Rome 4: The Art of War

by M C Scott

  Yes, Cremona. Before the legions destroyed it last spring, Cremona was a small town of small wealth and small satisfactions; of wooden houses barely gilded, ragged children playing games in the street, town councillors puffed up by their own importance; of quiet people, who did not understand that the legion which came to camp outside their walls was bringing ruin. They fêted them and fed them and took them into their homes and offered them every hospitality, as good citizens should.

  Then the other legions arrived and the fighting started and the men inside would not let the town’s councillors surrender, and even if they had the men outside wanted to take the town by force, because then the rules of war meant every spoil within it became theirs by right.

  And so by summer Cremona was a small town burned to charred roofbeams and the stubs of walls with a great banner of smoke lying heavy across it, holding in the stench of burned flesh and hair and bone, and the sounds of women, screaming.

  And then this autumn, after the eclipse on the night of the eighteenth of October, it all happened again.

  They shouldn’t have gone there. Really. Anywhere but Cremona. It didn’t deserve that.

  Antonius Primus’ advance forces got there first, but the bulk of his men were eighteen miles behind. He sent for them and they ran the whole way and then insisted on fighting. Caecina’s forces, meanwhile, arrived at the end of their hundred-mile march and they, too, insisted on fighting a battle that stretched into the night, where Roman fought Roman and men were able to switch sides to sabotage the enemy simply by picking up the shields of fallen men and listening to others speak the watchword.

  You know by now how Antonius Primus himself was in the front line and when his men were routed by an early attack he killed a retreating standard-bearer with his own sword and picked up the banner and carried it to the front and shamed his men into standing and fighting back.

  Maybe that’s why they won. Who knows? In battle, one brave man can turn a whole field; they teach us that as we train, and it’s true.

  So maybe Antonius Primus really did win single-handedly. Or maybe our men had lost heart when they lost Caecina. Or the terrain was against them, or perhaps it is true that at dawn, after a night’s hard fighting, when the men of Antonius’ eastern legions turned to raise a shout to the rising sun in Mithras’ name, our men thought they hailed reinforcements and lost all heart.

  But in the end the reason doesn’t matter. It’s the facts that count and the fact was that in this, the biggest and most important battle between Vitellius and Vespasian, we had lost.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Rome, October, AD 69

  Jocasta

  ‘WE WON!’

  Domitian, who had never seen war, punched the air, dancing. Around him on the couches or standing by the pool in my atrium were Sabinus, Caenis, Pantera and me. We had all lived through too many wars to contemplate another with anything but horror.

  ‘What?’

  Domitian rounded on us, his eyes alive with scorn. He had become more animated, more mobile, more expressive these past months. It’s possible, I agree, that I might have had something to do with that. I was kind to him. I didn’t reject him. I also did not sleep with him, ever.

  Now, when his gaze fell on me, his scorn became uncertainty. ‘Would you rather we had lost?’

  I said nothing. Caenis was the one who answered, and she did it gently.

  ‘We would prefer there to have been no battle at all,’ she said. ‘For every victorious man there is another dead, with his wife a widow, his children fatherless, his life gone, and all to satisfy the pride of legionaries who would rather fight than yield to the inevitable.’

  ‘But it wasn’t inevitable.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Pantera pushed himself to his feet. He was shaggily blond now, not the shimmering, almost-silver gold of Felix, the boss-eyed assassin who padded after him, but more like aspen leaves at early autumn; it gave him a more youthful look.

  Cleverly woven leather made a neckpiece and silver rings set with small, glittering gems adorned nine of his ten fingers so that, did you look at him unclosely, you’d have said he was someone’s ageing catamite, not older than twenty-five; fading, but not yet having lost all his beauty.

  Of course, this wasn’t true, but even I had to stare at him hard to remember who he really was, so you can understand why Lucius hadn’t taken him yet.

  He had been sitting on the floor by my feet until then, close enough for his shoulder to press against my knee. We were becoming easier in each other’s company; not yet friends, but allies, at least.

