The Art of War

Chapter 45

Rome, November, AD 69

Borros

A mile away from Caenis’ house, on the far side of the market that hemmed the Tiber, Pantera met up again with Felix and me.

He was a mess, really; he was clearly grieving for Amoricus, feeling himself to blame, which was fair, but he had spelled out the risks to us all when we started and neither of us who were left thought any less of him for it, or wanted to leave.

We couldn’t say this, though, because Pantera had brought a newcomer with him: a tall man with a scar running from the corner of his right eye almost to his chin. His skin was so browned by the sun that it looked like shoe leather. His hair was a fine iron grey. His nose was the eagle beak of Roman nobility and belied the peasant’s rough tunic and poor belt he was wearing. He looked like a nobleman dressed up as a slave for a particularly expensive party.

Pantera introduced this walking contradiction as Petilius Cerialis, once legate of the IXth legion, who had saved its standard in Britain when the Boudica’s tribal warriors slaughtered the rest of his men.

He was the kind of man we thought of as an enemy, we who spoke the British tongue, but Pantera said he had known him in Britain and he was a decent man and, at this time, he was on our side.

To him, Pantera said, ‘I apologize for my late arrival at our meeting. I was unavoidably detained.’

‘Not permanently, though, which is good for us, eh?’ Cerialis barked the man-amongst-friends laugh that made it all the clearer that he was not one of us. ‘But we’re here now, at your direction, and if you can truly conduct me north to the army of Antonius Primus as you have said, I will pay for it in gold.’

‘We can do it,’ Pantera said. ‘And as I told you when first we met, you need pay us nothing. But before we can go, we must make you look like a peasant woodcutter, a man for whom a silver coin is a fortune beyond imagining, not a legionary legate who has dressed on a whim in his slave’s best tunic. May I make a few suggestions? For your safety, of course.’