The Eagle's Vengeance (42 page)

Albinus shrugged.

‘So? It may be unspendable, but it’ll melt down just as easily as any other gold.’

The tribune tossed his aureus back into the chest.

‘Why not keep that coin as a memento of what we’re about to do? One aureus won’t be missed, but it’s my opinion that we’ll be in deep trouble if we remove many more.’

The senator frowned.

‘Why?’

Scaurus pointed at the chest’s interior wall, and at a line scored deeply into the grain on all sides of the deep wooden box level with the top of the mass of coins.

‘The line marks the level that the gold in the chest should reach. If we skim any of it out it’ll be more than obvious, and we’ll all doubtless be interrogated until whoever did the skimming confesses, and then dies in a manner that won’t best please their ancestors. I think it best to play this one straight.’

Albinus grinned wolfishly, lowering his voice so that only Scaurus could hear.

‘Unlike the last time we laid hands on this gold, you mean?’

The tribune nodded solemnly.

‘Indeed. These coins are highly likely to have been minted from the very same metal that we rescued from Gerwulf last year, after he took control of the Alburnus Major mine and stripped it clean. Gold which I delivered to you, at your explicit orders as I recall it, leaving
you
with the sole responsibility for its safe delivery to the imperial treasury.’ He paused for a moment before speaking again. ‘And, as I noted at the time, the only official record of its quantity and value.’ Albinus nodded, having the good grace to look suitably embarrassed. ‘It must have been minted into these coins somewhere under the praetorian prefect’s control …’

He paused for a moment, waiting for the senator to speak. Albinus stared at the gold with undisguised avarice again before sighing and turning back to the tribune.

‘Illyricum, most likely. Perennis has managed to put his sons in command of the armies of both Pannonia and Dalmatia, and there are several cities with the right to mint coins in those two provinces.’ He paused, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip for a moment before speaking again. ‘So, he must have ordered the gold to be shipped from Dacia to one of his boys, who then oversaw it being minted into these rather interesting coins after which it was sent north to Britannia. I presume that Perennis had someone in place in Eboracum to make sure that it reached the right hands?’

Scaurus nodded.

‘A legion tribune. Perennis took advantage of a stupid little mutiny by the Twentieth Legion that was over almost before it began to sack every legatus in the country, and sent his own men to replace them. This man, Fulvius Sorex, was given orders to make sure that the gold was kept safe until the new men arrived. They were clearly going to use it to bribe the Britannia legions into rising up together, so that they could be marched south through Gaul to join up with the Illyricum legions north of Rome.’

‘I see. Three legions from Britannia, another four from Pannonia and Dalmatia, plus all of their supporting auxiliaries would make for an army of at least seventy or eighty thousand men, and that’s before we get into the army on the Rhenus. With that sort of military muscle to hand a man close to the throne could assassinate the emperor, take the purple and turn to face any challengers from the eastern end of the empire with his confidence high. I expect that the praetorian prefect was only waiting for word from Britannia that the legions had declared for him before striking at the imperial family, although he must have been informed of the gold’s mysterious disappearance by now. But why, I wonder, didn’t he simply send a decent-sized army north to intercept you before you reached Rome?’

Scaurus looked at his fingers in apparent disgust at the dirt ingrained beneath the nails.

‘That’s probably down to the fact that we made sure that Fulvius Sorex wasn’t in any condition to tell Perennis’s legati anything when they arrived. When we left Eboracum the Sixth Legion was under the command of their camp prefect, a man with no love for the praetorian prefect, and the story that Perennis’s men will have received from Prefect Castus is that Sorex secreted the gold away for safe keeping whilst keeping the location to himself. Worse than that, it seems that the century of men he used for the task of hiding it were apparently all killed in an ambush north of the Antonine Wall, which means that there’s nobody left alive who can identify the spot where a fortune in gold is supposed to lie hidden. And without that gold Perennis’s legati won’t dare to declare a mutiny, since its presence in the province was hardly kept secret. The soldiers of the Britannia legions will believe that the legati are keeping it for themselves, and they’re not likely to risk rebelling against the throne without getting their fair share of the spoils.’

Albinus nodded his head slowly, contemplating the gold coin in his hand.

