The Art of War

Chapter 32

Rome, the ides of September AD 69

Trabo

I was repairing a wheel that afternoon, as I remember; but then, I spent a lot of those days repairing wheels. It would have been surprising had I not been.

I’m not a wheelwright by trade, but in my guise as a carter men expected me to be able to at least repair the spokes and set the rim true and I had found I could do that readily enough; after twelve years in the legions, I can turn my hand to most things.

It was a satisfying occupation. I liked the smooth feel of wood under my fingers, the smell of the shavings as I whittled a new spoke to fit its socket. I liked the satisfaction in a job well done at the end, as I set the wheel spinning down the hill. That kept the children happy, and impressed some of the less world-weary customers.

More important, it allowed me to sit at the side of any street in Rome without anybody paying me too much attention.

Which, in turn, allowed me to watch the people who mattered most to me.

The first of these, of course, was Jocasta, who was endlessly fascinating. I could have followed her all day and not grown tired of her. And she was easy to follow; far too easy. It may be that she knew I was there, and so was going out of her way to smooth my new mission as her self-appointed protector, but it was also possible that she was just distressingly easy to follow.

Take, for instance, her visit to Caecina that morning: she had made no effort to hide where she was going and none to hide that she had been there afterwards.

Given the nature of her mission as defined in Caenis’ rooms, this seemed to me at first to be the height of folly: she had successfully poisoned Valens and pretty much immediately after, she walked straight into Caecina’s office.

I know she’d said she’d do it, but fuck, I hadn’t thought she’d be so open about it. With the grace of a few hours’ thinking, though, I had realized it was little short of genius: what woman — what man, even — would walk into the heart of the enemy and seduce a general away from his chosen lord? In a city that thrived on subterfuge, there was something brilliant about hiding in the open.

She had done the same when she had invited Caecina, Valens and Lucius to a grand and busy dinner three nights before: she was a widow of high means and part of the social hub around which Rome’s elite revolved. The fact that of the eighteen guests only Valens fell ill, and that three days later, was an impressive — and deeply disturbing — testament to her skills with poisoning.

If she was my first target, then after that evening Caecina was my second. The general had clearly evolved an infatuation, for he called on the lady Jocasta the day after and stayed longer than propriety allowed, and, frankly, I hated him for it, but I couldn’t kill him.

Caecina never went anywhere without a cluster of Guards around him and these were not randomly selected men, drawn from the lottery pool, but the best of the best, chosen for their competence: men like Juvens, Geminus, Marcus Sulius Constans. I might have considered taking on any one of these in a matched fight, but not eight of the bastards at once.

And so I had watched Caecina for the next two days until noon on the ides, when he had emerged from the garrison gates on his high-stepping bay gelding, dazzling in white, with a gilded breastplate and helm and a tall white plume of ostrich feathers piercing the high blue sky, so that he had looked more like an emperor than a general; certainly more like an emperor than Vitellius, who had made the occasional foray into the forum recently, to read speeches clearly written for him by someone else.

Vitellius had had the sense to send Caecina out of Rome, though; sent him north with his legions to assault Antonius Primus and secure victory for his emperor.

Which meant there was nobody left to watch and I thought I might as well go home to the Inn of the Crossed Spears, to eat and drink and sleep awhile before night fell and I could begin to hunt Guards again. I had spent my nights hunting all this time and was becoming adept at finding and killing the men foolish enough to step on to the streets in Vitellius’ name.

The last wheel was nearly finished. A brazier at my side kept a pot of pitch on a low boil. I dipped my brush into it and drizzled hot, black tar into the sockets I’d cut, ramming the spokes home swiftly, so that rubbery pitch oozed up on to the inner surfaces of the rim and the hub. I painted more pitch along the outer rim, enough to make a good waterproof seal, and spun the whole thing a few times on the flat of my palm to let it dry.

There were silver-boys watching: silver-skins or silver-tongues or silver-hands, I didn’t know which, and didn’t really care; they were all one to me, but they liked playing with my wheels and so I stood up, swung my arm right back and hurled the new one down the road, setting it bouncing over summer ruts, gathering speed as it went.

