Rome 4: The Art of War (40 page)

Pantera was furious, although it was only because I’d seen it before that I could tell. The clipped consonants and strained patience might have sounded merely weary to any other man.

He said, ‘I didn’t send you all here to die. And you will. Lucius has seven thousand men up that hill and every one of them has something to prove. They are sober, rested and have the advantage of height. There’s no disgrace in leaving now to regroup and attack some other time.’

‘When?
After Vitellius has abdicated and we have lost our chance of glory?’ And then, at Pantera’s hard stare, ‘Do you think we don’t hear of such things down here, out of sight of the city?’

Pantera closed his eyes, sought patience, found something close enough.

‘I sent you word of that myself, and Trabo wrote back to me so I know you got it. But someone else must also have sent an order and now a slave is showing Lucius the best routes into the city. We are not the only ones using Tarracina as a proxy for battles being fought over the throne in Rome.’

‘Who betrayed us?’

‘A slave, but I don’t know who sent him. I will find out, but just now my first priority is your safety.’

‘No it isn’t.’ Julius Claudianus smiled, put his great meaty hand on Pantera’s back and turned him round. ‘That’s my worry and I’ll deal with it as I see fit. You are free to go back to Rome and your not-proxy battles.’

It occurred to me rather later than it should have done that the stoutly defiant Julius Claudianus was neither entirely sober nor entirely undrugged. The pinprick of his pupils should have been a clue, but the candle was shining in his eyes and it wasn’t immediately obvious. Poppy, likely. Or one of the mixtures the curse-women make that crumble on to hot coals and sweeten the air. I knew the men had been taking it. I hadn’t realized their commander had been, too.

I said, ‘Perhaps now is not the time—’

‘This is the only time.’ Pantera’s lips were a tight, white line in the candlelight. ‘Lucius isn’t going to give you time to negotiate, or to build defences. He hasn’t that kind of patience.’

He spun, looking round. A hundred men faced him, and more were coming, and none of them was sober, and each of them was fired by pride and drink and poppy. He’d have had to kill them himself to get them to stand down now.

His
capitulation showed in a short shake of his head. He turned back to Julius Claudianus. ‘Gather every one of your men. The slave guiding Lucius knows the ways in better than we ever will, so there’s no point in trying to block the gates. We can choose the pinch points to hold and make life difficult, so that anyone who is prepared to go can make it to the ships. We just need to be sure that any that aren’t used are broken: Lucius must not gain a navy by this.’

‘We?’ Julius Claudianus’ laugh was big and bold. ‘You’re not thinking to stay?’

‘I sent you here. I can’t leave you.’

‘Lucius sent us, not you.’

‘Only because I manoeuvred him into it. He was supposed to spend half a month laying siege to a city that could resist for half a year, not find a quick way in and slaughter you all by morning. I won’t have your deaths on my hands.’

‘You don’t. You think you’ve been manipulating us, but we were happy to go where you pushed us. This is our war too, don’t forget. We switched to Vespasian because we believe he will make a better emperor than Lucius. We’re all grown men. We know what we’re doing. Just go.’

‘Julius, you can’t—’

‘Pantera, for fuck’s sake. My men follow me, they don’t follow you, and never will. And we don’t run from trouble.’

‘Then I’ll stay with you.’

‘And let Vitellius win in Rome? Are you mad? The emperor is supposed to abdicate tomorrow. If you think that’s going to go smoothly, you’re a lot less clever than you pretend. The Guard will never let their man stand down. They made him, they’ll keep him. You have to be in Rome to make it happen if you want to see Vitellius gone.’

Julius’ hands were vast, with scars across the backs of old sword wounds, and knuckles crushed repeatedly into hard surfaces. He laid one of them heavily on Pantera’s shoulder.

‘You don’t have
to make everything right, just the thing that matters most. Get on your horse. Ride like the wind for Rome. And be ready, whatever happens tomorrow, to fight. Take Trabo with you. He was yours from the start. We’ll miss his cooking, but we’ll manage without it.’

