The Art of War

Chapter 67

Rome, 19–20 December AD 69

Borros

After the fire-storm, the calm.

We huddled in that hidden underground shrine all night, with Domitian giving us a running commentary on what was happening outside.

We knew early on that they had killed Sabinus. We heard the animal shout — that light-tube brought sound to us too — but we didn’t know what it was for until Juvens arrived at a flat-out run and began screaming abuse at his men.

Caenis took it particularly badly. She felt responsible, obviously, although there was nothing she could have done. Juvens should have controlled his men better; if anyone was to blame, it was him.

So we sat through the night and pretty much all we learned was that Pantera was virtually unbeatable at any game that involved bluffing, but he could be beaten at dice as long as it was only a straight roll and everything down to chance.

At a certain point, we nominated one corner to be a latrine, and all looked away as the ladies used it. The stink was vile. Being a slave, I was more used to it, but even so, three months of freedom had made me soft.

We thought we’d have to stay there through the whole of the next day while the temple on the hill burned out and probably we would have done, had not Juvens come back with about a thousand more Guardsmen and begun to forge a sense of order out of the chaos on the hill. Soon, the refugees had been herded down into the city until the place was empty.

We left after that, crawling out of our stinking hole, and scuttling the few dozen paces to the fifth house along, which had an exit in its back wall that gave on to a goat-path which led down the hill with a sheer drop on one side and the back walls of the houses on the other.

It was still dark, and on this side of the wall the blazing temple shed no light, so that we had to feel our way down in single file, one hand on the wall to our right, the other dangling out over nowhere. It wasn’t as bad as the climb down from the temple wall had been, but all of us grew closer to our gods as we prayed for delivery from the certain death of a fall.

We were a subdued group who gathered at the hill’s foot. Even the lady Jocasta was white and drawn and had no clever comment to make.

‘Where?’ she asked, as we reached flat ground. ‘Where is safe?’

Horus said, ‘The House of the Lyre.’

But Pantera said, at the same time, ‘The Inn of the Crossed Spears.’

Given the choice, where would you have gone?

We all turned south, towards the House, but Pantera was in charge; he pulled us north, towards the Quirinal hill and the slums that run along the side. We were a sorry lot, slinking along the back alleys towards the inn.

The night was greying into dawn by the time we reached a hut three blocks from the inn. It was a ramshackle thing, with a goat-hide for a door that wouldn’t have withstood even one Guardsman, but there was at least a bed, and water and food stored in a rat-proof barrel in the corner, and after the hole on the hill it felt like a palace. Domitian and Horus seemed to know it, and walked in as if it were home.

We drank and ate and laid Caenis down on the bed for rest, and then Pantera said to me, ‘The next twelve hours are critical. Antonius Primus must be told what has happened. Will you come with me? Trabo can keep this place safe, with the help of the silver-boys. Trabo, if they whistle three short notes, rising, it means the Guards are coming and you need to get everyone out. Marcus will show you where to go. Follow him without question and do it fast.’

Trabo was as exhausted as everyone else, but he was more shattered by Jocasta’s rejection of him than by the climb or the trek or the wait while the temple burned above us. He had gone down that ladder like a child expecting a gift and she had turned away from him, spurning him as clearly as if she had slapped him in the face.

I thought she might love Pantera, if any of us; certainly she never took her eyes off him and she had that look that women get sometimes, when they want to unscrew your head and lift out your brains and sift through them for all the hidden thoughts.

Anyway, Trabo was both desperately relieved not to be called away and desperately unhappy at being left with Jocasta. But he was a Guard at heart, for all he had tried to be a bandit, or a gladiator’s cook. He needed people to protect and Pantera had just given him two women and the emperor’s son to take care of. He didn’t care about Matthias and could happily have lived without Horus, but it was clear that Horus and Pantera went back a long way and that to the spy the whore was as important in his way as Caenis or Domitian.

So Trabo sulked like a whipped child and stuffed his mouth with cheese and chomped on it miserably and, like that, we left them; a family flung together by fortune, and making the best of it.