The Art of War

Chapter 70

Rome, 20 December AD 69

Borros

The early hours of the morning found Pantera and me in a side alley about three streets away from the hut where we’d left Trabo and the others; in essence, we’d run round a couple of corners and stopped.

Pantera had left me standing at the street’s end with orders to keep a lookout, and then hopped on to a wall, and from there up on the rooftops where he dropped out of sight into some hidden hollow.

He returned some short time later, looking satisfied, and we walked on through the waking city, with every street lit by the burning temple, every house smeared with soot and ash.

We passed slaves and freedmen in the street, vendors and craftsmen, setting up for the day. None of them paid us any attention, nor we them until we came at last to a particular bakery where the ovens were already fierce and the scents warm, crisp and mouthwatering.

In the store room to one side we found Marcus eating newly baked cake; that was the blond-haired Marcus who led the silver-boys and had so discomfited Trabo earlier in the year.

I didn’t listen to their conversation, but I can tell you it was short and swift and Pantera came out of this one, too, looking as if what he planned was going well.

‘Do you suppose Cavernus is awake at this hour?’ he asked.

‘The entire staff of the White Hare was required to be up with the sun when I was there,’ I said. ‘On the day the temple burned down, I’d be surprised if they weren’t up all night.’

‘Then with luck we can go there and eat, and perhaps sleep. It’s going to be a long day.’

‘Antonius Primus…?’

‘Will hear what has happened from a dozen mouths. We don’t need to speak to him personally.’

Pantera didn’t look tired. He looked like a man whose life had suddenly sharpened, but I was exhausted and I wasn’t going to turn down the offer of sleep. So we went to the tavern that had been my home for eighteen years and Cavernus greeted us like royalty — discreet royalty, which must be hidden, but royalty none the less — and gave us food and a little wine and a bed to sleep in and there would have been a girl to warm it if either of us had wanted.

For myself, unconsciousness came as I fell on the bed. Pantera, I think, made himself lie down and close his eyes as an act of will, but he was too vibrant to slip into sleep.

Marcus tapped on our door a couple of hours later, with news that Domitian, Caenis and the others had moved from the hut near the Crossed Spears and were believed to be heading in the direction of the Aventine.

Our task, I learned, was to find them and then follow them, discreetly. The silver-boys guided us with occasional whistles and many gestures, but our progress and theirs was hampered by the crowds who had emerged with the dawn. Some had come to stare at the fire, but most had gathered to watch the procession of Vestal Virgins make their way down from the emperor’s palace on the Palatine, through the forum and down toward the Tiber. Rumour said they were going to meet Antonius Primus on the far side of the bridge on the Flaminian Way; he had come that close to the city.

We were near the forum when we first saw them: a column of women, dressed and veiled all in white, with white and red ribbons in their hair and criss-crossed on their bodices. They seemed to float, so slowly did they move, and in utter silence; they were attended by none of the horns and drums and pomp that customarily announced Roman ceremony.

Their bodyguards were vast men bearing bundles of rods and axes with which to deter the inappropriate attentions of lesser mortals, but even they kept a seemly distance from the white apparitions. The only people permitted to approach the Virgins were their hand-matrons; former Vestals who remained to serve their younger, still-chaste sisters. They, too, were dressed in white, but their ribbons were blue to show that they no longer tended the sacred flame.

They moved to and from the Vestals to the gathering crowd dispensing favours: dates and apples in accordance with the Saturnalia; small denomination coins; slips of paper with exhortations and prophecies: Fortune favours you; Honour those who support you; Begin each day gladly, and it will end so.

Simply to be gazed upon by a Vestal could free a condemned man from his execution. On the day after the temple burned, with the smoke still billowing up from the top of the Capitol hill, everyone wanted to fall under their stare. They were the nearest thing Rome had to living gods and we all needed their goodwill.

The mood of the crowd was strangely erratic. There wasn’t a man, woman or child there who didn’t think Rome was on the road to certain ruin; the temple had gone and their emperor had all but abdicated, both things unheard of in the city’s history. On the other hand, it seemed as if the gods had simply taken the inversions of Saturnalia and pushed them to their natural limit. The emperor was no longer ruler. The people were no longer safe. Anything was possible.

So the crush of the crowd grew denser with every passing heartbeat and we were caught up in it, helpless as a pair of corks in the ocean; for a while, it was all Pantera and I could do to keep sight of each other, never mind follow anyone else.

No one gave us any favours and we broke out eventually, but we had lost touch with Marcus in the chaos and when we found him again his cocky know-everything air had gone.

‘We lost them.’

‘What?’ Pantera could make a single word sting like a sword cut. ‘Where?’

‘In the crowd. Not ten paces away. They were there, all of them, and then they were gone.’

Pantera’s gaze cut us both equally. I had never been afraid of him, but I was then. ‘Find them,’ he said. ‘Our lives and the future of the empire rest on it.’