Rome 4: The Art of War

by M C Scott

  On another day, Pantera would have stopped him. But there was blood on his tunic and that wild look in his eye that I couldn’t read and when he might have come up with a better plan, this time, he just cocked his head and said, ‘Have fun,’ and it made us feel like boys on a thieving trip, not men on the run.

  We waved Amoricus off without much more said, then gathered our weapons and listened to the scrabbling rats, to the whistles of the silver-boys, to the burbling doves somewhere in another street, high up on the rooftops.

  And then it came; the shout of angry Guards and the scuff-hammer of nailed feet running on a dry road and ‘Halt! Halt, damn you!’ and the snap of a lead shot smacking on armour and the tumble of a body and then they stopped shouting and drew their swords.

  The sound of iron whipping out of leather is one you’ll never forget, or the appalling realization that this is for real; that what they’ll do to you if they catch you is beyond your darkest nightmare. That’s when your bowels feel loose and your throat dries up.

  ‘Move.’ Pantera shoved his flat hand on the small of my back, thrusting me bodily forward. ‘If we stay, we waste his risk.’ He caught my belt and slowed me. ‘Not too fast. Walk with me. Look curious, not worried.’

  It was the hardest thing I’d ever done; just walk to the open street, head swinging like a bruised bear wondering where all the noise was coming from.

  Amoricus was putting on a one-man show of how to commit suicide. He was capering about in front of seven Guardsmen with one lying flat on the ground behind them. Even as we watched, he loaded up another shot and, whizzing it at the nearest, felled him like a tree.

  We weren’t the only people in the street. Almost everyone sane was staying behind their shutters, but there were half a dozen still stupid enough, or curious enough, to come out.

  Pantera slung his arm round Felix’ neck like they were lovers, pointed at Amoricus and said something obscene. Felix laughed and slapped his shoulder and they tussled their way out into the middle of the road, two young men coming out to see the fun.

  I couldn’t have done that. I was shitting myself, or close to it. I shambled along behind them and it was all I could do to keep my spear haft over my shoulder and not bring it down and poke the sharp end at the nearest Guards.

  We so nearly made it. They were all watching Amoricus, who was keeping them off him with his sling; they could have rushed him, but he’d dropped two out of eight and none of the six who were left wanted to be the next body cooling on the street.

  We ambled idly across, with Felix and Pantera play-wrestling, which meant that their heads were under each other’s arms and neither was readily seen, and we were within site of the alleyway Pantera had drawn for us when—

  ‘Stop! Stop that man! On the emperor’s order! A talent in gold to the man who stops him!’

  A talent? A talent? You could have bought half of Rome with a talent of gold and this wasn’t from the Guards that Amoricus was taunting, but from behind and to our left and it was Lucius, on horseback, hurtling down the road like a man possessed, screaming out what he’d give to the man who caught Pantera, and what he’d do to those who stopped him.

  Of course we bloody ran. Would I be here if we hadn’t?

  The alley was in sight and we sprinted for it, heads down, feet pumping. Three of the onlookers came at us from the sides, their eyes alight with the promise of gold. Felix killed one with a slash of his knife that opened up the man’s throat and sent blood in a wide arc across the street. Pantera stabbed another neatly in the eye, so that he staggered back, screaming.

  I came to my senses in time to hurl my pack at the next, and follow through with the wicked iron end of my foreshortened spear. His wasn’t a fast death; I hadn’t had the practice of the other two.

  We were out of the road and into shadow. Above us, the silver-boys twittered and Pantera stopped long enough to put his fingers to his lips and tweet out a response; three notes, rising then falling. To this day, I don’t know what it meant.

  There were horses behind us, crashing into a space made only for men. A spear burned past my right shoulder, missed Pantera by a hand’s breadth. He jinked left and right, fast as a hare, then in British shouted, ‘Left ahead, but veer right just before it,’ and we did exactly that, slewing right, then barrelling left at the last moment, into an alley so narrow, so dark, it was nothing more than a goat track between tall houses.

