Rome 4: The Art of War (39 page)

I slept lightly in the aftermath; the inheritance of my childhood. We silver-skins in the gutter never allowed ourselves to be drugged or plied with drink: our longevity often depended on rising before our clients and stealing out into the night.

That early instinct, perhaps, is what woke me a moment or two before strong fingers clasped my right ankle and tightened. I opened my eyes silently, waiting; only one person in the world knew to wake me thus.

I did not see a face to prove me right, just the faint glimmer of distant starlight on the blade that hung close to my eyes.

The hand left my ankle and Pantera’s voice, warm in my ear, said, ‘Rise.’

I did so. The youth curved in the bed beside me shifted slightly, but did not wake; he had experienced new things and was sleeping deeply on the other side.

My tunic
was pressed into my hands, still creased from the night; my sandals; an outdoor cloak I did not own and had never seen before.

I wanted to wash, to remove the distaste of body fluids and sweat that coated my skin, but there was no time. I was led to the balcony where the shutter eased open in total silence; my fault that it was so well greased that it made no sound to arouse the guards.

I looked out into the ink-black night, and the outlines of things that wait there.

‘Oh, Hades, not the plank,’ but yes, it was the plank, and there was a knife at my back and I must go first with Pantera behind me, step by dizzying step into the nauseating dark where the void that gaped on either side of the wood was as solid in its blackness as the next place for my foot, and the next, and the next.

I shook, and, shaking, became less stable. Pantera’s hands gripped my hips, at once intimate and threatening. Softly, he said, ‘You can’t turn back.’

‘I know. I’ve seen what happens to those who try.’

I shuffled on over the aching drop. Time flowed slow as syrup.

I aged ten years before I reached the opposite railing and clambered over it with legs that refused to hold me steadily upright. Inside, the tailors were asleep, and even if they hadn’t been they would have taken pains to appear so.

Down in the street we were met by two men. The first was as large and brutal as Drusus, but without the Germanic tilt to his chin: a Briton, maybe. The other was a boss-eyed youth with a lopsided grin, whose good eye feasted on my face in a way that made me sweat.

Pantera said, ‘How far to the horses?’

The big maybe-Briton held up three fingers.

Pantera caught my wrist. ‘Three blocks. Run.’

‘Horses?’ I had
heard his question. I held back. ‘What are we going to do with horses at this time of night?’

‘Ride them. Hard. We are going south after all. And we shall need your services when we get there.’

I knew better than to argue with Pantera when he was in this kind of mood, so we ran and we mounted and we rode.

We passed with extreme care through the streets of Rome on horses with muffled hooves, changing direction often, on the instruction of the big, red-headed Briton who roamed ahead like a hunting hound.

Outside the city, we stripped the soft leather from our mounts’ feet and rode down the Appian Way as fast as a horse may go in the dark, which was unnervingly fast for me; I have never been a good rider.

The horses clearly knew the route and loped along with a relish that suggested Rome was not their home, but that warm bran mash and oats awaited at our destination somewhere in the south. Lucius was south. I tried not to think about that.

I was such a bad rider that we paused along the route and Pantera and Felix, the boss-eyed blond boy, bound me into the saddle like a child, and I spent the next two hours wishing myself back in the warm silk bed with the youth who had not known what he wanted until it was shown him.

We stopped at an inn some significant time after my thighs had begun to scream in agony and my fingers had cramped immovably tight on the mane for support. I had to be helped down by the innkeeper’s boy, a briskly efficient child of less than ten years who had no concern for the time of night, but unsaddled the horses while his father lit the torches in their brackets and roused the fire high in the hearth, making light enough for us to sit and eat, and shadows enough for Pantera to meet whomever it was he had come to see.

That
meeting took place shortly, when another hard-ridden horse arrived, this time from the south. The rider wore the porphyry livery of the imperial messengers, but he clearly knew Pantera by sight. They met in a horse stall and I was with them, though I would rather have been in the warmth, eating and drinking with the rest.

By way of greeting, the messenger said, ‘The moon is fine and full tonight,’ which was a transparent untruth.

