The Art of War

Chapter 29

Rome, the ides of September AD 69

Borros

September brought an end to August’s stifling heat and the beginning of cooler air. It wasn’t cold yet, but the early leaves were turning and the clouds were thin as silk, and lofty.

By then, Pantera’s little Berber cripple had gone; the Guards had got wind of that disguise and it was no longer safe. Gudrun had cleaned the tattoos from his face early in September and the wound on his head had healed enough to be invisible. He had set aside the sackcloth tunic and taken on white robes, and become younger, taller, darker, with a long, lean spring to his step.

On the ides of that month, he was a Mauretanian merchant and his three personal slaves followed him: that’s to say, me, squint-eyed Felix, who was the fastest man with a cudgel I had ever met provided you let him use his left hand, and the scrawny gelding Amoricus, who had once been a priest of Isis.

I don’t know how Pantera found him, I never asked, but if Felix was a natural born killer, Amoricus was, as we swiftly discovered, as skilled a picker of locks.

You might think that we who had once been enslaved would have hated to be made slaves again, even only as a disguise, but in our month of freedom we’d found exactly how much easier it was to remain a slave for a while longer than to learn how to be a freedman in a city where the slaves envied us and the freeborn inevitably continued to despise us as mere freedmen, with no real standing.

And so we were slaves again, if only in name, and Pantera led us in a train through the markets towards the Circus Maximus. We had dressed with care: scruffy enough to look impoverished, not obviously muscled enough to look dangerous.

We made a line astern as he swept downhill to the corner tavern known as the White Hare where my old master, Cavernus, held sway over his clientele. Pantera stooped under the lintel; truly, he was not so tall that he needed to, but he was thinking taller, and so we all thought him taller too. He found a seat in a corner and we trailed after him and sat on the floor.

Cavernus served us himself, making much of his new client’s evident wealth and showing no sign of recognizing either him or me. As he bent over the wine, Pantera murmured, ‘Your man: is he here?’

‘Claudius Faventinus. He’s been in since the first hour after dawn.’

Cavernus’ eyes flicked to his right, where a balding Roman was staring with dull inattention into his own wine beaker. He was carrying too much weight to be fit, but not so much that it couldn’t be lost again. Broken veins lined his nose and were spreading on to his cheeks.

‘What can you tell me of him?’ Pantera asked.

‘He was a centurion in the western fleet at Misene.’

‘Discharged with honour?’

Cavernus shook his head. ‘He says so, but nobody else agrees. Don’t trust him. He’d sell his right hand for the cost of the next jug.’

‘Just the man I need.’ Rising, Pantera laid a silver coin on the table. ‘Hold this place for me, will you?’

He gave orders to us in a language that I suppose might have sounded Mauretanian to those listening but was, in fact, the tongue of the tribes of Briton. He spoke it always with the accent of the west.

‘If this man is not what he seems,’ he said, ‘we will need to kill him. Listen, but not obviously. And watch for how he moves.’

He swept across the floor, his white robes whispering behind, and approached the table of a man who was too lost in his own self-pity to notice that he was coming.

‘Claudius Faventinus,’ he said, leaning over, making much of his imagined height. ‘May I join you? I hear the navy lost a good man when you left…’

Pantera left the bar-room shortly after noon, with the three of us following behind.

Out of sight of the inn, he stopped. ‘Follow Faventinus,’ he said to Amoricus. ‘I need to know where he goes, who he speaks to, what he eats, what he drinks, whose bed he shares and what he dreams of while he sleeps. I need to hear everything of his life. Is that clear?’

‘Very.’ Amoricus was a straightforward boy in many respects. He had wanted to be an actor in his youth and we had discovered early that he had a memory better than a Hebrew’s, and a facility for extempore speech-giving that would have left half the city’s actors raw with envy. With better looks and a richer voice, and his balls still hanging on his body…

All that might have been, but was not, was written on his face, but nearest the surface was a delight that Pantera had trusted him with this new task.

With two of us left in his train, Pantera set off on what had become a daily tour of the city. He stopped at a shrine to Bacchus and threw a coin into a fountain, leaning over as the god dictated to look at his reflection in the rippled surface.

In doing so, he reached underneath the rim and retrieved from beneath it a long, thin flake of birch bark, carved along its inner surface in Etruscan script. There are those among the gladiators who will dance to your tune. Gladius.

Pantera dropped the wood into the burning fire of a small shrine to Aphrodite on the next street corner and we watched it bloom with bright flames, so that the letters briefly stood out white against the charcoaled wood before it all fell to ash.

