Rome 4: The Art of War (38 page)

On hearing a knock at the door, we both rose, swiftly.

Matthias, answering, padded white-faced from the door.

‘My lady, it is the lady empress Sextilia Augusta, mother to—’

‘She knows to whom I am mother. The entire world knows to whom I am mother. The entire world shares my shame.’

The empress’s voice was sharp and hard; fingernails dragged over fractured glass. The face was sharp and hard to go with it, although less ostentatious than one might have imagined.

I must have seen the lady Sextilia at some point when she was merely mother to two middle-ranking generals, but I cannot recall the event. I had seen her more recently, of course, but only ever entering her litter, and then only from a distance, when she was draped in porphyry silk, with a diadem on her high, tight headpiece.

Here and now, she was dressed in sober white, as if for mourning, with only a silver ring around her perfect, brush-stiff silver hair. She looked haggard and old and tired.

She said, ‘Lady Caenis, forgive my intrusion, but I have come to buy the services of the lady Jocasta.’

‘Buy them?’

I didn’t understand. And then I did, or thought so.

‘What services?’ Jocasta asked, more slowly.

‘Those you used with such effect against Valens. Do I look a complete idiot? Men don’t listen to the bathing-room rumours, or if they do, their talk is all of battles and whores and children got out of wedlock on hidden mistresses. Ours is of each other, and our skills. You are a poisoner. I would buy from you some poison.’

‘Why?’ Jocasta looked suddenly guilty, like a young Vestal caught
in the act of fornication, for which the penalty was death.

She had not denied the old woman’s accusations, if they were accusations. They sounded more like compliments; in the upturned world Rome had become, nothing was impossible.

‘Because of my two sons, the wrong one inherited the throne. Or perhaps neither son was worthy. Lucius has allowed himself to be lured south on a fool’s errand, taking with him more men than Rome can afford to lose. And he has left behind the spineless fool I gave birth to first, may the gods curse the day of his creation.’

‘My lady, Vitellius is a good man. He—’

‘He is a weak and vacillating idiot. If he were not reminded moment by moment by his men that he is emperor, he would forget. And he thinks he will be allowed to abdicate!’

I said, ‘My lady, he will. Of that I am certain.’

‘By Sabinus, yes, but Sabinus is as weak as he is. You should see them, two weak men together, each trying not to damage the pride of the other by stating clearly what must be said. My son is finished. He can go now on the pretext of abdication and await Antonius Primus’ mercy, or he can cling on a few days longer, and die at the hands of the Guards.’

‘Antonius Primus will not be emperor, lady. Vespasian will honour any agreement made in his name.’

‘Ha!’ The old crow’s laugh was hoarse and full of acid. ‘Vespasian is in Egypt. He will be here when? Next September? July if he hurries? And in the time before that, who will rule Rome? Antonius Primus or Mucianus and his train of catamites. I do not expect mercy from either man; each knows his duty. They will do what must be done so Vespasian can rule in benevolence. I choose to make my own fate. I have had a long life and a good one and it is time for it to end. And so I ask of the lady Jocasta that she sell me that which will bring about my demise most swiftly. I have gold.’ The skin was fine
as paper on her hands, bare covering to the knotted old-blue veins. She wrested two gold coins from her purse. Neither showed her son on the face.

‘No, lady.’ Jocasta’s hand on hers was white, with the knuckles green. ‘I will take no money. But I will ask that you are sure of what you do, and that you tell no one else. My reputation may not rely on much, but it relies on not being known as the poisoner of an empress. Mucianus would know how to deal with that, too.’

‘That is your price?’

‘Your word that you will tell no one that this is your choice, not the hand of fate. Yes, that is my price. I trust your honour.’

‘Which is more than my son does.’ She was smiling, archly and with anger in her eyes, but it was more of a smile than I could have summoned in like circumstances. ‘You have it here? What I need?’

‘No, lady, but I will bring it to you tonight, if I have your word that I may safely do so.’

‘Oh, you have my word,’ said the lady empress of Rome, with hollow emphasis. ‘Nothing will keep me in my shame and you are my clear exit. I will leave now.’