Deadpan, Pantera answered, ‘We may have luck then, on the night’s fishing. Thank you. May I?’ He held out his hand and was given a package which he set on an upturned barrel with a single candle for his light.

The package was of folded linen sewn in a particular pattern. Pantera cut the thread with a razor-fine knife and slid the blade under the imperial seal. This was Lucius’ personal mark; like his brother’s, it showed a chariot. Unlike his brother’s, Lucius’ horses were racing across the winning line.

Opened, the letter was short and in a laughably easy code. I read it over Pantera’s shoulder.

Brother: a slave belonging to Vergilius Capito, former governor of Egypt, escaped from Tarracina and is presently guiding us on a safe route up the largest of the Volscian hills that lie above the city. We are gaining the heights and will attack with tomorrow’s dawn. Victory shall be ours and we will return to you by the evening of the day after. We shall celebrate the remainder of the festival together as victors.

‘Is the slave yours?’ I asked. ‘Are you helping Lucius?’

Pantera laughed, hollowly. ‘Definitely not. But I bet he didn’t “escape” on his own. There are people who want Lucius to win just as badly as we want him to lose.’

I said, ‘If
Vitellius thinks Lucius is about to win, and will march back into Rome at the head of seven thousand victorious Guards by morning, he’ll abandon all thought of abdicating. You can’t let him see that letter.’

‘I wasn’t planning to. But another must go in its place: Vitellius and Lucius send messages to each other four times a day and they’ll notice if one is missing. Can you replicate this hand?’

I arched my brow. I can replicate any hand and he knew it, although he didn’t know that he himself had been taken in by at least one of my forgeries. ‘Tell me what you want to say.’

I was given pen and ink and a stool to sit on, but the upturned barrel was my only table. Nevertheless, I am a craftsman who takes a pride in his work and, after a few test sentences, I was ready.

I wrote to Pantera’s dictation, transposing the letters in my head, A to C, B to D and so on, through the alphabet. One can only suppose that Lucius and Vitellius believed their messenger service to be entirely secure or they would never have risked using such an infantile cipher.

In plain text, before transposition, what I wrote was this:
The rebels have attained the heights above the Volscian hills and are currently unassailable. We have them under siege, and victory will be ours before the month’s end.

Writing, I said, ‘Isn’t this still too optimistic? Will Vitellius give up his throne in the morning if he thinks Lucius will be back in January?’

Pantera was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his cheek pillowed on his folded arms. Sleepily, he said, ‘For the emperor, January is a lifetime away. He might waver if he thought Lucius could be home tomorrow’s tomorrow, but any longer than that and he’ll fold. Lucius, for his part, would never write anything that did not predict his own ultimate victory; we can’t put words on to paper that he would never send.
This will do what we need. But we need another, to send to Lucius, in case he is victorious. We can’t take the risk that he might head back to Rome of his own accord. Felix has a sample of Vitellius’ hand for you to copy. Take a clean sheet of paper and write this …’

At his dictation, I wrote a second letter to be sent to Lucius, and then watched with professional interest and not a little envy as Pantera sanded, folded and sealed the fresh paper to look exactly like the original, and sutured it closed with an identical, much practised, pattern of stitches.

Returning to the inn, I found that we had been in the barn for less than the time it took for Borros and Felix to eat their stew. The messenger ate standing up and departed swiftly.

Pantera, too, ate standing up, reading reports from a small man with no teeth who appeared to have been roused from deep sleep. At the end, he said to me, ‘If you want to sleep, you can stay here with Diodemus, or you can come with us. It’s your choice. Either way, you cannot return to Rome until Vitellius has abdicated.’

‘Or been killed.’

‘Or that, yes.’

Diodemus was the little toothless ruffian. He looked as venal as any of Rome’s bandits. He might well have
been
one of Rome’s bandits, come south for a change of pace. I felt the promise of sleep slipping away.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked, although I already knew; in some things, Pantera was entirely predictable and his sense of duty outweighed any normal regard for his own safety.