Do you think I should have argued? A part of me wanted to, or at least thought that honour required that I did. But the rest of me knew that to stay was suicide. Leaving with Pantera might be the same, but it felt a little safer.

We rode out soon after: me, Pantera, his two men and the catamite. We slipped on bound feet from the town gates, and even as we mounted we heard the first rhythmic mumble of armed men marching from the hill above the town. Behind us, Tarracina might still have been asleep for all the evidence there was of life.

We stopped at the coaching inn to leave Felix behind for some purpose to which I was not privy. I was standing with the horses when I saw the flames of Tarracina’s destruction begin to unfurl across the horizon, spreading outwards, to meet the first bright light of dawn.

So broke the eighteenth day of December in the first year of the reign of the emperor Vitellius; the day of his promised abdication.

Rome, 18 December
AD
69

IT WAS THE
eighteenth of December in the eight hundred and twenty-first year of Rome’s existence. Not once, in any of those years, had an emperor, a king, a ruler of any kind, stepped away from his reign.

At the Guard barracks at the back of the Quirinal hill, the air was dense with the iron stench of distress. To breathe was hard. To think was harder. To order the men was nearly impossible.

I stood in Lucius’ office with my back pressed tight against the closed door. Outside, the murmur of three thousand men was thunder, rolling out of the gates and down the hill.

Inside, Juvens was sitting on the floor with his knees hooked up and his head in his hands and what he said in here was the same as the men were saying outside, only that his accent was more polished, his choice of words crisper, free of the profanities … well, mostly free.

‘We’re
finished. He’ll walk down there at first light, read out his pathetic little speech telling the world he didn’t want to be emperor anyway and only the overweening ambition of Valens and Caecina made him do it and now one of them’s had his head stuck on a pole and the other is helping the man who did the sticking, so he rather thinks he’d like to go back to being an ex-general, thank you very much.

‘Oh, and of course he’ll disband the Guard he created because obviously Vespasian will want to make his own out of the men who have just won him Rome. Welcome, Antonius Primus and the bastards who lost to us at Cremona last spring and got lucky a month ago. Remember the lottery? Draw out a name, find your man and kill him? It’ll be the same again only our names will be the ones written on the folded lead. We may as well fall on our own swords now.’

‘Be my guest.’ I was angry. Not the fast, furious anger that comes in a rush of blood to the head and is easily dissipated by a brief flash of violence, but a slow-burning, steadily rising fury that had brought me to a point of terrible clarity.

‘Is it treason,’ I asked, ‘if your emperor wants to abdicate and you stop him? Or is it treason if you let him set down his claim to the throne and walk away? Is the office in the man or does the man own the office?’

Juvens lifted his head slowly. He peered at me as if I had fallen out of focus. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Completely so. We made the emperor. We choose when to unmake him. And today is not that day.’

I stepped away from the door and wrenched it open. Breakfast fires danced and flickered in the dark. Dawn was a faint blue line on the eastern horizon; night still held the city. ‘You can come or you can stay here and fall on your sword.’

A thousand men stood within earshot. They were armed, and cloaked
against the cold; their helmets were a dully undulant sea, glimmering here and there, touched by torches that guttered and flamed at their margins.

A signaller waited nearby, summoned an hour ago. I grabbed his horn, strode to the podium and sounded the summons to war.

The air was short: three rising notes and three falling, repeated three times. By the end of the second phrase, every Guard in the barracks was in parade order, waiting.

Two and a half thousand impatient men stood in front of me, and the battle rage rose from them thick as fog from a winter river, harsh as salt in a wound, pliable, malleable, mine to mould to my intent.

I sucked it in with the air I needed to speak. Never in my life had I addressed so many in one place at one time. I had to guess the pitch, the strength of voice that would make it carry.

‘Men of the Imperial Guard …’ Perhaps too loud, but it made the point. ‘Today of all days, you choose your own destiny. Will you go craven into the night? Or will you stand up for all you have fought for? Will you fight one more day, and another, and the one after that, until you see—’

I had to stop; I could not shout over their noise. Antonius Primus must have heard them, and Lucius, a day’s march to the south.