‘So it seems that you’ve saved Commodus from an ignominious death, young man. Mind you, Perennis will doubtless be readying himself to strike anyway, and gambling on the Pannonian legions being strong enough to deal with any resistance, and given his position of power I’d say he’s got a decent enough chance of carrying it off. He’s got the praetorians, doubtless he also controls the Urban Watch, and he’ll not let us get within a mile of the palace with this gold if he gets so much as a sniff that we’re inside the city.’

Scaurus gestured to Marcus to have the chest locked and replaced on the cart.

‘Which, I’ll admit, is what’s been troubling me all the way from Britannia. There’s not much point in our carrying it this far if any attempt to put it in front of the emperor is likely to end up with us all looking down the spears of unhelpful palace guards. So tell me, Decimus, exactly how is it that you think we’re going to be able to carry this gold into the imperial palace?’

The smile returned to Albinus’s face.

‘Ah, well that’s a secret that’ll have to stay mine and mine alone for just a little bit longer. Let’s just say that the praetorian prefect isn’t the only man in the emperor’s court with ambitions above his station. All will be revealed in good time.’

He turned back to look down the road towards Rome, the city’s walls glowing amber in the late afternoon sun’s soft glow.

‘And now I suggest that we get your boys here into their barracks, and give you and the men who’ll carry the gold into the city time to have a wash and a brush-up, and get them into some clean clothes. Armour, muscles and dirt may be good at keeping the bandits at bay, but they’re going to look a little out of place to the Watch, wouldn’t you say, not to mention Commodus himself?’

‘There’s another one having his blade confiscated. There are going to be a lot of happy muggers in the Subura later on tonight when all the men that have been disarmed at this gate try to make their way home!’

The leader of Albinus’s bodyguard, a bull-necked man with a decidedly military look called Cotta stood up from the crouching position in which he had been peering around the corner of the side street’s last house and shook his head in amazement as he looked back down the length of the column of men waiting behind him. The sixty Tungrian soldiers selected to carry the gold chests were flanked on either side by the twenty men of Albinus’s bodyguard, most of whom had adopted deceptively relaxed postures and were exchanging banter with the local children, who had quickly overcome their wariness and were swarming around them in the hope of begging small coins. Cotta saluted Albinus crisply, pointing back towards the gate.

‘There’s no way through there, Senator, unless we want to be relieved of our weapons and probably worse …’

Marcus nodded at the words, reflexively putting a hand to the dagger buried deep in the folds of his toga. Albinus and Scaurus were similarly armed, and every man in their twenty-strong bodyguard had at least one knife concealed about his person in addition to their heavy clubs, mostly strapped to upper arms and thighs beneath their tunics. The Watch standing guard at the Viminal Gate, one of the north-eastern entrances to the city inside the walls, were clearly taking their time processing the queue of humanity wishing to enter Rome, and searching every man, woman and child with equal thoroughness, and a lengthy queue was building up at the arched gateway. Even in the darkness, hours after the sun had set, the traffic into and out of the city via the gate’s opening was as busy as if it were midday, and Marcus was grateful for Albinus’s bodyguards both for the protection they provided the unarmed Tungrians and the light from their blazing torches. He looked up and down the queue’s shadowy length with an expression of irritation.

‘I still don’t understand why passage inside the walls is being restricted like this. When I left here the gates weren’t guarded, and hadn’t been in my memory. Who needs to guard the gates of a city that rules every scrap of inhabitable ground for a thousand miles in every direction, and where the city itself has long outgrown the walls that once surrounded it?’

Albinus laughed wryly, clapping a big hand on his shoulder.

‘Well now, Centurion, you sound just like a senator whose opinions I used to admire so greatly when he spoke on such matters, before he was murdered by the praetorian prefect, along with his entire family, simply to silence a potential dissenter and take his estate into the imperial treasury.’ He looked Marcus up and down in the torchlight as if sizing him up for the first time. ‘You may not look very much like him, but in mannerisms and inflection you could be Appius Valerius Aquila’s son for all I know.’

For a second Marcus wondered if he was going to make the obvious conclusion, and identify him as the dead senator’s only remaining descendant, but instead the big man waved a hand at the gate.

