The Art of War

Chapter 5

Rome, 1 August AD 69

Sextus Geminus, centurion, the Praetorian Guard

It was raining on the morning of the lead lottery that was my first true introduction to Pantera; the kind of torrential rain that felt as if the gods had upended the Tiber and were pouring the result on to our heads; the kind of rain where you were drenched to the skin as soon as you stepped out of the door; the kind of rain that everyone said was a bad omen.

But still, it was only rain; nobody was dying, and in any case, we were legionaries: if we were ordered out of barracks, we went.

Vitellius had given the order. He didn’t believe in the power of omens and he wasn’t going to cancel his precious ceremony just because the sky was weeping, so we were called to parade in the forum at the second watch after dawn and had to stand in our cohorts, listening to him read his speech.

We should have known it was bad then. I mean, really… we’d just marched the length of Italy, and risked our lives half a dozen times to put him on the throne. We’d fought other legions, just as good as us, when the men in them were our brothers, our fathers, cousins, friends and lovers. We’d killed men we admired and marched over their bleeding bodies in his name. Was it so hard to say thank you?

I’ve done it without notes, he could have done the same. But no, he had to read from his sodden scroll and we had to stand and watch it disintegrate in his hands. When he was done, we had to about-face and slow-march to the top of the Capitol.

There are three routes up that particular hill. If you’re feeling fit, there’s the Hundred Steps on the north face that take you straight up to the north gate, but it’s a stiff and savage rise. If you want something slightly less vicious, there’s the Gemonian steps on the southwestern aspect. That’s the place where the bodies of executed criminals are exposed before they’re tipped into the Tiber.

And then there’s the long, slow, winding path that takes you up the south slope on to the Arx and then across the saddle of the Asylum before you reach the Capitol proper and the temple of the three gods.

This was the new emperor’s opportunity to display his victorious troops to his city, which meant we had to take the slow route so that the masses could line the streets and cheer. They did, of course; to do anything else risked being arrested for sedition.

He’d already banned the astrologers, which did nothing much beyond ensuring that every street corner was decorated with graffiti telling in detail how the stars predicted his death. Everyone read it and half believed it, but nobody wanted to be next in line for exile, so the plebs turned up in force and stood in the driving rain to cheer us as we marched out of the forum.

I hadn’t been back in Rome for long and it was interesting to see what had changed. Nero’s giant statue was still there; Galba had taken it down and Otho had put it back up again. I think Vitellius couldn’t decide whether he wanted to make friends with the senate, who hated Nero, which meant he’d have to take it down, or with the people, who’d loved him, and wanted it to stay. I don’t think the fact that it was still there meant he sided with the people, more that he was just really bad at making decisions.

So we passed Nero, and remembered not to salute as we’d done when we were last in Rome, and on we marched up the hill, past the statue of Juno Moneta and on towards the mint, where you could feel the blast from the furnaces even through the rain.

The coiners had been working night and day since we came back to Rome, melting down coins of the other emperors ready for reminting. Vitellius had only just got round to sitting for the celators so it was only the newest coins that had his image on.

It wasn’t a bad likeness. If you only look at his face, he’s a good-looking man, taller than any of us by half a head, with a strong nose and a bald circle on his pate that can look quite stately at times.

He was lame, though, which is less than ideal in a general, and it wasn’t as if it was an injury gained in the field; he’d broken his thigh bone in a chariot accident, which is about as stupid as it gets, really.

So we passed the mint and the coins in my pouch jingled in sympathy with those being put to the fire, and my guts griped, and if I could have walked off down the path I would have done.

Why? Because the whole thing was a mistake. If you’re going to follow someone all the way to Rome, you have to make sure it’s the right man, and Vitellius was never that.

I said so in January when the whole thing started about not renewing our oath to Galba and swearing to Vitellius instead. I argued as long as I could, but there’s a point when loyalty to the old regime becomes treachery to the new and I had my men to think of.

So I swore with the rest of them and after that… when it comes to the edge, a man’s word is his only coin. If you can’t keep an oath, you’re no better than the barbarians.

On we trudged, past the row of dilapidated priests’ dwellings, each leaning on the next like an old man in want of a stick, and on, shuffling in through the vast and ancient gates of the temple, which has been home to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva since the time when Rome was too poor to build them a temple each and had to house all three under the one roof. Later, when there was gold enough and more to spare, nobody was about to offend two out of the three most revered deities in the city by rehoming them elsewhere.

So we were left that day to wait under the combined gaze of the three, each one cast in bronze, three times life-sized, standing amongst the columns in mute tolerance of us mortals who milled around their feet.

It was cold, then. We had stopped marching and the rain sank into our bones. I was a stinking mass of fulled wool and wet linen; a drenched dog would have smelled better.

The priests had lit extra braziers against the cold, and were burning incense on them by the fistful. I breathed in feathers of blue smoke that tickled my nose to the edge of a sneeze until, eventually, we officers were summoned forward into the central sanctum. In there, I didn’t sneeze at all.

Since I was a boy, I have been struck silent by this place, by the weight of empire bearing down on the roof beams. Built by the good king Tarquin at the founding of Rome, dedicated by the hero Horatius, a shrine of some sort has stood on this site since the city was no more than a spark in one man’s imagination.

Legend said that if the temple were to fall, Rome would fall with it: everyone knew this. Nobody, of course, expected it to happen.

‘Sextus Geminus! Formerly of the Fourth Macedonica!’

