The Art of War

Chapter 34

Rome, the ides of September AD 69

Jocasta

I went to Trabo in the evening, a little before dusk.

He was in the Retiarius, one of those foul little taverns where men gather after the circus to dissect the fight. There hadn’t been many of those lately; Vitellius’ first and only love was for the chariots. He had no interest in watching men gut each other publicly, so the tavern supplied its own battles: slaves or hired men who wrapped themselves in boiled bull’s hide and hacked at each other with blunted blades, or sharp ones if the watching men paid enough.

It smelled of piss and that metallic sweaty stench of too many men locked in too small a space on too hot an evening. The fight that night was between an albino Thracian and an ebony-black slave brought in from the hinterlands behind Egypt.

Trabo wasn’t watching the fight, although it took me some time to discover that. I was dressed as a tavern whore and working the room was necessarily a slow business; men to fend off, men to let down gently. I couldn’t afford to cause a riot and while I have no qualms about protecting my virtue by force if I have to, on that particular night I had to make sure it didn’t come to that.

When I had been through the entire room and failed to find him, I headed upstairs to the third floor, where were the better-smelling rooms with clean straw on the floor and fewer lice. The one in which I found him was surprisingly wholesome. The blanket on the bed was clean, after a fashion, and the walls had been newly whitewashed in the spring.

Trabo had eaten of their stew and had a flask of wine to hand. He was seated on the bed, writing a letter, when I entered.

‘Jocasta!’

His sword met me, face-high, as I stepped in through the door. He lowered it, but did not sheathe it. He was gaining wisdom, I think, or just so unsettled that he didn’t know whom he could trust any more. ‘What brings you here?’

‘I came to apologize.’ I pushed the door shut behind me, slid the bolts across. ‘May I sit?’

‘What? Yes, of course.’ He swept away the writing from the bed, set it neatly on the floor. That was Trabo all through; impetuous, but neat-minded. The combination had a lot to recommend it. ‘And wine? Would you like wine? I only have one beaker, but…’

‘We could share it?’

I sat on the edge of the bed. I had dressed in a rough tunic without adornment, and pinned my hair up with cheap bronze pins. I pulled them out and leaned forward to set them atop his letter, which let me scan the first lines.

To Geminus from Trabo, Greetings. I leave at first light on a horse Pantera has provided. He

I straightened, sat on the bed. Trabo looked as if I had just slapped him across the face. He was standing there with his sword in one hand and his beaker of wine in the other and didn’t know which to thrust forward first.

‘Geminus got to you through me,’ I said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’

‘You know about that?’ He was so relieved, it was heart-breaking. He leaned back against the wall — he almost fell on to it, really — and slid down until he was sitting on his heels with his hands laced around his knees. He looked more haggard than I’d ever seen him. More than when Pantera had a knife to his throat and he was within three breaths of dying.

Do I believe Pantera would have killed him back in Caenis’ cottage? Without question or hesitation, yes. Do you think Pantera doesn’t kill? He’s ruthless; he kills whoever gets in his way.

But now he had a use for Trabo, and Lucius had a use for him too, and poor Trabo was caught between, not knowing whether to serve both or neither, and terrified that one side or other was going to gouge out my eyes and rip out my tongue with hot irons in front of him if he made a mistake.

Wretchedness etched his every feature; it hung from his bones, it melted his features in the evening light. Hesitantly, he laid down the sword, and held out the beaker.

I took it, and set it on the floor. Then, standing, I crossed the small space between us and took his poor, misery-ridden face between my hands.

‘My dear man…’ I kissed the side of his cheek. ‘You are not made for this kind of despair. When we were children, you were a handful of sunshine, scattered among us. Where has it gone?’

‘They threatened to… harm you.’ He would not be more specific.

‘I know.’

‘You do?’ He pulled my hands from his face, held me at arm’s length. ‘How?’

Perhaps I could have told him that I’d had men following him who had listened to every word and brought the news straight to me, but I didn’t want to add to his paranoia. Maybe if I had things would have been different later, but they might have been differently worse, not better. Trabo is a soldier, he’s not built for subterfuge. We all used him and it was like using a spoon to cut meat; it might work after a fashion, and if it’s all you’ve got you make the best of it, but everything is damaged in the process.

So I let him hold me. We were close enough for me to see the fine veins threaded across the whites of his eyes, the lips that the beard didn’t quite hide, the arc of his brows. He had always been a handsome youth (my brother always fell for good-looking men) but for all my protestations of his sunny disposition there had ever been a rash, adolescent side to him that made him heady, prone to outbursts of righteous temper.

