'We live in a strange age, Nisus.' Vitellius carefully slurred his words.
'We have to be careful about what we say and who we say it to. You asked me what I believed.'
'Yes.'
'Can I trust you?' Vitellius turned and smiled at him. 'Can I afford to trust you, my Carthaginian friend? Can I assume you are what you purport to be, and not some cunning spy of the Emperor?'
Nisus was hurt by the accusation, as ViteIIius had hoped he would be.
'Sir, we haven't known each other long,' the wine caused him to stumble over the words, 'but I think, I'm sure, we can trust each other.
'At least, I trust you.'
Vitellius smiled faintly and clapped the Carthaginian on the shoulder.
'And I trust you. Really I do. and tell you what I believe.' He paused to look round carefully. Aside from the restless toil of the engineers. only a handful of men roved among the ranked tents. Satisfied that they would not be overheard, Vitellius leaned closer.
'What I believe is this. That the rightful destiny of Rome has been perverted by the Caesars and their cronies. The Emperor's only concern has been to keep the mob happy. Nothing else matters. Remove Claudius and the mob won't need to be quite so spoiled all the time. And that means the burden can be lifted from the rest of the empire. Then maybe we can look forward to an empire based on partnership between civilised nations rather than one based on fear and oppression. Who knows, even Carthage might return to her rightful position in such an empire… '
Vitellius saw the effect his words were having on Nisus. His face was now fixed with an expression of idealistic zeal. Vitellius had to stop himself smiling. It amused him immensely that men were so easily suborned to idealistic causes. Provide them with a sufficiently attractive set of ideals to flatter themselves with, and you could command them to do anything for the sake of the cause. Find a man who craved significance and the admiration of others, and you found a fanatic. Such men were fools, Vitellius told himself. Worse than fools. They were dangerous to other people, but more importantly, they were dangerous to themselves. Ideals were figments of deluded imaginations. Vitellius believed he saw the Roman world as it truly was – the means by which those with sufficient guile to bend it to their will could achieve their ends, nothing more. People too stupid to see this were merely tools waiting to be used by better men.
Or women, he reflected, as he recalled the skill with which Flavia had made her play against the Emperor, behind the back of her husband. She and her friends might have succeeded, but for the brutal methods of Narcissus and his imperial agents, like Vitellius himself. Vitellius recalled the man who had had to be virtually beaten to death before he yielded her name. He had been executed immediately afterwards, and now the only person other than himself who knew of Flavia's complicity was Vespasian.
'Carthage reborn,' Nisus mused softly. 'I've only dared dream of that.'
'But first we must remove Claudius,' Vitellius said quietly.
'Yes,' Nisus whispered. 'But how?'
Vitellius stared at him, as if considering how far he would go down this line. He took another mouthful of wine before continuing in a voice scarcely louder than the surgeon's, 'There is a way. And you can help me. I need to get a message through to Caratacus. Will you do it?'
The moment of decision had arrived and Nisus lowered his head into his hands and tried to think. The wine helped to simplify the process, if only because it stopped any cold, logical thinking interfering with his emotions and dreams. With very little effort it was clear to him that Rome would never accept him into her bosom. That Carthage would always be treated with harsh contempt. That the iniquities of the empire would last for ever – unless Claudius was removed. The truth was clear and uncomfortable. Drunk as he was, the prospect of what he must do filled his heart with cold terror.
'Yes, Tribune. I'll do it.'
Chapter Thirty-Two
'Where's your Carthaginian friend?' asked Macro. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, admiring the view from his tent down to the river. The evening meal was finished and tiny insects swirled in the glimmering light. Macro slapped at his thigh and smiled as his lifted hand revealed a tiny red stain and the mangled smear of mosquito. 'Ha!'
'Nisus?' Cato looked up from the letter he was writing at his camp desk, pen poised above the grey terracotta pot of ink. 'Haven't seen him for days, sir.'
'Good riddance, I say. Trust me, lad. His kind are best avoided.'
