The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  “If I were doing anything, I shouldn’t care to have Vettius take notice,” Celsus’s cargo master said. “But the same could be said of any man in trade in Rome these days. Your boss has a long arm.”

  “And a long thirst for money,” Fulminatus said. He grinned, “If there was to be a… change in the government, I’m betting I know who else would be out of a job if the trade guilds had anything to say about it. I expect they do.”

  The cargo master remained silent.

  “That wouldn’t be so good for me, now, you see,” Fulminatus went on. “Not unless I had some friends I could count on. Friends who owed me for some help, say.”

  “In other words, you think Vettius is going to go down if the emperor does, and you want to jump ship first.” Celsus’s cargo master looked disgusted.

  “You bet I do. I was hoping you’d see it my way. Of course if you don’t,” Fulminatus added thoughtfully, “I expect I could make enough trouble while my boss is still in office that this office couldn’t move a ship in or out of harbor for months.”

  He favored the cargo master with an unpleasant look, and the cargo master knew that this was no idle threat.

  * * *

  “Oh, they bit, all right. I’m in, and my job’s to keep tabs on you.” Fulminatus exhibited a cocky smile and hooked his thumbs into his tunic belt. “‘Course if anything goes wrong, I’m in deep water. I’ll be counting on you to take care o’ that.”

  Marius Vettius laid his stylus down and gave his subordinate a long look. “Stand up straight. You aren’t a dock thief. If anything goes wrong, I will tell the emperor that you joined the plot on my orders, to find the ringleaders. Does that satisfy you?”

  “That and the farm you promised me. I’ve a mind to retire like a gentleman.”

  “Not even I am capable of turning you into that,” Vettius said acidly. “But you shall have what I’ve promised, so long as you behave yourself.”

  “What I can’t figure is why you’re helpin’ this along.” Fulminatus perched himself chattily on the end of Vettius’s desk. “Seems to me, like, if they dump Domitian, they ain’t goin’ to be sendin’ you any love letters.”

  “Get off!”

  Fulminatus stood up, looking aggrieved.

  “You are not required to understand,” Vettius said icily. “You are required to do your job and keep your mouth shut, and if you are not capable of that, I can find a replacement for you.” His eyes were as cold as the waters in the Tiber, and Fulminatus backed off. “Permanently.”

  When he was alone, Marius Vettius sat looking thoughtfully at the reports spread out on his desk. They were beginning to grow. This was his third contact with the plotters. Soon he would be so enmeshed in the organization of their scheme that they wouldn’t be able to cut him out of it, even when they discovered his unwanted assistance. But Fulminatus had been a bad choice. Fulminatus was going to have to go, just as soon as Marius Vettius had the emperor’s purple securely enough about his own shoulders that he could spare him.

  XV Marius Vettius

  It was cold that winter, as cold as Hel’s domain, and the Rhenus froze – a smooth and glassy ice road, and an endless bridge between the barbarians and the Roman zone. Marbod of the Chatti came across it, sword in hand, leaving the Roman outposts on the eastern bank burning like beacon fires behind him. Velius Rufus took his army out of Moguntiacum to meet him, swathed in furs and leggings, grasping their pilum shafts with icy hands.

  Blood on snow has a sickly beauty, and by the time the Romans had pushed Marbod’s warriors back across the Rhenus, the white ground was wet with it. It had been no more than a skirmish, a testing, and that frozen river was a deadly open door. Velius Rufus sent an emergency message to the emperor in Colonia and set about strengthening his defenses. Then he looked at the Dead List and began to swear in disbelief.

  * * *

  “Did you hear?” Flavius’s face was shocked. “Grattius Benacus was killed!”

  “I heard.” Correus was slinging tunics and winter leggings into a trunk. “The whole palace has been running around all morning like apes in a circus. They just handed me this.” He shoved a wooden tablet with a broken purple seal across the bed at Flavius.

  In the next room Flavius could see Ygerna and her maid carrying armfuls of clothes about, and he had met Nurse towing Eilenn and Felix across the courtyard as he came in. He looked at the tablet and whistled. “Primus pilus to the Fourteenth! Congratulations. That’s Benacus’s legion. What happened to the primus pilus they had? Did they give him command?”