‘To Tarracina,’ he said, confirming the inevitable. ‘We have men there who must be brought out before Lucius attacks at dawn.’

I was desperate to sleep, but even so, when Pantera and his men rode out soon after, I rode with them. I rode against the screaming ache of
my thighs and an urgent desire for a warm bed and a decent night’s sleep.

But my world was far more dangerous than it had been just before midnight when I took an almost-emperor’s younger son to my bed, and I was betting my life on the belief that the safest place in the empire for the next few days would be standing right next to Pantera.

Rome, 18 December
AD
69

I HAD BEEN
with Julius Claudianus and the gladiators in Tarracina for nine days when Pantera came banging on the gates.

It was a heady, exhilarating time. In theory, we had marched down the Appian Way with the cohort of the Urban Guard to put down the revolt at Misene, but I don’t know of a single man who believed that was our true task; certainly none did by the time we’d reached the outskirts of the city.

I don’t know if he’d been coached by Pantera or was simply using his natural leadership, but Julius Claudianus had a deft touch with the men.

He moved from fireside to fireside in the evenings after we’d camped and gradually turned the conversation to Vespasian and how good his campaign had been in the east, and what had Vitellius ever done and wasn’t Lucius a complete nightmare?

Imagine Rome if he ever became emperor, which he was clearly
angling to do. He never said any of this, he just steered others to say it, and so yet more to think it.

And he never answered those questions, just left the men to talk them over amongst themselves so that by the time we got to Misene they were practically begging him on bended knee to change sides. So he had to: what else could a good commander do than yield to the wishes of his men? Particularly if they were his wishes in the first place.

Thus two thousand highly trained, loyal and dedicated fighting men became, overnight, two thousand highly trained and dedicated rebels who had no trouble at all in taking Tarracina. It had a stout outer wall, but Julius had paid men on the inside to open the gates for them and there wasn’t even a token resistance.

The drinking and whoring and feasting had started that night and hadn’t stopped. Saturnalia gave them the excuse, but it would have happened anyway. It was still going on the night Pantera came to us, with his rag-tag of followers.

He knocked on the door of the tavern we’d made our headquarters and the first thing I knew of his presence was the sound of his voice asking, ‘Julius Claudianus, is he here?’

Julius was asleep, actually. He shuffled out of his room barely dressed, all farts and sleepy scratchings, cursing at having been woken until he saw who it was, whereupon he became warily alert.

Lit by a single smoking excuse for a candle, we all gathered round while Pantera showed us a dispatch to Vitellius he had stolen en route.

‘This is real,’ he said. ‘Lucius is on the hill above the town. He’ll be on you by dawn like a starving hound on a rats’ nest. You need to move your men out of here before daylight. Get to the boats and scupper any you don’t use in your escape. Lucius has no navy, he won’t be able to follow you.’

There was a long moment’s silence. Julius Claudianus was a big
man, solid, with no flab, and now that he was awake you could easily see him at the head of a column, marching hard and fast for battle. He had been a legate once, and led the Misene fleet. It’s what made him perfect for Lucius, and for Pantera. But he was always his own man.

He snapped his fingers and servants began to dress him in front of us: linen undertunic, woollen overtunic, belt with many silver medallions, greaves, sandals …

He said, ‘We can’t run now. We have trained for this for the past three months. The men are desperate to fight.’

‘Your men are singing in poor harmony on the beach. They are not in any fit state to fight.’

Julius Claudianus wrapped his sword belt around his body, slipped the baldric loop over his head. Armed, he was as dangerous to look at as any man I’d met, and I’d been living amongst trained killers for months by then.

Other men were running in, gathering behind him, and they, too, were more stalwart than the off-key singing might have suggested. He ran his glance across them. They straightened under his stare. They were bristling with the anger of men whose pride had been threatened.

He said, ‘Gladiators can fight in any state, believe me. And they won’t run from a battle, even if I ask them to. They’d stab me in the back if they thought I was trying.’ He looked at Pantera down the vast crag of his nose. ‘You didn’t really send us all this way to run at the first flash of a blade?’