Rome 4: The Art of War (2 page)

But then Nero’s messenger finally came, and his order was not the one we had so feared.

Far from being required to fall on my sword, I, Vespasian, had been given command of the Judaean legions, with a remit to subdue the insurgents who had taken Jerusalem and stolen the eagle of the XIIth legion. If I failed, of course I would have to die, and even if I succeeded there was every chance that I might still face Corbulo’s fate, but for now, I was safe.

Duty said I must go, but, more, I
wanted
to: war was my lifeblood, the
hard matter of my bones, the joy of my ageing days, and no amount of love could hold me back from it. I tried to speak, to tell her so softly, and could not.

Nearby, a man groaned. I am shamed to say that it took me some time to realize that the voice was my own, and that it bounced back to me soft with the echoes of goatskin, not crisp from a plaster wall; that the scents around me were not of strawberries at all, but the autumnal fragrances of the legionary encampment: old fire smoke, men’s sweat, honed iron and rusting armour.

Everything was rusted here, in Judaea, because I was
here
in my tent, not
there
on Kos, and
here
was … a mile south of the Syrian border, and more than a year had passed since I had last lain with Caenis.

I was a general in command of Nero’s armies: three legions were camped with me and two more with Mucianus half a day’s march away.

I had been wounded twice in the past year. I had led the charge from the front more times than I chose to remember and I had won back a province as I had been ordered to do; all but Jerusalem was once again under Roman rule and death had not taken me yet.

I tried to open my eyes, and failed, and in the moment’s half-held breath between sleep and true awakening I knew two things: that I was alone in my bed – my act of emission had been solitary and wasted – but I was not alone in my sleeping quarters. An intruder was in there with me and he had not come with kindness in his heart.

I was not armed, that was the hard part. My sword was on my kit box at the far side of the tent, and might as well have been in Greece. A knife hung from the crossed poles of my camp bed, closer, but still too far away for me to reach it without being seen to move.

Beneath the thin linen that covered me, I was naked as a child,
with the stain of my own lust fresh on my loins. A shadow stood poised in the grey-milk light to my left.

What I did next was all instinct. I bunched both hands into fists, took a deep, rollicking breath, rolling a little, as a man does in disturbed sleep. For good effect, I whistled and grumbled on the exhalation.

And then I shouted.

‘
Haaaaaaaaaa!
’

It was more of a scream, really. On the battlefield, I would have been ashamed of its pitch; my men knew me as their general who roared like a bull.

Here in the close confines of the tent the noise crashed around, coming from all places at once, and it was powerful enough to scare a man who was already on the edge of his fear.

I couldn’t sustain it long, but it gave me time enough to hurl myself off the bed and tumble across the floor away from the deadly shadow.

I hit my head and scrabbled for my pack, which had to be close. My hands closed on cold metal: the long thin plates of the banded legionary armour that has come into use these last few years.

You have to understand that in battle I wear what my men wear, and usually I am glad of it, but this once, a general’s solid breastplate would have been better. I fumbled for a weapon, but the shadow charged at me, snarling.

‘No!’

I jerked aside, and felt a blade sting as it skittered over my ribs. I was bellowing like a bull now, no words, just a noise that might keep this hound of Hades away from my throat long enough for me to find …
ha!
The hilt of my gladius. This, too, was what the men carried into battle, and it was perfect: short, savage, sharp enough to gut a man.

I thrust it forward, kneeling, and felt it slide across a leather jerkin, but I
had already punched my left shoulder and forearm forward in a following blow. Perhaps a year ago I could not have done this, but I was battle fit by now, my body as much of a weapon as my shield. I felt muscle yield, the impact of bone, solid against me, the slide of leather. I drew my arm back for another thrust and—

A sudden flare of firelight, dazzlingly bright. Shapes shifted within it, and even as I wrenched my head away I felt the body beneath me flinch under a blow I had not delivered, felt hands grab past me to hold arms that were not mine, heard a voice I knew, but could not immediately place, shout, ‘Alive! Keep him alive!’

