Rome 4: The Art of War

by M C Scott

  He reached across me and took one of the coins from Pantera’s palm. ‘These are new.’ He flipped one over, flipped it back again. ‘The first coins of Vitellius had Victory on the reverse side. Then they struck thousands with Liberty instead and gave them to the new Guard by the handful. But these have the Wheat Sheaf, sign of plenty, on their reverse and that has not been seen in Rome before today. These are newly minted. I would wager my father’s chances of success that they have not been through more than two sets of hands.’

  For Domitian, that was a lengthy speech. Stranger even than that, he had taken Pantera’s arms, as men do after battle, and was saying, gravely, ‘It’s good to see you safe when the lady Jocasta and I had thought you dead. We lay on a rooftop at the edge of the street and watched you lead the Guards a dance up and down the Quirinal. The lady Jocasta said you were the best she had ever seen; breathtaking, was her word. But then we saw the bandits attack. We wanted to help, but there were so many of them and the lady Jocasta …’

  He stumbled, tripping over the unaccustomed weight of his own words, flustered in a way that was not common for a young man who, since childhood, had known the value of each syllable and hoarded it, miser-like, against the right moment.

  Gently, Pantera said, ‘Is she safe, the lady Jocasta?’

  ‘She is. I escorted her to the door of her own house. She lives high on the Aventine. Her house is …’ Domitian made an inchoate gesture with both hands, of fullness, and wealth and care. ‘She said she would visit tomorrow, in more propitious circumstances. She asks that if she comes as a lady, rather than as a centurion’s whore, will the lady Caenis receive her openly? It is not known that Jocasta favours Vespasian. Rather the reverse.’

  It was the hesitation in his voice that sealed it for me. That, and the fact that, for the first time in his entire life, this quiet, private boy had transformed into the image of his father.

  Domitian was in love.

  I bit my lip. I had not thought him lacking in love, simply that he had always been more enchanted by his flies and coins and books than by any human soul.

  In a moment’s inattention, I let Pantera catch my eye. The spy raised a brow that said more than I ever could. I wanted to clasp Domitian to my breast and tell him to go back to his collections of insects and his reading of Aristotle and leave the lady Jocasta to the man who had cared for her so clearly in the early evening.

  I did not, of course, say any of this, and in any case the moment was lost when Pantera yawned, widely.

  Matthias was scandalized: such things are not done in polite society, but Domitian, who could only have seen it from the corner of his eye, stretched his own jaw-cracking yawn, and, catching himself, flushed deeply.

  ‘My lady, lord,’ he bowed to us both, ‘I fear I must take myself from your company. I am not myself after dusk and would retire at once, with your permission?’

  We gave it, of course, and thus, swiftly and easily, he was gone.

  In his absence, Pantera leaned back against the wall and then subsided slowly down it. He came to rest, crouching with his knees hugged to his chest. Exhaustion softened his face.

  I said, ‘My lord, we cannot offer you a bed in our rooms, but there is a cot in the servants’ quarters …’

  ‘Thank you, no. I must leave soon. I endanger you every moment I stay.’ Hands flat to the wall, he pushed himself upright. ‘Lucius is a dangerous enemy. I would like to believe your rank and position protects you from the inquisitors’ tools, but Nero tortured Piso’s wife and we have no reason to believe Lucius has greater scruples.’

  Really! ‘If you are suggesting there is any danger I would ever betray—’

  He held up his hands. ‘I am sure your courage is as great as any, but it’s not a risk I am prepared to take.’

  ‘Then what will you do? We will not leave the city and you cannot if you are to promote Vespasian’s cause.’

  This late at night, I was prepared to speak the general’s name aloud. I would have used any weapon I had to bind Pantera close. Whatever the danger – and I had lived in the palace under other emperors; I knew exactly what the inquisitors did – I wanted to be a part of what was coming. I needed to be.

  Matthias was hovering, concern written on his face. I signed him to bed and when, unwilling, he had gone, I said, harshly, ‘You are to protect three of us: me, Sabinus and Domitian. In addition, you have sworn to help Vespasian ascend the throne. You can’t do either if you run from Rome.’