She gave a bow of her head, such as the men do. ‘Don’t escort me. I can find the door, and it is best if few see us together. Sabinus is returning even as we speak. You will find him in choleric mood, I fear. But he will get his way. Vitellius has never learned how to say no to anyone.’

Later: Sabinus home in foul mood.

‘He says he’ll go tomorrow as long as the Guard does not dissuade him tonight. I offered him a hundred million sesterces, a villa in Campania, all his slaves and freedmen with him, if he will only renounce any claim to the throne, and he wants to ask the permission of his Guardsmen!’

Sabinus had come to my house, and not alone. The two consuls suffect were with him: Quinctillius Atticus, who looked severely distracted: a man in love, or in lust, with the object of his desire too far away; and Caecilius Simplex, a man blighted with rat-like features who never looked anything other than avaricious.

Rome was buzzing. News of the emperor’s maybe-abdication had taken to the streets and run amok in the market places, the baths, the forum, the houses of the matrons and the equestrians, the inns and taverns of the freedmen and slaves; there was not a man, woman or silver-boy who did not know that by tomorrow they might well be ruled by a new emperor.

If the current emperor chose to leave them.

The men of power thought that he would. You could tell that by the fact that the two consuls, together with a delegation of twenty other senior senators, had openly walked past the Guards on watch outside my house, saluted them and instructed them to leave.

The Guards had duly walked away and now twenty-two of Rome’s civic leaders were cramped around the statues and four unadorned columns of my only public room. The place reeked of nervous sweat and wine-soured breath.

Fortified by their presence, Sabinus was at his most frus-tratedly choleric.

‘A hundred million sesterces! A man could drown in that much money. How much does he need, when nobody is ever going to visit him?’

‘None at all,’ I said. ‘Which is his problem. He wants to be liked, and if he abdicates his authority, he will be universally despised.’

Not least by his mother, although I didn’t say that. Her scent still hung in the room, not quite lost in the crush of sweating, middle-aged men with their paunches hidden in the folds of
their togas and their nerves not hidden at all, or their excitement.

‘Vitellius is universally despised already,’ Quinctillius Atticus, the man famed for the carp pool he had had built in his dining room for the emperor’s birthday, dragged his mind back from the faraway landscape it had been enjoying for long enough to comment.

He was a solid man of middling height and he wore his senatorial dignity as armed men wear their weapons. This was not the first time he had made advances to Sabinus, but never before openly, in the face of the Guard.

If anyone was looking for a testament as to how fast Vitellius’ support was falling away, it was there, in the fact that this man, second in authority to the emperor, had chosen to be here with Sabinus, and not at the palace with Vitellius.

Atticus said, ‘We are on the brink of Saturnalia. If Antonius Primus continues to make progress, he could be on us before the festival’s end. Vitellius is no longer emperor in anything but name, and if my lord Sabinus, prefect of this city, cannot persuade him to leave by words alone, then he should rouse the Urban cohorts and the Watch, both of which are under his command, and assault the palace.’

‘Ha!’

Sabinus’ laugh chimed with Domitian’s. The boy had been out on one of his jaunts and, arriving to a full house, had slid in at the back of the group. I sent him warning glances:
be careful; think before you speak
.

He ignored me.

His voice, being higher, carried more clearly than his uncle’s. ‘The Urban cohorts were staffed by Vitellius when he took power; the men are from the same legions as the Guard. They may nominally give their oath to my uncle, but in practice they will be loyal to Vitellius.

‘The Watch, meanwhile, is a hopeless gaggle of retired men who
train annually in fire-fighting and dream of long, lazy nights without work. It is worse to stage an assault that won’t work than to wait and let the threat of Antonius Primus and his legions do it for you.’

Speaking, he had moved to the centre of the room: younger son of the man they all now considered their emperor; the only one of the emperor’s sons resident in Rome.

After due pause, when he was sure he had the full attention of all those present, he said, ‘Uncle Sabinus, when did Vitellius say he would give his answer?’

