Enemy of Rome

XXXIV

‘Let’s see your pass.’ The gate guard at the Porta Collina had been on duty most of the night and his temper wasn’t improved by either the hour or the weather. His comrades stood around stupid with lack of sleep, hating the chill December rain that worked its way through their cloaks no matter how much lanolin was in the wool, and the country farmers who forced them to stand out in it.

The tall peasant driving the bullock cart had already been stopped twice in the untidy scatter of suburbs outside the city walls. He sniffed and spat on the road at the guard’s feet before reaching inside his tunic to withdraw a wooden token on a leather thong. The soldier studied the pass with a sour expression before carving another notch into it with his knife. ‘Only another five days on this. Make sure you apply to the quaestor’s office for a replacement or I’ll take pleasure in kicking your sorry arse back to wherever it came from next time I see you.’

Still grumbling, the guard rummaged through the muddy vegetables and damp sacks of fruit. Meanwhile, his watch commander stared at the peasant and his companion, a rangy, unkempt figure with a pronounced stoop who had been walking alongside the cart leading an ancient-looking pig on a frayed length of rope. Without warning the commander marched forward and hauled back the driver’s hood to reveal a hard, angular face with the pink line of an old scar running from eye to lip. There was just the slightest hesitation as the man met his gaze before dropping his eyes, but the surly defiance had already registered. ‘Get off the cart,’ he said brusquely. The peasant complied readily enough, but the rest of the watch straightened, sensing trouble. They were always happy to meet any show of resistance with a flurry of blows and kicks. ‘You didn’t get that scar working on any farm, friend. A sword did that, and I’d wager it’s not the only one you could show me, eh? A soldier’s scar. But you’re not old enough to have completed your service. So you’ve either been discharged or you’re a deserter …’

‘All I want is to get these vegetables to market,’ the driver grumbled. ‘I …’

‘Interrupt me again and I’ll make you eat this.’ The officer poked the club he carried into the peasant’s chest. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘The Verrens estate, out by Fidenae. I do a bit of work on the farm on the faraway slope. Caradoc here, he’s just a slave not quite right in the head that looks after the pigs. Please, master, if I don’t get …’

‘You won’t get through this gate until I see your discharge papers,’ the watch commander insisted.

‘But that’s not a thing a man carries about with him,’ the driver pleaded. ‘If I don’t get this stuff to market early I won’t get a decent price for it, and then what’ll happen? Yes, I’ve served, I was in the First Italica, but they didn’t want me any more.’

‘And why was that?’

The man flicked his cloak aside and the officer stepped back, his hand automatically going for his sword.

‘No place in a shield wall for a one-handed legionary.’ The peasant shrugged and held out the mottled purple stump of his right wrist, like an unwholesome, flyblown piece of meat on a butcher’s counter. ‘No pension for old Lucco, either,’ the cripple complained in his whining voice. ‘I’d have starved to death if it weren’t for my uncle getting me this job, not that it’s much of a job. Imagine a Roman citizen being treated the same as a slave, I ask you.’

By now the guard commander was bored. He’d no interest in an old soldier’s sob story. The maimed arm answered his question better than any discharge diploma and a long queue of carts was already building up on the road behind. As if to reinforce his decision the pig rubbed its wiry flank against him, emitted an enormous fart and splattered the cobbles with dark green shit.

‘Venus’ withered tits,’ he cursed. ‘Get that fucking beast out of here. The sooner it’s turned into sausages the bloody better. On your way and find another gate to go home by, because if I ever see your ugly face again I’ll break this stick across your back.’

The man Lucco bowed repeatedly and ran to the bullock’s head, leading it forward through the gate, followed by Caradoc the pigman. To Rome.

‘Not right in the head?’ Serpentius said.

‘If you were right in the head you wouldn’t be with me.’ Valerius rubbed at the stump of his wrist as they walked down the narrow cobbled track of the Alta Selita, three and four storey insulae apartments rising above them like cliffs.

The Spaniard saw the gesture. ‘A shame about your hand.’ Serpentius had carved the wooden fist Valerius normally wore on a thick leather stock that covered his wrist.

Valerius shrugged. ‘I can’t afford to wear it. Vitellius’s people might have put out an alert, and we’d have been dead if the gate guard had found it among the sacks. In any case, we’re here to negotiate, not fight.’

‘You’re forgetting Vitellius thinks I killed you in the arena at Cremona.’

Valerius winced at the sudden streak of fire across the top of his skull. He was still missing a finger’s-width circle of scalp Serpentius had removed with a single bloody flash of his sword to make the end look realistic. It wasn’t something he liked to be reminded of.

‘That’s true,’ he acknowledged. ‘But the man is no fool. He’ll have spies in Primus’s camp just as Primus has in his. If they’ve reported the presence of a one-handed man on the general’s staff he may think a little harder about what he saw. He’s nervous enough, that’s for certain, judging by the amount of security.’

The Spaniard’s dark eyes swept the area around them, taking in the little groups of Praetorians covering every junction. Rome was already a city under siege. ‘He’d be stupid not to be.’

They reached the Vicus Longus and Valerius brought the bullock cart to a creaking halt.

‘I still think this is a bad idea,’ Serpentius muttered as he bent to tie the pig’s tether to the body of the cart.

‘Somebody has to sell the estate produce,’ Valerius shrugged. ‘And you’ll get a better price than I will. You know what to do?’