'His kind?'
'You know, Carthaginians, Phoenicians and all those other shifty trading nations. Can't be trusted. Always looking for an angle.'
'Nisus seemed honest enough, sir.'
'Rubbish. He was after something. They all are. When he realised you had nothing he wanted, off he went.'
'I rather think he went off, as you put it, due to the nature of the conversation we had that night he cooked us a meal, sir.'
'Please yourself.' Macro shrugged, hand poised over another irritating insect weaving dangerously close to his arm. He slapped, missed, and the mosquito whirled away with a high-pitched whine. 'Bastard!' 'That's a bit strong, sir.'
'I was talking to a bug, not about your mate,' Macro replied testily, 'though one's as much of a nuisance as the other.'
'If you say so, sir.'
'I do, and now I think I need a little refreshment!' He rose to his feet and arched his back, hands on hips. 'We all sorted for the night?'
It was the century's turn for watch duty on the east wall; the recent battle losses meant that each watch had to stand for nearly twice the normal length of time. It was unfair but, as Cato had come to learn, fairness was not at the forefront of the military mind.
'Yes, sir, I've sent the rota up to headquarters and I'll make the rounds myself just to make sure.'
'Good, I don't want any of our lads trying to sneak a quick kip. We're low enough on numbers already, thanks to the locals. Can't afford to make matters worse by having any of them stoned to death.'
Cato nodded. Sleeping on sentry duty, like so many other active-service offences, carried the death penalty. The execution had to be performed by the comrades of the guilty man.
'Right then, if anyone needs me I'll be in the centurion's mess tent.' Cato watched him disappear into the gloom with a sprightly step, The centurions had managed to wangle a number of wine amphorae out of one of the transport ship captains. The consignment had been intended for a tribune of the Fourteenth, but the man had drowned one night when he had decided to go for a swim after far too much Falernian, and his new supply was snapped up before the slow-witted captain thought to return the cargo to its sender. Long before the Gaulish wine merchant received word that his customer was well past paying the bill, the wine would have been guzzled.
Left on his own, Cato hurried through the day's administration without any interruption and tidied the scrolls away. This was his chance for some peace and quiet. Much as he admired and liked his centurion, Macro was annoyingly sociable and insisted on conversation at the most inconvenient moments. So much so that Cato often found himself grinding his teeth in frustration while Macro prattled on in his soldierly manner.
Cato was painfully aware of how difficult it was for him to make small talk with his military comrades, even now after several months in the army. The easy masculine jocularity of the legionaries irritated him terribly. Crude, obvious and embarrassing, it was second nature to them, but he found it difficult to join in, not least because he feared that any attempt he made at the appropriate argot would be seen through in an instant. There was nothing worse, he reflected, than being caught out in a patronising attempt at slumming it with the common soldiery.
Cato occasionally tried to steer his conversation with Macro round to more stimulating matters. But the blank and sometimes annoyed expression that greeted his efforts quickly stilled his tongue. What Macro might lack in sophistication he made up for with generosity of spirit, courage, honesty and moral integrity, but right now Cato just wanted so
meone to talk to – someone like Nisus. He had enjoyed their fishing expedition, and had hoped to cultivate a real friendship with the Carthaginian. The surgeon's quiet sensitivity was a balm to the raw emotions grating inside him. But Nisus had been driven away by the blunt hostility of Macro. Worse, he seemed to be falling under the spell of Tribune Vitellius. So who could he unburden his feelings to now?
Cato wondered if the answer was to keep a diary and commit his troubles to paper. Better still, he would write to Lavinia and make the most of the tortured poet-philosopher role he had been using to impress her. As real as the traumatic experiences of battle had been for him, he was also analytical and intelligent enough to see them as being in some way instructive. They would confer on him a sense of enigmatic world-weariness that was sure to impress Lavinia.
