The Art of War

Chapter 37

Rome, October, AD 69

Trabo

Jocasta came to me late in the night and I could tell she was upset.

I wasn’t at the Retiarius any more; I had my own lodgings on the edge of the Capitol, by the gladiator school, a brisk but easy walk from the Circus Maximus.

Pantera had got me that job. Don’t ask me how or why, because I don’t know. I had thought my staying in Rome was a secret, known only to Jocasta and me, but it became clear that Pantera was in on the deal when, sometime in the first month, Borros, the big lumbering Briton who served him like a dog, found me at the Retiarius.

He made me buy him a drink, sympathized with my lack of work and then told me that Pantera thought it would be ‘useful’ if I were to offer my services to one Julius Claudianus, formerly a leader of the marines at Misene, now senior tutor at Courage, one of the foremost gladiatorial schools in Rome.

He said that I should offer myself as an undercook, and make no approaches, but that I should befriend Claudianus if I could. My story, if I needed it, was that I was one of the former Guardsmen returned incognito to find work in Rome because I couldn’t bear the exile. All I had to do was find another name and so, for a while, I became Julius Demonstratus, which aroused nobody’s interest.

I’m not the empire’s best cook, but I can soak beans and boil them and make sauces to pour over them; a gladiator school is not that different from the legions except that we were forced to eat more meat — I spent a winter eating hare and boiled beef once, and never want to see either again. The gladiators feast on more wholesome fare.

So I trimmed my nails tight and rolled up my sleeves and spent my days cloaked in broth-flavoured steam, washing pots and scrubbing vegetables and boiling beans and my hands have never been cleaner, my shit has never been so regular and I have never seen so many men so tired of fighting.

I didn’t talk about the legions much at first, but I found myself in the neighbouring tavern one evening with some of the other cooks and weapon-cleaners and general factotums and Julius Claudianus came over and took me aside and asked me a couple of pointed questions and I admitted that I had been in Otho’s Guard and that I was in Rome because I couldn’t bear to be away. I swore him fealty and said I wasn’t any threat and I wouldn’t cause trouble, all of which was more or less true.

He was a decent man: he eyed me up and down and said a good soldier deserved more and three days later I was the second cook and living in my own apartment room with a girl, Tertia, available if I wanted her. I didn’t want her; I wanted nobody but Jocasta, but it would have looked strange if I hadn’t taken her, so I did.

Tertia was easy and compliant and I grew to like her. She was intelligent enough to keep away when I had company, though that wasn’t often. Jocasta came to see me when she could, but there were days on end when I didn’t hear from her, then she’d turn up out of nowhere and we’d be together like a married couple for three days in a row. I told her about the job, naturally, but I never said that Pantera had got it for me. I thought she knew.

My room was on the eighth floor of the adjacent building, with one window that looked out over the main street and another that looked north, towards the Tiber. If you leaned out of that one and looked to the right, you could just see the temple on the Capitol’s peak, hidden behind the high rise apartment blocks that forested the hill’s flanks.

Inside, I had room for a bed and a chamber pot and a wooden cupboard with a lock on the door where I kept my spare clothes and a knife. I had a good mattress on the bed and linen over it. I thought it homely, and dreamed of somewhere like it, but bigger, where I could live with Jocasta when the war was over.

We talked of it sometimes, but not on that night when she’d seen Caenis’ bronze map and Pantera had told her his plans. I didn’t find out about that until later; when she came, she wasn’t in the mood to talk.

She wasn’t in the mood to do anything but fuck, hard; harder than anything we’d done before. I’d always held back until then, although now I can’t think why. I was afraid she might despise me, I think. There was something untouchable about her, even after we’d spent so many nights in bed and barely slept through any of them. I knew every inch of her body and I didn’t know her at all.

She pushed through the door that night with a look on her face that would have stopped any man in his tracks. I was halfway through undressing and she finished it for me in moments, then kind of punched me down on to the bed and slid over me without taking her clothes off.

I felt bruised all over when she’d done, exhausted, as if we’d just run through the night and then fought a battle. My back was shredded and bloody from the rip of her nails.

Afterwards, when she had mellowed a bit, I risked saying, ‘It’s Pantera, isn’t it?’

She wouldn’t speak at first. In the end, she said, ‘He’s trying to force Lucius into going north by saying he wants him to stay in Rome. He thinks Vitellius will be more pliable without his brother at his side.’

I knew she was close with Lucius. I didn’t know how close and I didn’t ask. She came to me of her own free will and that was enough. If she knew the danger I posed to her, she didn’t speak of it.

I asked, ‘Is he right? Will Vitellius be weaker?’

‘Probably.’ She was nibbling at the side of her nail, looking up at the ceiling. Wherever her mind was, it wasn’t on the eighth floor of an apartment building on the Capitol.

‘How is he going to make Lucius go? It’s not as if he can give him orders.’

‘But he can, you see. That’s the point. He’s going to let him find a letter saying that the last thing he wants is for Lucius to go north.’

‘So he’ll go.’

‘Of course he will. He’s an idiot.’ She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. She had a bruise or two of her own on her back, near the wings of her shoulders, where I had held her too tightly. I traced the outline with the knuckle of my thumb, gently.

She gave a long, hard sigh. ‘I hate them both.’

And in that, I believe she was telling nothing but the truth.