The Art of War

Chapter 63

Rome, 19 December AD 69

Trabo

Domitian was on the roof and I was there with him, babysitting after a fashion, or at least keeping an eye on him to be sure he wasn’t captured.

Losing Domitian now would have meant the end; everyone knew that Vespasian adored his children and the boy would have been a bargaining counter beyond price, with or without the woman Caenis.

So I watched him, and while he may have spent a night with a catamite, in daylight he had courage, of a kind; he was certainly fit to be a Caesar’s son.

With flames playing over his face and crisping his hair, he was a dancing, leaping, manic satyr with a startlingly accurate aim for one who had spent the greater part of his life studying insects and collecting coins.

Bending, he ripped tile after tile from the roof beneath his feet, and flung them after the manner of a discus thrower so that they spun blade-wise through the air and sliced edge- first into the men below. Around him, a band of senators’ sons were throwing their missiles likewise into the faces, raised arms, hands and chests of the under-defended Guards.

By tradition, the Guard never carry shields; honour says that these men need only a blade to defend the emperor, and while this might be accurate after a fashion there are times — now — when a shield wall would have made all the difference between success and ignominious defeat.

Domitian had been winning. Supported by the youth of Rome, he had been at least holding the Guard at bay for longer than they would have wanted; they were men bent on a mission and didn’t want to be stopped by a boy.

Which is, presumably, why they lit the fire. It was a clever move; everyone knows that fire is the opposite of water and runs up hills, and besides, the wind was behind the Guards; they could safely torch the priests’ houses and perhaps burn the temple and run no risk that the rest of Rome would fall to ash around them.

The flames were small and faltering at first, but they grew quickly into a roaring wall that fed fast on the old, old houses with their oak beams and wattle walls. Soon there was a level of heat that even the son of an emperor could not withstand. Already Domitian’s face was scarlet, sweat swimming off him. His brows had been scorched away, leaving his face naked of hair.

Pantera came up round about then.

He reached us just as Domitian staggered back from the fire’s leading edge. The Guards were level with Jocasta’s abandoned barricades by now. With nobody left there to man them, the planks and sacrifice-knives were of little more than nuisance value; just enough to slow the oncoming men for the time it took to lift the knives away without slicing their fingers.

‘My lord.’ Pantera heaved himself up beside Domitian as he wrenched a fresh tile from the disintegrating roof. ‘Please, you’ve done all a man could do. The women are safe in the temple. But if you remain out here, you will be caught between the fire and the Guard and the one will eat you while the other will hold you to ransom against your father’s claim to the throne.’

Domitian laughed, drily. ‘My father would not abandon his ambition on my behalf.’

‘I think you would be surprised by what your father would do for you.’

The round, bulging eyes met his. Domitian’s naked brows slid upwards. ‘It might be interesting to test it.’

Fire was scorching the left side of Pantera’s face. With studied calm, he said, ‘If you find death a source of fascination then yes, it might be interesting. Those of us who live in its shadow tend to believe we will see the Styx soon enough and we are best served by avoiding too early a crossing. If you wish to die, lord, now is your opportunity. If you wish to live to serve Rome, the temple awaits. We can barricade the gates when you’re in.’

‘To serve Rome…’ Domitian looked down, chewed his lips. When he looked up again, the wild light was there again in his eyes. I truly had no idea which future he would choose, and was mightily relieved when he spun, and raised his arms to his followers. ‘To the temple!’

The rest were glad to leave. They lobbed their last few missiles and didn’t stop to see who they hit, or where. With Domitian in the lead, we all ran together over the tiles, and down at the end to spring for the small postern gate.

Jocasta hauled it open and threw it shut behind us. She was filthy, and thin and scratched and smoke-stained and radiant.

Caenis was there with her. Vespasian’s little Greek sparrow of a mistress dropped the bar on the big main gate. Others had already begun to stack tables and wooden beams against the gates, but they must have known that they were nothing more than imaginary boundaries.

I looked round for Pantera and lost him momentarily in the crush of huddled refugees that filled this old, dry, dusty place to capacity. More had joined through yesterday and there were over a thousand now, men, women and children. The gods of the temple had not received so many visitors since the ceremony of the lottery at which Geminus picked out Pantera’s name from the bag, and Juvens had picked mine.

Sabinus was moving through the crowds, making sure the women and children had water, that the men were keeping their courage.

‘Pantera!’

Quinctillius Atticus, the suffect consul, came striding from the libraries. He had made an office there, amidst the three thousand bronze tablets that held the senate’s decrees going back to the start of Rome. Having spent the morning distributing leaflets castigating the emperor who had elevated him to consul, he sought safety now in the constancy and reliability of law.

