men can write and I can write in any hand; if I see it once, I can mimic it to perfection the way some men can speak in voices not their own, or alter their appearance.

I had, for instance, penned every one of the letters ‘from Vespasian’ that were circulating amongst Antonius Primus’ troops, and, by dint of double agents, had also reached Caecina’s legions, to let the troops know what was on offer should they choose to defect.

Here and now, I wrote in my own hand and finished with a salutation in plain, unencoded text that Pantera had not written.

Blessings upon you, Emperor of Rome.

‘For decency,’ I said. ‘If he will truly be emperor by the year’s end, you need to begin to treat him as such.’

‘I have always treated him as such,’ Pantera said, flatly. ‘When can you send it?’

‘Now is as good a time as any. The bird can still fly some way at dusk and there are places to rest in the forests of the south. If you wait, you can see it go.’

The chosen dove was one of the slate greys pacing the breadth of the wicker cage. It crouched at the sound of my voice, and it was the work of moments for me to fold the fine paper to exactly the breadth of my thumbnail, roll it into a cylinder and slide it into the tube fixed to the bird’s leg.

Done, I lifted my hands and opened them. The bird stood tall, took in its surroundings, bobbed its head at its fellows and then launched skyward on a racket of wings that sent the pair left behind into a clattering alarum.

Pantera watched the bird until it was a pinprick in the unstained blue of the sky. He left then, with little more said.

On the
way down, the stairs were busier, not so much with traffic ascending or descending as with men and women who had moved away from the rest for the semblance of privacy while not yet abandoning the party.

Downstairs, the bower garden was busily full. The serving boys were now naked to the waist, the girls’ tunics were kilted shorter, and opened to show the first curves of their breasts.

The music was pitched to a different note; it wove through the vines, the citrus branches, the standing and lying couples, drawing the sexual tension to breaking point, and holding it there. The masks were gone now, and the pretence; and those who preferred to display in public were making the most of the wide couches set at angles to the great many-stemmed candlesticks.

A woman sat astride a man, head thrown back, her nipples clamped between his rigid fingers, their tight-locked hips moving with increasing urgency. Nearby a man stood with a woman held in front of him, her back to his chest, his fingers working at her groin. She pulled his head to hers, and bit on his ear. Elsewhere, a boy knelt, a girl lay naked on a couch, a trio of young, lithe bodies made a triangle of lust.

Pantera noted the names of those he could identify, and the figures of those he couldn’t.

At the door, the giant Belgian accepted another gold coin and waved him away, smiling.

Rome, the ides of September
AD
69

I WENT TO
Trabo in the evening, a little before dusk.

He was in the Retiarius, one of those foul little taverns where men gather after the circus to dissect the fight. There hadn’t been many of those lately; Vitellius’ first and only love was for the chariots. He had no interest in watching men gut each other publicly, so the tavern supplied its own battles: slaves or hired men who wrapped themselves in boiled bull’s hide and hacked at each other with blunted blades, or sharp ones if the watching men paid enough.

It smelled of piss and that metallic sweaty stench of too many men locked in too small a space on too hot an evening. The fight that night was between an albino Thracian and an ebony-black slave brought in from the hinterlands behind Egypt.

Trabo wasn’t watching the fight, although it took me some time to discover that. I was dressed as a tavern whore and working the room was necessarily a slow business; men to fend off, men
to let down gently. I couldn’t afford to cause a riot and while I have no qualms about protecting my virtue by force if I have to, on that particular night I had to make sure it didn’t come to that.

When I had been through the entire room and failed to find him, I headed upstairs to the third floor, where were the better-smelling rooms with clean straw on the floor and fewer lice. The one in which I found him was surprisingly wholesome. The blanket on the bed was clean, after a fashion, and the walls had been newly whitewashed in the spring.

Trabo had eaten of their stew and had a flask of wine to hand. He was seated on the bed, writing a letter, when I entered.

‘Jocasta!’

His sword met me, face-high, as I stepped in through the door. He lowered it, but did not sheathe it. He was gaining wisdom, I think, or just so unsettled that he didn’t know whom he could trust any more. ‘What brings you here?’

‘I came to apologize.’ I pushed the door shut behind me, slid the bolts across. ‘May I sit?’

‘What? Yes, of course.’ He swept away the writing from the bed, set it neatly on the floor. That was Trabo all through; impetuous, but neat-minded. The combination had a lot to recommend it. ‘And wine? Would you like wine? I only have one beaker, but …’

‘We could share it?’

I sat on the edge of the bed. I had dressed in a rough tunic without adornment, and pinned my hair up with cheap bronze pins. I pulled them out and leaned forward to set them atop his letter, which let me scan the first lines.

