The Art of War

Chapter 19

Rome, 4 August AD 69

Horus, owner-in-part of the House of the Lyre

If you speak to the Marcuses, they will tell you that Pantera came to the House of the Lyre by an indirect route, down the Aventine, across the forum and south into the ghettos and slums on the side of the Capitol — the heaving, stinking, built-up rat warren where neither fire nor Nero’s building regulations have effected any serious change to the architecture for generations.

There are apartment blocks eighteen storeys high there that lean on to the side of the hill like drunken men on a bad morning, leaving dim alleys beneath where the sun never penetrates and the worst of humanity can slake its lust in eternal shade. Pantera said to me once, some years ago, that he felt less safe in the slums of the Capitol than he did in the forests of Britain and he was not safe there, not when he was a Roman, hunting Britons, nor later, when he made himself a tribesman and was hunting Romans with his warriors.

Now, with the whole of Rome offered real silver to catch him, he hugged those unsafe places as if they were friends. And he immersed himself in his new guise.

Even the silver-boys, who can transform themselves from street thieves to boy nymphs in the twist of a smile, said that he had utterly changed himself into a Berber grandfather, a lame date-carter, making a pittance carrying his wares balanced in a sack on his head, which made his limp worse. He was afraid of dogs.

He left behind the last of the summer sunlight and moved deeper into the heart of the slum.

In this place are inns that cater only to slaves, and others that cater only to freedmen. There are fishmongers, ironmongers, bakers, carpenters, tanners, fullers, dyers, spinners and weavers: if a trade stank or might cause a fire, or blind its crafters, or pollute the local water, it was done there, in the sink of the city.

And then there were the brothels, which at least smelled sweeter.

Their doors, on the whole, were painted in martial red, with carvings of men in full erection all around. The shutters had breasts painted on them that made pairs when closed, and strange anatomical impossibilities when pegged open. For the hard of thinking, the door knockers were shaped like engorged phalluses, if giants gave their members to madams for their premises.

With the Marcuses watching from their rooftops, the little black Berber that was Pantera passed through all these without pausing long in any one place; just enough to look back and be sure he was not being followed by other than they. He whistled occasionally when they lost him. Yes, they lost him, which is almost unimaginable, but you have to remember he was one of them once; we both were. We know how they think.

He came to the outer, southern edge of the ghetto, where the brothels mixed with ordinary houses and were less indiscreet. Down one carefully unspectacular side street was a particular door painted lilac set between thrown-back shutters that showed musical instruments played by fully clothed youths of both genders. The knocker was in the shape of a lyre.

Pantera walked past once, carried on to the end of the street, turned right and right again in a circle, rested his dates on the ground and waited. The city was at its busiest and he must have known that if one of Lucius’ agents was following him, this was when they would have been hardest to see.

There were no Guards in the vicinity. He must have passed a dozen or more detachments on his way here, but they wouldn’t be in this particular street; the House of the Lyre has its own reputation and it would sit ill with the man who upset its management if that upset were passed to the clients, most of whom outranked any member of the Guard.

Yes, I am proud. We made this house, my sponsor and I, and it has grown in less than fifteen years to be the foremost of its kind in Rome.

But more of that presently. On the day in question, which was the fourth day of August that year, Pantera the spy made his circuit a few more times, and then, on the fourth or fifth pass, he stepped up and knocked lightly on the lilac door.

A giant German with a small head on vast shoulders and inked marks on monstrous biceps answered. He was so big that his member might well have graced the doors deeper in the slum, except that nobody would ever have been suicidal enough to try to take it. He cost a fortune, and was worth every slip of silver; nobody, however drunk or drugged or finely born, was going to offer violence in his presence.

Pantera was not intimidated; quite the reverse. He cocked his little wizened head to one side and, bright as a blackbird, said, ‘The seas were stormy when I travelled here. Perhaps the House of the Lyre can offer balm to a travelling soul?’

The giant blinked down at him and stared and blinked again. He gave the impression of a man who thought slowly, and then followed with his fists. It was, as Pantera knew, and I can attest, an entirely false impression, but he played it well.

