Rome 4: The Art of War (50 page)

They moved to and from the Vestals to the gathering crowd dispensing favours: dates and apples in accordance with the Saturnalia; small denomination coins; slips of paper with exhortations and prophecies:
Fortune favours you
;
Honour those who support you
;
Begin each day gladly, and it will end so
.

Simply to be gazed upon by a Vestal could free a condemned man from his execution. On the day after the temple burned, with the smoke still billowing up from the top of the Capitol hill, everyone wanted to fall under their stare. They were the nearest thing Rome had to living gods and we all needed their goodwill.

The mood of the crowd was strangely erratic. There wasn’t a man, woman
or child there who didn’t think Rome was on the road to certain ruin; the temple had gone and their emperor had all but abdicated, both things unheard of in the city’s history. On the other hand, it seemed as if the gods had simply taken the inversions of Saturnalia and pushed them to their natural limit. The emperor was no longer ruler. The people were no longer safe. Anything was possible.

So the crush of the crowd grew denser with every passing heartbeat and we were caught up in it, helpless as a pair of corks in the ocean; for a while, it was all Pantera and I could do to keep sight of each other, never mind follow anyone else.

No one gave us any favours and we broke out eventually, but we had lost touch with Marcus in the chaos and when we found him again his cocky know-everything air had gone.

‘We lost them.’

‘What?’ Pantera could make a single word sting like a sword cut. ‘Where?’

‘In the crowd. Not ten paces away. They were there, all of them, and then they were gone.’

Pantera’s gaze cut us both equally. I had never been afraid of him, but I was then. ‘Find them,’ he said. ‘Our lives and the future of the empire rest on it.’

Rome, 20 December
AD
69

IN A CITY
layered with a fine mist of ash, the silver-boys were everywhere; I’d never known the streets of Rome so infested with small boys. Every rooftop had one, every side alley had two and their whistles meshed us in a net of sound just as the falling ash from the temple fire meshed us in filth.

We thought the Vestals had been sent by the gods to protect us from Pantera. The crowd around them was like an army, the front row solid as a shield wall.

I was set to break through, with my shoulder angled down and to the fore as we did in the Guards. Domitian was with me; he must have read of the tactic, or seen his father show it off, or his brother.

But Jocasta dodged into a side shop and came out with cloaks and hoods – she must have paid for them, but the bargaining was very brief – and said instead, ‘The best place to hide is in a crowd. All we have to do is change how we look and we can
get in amongst the people, become one of them. Do it quickly. The silver-boys are everywhere.’

I caught Domitian’s eye and gave the nod, and together we pushed the crowd open a little to let us all in. As soon as the pressure was off, the mass of men and women closed again behind us, solid as a dungeon door, trapping us in, but trapping out Marcus and his light-footed spies.

We kept close in our pairs, me and Jocasta, Horus and Domitian, Caenis and Matthias. Of them all, Caenis and Matthias had been hardest to persuade into coming; Caenis would not have it that Pantera intended anything other than the best for her and Vespasian and, by inclusion, Vespasian’s son. It took Domitian himself to point out that her house had been burned to the ground because Pantera had been seen going into it and that no decent man would have allowed that.

Bunched together, keeping watch each for the other, we were swept up by the crowd that surged in the Vestals’ wake down the Palatine, and across the open space of the forum.

It was there, or close to it, that I saw Pantera standing on the margins with blond-Marcus to his one side and Borros to the other. He looked as thunderously angry as I’ve ever seen him, and he was clearly searching for us. I tipped my head down, let the hood of my cloak fall further over my face.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Jocasta’s vindicated smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Don’t be. Loyalty is a coin of infinite value, only sometimes it needs to be spent with more care. Still, we need to get out of here. He’ll work out soon enough how we got past him. I would.’

That was easy to say and harder to do. We were swept slowly out of the forum, leaving behind the temples and the ugly statue of Nero, and on down the Flaminian Way.

We passed on north, with the Aventine to our left, past the circus and
all the gladiator schools, past the temple to Claudius. We were heading out towards the markets that lined the Tiber, towards the bridge that was the front line of Vitellius’ defences, when a flash of colour caught my eye: cowled robes in vermilion and midnight blue, worn by a huddle of shifty-looking individuals. Then one of them turned round and what I saw wasn’t human.

