Defender of Rome

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The message contained a time, a place, and a name. Valerius drew breath when he recognized the name. Why should he be surprised? They hadn’t set eyes on each other for at least ten years, but this was a man who had spent more than a decade at the very heart of the Empire, close enough to hear every beat.

Should he go? What did he have to gain? Or lose? The meeting place was convenient enough for his purposes, but they had never been friends. Their short relationship had been closer to master and servant. He remembered feeling used at yet another demand to fetch water from the well or recite from memory a complex argument by Apollodorus of Seleucia, or one of a dozen other wordy, overblown Stoic texts. But he had learned. His mind had quickened and his grasp and understanding of the subjects had grown with each passing day he spent in the great man’s presence. Great? Seneca hadn’t been great then. A few slaves, most of them spying for the Emperor. A trusted servant who no doubt betrayed him to his enemies. His ‘villa’ had been a run-down Corsican chicken farm and the fine court clothes he affected were worn and patched by the time Valerius had been sent to him. Exile had cracked him like one of the eggs his hens laid among the vines, but it had never broken him. Seneca consoled himself with his studies and his teachings and the letters he wrote to his mother, and ignored the heat and the filth.

Strange that a life devoted to logic and forbearance should have been almost destroyed by such an enormous capacity for human recklessness. The irresponsibility which had brought him into conflict with Caligula was bordering on suicidal. A woman had been the cause of it. That folly might have been forgiven, but to argue semantics with an Emperor who thought himself the new Aristotle was perhaps pushing Stoicism beyond its acceptable limits. Caligula’s acerbic dismissal of Seneca’s writings as ‘lime without sand’ had been more painful even than the threat of execution. And how could a man who had fought so hard to resuscitate his career throw everything away for a second time by conducting a flagrant, pointless affair with his new Emperor’s niece? Even benign old Claudius couldn’t allow that to go unpunished. Seneca had been fortunate to escape with nine years’ misery in exile. It had been Agrippina who finally recalled him and saved him from madness, and had entrusted him with her son’s education. His genius had made him first indispensable and then a liability. He was finished, but he didn’t seem to know it. And that made him doubly dangerous.

Of course, there was another possibility. It could be a trap. Valerius smiled at the thought. Proximity to the Emperor was making him paranoid. The writing was in the same firm, controlled hand he remembered.

But why now? This was no invitation to a pleasant afternoon of philosophical debate and discussion. The whole tenor of the note and the way it had been delivered was designed to intrigue him. It was the bait thrown to a hungry carp in a stew pond. Yet the bait was so blatantly presented that there was no disguising it could also be an invitation to put his neck on the executioner’s block.

So he should be suspicious, and he was suspicious, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take the bait.

He went through the arrangements in his mind, aware that the dangers ahead could be as great as anything he had faced in Britain. When he answered Nero’s commission he had laid aside the cosy trappings of civilian life to become a soldier again. He just wasn’t sure yet what he was fighting for.

Valerius rode out early next day through the valley between the Quirinal and Viminal hills and then up on to the Via Salaria, with the winding course of the Tiber away to his left. In the relative cool of the morning even the streets of the Subura proved bearable and once he was in sight of the massive red brick Praetorian barracks he was able to enjoy the prospect of the open road ahead.

Fidenae lay only six miles beyond the city walls, but his father’s estate was tucked in a valley a further three miles to the west of the town, a sprawling untidy mix of vine and olives around a villa that had once been fine but, like the estate, suffered from lack of investment. Still, it would take him only two hours at most and it would be good to see the old man again. Perhaps this time he could persuade him to visit Olivia. The road was one of the oldest in the Empire, the route the Sabines had once used to fetch salt from the Tiber marshes, and later in the day it would be busy with people travelling to and from the city. As he rode past the first of the tombs lining the highway the air grew warmer and he allowed his senses to be lulled by the low buzz of insects, the bittersweet scent of horse sweat and the murmur of the wind in the roadside trees.