Carefully spreading out a blank scroll with his forearm, Cato dipped his pen into the inkpot, wiped off the excess ink and placed the tip on the plain surface of the scroll. There was light enough to write by for a while yet before he would have to resort to the dull glow of the oil lamp, and he took time to order his thoughts carefully. The pen made contact with the scroll, and neatly scratched out the formal greeting:
The pen paused interminably as Cato faced the familiar challenge of the first sentence. He frowned with the effort of producing an opening line that would be impressive without being unnecessarily florid. A nip sentence would put Lavinia in the wrong frame of mind for what would follow. Conversely, an overly serious tone at the outset might be off-putting. He slapped the side of his head.
'Come on! Think!'
He glanced up to make sure he hadn't been overheard, and coloured as he met the twinkling eye of a passing legionary. Cato nodded back and smiled self-consciously before he charged the pen with ink and wrote the first sentence.
My darling, scarcely a spare moment goes by when I do not think of you.
Not bad, he reflected, and true in word, if not wholly in spirit. In the few moments when his life was not busy with some duty or other, he did indeed think of Lavinia. Especially that one time they had made love in Gesoriacum shortly before she had left for Rome with her mistress, Flavia.
He bent his head and continued. This time inspiration came easily, and his pen hurriedly scratched out the words that poured from his heart, flying back and forth between the inkpot and the scroll. He told Lavinia of the very personal way in which he loved her, of the passion that burned in his loins at the very thought of her, and of how every day marked one less before the next time they would be in each other's arms.
Cato paused to read over his work, grimacing here and there as his eyes froze on the odd glib phrase, cliche or clumsy expression. But overall he was pleased with the effect. Now he wanted to tell her his news. What he had been doing since they had parted. He wanted to unburden himself of all the terrible things he felt compelled to remember but could never make sense of. The guilt at the recall of a killing thrust, the stench of a battlefield two days later, the foul oily smoke of the funeral pyres blotting out the sun and choking the lungs of those caught downwind. The way blood and intestines glistened as they were spilled on a bright summer day.
Most of all he wanted to confess to the bowel-clenching terror he had felt as the transport had approached the screaming ranks of the Britons on the far side of the Tamesis. He wanted to tell someone how close he had come to cowering down in the scuppers and screaming out his refusal to take any more.
But just as he feared that his comrades would react with disgust and pity at his weakness, so he feared that Lavinia, too, would consider him less than a man. And conscious of his youth and lack of worldliness compared to the other men of the legion, he feared that she would despise him as a frightened little boy.
Dusk dimmed into night, lit only by the thin crescent of a waning moon, and finally Cato decided that he could not tell Lavinia any more than a bald outline of the battles he had fought in. He lit the lamp, and by its guttering glow he leaned over the scroll and briskly and simply described the progress of the campaign so far. He had nearly finished by the time Macro rolled in from the centurions' mess, swearing loudly as he stubbed his toe against a tent peg.
'Who the fuck put that there?' His anger only made his speech more slurred. He stumbled past Cato into the tent and collapsed heavily onto his camp bed, which in turn collapsed with a splintering crack. Cato raised his eyes and shook his head before wiping his pen and clearing his writing materials away.
'You all right, sir?'
'I'm far from all right! Bloody crap bed's croaked on me,' the centurion mumbled bitterly. 'Now fuck off and leave me alone.'
'Right you are, sir. Fuck off it is.' Cato smiled as he rose and ducked his head under the fringe of the awning. 'See you in the morning, sir.'
'In the morning, why not?' Macro replied absently as he struggled with his tunic, and then decided to give up, slumping down on the ruins of his camp bed. Then he lurched up on an elbow.
'Cato!' 'Sir?'
'we've orders to see the legate first thing tomorrow. Don't you go and forget, lad!'
'The legate?'
'Yes, the bloody legate. Now piss off and let me get some sleep.'
