Lions of Rome

by S. J. A. Turney

  With a cry of alarm, Fulvius fell sideways, his saddle still gripping him tight, but no longer attached to the horse.

  He landed badly with a thump, and his blades skittered away across the cobbles with the impact.

  By the time the tribune had extricated himself from the troublesome saddle and began to rise, Rufinus was in front of him, sword in hand.

  ‘I’d planned to make you suffer,’ Rufinus said as he lifted the sword above the defenceless officer. ‘But time is of the essence.’ The blade fell, the tip aimed neatly between the shocked, upturned face and the collar edge of his cuirass. As the sword slammed down into him through neck and chest, impaling the heart in the process, Rufinus sighed. ‘And in the end, you’re not worth the trouble.’

  He ripped the sword free and stepped back, watching the gasping tribune clutch at his neck as blood welled up in huge quantities.

  Rufinus straightened.

  Dis was avenged. The last of the six murderous cavalrymen was gone. He might have felt something more, he thought, perhaps a sense of closure, but all that filled his mind now was an image of Cleander – the man who had kept his brother prisoner, engineered the deaths of people Rufinus respected and cared for, controlled Rome with an iron fist and a black heart, and perhaps even saw himself one day on the throne.

  And right now, Cleander was back at the city gate, facing off against Pertinax and Severus. The whole thing could end now, but Cleander had to survive the clash, ridiculously. If his entire web of grimy influence was to collapse with him, Cleander could not become a martyr, killed in a clash with the Urban Cohort. He had to survive long enough for the emperor himself to condemn him. And that depended on what happened at the Porta Raudusculana, and on that small group of brave citizens who had managed to get out of the city and were even now running for the emperor’s gate to denounce the traitor.

  Swallowing his nerves, Rufinus wiped his sword on his scarf and then discarded it before pulling himself with difficulty back up into the saddle and turning his horse around, heading back down towards the stand-off by the gate.

  Chapter Twenty Seven – Enemy of Rome

  Rome, June 17th 190 A.D., morning

  Something had happened at the gate in his absence. What had been more than a hundred mounted Praetorians when he left, sitting defiant in the saddle and with that permanent superior smirk plastered across their faces, now looked like a defensive unit in the worst of battles. There were perhaps thirty or so left, and only half of them were still mounted.

  Bodies lay strewn across the wide thoroughfare – armoured figures in both white and madder red. Blood filled the crevices between the cobbles and flags, sitting glistening in the sun, and the smell of blood and death had finally overridden the omnipresent stink of summer-parched dung that hung annually over the city.

  The fight that had broken out had been brutal and short, and the Praetorians had clearly made good account of themselves despite everything. The number of dead was roughly even despite the odds of five to one.

  Clearly someone had given the order to disengage, though whether it had been the white-clad Guard or the Cohort it was impossible to tell.

  The Praetorians were formed up now, filling the gateway with their meagre remaining numbers, battered and bloody shields held forth, crimson blades held forth against the enemy. They were defiant even to the end. Had the Guard not fallen quite so far these past few years, Rufinus might have been proud of his old unit for that. The Urban Cohort was lined up facing them once more across the corpses, their first engagement a qualified success.

  ‘Disperse and return to your fortress before we are forced to finish this,’ Pertinax bellowed from his lines.

  Rufinus peered that way. Pertinax sat astride his horse with blade visible, though no sign of its use as yet showing. Severus, on the other hand, was already noticeably blood-spattered, and his blade bore stains.

  There was no reply from the Praetorians, though they remained defiantly in position.

  Something struck Rufinus as wrong, though he couldn’t immediately identify what it was. His eyes ripped back and forth between the men of the Cohort, glaring belligerently under the controlled command of the prefect and the consul, and the Praetorians, clearly defeated and outnumbered hopelessly, and yet still standing bold.