It must have been close to the third hour when he reached the gateway to the estate. He experienced a strange sense of wellbeing as he rode beneath the stone arch. This was truly home, though he hadn’t called it that for years; the place where he had spent his childhood, carefree and safe among the hills and the streams. Twelve years earlier he’d been sent away to study, first under Seneca and then in Rome. Apart from a single short visit before he joined the Twentieth, and his mother’s funeral, he hadn’t been back since. He spotted a slave boy in a ragged tunic sprinting through the vines on the ridge above the dirt road and smiled: once he would have been on watch up there.

By the time he turned the corner and saw the familiar low outline of the villa, an elderly man with lined, careworn features and straggling grey hair was waiting to welcome him with a jug of water and part of a loaf. Despite his years, the old servant’s limpid eyes were still sharp and they lit up when they recognized Valerius.

‘Granta,’ the young Roman shouted. ‘You haven’t aged a day.’ He slid from the horse and ran to his father’s long-suffering freedman, stopping short when he remembered he was no longer a child and couldn’t greet him with a hug. They studied each other for a few moments.

‘You have grown into a fine young man, master Valerius.’ Granta’s voice, which could tear a hole in a barn wall if he found a slave shirking, shook with emotion. ‘We were so proud when we heard about your great honour.’ The old man was smiling, but Valerius noticed the familiar shadow that never seemed to be far away whenever he met an old friend. Britain had marked him as surely as if the Iceni had pressed a slave brand against his skin. He saw Granta eyeing his wooden hand.

‘Even better than the old one.’ He grinned and pulled back his sleeve to show the carved fist attached to the leather socket that sheathed his arm. ‘It can hold a shield or a cup, as long as it’s not one of your best, but it can’t get up to mischief.’ Granta laughed, grateful to have the delicate subject out of the way. Valerius took a drink from the cup and a bite from the bread. ‘Is my father home?’

The smile stayed in place, but Granta shifted uneasily. ‘He has been out tending the olive trees on the north slope since dawn. I was about to send a slave to him with bread and oil when you arrived.’

‘Then I’ll take it, and surprise him.’ He saw a shadow cross the old man’s face and laughed. ‘Don’t worry, it will be a gentle surprise. I’ll make sure he doesn’t have a seizure.’

Granta wondered politely whether he wouldn’t prefer a bath to wash off the dust, but Valerius insisted and a young slave brought him a leather waterskin and a parcel made up with vine leaves. Before he set off, he removed his sandals to enjoy the warm earth between his toes, but he hadn’t gone far before the memory of the big black scorpions he once trapped here made him tread more warily. And, if he was honest with himself, that wasn’t the only recollection that invoked a prickle of fear. Life on the estate hadn’t always been idyllic. His father had brought him up by an aristocratic code which dictated that any deviation must be punished with the rod. He had sometimes hated the old man for it but, as an adult, he wondered just what it had cost Lucius to make him suffer.

The walk from the villa to the north slope took twenty minutes and he was sweating lightly by the time he reached there. He knew he was getting close when the neat rows of vines were replaced by gnarled olive trees his family had cultivated for generations. The warm, scented air tasted fresh and pure and for the first time he felt able to banish thoughts of Nero’s vile kiss. At least here, among the shades of his ancestors, he could feel clean. But he couldn’t forget everything. Seneca’s estate lay on the other side of this hill and once more he pondered the philosopher’s motives. Seneca had always been a leader, not a follower, and had developed his own, flexible theory of self-determination. Virtue might be sufficient for happiness, as he had preached, but survival was another critical factor. How happy could a dead man be? The same logic told Valerius that Seneca had seen a way out of his predicament and the only reason for the meeting was because he, Valerius, had something Seneca needed or wanted.

A flash of blue against the dusty green of the close-ranked trees drew his attention and he smiled. He doubted whether his father had ever worn anything so vivid even in the days when he was close to Emperor Tiberius. Lucius must have brought someone to help him with his inspection. In a way, it was a surprise to find him out here at all. His father had never been a man of the soil. Running the family estate was an obligation, but the task of working it could safely be left to his freedmen and his slaves. Yet here he was, rising at cockcrow and getting his hands dirty.