Thus, rescued, I, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, senator, second son of a tax farmer and current commander of the armies of Judaea, rolled away, and sat up.

On the far side of my tent was a flurry of contained violence, in which I took no part.

Judaea, June,
AD
69

‘
MY LORD?
’

I was sitting hunched on a folding camp stool in front of a brazier in the outer, more public, section of my tent.

My hands were wrapped round the old silver mug that was my grandmother’s gift when I first left home. I’ve had it with me on every campaign since Britain; I have it still.

It’s my mirror as well as my drinking vessel. Once in a while, it shows me a handsome man, flushed with victory. That night – I suppose it was morning by then – a ruddy-faced farmer stared back at me with haunted eyes, cheeks too broad and chin too sharp, hair grey as a winter’s dawn and two fat brows creeping to kiss in the folds of a frown.

I had faced death in battle so often that I had come to think myself immune to fear. That morning, I had learned that I was not.

Sweat ran like rain off my face, while the rest of me was shaking with cold and fright. I wrapped my arms about my ribs, testing
the bruises and the long line of the knife cut, and discovered that someone had draped my campaign cloak about my shoulders.

For decency’s sake, I should have pulled it tight and belted it, but I made a decision a long time ago not to hide myself from my men, and so I let them see for themselves the crusting on my thighs and the shivers that racked me, and the heavy, hollow breathing, like a horse that had just lost its race.

It wasn’t enough though; they were waiting for more and the press of their patience was giving me a headache.

I looked up, squinting against the brazier’s heat. ‘Demalion?’

Demalion of Macedon had been my personal aide for the past two years. He was the only man I knew who would have had the compassion to think of a cloak at a time like this.

Demalion is tall and dark of hair and would be heart-breakingly comely were he not so weighed down by old grief. When I first took him on as my aide, I promised myself that if I ever saw him smile, I would open the flask of Falerian I had brought with me when I left Caenis.

‘My lord?’

Not tonight, evidently, for the man who stood just beyond the rim of the fire’s red glow was not smiling, and was not Demalion.

If Demalion was striking, Pantera – the spy, whose name meant ‘leopard’ – was the kind of man who could blend into the background in a crowd of two.

And, of course, he was the one who had broken into my tent and led the capture of the assassin; I should have known him sooner.

What can I say of him? If you know Demalion’s story, you will know how Pantera and I first met. After the re-formation of the XIIth, he joined me for some of the Judaean campaign and I made use of him, or him of me; I never knew which, although in
an odd kind of way I trusted him more than many of the men around me.

He was a spy, subterfuge was his world, but he had a kind of integrity that seemed real to me and I believed that he spoke the truth when he chose to speak.

He wasn’t saying anything just then. He was simply standing on the other side of the fire, a shadow beyond the rim of light, with nothing exceptional about him. He was of middling height, of middling build, with hair of a middling brown and middling skin tanned by wind and sun, neither as dark as the Syrians nor as pale as the northmen of the Germanies.

It was only when he moved that he set himself apart: despite all his injuries, he had a feline grace about him that had my hair standing on end, such as I have left.

‘Pantera,’ I said. No joyous reunion this, everything quiet; he demanded that, somehow. ‘I thought you were in Rome?’

‘I was. I left at the end of April.’

Which would have been when he heard news of Otho’s death; when Vitellius was acknowledged emperor.

I didn’t ask why he had left then, nor why he had come to me now; the answers were obvious, and I hated them.

Even so, to have travelled from Rome to our camp in two months was impressive, but I couldn’t find anything to say that didn’t sound patronizing and so instead I tipped my head towards the tent flap, and the growing sounds of chaos outside.

‘Where’s Demalion?’

‘Making the assassin ready for questioning.’

Two questions answered, and neither of them had I asked: yes, the intruder was an assassin; yes, he had survived his capture. Such economy of thought.

