The Art of War

Chapter 30

Rome, the ides of September AD 69

Geminus

Yes, well, that wasn’t for want of trying, was it?

You have to understand that the best part of July and all of August passed in what felt like a flurry of activity during which, in fact, we achieved precisely nothing.

After that first day’s near misses, we were back to relying on informers, and, as I said before, if you offer a fortune for a sighting of someone who can change his appearance more or less at will, a lot of people will discover they have seen someone who must be him.

For the first four or five days after that first street fight, Juvens and I spent half of each day interviewing men, women and children who charged us handsomely for their dross, then rushing about the city following their lies. Eventually, Lucius lost his temper, and had the latest two beaten until they confessed that they’d fabricated their evidence. Then he had their hands cut off, saying they had attempted to rob the treasury which was a tenuous extension of the truth if ever we heard one.

One of them died as the executioners tried to cauterize the stumps. The other one was sent home with his hands in a sack about his neck and word soon got round that making things up was unwise. After that, the flow of information dried to a dribble, but it was coming in then from Lucius’ sources in the city. He spent a lot of his time studying the papers Nero had left that described Seneca’s network.

You wouldn’t have thought Nero was a fastidious man, or prone to extensive record-keeping, but his notes were surprisingly full and Seneca had clearly been something of a personal obsession. There was more detail of his agents, his network, his ciphers and codes than any one man should have possessed and Lucius was like a pig in an acorn field; he could barely believe his luck. He thought if he read it all he’d be able to build his own network in a far shorter time, and pretty soon he set about doing exactly that.

He found men he could trust and paid them good silver and it began to yield results. Near the end of August, we heard that Pantera was using the guise of a Berber cripple. We scoured the city for Berber cripples and found a few but none of them was him. I think we might have got close once or twice, but always the news we received was that little bit too late, or was mildly ambiguous, or sometimes turned out to be just plain wrong, and on those occasions the fact that we’d rushed halfway up the Esquiline to a particular tavern at a particular time of day probably helped Pantera to work out who it was that was feeding us the information. It didn’t make any material difference, anyway; we still wasted weeks chasing down cold trails with no sign of that changing.

Added to that, whoever was slaughtering the Guard carried on whittling away at our men until they wouldn’t leave the barracks after dark unless we ordered them and then never in groups of less than eight. We had to hire in whores and then ration them and then deal with the resulting fights. The whole summer was a nightmare, really.

September fell on us like a winter tree.

One day it was August, and my worst problem was the nightly predations on the Guard and the frantic rumours that arose from them, and the next it was the first of September, which was the emperor’s birthday with all the havoc that entailed.

It brought Vitellius back from the southern hills whither he had gone to escape the heat and smells of the city in summer. That much was good: if the people had not quite forgotten they had an emperor, they were forgetting that his name was Aulus Vitellius, not Lucius. So he came back for a day of processions and fanfares and pomp and majesty… and feasting. So much feasting.

Afterwards, the rumour was that Vitellius spent his life feasting at other men’s expense when in truth it was only this one birthday, which spread out over the ensuing days like a fat man on a bath bench, so great was the number of senators desperate to show their loyalty to their emperor.

There were over a dozen of them, each anxious to put on a greater show of wealth and extravagance than his predecessor, each eager to find a new dish that might delight the tongue of so fine a connoisseur as this man who had fallen on to the throne and did not quite know how to hold it.

Thus Vitellius, who actually preferred plain fare but had not the strength to say so, was subjected to goose liver and lark’s tongue pate, to stuffed dormice, to whole roasted ostriches, bathed in many-flavoured sauces.

Quinctillius Atticus paid a fortune for a pool to be built in his dining room within which live carp swam, so the emperor could choose the best for himself as it passed under his nose: his steward practised catching the things for half a month beforehand and still failed on the day, the fish having become more adept at hiding than he had at netting them.

Suetonius Mellos went one better and brought in a dolphin from the sea, while Titus Calpurnius bought a black and white striped kind of wild horse from Africa that killed three of his men before they could kill it, and when the survivors had done so they found it a rickle of bones, so that the cook had to kill a mule and substitute its flesh for the other. Everybody was agreed, thereafter, that neither mule nor zebra, however finely roasted, was fit food for an emperor, but the striped hide was worth its weight in gold.