‘The seas can be rough,’ he said presently, in passable Latin, ‘but we always have calmer waters in our house.’

He nodded his tiny head, a sight altogether like a pea bouncing on a bough; then, in rougher, easier Greek: ‘It’s been long enough.’ He held out one massive arm.

Pantera clasped it fondly. ‘Drusus, I miss you every moment I’m away. But it can’t be helped. Is he in?’

‘He is. And alone. I could take you up, but-’

‘But you won’t because we’re all safer with you guarding the door. This for your time.’

A piece of silver changed hands, not enough in most circumstances to buy entry to the House, but this was Pantera; he had rates all his own.

So what can I tell you about our house? If one were to enter as Pantera did, by the front entrance, which is the only one permitted to clients, one would pass from a plain and inexpensive street into sophisticated, genteel beauty. The door gives way to a small vestibule, but that’s only for show. Beyond that is a large courtyard garden, open to the skies, so that the five storeys of the house look inward over an abundance of late-flowering lilacs, olives heavy with fruit, citrus trees, cherries, balm.

Doves settle and coo in the bowers. Songbirds shower the visitor with golden notes. Doors lead off on all sides, on all floors. Those above the ground floor have rails and balconies that look down on to a garden that is laid out to be as restful seen from four storeys up as it is to walk through. Staircases lead up from the two diagonals; the northeastern and south-western corners.

Pantera took the latter, which was closest. He ran lightly up four flights of narrow, claustrophobic stairs. The frescoes were new, but nothing he hadn’t seen before in one form or another.

On the lower walls are images of sexuality; not the grotesques of the inner-ghetto brothels, but subtle frescoes of silk-clad women regarding their reflections in slow-flowing rivers, young men poised in acts of bravery and strength. As he ascended, the images became more explicit and the faces more recognizably those of the men and women who worked in the House. Each had a specialty, and these were depicted in unashamed detail, so that by the time the visitor reached the top floor he or — less often — she would have had time to examine the possibilities in theory, and so would be ready to explore them in practice.

Some of those explorations were taking place as he passed, giving rise to the sounds and scents of intercourse; even now, in the mid-morning, we had clients who had paid for a full day, dusk to dusk, and were loath to waste time sleeping.

Elsewhere, the employees of the House slept off a night’s work, together or alone. A few of them passed Pantera on their way to or from the baths on the lower ground floor. They slid past clad in silk, eyeing the lame, wizened Berber, deciding that he must have a great deal more money than appearances might suggest. We keep an exclusive establishment and nobody comes here who lacks the means to spend freely. Everyone who comes requires absolute privacy and will pay to preserve it.

On the top floor, the fourth, an expensive drift of frankincense underlined, strengthened, deepened, made more intimate, exotic and enticing the enduring smell of human sex that leaked up from below. Pantera took a left turn at the top of the stairs, skirted the balcony that looked over the now vertiginous drop into the courtyard garden, and entered a corridor that stretched out away from it; a spur that led away from the main building.

The floors on this level were painted in a brilliant, martial red: a man’s entire body of blood could have flowed along here and been invisible until you trod in it. The walls were paler: Mars met the white light of the moon and made a delicate pastel pink. There were fourteen doors along the corridor, seven on either side, painted progressively in the colours of the rainbow, beginning with a deep cherry red at the head of the stairs and cascading through amber, sun, spring, sky and midnight to a single lilac door at the far end that stretched across the corridor’s full width.

Not that Pantera inspected the rainbow hallway in any depth. You see, when he feigned his fear of dogs in his Berber guise, it was not all a sham; he had learned by sad experience to be wary of hounds and there was one in particular where, shall we say, a mutual respect had arisen.

That hound was Cerberus, a vast, black, strong-tailed, loll-tongued, prick-eared monster with great brown eyes and teeth as long as your thumb, and he was stationed outside the lilac door. A chain ran from his iron-spiked collar to a rivet in the floor, but it was coiled in loose piles and it was impossible for a visitor to estimate its length.

