Rome 4: The Art of War (9 page)

Pantera said nothing. He had reached the letter’s second request. If anything, it was more momentous; certainly more dangerous.

If I am dead, then Nero still lives: I made him and I would have destroyed him, but I have failed in that and you are left to repair the damage I have wrought. Find a man of worth and
substance: find a match for Caesar –
the
Caesar, Gaius Julius – and put him on the throne. Somebody has to
.

Corbulo.

A victorious general, beloved of his legions; a man who could easily have become the new Caesar.

His name was not written on the page, but leapt from it none the less. None of us was going to write it down; it would have been a death sentence for the empire’s best hope if it had been found. Even so much as was written had the potential to end all our lives.

Nothing in this room was there by accident, certainly not a lit candle in the good morning light. Pantera leaned over and tilted the letter to the flame’s bright tip. The paper was Egyptian, thin and costly. It crisped and curled into smoke.

He held it until his fingers were scorched, then, dropping the last corner, said, ‘I have to go east; there is a man in Caesarea whom I must kill. Afterwards, if I am alive, we will talk about what oaths I can and cannot give.’

Rome, 3 August
AD
69

SECOND MEETING: EIGHTEEN
months later; still in Nero’s reign. Pantera was alive and his enemy was dead. So was another man, one who had come to matter to him more; a king who could have saved his people. It was a year since that one had died and the hurt was still fresh in Pantera’s eyes when I met him.

It was autumn, time of first frosts. Trees were cast in bronze and black; roads were etched with ice, and dangerous. I had arranged to meet Pantera in the Mariner’s Rest, a tavern at the port of Ravenna, where the eastern fleet of the Roman navy waited out every winter.

Outside, two dozen warships wallowed at anchor and gulls slid on hard, salty air. Inside, the innkeeper kept a vat of hare stew against the cold. The smell of juniper berries and rich flesh was earthen in its power.

The room was packed with legionaries and marines. Pantera pushed through to where I was sitting at a table in the corner
and we waited while the stew was placed before him. Unlike the first meeting, this one saw us both somewhat disguised. He had the dress of a moderately successful merchant; I was a tavern wench, hair down, coarse tunic cut low.

The Rest wasn’t a bar that entertained many women, and so those few of us who were there caused something of a stir. When I leaned in to kiss Pantera’s cheek, the men at the neighbouring tables glared their hatred at him, wanting to see what he had that they lacked. He smiled at them, blandly. They looked away.

The stew was truly excellent. After two months at sea, I imagine anything would be good that didn’t taste of fish, but this was better than that: something to come back for.

I let him savour the first burst of flavours, then said, ‘Who has died?’

Spoon halfway to his mouth, Pantera raised a brow. ‘The two sailors at the corner table, the Gaul and the Greek, are planning the detail of how they will take you when I leave.’

Nice try. I shook my head. ‘They won’t do anything while Barnabus watches over us.’

Barnabus was the tavern’s owner, barman and door guard. I glanced across at him. He smiled at me and nodded; we knew each other well.

‘Ex-navy?’ Pantera asked. The marines of Ravenna had a reputation that made the legions seem restrained.

I said, ‘He was captain of his own ship before he retired and bought himself a wife. I caught the man who raped his daughter and delivered him here.’

‘Alive?’

Of course. I nodded. ‘Nobody will touch me in here. And out there’ – I tipped my head towards the world beyond the door – ‘they won’t find me. But it was a good distraction, a worthy try.’ This
was neither the time nor the place for our previous long, weighted silences, so I continued without waiting for him to speak. ‘You sent a message saying you were coming back to work with me to make Nero’s successor. If you are in mourning, it may affect what we do. I need to know the details. Who was he?’

Menachem
. The name stuck on the two sides of his tongue, closing his throat.

My informants had been effusive in their eulogies of the warrior-king on his milk-white Berber mare, his black hair flowing from his helmet, and the thin loop of his crown dazzling in the morning sun. A legionary of the XIIth killed him, they said: Demalion, with Pantera’s own bow.