  Both things struck him at the same time: the reason no one had answered the prefect’s demands was almost certainly because no one was commanding the Praetorians. Cleander was not there. Moreover, as his gaze took in the scene as a whole and his mind made that important connection, his eyes also told him that the numbers didn’t add up. There had been over a hundred cavalry here and now they numbered maybe thirty, and yet there were only another thirty or so white-clad bodies on the ground. Where were the missing thirty?

  Rufinus shivered. Had Cleander raced back to the Castra Praetoria to call out the rest of the Guard? Had he been aware that Fulvius had abandoned him, or just realised that the tribune had failed for some reason?

  Gingerly, hoping he wouldn’t suddenly find himself dragged into this dreadful stand-off and the bloodbath that it was almost certainly going to result in, Rufinus walked his horse out from the side street. It felt exceedingly odd to ride out into the open out here, where bodies of civilians littered the street behind the line of the Praetorians. He paused in the middle of the street, trying to figure it out.

  Cleander had been in a hurry. He was a desperate man. His grip on Rome was slipping and he knew it. The emperor was a god to his people, and even the senate would not refuse his word. No man in the empire had the authority or power to touch Cleander in his Rome… except the emperor Commodus. A word from the living Hercules would see Cleander peeled and crucified. And no matter how much the emperor relied upon the man, no matter how long they had been close Commodus was a man of his people. He loved them and they loved him. And if they had turned on Cleander, so would he.

  If the mob got to Commodus and demanded Cleander’s head the emperor would oblige, and the chamberlain knew it. But if they never reached the emperor, and instead Cleander arrived at that maritime villa, he could undo it all. Given time to work, he could piece together the events that had brought him to this juncture. He could deflect the blame onto Dionysus and Pertinax, for he was an expert at playing that sort of game. In fact, he would probably have never allowed himself to become so hoodwinked in the first place had he not become cocky, certain that he was untouchable.

  A significant number of civilians would be racing for the emperor’s villa even now, and they would be moving fast despite the distance, for the future of Rome, its chamberlain, and their own lives might depend upon it.

  Given that, there was no way Cleander would risk wasting time calling up his reserves. He had to stop that petition now. That was why he had sent Fulvius, unaware that the tribune intended to betray him at the last. Cleander had not gone back to camp, for that would be admitting defeat and climbing up onto the cross, but still Pertinax and Severus had the Urban Cohort blocking the road to Laurentum.

  Rufinus’ suspicious eyes swung back up the road whence he’d emerged, up to that rise where Fulvius lay sprawled in a heap and a pool of blood. Fulvius had been running for his life, but that was not what Rufinus had assumed when he first saw him go. He had presumed the tribune was following the lines of the old wall round to the Porta Trigemina to gain access to the sub-urbs and chase down the crowd of civilians.

  Rufinus realised with a cold knot of fear what had happened.

  While he had been up that western street dealing with Appius Fulvius, and the consul and the Urban Cohorts had been involved in a vicious fracas in the gateway that would have been chaotic and noisy, Cleander had taken one turma of cavalry and slipped away. Fulvius might not have been meaning to sneak out of another gate, but Rufinus was fairly certain that Cleander had. And if he’d not gone past Rufinus to the west, nor through this gate, and certainly not back towards the Castra Praetoria in the north, then he had gone east.

 
‘Roma Victrix!’ came a sudden loud call, and Rufinus’ head snapped round. The Praetorians were marching against the Urban Cohort once more. The last fight here was about to start. Rufinus was half inclined to lend a hand, striking at the white figures from behind, but he shook off the notion. Severus had everything under control here. They might fight hard and to the last, but the outcome was inevitable, given the difference in numbers. And if he got bogged down here he could be of little use elsewhere.

  With a deep breath, Rufinus turned his back on the last stand of Cleander’s Praetorians and rode across the main street into the narrow road opposite. It was the obvious choice. If Cleander and his riders had slipped away in the fight, they had to have used somewhere close that went in the right direction. Again, with the Cohort Rufinus had patrolled all these streets and knew them well. Two brief doglegs would take a man to the next gate in the ancient wall to the east, the Porta Naevia.