Moving on, he bought a barrel of wine stamped with an oak leaf and a lyre. Some distance away, he emptied it into a gutter, cracked open the barrel and read what was written beneath a coating of clear wax on the inner surface of one of the staves.

Antonius Primus leads three legions towards Rome. He has met no resistance. Six centurions who stood against him from within his own ranks are dead. The rest favoured Otho, and so hate Vitellius. They will stand firm.

The stave was broken into pieces and that, too, was burned before we moved into the more expensive parts of the Capitol hill, above the vast shrine to Isis that housed her principal priests.

There, a message spoken in low tones, through shrouding smoke, by a veiled woman told us that the sun in Egypt seared the sand and that those who wished for water must wait for the end of winter. As an afterthought, she reported that the lily continued to bloom through the summer and probably into next year.

‘Hypatia is in contact with Vespasian, who has the legions of Egypt ready to sail in the spring if we need them,’ Pantera said as we walked away. ‘We’ll need to secure the Misene fleet if they’re to land safely. And Titus is still in love with Berenice, who was a queen in Judaea.’

We absorbed this, Felix and I, and stored it for future reference. It came from you, didn’t it? You are Hypatia? We didn’t understand half of it and told none of it to anybody.

At the foot of the hill Pantera received from a particular date-seller a pebble of fired clay the exact shape, size and colour of a date, which, when either end was twisted, opened to show a hollow core containing a brief message in a cipher that took him nearly an hour to translate.

Written out, it said, The marines at Misene are ripe for the picking. Speak to these men. A list of ten names was added.

At an ostler, he paid for the keep of a horse that did not exist and received a message in a sealed pack.

Three streets away from the stables, Pantera examined the packaging. The heart of the wax seal contained a single black horse hair which proved, on close examination, to be unbroken. On the seal’s surface was the imprint of a galley under full sail: Marc Antony’s sign. Within was a simple uncoded note.

Antonius Primus has stopped at Verona and is making camp. The people of the countryside fear the coming war.

Returning to the market, Pantera bought paper, wrote a reply, folded the paper across and across and slid his knife blade along the folds to divide it into four pieces. Each was bound into a new package, identical to the original.

Back at the ostler, one package was handed back as if it were the first one, unopened, to be sent back to the sender; the seal was the same, but with a new hair set in the centre. It was from Felix, who had the finest, palest hair of us all; only if you knew what to look for would you have seen the difference.

Later, at the big, busy livestock market by the Tiber, an ox-cart drover, a muleteer and a travelling bladesmith each accepted a silver coin to deliver their packages unbroken. With the silver coin went a phrase: ‘It is many years since Antony lost at Actium. May there be many more before such a battle comes again.’

Thus, simply, was Pantera’s reincarnation of the Antonine messenger service ordered. The men were dour, closed-faced individuals; I wouldn’t have picked them out of a crowd, but Pantera had talked to them all in the course of the past month and they all worked for him with a devotion as great as any of us.

Felix and I held back when he spoke to them; it wasn’t that he didn’t trust us, but we all knew that Lucius was becoming more desperate by the day and that if one of us was taken alive, it was better for everyone if whoever was taken didn’t know the details of the men Pantera had sought out.

What that means is that while I could describe them for you, and where he met them, I couldn’t tell you their names, or what they were paid, or whom they delivered to.

Were we watched? Of course we were. The silver-boys followed us everywhere and Pantera did nothing to lose them, at least not while we went about our daily message round. If one of them had chosen to betray him, they could have done so. But he wasn’t arrested, which means they didn’t, right?

In the mid-afternoon, after one such conversation, Pantera said to Felix, ‘It might be that there is no bear hunting the streets tonight.’

‘Trabo is taken?’ We knew he was the bear, you see.

Pantera shook his head. ‘No, but he may be occupied elsewhere. Still, it would be unfortunate if the Guard were to be spared, don’t you think? If two or three of them were to die, marked by the bear, it would keep them on their toes. Make sure you are not seen.’

‘Of course not.’ Felix, who lived to kill, grinned like a child who had expected hard labour and instead had been sent to play in the fields. He left us, quietly, unobtrusively, cheerfully.

Pantera sent me back to the Inn of the Crossed Spears with orders to keep an eye out for Trabo and to protect him if he needed it. I did as I was bid, but Trabo didn’t come there that night, and, for all that there were so many Guards obviously waiting for him, there was no violence to speak of.

They hadn’t laid a finger on him since July and they showed no sign of getting any closer.