The grim marathon of eating, vomiting and eating again came to an end, and with it, to our great relief, the flood of Guards that had been required to man the streets to ensure the emperor’s safety. Every Guard in the newly made cohorts who was fit to stand had been ordered out during those three days. Nineteen of them had not come back alive.

The bodies had been left openly displayed around the city, rarely in the place where they had been killed. All bore the now familiar marks of the bear-man who was supposed to be ravaging them.

But — finally! — their killer had made a mistake, a series of mistakes, really, and we were on to him.

Over the course of the past half-month, three men had escaped his attacks. Each of them had provided us with a description of a bearded man with sandy hair and light eyes.

And one of them had said, ‘If you shaved his beard off, it was Trabo. I’m sure of it.’

Trabo? Trabo! Of course, it made complete sense, and asked the same question the other two had agreed: yes, it could have been Trabo. Yes, if pushed, they would be sure. Juvens was beside himself with joy. A pale-bearded, big-built man is not that hard to find, even in a city the size of Rome.

It had taken us a few days, but by the ides of September we knew his routines. A dozen men of the Guard were watching the Inn of the Crossed Spears, with orders to send a runner to me and Juvens as soon as Trabo appeared. We weren’t expecting him to head for the inn until late in the evening, and so at dawn I was in the main parade ground, where Clodius Icelus, a Guard in my cohort, was being flogged for repeating one of the many rumours about the killer.

He had ceased to scream, but the wet-iron taste of blood stained the air and the sound of his breathing was a ragged nightmare. I couldn’t walk away from it, any more than I could have walked away yesterday, the day before or any of the other days in the last two months when men had been flogged for rumour-mongering.

There were no bears in Rome, even before the recent revelations, I had been certain of that; no shapeshifting men hunting abroad as beasts at night; no deathly ghuls called forth from the deserts of the east by Vespasian’s necromancers. Vespasian was a man like any other, and I knew he could be beaten like any other; but not if the men who might have been doing the beating were talking themselves into defeat before ever they set foot on the battlefield.

They were scared, I accept that; they drew lots for what had once been routine night patrols of the city and had become instead a venture into a threat-filled nightmare, with strong odds that if you came back alive it was only because someone else you knew had died, messily.

Men gossiped under these circumstances; it was only natural. And it was equally natural that the officers ordered them to be flogged, hoping for silence, knowing it wouldn’t come.

I watched the sun burn the morning’s haze off the city, let the slow silent blue of the sky still my wandering thoughts, and waited for it to end.

And then it was over. The unconscious Clodius was carried to the physicians who had the skills to keep him asleep for three days with serum of poppy and nightshade and then send him back to his unit. Unless he caught blood fever and died, there was every chance he’d be on duty again before the next full moon, but he’d be left behind when the rest of his unit marched out to meet Vespasian’s legions.

They were due to leave at noon, and they weren’t any happier about that than they had been about the night patrols of a city that had become so exceptionally dangerous. Because this was the truth we all faced: Antonius Primus’ armies had stepped on to Italian soil earlier in the month after a string of martial victories over pro-Vitellian forces.

At forty-nine, Primus was nearly twice Caecina’s age, and could not have hoped to inherit the empire from his chosen lord: if nothing else, we all knew that Vespasian had two sons to inherit after him. But you could smell the raw stench of ambition even down the full length of Italy, and Antonius Primus, legate of the VIIth Galbania, self-appointed leader of Balkan legions, reeked of it.

In Vespasian’s name, he was leading five legions toward Rome, plus their auxiliaries, cavalry and anyone else who had tagged along hoping to profit from the carnage. Against them, Vitellius was sending detachments from eight legions, plus cavalry and auxiliary. Over half of the forty thousand men who had marched into Rome in the late spring were marching out again and the Roman people had lined the routes to cheer them on their way with a patriotic fervour that was only partly feigned: their daily prayers were that Rome might not remain a military garrison for the rest of their lives, and the news that men were soon to march out in large numbers had sparked something close to holiday fervour.