It was the boys’ job to catch it before it shattered to tinder at the foot of the hill. The slower ones raced after it in a racket of high-pitched squeals, more like young pigs than boys. The brighter ones had already stationed themselves halfway down the hill. There were three of these and they stepped out as the squealing reached its peak, and set themselves in the wheel’s path.

The smallest was the leader; even from here, I could see that. Pinch-faced, with dirty blond hair, he ordered the other two and they stepped aside, angling up from him, so that when the wheel came down they were in V-formation, and could catch it effortlessly. They didn’t even bring it back to me for the copper coin I had promised, but passed it to the squealing toe-rags who had skidded to a halt around them.

That’s a lot of trust — or authority — for one small boy and it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, either. I wanted to learn his name, to find out where he lived, perhaps to recruit him to more interesting tasks than catching spun wheels.

I turned to the watching crowd, singing out, ‘All done here! I’ll be back tomorrow, or at least tomorrow’s tomorrow. Bring your wheels and I will mend them. Best repairs in the city!’

I had the patter off by heart now, so I could speak while I packed my gear and my eyes roamed the shadows where the muddy-blond silver-boy had been — and found he had gone. That’s the habit of these boys: they know how to vanish and they’ll only reappear when they want to.

I slung my pack over one shoulder and lifted the container of hot pitch carefully, one-handed, by a loop of iron wire with a wooden grip for a handle. Every inch the wheelwright, I trudged down the hill from the garrison, heading for my corner bench at the Inn of the Crossed Spears where a flagon of wine had my name on it, or at least the wheel mark of a carter, which was as much of a name as I used in those days.

I turned left again and eased my way through the slum, heading towards the Street of the Lame Dog and the inn where Gudrun’s cooking awaited me: lamb stew, with rosemary and thyme.

Amidst all the scents of cooking that assailed the streets, this one stretched out. I built a solid image of it, the smell, the sight, the taste of the first spoonful ‘ Psst! Carter! ’

It was the silver-boy from the hill, the one who had controlled all the others while they caught my wheel.

He was half my height, with his dirty blond hair and grubby nails, and he was beckoning me with an imperious wave of his hand. I could have tried to evade him, perhaps, but I doubt I’d have managed it: there may be places in Rome where a man can escape the Guards, but there is nowhere out of sight of the silver-boys.

With a shrug, I turned sharply right and followed the flag of his old-straw hair as he disappeared into this latest twisting alley. We ran along it at a swift trot, the boy light as thistledown, me hampered by my pack and my half-can of cooling pitch. When the boy turned right and right again, into ever-narrower going, I lost sight of him, speeded up, hurtled round the corner, and ‘ You! ’

‘Me. Indeed, so,’ said Pantera.

He was sitting on a barrel, playing finger games with some twine. Around him huddled a dozen filthy, entranced boys. Not one of them had dirty blond hair.

‘Where’s he gone?’ I asked. ‘The boy who rules them?’

‘Marcus?’ Pantera looked around, as if searching. ‘I have no idea. He does what he’s paid to do and then he leaves. He was paid to bring you here. He’s done that; there’s no need for him to stay. He isn’t interested in the shadows made by string.’

For the rest, who were manifestly fascinated by what was nothing more than sleight of hand, slickly done, Pantera called the string into a delicate, angled shape that sent the shadow of a hare and then a wolf on to the patch of wall which caught the only light. The boys sighed in awe, and then again in frustration as Pantera palmed the string and stood up.

‘Time to go,’ he said, shooing them away. ‘Later, we can make more.’

I watched them disappear, effortlessly swallowed up by the city. ‘Are they all called Marcus?’

‘So they say.’ Pantera smiled; a flash of warmth swiftly gone. ‘They know who you are.’

‘The boys?’

‘No. I mean, yes, of course, they always have, but they’re not your enemies. I mean Geminus and Juvens. And Lucius. Three of your victims lived. One saw your face. They have a dozen men waiting for you at the Inn of the Crossed Spears. You can’t go back.’

