The Art of War

Chapter 64

Rome, 19 December AD 69

Geminus

‘Stop,’ Juvens shouted, and then again, because nobody was listening, ‘ Stop! Fall back. This is pointless. We could run at those gates all night; they’re not going to fall.’

‘We could burn them?’

The voice came from the dark and could have been anybody’s. Already the priests’ houses had fallen in on themselves, the flames dancing to nothing. The glowing embers were bright, but not bright enough to identify a man in a crowd.

It didn’t matter who had spoken; it wasn’t a good idea.

Irritably, Juvens shook his head. ‘Can you not smell the damp? They’ve soaked the wood. It won’t burn unless we pile half the city in front of it and I’m not going to destroy Rome just to get to an ageing fool and an adolescent boy. We’re going back down the hill. There are other ways up to that temple.’

Juvens had time to plan his new strategy on the long run down the north face of the Capitol. At the foot, he divided his men into three groups.

‘Right, Sextilius, you’re leading a feint back up the hill. Go up by the Gemonian steps so it looks as if you’re trying to sneak up. At the top, start gathering wood to burn down the front gates. I don’t think you’ll succeed, but no harm in trying. Let them see you, but make it look as if you’re trying to hide. Got that?

‘Priscus, you’ll take thirty men and go round to the Hundred Steps on the south side. See if you can emulate the Gauls, but if they start pouring down hot oil or sand, pull away. This is not about getting through, it’s about splitting their attention.’

‘Where are you going?’ Priscus was young and ardent and too curious for his own good.

‘We’re going up through the tenement towers on the northwest face. There are one or two that stretch nearly to the height of the walls and they’re in complete darkness, shaded by the temple walls. If we can get up there with a few ropes and some planks, we can build a bridge across to the temple and get over the wall in force. All we need to do is open the gates from the inside and Sextilius will be there, ready to run in.’

Sextilius was a year from retiring; Juvens and I both knew he had bought an inn and a girl and was looking forward to a long and profitable old age, which was why he had spent all summer avoiding the lotteries that sent men out to die on the streets, and we had let him. He owed both of us now and Juvens was calling in the favour.

Sextilius gave a sour smile. ‘I and my men will be there.’

If there was ever a place Nero’s building programme should have reached, the northwest foot of the Capitoline was it. Here, the tenements sprouted up along crooked alleys that smelled sourly of pig ordure and human urine; row upon row of unstable, old-wood, up to eighteen-storey blocks that leaned and leaked and loomed up into the night in a fire-fighter’s nightmare of brisk inflammability.

Juvens had marked in his mind the tallest of the blocks, but standing at the foot, peering up, it was impossible to tell which one had the pale roof that had shown so clearly from the level top of the hill. He made a guess and prayed aloud to Jupiter that it might be right, and changed his prayer half made and sent it instead to Mars, who was more likely to listen than the god whose temple he was assaulting.

He kicked in a door and found an entrance hall where the smell of urine was so strong it made his eyes water. His men piled in behind him, coughing. It was the third night of Saturnalia; the only souls left in the tenements were the very young, the very old, or the very pregnant.

‘Who are you?’

Standing in the nearest doorway was a dark-haired, wide-faced woman with a belly so ripe it looked ready to split apart. She stood with her hands on her hips, her spine arched back, her face fierce.

Juvens bowed. ‘My lady…’ She was almost certainly a whore, but he had been trained in manners from infancy and would not lower his standards now. ‘We are Guards in the service of the emperor. We need to ascend to the roof of this building, that we might prevent the enemies of the empire from bringing their war to Rome.’

‘Real Guards? Not bandits?’ She didn’t believe him, and why should she have done when the Guard had never penetrated that deep into the slums? She nodded over her shoulder. ‘The roof’s that way.’

The stairs were narrow and uneven. In places rats or rot had taken away a tread entirely and Juvens, running up, had to lengthen his stride mid-leap to avoid the gap. His men followed in train behind and the instructions filtered back down, level by level, to those still waiting to ascend. ‘Mind out! That one! Jump!’

Juvens counted seventeen landings before the last. Breathless, he stepped into darkness. He carried no torch, but Gaius Halotus, three men behind, was carrying a smoking pitch-pine torch that sweetened the air and shed just enough light to see how tiny was this place, how close the walls, how fragile.

‘No windows?’ Halotus was a big man, huge on this claustrophobic landing. Doors led off, but were locked; Juvens tried them as soon as there was light enough to negotiate the old, dried turds and smears of vomit. He shook his head. Halotus pulled a face, looked around at the walls, picked a place where the mortar looked most rotten, leaned back and kicked.

Three bone-jarring, teeth-rattling strikes later the wall had a window, or a door, or whatever you might like to term the jagged opening that let in the clean night air and showed that they were two blocks too far north.

‘Fuck.’ Juvens leaned out. The temple was tantalizingly close, a wall not more than a few feet higher than where they stood, but just too far to reach.

The adjacent building was a bare five feet away, but the slope of its roof was tilted towards them, and without the ability to take a run there was a real risk of falling eighteen storeys to the ground below. His stomach swooned at the thought.

‘Do we have planks?’

‘Not enough, but we can make some.’ Halotus had only a passing relationship with his civic duty of care for the city. Before Juvens could stop him, he had ripped a door from its hinges and was thrusting it through the newly made hole in the wall. It bridged the gap with a hand’s span on either side; still terrifying, but workable.

Juvens, of course, had to lead the way across. Someone in the early ranks up on the landing had a rope. They tied it round Halotus to act as an anchor and Juvens crawled across the rough wood, feeling paint flake off under his hands; he had no idea what colour it was, only that it was leaving raw wood that drove splinters into his knees.

But he made it across and stood and set his foot on the edge to hold it better for the next man, who took his place, and the third, who had brought a torch, but covered it at Juvens’ whispered oath. ‘If Sabinus sees us, we’re finished.’

Unwilling to leave themselves lightless, the men clustered round it so that the light could not leak up to the temple on the Capitol. And they prayed that neither Sabinus nor any of his men looked their way.

They had reason to hope that they wouldn’t; from the fires glowing bright again on the Asylum, it seemed that Sextilius was making good progress with his feint from that direction. What Priscus was doing round the south side was anybody’s guess, but there were no screams coming from there, so Juvens allowed himself a measure of optimism.

His men were all across on to the middle tenement. Halotus came last, picked up the door and carried it under his arm to the far edge of the roof.

Here, the gods smiled on them; the adjacent tenement had leaned in towards the one they were on, cosily, like a gossiping neighbour. The gap between was a mere three feet and the men had room to take a run at it. Like boys winning a dare, they ran and jumped and tumbled and soon they were betting on it as a long jump that threatened to send some men out across the other side into oblivion.

‘ Steady! ’ Juvens’ voice was a whip cracked across them. They gathered in the centre, laughing, and the moment was swiftly forgotten. They stood on the roof and gazed into the temple compound and then it was only a matter of readying themselves to cross the gap.

They were waiting for Halotus to bring the door when they saw the barrel of burning pitch fly out over the temple walls.

I still have no idea why that happened. You’d have to ask those who were inside if you want to know that, but there’s no doubt it contributed to the disaster that came afterwards.