‘Tonight. He will speak to the Guard on duty in the palace and tell them of his intention. If they agree – I say it again: he is asking their permission! The emperor is asking the permission of his Guards! – he will send me word of his intent.

‘Assuming he gains their agreement, he will walk to the forum in the morning, and tell the assembly of his decision to stand down. He will give his dagger to the consul Caecilius Simplex’ – Sabinus bowed to the rat-faced consul – ‘who will take it in the name of Vespasian. At the same time, those of us who are loyal to our new emperor shall gather at my house on the Quirinal, administer the oath to the Urban cohorts and the Watch, and then go together to the forum and thence to the palace, which we shall occupy in my brother’s name.’

‘If the Guard doesn’t stop you,’ said Quinctillius Atticus. ‘We still have no idea what they will do, and they could stop everything.’

‘They must not be allowed to. Where is—’ Surrounded by men he did not yet trust, Sabinus cut himself off. His gaze met mine and then Jocasta’s. ‘Our friend? The one who is recently returned to Rome? He will know how to contain the Guard.’

‘He might, if we knew where he was,’ Jocasta said. ‘But if he’s not with you, then we have no idea at all where he is.’

Rome, 17–18 December
AD
69

SATURNALIA ONLY REALLY
begins each year on the night of the seventeenth of December.

Throughout the empire, but nowhere more than in Rome itself, it is the time when the nobility plays at being ignoble: servants become the served, slaves become temporarily freed and may command their masters. In the legions, officers are treated as serving men and the lower ranks give the orders. There are limits to the licence, of course, but the principle of freedom and revelry is universal.

At the House of the Lyre, the traditional transfer of relationship between master and slave has a slightly different flavour. Every year, a select group of favoured clients is invited to attend a private evening of wine and food after which they must prostitute themselves for the delight of those whose services they normally buy. Men and women are invited in equal numbers and all have to swear a binding oath beforehand that no request, however outlandish, will be turned down.

There
is, naturally, a lengthy list of those who would give very large amounts of gold to be invited to such an event, and so different names grace the guest list on each of the seven nights of Saturnalia. The clients are not charged, but it is observed by those who take an interest that the men and women who have invested most in the House of the Lyre during the preceding year are the ones most likely to be on the guest lists in December. November is a particularly lucrative month.

This year, the first night of Saturnalia was everything the House and its friends had dreamed of. Rome was under threat, very nearly under siege, and in the uncertainty men and women of status sought the amnesiac qualities of lust with a passion heretofore unknown.

Offered the opportunity to immerse themselves in undiluted hedonism, to explore new ways to sate themselves, they fell on it with single-minded dedication, leaving the gardens strewn with clothing, the stairs, the corridors and the landings littered with discarded wine jugs, and the doors of the bedchambers hanging open.

Because that’s the other rule: at the Saturnalia, nothing must be done in secrecy; everything must be open to view.

By midnight, the peak had passed. It had been, we all agreed, a resounding success. The wine was gone, the candles had burned to softened stubs – those that had not been taken from their candlesticks and put to other use. The couches in the garden must be recovered before the morrow; nothing would remove the stains of wine and bodily secretions, but that wasn’t uncommon and they had more than paid for themselves. We had craftsmen on hand ready to make them new again.

Of rather more concern was the fact that a senator had been carried out to his litter blue-lipped and barely breathing, but he was still alive when he left, and even if he had died in the night
we knew that his heirs would never press charges: the disgrace of their paterfamilias having failed to sustain his ardour through the notorious Night of Free Exchange at the House of the Lyre would have finished them.

And so the last steward and servant – there were, of course, several still sober who were not engaged in the entertainment – had gone to bed. All through the house, men and women were sleepy, full of wine and good food, their stamina temporarily defeated.

I was abed, but my door was not open. Alone of all the guests or servants, I was not governed by the rules of the Night and the House. My door was locked and bolted as was my nightly habit, but this once, unusually, I was not alone.

I, too, had explored the detail of another’s body, and let mine be similarly explored. We had sated ourselves more than once and we had both found unexpected pleasure in it.