‘Fuck.’ I leaned back against a wall. Gudrun’s stew was a dream on my tongue, but there were compensations and the thought of all-out war against the Guards wasn’t a bad one.

I closed my eyes. My hands flexed over and over on my pack and my pitch. My mind swam with plans, but within them was a kernel of doubt. I didn’t trust Pantera; since that first evening at Caenis’ house, I never had. He was too tricksy, too much the spy, and there was something about him here and now that was not quite honest.

‘You’ve seen them?’ I asked.

‘Of course. They think they’re being subtle, but they’re Guards…’

‘And Guards think subtlety means wearing a plain belt, without legionary markings.’ I forced a smile. ‘So I need to find somewhere else to live. I can move from the inn, go down the hill to-’

‘Trabo, you need to leave Rome.’

‘ What? ’

‘We need someone to go to Ravenna, to bear a message to Lucillius Bassus who leads the eastern fleet. He’s halfway to our side but he needs some final persuasion. I have a letter in Vespasian’s hand, bearing Vespasian’s seal, offering Bassus land and gold and a commission in the legions if he’ll come to our side. You can deliver it, and stay with him, and talk him round. You’ve been in the Guard. You can talk tactics where even the best messenger can only relay what he’s told.’

The letter lay on Pantera’s open palm: a scroll, pale in the dusk light. It was a forgery, of course; no letter from Vespasian could have got here so quickly. He wanted to make me into a messenger boy.

Screw that.

I laughed and heard it bounce off the walls. ‘I’m a free man. I don’t take orders from anyone. Go fuck your mother.’

I turned and would have walked away, but the not-vanished silver-boys had shifted piles of debris into my path. Nothing much, just a couple of barrels, a sack full of evil-smelling food waste, a dozen smoothed planks that were too good to be there and must have been stolen from a building site. They had done it with such quiet care that I hadn’t heard them move, but I was trapped as efficiently as if they stood there with spears to hold me still.

I spun on my heel and threw out the only weapon I had to hand. ‘If you’re trying to get rid of me so you can have a clear run at Jocasta, you can forget it!’

‘A clear run?’ This time, it was Pantera who laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. ‘I rather think Caecina is ahead of me in that queue, don’t you? And then Domitian. And very likely Juvens and Geminus. At the very least, they have men following her who are far more subtle than you. And she knows about them, too.’

‘You think I’m an idiot?’ His tone… I could have hit him, but there was too much junk between us and I’d seen how fast he could throw his bloody little knife.

He knew it, obviously. With exaggerated calm, he said, ‘You’re far from an idiot, but you’ve spent too many nights hunting Guards and too many days tracking a woman across the city and the sum of these has made you careless. I think you’ll be safer in Ravenna, and also useful.’

‘I’m not-’

Pantera cut across me. ‘Listen to me. If I wanted you dead, you would be lying cold on the street, so just this once, do what you’re told and think it through later. Deliver my message to Bassus and the navy. It’s sealed in a way that will show if you’ve opened it, so obviously you won’t. Can you write?’

‘What? Of course I can write.’

‘So then I ask only that you write a report of everything you see and hear and send it to me.’

‘But…’

Pantera pushed himself off his self-made throne. In two steps, he was in shadow, barely visible. His voice trailed back to me. ‘Trabo, don’t make this more difficult than it has to be. Your life hangs by a particularly fine thread. I am doing everything I can not to have to cut it. You will be safer outside Rome, trust me on that. And you will be just as useful to all of us. I will need to send messages to the fleet, to Antonius Primus, to whoever else defects from the Vitellian side. You can be my go-between to all these and you can fulfil your oath to Caenis while you’re at it. Go now. Find yourself a bed for the night somewhere small and quiet and in the morning there’ll be a horse waiting for you at a tavern called the Retiarius on the western edge of the cattle market. It is being held in the name of Hormus, which is the guise you will use; a freedman of Alexandria. You should ride out with the dawn. The silver-boys will see you safe.’

