The Art of War

Chapter 33

Rome, the ides of September AD 69

Horus

It was a challenge by then for the silver-boys to try to follow Pantera. Sometimes, he let them, and that night was one of those times; they followed him easily all the way from the Quirinal, where he’d accosted Trabo, across town to the House of the Lyre.

At the House, the door was guarded by Segoventos, a gigantic, much-scarred Belgic tribesman who could have been Drusus’ cousin but was, in fact, a failed gladiator I had bought for a good price only half a month before.

He wasn’t Drusus, by any means, but in the short time he had been with us he had learned how to be our doorman and he eyed this particular visitor with a cultivated air of suspicion.

Pantera bowed, hands to heart.

‘My name is Osiris. I have a meeting arranged with the gentleman Horus.’

‘Osiris. To see the gentleman Horus.’ Segoventos ran his tongue around his teeth, found a gap, sucked at it. Presently, he rang a small silver bell and repeated this same to the silk-clad boy who appeared, listened and sprinted back into the incense-laden interior of the House.

Time passed, during which, as if manifest by the gods, a gold coin appeared on Pantera’s palm; evidence, perhaps, of his wealth, his discretion, his suitability for audience. Nevertheless, Sego was good to his training; he allowed a seemly length of time to pass before he took it, to show that he was the one doing the favour, not receiving it.

Presently, the boy returned, flushed and panting, and nodded to the Belgian, and then again, startled, to the white-robed stranger who had just handed him a silver coin.

‘Top floor,’ Sego said. ‘Last door in the corridor. Don’t go near the hound.’

‘There’s a hound?’ Pantera conveyed a degree of concern above the average. ‘Perhaps the boy could escort me…?’

Segoventos rolled his eyes. But there had been gold, and might yet be more.

‘Marcus will escort you,’ he said, with false grace. ‘And he will not charge for it.’

This Marcus had darker hair than his namesake who owned the rooftops, but was otherwise cast from the same mould: fleet of foot, sly of hand, swift of mind and tongue — and the very soul of discretion. He led Pantera not up the nearer, easy stairs at the south-western corner of the atrium, but through the courtyard towards the set of more hidden stairs opposite, which, amongst other things, afforded his visitor an opportunity to study the garden on the way past; a garden much changed from the mornings. The House of the Lyre came to life at night, and now, in the mid-evening, that life was beginning to flourish.

The sun was going down, lancing long, lazy beams through open shutters, lighting the garden to amber green, wrapping soft shadows around the dozen or so masked men and women who gathered amid the citrus boughs.

At this stage in the soiree, by deliberate design, it was impossible to tell who was client and who whore; all were impeccably dressed, jewelled and coiffed; all wore masks that offered anonymity; all talked in low tones, taking wine served by boys named Marcus to the tune of lyres played by girls named Julia.

There was gentle laughter, touching of hands, first hints of nipples that hardened to a look, first glimpse of calf, first meeting of eyes and minds.

Marcus led Pantera up the stairs to the first floor, where four fragrant young women in diaphanous silk gathered round a man who sported senatorial robes, tented out, just then, by his erection. Above the mask his greying hair grew thickly, with no hint of baldness.

Pantera, passing, barely gave him a glance. On the way to the second floor, he murmured to the boy, ‘Quinctillius Atticus?’

‘If you say so. He comes every night and never has less than three and never the same ones. He pays for each of them in gold.’

‘Amazing he has any left after the carp pool he made for the emperor.’

The open areas of the upper floors were empty, although the rhythmic thrust and murmur of intercourse spread from behind the walls where early clients — those with wives who insisted they attend dinner — were making the most of the cheaper rates.

On the top floor was silence. They reached the spur. Ahead was the corridor, and at the end of it the lilac door with the great hound outside.

Marcus stopped almost out of earshot of the door. Swiftly, he said, ‘Lucius never comes, but Domitian has been once, Vespasian’s son. He wanted an older woman, tall, with raven hair, and got her to show him all the ways a man might pleasure a woman. He took no pleasure himself, but paid in gold when he left. They say he’s in love with the lady Jocasta.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

Marcus shrugged. ‘The slaves in the baths. The women who cut hair. The boys from the Palatine.’

‘Do they say where he gets his gold?’

‘From his father’s mistress.’

Pantera considered a moment, then more silver appeared on his palm. ‘And our friend? Has he had any visitors?’

I was ‘our friend’, yes. He must have known that Marcus was as loyal to me as he was to him, but he asked anyway, and Marcus answered with the truth as he knew it.

‘Three or four. One of them is a Guard. Tall with dark hair and sharp eyes. I don’t know his name.’

‘Find it before I come again.’

The boy skittered off down the stairs. Pantera cautiously advanced to where Cerberus awaited him. He stayed back out of reach and whistled until I opened the door and invited him in. For his sake, I left Cerberus outside.

I began to speak even before the door shut.

‘Drusus is close to Vitellius now; a personal guard as well as masseur. The emperor and his brother have begun to use him for those executions they dare not entrust to the Guard.’

‘You mean other Guards?’

‘Those, and highborn men who may be married into Guard families. He has killed two such in the last days. One was an instructor at a gladiator school. Fabius Longinus. The other was a merchant who ran a date-selling business on the Palatine. I don’t know his name. Lucius thought both of them were your men.’

‘And now he knows they weren’t.’

‘I hope so.’

I was nervous, and trying not to show it. I led Pantera through to the farthest part of the room, beyond the curtain of pearl and ivory, beyond the vast, oceanic bed, on to the balcony. I had a garden there, smaller and more discreet than the one downstairs, where the clients paid a thousand sesterces a night to have their senses drawn to the tightest, finest pitch.