Cerberus wasn’t howling to announce the presence of a visitor, he was too well trained for that. He wasn’t straining to reach him either, but still, Pantera was not inclined to move close. Without moving his eyes, he pursed his lips and began to whistle; not a command to stay or come, but a low, rolling air that blended with the murmuring of doves nearby. It was his signal to me, to let me know who he was.

It’s possible I might have known him without that; I am used to seeing the truth beneath men’s subterfuge, but I heard the air before I looked, and so, squinting through the spyhole in the door’s ornament, I was able to appreciate his disguise in its fullness. Still, I didn’t rush to invite him in.

Pantera whistled. The hound blinked. For a long time, nothing else moved.

Pantera finished the tune and had no other and it looked to me that he was about to turn away. I couldn’t let him go like that, difficult though his presence was for me.

I let the door open a fraction. ‘The Guards are offering six hundred sesterces for you alive, did you know?’

‘Seven.’ Still Pantera did not move. ‘Would you prefer that I leave?’

I said nothing, just undid the chain, let the door swing open and beckoned him in.

On the inside of the door was a silvered panel four feet by two that showed the new visitor how he looked to those around him. Women have been known to enter on occasion, but I have found that men, in particular, like to be assured that they look good.

As Pantera stepped in, we were framed together: him, a wizened Berber grandfather with tattoos like knife cuts on his cheeks and an ancient wound on his head that was not there the last time I saw him; me taller, because I was standing upright, though we are of a height when both standing the same. The mirror flattered my Alexandrian colouring, the doe-brown eyes, the blue-black hair, the olive skin; my patrons find me beautiful and I pay attention to my looks: no hair in unfortunate places, my eyes always enhanced with shading in the Egyptian style. My robes were of lilac silk and cost more than anything Vespasian or his agents could have afforded: the House of the Lyre never skimped on quality.

Pantera shut the door, slid across the three bolts and fastened the chain; he had always been careful, but that day he was doubly so.

He came fully into my domain, then. Though it was hidden away, the room was the biggest in the House, larger than most atria. A beaded curtain divided it in two and beyond was a silk bed big as a boat, and beyond that, a wide, sun-bright balcony on which doves and songbirds dozed amidst hanging vines.

The area nearest the door had no bed, but a low table carved in boxwood inlaid with coloured stones and a couch upholstered in a midnight-blue silk so deep, so lustrous that a man could have fallen asleep in its embrace and not woken for a month. On a table nearby stood a Greek vase that rose to waist height, wrought around with images of naked men. It was centuries old, from the glory days of Athens, when the world was a simpler, more beautiful place. Wherever you were in the room, that vase commanded attention.

The only other thing of note, which I must mention now, so that you know for the catastrophe that came later, is that there was a lilac-painted cupboard that served as Cerberus’ kennel at the far end of the couch. It was painted to fit with the restrained beauty of the room, but it was clearly the hound’s domain.

Pantera knew what it was, and, accordingly, sat at the far end of the couch. Cerberus lay down in the open kennel door and set his head on his great feet. His eyes never left Pantera’s face.

Pantera stayed quite still. ‘What do I call you?’ he asked.

I ignored the question at first, caught his chin, tilted it to the light, studied the work that had been done on his face. The wound on his head was new, but only by close scrutiny did I discern that. At length, I said, ‘Very good. I wouldn’t have known you if you hadn’t whistled. Clearly Cerberus did, or you would be dead.’

‘You are nameless?’

I laughed, softly. ‘If Lucius succeeds in taking you alive, I will very much appreciate being nameless, yes. If I must have a name now, you may call me Horus.’

‘You were Osiris once.’

‘Then we may agree that I have refined my pretensions.’

He looked so old, then, when I know that we are within six months of the same age. We were silver-boys together, two of the very few of our generation who didn’t end our lives floating face down in the Tiber.

We found our sponsors, you see. Pantera, of course, found Seneca who took his raw talent and polished it to the rough diamond he became. Seneca found me, too; I had some talents he valued, but my best and greatest sponsor was, and is, Mucianus, who was leading the armies for Vespasian.