He was gone. I was left alone, furious, to work my way out of the alley with Gudrun’s stew a dry memory in my mouth. I didn’t trust Pantera, but there was a chance he’d been telling the truth about the Guards at the Inn of the Crossed Spears and I couldn’t take that risk.

I turned back into the winding alleys of the slums, turned left and left and left, heading towards the Quirinal, not entirely sure where I was and simmering on the injustice of all Pantera had said while at the same time striving to think where else I might go, what I might eat, how I might plan a night’s hunting and still get to see Joc Juvens.

And Geminus.

And Marcus Sulius Constans, and five other Guards of similar calibre, strung out across the alley ahead and behind in an ambush as fair and square as any that might infest your nightmares.

When they come for you like that, you have to move fast, right?

‘ Ha! ’

I swung my pot of half-congealed pitch in a fast, looping arc. Hot tar spewed out, spraying the nearest men. They fell back, cursing viciously, but quietly; someone had commanded them to keep at least a modicum of silence.

I didn’t care about quiet; the more noise the better, especially if the bastards were keen on hush, that was my theory. My pack was my shield, my stave-knife my sword. I was on the first of them — Constans — ready to kill and then to die.

I was already angry after Pantera’s petty jibes, and now I dropped all pretence of civilization. I was free and wild and reckoned I could kill at least three more of the bastards before they sent me to join Otho in whatever afterlife he was in.

I slashed my blade back-handed at Juvens’ beautiful, much-admired face, then flicked and slashed forward at a man I knew by sight but not by name. Blood sprayed back to the alley walls.

Three men hurled themselves at me, cursing, clearly aiming to kill.

I turned, howling. ‘Come on then, motherfuckers! See if you’re hard enough!’

Geminus got in between us, his sword arm outstretched. ‘Stop! Stop it, damn you! The first man to draw blood on Trabo will be flogged to death at tomorrow’s dawn!’

He stopped them all right, but he didn’t stop me. I had no idea what game they were playing, only that I didn’t plan to be a part of it.

I slammed my shoulder into Constans’ chest, thrust my blade in under his kidneys, pulled it out, readied for a second strike to make sure he was dead — and could not move my arm.

My right wrist was clamped in Geminus’ two hands. Moments later, someone caught my left hand, planted a nailed foot in the small of my back and cranked my arms back.

In a sudden, shearing agony, I heard my shoulders pop, and wondered if the ligaments were tearing. Then I felt both wrists roped and knew they had me alive, and could kill me as slowly as they wanted to; which would be very slowly indeed.

Unless I could make them kill me swiftly, now. I kicked out, hard, and caught a man in the balls; to this day I have no idea who it was, but he was gone, anyway, doubled over and whining.

I grinned and kicked again and again, until my tied arms were hoisted up behind me, high, fast, hard.

I couldn’t move. My feet were barely touching the floor, all my weight was hanging on my arms, my shoulders exploded with a kind of pain I’d never known. I was retching with it, weeping, desperate.

I stopped trying to kick; there was no point and I needed to conserve my strength. I refused to give up hope until they nailed me to a plank and hoisted me higher than this, but I had to be clever about it. I was trying to see what was happening when someone wrenched my head up by my hair and Geminus came to stand in front of me.

Usually, in circumstances like this, the leader of the group would kick the life half out of the poor bugger they’d just caught, to teach him a lesson for having killed one of their people. But not this time.

Nothing happened. Nobody touched me.

Geminus, ever-steady, never-rash Geminus, said quietly, ‘You are working with Pantera. No — don’t start; we know everything and we don’t have time to listen to your denials. You are the bear-man who has been killing our Guards and you are also in league with Pantera. On both counts, you are an enemy of the state, and should be flogged to death. This will happen if we have to take you into custody now, although I imagine Lucius will want to question you in detail first.’

Of course he fucking would. I spat in Geminus’ face; you have to at times like that.

He didn’t flinch. Instead, as if we were taking wine together, or sharing a lazy bench in the baths, he said, ‘I am empowered to make you an offer. Work with us. Tell us everything we need to know about Pantera: what he is doing, who his messengers are, whom he trusts and who trusts him. In return, we will give you your life. And that of the lady Jocasta. Refuse us, and you can watch her die before you do. It will not be swift.’