‘A centurion?’ I asked, but it was more of a comment than a question. It’s always the centurions who are sent to do the
dirty work; they make the most dedicated and efficient killers.

In any case, this one was hardly the first. Galba had sent one to kill me when he first made himself emperor just after Nero’s death. Otho, his murderer and successor, would no doubt have got round to sending another if he hadn’t been so busy trying to fend off Vitellius. And now Vitellius, or more probably Lucius, his younger, more ambitious, more ruthless brother, had sent yet another to accomplish what the others had failed to do.

Truly, any questioning was only for the men, to assuage their need for retribution; we knew the answers, or so I thought. My only real doubt was whether, without Pantera, he would have been stopped in time.

But the legions expect certain things, and there are rituals that must be observed, not least by a general whose life has been saved by the diligence of his staff.

I set down the mug and lumbered to my feet when I would have just as happily gone back to bed. ‘What do I need to know before we go out there?’

That was the thing about Pantera, you could ask him these things and expect a decent answer.

‘Not a great deal. His name is Publius Fundanius. He was a local man, a Syrian, recently promoted to the third cohort of the Tenth. Seneca always said that the best agent was the officer of the enemy you turned to your own ends, but the second best was the local man, who knew the lie of the land and could chart his way about it. With this man, Vitellius had both woven into one; a local man who was also an officer in your ranks.’

‘What did they offer him?’

‘A commission in the new Praetorian Guard.’

‘But he isn’t Roman.’

‘That doesn’t matter any more. The new emperor is in the process of
turning the entire First Germanica and the Fourth Macedonica into Guards.’

‘Hades, is he?’

That was news, and there was little enough of that from Rome just then. I was like a starving man shown a roast goose, desperate to rip it apart with my bare hands.

‘He’s taking risks, isn’t he? The men of the Macedonica are raised from the barbarian tribes around the Rhine. They may be citizens, but only because their grandfathers fought for Caesar and their fathers for Tiberius. The Germanica are worse. If you’re going to pay your Guard twice what you pay everyone else, you’d have thought you’d take care to choose them wisely; at least pick real Romans. In any case, Rome has nine cohorts of the Guard already; how many does a man need to make himself feel safe?’

Pantera smiled, just a little. Have you ever seen him with a smile on his face? He was a different man, suddenly; younger, with a spark like a street urchin.

He cocked one brow and said, ‘He’s made sixteen new cohorts of the Guard and four Urban cohorts, each of a thousand men.’

‘That’s twenty thousand men!’ You could have heard that shout in Syria. ‘Is he insane? Rome will burn, those parts that have not been pillaged!’ And then, ‘What’s he doing with the old Praetorians, the ones who supported Otho?’

‘He decommissioned them; paid their pensions and ordered them out of Rome. Also the astrologers: they have to be gone by the first of October, on pain of death.’

I wanted to sit down, to call for wine, to bank up the brazier and pepper Pantera with questions about Rome and her new emperor. What was Vitellius doing with his power? Was it true that he was driven by his brother, that Lucius was the real power behind the throne?

But outside, a man gave a single, quiet order and another voice was
choked off in the kind of noise that only animals make, or men in great pain.

I stood and Pantera handed me my belt and made me presentable, as Demalion would have done.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘we’d better learn what we can from our nocturnal visitor and then kill him before half the camp tries to tear him apart with their bare hands.’

Judaea, June,
AD
69

‘
SAY IT.
’

It was only just after dawn. The day was milk-white cool, a faint mist draped along the horizon waiting for the sun to burn it off.

The Syrian assassin hung by his wrists from the whipping post that had become both more and less than that.

Pantera stood nearby, his face and tunic mottled with blood. I saw his hands make a small, sharp movement and there was a pained, inaudible mumble that ended in a grunt.

‘Louder. Who sent you?’

‘
Lucius Vitellius!
’

The name bounced off the silence. Half the camp had heard what had happened and had come to watch. They were standing in lines, armour bright, glaring hatred at this man who had been their friend.