Sword of Rome

VI

9 June

By early summer Rome was a whirling sea of rumour and gossip, each tale twisted and chewed over as a dog gnaws an old bone, and less likely than the one that preceded it. Nero had called on his old friend King Tiridates of Artaxata and an army of Armenians and Parthians was already marching to his aid. He had filled a ship with the contents of Queen Dido’s treasury and set off to found a new Empire in Africa. He had laid down the reins of power and pledged to make his career on the stage. He was already dead. Other stories were closer to the truth. Two more legions in Moesia had deserted his cause. Vespasian, who had yet to openly declare for Galba, had guaranteed Nero’s safety and offered a place of exile in Alexandria. This last scenario, Valerius knew, the Emperor’s opponents wanted to be true, and his new friend Nymphidius Sabinus, joint prefect of the Praetorian Guard, did what he could to make it seem so, sending loyalist elements among his cohorts to Ostia to await Nero’s coming. Within hours of their departure their more avaricious comrades accepted an offer from Nymphidius on behalf of the Lieutenant to the Senate and People of Rome of thirty thousand sesterces a man, ten years’ pay by Valerius’s calculation. Where Galba would find the money was another matter. The old man might be rich as Croesus, but Valerius doubted that Rome’s most notorious skinflint would be pleased to hear he had paid twice as much for his Empire as Claudius two and a half decades earlier.

Still the Senate wavered. Galba had not moved from his base in Hispania and the legions of Verginius Rufus, battle-hardened and angry, lurked around the headwaters of the Rhodanus in Gaul. Galba had the authority, but Rufus had the power. If ever Rufus wanted to be Emperor, now was his chance. But, through fear, or loyalty, he did not take it.

It needed one more push, and only one man could provide it. Valerius packed a thousand aurei of Otho’s Emperor’s bounty in the builder’s sack and went to visit Offonius Tigellinus. By late afternoon the deed was done and the Senate declared Emperor Nero Claudius Germanicus Caesar an enemy of the people.

The house Valerius sought lay close to the Temple of Diana on the Aventine Hill overlooking the Circus Maximus. Substantial and well built, it might have been the home of a prosperous merchant. He doubted it would have been the first choice of the woman who now occupied it, but perhaps she had good reason for selecting a modest residence. This visit was a distraction from his mission, and a potentially dangerous one, but Valerius was bound by the vow he had made to her father, and even if it had not been so, his heart would have drawn him here.

The thought of seeing her again turned his legs weak and he fidgeted at the entrance like a nervous schoolboy until a doorman answered his knock and showed him inside. Domitia Longina Corbulo’s face showed surprise when she recognized him, followed by a frown of suspicion as the doorman announced him by the assumed name he had given. But she would not have been her father’s daughter if she hadn’t instantly recovered her poise. She ushered him through to a light-filled room with an open roof and a small pool at its centre. On a bench in one corner an elderly woman looked up from her sewing and frowned. Domitia took a seat on a second bench and waved Valerius to a cushioned marble ledge a few decorous feet away.

‘You should not have come here, Valerius.’ She smiled. ‘I am a respectable married woman, you know.’

He shot her a warning look at the use of his true name, but Domitia only laughed in that unaffected way he remembered. If anything, she had grown more lovely in the two years since they had parted, the lithe figure fuller than he remembered, but the deep brown eyes still with their mocking glint. Not a girl any longer, but a true Roman lady. A respectable married woman. She would be nineteen.

‘Do not concern yourself. Cassia is deaf.’ She exchanged smiles with the old woman. ‘She sees no evil, because I ensure there is none to see, and she hears nothing at all, which I find useful. When he went to take up his praetorship in Sicilia, my husband left me with a hag whose tongue was as sharp as her ears, but I rid myself of her before she could do any damage.’

Valerius allowed himself a smile. ‘Still as formidable as ever.’

‘I may be married, Valerius.’ Her words were accompanied by a smile, but they held an iron core. ‘Some day I may even be owned, but I will never be ruled.’ She held his gaze for what seemed an age. At the very heart of her was the same resolve that had made her father who he was: Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, general of the armies of the East. ‘I thought you must be dead.’

The change of direction caught him off balance. He remembered the desperate escape from Antioch as the Emperor’s agents closed in after Corbulo’s death. The resolve she’d shown even as her world was being torn apart. ‘I should have been. In Alexandria, Vespasian kept Nero’s assassins at bay, but when we left for Hispania they followed us through Africa and Mauretania. They came close in Leptis, but Serpentius saved both our lives.’

‘He is with you?’

‘He has business in the city.’

She nodded, slightly distracted. ‘And you have been with Governor Galba?’ He could hear the doubt in her voice.

‘You disapprove of what he is doing? I would have thought-’

‘No.’ Domitia shook her head. ‘It is just that he seems so …’ She searched for a word he knew was ‘feeble’, but came up with ‘old’. The next words came in a rush. ‘A true soldier would already have been at the gates of Rome. A true soldier would not have waited. You would not have waited, Valerius. You would have destroyed that man … that monster.’

He felt the heat of her passion, the same heat that had seared them both on the sun-scorched Egyptian beach where the shattered wreck of the Golden Cygnet had lain rocking in the shallows. He darted a glance at Cassia, but the old woman was concentrating on her needlework. That monster … the man who had ordered her father’s death. Nero. ‘That is why I came. I wanted you to know that he will fall, probably before morning. Who knows what might happen. The city could be dangerous for days, even weeks. Perhaps it would be safer if you left.’

She shook her head. ‘I will be safe enough. I have a protector who will provide me with guards.’ She saw his look as the alternative meanings of the word ‘protector’ registered and gave a bitter laugh. ‘No, Valerius, he would not dare. He was part of the escort General Vespasian provided from Alexandria. Now he follows me around like a devoted puppy, but sometimes … sometimes I see a look in his eyes that troubles me. When this is over I will send the puppy away with his tail between his legs.’

‘And who is this … protector?’

This time the laugh was genuine. ‘Surely you’re not jealous, Valerius? That was in another lifetime. He is seventeen, just a boy.’ He could have reminded her she was the same age when she had become his lover, but he doubted she would see the irony. They talked for a while longer, tiptoeing around the subject that linked them like one of the shackles binding the prisoners in Nero’s death cells beneath the Palatine. It was not his place to raise it, and when Domitia declined the opportunity he sensed the interview was at an end. They rose together, somehow coming closer than either intended. He could smell the scent of the perfumed oils on her body, and something more subtle below it.

‘Was that the only reason you came, Valerius, to warn me?’ She said it lightly enough, but the words made his head spin. When he spoke he seemed to have pebbles in his throat.

‘No. I wanted to see you again, for one last time.’

There was a moment — a long moment — when he wondered if she wanted him to take her in his arms and kiss her. He wanted it, and he knew she knew he wanted it. But neither moved. Eventually, her face twisted in a grimace that might have been pain or regret and she reached out her right hand to place something in his left. He looked down at the blue Caesar stone polished by the touch of Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo’s fingers.

The whispered words were so faint that, afterwards, he wondered if he had heard them at all.

‘Restore his honour, my Hero of Rome. Finish it.’