The Art of War

Chapter 18

Rome, 4 August AD 69

Jocasta

Where were we? Pantera’s visit to my house on the Aventine. Yes, I remember. I was reading, I imagine, when Caliope came to find me.

Caliope was eighty-six and had had her tongue removed at fifteen by a senator who needed discretion and believed all women gossiped by nature. He cut off her ears at the same time, apparently thinking to make her deaf. A deaf and dumb servant is useful, you see; she can’t tell tales.

Anyway, Priscus was an idiot and my mother, Tiberia, bought Caliope while the wounds were still fresh, and nursed her back to health. She was beautiful in her youth, and showed a capacity for figures and accounting that outshone me or either of my brothers. She had had control of the household accounts in our family for nearly forty years and even now, when her sight is failing and she can only see figures written thrice their usual size, and must work the abacus by feel alone, she is fast and accurate. She is also utterly loyal.

The day we are talking about, the day after Pantera was beaten by the bandits, she came fast to me up on the third floor and tapped a spread-fingered rhythm on my arm. Her sign language is impenetrable by anyone outside the family.

‘A man?’ I asked. ‘The same one who came yesterday?’

No. A curt shake of the head. Caliope’s hair is white as winter ice and cut short, to evade the lice. In the mid-morning sun, it shone about her head like ermine, framing the dark holes of her ears.

She mimed a small man, hunched, and her vocal hands said that his skin was black as night. He asked for you by name. He said to tell you that he was here in the name of his Teacher.

Pantera, then. Nobody else still referred to Seneca by that name. Nobody else still spoke of the old man at all, except Pantera.

I called for wine, splashed water over my face, put on a smile and let Caliope lead me downstairs to where Pantera was waiting for me in the slaves’ room on the lowest floor.

The stench reached me before I saw him. I rounded the corner, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I-’

‘You can’t invite me upstairs. It’s all right; I know.’

Hades, but he looked different. I was expecting a disguise, but this? If he hadn’t spoken, I’d have thought Caliope had finally gone mad and was inviting in the debris from the streets.

I clamped my mouth shut and studied him. He wasn’t angry, and clearly he didn’t wish to talk about the night before, which was fine by me.

It’s possible he hadn’t seen me and the almost physical struggle I’d had with Domitian on the rooftops to persuade the boy to come away from the fight.

It’s just as possible that he hadn’t spotted the small, quiet, costly man I sent to follow Domitian home, but my man had seen Pantera and everything I have ever heard about this spy suggests to me that he sees those who follow him long before he is seen.

So I was fairly sure that he’d known I was there, and known also that I’d seen him in danger and not gone to his aid. And yet there was no rancour in his gaze. He seemed only to be waiting for my impression of his appearance and how he had changed.

What can I say? It wasn’t just that his skin was black and his hair curled, his whole demeanour was different; he was another man than the one I had met in the inn last night and he, again, had been different from the one who had spoken to Caenis in her house that evening. I could have said so aloud, but I thought that if he could read me at all, he would know that his guise was good.

My mother used to say that when in doubt, it’s always wise to pour the wine; so I did. My hand was steady.

‘How did you survive?’ I asked.

‘Last night? Your friend Trabo helped me.’

So he did see. ‘Did he know who you were?’

‘No, but he knew you in the inn and he had watched us go into Caenis’ house. I assume he followed me out. He left when the last three attackers tried to run. He killed them and then spent the night hunting Guards. Five are dead if the rumours are true. Give him long enough and he’ll wipe them all out.’

‘If they don’t get to him first.’

‘Which, of course, they will.’

There was another silence. Each time we met there was silence.

Irritable, I handed him his wine. ‘What brings you here?’

He rubbed the knuckle of his thumb along his brow and I watched him change his mind about what he was going to say and that, I have to tell you, was quite easily the most disconcerting moment in the entire series of disjointed, disconcerting meetings I’d had with this man.

With a kind of slow reluctance, he said, ‘Lucius knows who I am, what I am. We thought he did when he sent an assassin to Vespasian, but last night proves it. He knew I was going to the widows’ street. The Guards couldn’t have got there in time otherwise.’

Hades. I had gone cold. My palms were wet. ‘Nobody knew in advance where you were going, not even me.’

‘Somebody found out.’

He moved a little and I had to hold myself still not to flinch. He was armed, obviously. So was I, but I had seen how fast he could throw. It was a measure of how unsettled I was that I even thought he might attack me.

Nothing happened, naturally. We each waited for the other to make the first mistake, in the way Seneca taught us. We were his children, both of us, the product of his making, and we were never easy in each other’s company, even later, with everything that happened.

I searched his face for clues, but he was a small, black, wizened monkey of a man and his eyes were the same as they had always been, which was no help at all. And he believed there was a traitor close to Vespasian’s cause. I could have wept, but where would that have got us?

‘Did Caenis know to expect you?’ I asked. That was always possible. ‘Vespasian must have written to her, surely?’