‘The answer to your peevish question is simple enough, Centurion, if you consider the politics of the day and our mission tonight. Perennis controls not only the praetorians, but also the Urban Cohorts and the City Watch. And if the former tend to spend most of their time sitting around in barracks waiting for a riot or a gang fight to give them a reason to break some heads, the Watch are more used to mixing with the people, which is why he’s using them to control what comes into the city,
if
you take my meaning.’

Scaurus leaned forward, his voice lowered to little more than a murmur.

‘You’re saying that he has them looking out for
this
…’

He rolled his eyes to look at the nearest of the gold chests, standing in the middle of the side street with a half-dozen brawny Tungrians waiting stoically around it, ready to heft its deceptively heavy weight back into the carrying position. Albinus nodded with a knowing grin.

‘Indeed I am. And were we to progress to the front of that most unpleasant-smelling queue we could most certainly expect to be ordered to open the chests. At which point, whilst we greatly outnumber the men on guard, we would quickly find ourselves outnumbered by their reinforcements, surrounded, arrested and dragged away to the local Watch station –’ he lowered his voice and adopted a solemn expression ‘– never to be seen again, I expect.’

The tribune raised an eyebrow.

‘Unless …?’

Albinus’s grin returned.

‘Unless, of course, something were to happen to distract the Watch from their important duty. As it happens, one of the men who passed through the gate just now, having been thoroughly searched of course and found to be carrying nothing more threatening than his own cucumber, is even now acting to provide us with just such a distraction.’

He paused for a moment, staring up at the night sky above the looming city walls before speaking again.

‘The problem with owning property in the city, of course, is just how prone one’s buildings are to the risk of fire. It only takes the slightest hint of a spark in the wrong place to send an entire apartment block up in flames, a cooking stove overturned in a ground-floor tavern, or perhaps a candle catching at a piece of wind-blown fabric. And of course, once one of the blasted things is alight everything around it is at risk. It’s a good thing we have the Watch to deal with such emergencies, wouldn’t you agree?’

As if on cue, a faint chorus of frenzied shouts sounded over the queue’s grumbling murmur and Albinus nodded smugly. After a short wait, during which the shouting from beyond the walls grew steadily louder, a glow became visible above the wall’s rampart, and dirty grey smoke started to rise into view, illuminated from below by the fire’s flames. The initial signs of the fire quickly strengthened, the grey stain that obscured the stars rapidly thickening as the fire took hold of whatever it was that was burning fiercely beyond the wall.

‘Any time about
now
, I’d say, or at least I bloody well hope so …’ Just as Albinus spoke, the half-dozen men standing guard at the city gate were summoned by a panting runner, and the senator nodded his head sagely, pointing to a mongrel in the act of emptying its bowels in the shadow of the gate. ‘Ah, it seems that the fire is stronger than first believed. At a guess the next-door building has gone up in flames too, and I’d bet a gold aureus to the turd that dog’s so busily curling out that it’ll be another one of my properties. When the gods decide to punish a man they certainly do so thoroughly, don’t they?’

With shouts to the queuing citizens to stay where they were, the Watch ran for the fire, leaving the waiting queue looking at each other in bemusement.

‘And there’s the only real problem with combining the duties of policemen and fire fighters. When fire strikes, who’s to watch the city, or in this case, the city’s gates? Come along then, let’s not keep our date waiting. He’s uncommonly bad tempered when he believes he’s not getting the respect that he’s due!’

The senator led them through the unguarded gate in the wake of the other members of the queue who had been similarly swift to take advantage of the Watch’s absence.

‘This way, gentlemen, turn right here and we’ll head on down the Viminal Hill until we have no choice but to dive into the slums. You’ll be earning your corn soon enough, eh Cotta?’

The streets of Rome were still warm three hours after the sun had dropped below the horizon, and Marcus could feel the heat that had been baked into the stones through the leather soles of the sandals that Albinus had procured for them. Like the rest of the clothing he’d been given the shoes were of the best quality, made with buttery-soft leather that moulded to his feet like a second skin. The three officers were all wearing heavy woollen togas, the hems of both Tungrians’ garments decorated with the thin purple stripe of the equestrian class, and the once crisp linen tunic beneath Marcus’s weighty garment had quickly become damp with his sweat. Scaurus had laughed quietly at his centurion as the younger man had awkwardly donned the toga, unfamiliar with its folds after so long a gap since the last time he’d worn the garment, pointing to the thin equestrian stripe with a sympathetic grimace.