There, in that room in a seedy inn on the wrong side of the Tiber, what I held in my hands was a grown man in trouble, but a good one, and Rome was pitifully in want of good, grown men.

His eyes were locked on mine. I could feel the first stirrings of interest beneath his tunic, but he was too troubled, at first, to pay them heed. He said, ‘What can I do? Pantera told me to leave Rome and I’d barely walked three streets when Geminus was telling me to report to him. I can’t serve them both.’

‘Why not?’ I leaned my head on his shoulder. ‘You are offering Lucius an ear in the heart of Vespasian’s front line, or at least where the front line will be when Antonius Primus reaches Italy. Believe me, he’ll be glad enough of that.’

‘But if Pantera finds out, he’ll-’

‘Pantera understands.’ I took his hand, turned it over, kissed his palm. ‘You are too good a man to lose. That’s why he did what he did. He is doing his best to protect you, although I think we can do better.’ I folded his hand closed. ‘Do you want to leave Rome?’

‘What do you think?’ He was listening to his body now. For the first time that evening, I saw him smile. Sweat stood proud on his brow. I smoothed it away with my thumb. ‘Do I want to leave you? Am I crazy?’

‘I hope not.’ I pressed more tightly against him and turned my face up for his kiss.

He slid his arms round my waist, carefully, as if I were made of some fragile glass that might be easily crushed. I felt the weight of his elbows on my hips, the skin of his palms on the back of my neck, rough and ridged were he’d held a sword for days on end, and killed with it.

He was not killing now. For all his evident strength, there was a surprising delicacy to his touch as he lifted me up and laid me back on the bed. I drew him down on top of me, but later, when we had paused to slither out of our tunics, I pushed him down and lay on top of him and explored his body fully with my lips and hands before I let him enter me.

We slowed when dark came, and lit a candle and gentled each other by its light, as new lovers do, tracing the fall of shadows, the new curves and crannies that it created. ‘I’ve always wanted you,’ he said. ‘How did I not know it?’

‘The time wasn’t right.’ I traced round his nipple with the edge of one fingernail and watched it stiffen in response. ‘You don’t have to leave Rome, you know.’

‘I do. They’ll take you and-’

‘No, listen. You have to go out; they have to see you go, but if a bearded carter in the name of Hormus arrives with sealed messages for Lucillius Bassus at the naval base in Ravenna and that same man writes back detailed reports to both Pantera and Geminus, who is going to know they aren’t from you?’

He swallowed, tightly. His skin felt cold, suddenly, under my palms. ‘Where would I be instead?’ he asked.

‘You would be without your beard and with your hair less dark,’ I said. ‘If Gudrun at the Inn of the Crossed Spears can make Pantera into a Berber, I think we can find someone to turn you into a northman. You couldn’t be a carter any more, you couldn’t go back to the inn. You couldn’t risk being seen in Pantera’s company or mine. But Rome is a city of millions. There are places a man can hide if he chooses.’

I had been kissing his chest, nipping the hairs that grew there between my lips as I spoke. Then I looked up. His eyes shone rich with hope.

‘If I stayed, could I see you?’

‘I would like it if you did.’ I kissed him. It felt good. I corrected myself. ‘I would be heartbroken if you didn’t.’

We slept soon after that, and made love again when we woke, and by the time he went to find the horse that had been booked for him in the name of Hormus, we had a workable strategy planned.

Trabo had finished his letter to Geminus and had pressed on to the closing wax a small circle of wheel-binding wire that he had woven into his own makeshift seal, to prove that the letter was his. Geminus had its twin, to match against it in a rough but effective scheme dreamed up in the alley.

The seal was now in my possession, to give to a man loyal to me who would be well paid to take Trabo’s place on the trip up to Ravenna. I didn’t find it necessary to tell Trabo that the group would be ambushed and all the others killed and only Hormus would ‘escape’; as I said before, Trabo is a soldier, not made for subterfuge, and there are things we had to do to ensure his safety that he was better off not knowing.

That apart, we had a good result. Lucius thought he owned Trabo and Pantera thought that Lucius thought it while Pantera was the true owner. And I knew that Pantera thought so and was wrong: if anyone had rights over Trabo that September, it was me, and me alone.

Everyone thinks that it was Pantera’s actions that changed the course of this war and brought about what happened, and while on the larger scale that might be true it is also true that here in Rome, Trabo was the hub about which we all turned; his loyalty was the one thing we had all bought and none of us owned and in the end it was that — his loyalty — that we all needed.