Rome 4: The Art of War (36 page)

‘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.’

Rome, 16 December
AD
69

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.

Vitellius, mournfully: ‘We have lost! We face a winter of no supplies and in spring Vespasian will land with his legions from Egypt, men well fed and in good heart who will fall on us like locusts and destroy the very fabric of our city!’

Lucius: ‘No, brother, they will not, for I will not let them. Give me six of the seven cohorts you brought back from the north and I will uproot these vermin and make safe the port of Misene.’

Vitellius: ‘I thought you were needed here, in Rome?’

Lucius, at the end of his tether: ‘And I thought the gladiators were true to us.
I was wrong. Geminus can hold Rome while I’m gone. I have no choice now but to go south.’

V: ‘To thwart your enemy, the spy Pantera? Is that it?’

L: ‘Pantera has nothing to do with it.’

Lucius was lying, obviously. I knew it, and one can only suppose that the emperor, being his brother, knew it too, but Vitellius had never yet stood his ground in any familial confrontation and so, on the ninth day of December, Lucius marched out of Rome, at the head of six cohorts of the Guard. He left an order behind for his brother to implement in his absence.

‘Instruct Juvens to withdraw to Narnia; it’s not far back up the Flaminian Way and it is far more defensible. Have him sit there and prepare to hold the road against Antonius.’

This, then, was the position by the sixteenth of December: Juvens was in a hilltop town which commanded the only bridge over the river Nar, an easily defended position that his men could hold for months if they had to. The officers might have melted away like sealing wax in a forge, but the men were holding firm.

Lucius had taken six cohorts of the Guard south to crush the rebels – and to find and kill Pantera. He was camped in the Volscian hills, trying to work out how to take back the town of Tarracina. I had stayed behind to hold Rome with the last three cohorts of the Guard and the notional help of Sabinus’ three remaining Urban cohorts plus the fire-fighters of the Watch.

Vitellius, meanwhile, had been making an idiot of himself, offering daily inducements to knights and senators in an effort to hold them to his cause. He had gold, and he gave it away. He had property, and he gave that away, too. He offered entire provinces freedom from tribute in exchange for loyalty that could change in a moment on the back of promises that no
incoming emperor was ever going to honour. Men laughed in his face.

At the last, when nothing you have has value, there is nothing to give but yourself. And so he gave it, in tears and praise and blandishments; and men despised him more every day.

None of this kept me from rising in the mornings with a song in my heart. Lucius was gone!

If I had known how to contact Pantera, I might have been tempted to tell him where Lucius was, just to make sure they met and fought it out, but actually there was no need; the emperor’s brother was riding a chestnut stallion with gold braided into its mane and peacock feathers on its brow and he had led six thousand men down the Appian Way. Even if you weren’t a spy with ears in every household, you’d know exactly how to find him.

In the darkest, most hidden corner of my heart, I wished Pantera the best of luck.

Rome, 16 December
AD
69

IT WAS MIDWAY
through the morning of the sixteenth, the day before Saturnalia. I was with Sabinus, sitting at a table in his big red room, composing a letter to Vespasian. It was the fourth letter I had written this month, and none of them yet dispatched, because Pantera had gone south to force a confrontation with Lucius, and without him there was no way to send anything to my love with any real hope that it would reach him.

Still, I wrote regularly; not a great deal and most of it domestic, but hidden within the lines was news of the campaign set in phrases only Vespasian would understand.

Out of courtesy, I did not write of Sabinus, who was becoming increasingly nervous. He had never wanted to be elder brother to an emperor, and as it came closer he wanted it less and less. He was used to the power plays of the senate where each man knew his place, and he was most uncomfortable with the almost-power being thrust upon him daily by
the changing events. He paced now, pointlessly, between the overdone fountains and the ugly red wall and back again.

His steward entered, coughed, but had no time to announce either the lady Jocasta or Domitian, who came with her, for the boy pushed past him at a run and came careering to a halt at my desk, where he grabbed my hands in his.

‘I’ve signed up!’

‘What?’ My words to his father lay clear on the table.

My dear, your son grows daily more confident in his manner and his bearing. He walks amongst the city in the company of the silver-boys, much as did Nero, but he has more intelligence than the emperor ever had, and, I believe, more compassion. Only yesterday, he rescued an injured dove from boys who were throwing stones at it, and brought it here to nurse. He wakes earlier, stays up later, and

I looked up at him, sharply. ‘What do you mean, “signed up”? For what?’

‘Vitellius is down in the forum himself –
himself!
– asking the citizens of Rome to sign up to a militia to protect the city. He says he has only three cohorts of the Guard left, and that is not enough and he needs the men of the city to fight for him. So I signed up.’

‘You’re surely not going to fight against your father’s men?’

‘Of course I’m not!’ He let go of my hand, described a small pirouette on the marble floor. His smile was positively mischievous and it was directed at the woman who followed him in: Jocasta. If not his shadow, she had been his frequent companion these past months.

He threw her a complicated smile, full of triumph, that I did not understand. ‘I gave a false name.’