He drew Pantera back under cover of the porch to a place between the columns, where they could talk. There, Jupiter stood ten feet tall in bronze, a perfect image of all that was good in Roman manhood. Juno stood a dozen paces away, only a little smaller; a matron with the face of a goddess. Minerva cast her arms wide, drawing in the congregated masses to her breast. Within the sacred triangle of these three, Atticus talked in stately whispers that echoed up to the roofbeams and were heard by us all.

‘We need to get out of here. We’re trapped and every man and woman here is named as a follower of Vespasian. If there are reprisals, their families will suffer.’

If there was ever a man who was likely to have drawn reprisals on his family, it was Atticus. But hundreds of men heard him, and feared for their kin.

‘Lucius is not here,’ Pantera said. ‘And Vitellius has more sense than to start purging the families of Rome. We need to block the temple gates and hold firm until Antonius Primus reaches us.’

Atticus’ hands worked each other, knuckle on knuckle, a knot of anguish. He said, ‘Lucius may return. And Vitellius takes his orders now from the Guard. The priests have shown us a hidden door in the southern wall that leads down to the Hundred Steps. If we leave now, we could be clear of here by noon.’

‘And where would we go, consul?’ Domitian had found us; it wasn’t hard when every one of the thousand men and women was listening in on the conversation.

Vespasian’s son leaned against a wall, his round face still scarlet, babyish without its brows. His gaze, though, was of a man who had tasted blood and found it to his liking. His voice carried easily to the edge of the crowd.

‘The Guard has Rome locked down. The gates are manned; not a rotting corpse can get through but that they search the coffin for men hiding underneath. Antonius will come to our aid. We are as safe here as anywhere. I say we block the gates and wait.’

‘And do it swiftly,’ Pantera said. ‘The Guards are nearly on us.’

The balance hung a moment longer; if the consul had been a leader of men, he could have gathered the crowd and made a run for the south gates and freedom. But the fates do not wait for the faint-hearted and there was a roar and thunder at the front gate that spun everyone round to face it.

‘The statues!’ Protocol was gone. Pantera was already shouting orders, and to hang with those who outranked him. ‘Pull down the statues and set them across the gate.’

‘The statues of the gods?’ Domitian’s eyes flew wide. ‘The statues of Jupiter? Of Juno? Minerva?’ Hoarse, disbelieving. ‘They’re sacred.’

‘And they’re made of bronze: they’ll withstand rams and fire, perhaps for long enough to let Antonius reach us. Unless you can dismantle the temple and use the stone from the columns in time, there’s nothing else to hand.’

The light was dying; evening slid in across the sky and the fires burning out on the hill were brighter now than the sun. Domitian was level with Pantera and me. The shifting shadows blurred his face; he was a child again, briefly, and then a man. He nodded. ‘The gods have brought us this far. If they wished to stop us, they would have done it by now.’

He raised his head. He was not the bull-voiced warrior that was his father, nor even his brother Titus, who was a golden Ares, but his voice was strong enough, and the gods allowed that it did not break back to the high notes of childhood.

‘Jupiter in his wisdom sent the rainstorm yesterday that kept us safe. Now he offers us his body, to use in our defence. In his name, we shall take the bronze statues and set them across the gates. Later, when Rome is ours, we shall offer sacrifices on this day every year, to thank him!’

He was Vespasian’s son; his word was enough to get the huddled refugees to make a stand, but it took Pantera and me and, surprisingly, Horus to arrange them into coherent groups, ten to wrap ropes around each statue to topple it, with another three dozen strong men ready to take it as soon as it lay flat and carry it to the gates.

There, Jocasta directed the laying out, as in state, of each vast figure: Jupiter lay on his back, then Juno was set across him, head to toe, to prevent any uncivil, possibly sacrilegious suggestions of fornication.

These two blocked the main gates. Minerva blocked the smaller postern gate at the side, all alone.

There was a vantage point on the temple roof where it reared high enough to give a good view out across the hill; already two or three ragged ladders leaned against the walls leading up to it. With nothing left to do at the gates but pray to the gods who held us, we three climbed up and were in time to see Juvens lead his men from the barricades and across the Asylum from the Arx to the final hill.

They came as a storm-pushed wave; dark shadows of men in the darkening night, with fire all along their right side, casting their helmets in red, their faces in amber, their raised blades in gold.

Locked together, arm in arm, shoulder on shoulder, they ran at the smoke-blackened gates.

The force of their impact was a thunderclap loud enough to wake the dead, or the slumbering gods. Their shouts ripped through the throats of us who watched, leaving our chests shaking, our hands bunched tight.

The gods held. Under Juvens’ shouted commands, the Guards took thirty good paces back and came again. And again. And again.

They were demons, dragged from the underworld, come to assault the citadel of the gods; and they failed.