To Geminus from Trabo, Greetings. I leave at first light on a horse Pantera has provided. He

I straightened, sat on the bed. Trabo looked as if I had just slapped him across the face. He was standing there with his sword in one
hand and his beaker of wine in the other and didn’t know which to thrust forward first.

‘Geminus got to you through me,’ I said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’

‘You know about that?’ He was so relieved, it was heart-breaking. He leaned back against the wall – he almost fell on to it, really – and slid down until he was sitting on his heels with his hands laced around his knees. He looked more haggard than I’d ever seen him. More than when Pantera had a knife to his throat and he was within three breaths of dying.

Do I believe Pantera would have killed him back in Caenis’ cottage? Without question or hesitation, yes. Do you think Pantera doesn’t kill? He’s ruthless; he kills whoever gets in his way.

But now he had a use for Trabo, and Lucius had a use for him too, and poor Trabo was caught between, not knowing whether to serve both or neither, and terrified that one side or other was going to gouge out my eyes and rip out my tongue with hot irons in front of him if he made a mistake.

Wretchedness etched his every feature; it hung from his bones, it melted his features in the evening light. Hesitantly, he laid down the sword, and held out the beaker.

I took it, and set it on the floor. Then, standing, I crossed the small space between us and took his poor, misery-ridden face between my hands.

‘My dear man …’ I kissed the side of his cheek. ‘You are not made for this kind of despair. When we were children, you were a handful of sunshine, scattered among us. Where has it gone?’

‘They threatened to … harm you.’ He would not be more specific.

‘I know.’

‘You do?’ He pulled my hands from his face, held me at arm’s length. ‘How?’

Perhaps I
could have told him that I’d had men following him who had listened to every word and brought the news straight to me, but I didn’t want to add to his paranoia. Maybe if I had things would have been different later, but they might have been differently worse, not better. Trabo is a soldier, he’s not built for subterfuge. We all used him and it was like using a spoon to cut meat; it might work after a fashion, and if it’s all you’ve got you make the best of it, but everything is damaged in the process.

So I let him hold me. We were close enough for me to see the fine veins threaded across the whites of his eyes, the lips that the beard didn’t quite hide, the arc of his brows. He had always been a handsome youth (my brother always fell for good-looking men) but for all my protestations of his sunny disposition there had ever been a rash, adolescent side to him that made him heady, prone to outbursts of righteous temper.

There, in that room in a seedy inn on the wrong side of the Tiber, what I held in my hands was a grown man in trouble, but a good one, and Rome was pitifully in want of good, grown men.

His eyes were locked on mine. I could feel the first stirrings of interest beneath his tunic, but he was too troubled, at first, to pay them heed. He said, ‘What can I do? Pantera told me to leave Rome and I’d barely walked three streets when Geminus was telling me to report to him. I can’t serve them both.’

‘Why not?’ I leaned my head on his shoulder. ‘You are offering Lucius an ear in the heart of Vespasian’s front line, or at least where the front line will be when Antonius Primus reaches Italy. Believe me, he’ll be glad enough of that.’

‘But if Pantera finds out, he’ll—’

‘Pantera understands.’ I took his hand, turned it over, kissed his palm. ‘You are too good a man to lose. That’s why he did what he did. He is doing his best to protect you, although I think
we can do better.’ I folded his hand closed. ‘Do you want to leave Rome?’

‘What do you think?’ He was listening to his body now. For the first time that evening, I saw him smile. Sweat stood proud on his brow. I smoothed it away with my thumb. ‘Do I want to leave you? Am I crazy?’

‘I hope not.’ I pressed more tightly against him and turned my face up for his kiss.

He slid his arms round my waist, carefully, as if I were made of some fragile glass that might be easily crushed. I felt the weight of his elbows on my hips, the skin of his palms on the back of my neck, rough and ridged were he’d held a sword for days on end, and killed with it.

He was not killing now. For all his evident strength, there was a surprising delicacy to his touch as he lifted me up and laid me back on the bed. I drew him down on top of me, but later, when we had paused to slither out of our tunics, I pushed him down and lay on top of him and explored his body fully with my lips and hands before I let him enter me.

We slowed when dark came, and lit a candle and gentled each other by its light, as new lovers do, tracing the fall of shadows, the new curves and crannies that it created. ‘I’ve always wanted you,’ he said. ‘How did I not know it?’

‘The time wasn’t right.’ I traced round his nipple with the edge of one fingernail and watched it stiffen in response. ‘You don’t have to leave Rome, you know.’

‘I do. They’ll take you and—’

‘No, listen. You have to go out; they have to see you go, but if a bearded carter in the name of Hormus arrives with sealed messages for Lucillius Bassus at the naval base in Ravenna and that same man writes back detailed reports to both Pantera and Geminus, who is going to know they aren’t from you?’

He
swallowed, tightly. His skin felt cold, suddenly, under my palms. ‘Where would I be instead?’ he asked.