‘
Then why—’

‘Because if Vitellius is stupid enough to give me a sword and a helmet, that’s one less he can give to someone else. And if I wear them, I can fight …’ Slowly, his smile collapsed. ‘You don’t want me to fight?’

I stood; he was more easily faced these days standing.

‘Domitian, you’re not trained for it. And you’re the second son of the man who is emperor of everything except the city of Rome itself and he might have that, too, by the end of this month. Your elder brother is in Judaea and has yet to assault Jerusalem, in the course of which, if he leads from the front in the family tradition, he could easily be killed. Of course I don’t want you to fight. Your father would have a fit.’

‘My father has time only for men who are useful. Do you think he will look at me any differently if I stay at home counting the wings on dead flies?’

‘Your father is proud of you.’

‘Caenis, if you think that, you’re more—’ There was a familiar sound in the servants’ quarters, although at that moment I couldn’t quite place it. I heard Matthias and Sabinus’ steward talking, then a curtain was pushed quietly across the doorway.

And then the impossible; a man was there whom I had thought – feared is better, yes – that I might never see again.

‘Pantera!’ I took a slow step forward and was swept sideways by a furious Domitian.

‘What on earth are
you
doing here? You’re in Misene!’

‘Except that I’m not,’ Pantera said reasonably. ‘I’m here.’

‘Does that mean Lucius has lost? That he’s dead?’ Jocasta was nearer Pantera than Domitian. Her gaze raked his features, his clothes, striving to take meaning from the peasant garb he wore; it might have been near to Saturnalia, when men and women changed places with their slaves, but he looked too much like the real thing.

He said, ‘Sadly Lucius remains alive and well, but he’s too deeply caught up in the fighting at Tarracina to come back when he finds out I was never there.’

Everyone gaped at him now, even Jocasta.

‘
Never there?
’ she said. ‘You never went south at all?’ It was hard to tell if she was as furious as Domitian or simply shocked.

‘Sorry.’ Pantera lifted one shoulder in a loose, wry shrug. ‘But it was safer for everyone if you all thought that’s where I was going. In reality, I went north to study the placements of Juvens’ defences at Narnia in case Antonius needed to know them in detail.’

‘North?’ There was a brittle edge to Jocasta’s laugh. ‘You went to
Juvens
? And you think that was safer?’

Everyone was standing now, and Pantera walked through us, as through statuary. He glanced down at the letter on my desk, idly moved my ink stand to cover the writing so nobody else could read it.

‘It was safe enough. I carried wood for the braziers, and nobody looks at wood-carriers. Besides, I was in good company. Petilius Cerialis came with me – he was the legate of the Ninth during the revolt in Britain. He wanted to offer his services to Antonius Primus, so it seemed useful if he could take with him a general’s view of Juvens’ troop placements and their morale. We stayed with Juvens’ men for eight days and now Petilius has gone to Antonius with all the necessary details and I’ve come back here. It was … restful.’

He looked better than he had done; less haunted, less starved of food and sleep. I could only imagine the relief of not being hunted day and night by the monster that was Lucius.

Still, the fact remained that nobody was looking for him in the north because everyone believed he had gone south to stir up trouble with the marines at Misene, me included.

Do
you trust no one, not even me?

I said, ‘Why have you come back now?’

‘First, because I can. But mainly because Vitellius is about to get a shock and it would be immensely useful to Vespasian’s cause if Sabinus were to be with him when it happens. My lord Sabinus, if it please you, there’s a litter waiting—’

‘What kind of a shock?’ Domitian asked. He had become obdurate, of late, and importunate, and rude.

I thought how I could phrase this in my letter.
In certain ways, and primarily when he feels himself slighted, our young charge has begun to emulate some of the more interesting features of the man whose singing you so admired.

Pantera answered, ‘The kind of shock that will push him finally to abdicate.’

It was Sabinus, surprisingly, who was most upset by this. ‘This is intolerable! Are we under attack? Have my brother’s forces slaughtered the seven cohorts at the Nar? You told me this war would be bloodless. You
said
—’

Pantera lost patience. He didn’t shout, but the texture of the air became noticeably crisper.

Sabinus stepped back; we all did. With precision, Pantera said, ‘I said we would do our best to spill as little Roman blood as we can and that is exactly what we are doing. I believe Juvens’ cohorts on the Nar are suing for surrender as we speak; they, too, have had their shock, and now it’s coming here; something personal and visceral that will make the point to Vitellius that clinging on to power will help nobody.

‘Accordingly, he may wish to begin negotiations for his abdication. You need to be on hand to see that nobody can talk him out of it. Watch Geminus, he’s the one with the fastest wit and trusted most by Vitellius as well as his brother. If you need to order him out of the room, do so. Do whatever it takes, but walk away with some kind of deal. Your brother’s future – and
your own life – hinge on it. There’s a letter here’ – he held it out – ‘with details of all that you may offer him: safety, gold, his slaves and freedmen to accompany him. Don’t go beyond this remit, but I don’t think you’ll have to. Your trouble will be in convincing him that it’s genuine.’