  Entering that narrow street, the atmosphere changed. Here there were no bodies. Neither the internecine fighting between Rome’s military nor the wanton butchery of her citizens had spread into this street. In fact the only signs of life were only just alive, being the ever-present plague victims floundering by the street’s edge and hoping for some sort of relief. Citizens had fled up here from the slaughter, for sure, but had left no trace of their passage.

  Rufinus’ theory seemed to be proved positive only a short distance up the street. Two separate pieces of evidence supported the notion of Cleander’s passage. A large puddle of urine from an overturned public pee amphora – a Vespasian as they used to be humorously named – had been trodden in by two horses, the wet hoof prints travelling east as they faded. And a little further up the street a pile of horse dung sealed it. Cleander and his riders had come this way, using the sacrifice of their comrades against the Cohort to buy them sufficient time to slip from the city and chase down those troublesome citizens taking their plea to the emperor.

  As Rufinus moved through two junctions, making for the crumbling ruin that had once been the Porta Naevia, he ran through some quick calculations in his head. More than ten miles to the emperor’s villa, he reasoned. Thirteen or fourteen, in fact. It sounded a long way to go by foot. Pheidippides once ran twenty six miles with tidings of the victory at Marathon in only three hours. Mind you, he died afterwards. Pheidippides could make the imperial villa then in an hour and a half.

  Back home, the gate of Tarraco had been just short of seven miles from the estate of their villa. Rufinus and Lucius had raced that distance time and again and had done it in less than an hour, although they’d been younger and fitter than most of the Roman crowd.

  Two hours, he estimated, given the urgency of their flight and the likely knowledge that they would be hunted once the Praetorians got their act together. It had been a little more than a quarter of an hour between the first citizens leaving the circus and Rufinus exiting to find a horse. He’d spent at least another quarter of an hour getting somewhere quiet and waiting for the Praetorians. And then probably another quarter of an hour following them over the hill and down towards the gate. In truth, all those moves were probably a little longer than that. Likely an hour had passed between the first man leaving the circus and the two forces facing off at the gate. More than a quarter of an hour had passed since then, too, dealing with Fulvius and then cutting back across the gate and up this way

  He chewed his lip. If his calculations were correct, the front runners of the mob heading for the imperial villa might well have had almost an hour’s lead on Cleander. They would be well on the way and closing on the estate.

  What good Rufinus was going to be able to do against a full turma of thirty cavalrymen he wasn’t sure, but if one thing was certain it was that he was not going to sit back and let Cleander have even a chance at pulling his backside back out of the fire.

  Gripping the reins so tight that his knuckles whitened, Rufinus turned the last corner and rode out to the gap in the crumbling walls that marked the site of the fallen gate. Here was the first true sign of Cleander’s passage.

  A small detachment from the Urban Cohort had been stationed at the Porta Naevia – again almost certainly the work of Severus or Cestius, for this was not a regular posting. Five bodies lay in twisted positions around the gate wearing the red tunics of the Cohort, and several Praetorians lay among them. There had been a short and brutal fight, which confirmed something for Rufinus: the Cohort must have been given standing orders to stop the Praetorians exiting this part of the city. What had started as an angry demonstration by a girl in the circus has spiralled out past the status of a riot and into something now approaching civil war, with Rome’s two central military units pitted against one another for the future of the city.

  Trying to harden his heart against what was happening, Rufinus rode out through the gate. Beyond the crumbling walls that had last been of use centuries ago in the Republican civil wars, the city had grown outwards. Indeed, were it not for the higher parts of wall still jutting up it would have been difficult to tell that the city had even had such walls.

  Making his way between houses and shop, insulae and warehouses, Rufinus followed the Via Ardeatina for a short distance before veering off into a side street and curving around the outer edge of the sub-urbs, heading for the road the mob would have taken.

