The Art of War

Chapter 50

Rome, 17–18 December AD 69

Horus

Saturnalia only really begins each year on the night of the seventeenth of December.

Throughout the empire, but nowhere more than in Rome itself, it is the time when the nobility plays at being ignoble: servants become the served, slaves become temporarily freed and may command their masters. In the legions, officers are treated as serving men and the lower ranks give the orders. There are limits to the licence, of course, but the principle of freedom and revelry is universal.

At the House of the Lyre, the traditional transfer of relationship between master and slave has a slightly different flavour. Every year, a select group of favoured clients is invited to attend a private evening of wine and food after which they must prostitute themselves for the delight of those whose services they normally buy. Men and women are invited in equal numbers and all have to swear a binding oath beforehand that no request, however outlandish, will be turned down.

There is, naturally, a lengthy list of those who would give very large amounts of gold to be invited to such an event, and so different names grace the guest list on each of the seven nights of Saturnalia. The clients are not charged, but it is observed by those who take an interest that the men and women who have invested most in the House of the Lyre during the preceding year are the ones most likely to be on the guest lists in December. November is a particularly lucrative month.

This year, the first night of Saturnalia was everything the House and its friends had dreamed of. Rome was under threat, very nearly under siege, and in the uncertainty men and women of status sought the amnesiac qualities of lust with a passion heretofore unknown.

Offered the opportunity to immerse themselves in undiluted hedonism, to explore new ways to sate themselves, they fell on it with single-minded dedication, leaving the gardens strewn with clothing, the stairs, the corridors and the landings littered with discarded wine jugs, and the doors of the bedchambers hanging open.

Because that’s the other rule: at the Saturnalia, nothing must be done in secrecy; everything must be open to view.

By midnight, the peak had passed. It had been, we all agreed, a resounding success. The wine was gone, the candles had burned to softened stubs — those that had not been taken from their candlesticks and put to other use. The couches in the garden must be recovered before the morrow; nothing would remove the stains of wine and bodily secretions, but that wasn’t uncommon and they had more than paid for themselves. We had craftsmen on hand ready to make them new again.

Of rather more concern was the fact that a senator had been carried out to his litter blue-lipped and barely breathing, but he was still alive when he left, and even if he had died in the night we knew that his heirs would never press charges: the disgrace of their paterfamilias having failed to sustain his ardour through the notorious Night of Free Exchange at the House of the Lyre would have finished them.

And so the last steward and servant — there were, of course, several still sober who were not engaged in the entertainment — had gone to bed. All through the house, men and women were sleepy, full of wine and good food, their stamina temporarily defeated.

I was abed, but my door was not open. Alone of all the guests or servants, I was not governed by the rules of the Night and the House. My door was locked and bolted as was my nightly habit, but this once, unusually, I was not alone.

I, too, had explored the detail of another’s body, and let mine be similarly explored. We had sated ourselves more than once and we had both found unexpected pleasure in it.

I slept lightly in the aftermath; the inheritance of my childhood. We silver-skins in the gutter never allowed ourselves to be drugged or plied with drink: our longevity often depended on rising before our clients and stealing out into the night.

That early instinct, perhaps, is what woke me a moment or two before strong fingers clasped my right ankle and tightened. I opened my eyes silently, waiting; only one person in the world knew to wake me thus.

I did not see a face to prove me right, just the faint glimmer of distant starlight on the blade that hung close to my eyes.

The hand left my ankle and Pantera’s voice, warm in my ear, said, ‘Rise.’

I did so. The youth curved in the bed beside me shifted slightly, but did not wake; he had experienced new things and was sleeping deeply on the other side.

My tunic was pressed into my hands, still creased from the night; my sandals; an outdoor cloak I did not own and had never seen before.

I wanted to wash, to remove the distaste of body fluids and sweat that coated my skin, but there was no time. I was led to the balcony where the shutter eased open in total silence; my fault that it was so well greased that it made no sound to arouse the guards.

I looked out into the ink-black night, and the outlines of things that wait there.

‘Oh, Hades, not the plank,’ but yes, it was the plank, and there was a knife at my back and I must go first with Pantera behind me, step by dizzying step into the nauseating dark where the void that gaped on either side of the wood was as solid in its blackness as the next place for my foot, and the next, and the next.

I shook, and, shaking, became less stable. Pantera’s hands gripped my hips, at once intimate and threatening. Softly, he said, ‘You can’t turn back.’

‘I know. I’ve seen what happens to those who try.’

I shuffled on over the aching drop. Time flowed slow as syrup.

I aged ten years before I reached the opposite railing and clambered over it with legs that refused to hold me steadily upright. Inside, the tailors were asleep, and even if they hadn’t been they would have taken pains to appear so.

Down in the street we were met by two men. The first was as large and brutal as Drusus, but without the Germanic tilt to his chin: a Briton, maybe. The other was a boss-eyed youth with a lopsided grin, whose good eye feasted on my face in a way that made me sweat.

Pantera said, ‘How far to the horses?’

The big maybe-Briton held up three fingers.

Pantera caught my wrist. ‘Three blocks. Run.’

‘Horses?’ I had heard his question. I held back. ‘What are we going to do with horses at this time of night?’

‘Ride them. Hard. We are going south after all. And we shall need your services when we get there.’

I knew better than to argue with Pantera when he was in this kind of mood, so we ran and we mounted and we rode.

We passed with extreme care through the streets of Rome on horses with muffled hooves, changing direction often, on the instruction of the big, red-headed Briton who roamed ahead like a hunting hound.

Outside the city, we stripped the soft leather from our mounts’ feet and rode down the Appian Way as fast as a horse may go in the dark, which was unnervingly fast for me; I have never been a good rider.