  Pantera gave me a long look. ‘I wasn’t planning to run anywhere. There are ways to be in Rome and be invisible. I am merely trying to protect you from—’

  ‘From the danger of your presence; I heard you. You said earlier that you planned to stay here as a servant. Do you plan that still?’

  He took a moment to reply, which seemed unusual for him. The candles were dimming. I moved them closer and saw Pantera wince against the new light. He was sweating, and it was not all down to the evening’s sultry heat.

  Sighing, I took his wrist, felt the sharp, hard pulses at the base of his thumb. Briskly now: ‘Tomorrow we can worry about your future and mine and how they may be protected. Tonight, you need a safe bed and a physic. Go to Scopius, the dream-teller who owns the Inn of the Crossed Spears, tell him Artemis asks of him that he give a stranger a bed and lends the skills of his wife in tending to his injuries.’

  ‘Artemis.’ His eyes were river brown in the lamplight, and full of humour. ‘You are, of course, a goddess.’

  ‘And, of course, I am not.’ I snapped at him; I hadn’t snapped in months – years. Vespasian could drive me to it; few others. With more restraint, I said, ‘I played the part in a play once, when Scopius and I were children. He was … attached to Antonia’s household for a while, not as a slave, but as a boy servant. The empress encouraged her servants to create our own entertainment. She thought it better than that we seek it outside her household.’

  His gaze didn’t flinch, but still, we were both reminded that I was not a lady and never could be, even if my man became emperor.

  I made light of it; I did not want to shame him. ‘Once a slave, always a slave. If you need to get word to me, send it with one of the silver-tongues. For Scopius’ sake they will hold their silence against any inducement.’

  ‘Silver-tongues?’ He looked at me strangely.

  ‘The street boys who carry messages around the ghetto are called silver-tongues. The ones who sell their bodies are silver-skins and those who thieve are silver-hands. Often the three are one and we call them silver-boys.’

  ‘But not always.’ There was a depth behind his gaze that I didn’t understand: I do now, of course. He said, ‘I take it Scopius knows the most reliable ones?’

  ‘Always. And they know their way here. I may be a lady in dress and style, but on the streets, I am still one of their own.’

  Pantera nodded, slowly. ‘Good. Then it may be …’

  He closed his eyes, pressed his fingers splayed against them. They were broad, strong fingers, darkened by the sun, but they turned pale as he pressed them to his brow, bone on bone.

  With dogged clarity, he said, ‘My lady, this is a suggestion only, you are free to turn it down, but it might be useful if you were to go to the market tomorrow morning as usual, and were to be seen to fall, to injure, say, your hip or your ankle, something that is not serious enough to need a bonesetter, but serious enough for you to plausibly hire a litter to bring you back here, and thereafter take one wherever you go. Does Scopius the innkeeper hire out litter-bearers?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Then, if it suits you to do this, send Matthias to hire a team from Scopius; trust us to see to it that he gets the right ones. Spend the next few days visiting your friends, lots of your friends, particularly those who support Vitellius. Nobody expects you to stop loving Vespasian, but let it be known that you fear for his life and wish he would not pursue this cause. Be subtle, but clear. Visit Sabinus and make sure he takes the same line.
If I need to send a message, I will use the silver-tongues, as you say. And when it is safe, I will come to you.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Rome, 3–4 August AD 69

  Julius Scopius, innkeeper and dream-teller

  I AM SCOPIUS. In childhood, I was a friend of the lady Caenis before she was a lady. Now, I am innkeeper, dream-teller, husband to Gudrun, and father to the acrobats Zois and Thaïs. Amongst other things, I own the Inn of the Crossed Spears.

  Your man came to us that night shyly, shamed to be asking for a bed and unwilling to ask for more. He was hurting and desperate and he wanted us to think he could simply sleep did we but give him a safe bed on which to lie.