Vitellius was proving surprisingly popular. The people liked him, although whether that was simply because he wasn’t Lucius was hard to say. Whatever the reason, he had gone out amongst them after his birthday celebrations and, one smile at a time, was winning his city back from his brother, from his generals, from the torpor and muttered disquiet of his people.

Sending his two leading generals north with the army was part of his strategy.

It was a good idea, ruined by the fact that only Caecina had turned up at the barracks that morning, and in a foul temper.

He it was who had ordered Icelus flogged. He it was who had stood close enough to be coated in a light spray of blood, so that his skin, ordinarily healthy, was mottled with raised spots from which men naturally recoiled.

He was screaming orders now, harassing Guards who were already running to their duty. Disgusted, I had turned away when the light, unmistakable tread caught up with me.

‘If this lot meet Antonius Primus and his legions, they’ll lose. They are sheep with no sense, and they fear the thought of real battle.’

I had been at Cremona with exactly these men when they had fought Otho’s forces through the night and half of the following day. Never in my life do I want to see a battle more real than that one — and we won it.

I was concerned, briefly, that my brows might rise and betray me, but no, my face had schooled itself to the tepid acceptance I most despised and had most frequently used of late.

I said, ‘With luck, Antonius Primus will turn tail when he sees the size of your army and you’ll be back in Rome before the start of winter.’

Mentioning the season was a guess, but it struck the target. Caecina’s eyes closed a moment and opened again only slowly.

‘Winter,’ said my commanding officer, ‘is too fucking close. We shouldn’t be marching anywhere now. We should be training these lazy bastards until they have forgotten their own names and their mothers’ names and the name of the girl they fucked last night if they ever knew it at all and remember nothing but their place in the formation and how badly they want to kill the man opposite them. We should be blocking the passes into Italy and securing the navies. We should be

…’ He cupped his hands to his face in despair. ‘We should have left by now and we’re not ready. Most obviously, we don’t have Valens and Valens is supposed to be leading half of this fucking army. Find him. Bring him here. Remind him of his duties, however pleasant you have to be. You can be pleasant, I’m sure.’

Caecina wasn’t Lucius, he didn’t freeze a man’s blood in his veins with one look, but he wasn’t a happy sight when he was angry and he was beyond angry now. With the thought of that as my spur, I set off for the big double gate that let out on to the Quirinal and from there to the Capitol.

That day, the gateway was far more crowded than it had been, but that was to be expected; the half of Rome that wasn’t lining the streets to cheer the legions’ departure was here trying to make some last-minute sales to men with too much silver in their pouches and little hope of spending it on anything approaching luxury in the days ahead.

At the gates, I had to shoulder my way past boys selling luck charms (Long life and good health to you!) and women selling finches in small cages (Bright songs for bright spirits! Joy on your march and good health to you!), and I was contemplating what kind of chaos it would cause if I set about the citizens with my staff when Juvens appeared at my shoulder.

‘Going somewhere interesting?’

Until recently, Juvens had been despondent. Failing to find Trabo had buffed the shine off his reputation and he’d been sullen and sour for over a month. But since discovering that his nemesis was the bear-man he’d never looked more cheerful: however fearsome your quarry, hunting a living thing was preferable to hunting a shadow. I should know; I was still hunting Pantera.

The men at the Inn of the Crossed Spears were Juvens’, and they had clear orders to follow their man but not spook him. Still, I would have been with them, were it my target and my men.

‘Why are you not at Scopius’ inn?’

‘Because Trabo knows what I look like and we’d lose him for ever if he saw me.’ Juvens’ smile was irritatingly indulgent. ‘You’re looking cross. Did I see the blessed Caecina venting his wrath on you?’

‘No, you saw him vent it on Icelus. I merely caught the backlash.’

‘Which is why you are veritably running across the city.’

‘I’m not running.’

‘Of course not, just walking at a speed that would put a bolting horse to shame. May I trot alongside?’ Juvens was panting. I slowed my pace and found the veins were pulsing in my neck.