Jocasta? I was bent so far over I could see my knees and my arms were screaming pain from wrist to shoulder, but even so, at the sound of her name, I felt the colour flood from my face.

In a voice that was far from my own I said, ‘What do you mean, you will give me Jocasta’s life?’

‘If you work with us, she will not be touched.’

My guts were in turmoil. In the red mist in my mind, I could still see Pantera’s smile, hear his clear, acid voice, and the laughter in it. ‘I rather think Juvens and Geminus are before me in that queue, don’t you?’

Jocasta. Held by these men?

I must have said her name aloud.

Geminus smiled, amiably. ‘She is not in custody yet. Nor will she be if you walk away from here as our man. Moreover, the price will be removed from your head the day Vespasian dies, or otherwise relinquishes his claim to the throne. On that day, you will be free to live in Rome, and your lady with you. Naturally, if you refuse our offer, I cannot guarantee her safety. Lucius, as you know, is somewhat

… impatient.’

I did know, and more than that, I knew the ways of the Guard. Lucius, Caecina, Valens… all of them were two-faced double-dealers you wouldn’t trust to sell a lame mule without lying, but they had sent Geminus to talk to me because everyone who was anyone knew that Geminus never lied. And so this was the truth; I had to treat it at face value.

I said, ‘Pantera has ordered me out of Rome. He came to me… earlier and told me to take a message to Ravenna. He thinks he can bring the marines on to Vespasian’s side. I am to send him written reports of everything I do there. If I refuse, he’ll want a good reason.’

They weren’t expecting that. Geminus rolled the tip of his tongue round his teeth. He looked across at Juvens, who said nothing; I couldn’t see his face.

Geminus said, ‘You can write?’

‘Of course!’

‘Then you will go to Ravenna as Pantera has instructed. You will do everything he asks. But you will report to us every order he sends, every bribe he issues, every approach he makes. You will give us the names of his men and those who might become his men; above all, you will report all the detail of Antonius Primus as and when he reaches the port. If you do this, Jocasta will be permitted to walk free in Rome. Fail, and you will watch her die over many days. Lucius will do this. He has no pity.’

‘I know.’

‘Then you agree?’

‘For Jocasta’s sake.’

‘Good.’ He didn’t laugh; none of them did. He gave a small, tight smile, as at some inner jest. ‘It goes without saying,’ he said, ‘that this conversation never happened.’ And then to the men on either side: ‘Cut him loose.’

None too gently, they slit away the cords from my wrists, dropped me to the ground, and watched while I massaged the pain from my arms.

I said, ‘We’ll need to set up a route for my messages to you. We can’t use the silver-boys; they’re all in Pantera’s pay.’

‘All of them?’ Geminus swept a hand through his hair. ‘Hades… how much gold has he got?’

‘He doesn’t need gold. He used to be one of them. They’d sell their own mothers for him if they had them, and not charge him a penny.’

It turned out that Geminus already had a plan for exchanging messages, and it didn’t involve the silver-boys. He laid it out in its elegant simplicity, and I added one small refinement of my own and that was it, we were done.

The men lined up ready to go. Geminus stood before me and saluted, officer to officer. ‘We feared you,’ he said. ‘There can be no greater respect. Do whatever Pantera asks of you, and report the results to us. Go safely.’

It hurt as much to return the salute as it had done when they hauled me up, but I managed it and the strange thing was that it felt good, and real and right, as if the unruly anarchy of all those nights spent hunting had been the illusion, not the other way round.

When I was young, they used to say that a man may run from the legions, but if he is truly a legionary, he will find that he cannot leave the army life behind. I thought I had escaped and now I found that I hadn’t, I couldn’t and I didn’t want to.

Otho’s shade gazed at me mournfully as I walked away. I renewed my oath to him, to honour his memory and see Vitellius dead, just that I had found a new way of doing it.

He shook his head. Later, I promised him, All will be as you wanted it. Later.