  “Far otherwise,” Correus said. He slammed the trunk lid down and sat on it. “They cashiered him, and from what Governor Clarus said, he was lucky to get out alive. I don’t know what happened exactly, but Velius Rufus held him to blame for Benacus.”

  “You mean he thinks he deliberately set his commander up to be killed?”

  “That’s what Rufus thinks, but he can’t figure out who would want Benacus dead, so he let him off with a Dishonorable for negligence.” He pushed the pin of the trunk latch home and shouted for Eumenes.

  “And they gave the post to you? Quite a decoration.” Correus’s last legionary posting had been as centurion of an Eighth Cohort. Promotion to primus pilus, commander of the First, was an unusual jump, even with a major fleet command in between.

  Correus snorted. “I’m not so sure. I get a demoralized legion to hold together until a new legate gets here. Fun, that, in the middle of a war.”

  “At least it’s dry land, sir,” Eumenes said cheerfully. “The horses are all ready, and the wagon’s loaded except for this and the lady’s things.” He shouldered the trunk and balanced it carefully through the door.

  “Ygerna! How are you doing?”

  Ygerna appeared in the doorway with a night shift and a wooden rabbit in her hand. “I am going mad, as you can see. Good morning, Flavius.”

  “D’you want me to send a slave around to help?” Flavius asked.

  “No, thank you. I have too many slaves as it is. Septima packs the children’s things, and then Nurse says she has done it wrong and packs them again in a trunk that Cottia has been putting my gowns in, and now everything is mixed, and instead of my winter boots I have a rabbit.”

  Flavius laughed. “Why don’t you sit tight here and let Correus send for you when he’s settled in?”

  “That is what Governor Clarus said, but I know what will happen. Correus won’t settle in; he will go off with the army, and then they will say I can’t travel unescorted in a war zone, and I will sit here until the war is over. No, we will go to Moguntiacum, thank you. At least there I will know what is happening.” She would know if Correus were killed was what she meant, but she wasn’t going to ask ill luck and say it. Two-year-old Eilenn slipped up and clutched her mother’s skirts, her brown eyes as wide as pools.

  “Mama!” Felix’s voice wailed somewhere in the background. “I’ve lost Eilenn!”

  Ygerna scooped the baby up. “Try to stay put, poppet. Correus, tell Eumenes he may take the two trunks that are fastened, before Nurse and Cottia begin to dig in them again.”

  Flavius watched the baby wistfully. His own second child, a boy, had been stillborn in the fall, not long after his father-in-law’s trial. He owed Vettius another debt for that, he thought savagely, and then twitched guiltily because no doubt he had been in Fiorgyn’s bed when it had happened. “I had better take myself off,” he said. “We’ll be on the road today, too. The whole town looks like an anthill. Even old Rhodope has changed her mind and bought herself a new wagon.”

  “Well, so much for the emperor’s peace treaty,” Correus said, silently cursing Ranvig along with Marbod of the Chatti. There would be war on two fronts now, no doubt. The peace talks had produced nothing more than a season’s respite.

  “No,” Flavius said, and Correus could hear a sort of desperate relief in his voice. “The delegation from the Semnones has been invited to join us.”

  “What!”

&n
bsp; “It’s not such a bad idea,” Flavius said defensively. “They will travel with the emperor’s camp, and they may see for themselves what happens to the Chatti and the ones who have been making trouble on the Upper Rhenus.”

  “The ones who have been making trouble on the Upper Rhenus belong to Ranvig!” Correus said.

  “The chieftain says not.”

  “The chieftain is lying, and you are not such a fool that you don’t know it!” Correus snapped. “The emperor knows it.”

  “The emperor also hopes that Ranvig will see the error of his ways when he sees our army in action. We aren’t undermanned the way we were the last time. If the damned river hadn’t frozen and given Marbod a place to cross and surprise us, we’d have gone over in the spring and wiped the ground with Marbod. As it is, we’ll do it soon enough.”

  “I expect we will,” Correus said. “But I don’t expect Ranvig to take a lesson from it.” He picked up an old pair of army-issue saddlebags and began moodily stuffing a change of clothes into them. “I wish he would,” he said sadly.

  “You like him.”

