The Art of War

Chapter 52

Rome, 18 December AD 69

Geminus

It was the eighteenth of December in the eight hundred and twenty-first year of Rome’s existence. Not once, in any of those years, had an emperor, a king, a ruler of any kind, stepped away from his reign.

At the Guard barracks at the back of the Quirinal hill, the air was dense with the iron stench of distress. To breathe was hard. To think was harder. To order the men was nearly impossible.

I stood in Lucius’ office with my back pressed tight against the closed door. Outside, the murmur of three thousand men was thunder, rolling out of the gates and down the hill.

Inside, Juvens was sitting on the floor with his knees hooked up and his head in his hands and what he said in here was the same as the men were saying outside, only that his accent was more polished, his choice of words crisper, free of the profanities… well, mostly free.

‘We’re finished. He’ll walk down there at first light, read out his pathetic little speech telling the world he didn’t want to be emperor anyway and only the overweening ambition of Valens and Caecina made him do it and now one of them’s had his head stuck on a pole and the other is helping the man who did the sticking, so he rather thinks he’d like to go back to being an ex-general, thank you very much.

‘Oh, and of course he’ll disband the Guard he created because obviously Vespasian will want to make his own out of the men who have just won him Rome. Welcome, Antonius Primus and the bastards who lost to us at Cremona last spring and got lucky a month ago. Remember the lottery? Draw out a name, find your man and kill him? It’ll be the same again only our names will be the ones written on the folded lead. We may as well fall on our own swords now.’

‘Be my guest.’ I was angry. Not the fast, furious anger that comes in a rush of blood to the head and is easily dissipated by a brief flash of violence, but a slow-burning, steadily rising fury that had brought me to a point of terrible clarity.

‘Is it treason,’ I asked, ‘if your emperor wants to abdicate and you stop him? Or is it treason if you let him set down his claim to the throne and walk away? Is the office in the man or does the man own the office?’

Juvens lifted his head slowly. He peered at me as if I had fallen out of focus. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Completely so. We made the emperor. We choose when to unmake him. And today is not that day.’

I stepped away from the door and wrenched it open. Breakfast fires danced and flickered in the dark. Dawn was a faint blue line on the eastern horizon; night still held the city. ‘You can come or you can stay here and fall on your sword.’

A thousand men stood within earshot. They were armed, and cloaked against the cold; their helmets were a dully undulant sea, glimmering here and there, touched by torches that guttered and flamed at their margins.

A signaller waited nearby, summoned an hour ago. I grabbed his horn, strode to the podium and sounded the summons to war.

The air was short: three rising notes and three falling, repeated three times. By the end of the second phrase, every Guard in the barracks was in parade order, waiting.

Two and a half thousand impatient men stood in front of me, and the battle rage rose from them thick as fog from a winter river, harsh as salt in a wound, pliable, malleable, mine to mould to my intent.

I sucked it in with the air I needed to speak. Never in my life had I addressed so many in one place at one time. I had to guess the pitch, the strength of voice that would make it carry.

‘Men of the Imperial Guard…’ Perhaps too loud, but it made the point. ‘Today of all days, you choose your own destiny. Will you go craven into the night? Or will you stand up for all you have fought for? Will you fight one more day, and another, and the one after that, until you see-’

I had to stop; I could not shout over their noise. Antonius Primus must have heard them, and Lucius, a day’s march to the south.

The holler was ragged at first, but resolved, slowly, into a single sound: my name.

‘Gem-in-us! Gem-in- us! Gem-in-us! ’

This, too, was an entirely new experience. My own rage grew, blossomed, tempered by a pride I had never imagined, and the power of it transported me beyond myself.

I raised my hands to call for quiet and the men hushed in a moment. I looked down across two and a half thousand faces and they beamed at me as if the sun rose only in my eyes. I had never loved anyone as I now loved these, my men. I took a breath, knew exactly how to pitch my voice to best effect.

‘Men of the Guard. Our emperor needs our help. This is what we shall do…’