  Standing now, he said, ‘Nothing in war is inevitable. If Caecina’s legions had reached Cremona sooner, they would have swung the balance. We were lucky, and a good war doesn’t depend on luck. So …’ He stepped half a pace to his left and was no longer in shadow. ‘We must make sure we don’t rely on luck next time.’

  The change in Pantera had not all come from Gudrun’s dye pots; the strains of all that Lucius planned to do to him weighed on his cheekbones, hollowing the flesh beneath them. He was leaner, fitter, sharper. The set of his mouth did not allow for compromise, if it ever had.

  ‘To that end, perhaps it would be useful if we surveyed the terrain and the positions of the legions and looked at what may be coming between now and the year’s end. Caenis? Can it be done now?’

  It could, evidently, whatever ‘it’ was.

  With a small and secret smile, Caenis nodded to Matthias who rang a silver bell, and in moments her Spartan atrium had sprung to life with servants carrying things in from a side room, setting them down, and shifting them around until everything fitted together. Matthias fussed over the end result for a moment, then stood back and clapped his hands.

  The room emptied again, leaving behind only those of us at the heart of the conspiracy: Pantera, Sabinus, Caenis, Domitian, and me.

  On the marble floor, in the clear space by the pool where Caenis’ writing desk had lately stood, was a new waist-high table, and on it was something I had heard of from the old days, but never seen: a scaled model of Italy, about the length of a man lying down.

  Mountains stood proud, the indented seas dipped deep, painted pale blue across their floors so that when Matthias poured water into them from a copper jug, they seemed truly to be minor oceans, shimmering with promise.

  Caenis stood beside it. She was a small woman, but she dominated any room she was in. Her eyes were bright and thoughtful and never rested anywhere long enough to be impolite, but always long enough to see what was there to be seen.

  Her hair shone and was modestly kept, with few pins and no veil. Her skin was perfect. Her hands were steady and not yet knotted with the arthritis that affects so many who have once been slaves; she had been a clerk, well trained and well kept, and it showed.

  She said, ‘It is good, at last, to be able to offer something concrete to our endeavour. This map is over one hundred years old. It was a gift to the lady Antonia from Marc Antony, her father. Sadly, the old symbols and figurines that showed Antony, Caesar and Octavian, with their legions and fleets, are long gone. In their place, I have had more made.’

  So saying, she opened a silk bag, and lifted out on to the edge of the table three dozen lifelike models of mounted horsemen, carved in wood.

  They were all identical, or as close as human hand could carve, but as she set them out on the terrain she laid across each shoulder a cloak of blue for Vespasian or green for Vitellius, these being the colours each was known to favour in the chariot races. Those legions whose affiliation was not yet known she coloured white.

  Thus did she bring the map to life: a river of blue-clad men surged towards Rome with streaks of green standing thinly in their way. The greatest mass of green was in Rome, of course, where the Guard remained, but most striking of all was the vast mass of twenty-five thousand blue-clad men led by Mucianus making their inexorable progress towards us from Syria.

  When Caenis stepped back to let the rest o
f us come forward, she was rewarded by our growing delight. There was a childlike pleasure in moving models on a map, and one as beautiful as this made it an art form. We could plan campaigns and move the men to suit our whim, and test feints and mock retreats and see where the terrain would hamper us.

  Domitian was first to start arranging the men differently. He said, ‘Antonius Primus can’t be down here at Cremona any longer. He won’t wait at a battle site, in case Valens manages to raise an army and falls on him. He must be coming up Italy by now.’

  He had hold of a figure in a blue cloak and was moving it up the roads that were marked as deep lines on the map.

  ‘He is,’ Pantera said. ‘He has joined Lucillius Bassus, who has pledged his oath to your father. That was at Ravenna, here, on the eastern coast. The marines have moved out of the port to provide support on his flank.’

  He placed a number of blue cloaked-pieces inland from the port where a ship wrought in the bronze showed the navy to be resting.