I said, ‘Lucius is obsessed with you. He talks incessantly to Vitellius about how he will outsmart you, outflank you, catch you and kill you slowly. He has prepared… you don’t want to know what he has prepared, truly, you don’t. He has men who are sending him messages from within both the fleets; Claudius Faventinus claims he has your trust, and hands over your messages as they arrive. Other men report from within the gladiator schools, and from close to you on the Quirinal.

‘Lucius thinks you poisoned Valens, but he doesn’t know how. He knows for a fact that you are sending out forged letters that purport to come from Vespasian. He believes you were in the guise of a date-seller, and that you are endeavouring to seduce the gladiators to treachery. He thinks he is blocking you at every path.’

Pantera leaned on the balcony’s iron railing and looked out and to the side and down. Any other man might have been taking in the view. Pantera, if he had not changed, was planning eight different routes of escape in case he were ever cornered here.

He said, ‘He may be right. We have to wait and see. In the meantime, I need to send a message to Vespasian.’

Why else had he come? I indicated a cage on the left, big enough for perhaps eight birds, if they lived closely. ‘I have three birds remaining that will fly to him. No more after that and no chance of getting any before the spring. You can only send three messages between now and then; is this one so important that it must be one of them?’

‘If you had only one bird left, this is the message it would carry.’

‘You have it ready?’

‘Not encrypted. I need your day codes for that.’

‘Wait.’

In a shimmer of beads and roses I was gone, and swiftly back with the tools of our trade: a sheaf of message paper, fine as onion skin, bought from Egypt at a price far beyond its weight in gold; a slate with what looked to the careless eye like a shopping list written on it, but was in fact the day codes that I had set with the dove-keepers in Alexandria; and a wax tablet on which to make the transitions that turned a sentence into gibberish for those who did not have the means to turn it back again.

‘Your message?’ I held out my hand, so different from his. Mine are manicured three times in a month; his, never.

‘I didn’t write it down.’

‘Of course not. Here.’

The wax was perfect; just warm enough to take the mark readily, not so warm that his words smeared out of recognition before he was done.

Pantera wrote, To the emperor Vespasian, from his servant, greetings. Your kin are well. Caecina leads Vitellius’ forces against Antonius Primus who marches five legions in your name. Both naval fleets will soon be ours: Ravenna within days, Misene within a month if all that we attempt bears fruit. Rome will be yours by Saturnalia.

Discretion personified, I fed the birds, holding out my cupped palms with handfuls of crumbled nuts. Doves and finches clung to my fingers and pecked freely. I didn’t look up until the transcription was done and the upper half of the wax tablet wiped clean of the original message.

‘Will you write it for me?’ Pantera handed him the tablet. ‘My script is not small enough.’

To be carried by a dove, the script must be tiny or the message short. I can write letters so small they look like ant tracks across a page, and only the best-eyed scribes can read them. I can make and break these straightforward ciphers as fast as normal men can write and I can write in any hand; if I see it once, I can mimic it to perfection the way some men can speak in voices not their own, or alter their appearance.

I had, for instance, penned every one of the letters ‘from Vespasian’ that were circulating amongst Antonius Primus’ troops, and, by dint of double agents, had also reached Caecina’s legions, to let the troops know what was on offer should they choose to defect.

Here and now, I wrote in my own hand and finished with a salutation in plain, unencoded text that Pantera had not written.

Blessings upon you, Emperor of Rome.

‘For decency,’ I said. ‘If he will truly be emperor by the year’s end, you need to begin to treat him as such.’

‘I have always treated him as such,’ Pantera said, flatly. ‘When can you send it?’

‘Now is as good a time as any. The bird can still fly some way at dusk and there are places to rest in the forests of the south. If you wait, you can see it go.’

The chosen dove was one of the slate greys pacing the breadth of the wicker cage. It crouched at the sound of my voice, and it was the work of moments for me to fold the fine paper to exactly the breadth of my thumbnail, roll it into a cylinder and slide it into the tube fixed to the bird’s leg.

Done, I lifted my hands and opened them. The bird stood tall, took in its surroundings, bobbed its head at its fellows and then launched skyward on a racket of wings that sent the pair left behind into a clattering alarum.

Pantera watched the bird until it was a pinprick in the unstained blue of the sky. He left then, with little more said.

On the way down, the stairs were busier, not so much with traffic ascending or descending as with men and women who had moved away from the rest for the semblance of privacy while not yet abandoning the party.

Downstairs, the bower garden was busily full. The serving boys were now naked to the waist, the girls’ tunics were kilted shorter, and opened to show the first curves of their breasts.

The music was pitched to a different note; it wove through the vines, the citrus branches, the standing and lying couples, drawing the sexual tension to breaking point, and holding it there. The masks were gone now, and the pretence; and those who preferred to display in public were making the most of the wide couches set at angles to the great many-stemmed candlesticks.

A woman sat astride a man, head thrown back, her nipples clamped between his rigid fingers, their tight-locked hips moving with increasing urgency. Nearby a man stood with a woman held in front of him, her back to his chest, his fingers working at her groin. She pulled his head to hers, and bit on his ear. Elsewhere, a boy knelt, a girl lay naked on a couch, a trio of young, lithe bodies made a triangle of lust.

Pantera noted the names of those he could identify, and the figures of those he couldn’t.

At the door, the giant Belgian accepted another gold coin and waved him away, smiling.