  “I have a good healthy respect for him. I – yes, I do like him. He’s not like Nyall. There’s something more human and crafty about Ranvig. But if he thinks he can outsmart Rome, he’s wrong. He’ll end up just like Nyall, and it makes me furious to watch it.”

  “Not if he makes a treaty with Rome,” Flavius said.

  Correus shook his head. “He isn’t going to make a treaty with Rome. We’ll have to fight him eventually, and it’ll cost us more men to do it and gain us less land because we can’t hold anything beyond the Agri Decumates unless it’s friendly. But it will cost Ranvig his tribe to prove it. You know I’m right, Flavius. You said the same thing to Forst.”

  Flavius made a noise that might have been a laugh, but he didn’t look like he was laughing. “A fine trio we are, you and me and Forst. Trailing about after Ranvig and the emperor, all hoping it isn’t going to come to a war, and all knowing damned well that it is.”

  “I was hoping Forst would take himself home when the Alps passes opened.”

  Flavius shook his head. “Poor man, he doesn’t know where home is, I expect. He just sort of… goes on, and hopes he won’t have to decide.”

  Correus looked at his brother helplessly. He found Flavius as pathetic as Forst, turning a blind eye to the realities of war and a wife he would have to go back to, to snatch a few more days with Fiorgyn in some private world they had built up between them. Flavius would be more unhappy than most men who did that, because when he wasn’t with Fiorgyn, he would see the real world all too clearly from a seat beside the emperor.

  Correus looked about the room to see if he had left anything and decided if he had, it probably wouldn’t be anything he would have a crying need for in Moguntiacum, with five thousand unnerved legionaries to keep him busy. The common legionary was used to his commanders changing, but not in the way the Fourteenth Gemina’s had done. Correus had no illusions about this posting. His own abilities had no doubt had a lot to do with it – no one was going to hand a legion over to an incompetent – but so had the fact that he was handy. With the legate and primus pilus both gone, someone was needed to take over immediately, and a fleet commander wasn’t a lot of use cooling his heels in Colonia waiting for his river to unfreeze.

  He ran a hand through his hair and jammed his helmet down over it. Eumenes went by and reappeared with Ygerna’s trunk, and Correus sat on the bed and tried to buckle his greaves himself. They were parade armor, heavily silvered and embossed, with fidgety, intricate buckles that were almost impossible to fasten oneself without sticking one leg up in the air like a cat.

  “Here, let me do that.” Flavius knelt down and poked the tongue through the buckle. “There, you look more yourself.”

  There were very few differences between the uniform of a cohort commander and a commander of Marines, insignia mainly, but Flavius knew that his brother’s attachment to the legions, the Eagles, bordered on obsession. Correus had taken time to drag out all his old insignia and refit it, down to the Second Augusta belt buckle with the same Capricorn badge the Fourteenth Gemina carried. Both legions had been raised by Augustus and carried his natal sign for a badge. A good omen, maybe.

  Correus twitched his gold and scarlet cloak into place and gave his brother a quick grin and a thumbs-up sign. There were little flames of excitement in his brown eyes. Correus could complain all he wanted to. He looked the way he had the day he got his centurion’s insigne. He shouted restlessly for Ygerna again. Flavius wondered how Ygerna was going to take it all, and then remembered that she had traveled with Governor Frontinus’s army for most of the campaign for West Britain.

  A palace slave scurried in and bobbed a respectful obeisance in all directions. “The governor has lost the speech he was going to make, and has anyone seen it? And the emperor is looking for you, sir, and the centurion’s escort is ready.”

  “No, we haven’t seen it, tell the emperor I will be along directly, and the centurion thanks you,” Flavius said gravely. Things were starting to move. He found himself catching some of Correus’s excitement.

  * * *

  Half of Colonia turned out when the emperor left for Moguntiacum, and if one didn’t look too closely, it might have been a festival. Laden carts rumbled by, the Praetorian Guard lined the way in their showy uniforms and then fell in behind the emperor’s carriage, street singers added their dubious talents to the noise, and tumblers flip-flopped in the snowy road, hoping to attract the emperor’s eye and largesse. Everyone who had come to Colonia in the previous spring made ready to move out again to wherever things would be happening now. Even Rhodope, complaining about her bones, joined the cavalcade at a respectful distance in a wagon even more splendid than her old one.