As he approached, the blue turned out to be turquoise and belonged to a skirt whose owner was part hidden behind a tree. Valerius saw no sign of his father, but he could make out the low drone of a man’s voice. The twisted olive trunks and low branches disguised his approach until he was a few paces away. He saw the girl in the instant she saw him. Long black hair, a pair of frightened brown eyes and a sharp gasp as her hand flew to her mouth. She sat at the base of a tree with her legs half tucked beneath her and the skirt draped decorously around. His eyes were drawn to the high breasts that quivered beneath her shift and he smiled to show she had nothing to fear. He turned to face his father.

Lucius stood directly across from the girl. Valerius had intended to surprise the old man, so a little shock might have been expected, but not the anguish that was written plain across his face, nor the ferocity of a man ready to kill to protect whatever terrible secret he’d been discovered in. A pruning knife lay at the old man’s feet and Valerius realized he was fortunate it hadn’t been in his father’s hand.

‘Father?’ He grinned uncertainly. ‘I brought you food.’

After a moment’s hesitation the old man’s face slowly crumpled and the fire vanished from his eyes. Lucius stumbled forward to take Valerius in his arms, then stepped back to stare in a kind of wonder at the wooden hand.

‘I am responsible for that. I sent you there.’ Valerius shook his head, but Lucius smiled sadly. ‘No, do not deny it, we both know it is true. But I swear here and now that I will repay this debt before the end.’

The girl had taken herself out of earshot and now sat a few yards away, her head bowed and her face concealed behind the dark veil of her hair. She was younger than Valerius had thought, probably no more than seventeen.

‘Ruth,’ his father called. ‘You should go back and help in the kitchen.’

She rose with a dancer’s grace, and, still without looking at Valerius, walked off down the slope.

Lucius’s eyes followed her swaying back and his face radiated a kind of awkward, bemused contentment. With a shock Valerius understood the reason for his father’s reaction. Surely it wasn’t possible? He was ancient: in his sixties. The girl could be his daughter. His granddaughter. And she was a slave. Lucius, the defender of all things moral, who would have damned another man for even thinking such a thing? Yet what else could explain his earlier defensiveness? And he had changed. Already Valerius had seen that Lucius was more at ease with himself than he had ever been.

‘She is very pretty,’ he said.

‘She is just a slave,’ Lucius replied in a tone that invited no further conversation.

Valerius leaned back against a tree. If his father wanted to believe no one knew, he was happy to go along with it. But it was just as well he’d found out. Ruth was pretty. And desirable in a wholesome, vulnerable way. If he hadn’t been aware of his father’s feelings he might have invited her into his bed. He pushed the thought aside and returned to the reason for his visit. ‘You should see Olivia.’

Lucius frowned. In the past he would have rejected the suggestion outright. Now, Valerius was heartened to see, he was prepared to consider it. But the old man would not give in easily.

‘She shamed me,’ he grumbled. ‘She should have accepted my choice of husband. A woman’s duty is to obey her father.’

‘You made the wrong choice.’ Valerius’s words had no force behind them; this was a subject they had argued to the bones.

‘Perhaps, but still…’

‘You are always welcome. She has been asking for you.’

‘I will think on it.’

Valerius turned the subject back to the estate and they walked together through the olive trees, commenting on this one or that. Did it need pruning? Was it too old to provide the best quality oil? Lucius complained about dwindling profits, but hinted that a solution was in hand. Twice on the way back to the villa Valerius had the feeling that his father had something important to say to him. Twice the moment passed.

‘Will you stay the night?’ the old man asked. ‘Granta and Cronus would enjoy your company — as I would.’

‘I cannot. I have an appointment… with Seneca.’

A shadow fell over Lucius’s eyes. ‘Be very careful, Valerius.’