The story told itself anew on Pantera’s face: the shock of the death, the emptiness after, the slow climb back to normality, if his life could ever be described as normal.

It was not my place to be kind to him. I said, ‘I need to hear you speak his name. To know you can.’

Pantera set down his spoon. ‘Menachem. His name was Menachem ben Yehuda ben Yehuda. He made himself king in Judaea.’

‘He made himself king?’ I asked. ‘Or you made him?’

‘I helped show him how it could be done, but he was the raw material that made it possible. He was born to it. I have never met his like.’ He looked down; we both did. His finger, clearly unbidden, had sketched a horse in spilled wine on the tabletop.

It was not a good horse. He swept it away with the heel of his hand.

‘Did you love him?’ I asked.

‘Not in the carnal sense. But I found in him a man worth following. I could have lived in his service and not felt my life wasted.’

‘I envy you,’ I said, and it was true.

Pantera
raised one brow. ‘I thought you had found the same in Nero?’

‘Nero?’ I was genuinely puzzled.

‘Why else does he use Seneca’s network as his plaything?’

Now, I was horrified. ‘Do you seriously think I have taken all that Seneca built and handed it to
Nero
?’

‘I think that Nero thinks that you have. Certainly he has made full use of all your resources this past year in Parthia and in Britain.’

If ever I was going to strike a man, it was then. Pantera saw it; his entire body grew tense. But I am not so impulsive as that, not so caught up in the chaos of my own feelings that I would have given him the satisfaction of driving me to violence.

Softly, with venom, I said, ‘The
empire
has had use of our resources; it has always been so. Nero can still be guided. Until or unless we remove him, we must offer him aid in the interest of the greater whole.’ I leaned back, still angry. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come back when you could have stayed in Judaea?’

He shrugged. ‘Last winter, in Caesarea, we heard the news of Corbulo’s death.’

Well yes, that was old news; nobody in Rome thought of Corbulo by then, except with faint regret for what might have been.

Pantera said, ‘I have met his replacement. Someone who can do what Corbulo could have done, but better than he could have done it.’

‘Really?’ If I was cynical, I had good reason. Do you know how often I had heard that?

‘He’s a war-hardened general and he’s only the first generation in the senate. His brother’s a notorious sycophant, but he himself hasn’t had time to become corrupt or venal and he certainly isn’t weak.’

‘Vespasian?’ I laughed
and that shocked him, but there was a look of discovery in his eyes, as if he had learned something new about me, and interesting.

Drily, I said, ‘I’m the daughter of a consul and sister to a celebrated poet; of course I know Rome. I know every second son and disgraced cousin, I know their strengths and their weaknesses and how they might be bought. Certainly, I know Titus Flavius Vespasianus.’

‘Then you must agree that he is all that Corbulo was, and more?’

And so I understood at last the fire in Pantera’s eyes. Losing Menachem, he had lost everything, but now he had once again found his soul’s dream: a man he could respect, a man he could follow, a man he could serve and not feel himself demeaned.

Seneca had always told me that Pantera was looking for this, and that when he found it no one sane would stand in his way.

But I am Jocasta, not Seneca, and I did not love Pantera; nor was I afraid of him. I did not intend to let his obsession ruin Rome.

I said, ‘This is a man who didn’t even want to be a senator until his elder brother shamed him into it. And you think he wants to be emperor?’

The smile he threw me was gone so fast that if I’d blinked, I’d have missed it. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t. Which is exactly why he’ll be so good.’

‘Only if he has what it takes to see it through,’ I said. ‘A half-cocked civil war will be worse than no war at all.’

‘If he can be made to want it, he has what it takes.’ Pantera leaned across the table, took my hands in his own. You know him, you know how unusual that is. The men at the neighbouring tables were one step closer to killing him for it.

Ignoring them all, he said, ‘I’ve seen him with his men. He’ll sweep
through Judaea and the legions will adore him. They’ll follow him to Hades if he asks them. All we have to do is make sure he asks at the right time.’

This was long before Galba made his move; it was even before the Judaean war had really started. We didn’t know yet what Vespasian could do. Except Pantera, obviously, who had seen enough to be sure.