  The sun had never shone here; the air was dank with mould and death and debris. We couldn’t run; we couldn’t see where we were going, but then neither could Lucius. He had to dismount from his sweating, bloodied horse and scream for torches.

  That bought us time. Pantera caught both our hands and eased us forward, step by tremulous step, deeper into a dark we knew nothing about. It wasn’t like night in there, it was thicker than that, as if people waited just an arm’s reach away, and were watching us. It was the late afternoon and the rest of Rome lay soaked in sun and here we were in our own private underworld.

  ‘Go right.’ Pantera’s voice in my ear.

  I fumbled to the right and found an opening, a doorway, and beyond it a room with a single lit lamp in one corner; a blessing of light, or a curse if it was seen outside, but it was tucked in an alcove and the door was shut behind us and nobody followed, so it can’t have been.

  I was wet with thick, greasy sweat. My palms were soft with it. My bowels ached with the need to empty. There was more light in there, more like early dawn than midnight.

  In the grey gloom, I saw Pantera lean his shoulders against the door, with his head turned to the side, listening. He held up one hand when I might have spoken and then, with a finger to his lips for silence, pointed to a shuttered window opposite.

  It opened without sound and we wriggled through it, eellike, and out into another shaded alley, and then another opposite and another and we were halfway up the side of the Capitol and into the slums where Lucius could hunt for a year and never find us.

  Felix got us watered wine, I don’t know where from. I fell back against a wall and drank until I could drink no more. I still felt parched when I was done. Pantera had sunk down with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He took one drink and looked up. He had aged ten years and his eyes were hollow spaces of no light.

  Presently, the silver-boys’ whistling caught up with us; they had lost us for a while as we dodged between alleys in places even they didn’t know.

  Pantera tilted his head and listened and gave an answering call. One small boy with tousled blond hair jumped down from a rooftop and spoke to him in a language that made no sense to me, gave a brief nod of his head and then vanished.

  ‘Amoricus,’ Pantera said. ‘They’ve got him.’

  ‘Hades.’ I felt sick. ‘We have to …’

  Pantera was on his feet. ‘They’re taking him to the barracks. This way.’

  We stood no chance of getting him, that much was clear. There were two tent-units of Guards around him, and Lucius at the front. They knew we’d try to free him. They didn’t know we had an oath that said a clean death was better than what Lucius would have made of his life. And he knew too much; it wasn’t all altruism. He could have destroyed us.

  We took to the heights, to the apartment blocks, and one room in particular which was owned by a cook at Julius’ gladiator school and overlooked the street from the front.

  Amoricus came along it soon, hobbled with iron chains at his ankles and others at his wrists, with a rope tied about his neck like an ox; they hauled him along like that. Sixteen men ringed him, with their swords out and their shields raised and barely a gap between them.

  Pantera took that gap. He was white as salt, but his hand was steady. I’d never seen a man throw a knife more than the breadth of a room. He threw it from a distance of fifty paces at an angle down and back, from an upstairs window overlooking the street.

  Before he threw, he gave a particular whistle, like the silver-boys’ talking-whistles, but also
like a temple flute, and Amoricus looked up.

  He saw us, I’m sure of it. And he smiled.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Rome, November, AD 69

  Caenis

  I WOKE TO the comfort-sounds of the house: Toma and his sister Dino in the kitchens, Matthias filling the lamps, young Katos sweeping the floors.

  In the normal course of things, one of them would have come to rouse me shortly. I knew I could have risen early and surprised them, but that morning for the first time I was warmer under the covers than out, and didn’t want to move.

  I dozed, thinking of Vespasian, wondering what he was doing. Outside, murmuring voices mingled with the sounds of doves and the waking street. Somewhere nearby, a question was asked and answered, but I couldn’t hear the words. Naked feet padded on my marble floors. My marble floors. Mine. To own a house still felt daily like a miracle. To have one with floors built to one’s own design … the wonder of that would have silenced me if I had let it.