The horses clearly knew the route and loped along with a relish that suggested Rome was not their home, but that warm bran mash and oats awaited at our destination somewhere in the south. Lucius was south. I tried not to think about that.

I was such a bad rider that we paused along the route and Pantera and Felix, the boss-eyed blond boy, bound me into the saddle like a child, and I spent the next two hours wishing myself back in the warm silk bed with the youth who had not known what he wanted until it was shown him.

We stopped at an inn some significant time after my thighs had begun to scream in agony and my fingers had cramped immovably tight on the mane for support. I had to be helped down by the innkeeper’s boy, a briskly efficient child of less than ten years who had no concern for the time of night, but unsaddled the horses while his father lit the torches in their brackets and roused the fire high in the hearth, making light enough for us to sit and eat, and shadows enough for Pantera to meet whomever it was he had come to see.

That meeting took place shortly, when another hard-ridden horse arrived, this time from the south. The rider wore the porphyry livery of the imperial messengers, but he clearly knew Pantera by sight. They met in a horse stall and I was with them, though I would rather have been in the warmth, eating and drinking with the rest.

By way of greeting, the messenger said, ‘The moon is fine and full tonight,’ which was a transparent untruth.

Deadpan, Pantera answered, ‘We may have luck then, on the night’s fishing. Thank you. May I?’ He held out his hand and was given a package which he set on an upturned barrel with a single candle for his light.

The package was of folded linen sewn in a particular pattern. Pantera cut the thread with a razor-fine knife and slid the blade under the imperial seal. This was Lucius’ personal mark; like his brother’s, it showed a chariot. Unlike his brother’s, Lucius’ horses were racing across the winning line.

Opened, the letter was short and in a laughably easy code. I read it over Pantera’s shoulder.

Brother: a slave belonging to Vergilius Capito, former governor of Egypt, escaped from Tarracina and is presently guiding us on a safe route up the largest of the Volscian hills that lie above the city. We are gaining the heights and will attack with tomorrow’s dawn. Victory shall be ours and we will return to you by the evening of the day after. We shall celebrate the remainder of the festival together as victors.

‘Is the slave yours?’ I asked. ‘Are you helping Lucius?’

Pantera laughed, hollowly. ‘Definitely not. But I bet he didn’t “escape” on his own. There are people who want Lucius to win just as badly as we want him to lose.’

I said, ‘If Vitellius thinks Lucius is about to win, and will march back into Rome at the head of seven thousand victorious Guards by morning, he’ll abandon all thought of abdicating. You can’t let him see that letter.’

‘I wasn’t planning to. But another must go in its place: Vitellius and Lucius send messages to each other four times a day and they’ll notice if one is missing. Can you replicate this hand?’

I arched my brow. I can replicate any hand and he knew it, although he didn’t know that he himself had been taken in by at least one of my forgeries. ‘Tell me what you want to say.’

I was given pen and ink and a stool to sit on, but the upturned barrel was my only table. Nevertheless, I am a craftsman who takes a pride in his work and, after a few test sentences, I was ready.

I wrote to Pantera’s dictation, transposing the letters in my head, A to C, B to D and so on, through the alphabet. One can only suppose that Lucius and Vitellius believed their messenger service to be entirely secure or they would never have risked using such an infantile cipher.

In plain text, before transposition, what I wrote was this: The rebels have attained the heights above the Volscian hills and are currently unassailable. We have them under siege, and victory will be ours before the month’s end.

Writing, I said, ‘Isn’t this still too optimistic? Will Vitellius give up his throne in the morning if he thinks Lucius will be back in January?’

Pantera was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his cheek pillowed on his folded arms. Sleepily, he said, ‘For the emperor, January is a lifetime away. He might waver if he thought Lucius could be home tomorrow’s tomorrow, but any longer than that and he’ll fold. Lucius, for his part, would never write anything that did not predict his own ultimate victory; we can’t put words on to paper that he would never send. This will do what we need. But we need another, to send to Lucius, in case he is victorious. We can’t take the risk that he might head back to Rome of his own accord. Felix has a sample of Vitellius’ hand for you to copy. Take a clean sheet of paper and write this…’

At his dictation, I wrote a second letter to be sent to Lucius, and then watched with professional interest and not a little envy as Pantera sanded, folded and sealed the fresh paper to look exactly like the original, and sutured it closed with an identical, much practised, pattern of stitches.

Returning to the inn, I found that we had been in the barn for less than the time it took for Borros and Felix to eat their stew. The messenger ate standing up and departed swiftly.

Pantera, too, ate standing up, reading reports from a small man with no teeth who appeared to have been roused from deep sleep. At the end, he said to me, ‘If you want to sleep, you can stay here with Diodemus, or you can come with us. It’s your choice. Either way, you cannot return to Rome until Vitellius has abdicated.’

‘Or been killed.’

‘Or that, yes.’

Diodemus was the little toothless ruffian. He looked as venal as any of Rome’s bandits. He might well have been one of Rome’s bandits, come south for a change of pace. I felt the promise of sleep slipping away.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked, although I already knew; in some things, Pantera was entirely predictable and his sense of duty outweighed any normal regard for his own safety.

‘To Tarracina,’ he said, confirming the inevitable. ‘We have men there who must be brought out before Lucius attacks at dawn.’

I was desperate to sleep, but even so, when Pantera and his men rode out soon after, I rode with them. I rode against the screaming ache of my thighs and an urgent desire for a warm bed and a decent night’s sleep.

But my world was far more dangerous than it had been just before midnight when I took an almost-emperor’s younger son to my bed, and I was betting my life on the belief that the safest place in the empire for the next few days would be standing right next to Pantera.