My head snapped up; it does when you hear your own name. I looked to the altar and there, staring at me, was Aulus Caecina, legionary legate of that very IVth Macedonica, the general who had driven us through the Alps at a time when everyone else said winter had made the routes impassable. If any one man made Vitellius emperor, it was him. I have never quite known how to be in his company, and knew now least of all.

At least he was alone. There were priests on either side of him, of course, but no other officers. I had been afraid that Lucius might have been there; seeing Caecina alone was the first good thing that happened that day.

I did what eighty-three men before me had done, and seventy-six did after. I took eight good paces forward, knelt before the bright, hot fire, and stretched out my left hand.

A priest standing at Caecina’s right side thrashed the air about my head with a laurel branch, sign of victory. Another priest, smaller and broader in the beam, glanced down at his notes, filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Sextus Geminus! First centurion, fifth cohort, the new Praetorian Guards!’

So that was my new rank. It was the same as the old one, except that the Guard was… the Guard. Better paid, kept in Rome, responsible for guarding the emperor’s life with our own.

Caecina was talking to me, genially enough.

‘… so thoroughly deserved. I never saw a man swing his century faster to face a new enemy. This is small recompense for your dedication and valour-’

He was good. He caught my hand and slid on a silver arm ring, which was my reward for my part in the battle at Cremona. He pushed it up beyond the elbow with the same kind of deft, impersonal precision the priests use when they cut a bull’s throat.

It was his words that mattered far more than what he did. There was a point in the assault on Cremona when I’d turned three centuries round to face an assault on our right flank and he remembered it as if he’d been there in the mud and the slaughter, hearing every cursed command.

Very likely, he remembered something equally relevant for every one of the hundred and fifty-nine men with me; it’s who he was, and that kind of care for his men was one of the reasons we’d mutinied against Galba when he asked us to, and then followed him to the brink of civil war and back.

Like Corbulo, like Vespasian in the east, Caecina was a soldier’s soldier and we all respected him for it. What the rest didn’t know was what he was like behind closed doors. Nor had I until the night before.

The trophy ring fitted perfectly. Cool silver hugged my flesh, so that I could feel the hard, fast throb of my veins against it. My whole body was shuddering, finely, like a leaf; if anything was going to happen, it had to happen now.

And it did.

As Caecina stepped back, the priest threw more incense on to the altar; much more than before. A broad fan of smoke splayed out, cutting us off from the line of waiting men behind.

I was alone then, with the priests and the altar and this man who remembered everything. I swallowed and heard my own larynx pop. Caecina looked at me as if I’d farted.

From his side, the bass-voiced priest bellowed, ‘Choose! And may the gods guide your hand!’

A black silk bag was thrust forward at waist height. As each man had done before me, I slid my hand through the bag’s narrow mouth, and felt Nothing.

I panicked, I will admit that now, to you. This was a lottery. I was eighty-fourth in a line of a hundred and sixty men. I was expecting to feel seventy-seven tokens of folded lead from which I was required to select one. For nearly a day, I had been steeling myself against this moment.

But now it was here, my hand closed on empty air. In shock, I looked up at Caecina and read on his face such intensity of cold, flat anger that I shoved my hand back in again, fumbled about and — there! — felt a single filet of lead lying in the bottom, tucked into a corner hidden by the overlying fabric.

It was the length of my thumb, folded over at either end and sealed in the middle with wax, and when I drew it out I saw that the wax was black and that the imprint of a chariot stood proud on the matt surface. Vitellius was favouring Nero, after all: the chariot had been his emblem, too.

I didn’t break the wax seal; my orders — all our orders, given to us in the officers’ quarters just last night — were to wait, and open them later, in private.

I held the tab out on the flat of my palm to show I had taken it. Caecina, restored to good humour, nodded briskly and I took my eight paces back and that was it: over.

It wasn’t over, of course, it was only just beginning, but it felt like a huge step taken. I wasn’t alone in feeling heartsick, I think; it was on other faces as we shuffled on sideways and sideways and watched each man take his eight steps forward and pick his lead from the lottery.

There was a tedious similarity to the proceedings broken by small differences in the rewards for our endeavours; Juvens, three men after me, was awarded a spear for personal valour, not an arm band, and Halotus, who came eight after him, was given on behalf of his entire century a disc to display on their standard.

Whatever he was awarded, though, each man at the same time took a folded token from the black bag and stepped back, keeping the seal unbroken.

The lead grew warm and soft in the waiting. I kneaded it between my fingers; by the time the lottery came to an end, it was an acorn, which once had been a small, flat lozenge.

‘Gentlemen!’ Caecina held up a hand. His voice was high for a man’s, sharp and clear. ‘You each have a tab and, on it, a name. You know what to do. Know as you do so that we are, once again, a nation at war with itself.’

That got our attention: I had heard the news the night before, but my fellow officers had not. All along the row, we stood more upright, our eyes fixed on our general.

Caecina pitched his voice well; he knew how to play a crowd. ‘We have news from the east. On the first of July, the prefect of Egypt swore his oath to Vespasian as emperor. His legions did likewise and they were followed by the legions of Judaea and Syria respectively. He is appointing senators, prefects, praetors. He is minting coins in his own image and collecting taxes in his own name. He is choosing senators and consuls to serve his version of Rome and he is recruiting armies to march at his command. In short, he is behaving as if he were already emperor and we the traitors standing against him. He is preparing for war and we must be ready to fight.

‘Eight legions are ranged against us. There will not be any more, because our emperor is loved by his men, but they are enough for us to show once again that we are the best the empire can command.

‘Go now, and prove yourselves first with this one assignment. And then, next spring, we will march against the traitors.’