The Art of War

Chapter 13

Rome, 3 August AD 69

Geminus

‘ There! The centurion… Pantera… whoever he is. The widow’s throwing him out! See? On the other side of the acrobats. Get him!’

The gods were smiling, it seemed. Lucius had sent word that the spy, Pantera, had come to Rome disguised as a centurion and had just been seen to enter the house of the oak leaves on the widows’ row. Sadly, that was the limit of his information. He hadn’t been able to give any suggestion as to how long our target might remain inside or where he might go when he left.

I nearly broke my fingers throwing on my sword belt, gathering my team, setting them to run down the road, but even so I feared we were going to arrive to an empty house and spend the next few days chasing shadows.

Running, I prayed to Jupiter Best and Greatest, and, miraculously, my prayer was answered, for as I turned the corner I saw Pantera himself being summarily ejected from the house with the oak leaves by a small, dark-haired woman with a voice like a harpy.

I skidded to a halt and signalled the men to spread out into the crowd. I had Juvens with me, plus Artocus and Saturninus, two solidly reliable men of the IVth Macedonica, whom, with Lucius’ agreement, I had commandeered for the duration of our hunt. We had all fought together in the recent past; we knew each other’s signals and likely movements as well as we knew the marching patterns of our morning parades.

Within two paces, each of us had slowed to a walk and were threading through the men, women and children who filled the street.

Juvens was nearest the door: Juvens, the least predictable of our team, who treated this entire undertaking as if it were a new and exciting adventure, which, as I frequently said, only showed how utterly he had failed to grasp the situation.

I was in command of this unit, though, not him, and so I pushed slowly through the heaving, sweating mass of humanity, and peered through a tangle of acrobatic limbs, and saw that Pantera was now out on the street.

I sound as if I was sure it was him, when in truth I hoped it was, which is different. It might have been Pantera, but then again it might not; I had no idea how accurate was Lucius’ information, and in my experience, if you pay good coin for something as intangible as a sighting of a stranger few people can recognize, there will be a great many such sightings for exactly as long as it takes you to come up with some valid system of verification.

Lucius was far from gullible, but he did have an air of hurried desperation about him and desperate men often listen closest to those who tell them what they want to hear.

The man who might have been Pantera fell forward, shoved by the woman in the house. As the door slammed behind him, he tucked neatly, rolled forward and came up on his feet, like one of the acrobats.

He looked furtive, but not theatrically so, if you get my drift. He had a quick look round in case anyone had seen him doing something that wasn’t the usual act of a drunken man, but when he found that the crowd was apparently still absorbed with the show he spat out a mouthful of dust, brushed himself clean and sauntered off down the street towards the Inn of the Crossed Spears.

I got a decent look at him then and became more hopeful we’d got the right man. Certainly he had the right build and height and his hair was the colour of old leaves, just as I remembered it. It had been burnished a little by the summer’s sun, but then if he’d been in Judaea that made sense.

The others were looking for my lead so I signalled with the flat of my hand stretched out straight like a javelin, which means ‘Follow’, and we all four began to thread our way through a crowd that didn’t want to move, even for Guards.

Particularly, you might think, for us, the newly made Guards, newly brought here, newly prone to pillaging the city that had become our home. The officers of our new Guard were Roman, mostly, but the men were from the provinces and to them Rome was just another city under occupation.

I’ll accept that the Urban cohorts and the vigiles of the Watch were doing their best to keep order, but they were four cohorts each against four legions and, worse, they were led by Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, and he had quite enough difficulties of his own to contend with. Being brother to a traitor meant he had to spend his every waking hour proving loyalty to Vitellius, and calling his cohorts on to the streets against the emperor’s new Guard was hardly going to help his cause.

The end result was that here, in Rome herself, the pax Romana hung by an absurdly fine thread, and this evening in particular, hot, sultry, with a crowd on the edge of a riot, there was a sense of unfocused danger that gnawed at my guts.

Around me, the acrobats were finally running to the end of their repertoire and the crowd was reaching a peak of uncontrolled rapture.

The two girls, one dark, one fair, were lifted by the two tallest men and hurled high in the air. Blazing torches followed them, spinning in the soft moth-light of dusk, and were caught, each at the apex of its arc, so that the girls hurtled down again, a torch in either hand, to be caught in their turn, lightly, by their menfolk. The applause was wild, chaotic and deafening.

What can I say? You’d have to be made of stone not to have been dazzled by such a display, not to imagine what it might be to take the girls, one or both, there on the street, or at the very least, to lift them high and carry them into one of the upstairs rooms of the tavern.

They would have been compliant; you could just see how their bodies screamed it. And the expression on their faces, alight with the joy of the throw, was so like men in the afterglow of battle, full of what they have achieved, or women in the afterglow of…

I bit my tongue and wrenched my gaze away — and Pantera was gone.

‘ Fuck. Where is he?’

‘Vanished while we were distracted,’ Juvens said, grimly. ‘You might even think that last show was put on for his benefit.’

‘He’s not far,’ Artocus grunted. He was one of the few who had paid scant attention to the acrobats. Uncharitably, I thought that if it had been a boy who had been tumbling high in the sky he would have found it less easy to keep his gaze averted.

Still, he was a reliable man on the battlefield and now he said, ‘Your man turned left at the head of the street. The lane there runs back up the hill to where the senators live.’

We were moving before he’d finished the sentence.