The holler was ragged at first, but resolved, slowly, into a single sound: my name.

‘Gem-in-us! Gem-in-
us! Gem-in-us!
’

This, too, was an entirely new experience. My own rage grew, blossomed, tempered by a pride I had never imagined, and the power of it transported me beyond myself.

I raised my hands to call for quiet and the men hushed in a moment. I looked down across two and a half thousand faces and they beamed at me as if the sun rose only in my eyes. I had
never loved anyone as I now loved these, my men. I took a breath, knew exactly how to pitch my voice to best effect.

‘Men of the Guard. Our emperor needs our help. This is what we shall do …’

Rome, 18 December
AD
69

I WAS LIVING
through a waking nightmare. I had ridden harder, for longer, on less sleep in the past night than the cumulative total of my life.

Daylight saw me back in Rome, with the blazing hell of Tarracina seared on the backs of my eyes.

I had no idea if Julius Claudianus and his gladiators had any chance of beating Lucius’ Guardsmen, but I knew they would try and that the trying would be vicious, bloody and terrible for those who didn’t die swiftly.

The belief that, for the foreseeable future, the safest place in the empire was at Pantera’s right hand had sustained me through the night and it sustained me now, as we passed through the gates at the head of the Appian Way and into the southern suburbs of Rome.

The horses were left with an innkeeper who seemed, if not to expect us, then at least not to be overly surprised at our hasty arrival and similarly hasty departure. He had an urn of soup ready, full
of thick, floating things best not explored; we took the bowls he gave us and drank from them as we moved swiftly through the waking city. Slaves were up and about, cloaked against the winter’s cold, but few others.

In some dark, unnamed alley we stopped to urinate against a wall: a line of four men – Pantera, Trabo, Borros and me – darkly dressed, not recently shaved, pissing in arcs on to the bricks. A sudden wall of noise rose from below, where the forum awaited the day’s gathering.

Pantera’s head snapped up. ‘That’s Vitellius. He’s early. Run!’

We ran. It was mostly downhill, but still, I was spitting blood from my lungs on to the dirt by the time we reached our destination.

The Forum Romanum: once a market place, now the centre of civic life in Rome; a plaza, surrounded by ancient temples and newer civic buildings; a place of constant building since the days of Rome’s republic.

The temple of Vesta and the circular House of the Vestal Virgins lie on the eastern edge, settled between the regia, where once kings lived, and the Palatine hill. Pantera scrambled up on to a broken wall alongside the regia.

Borros and Trabo scrambled up the sheer surface in an act of magic that I couldn’t possibly repeat, but I was lifted up one-handed by Borros, so that I could see at least as far as the place where the emperor stood, surrounded by grim-faced – one might even say murderous – Guards.

A very large number of Guards.

In fact, looking through the ranks of those gathered, there were easily as many Guards as there were citizens and they were not listening to Vitellius read from his prepared script: they were watching the men around them.

Nobody, particularly, was listening to the emperor. It was humiliating enough that he read to us when any man of worth should have
been able to speak extempore in times of need. Worse was the fact that he made no effort to send his voice to the crowd. He seemed to be speaking mainly to the Guard officer next to him, and that without conviction.

His son was there, poor stammering waif who no sane man had ever believed would live long enough to take the throne, and might now not live long enough to see so much as the new year. The boy was dressed in funereal grey, and now that I looked at him in the poor winter light I saw that his father was the same.

It’s true: amazing as it may sound, Vitellius had come in mourning to his own abdication. And he was weeping!

Emperors of Rome are proud men. Of course Augustus wept when his Varus lost three legions in the forests of the Rhine, but that was a proud weeping, as of a father for the loss of a beloved son.

No emperor, not even Nero, wept for pity at his own misfortune. If he hadn’t been surrounded by stone-faced Guards, there was a fighting chance that Vitellius would have been booed out on to the streets, bundled into a sack and thrown into the Tiber. As it was, he snivelled on to the end of his speech; short, perfunctory and inadequate.

I hadn’t heard a word of it, because by then I was fixated on the Guard officer who stood so menacingly at his side. It was Geminus.