  With another man at another time, I would perhaps have given him the keys to one of our private rooms and if he was dead in the morning, who would care? But I am a dream-teller and Gudrun watches the branching futures in the smoke bowl and we both knew that this man must live.

  Why? Because we would not be here, talking now, if he had died, and here is where we need to be.

  So; he came from Caenis who had saved my life once and for that alone we would not turn him away. We knew what he needed and we each have our specialty; me, Gudrun, Zois and Thaïs.

  Between us, we bathed him and oiled his hurts, the old as well as the new, and wrapped his hands and his head in willow bark and when he was warm again, and had drunk the hot, sweetened herbs that Gudrun cooked for him, and was pliant, we laid him on a bed with a good straw mattress and sang him to sleep.

  In truth, he was already sleeping. Better to say that we sang him good dreams, to sweep away the nightmares in which men hit and burned him. They were not helping him to heal.

  He woke before dawn the next day with less pain than he deserved and more than he wanted and then, at his request – still shyly made, but he knew by then what we could do – we set about changing how he looked.

  Gudrun mixed the paste for his skin and hair and I smoothed it on, to be sure that every part of him was covered. Some hours later, when he had endured as much of the itch and discomfort as he could, we let him wash it off at the well; his self-respect needed it by then.

  I gave him sacking to dry himself and then Gudrun held up the broad, flat, silvered bowl that he might see himself.

  ‘Will you look?’ she said.

  He looked at her queerly, then. I think he did not remember her speaking the night before and this was the first time he had heard her truly. Her voice is northern, far, far northern, from the ice floes where walrus lie and many-horned deer run across the plains, and she speaks her Latin as one who learned it late, and still it splits her tongue. I love the sound of it, round in my ears, but it can take some getting used to.

  Or maybe it was the bowl he recognized, for she had looked in it at the smoke-futures while he lay on his mattress and he might have woken and seen her.

  But she was holding it up for him to use, so he stopped looking at her and instead looked at his own face in the bowl’s reflection. We saw his eyes grow wide with shock and knew we had done what he needed much better than he had expected.

  He took the bowl from Gudrun, tilted it this way and that, and what he saw was the same from every angle. Truly, he had become a Berber: every part of his skin was as dark as a paste of walnut juice mixed in ewe’s milk butter with the egg of a dark-feathered hen can make it. On top of that, Thaïs and Zois had worked for an hour with certain other pastes so that the wound on his head, which had been angry and swollen the night before, looked as if it had been done in childhood.

  His hair, once straight to the nape of his neck and glinting amber where the sun had caught it, was now black and curled tight to his head, like lamb’s fleece. Since he was become a Berber tribesman, we had fashioned on his face the spiral tattoos that those people wear. With a sharpened quill, Gudrun had applied a mix of copper rust and powdered granite and ash that gives the look of an old tattoo, but will come off again with vinegar or lemon juice.

  Catching sight of them, Pantera tilted the mirror so that it caught the light and sent dazzling patches a-dance across the walls and we could see the work as if under the noonday sun.

  Gudrun grasped his chin and manoeuvred his face a little to examine her craft. Her fingers worked a little around the edge of the contusion on his brow, blending it in. If I say it myself, he was a testament to a great art; the scar looked ancient and the tattoos, too, looked as if they had been done at a puberty so long ago, the world had aged in between.

  Only Pantera looked young and vital; our songs and our medicaments had rejuvenated him. Then, setting down Gudrun’s mirror, he wrought his own magic, and even as we watched he seemed to age before us, to shrink into himself, to grow smaller, more frail; if you had passed him on a street corner you would have thought him half dead with the weight of time laid on his shoulders.

  He looked at Gudrun, and then at me. ‘If I need to change back,’ he said, ‘can it be done?’

  ‘I am Scopius,’ I said. ‘Anything can be done. Come to me with a night to spare and you can become who or what you will.’

  He gave me a sharp glance, but took me at my word. ‘Then all that’s left to be done is that I go and lie for half an hour on the manure heap, so that I smell more like an unwashed Berber grandfather and less like a good winter stew.’