  He went on, ‘Antonius Primus is coming on towards Rome now, with an advance army of perhaps ten thousand men, mostly fast-moving auxiliaries and cavalry. The infantry are coming on more slowly behind. All the early estimates still stand: he’ll be with us by Saturnalia.’

  Saturnalia. Less than a month away. A winter war.

  This shocked us all to momentary silence. Sabinus broke it, saying, ‘Vitellius is hiding in the palace as if nothing were happening. Surely now he must act.’

  ‘But what can he do?’ I pointed to the map, where Pantera was setting blue-coated horsemen in a line pointing straight for the heart of Rome. ‘Caecina has defected to our side and Valens is still in the depths of Italy. The emperor’s two best generals are absent. He has nothing left but leaderless men.’

  ‘He has his brother,’ Pantera said.

  ‘Lucius will never leave Rome,’ I said. ‘He’s the core of the administration. It will fall apart without him.’

  ‘Which is exactly why we need to lure him out,’ Pantera said. ‘And we have to do it before things become complicated at Misene. See what happens if we can persuade them to join us.’

  His hands swept across the map. The flowing blue river of Antonius’ forces advanced in a great curving line towards Rome. But behind the city lay a mass of green-clad men: the marines at the western naval port Misene, who, we had to assume, were as able as their counterparts at Ravenna. Before our eyes, Pantera changed their cloaks from green to blue.

  Now, when we looked, the green cloaks in the city were effectively surrounded; there were blue men advancing along the Flaminian and Appian ways, north and south, and no escape routes remained for those who would flee the city.

  There, graphically outlined before us, was a stark truth: if the marines at Misene went over to Vespasian, then Vitellius and Lucius were effectively trapped in Rome.

  ‘Clearly, the marines are our key,’ Pantera said. ‘I’m working on bringing them to our cause but we need to lure Lucius north. If he’s still in Rome when the marines defect, he’ll be down on them like a hammer on a naked hand and we’ll lose the west coast. And if we lose the west coast’ – he pointed away from the dog’s head of Italy to where Egypt lay – ‘Vespasian will not be able to reach here in the spring if he is needed.’

  ‘How can you make this happen?’ Domitian asked bluntly. ‘You don’t command Lucius.’

  ‘No, but if he thinks I really don’t want him to go north, he’ll do it.’ Pantera gave a dry smile. ‘Trabo was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Since July, he has been with the fleet at Ravenna passing to Lucius every letter I have sent to Antonius Primus. Shortly, he will pass on one I sent three days ago, which said that I was doing everything in my power to prevent Lucius from leading the legions north on the grounds that he could do us serious damage and interrupt the assault on Rome. The battle between us has become intensely personal. If he thinks I want him to do something, he will do its opposite. I have no doubt of that.’

  We left soon after. The last thing I remember is the sight of Caenis looking hard at Pantera, as if she had caught him out in a lie, but I thought it had something to do with Domitian.

  Pantera and I collided in the doorway. I was waiting for my litter-bearers, he was heading out into a city where death waited for him round every corner. Already he looked smaller, more exhausted.

  ‘Come back with me,’ I said. ‘I can offer a clean bed and hot food and safety, at least for one night.’

  ‘No you can’t. You’d be endangering yourself and not helping me. I couldn’t let you risk that.’ We were close, and I could feel the warmth of his body, taste his breath. This was not the faked slobberings of a pretend-drunken centurion and his pretend-whore. I could smell him, that scent of slightly scorched linen that hovers over some men and makes the air sweeter. I caught his wrist.

  ‘Come. You will be safe.’

  I felt his hesitation. He did want to; I truly believe that. But he shook his head. ‘I can’t. One woman, caught between two men. It never ends well.’

  ‘Two men?’ I stared at him. ‘You surely don’t think Lucius …’

  ‘I wouldn’t so insult you. But without question Trabo is in love with you and has reason, I would say from the frequency of your meetings, to think his passion is returned.’