  It was not long before the connecting streets led him out onto the Via Ostiensis, and there he turned and looked back towards the city. The Urban Cohort was visible from here, now with their back to him as they finished off the last of their Praetorian foe and mopped up the fracas. Before they spotted his white-clad figure and decided he was their next target, Rufinus turned south and raced away from Rome.

  He was less than two miles from the city when he found the next evidence of Cleander. A dozen or more citizens lay sprawled in mud and blood at the road side, murdered in flight as was evidenced by the wounds all showing in their backs. They had been ridden down by Cleander’s horsemen in their panic. Rufinus’ lip twitched. He vowed once more that Cleander would not see the sun set on this day.

  Less than a mile later at the junction of the two main roads there was worse to come. Here, it appeared that some of the mob who had fled Rome and who had been too slow to escape the pursuing Praetorians had tried to make a stand. Men had armed themselves with branches and sticks. More than twenty citizens lay dead, wounds inflicted at all angles in the slaughter. One Praetorian lay among them. Their sacrifice might not have been in vain, but could it really have been worth it?

  Once more Rufinus felt the bile rise into his gullet at the knowledge that he and his fellow conspirators had engineered this, had willingly allowed this slaughter to come to pass. He was beginning to feel sure they would be cursed for this for all time.

  Turning off the Via Ostiensis past the ruined bodies, he began the trek along the Via Laurentina, which led to the seaside villas of the rich and the small town that served to give the area its name. His disgust, misery and self-loathing increased with every pace of that road, for now the slaughter became constant. Here and there, every few hundred paces along the way, lay fresh bodies. Cleander and his Praetorians had moved through the travelling throng like a scythe through wheat, destroying all in their path. All to stop the truth reaching the emperor.

  Truth?

  Rufinus felt sick. He might never be able to say what the truth was again, for the truth that Cleander so feared and that was carried by the desperate citizens was itself little more than a tissue of lies built up by Rufinus and his friends.

  He had been trotting thus far, knowing that he needed to save his horse’s energy, for this was no short distance and there may be a fight coming at the end of it. But now, as he began to smell the salt of the sea in the air, Rufinus put heel to flank and urged his horse into greater speed. Time was short, and the citizens and Cleander both could be approaching the imperial villa now.

  The eight or nine miles of the Via Laurentina passed in a horrible blur of dry, dusty
road and twisted, ruined bodies. Twice more on the journey he found evidence of brave stands made by a few to save their companions and slow the chamberlain, such that their plea might reach the emperor’s ear. Both of those violent massacres had claimed another Praetorian. Still, there would be so many remaining with Cleander.

  Finally, as the salt tang became noticeably stronger the sea came into view, the small town lying visible on the coast just a mile to the south. The great estates of the rich lay along the seafront north of that and so Rufinus turned, his route marked out with dead Romans in case he ever needed directions, and rode for the emperor’s villa.

  A dozen or more corpses further along the main road, and he knew he was close. The sound of a distant engagement drifted back in the quiet air: screams and clashes and the thunder of hooves still distant enough to become just one great rumble to anyone who had not lived through it often enough to pick apart the strands.

  Time was tight. He was near the great estates and that meant that they had to be close to the emperor now. Had Cleander beaten him to it after all this? But then surely if he could hear the racket of combat from here, then so could the residents of the imperial estate?

  He spotted the end of the emperor’s drive easily. He had never been here, of course, but he had served in Commodus’ guard and he knew the glorious emperor’s style well enough. The other drives he had passed along the road had been tastefully marked with a fountain of tumbling water over statues, or a marble plaque.

  Only here did Hercules stand watch along with some Amazon woman with one breast, both in garishly-painted marble at the entrance of the drive. This was the residence of the emperor, and Rufinus would have known it without the small crenulated shed where a guard would usually sit, or the small pile of civilian corpses lying at the junction like some kind of grisly milepost.

  He could hear the fighting now in the driveway and turned the corner in the hot summer sun, between the lines of trees that bordered the drive. The sight that met him pulled his heart into his throat.