‘What the fuck is
that
?’

My voice was a squeak, my blade half drawn. Horus put a warning hand on my arm. ‘Don’t. They’re priests. It’s a mask.’

‘Anubis,’ Domitian said, in wonder. ‘Dog-headed god of the Underworld. Are they Alexandrians?’

‘They’re priests of Isis,’ Horus said. ‘There’s a temple behind the water tower that’s said to have greater wealth than any other in Rome. They’ll be taking it out of the city before Antonius’ legions come in and decide to sack it.’

Jocasta said, ‘And this is their best chance; nobody is going to commit acts of war while the Vestals are in procession. If they can leave now, they’ll be safe. Shall we join them?’

Her smile was all challenge. Caenis saw it and bit her lip, but Domitian had begun to catch the fever of the day.

‘Who has gold? Isis is only rich here because the priests love the sight of it.’

‘I do.’ Jocasta untied her belt. Along the back was sewn a pouch exactly like the one I had worn when I came into Rome. She hadn’t used hers as a weapon, but she could have done; it was easily heavy enough. When she opened it, we saw gold glimmer softly inside.

‘I have enough here to pay a dozen men for a year. Trabo, I believe you can match it?’

I could, and I did. There was something of an altercation when we first joined the group, much vermilion flouncing by the priests, whose dog-headed masks prevented them from offering coherent argument, but Jocasta opened her hidden purse and
poured out her gold, and I joined her, and very swiftly the muffled grunting stopped.

A tall figure at the back spoke a sharp order in a language I didn’t know and someone nearer to us lifted the mask, revealing a woman of mature years beneath.

‘What for do you offer this?’

She wasn’t Roman, clearly, but nor did she sound Alexandrian.

‘For sanctuary amongst the people of Isis,’ Jocasta said. ‘We must leave Rome
incognito
. In the name of the Chosen, who is our personal friend, we would ask that you let us join your procession. When, in the coming days, the rightful emperor sits on the throne, your reward will be ten times what we offer now.’

Domitian started forward. ‘My father—’

Jocasta’s glance silenced him more effectively than anything I could have said, but still, in those two words he had revealed everything.

All the priests except the tall one at the back removed their masks then, and were exposed as men and women in equal numbers. Another short order came from the hidden one, at which the elderly priestess, with obvious regret, said, ‘Keep your gold, lady. In the name of the Chosen, and of the god, we shall usher you in safety across the river. We go to our temple, which is some half mile beyond the bridge. Will that please you?’

‘It will please us beyond saying.’ Jocasta tipped her coins back into her purse. She nodded past the rest to the tall, masked figure at the back. ‘We thank you.’

Rome, 20 December
AD
69

HOW DO YOU
find one small woman and one youth in a city of millions? How do you find them when there are twenty thousand armed men standing at your gates waiting to enter the city – and they will have no trouble at all finding the man they seek because your emperor insists on staying in his palace, which is the first place they’ll look?

The Vestals had agreed to take our offer of terms to Antonius, which had at least bought us time to look for Domitian and Caenis, but we had failed to find them. And then came the Vestals’ answer, brought by one of the blue-ribboned matrons and three monstrous lictors.

I relayed it to Vitellius in private.

‘Antonius Primus says no. He has turned down the Vestals’ plea for peace. He says that all hope of armistice vanished with Sabinus’ death and he will attack today. To make it easier for both sides to identify their own men, he has issued his forces with blue armbands, that being the colour Vespasian favours. They have
sworn never to take them off in an effort to appear other than they are, even if they have been cornered by our men and are facing certain death. He suggests we colour our men green on the same basis. Accordingly, he has sent us three bolts of green silk as his gift.’

Vitellius stared at me flatly, running his tongue round his teeth. ‘Pushy little man, as I remember,’ he said. ‘Did your men learn anything from their trip across the river?’