  Correus waved at her as she sat imposingly beside the wagon driver, in a saffron-colored gown and a green hood with a hat over it, and got a glare from Ygerna in her own carriage. He laughed and made the Sign of Horns at her as if he thought she might curse him for waving at a whore, and she laughed back but kept her eye on him. Rhodope’s girls were peering interestedly at the soldiers from behind their curtains, and Correus saw with a small shock that there was a new one among them – a blond woman with a pale, virgin’s face and wide blue eyes. She rested one white hand on the rim of the carriage and watched the men outside. The last time Correus had seen her had been in Theophanes’s camp when a man had died for her. He made the Sign of Horns in earnest now. Correus was generally unimpressed with curses and bad omens and the like, but that woman made his skin crawl. He would warn Rhodope, he thought, when he got the chance. How the woman had come into Rhodope’s keeping, he had no idea, but she would be trouble to someone if she stayed.

  He turned his mind back to his family. On a primus pilus’s pay he could afford a good house in Moguntiacum, and Ygerna was going to stay in it, whatever she thought, until he was sure that wherever the Gemina was sent would be safe for her. She could keep Eumenes with her. Correus had looked after himself before; he was not so great a man now that he couldn’t do it again. He looked back and saw the big-boned men of the German delegation beginning to ride out also. Flavius would be with them, on some pretext, he thought, unless Ranvig sent him about his business. He hoped Ranvig wouldn’t decide to stick a knife in Flavius when he had finished his talks with the emperor.

  The cavalcade moved on, taking the excitement with it, and when they had gone, Colonia seemed empty, hollow, bereft of the throngs that had flocked there in the emperor’s wake. There was only a small guard left under Governor Clarus’s command, enough to hold the city walls if the Chatti got that far, which seemed unlikely. Opinion in Colonia was that Marbod had made a mistake attacking the Romans, and no one had shown any inclination to join him in it.

  “Dunno why you’re goin’,” the foreman of the glassworks said irritably. “Now that that lot’s left, we can get down to proper business and leave off these finicky little portrait plat
es and things.”

  “You’ll do less business, too,” Forst said, “and someone will have to go. It might as well be me.” He laid his leather apron over the end of his workbench.

  “I could turn loose four of those useless layabouts and keep you,” the foreman said, “and still come out ahead.” He gave a disgusted look at the boys trotting back and forth with stacks of molds at the end of the open hall. While he watched, one of them tripped over a loose board in the flooring and dropped his molds. “At least you can walk a straight line, and you have a fair amount of talent in yer hands.” He shook his fist at the culprit. “All right, sweep it up, and it comes out o’ yer pay, mind!”

  “Nah, it is time I went,” Forst said obstinately.

  “Whatever for? You got a girl with those heathen Germans?”

  “I’m a German, too,” Forst said. “So are you.”

  The foreman shook his head. “My dad and mother was Germans. I’m a Roman, and I know what side my bread’s buttered on. Those tribes came snoopin’ around Colonia in the last war with a lot of large talk about freedom and Roman oppression, and we gave ’em the boot same as we done this time. Don’t you go get mixed up in that, or you’ll have a slave ring around yer neck again sooner than you can say ‘Mercury help me.’” He shrugged. “Well, I suppose if you’re goin’, I can’t stop you. You can collect yer pay at the office, but they’ll short you for the day you didn’t finish out.”

  Forst nodded and poked a finger at the mold he had been carving. “This is done.” It was a ribbed bowl with a chariot race going around the side, carved to factory standard from a pattern.

  The foreman picked it up. “You should stay. I could give you more pay, maybe.” He thought of a parting shot. “If you’re fool enough to go somewhere, then go back to Rome. Moguntiacum’s not goin’ to be healthy.”

  Forst paid the landlord of the dingy room he had taken and got his horse out of the stable where it had been eating up half his pay. It left him little enough to travel on. He had sent most of the rest to Emer with a letter full of lame excuses. He had so far been unable either to turn his back on Germany or to break his faith for good with Emer. The quickest road to Rome went through Moguntiacum. He would decide there… maybe. He pointed the horse’s nose for Moguntiacum, wishing for a hand to come down out of the sky and point the way.