  I let it instead lift me out of bed and dressed in the simple tunic I kept for days when I was not planning to see anyone. I slipped my feet into the sandals that had once caused me so much pain; there were no pebbles in the soles by then. Pantera had long since given up bearing my litter and so I was walking normally again.

  I heard Matthias come to rouse me, his careful shuffle as distinctive as his face, and swept my fingers through my hair in lieu of a comb and splashed rosewater on my face. I was patting my cheeks dry with a linen cloth when he tapped, and, at my call, entered.

  ‘Matthias, I—’ I caught sight of the face in the silver plate that was my mirror. It wasn’t Matthias. ‘Pantera? Is Matthias all right?’

  ‘Exceptionally so, I would say. A life lived half in stealth suits him.’

  He was right about that: Matthias had discovered in himself previously unknown skills. He could lie with a straight face, could hold a Guard in lengthy conversation for the time it took me to hide away incriminating documents and have the Guard think that he – the Guard – was the one prolonging the conversation.

  He had skills in sleight of hand that impressed me greatly and I had hoped would impress Pantera. The thought that he might have seen them without my being there was unexpectedly irritating. I spun round, ready to tell him so.

  And then I caught sight of his face, the grey-white exhaustion, the near-defeat, the haunted, aching eyes.

  ‘Oh, my dear, who has died? Is it Jocasta?’

  He shook his head. ‘Amoricus,’ he said, and when I didn’t react, ‘The gelded priest of Isis. Lucius has him.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Dead.’ He didn’t say ‘I killed him’, but it was written across his brow and in the lines about his eyes. He said, ‘Lucius is too close. I have to leave Rome. I’m going south tonight. I came to tell you.’

  I closed my eyes, so that he might not see tears shine in them. Of course he had to go, but I didn’t have to like it, any more than I had liked Vespasian going to war when we were in Greece.

  Even to me, it was a surprise how much I had come to rely on his certainties, his half-spoken thoughts, his elisions and allusions and secrecy. I felt safe when he was close. With him leaving …

  He said, ‘I gave my word to Vespasian that I would protect you. Just at this moment, the best I can do is not to know what your plans are. But you must have them.’

  ‘Plans for what?’

  ‘For how you will escape from Rome if I make a mistake. If I am taken, there will be a limited amount of time before I start to give them the truth. You must be gone before then.’

  The thought made me ill. I said, ‘Sabinus and Domitian and I can all—’

  ‘Not them. Just you. You must make your plans alone.’

  I snapped my mouth shut. From the beginning, it had been clear that Pantera didn’t fully trust Sabinus and Domitian, but he had never said it so openly. What could I say? I nodded.

  He gave a short, dry smile. ‘Thank you. I would suggest you talk to the vintners who take empty barrels out of the city. They are large enough for a small woman, and rarely searched.’

  ‘Oh, Hades.’ I pressed my hands to my eyes. In the dark behind my closed lids, I was a small girl, hiding in a tiny store cupboard, savagely beaten when found. I had always promised myself I would not do anything like that again.

  A thought crept in from the darker parts of my nightmares. I said, ‘I can’t do that, because you know about it.’

  ‘No. So you must pick something similar, but different.’

  ‘How will I know when I have to go? Lucius is hardly likely to send a slave round with a warning.’

  ‘Marcus will come to you, one of the silver-boys. He will say that the mule has foundered, and ask you to help him move it. You will leave with him at that moment, and he will get you safely to wherever you ask to go. After that, the less I know, the better.’

  He gripped my shoulder, briefly, a quick squeeze and away. From the doorway, he said, ‘Be safe, Caenis. In the end, it’s what really matters.’

  I stood in my room a long time after he had gone, and then went to find Matthias and asked him to take me to the market by the Tiber, where I remade the acquaintance of a Greek reed-seller with whom I had once had dealings and who had had a passing crush on me.