Pantera knew this, I’m sure; we had never spoken of it openly, but he would have been a lesser man had he not. He knew that Mucianus owned the House and that he paid for its upkeep. You could have said that Mucianus owned me, if you like, but both of us would have denied it. He was generous. He is very generous, in fact. He did not consider ownership necessary and I have never been his slave.

For my part, I had my own sources of information, so I already knew that Pantera had come from Vespasian’s side and that he was in Rome to protect the general’s family and to promote his attempt to become emperor. The message doves had brought other messages, too, for Pantera.

I said, ‘Hypatia sends you her greetings. She says to tell you that Kleopatra fulfils her promise, that Iksahra hunts with her hawks across the sands to great effect, and the general is settled and safe. I don’t wish to know what any of this means.’

He relaxed a little, sat back, smiled like in the old days. ‘I wasn’t planning to tell you. If you are taken, I would prefer you, too, to know as little as possible. Has anything come from the east?’

‘Two birds. The messages were sealed. I have not opened them.’

Cerberus guarded more than my person. I knelt by him then, and took off his collar. Pantera looked at me as if I had gone mad, but the hound leaned on my shoulder and swiped his tongue across my face and his tail hit the floor hard enough to make it shake.

There were eighteen spikes on his collar, each two inches long. I unscrewed the third along from the tie and tipped out the two small ivory cylinders from the centre.

‘I don’t know the ciphers,’ I said, which was true, although it was also true that one of the skills Seneca found and nurtured in me was that of code-breaking. You wouldn’t think it in an Alexandrian with the looks of a girl, but there were few ways of disguising a message that I could not read, given time.

My other skill? That was forgery. I can mimic any man’s hand, or woman’s, come to that. Which is why, obviously, I was uncertain of Pantera.

But we digress. I handed him the cylinders and told him I didn’t know their contents and he gave me that sideways smile again, because he and I had spent months in our youth breaking into other men’s private correspondence. I think he saw it as a testament of my respect for him that I hadn’t looked at these, and truthfully, I hadn’t.

He opened the heavier of the two cylinders first and, after a moment, held it out so that we could both read the contents. The sparse lines on the rolled bark inside were written in a simple letter-substitution cipher he had created himself twenty years ago, which both of us could unravel in our heads as we read it.

From Mergus to the emperor’s spy, greetings.

We have met Vologases, King of Kings of Parthia, who promises peace between our empires when Vespasian rules. He has offered forty thousand archers to our cause. Vespasian will not accept foreign aid, but is grateful for the offer. Mucianus marches west with five legions. We are for Alexandria. Men seek you with ill intent. Take care.

‘Interesting?’ I asked.

‘Marginally.’ He laid the missive down on the table. ‘I didn’t know about the archers. It’s good to know the King of Kings is choosing Vespasian as his preferred emperor. It could mean peace in the east.’ He had been there, you see, to Parthia, or at least close. He had spoken to the King of Kings.

The second message was from Mucianus, which was a surprise; I thought he only wrote to me. He used a more complex cipher of his own creation so that Pantera had to ask me for the key and then for a slate so he could transcribe it. It wasn’t impenetrable, don’t think that: a competent code-breaker on either side could have mastered it in a morning. With the key, it was effortless. Pantera transcribed it on the first pass.

From Mucianus, to the maker of minds. We need Ravenna. It must come to our cause.

Just that. Pantera stared at it, chewing his lip.

After a while, I said, ‘ Maker of minds? Does he always call you that?’

‘Never before.’

I said, ‘He is not one to waste a bird.’ He knows the trouble we take to get them to him. He would never do that.

‘Nor to speak the obvious.’ Pantera raised a brow. ‘Have you a candle?’

The candles were on the far side of the beaded curtain, with the bed and the cooing doves. I passed through, setting it chiming. When I returned, Pantera was holding one of the beaded threads, studying the beads. In wonder, he said, ‘I had thought these were painted wood.’

He held in his hand a fortune threaded on a few feet of silk. The beads were of ivory, pearl, palest amber. The very lowest bead on each strand, which weighed the others down, was a nugget of raw gold.