Chapter Thirty-Three
The first hour watch sounded from the general's headquarters, followed at once by the calls from the other three legions camped on the north bank of the Tamesis, and an instant later from the legion still on the south bank. Although General Plautius was with the larger force, coordinating the preparations for the next phase of the advance, the eagles of all four legions were still housed in a headquarters area constructed on the other side of the river, so officially the army had not yet crossed the Tamesis. That triumph would be accorded to Claudius. Emperor and eagles would cross the Tamesis together. It would be a magnificent spectacle, Vespasian had no doubt of that. The greatest possible political advantage would be wrung out of the advance to the enemy capital at Camulodunum. The Emperor and his entourage, dressed in dazzling ceremonial armour, would lead the procession, and somewhere in the long train of his followers would be Flavia.
Flavia, like all those close to the Emperor, would be carefully watched by the imperial agents; all those she spoke to and every overheard conversation would be dutifully noted and forwarded to Narcissus. Vespasian wondered whether the Emperor's most trusted freedman would be accompanying his master on the campaign. It depended on how much faith Claudius had in his wife and in the prefect of the Praetorian Guard commanding the cohorts left in Rome. Vespasian had met Messalina only once, at a palace banquet. But once was enough to know that a needle-sharp mind contemplated the world from behind the dazzling mask of her beauty. Her eyes, heavily made up in the Egyptian style, had burned right through him, and Vespasian had only just managed to prevent himself from shifting his gaze. Messalina had smiled her approval at his temerity as she held out her hand to be kissed. 'You ought to watch this one, Flavia,' she had said. 'Any man who so easily withstands the gaze of the Emperor's wife is a man who would be capable of anything.' Flavia had forced a thin-lipped smile, and quickly led her husband away.
It was ironic, thought Vespasian as he recalled the event, that it was him rather than Flavia who had been singled out as the potential conspirator, however lightly. Flavia had seemed to be the loyal wife and model citizen in every respect, and had never given him cause to fear that she might become involved in anything more perilous than a trip to the public baths.
Looking back, the small social lunches she had given or been invited to without his presence now looked positively sinister, especially as a number of those with whom she had dined had subsequently been condemned following investigation by Narcissus' network of spies. Vespasian still did not know how deep her involvement was with those who were plotting against Claudius. Until he confronted her, he could not be sure. Even then, supposing she was half the cold-blooded traitor that Vitellius claimed, how would he know if her version of events was truthful? The possibility that Flavia would lie, and he woul
d not be able to recognise the lie, filled him with a terrible sense of self-doubt.
The tramp of feet on the boards outside his office tent caught his ear and he quickly grabbed the nearest scroll and concentrated his gaze on it: a request for extra hospital capacity from the legion's senior surgeon, A hushed exchange of words took place before the sentry barked out:
'Wait here!'
The flap parted and a shaft of daylight slanted across the desktop, causing Vespasian to squint as he looked up. 'What is it?'
'Excuse me, sir, Centurion Macro and his optio to see you. Says he was ordered to be here by the first hour signal'
'Well, then he's late,' Vespasian grumbled. 'Get them in here.'
The sentry ducked out and stepped to one side. holding back the tent flap. 'All right, sir. The legate will see you now.'
Two shapes stepped into the shaft of light and marched up to his desk, then stamped their feet down and stood to attention.
"Centurion Macro and Optio Cato reporting as ordered, sir.'
"You're late.'
'Yes, sir.' Macro briefly thought about apologising, but kept his silence.
No apology was acceptable in the army. One either did as one was ordered or one didn't and there were no excuses.
'Why?'
'Sir?'
'Why are you late, Centurion? The first hour was sounded a short while ago.'
'Yes, sir.'
Vespasian knew when he was being stonewalled. As his vision readjusted to the dim light of the tent's interior he saw that the centurion was heavy-eyed and looked tired. In view of the man's record, he decided an unofficial warning would suffice. 'Very well, Centurion, but if you let it happen again there will be consequences.'
'Yes, sir.'
'And if I ever hear that you've been letting drink get in the way of duty I swear I will have you returned to the ranks. Got that?'
The Eagles Conquest c-2 Page 21