  The years had treated us both well, and he was as glad to see me as I was him. He was still moving great carts of reeds from the riverbank out of the city for the limers to catch birds. They were big loads, but light, and a small woman hidden amongst them could hope to escape detection.

  His name was Philiskos. I bought him pastries and agreed to visit again soon.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Rome, November, AD 69

  Borros

  A MILE AWAY from Caenis’ house, on the far side of the market that hemmed the Tiber, Pantera met up again with Felix and me.

  He was a mess, really; he was clearly grieving for Amoricus, feeling himself to blame, which was fair, but he had spelled out the risks to us all when we started and neither of us who were left thought any less of him for it, or wanted to leave.

  We couldn’t say this, though, because Pantera had brought a newcomer with him: a tall man with a scar running from the corner of his right eye almost to his chin. His skin was so browned by the sun that it looked like shoe leather. His hair was a fine iron grey. His nose was the eagle beak of Roman nobility and belied the peasant’s rough tunic and poor belt he was wearing. He looked like a nobleman dressed up as a slave for a particularly expensive party.

  Pantera introduced this walking contradiction as Petilius Cerialis, once legate of the IXth legion, who had saved its standard in Britain when the Boudica’s tribal warriors slaughtered the rest of his men.

  He was the kind of man we thought of as an enemy, we who spoke the British tongue, but Pantera said he had known him in Britain and he was a decent man and, at this time, he was on our side.

  To him, Pantera said, ‘I apologize for my late arrival at our meeting. I was unavoidably detained.’

  ‘Not permanently, though, which is good for us, eh?’ Cerialis barked the man-amongst-friends laugh that made it all the clearer that he was not one of us. ‘But we’re here now, at your direction, and if you can truly conduct me north to the army of Antonius Primus as you have said, I will pay for it in gold.’

  ‘We can do it,’ Pantera said. ‘And as I told you when first we met, you need pay us nothing. But before we can go, we must make you look like a peasant woodcutter, a man for whom a silver coin is a fortune beyond imagining, not a legionary legate who has dressed on a whim in his slave’s best tunic. May I make a few suggestions? For your safety, of course.’

  PART V

  SURVIVING SPIES

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Rome, 16 December AD 69

  Geminus

  LUCIUS WAS GONE!

  It was the sixteenth of December, the rain was relentless and Lucius had gone, taking six of Rome’s nine Guard cohorts with him, leaving
me to man the entire city with the remaining three, but still, I felt a lightness of heart that I’d forgotten was possible.

  He had gone south, ostensibly to put down the calamitous rebellion of the Misene fleet, but in truth, as everyone knew, he had gone to hunt Pantera; by now, he cared about nothing else.

  You need to know something of what brought us here. It went like this.

  We didn’t catch Pantera after he left the House of the Lyre. We came excruciatingly close and Lucius had all sixteen of the men who had let him kill his little gelded priest flogged. If we’d got that one home alive, I truly believe we’d have had Pantera by the nightfall.

  The next few days, we all walked gently round Lucius, even Vitellius, but he was already planning his moves.

  Clearly, Pantera had gone south. Clearly, Lucius needed to follow him. He just needed a good excuse, and within a double handful of days he had it.

  We were taking wine in the emperor’s quarters when a dissolute ex-marine by the name of Claudius Faventinus arrived with the news that, after a brief show of fighting, the thousand hand-picked, hand-trained gladiators and the entire cohort of the Urban cohort who had accompanied them on their march south had all sworn an oath to Vespasian.

  They had been ordered so to do by their officers, led by Julius Claudianus.

  I thought Lucius might explode then, but fast on the heels of the first messenger came a second, with news that the newly treacherous gladiators had joined forces with the marines at Misene and marched on to capture a small town called Tarracina, nestled on the Appian Way about sixty-five miles south of Rome. There they dug in and partied, celebrating their victory.

  So Lucius had the best excuse possible to head after Pantera. He slammed his way into the emperor’s presence, and found that Vitellius had already heard the news. A fraternal spat took place, along familiar lines.