I said, ‘Mucianus sends me beads as he finds them, or things he thinks can be fashioned to be suitable. There’s a trader in the city, Ostorius — you’ll remember him from the rooftops? The black-haired half-Dacian with the smallest finger missing on his left hand? He’s a woodsmith now. He can carve anything into a bead, given time.’

With every passing heartbeat, we were receding further into our shared childhood. We huddled together on a couch that seemed suddenly too big for what we had become. I passed him the candle in a silver stick and the kindling ember held in a small pot. He lit the wick.

Heated, the thin paper crisped at the edges, but across the width of the page grew letters, darker than the darkening bark around them.

Beware treachery. F amp; A not alone. One other: you his sole target. Now dead. Did not have a name to give, or a face.

‘F and A?’ I asked.

His face was pinched. ‘Fundanius and Albinius. They were two centurions in Lucius’ pay who tried to assassinate Vespasian in Judaea. Fundanius said before he died that I had been his second target.’

‘And Mucianus has caught another who was sent to kill you alone.’

‘Evidently.’

‘How do they know who you are?’

‘If I knew that, I would sleep better at night.’

Pantera burned the two messages, dropping the last fragments into the ember-bowl where they charred and curled and became fine threads of sweet smoke.

‘I should go.’ Pantera stood. It didn’t seem likely to me that he had got all he came for, but he gave every sign of leaving. ‘If anything else comes in, the silver-boys will know how to find me.’

‘Are you back for good?’

‘I’m back for now.’ In two strides, he was at the door, and Cerberus had not moved to stop him.

He paused in the process of leaving, as if struck by a thought. ‘Do you still have dealings with Tiberius Nisens at the palace?’

This, then, was why he had really come.

‘The bath-master?’ I had to think about that. ‘What kind of dealings do you mean? He’s not a client of the House; he can’t afford it.’

‘But you see him still?’

‘Sometimes. He’s a friend.’ He was almost a brother, once, but that doesn’t always lead to trust.

‘Do you still have sufficient connection to him to suggest subtly that he take on a new masseur?’ Pantera asked.

‘Probably. He won’t take you, though. Vitellius is a big man; he needs big hands on his body.’

‘Are Drusus’ hands big enough?’

‘Hades!’ I haven’t laughed in years the way I laughed then. And then I stopped laughing, because he was serious.

‘You’d have to pay gold,’ I said. ‘Drusus is not cheap.’ He was not for sale for any money, actually, but I knew that he would do what Pantera asked; there was a love between them that I had never been part of.

Pantera said, ‘I have Vespasian’s writ. I have all the gold we need. But I need a man inside the palace, who hears what Lucius says when his guard is down. Drusus is one of the bravest men I know.’

‘If I tell him that,’ I said, drily, ‘maybe you won’t need gold. He worships you. I can’t think why. ’

It was Pantera’s turn to grin like a boy. In truth he loved this place, the memories of it, the lifestyle, my company. He didn’t have to say so, it showed in his eyes.

He said, ‘I can’t think why, either. And I will pay gold in any case. See if you can get Drusus into the palace. Leave word for me with Cavernus at the White Hare on the Esquiline.’

Cavernus. And me. And Drusus. All the relics of his far gone past. I said, ‘Is there nobody newer you can call on?’

‘When my life is worth seven hundred denarii and rising? Only the distant past is safe from that.’

‘Then you might want to know that Julius Claudianus leads one of the gladiator schools now. He trains on the Capitol side of the Circus Maximus. Vitellius likes him. He may have access to the things Drusus can’t hear. And there’s-’

‘Stop.’ Pantera put up his hand. ‘What you are doing is already enough. And what you don’t know can’t endanger you. Do you employ the silver-boys still? The Marcuses?’

‘When they ask me to.’ The fact that he knew them by name told me all I needed to know. ‘I’ll send them with word if anything comes in.’

Pantera gave a small salute, a lift of the finger that the street boys use to say the road ahead is clear. ‘Keep safe. I’ll whistle for Cerberus when I’m back.’