  He was recovering his sense of humour, and we were coming to recognize it. Zois, above all of us, was mesmerized by him. As soon as he was awake, she had come to sit cross-legged at his feet, to ply him with questions. He, for his part, had answered them honestly and freely, treating her enough as an adult for her not to feel patronized, not so much that she was lost. I know now that he had a child who would have been around her age, had she lived; then, I thought he was just taken with Zois, as so many men were, and that I had need pay mind to her virtue.

  So I was more than half concerned when she asked, ‘Where will you go?’

  He could have sent her away, told her it was none of her business, or that she was safer not to know if the Guards came visiting, all of which was true. He did none of these things, but rather magicked a silver coin from the tip of his nose and tossed it to her, saying, ‘Into the market, first, I think, to buy a sack of nuts or dates to carry: nobody looks much at lame Berber grandfathers, but even fewer will look at one if he is balancing a sack of dates on his crown.’ His eyes met mine across the top of her head. ‘I may also visit the silver-boys. Unless you would caution me not to?’

  That gave me pause; nobody visits the silver-boys who has not been one, and I did not know him, or thought I did not. But then Rome is a big place and the silver-boys of the Quirinal, where we were, are different from those on the Palatine who are different again from those on the Capitol, and so it goes for each of the city’s seven hills.

  ‘They will be safe for the likes of you,’ I said. ‘And you may give them my greeting.’ Which is to say, my assurance that he, Pantera, was safe. It was the greatest gift I gave him that day, but neither of us knew so at the time.

  He lifted the mirror-bowl and held it a moment in such a way that my daughters were shown in it together. Zois is like me, small and dark and stringy; she will never turn men’s heads with the curve of her figure, but she has a sharpness to her features that raises the blood.

  Thaïs takes after Gudrun, since you ask; they are both ice-blonde and Nordic, and while the girl has not yet grown into the stature of her mother the signs of it are there, and are what hold men’s attention when she dances on the tightrope across the street or spins at the top of a pyramid of men.

  Pantera took the bowl and set it down, so that the only reflection was his. ‘I saw your wife watching the smoke-dreams last night, after you had put me to bed.’

  ‘You should not ask what she saw,’ I warned him.

  ‘I don’t plan to.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘If death is coming, I would rather not know. If it’s not …’ He shrugged. He had been close enough to death often enough to know that there are worse things tha
n dying. ‘I wouldn’t want to become careless. I just wanted you to know that I had seen.’ And then, briskly, shaking himself clear of the memory, he asked, ‘Have you been out to market this morning? Have you heard any news?’

  The question was directed at me; he must have known I’d been out.

  ‘If you mean are they hunting you,’ I said, ‘yes they are. Half the Guard is out asking for you by name and description in the morning markets. They say you are an enemy of the state and offer five hundred denarii for news of you. A lot of people say they have seen you. None of them is telling the truth. Yet.’

  An enemy of the state is what they called Nero, which was enough to make him kill himself when he thought they might take him alive. Enemies of the state have their necks caught in a cleft stick and are flogged to death, although not, of course, until they have revealed all they know about other enemies of the state. People who harbour them are subject to the same sanctions.

  Pantera’s face grew grave. Formally, he said, ‘I endanger you all by my presence here. I’m sorry, I had not thought they would be so swift to act. I will leave now.’ He delved into his money belt and brought out gold. ‘Perhaps this, for your trouble.’

  I was the shy one then. It was Gudrun who put words to it. ‘We don’t need your gold.’

  This was true: we owned the Inn of the Crossed Spears, plus the entire acrobat troupe who played in it. At least half of the houses strewn along the Street of the Lame Dog were ours while the inhabitants of the other half, if they didn’t owe us rent, at least owed us loyalty.

  Pantera closed his fist over his hand. He didn’t turn away. ‘Every man has his price. How long before the emperor’s silver outweighs a promise?’

  ‘Long enough for what you need,’ Gudrun said and then, seeing his face, said, ‘We have our dreams, too, and they tell us we shall not be betrayed while you are with us.’