He went on, ‘He has eight legions he can call on. That’s enough if we can put the weight of the Senecan network behind him. With them he could rule the world from Jerusalem. Or Alexandria. Or the Rhine. But he won’t need to. We can give him Rome.’

This, then, was the true reason Pantera had come back to see me that autumn: to find out if I would throw the network’s full weight behind Vespasian when I had only given parts of it to Nero, and then only at second hand.

Then and there, in the bar of the Rest, I still had a choice. I could have tried to turn him back and I didn’t.

The decision not to was mine alone, and I take full responsibility for it. I gave him what he wanted and if you want to call that weakness on my part, you are welcome. But ask yourself this: in my place, knowing him as you do, would you have acted differently?
Could
you have?

‘Does Vespasian know you want this of him?’ I asked.

It was as good as saying ‘yes’. The light in Pantera’s face was something to see.

He shrugged, like a boy caught out in a half-truth. ‘Not yet, but there are people around him who do. Hypatia, Mergus, Estaph … They’ll help to steer him in the right direction.’

‘He’s a stubborn man,’ I said. ‘It won’t be easy to change his mind.’

‘But it can be done. There’s a prophecy in Judaea which says a leader will arise out of the east to rule the whole world. He listens to such things.’

‘Does it
apply to him?’

‘It can be made to.’

And it was. I have no idea how he did it, you’d have to ask Demalion for the details, but after the fall of Jotapata, Yusaf ben Matthias had emerged alive from the wreck of Hebrew hopes, and proclaimed Vespasian the inheritor of the Star Prophecy; then, later, an oracle at Mount Carmel said the same, and another at the shrine to Venus outside Alexandria.

They say Vespasian paid attention to such things, but even if he didn’t, his men certainly did.

All that said, it was Lucius’ assassin who tipped the balance and set Vespasian on the path to civil war. We might not be here if that one man hadn’t tried and failed to kill the general, and if he hadn’t said what he did to Pantera.

But he did, and that led directly to our third meeting.

Rome, 3 August
AD
69

THE THIRD MEETING
between Pantera and me took place on the same day that Trabo returned to Rome. I didn’t know that at the time, but we found out soon enough.

Pantera had sent word ahead that he would meet me in the early evening at the Inn of the Crossed Spears. I got there before him and took a place in a corner of the courtyard, where it looked out on to the street, and waited.

He arrived near dusk, weaving drunkenly through the crowd, jeering and laughing at the girls on the tightrope, at the jugglers who flung their fire sticks up and round and tossed swords at each other.

He looked seasick. He isn’t a good traveller, and while it was two days since he had hit land at Ravenna, I think he was still feeling the ground sway beneath his feet. He looked as if the smell of wine was going to make him vomit, but it may have been an act; he was playing the part of a centurion and carried papers in his belt pouch that said he was
from Britain, sent with news of the latest insurrection.

It was a subterfuge he could carry easily; he’d lived in the province for long enough to be able to talk for days about the tribes and their uprisings if he had to. It was all to waste, though: nobody challenged him. Rome was full of strange centurions; another one here or there made no difference.

He reached my table, just another drunken officer greeting his wife, or more likely his mistress. That evening, I was better than a tavern slut, but rather more gaudy than a good Roman matron; more gilt on the brooches in my hair, brighter stones around my neck. If I was a bought woman, I was expensive.

We each played our parts with the ease of long practice. Anyone looking at us would have thought our attention was all for each other; a passionate, erotic delight, barely kept decent by the public place in which we met. In reality, we were both watching a bearded carter with a wide-brimmed hat who was not paying quite enough attention to the whore on his knee.

I had watched him come in and knew he was out of place, but I was impressed by how fast Pantera picked him out from the rest. He sloshed his wine on the table, hiccoughed a laugh, swept the mess away with the heel of his hand and stumbled down beside me.

Leaning in for a kiss, he said, ‘Man at the far corner. The one with the girl on his knee who’s watching a house in the street of the widows. He walks like a soldier.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s Trabo.’