The Art of War

Chapter 60

Rome, 19 December AD 69

Jocasta

Night plunged into the western sea and sucked the rain with it. The next day, the nineteenth of December, dawned fresh and clear and seemed as if it might be kind to those of us besieged on the Capitol hill.

Pantera came back before dawn, and seemed cheerful, and then Cornelius Martialis returned before the first watch was called with news that Vitellius had turned down the offer to abdicate — again — but that he believed his brother to be caught up in Misene and unlikely to return.

Pantera was responsible for that; I read it in the quiet confidence of the nods exchanged between Trabo and Horus. Pantera himself is too used to hiding the truth to let such things slip. But whoever had set it up, the truth was that Lucius was trapped well away from Rome and, barring miracles, there was no chance of his riding in to offer Vitellius a last-minute reprieve.

Mind you, on the morning of the nineteenth, there was no certainty that Vitellius was going to need that. We were stuck on the hill with a cordon of Guards around and no sign that Antonius Primus was close to rescuing us. We were like a family, four hundred strong, caught in close proximity when we were better apart. Trabo couldn’t look at me, and Domitian didn’t know where to look when he was in my presence, except that he must not, ever, glance at Horus, which of course told its own story.

Only Pantera was equally at ease with us all. We discovered that he could play dice with distressing skill and he taught us a board game common among the tribes of Britain where coloured pieces move from square to square across and must try to surround the king of the opposite side. He didn’t seem to be interested in trying to find an escape route from the hill. I had found cellars with an almost-hidden entrance below the clerks’ room which I thought might have caught his attention, but he just took his winnings and carried on playing.

Soon, noises of a skirmish reached us, of horses in anger, of iron smashed on iron, on stone, on wood, on flesh. I ushered my small force of men and women down the hill a short distance and stationed them along the barricades we had built in the night. We had brought whetstones to sharpen the knives that were set upright in the barricades and goose grease to ease the levers we had set in place to roll the larger lumps of masonry down on to the heads of those coming up, but none of us expected the line to hold for long.

Domitian came too, bringing the sons of senators, who numbered a rather larger force than mine, and they climbed up ladders on to the row of dwellings that lined the long, slow route to the temple. There was a festive atmosphere amongst the dozens on the rooftops, with food and drink passed up from below and many salutations, most of them scurrilous, as befitted the third day of Saturnalia. The sun shone. We waited.