I shoved past a tall Mauretanian curse-vendor (Honoured lords! Lay low your foes, whosoever they may be!) and wondered if I could buy one of his tabs for Caecina, and what it might cost to pay for his silence afterwards. I was safely past before the thought had taken root.

‘Are we going to collect Valens?’ Juvens asked, at my shoulder.

‘I am going to find General Valens, yes. You, meanwhile, are waiting for a report from your men and are instantly ready to act on it. If not, you’d better have a good excuse.’ Turning, I found I could walk backwards almost as fast as I could forwards. ‘Unless you’ve been ordered to follow me?’

I didn’t want to think that likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Lucius was ten times more frightening than Caecina and Lucius delighted in turning a man’s family against him; or if not his family, then his closest friends. Squeezing through the crowds, I studied Juvens, searching his open, playboy face for signs of subterfuge.

Ten paces on, I gave up; I wouldn’t have known what to look for anyway and I wasn’t going to treat my closest friend as an enemy. If I did that, Lucius would have won, and while I might have given my oath to the emperor, and had every intention of holding to it until death, I had given nothing at all beyond necessary obedience to the emperor’s brother, nor did I ever intend to give more.

Quite what we thought would happen when Lucius ascended the throne — because he was obviously aiming for that and part of the reason Caecina was so unwilling to leave Rome was that it meant leaving Lucius behind with his brother — was anyone’s guess and too far away to contemplate. Thus did I keep myself sane.

With Juvens easy at my shoulder, I came to the Aventine, strewn with big houses with gilt-tiled roofs and fountains that had flowed with wine instead of water on the occasion of the emperor’s birthday.

Here was the real wealth, the vast, overstated, too-much-money-and-no-sense wealth that buys fripperies because they are today’s fashion; British slaves this month, Thessalian next; pate of larks’ tongues today, caviar tomorrow; wine yesterday, a different wine today, a different one again tomorrow. Always wine. And gold; there was so much gold here, a man could have died blinded by its shine. Valens lived on the crest of the hill, with a view north in the direction his legions were due shortly to march.

The front door to his house was locked and barred as if he had already left and sent the slaves away, but a door at the side gave on to a walled garden aburst with colour and scent; many dozens of fruit trees bowed under the bounty of their harvest, while late-flowering roses climbed the walls, assaulting the air with their perfume. A small river flowed cheerily down the slope, though I would have bet it was not natural, and that Valens was not paying his due to the water commissioners for diverting their aqueduct to this small patch of glory.

This was my first impression, taken in a single sweeping glance, which ended at the gardener’s hut. There, a group of slaves was huddled round a prone figure, headed by Hermonius, physician to the wealthy, and, in my opinion, one of the most morbidly dangerous men in Rome.

‘Valens?’

I was running now, if not fast enough to put a bolting horse to shame, then at least fast enough to leave Juvens behind. At the hut, I skidded to a stop: it was Valens, prone, perhaps breathing, with a splattering of vomit near his head and clumps of foul, bloody diarrhoea clotted about his buttocks and the ground around.

The stench was enough to throw a man back. I gagged, covered my mouth with my hand, and knelt, feeling for a pulse. The slaves had backed away; they had no authority and could exert none. I grabbed the closest, a youth of perhaps eighteen. ‘Run to the Quirinal hill. Find Scopius who tends the Inn of the Crossed Spears. Tell him we need his wife, to tend your master who has both vomiting and loose bowels. If you can’t find him, ask the silver-boys. Tell them there’s gold in it and no harm to their master. Don’t gawp at me, child; I was born here, I know how the streets run. Go! ’

He ran. I turned back in time to grab Hermonius, the physician, and bodily prevent him from taking a lancet to the general’s veins. ‘You can leave. We don’t need you.’

‘You, sir, have no authority, while I- Ah! ’

I had drawn my blade and slammed the flat of it back-handed across the physician’s chest, sending the man flying into a pile of mule manure.

I stood over him, with the point at his face. ‘My blade is all the authority I need. You will leave. I will send for you should we have need of your particular lack of skill.’

I watched the physician scuttle away, and then rolled my general gently on to his back, sent for sponges and water and waited for the slave to reach Scopius and Gudrun, praying all the while that at least one of them would come.