‘Oh yes,’ the Spaniard said sourly. ‘First I sell the pig …’ He saw Valerius’s look. ‘All right. I check out the house up by the Temple of Diana on the Aventine for word of the lady Domitia. If I don’t find out anything there, I seek you out at the villa of your old mate Gaius Plinius Secundus.’

Valerius nodded. ‘It’s up on the Esquiline, not far from the Fountain of Orpheus.’ If anyone knew what was happening in Rome, it would be Pliny. He’d been surprised when Titus had mentioned his old friend’s name as they’d discussed possible contacts in Rome. But Pliny had acted for Vespasian in some dispute with the Empress Agrippina in Claudius’s time and they were still friends. Titus stressed there were no guarantees that Plinius would help them, but he believed the lawyer favoured Vespasian over Vitellius. Valerius’s first instinct had been to search for Domitia himself, but he knew it would have condemned him as selfish and immature in her eyes. She retained her father’s sense of duty and honour. What was the love of two people when balanced against the thousands or tens of thousands of lives that might be saved if he could only persuade the Emperor to stand down? ‘Before I approach Vitellius I need to know how things stand on the Palatine and in the Senate. Things may have changed since Cerialis was here last.’

‘Just be careful.’ Serpentius looked around as the street began to fill up with people going about their business. ‘I’ve found that the older we get the more difficult it is to stay alive.’

With just a hint of a salute the Spaniard was gone, the cart disappearing in a crowd heading down towards the pig market outside the Porta Salutaris. Valerius hesitated for a moment, shook his head ruefully and took the left fork towards Subura, down through the shallow valley between the Quirinal and Viminal hills. The persistent rain ran down his neck, making him shiver. He pulled up his hood and hugged his cloak tighter about him, dodging the nameless filth that flowed from the narrow alleyways into the gutters. It felt strange to be walking these familiar streets in another man’s clothes. Each corner he rounded carried the threat of meeting someone he knew, or who knew him, and he instinctively pulled the hood close to hide his features. All it would take was a single shout. The chances of talking his way out of trouble were low and it would have been suicide to try to smuggle even a fruit knife past the guards.

But the hood had its disadvantages. A less wary man on such a mission might have ignored the rain and kept it back. Then, he might have noticed the similarly clad figure who slipped from a doorway and followed in his footsteps. Civil war breeds spies and informers the way a shaggy dog breeds fleas in summer. The spy couldn’t even tell you who he worked for. He suspected it was the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, because his contacts had changed with each change of regime, even the subtle changes within changes that few people would notice. Then again, perhaps he was in the pay of the vigiles, the city police, which would make his ultimate paymaster Titus Flavius Sabinus, brother of the man whose forces were even now marching on Rome. But that was no concern of his. All that mattered was that he got paid and his family was fed. It would have surprised him to know that he was actually employed by a small group of clerks in the Palatium. They were pragmatic men who’d long ago recognized that knowledge was the currency of survival and whose network of agents kept them informed of any potential upheavals in their ordered lives. It had seen them through five changes of Emperor and would see them through many more.

Not that any of this mattered to the spy. He was a good spy. Not young or old. Not tall or short. Just ordinary. This was his city and you could see a hundred dull, bovine faces like his on any Roman street. It made him invisible.

Each market-day morning he made it his business to be at the corner of the Alta Semita and the Vicus Longus. The guards at the Porta Collina might change, but the spy was ever present. As always, he searched for something that didn’t fit. Something a little different. A mannerism that changed from one day to the next. Someone in more of a hurry than usual. Today’s sighting had been so obvious that at first he’d wondered if someone was trying to trick him. The spy had an excellent eye for faces. He knew everyone who came down this road at this time of this day. Sometimes faces would alternate, sometimes they would disappear for a few days. He’d never seen these faces before. A whip-thin, dangerous-looking character who walked with a stoop, but inexplicably straightened after he’d tied the pig to the cart. And the other, the one with the scarred face, who cultivated an air of peasant servility until he spoke to the first man, when his manner changed completely. Actors playing a part, was the spy’s first thought, and the spy knew all about acting a part. After that it was just a question of which to follow. They made the decision easy for him. No one went on a clandestine mission leading a bullock cart and trailing a pig.

He kept pace with the figure in front, never letting him get far enough ahead to be out of sight, or have the opportunity to dodge into one of the narrow alleyways that honeycombed this district. He favoured the shadows beneath the shop awnings, sometimes on one side of the street and sometimes on the other. The way the other man varied his pace and stopped occasionally only made him smile because it confirmed his initial suspicions. Someone who also knew his business. Someone valuable. He meant the man no harm. He would follow him until he had his meeting, and, depending on the circumstances, perhaps to another rendezvous. After that what he needed was a fixed point of reference, or perhaps to get a signal to one of the patrols with whom he occasionally worked. They’d keep the man under guard until he’d made his report. Then it was up to them. Whoever they were.

He was so focused on his target that he had no warning of the arm that whipped out and dragged him into the alleyway. Not that it mattered, because he knew what was going to happen as soon as he felt the iron talons hooking into his flesh. Such a pity, he thought as he felt the sting of the knife across his throat and heard the roaring sound of his own death in his ears; he had been a good spy.

Serpentius wiped the curved knife on the man’s cloak and walked quickly away. The instinct that something wasn’t right was buried so deep that he’d almost missed it. He’d left the cart with a beggar with the promise of a denarius if it was there when he came back, and that he’d find him and cut out his heart if it wasn’t. He’d known Valerius’s route and the spy hadn’t been difficult to spot. He wasn’t a very good spy, after all. A good spy would have looked behind him.