The Art of War

Chapter 10

Rome, 3 August AD 69

Jocasta

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.’

Pantera eyed me sideways. ‘Are you sure?’

It was well over a decade since anybody had questioned my skills. Tightly, I said, ‘We lived next door to each other as children. My brother was in love with him. It’s him.’

‘So, then, what is an enemy of Vitellius doing watching the house of Vespasian’s mistress? He is Vitellius’ enemy?’

‘If he wasn’t, he is now. A tribune of the Guard drew his name in the lottery two days ago: Juvens.’

‘That should be interesting.’ Pantera whistled, softly, then glanced around the bar. Really, it was barely a look, but he said, ‘I count three men that are yours, plus the boy collecting the empty beakers. Did you pay the tumblers too?’

I could have lied, I suppose, out of professional pride, but why bother?

‘Yes.’ I shrugged. ‘I thought we might have need of them. Zois and Thais can provide a distraction that no man will be able to withstand.’

‘And all without losing their maidenhood. Very clever.’ He toasted me, lifting his beaker. He tipped it back, but he didn’t drink.

Two small boys were watching us, round-eyed. For their benefit, Pantera hooked an arm around my shoulders and drew me into the shadows where it was possible to speak almost normally.

‘Tell me about Juvens. I thought Nero had killed him with Seneca and the rest?’

‘He did.’ I rested my head on his shoulder. He held me close, pressed his lips to my head, but he didn’t lose his focus as another man might have done. Did I want him to? I didn’t expect it, he was too professional for that, but I expected… something. Some stirring of the loins or quickening of the pulse to show that I had reached him. There was none of that.

I might have thought he loved only men, but I knew about the healer-woman, Hannah, about the child they’d had, about what she’d meant to him.

What I didn’t know was whether there had been another woman since the night of the fire when he had loved her. The news from the east was limited and it all came from people who knew him, and cared for him. He had that effect on those he touched: they wanted to protect him because he spent so little effort protecting himself.

So if he had his secret loves, they stayed secret, and he was not about to be seduced by his own spymaster.

I answered his question.

‘Juvens the father is dead. The elder son tried for the consulship and when he failed he fled into exile. This is Juvens the younger. He escaped to the Rhine legions, and was there when they made Vitellius emperor.’

‘And thence to the new Guard. Does Trabo know about the lottery?’

‘If he doesn’t, he deserves to die. If he does, it would explain why he’s made himself into a carter.’

‘But not why he’s watching the home of Vespasian’s mistress.’

I thought about that. ‘He was Otho’s man. He might have the same purpose as us. Your letter was less than explicit, but I am assuming our purpose is to visit Caenis?’

That was a guess, and only recently made. I had ordered her house watched, of course, from the moment Pantera had named Vespasian as his man; information is the currency of a spy and I needed as much as I could get, but nothing had been reported beyond the daily routines of every other woman whose man was away on extended duty, or dead.

Every day without fail, the lady Antonia Caenis rose with the dawn and walked down to the markets that line the Tiber in the company of the retained freedman who kept her accounts, served her at dinner and organized the maintenance of her cottage. She returned to the cool of her atrium before the noon sun roasted the day, and in the afternoon she visited friends, or entertained them, before an early supper and bed.

In the streets around were women whose candles burned long after the midnight hour, but there, in the Street of the Bay Trees, the widows retired at a seemly hour and their night lamps were rarely lit. There was a brief span of time just before dusk in which the daily household chores were completed, and visitors might approach the house.

Now, in fact.

Pantera said, crisply, ‘My letter was designed to endanger neither you nor the person carrying it if either was stopped and searched. Yes, we are going to visit Caenis, and if Trabo has a similar plan and he’s recognized and taken for questioning before they kill him, we could be finished before we start. We’d better move.’

He leaned back and lifted his beaker. It was almost empty: what little had been in it he had sloshed on the table. Theatrically, he drained the last dribbles, and stretched out his hand.

‘I think it’s time the centurion and his lady paid their respects to Vespasian’s mistress, don’t you? Do you suppose your acrobat friends could be persuaded to create a small diversion?’

They did as he asked.

At my nod, they danced out of the courtyard, across the road and into the Street of the Bay Trees. The crowd followed, as goats follow the herd boy.

Caenis’ house was halfway along on the right. We staggered arm in arm towards it, laughing, carousing, waving our wine beakers with the rest.

Near the house with the oak leaves carved above the lintel, Pantera bellowed a laugh, threw a coin at Zois — he missed — and leaned in to kiss me, fumbling at his toga, as if unfamiliar with the raising of it. By happy fortune, we fell up against the door with the oak-leaf carving. It was unpainted and otherwise unembellished, but new, of strong, green timber; someone had spent gold on it, recently.

Pantera thumped the heel of his hand once above the latch. Footsteps padded close and presently the door cracked ajar.

‘Leave,’ said the little Hebrew freedman. He was bald, with a small pointed beard and sad eyes. He was already closing the door.

Pantera jammed his foot in the doorway to hold it open. Through the gap, he proffered Vespasian’s ring; the big, heavy one, of poor gold, with the oak leaves on it. ‘Your mistress will want you to let us in.’

The little man knew that ring. The colour leached from his face. ‘What news?’ His voice was hoarse.

‘Nothing bad,’ Pantera said. ‘The general is well. But in his name, we must speak to your mistress. We are only two. And you should lock the door after we enter.’

The door swung back, letting out a whisper of cool air, scented with lilies. Beyond was a small vestibule and beyond that a modest, four-pillared atrium with an angled roof open to the sky and a pool below the centre that reflected the few clouds left over after all the rain.

Plaster busts of past emperors and their women — mostly their women, when I looked more closely — were set in niches along the walls. Between them, curtained doorways led off. From one of these a melodious voice, light and true as a flute, asked, ‘Matthias? Who comes?’

‘Two persons, lady, with news of the master.’

Sober now, stripped of pretence, we followed him in.

We were left to wait in the atrium, where couches were set about the central pool. Behind, a small garden was alive with lilies and citrus trees. The late afternoon sun lay low in the sky. The shadows had clear-cut edges. I watched Pantera move to the place where light and shade combined to make him least visible.

As I said earlier, his instinct is to cleave to shadow, whereas I have always thought that there is an advantage to being in good light; I can learn as much from a person’s reaction to me as I can from seeing them.

So we were there, him half hidden, me in the last light of the sun, and both watched a curtain slip aside from a doorway on the far wall.

How shall I describe her, Vespasian’s love?

Like her freedman, Caenis was small and slightly built, and she had an easy grace. Olive-skinned, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, she was Greek, I thought, although Greeks are not often enslaved these days, so perhaps she was at least partly Dacian; that would have accounted for her oval face and green-brown eyes.

And she was sharp; already her gaze had glanced past me and found Pantera. I should have expected that: for many years she was amanuensis to Antonia Tertia, known as the Younger; the elegant, cultured woman who was daughter of Marc Antony, niece of Augustus, mother to Claudius, grandmother to Caligula.

Which means that, while still a slave, Caenis had been clerk and confidante to one of the empire’s most powerful women; she was always going to look first into the shadows, and only afterwards study what was in the light.

More important, she was loved enough in her youth to have been freed by her mistress, and she was loved enough in her later years to have been installed here, in the widows’ quarters, where few men’s attention fell.

And her lover had sent Pantera to see her safe.