‘I asked him not to, but even if he did, she loves Vespasian and he her. Many things can be bought, but not love. If we can trust anyone, we can trust her.’ He waited for me to answer and when I didn’t — I had nothing to say — he said, conversationally, ‘Lucius came to visit you yesterday.’

Who? Who told you that? Have you spies in my household? In his? Or do the silver-tongues on the street report to you so soon, when you’ve been here but two days?

I had spent three hard years trying to buy the favour and trust of the silver-tongues. I thought I had bought Scopius and his wife Gudrun at the Inn of the Crossed Spears, but never the boys who lived on the rooftops.

None of this I said aloud. None, I believed — I still believe — showed on my face. I shrugged. ‘He is coming back again today. Soon. I thought you were him.’

‘Does he know what you are?’

‘ No! Do you think I’m insane?’ No other man knocks me off balance this easily. I pressed my lips tight, turned a circle on one heel, all the things one does to regain composure. I came back to him with my temper on a tight rein. ‘He has… difficulties with his wife. She is not the woman he wants her to be.’

‘And you are?’

‘He thinks I may be. I have not disabused him of that idea yet. I thought it might be useful if one of us was close to him and it can’t be you or Caenis or any member of Vespasian’s family, he wouldn’t allow it.’ I was talking too much. I stopped.

Whore.

The word hung between us. I waited for him to say it, for evidence that he was even thinking it, but there was, if anything, a new respect in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before.

‘Useful.’ He nodded, slowly. ‘Also immensely dangerous.’

‘Unlike walking round the city in broad daylight with a price of seven hundred sesterces on your head. Which is, of course, entirely safe.’

His laugh was there and gone too fast to catch, like a flash of winter sun, but there was a genuine warmth that was all the more surprising for its cause. Seneca had loved him. Slowly, over many meetings and in small currencies, I was beginning to understand why.

Still amused, he said, ‘Seven hundred already? I last heard six, but that was in the Palatine stews. It was five at dawn this morning. I am growing more precious by the hour.’ He sobered quickly. ‘So we each face danger.’ He leaned back against the wall, arms folded. ‘If it can be done safely, I think you should let Lucius know that the lady Caenis has invited you to dine with her. Let him know that you will report to him what you hear there. Let him know that you might be useful.’

‘And if he accepts? If he asks me to spy for him, what do I tell him?’

‘That you have to be free to use your own discretion, and that things will change with time. If it were me, I would tell him as much of the truth as I could without damaging me. Let him know that Caenis is intimately involved in Vespasian’s bid for power; if he hasn’t worked that out already, he’s not the man we think he is. Tell him small things, enough to make him trust you. If we’re going to defeat him, it will be by the piling on of small facts of questionable truth that hide the one big lie at the centre.’

‘So you trust me not to tell him everything?’

‘Truly?’ His smile grew thin and hard and didn’t go near his eyes. ‘At this moment, I don’t trust anybody. But I would like to grow to trust you.’

He was not that different, then, from every other man who ever crossed my path. Somehow, I had expected more. But I have had years of practice at hiding that kind of disappointment.

I said, ‘How will I reach you? I can’t be seen sending servants to Scopius; it’s too dangerous.’

‘With this,’ he said, and opened his palm. On it lay a small and shrivelled date. ‘Take it.’

I did, and discovered that it was not a date, but a simulacrum made of fired clay and painted so that it was the exact shape, size and lustre of an old winter date, the sweet kind, that breaks apart as you eat it.

My mouth watered just holding it, even when I had learned how to twist the two ends in opposite directions and open it to reveal the hollow centre where the stone would have been. Inside was a tight-rolled slip of finest paper, enough to write perhaps two dozen words, if the letters were small.

‘Be brief,’ he said. ‘Use the oldest ciphers. Nobody else will remember them.’

It was his compliment to me that he thought I would. I didn’t, but I had Seneca’s papers and could work them out. Very likely, he knew that, too.

Later, after he had gone, I opened the paper rolled up in the date and read what Pantera had left there: a phrase of Seneca’s reproduced in plain text, without any kind of code or cipher.

Most powerful is she who has herself in her own power.

She. Seneca wrote the lines for a man; Seneca wrote everything for his men. Pantera had reworded it for me.

She who has herself in her own power. I have always had that. I was not going to change then, or now.

I burned the note and hid the dangerous date and waited for Lucius’ visit.

He came less than an hour later, and he was, as ever, suave and urbane and endlessly courteous. He brought me gifts of gold and pearls and diamonds, and a fine mind and a ready laugh.

He was, in short, everything that Pantera was not. And he was not dangerous to me as long as he thought I was giving him what he wanted: my mind and then my body.

I planned to give him both, though I hadn’t yet yielded to his touch. I gave him conversation and laughter and quick, ready answers.

Neither of us, I think, was disappointed with our intercourse. He promised to come again, and I believed him.