Eight of my men had dressed as lictors and accompanied the Vestals into Antonius’ camp, to assess the enemy numbers and their dispositions, their morale. I said, ‘They report what we already know: that Antonius Primus has at least twenty thousand men straining at the leash, in high morale, desperate to attack.’

‘Nothing new, then.’ Vitellius was sounding ever more like a general. His tone was dry and self-mocking, not the piteous weeping of the day before. ‘Have we found the boy Domitian yet? Or Caenis?’

‘Not yet, lord. And now it can no longer be our priority. I should be out there with the men. We have to hold Rome until Lucius gets here.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Three hours after our messengers reach him, I hope.’

Four had been sent, none had yet returned, nor had any others arrived to us from Lucius, but Vitellius didn’t need to know that.

I said, ‘He’ll be here within the day. In the meantime, Drusus will take care of you. If—’

Drusus coughed discreetly from the doorway. ‘Lord?’

He stepped back and a figure entered coated in fine white ash so that for a moment he looked like an albino. It wasn’t until he stared at me and Vitellius simultaneously with his uneven eyes that I knew who he was.

‘Felix!’ I bounded forward. I could have kissed him: he was one of the four
I had sent to Lucius and I had despaired of ever seeing him alive. ‘What news?’

The boy was fizzing with a strange kind of energy that I could not read. Vitellius could, though; he had grown up with Lucius and knew the signs.

‘I think he has recently killed, is that not so, child?’

The boy flushed scarlet to the roots of his pale hair. ‘There were more bandits on the road, lord. I had to—’

‘I’m sure you did. Do you bring word from my brother?’

‘I do. He had not time to write, but he entrusted me to say this to his brother, the emperor …’ He screwed up his eyes and, in a voice not entirely unlike Lucius’, said, ‘Give my apologies to my dearly beloved brother, and tell him that I am in the midst of heavier fighting than I had anticipated, but that none the less I will be in Rome three days from now, perhaps sooner if all goes well.’

‘Three days?’ Vitellius gaped. ‘Who is he fighting?’

Felix looked confused. ‘Men, lord?’ he offered.

‘Men!’ Vitellius laughed, hoarsely. ‘Gods preserve us.’ He looked at me, his eyes raw with loss. ‘Three days until my brother comes. I make that about two and three-quarter days too late, wouldn’t you say? Even if he wins against his so-tenacious rebels, which he may well not do.’

At least we knew. I said, ‘Lord, you must leave. Go to the Aventine, if you will not flee Rome. You’re offering yourself as a sacrifice if you stay in the palace and there’s no point in that.’

‘What will you do?’

‘With your permission, I will join Juvens in defence of the city. I am more use out there than in here. I will keep an eye out for Domitian and Caenis, but only fools will be out in the streets with the fighting that is coming and they are not that. I beg you to let me go. Drusus will protect your person better than I ever could.’

My emperor
was not a vindictive man, and he knew what I wanted. ‘Go, then. Do what you must.’

He had an idea, then; I was learning to recognize the signs. I saw him think a moment, then take off yet another of his many rings and hold it out to Felix. ‘Do you know how to talk with the silver-boys, child?’

A sudden craftiness entered Felix’ features. ‘It may be possible, lord.’

Lucius would have had him hanging from his wrists over a slow fire until he got the truth out of him, but we didn’t care; this boy had got through to us when three others had failed. That his message was bad was not his fault, and personally I wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed half the Guard to get it to us.

Ever aware of the power of gold, Vitellius placed the ring in the boy’s grubby palm and folded his fingers over it.

‘This and the titles that go with it are yours if you can talk to the silver-boys and get them to help you find Domitian, younger son of Vespasian. He’s in the city somewhere and we would bring him to safety before the fighting starts. His life is at risk if he remains at large; tell him that.’

It was tactfully done. Felix clasped the ring to his chest, his pale eyes shining. ‘Lord, I will find him,’ he said, ‘and make him safe.’

For a long time after he had gone, Drusus wore a small smile on his face, like a father whose favoured son has performed a deed of great valour.

Three being the number for luck, I wound my emerald-green scarf three times around my upper arm, which was fine, except that the flapping ends spooked the rangy bay gelding the stable master had sent for me.