  Shocked, I took a step back; he had just lied to the entire group about Trabo’s being at Ravenna. And I had believed that he believed it. How did he know? And how long had he known? ‘Are you following me?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He gave a small, rueful smile. ‘But I am most certainly following Trabo. You’ve done well, both of you. And the reports from Ravenna are exceptional in their detail and literacy. Whoever you sent there is far more competent than Trabo would have been. I commend your choice of agent.’

  He lifted my hand and kissed the back; just a touch of dry lips, no passion in it at all, but it carried more intimacy than anything we’d ever done.

  ‘Good night, Jocasta. This war will be different next time we meet.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Rome, October, AD 69

  Trabo

  JOCASTA CAME TO me late in the night and I could tell she was upset.

  I wasn’t at the Retiarius any more; I had my own lodgings on the edge of the Capitol, by the gladiator school, a brisk but easy walk from the Circus Maximus.

  Pantera had got me that job. Don’t ask me how or why, because I don’t know. I had thought my staying in Rome was a secret, known only to Jocasta and me, but it became clear that Pantera was in on the deal when, sometime in the first month, Borros, the big lumbering Briton who served him like a dog, found me at the Retiarius.

  He made me buy him a drink, sympathized with my lack of work and then told me that Pantera thought it would be ‘useful’ if I were to offer my services to one Julius Claudianus, formerly a leader of the marines at Misene, now senior tutor at Courage, one of the foremost gladiatorial schools in Rome.

  He said that I should offer myself as an undercook, and make no approaches, but that I should befriend Claudianus if I could. My story, if I needed it, was that I was one of the former Guardsmen returned incognito to find work in Rome because I couldn’t bear the exile. All I had to do was find another name and so, for a while, I became Julius Demonstratus, which aroused nobody’s interest.

  I’m not the empire’s best cook, but I can soak beans and boil them and make sauces to pour over them; a gladiator school is not that different from the legions except that we were forced to eat more meat – I spent a winter eating hare and boiled beef once, and never want to see either again. The gladiators feast on more wholesome fare.

  So I trimmed my nails tight and rolled up my sleeves and spent my days cloaked in broth-flavoured steam, washing pots and scrubbing vegetables and boiling beans and my hands have never been cleaner, my shit has never been so regular and I have never seen so many men so tired of fighting.

  I didn’t talk about the legions much at first, but I found myself in the n
eighbouring tavern one evening with some of the other cooks and weapon-cleaners and general factotums and Julius Claudianus came over and took me aside and asked me a couple of pointed questions and I admitted that I had been in Otho’s Guard and that I was in Rome because I couldn’t bear to be away. I swore him fealty and said I wasn’t any threat and I wouldn’t cause trouble, all of which was more or less true.

  He was a decent man: he eyed me up and down and said a good soldier deserved more and three days later I was the second cook and living in my own apartment room with a girl, Tertia, available if I wanted her. I didn’t want her; I wanted nobody but Jocasta, but it would have looked strange if I hadn’t taken her, so I did.

  Tertia was easy and compliant and I grew to like her. She was intelligent enough to keep away when I had company, though that wasn’t often. Jocasta came to see me when she could, but there were days on end when I didn’t hear from her, then she’d turn up out of nowhere and we’d be together like a married couple for three days in a row. I told her about the job, naturally, but I never said that Pantera had got it for me. I thought she knew.

  My room was on the eighth floor of the adjacent building, with one window that looked out over the main street and another that looked north, towards the Tiber. If you leaned out of that one and looked to the right, you could just see the temple on the Capitol’s peak, hidden behind the high rise apartment blocks that forested the hill’s flanks.

  Inside, I had room for a bed and a chamber pot and a wooden cupboard with a lock on the door where I kept my spare clothes and a knife. I had a good mattress on the bed and linen over it. I thought it homely, and dreamed of somewhere like it, but bigger, where I could live with Jocasta when the war was over.

  We talked of it sometimes, but not on that night when she’d seen Caenis’ bronze map and Pantera had told her his plans. I didn’t find out about that until later; when she came, she wasn’t in the mood to talk.