The Art of War

Chapter 7

Rome, 3 August AD 69

Quintus Aurelius Trabo

I hadn’t met Pantera before that day, and I wouldn’t say my life was incomplete without him.

I heard about the lottery soon after it had happened; everybody did. By the evening of the next day, a dozen different stories were circulating of who had drawn what name, and by the day after that, the complete list was making its way north up the Flaminian Way.

Word reached the drovers sometime after we crossed the river Nar, about a day short of Rome in the cart I was in. Men were reciting names of the hunted and their hunters and mine was first on everyone’s lips. Set against me was Juvens; the best officer in Vitellius’ army.

So I knew then what kind of calibre of a man they’d put on my tail. It felt like an honour, and did nothing to stop me from heading into Rome. I knew I could beat him: he wasn’t that good.

It stopped raining that day, I remember, the day I came back to Rome. They’d had three days of torrential rain and then the gods unleashed a blistering sun that lifted a haze off the mud and set the flies dancing in their millions.

It would have been easier if we’d been able to move a bit faster, but every man and his mule was on the road, making the most of the weather to bring the smallest bit of mouldy corn and mildewed leather into Rome while there was a profit to be had.

The emperor Vitellius had sixty thousand mouths to feed in a city already starved by last year’s abysmal harvest, and anyone who could cut his crops ahead of his neighbour was likely to see his wheat worth its own weight in gold; at least, that was what we thought.

Rome needed wool, too, so I was a carter’s assistant, driving a team of four oxen yoked to a frame with wheels tall as two men, and slung between them a cart that carried forty bales of wool.

What did I look like? Well, not a tribune of the Guard, that’s for sure. It had been four months by then since Otho died; that is, since he took his own knife and killed himself so that other men might not have to die in his stead. There never was a man like Otho and I grieve for his loss with every waking day.

Me? Yes… I was perhaps a little taller than the average carter’s assistant, a little broader in the shoulder. All right, a lot broader. I wasn’t going to let my battle fitness go just because I wasn’t training every day in the Guard; there are ways to stay fit that don’t involve wearing lead weights and running up the hills of Rome.

I was dressed like a carter, that’s what counted: a fifth-hand woollen tunic, good strong boots, a hat with a broad brim — and a beard.

The Guard is ever clean-shaven; that beard was my best disguise. My belt was a good one, too: a hand’s breadth of ox-hide that would have cost a fortune in leather-starved Rome where the sacrifices were flayed and their hides sent straight to the tanners and from there straight to the legions.

In any war, the makings of armour become as scarce as food, and this war had grumbled on for over a year now; everything was in short supply. So if nobody looked too closely at the face behind the beard of the carter’s assistant, it was because they envied the breadth of my belt, or were already trying to estimate the worth of the eighty bundles of unwashed fleece in the cart behind, or had been knocked back by the stink of raw lanolin that had the flies dancing in ecstasy for a full three yards all around us.

The carter didn’t know who I was, of course. He didn’t want to find out. We parted as we had joined, with a hand-shake and a nod, not long after the cart had passed through the gate that lies north of Augustus’ tomb.

So that was me, Quintus Aurelius Trabo, formerly a tribune of the Praetorian Guard, now an outlaw with a price on my head, coming home.

So much had changed since I had left, and so little. It was spring when I marched out of the city in the van of Otho’s legions, barely two months after Galba’s assassination.

I’ve searched my conscience over my part in that and I’m not ashamed. It was bloody and vicious and brutal, but even now, I wouldn’t undo any of it. The old man was a martinet, a throwback to the old days of the Republic, a disaster in the making.

Otho, on the other hand, knew how to think, and when to act. He was young, not yet quite forty, and had the resilience, courage and foresight that Rome needed then and, if you’ll take my opinion, she still needs now. He was generous with his money and intelligent about how it was spent. He had honour and battle sense and the ability to talk up or down to the idiots in the senate when they needed it.

When he died, my world died with him, and I’ll admit now that I thought hard about joining him in his honourable oblivion. I might have done it, too, but he had given me a letter to deliver and told me not to return to Rome too soon, to allow some time for things to settle. I knew what he was about, but I promised him I’d do whatever he asked and keeping that promise was one of the two things that brought me back.

The other was just as important. You’ll have heard the rumour that I took an oath over his still-warm body to avenge him? It’s true. That was the reason I carried a knife in the top of each boot and enough gold in the back of my belt to fund a small army, which was exactly what I planned to do.

It was early evening by the time we reached Rome. We’d set off at dawn, but the road had been so bloody slow we’d lost the best part of a day travelling less than ten miles. The first thing I saw when we were through the gates was the way the low sun glanced off the slow summer waters of the Tiber, lighting up the city. A weaker man, or one with less business ahead of him, would have wept at that.

I left the carter more or less at the place where the fire started five years ago. Then, it was all old wood and straw; it’s not at all surprising that it went up in flames. Now, the streets are wide apart and there are water butts at every junction, and gongs to call the Watch if anyone sees so much as a spark.

I wandered round, getting my bearings, and struck off towards the Quirinal, and the Guard barracks that sits at the back of the hill. It had been my home for ten years and I wanted to be near it, even if I couldn’t go in. Plus I had Otho’s blessed letter to deliver. I’d promised that I would do everything I could not to endanger the recipient, so I planned to reconnoitre on the first day, to see if the address was being watched. Daft as it seems now, I hadn’t thought other people would be doing the same.

I listened as I walked; the talk of the streets is always interesting. They were still talking about the lead lottery, of course, or the death lottery as it was becoming known, but there were those, even amongst the merchants, who were still harking back to the fact that the emperor had made Guards of men who were not born and bred in Rome, as if this somehow diminished their own worth — the carters, the drovers, the merchants — as citizens of a great city.

This is old news now, and people are used to it, but back in the summer men were still reeling over the thought that it was possible for the legions to name an emperor outside the city and then give him his prize. That had never been done before, see, and the opinion of the gutter was that it wasn’t a clever thing to have done then. Not any of it.

Everyone hushed up when the Guard came, and fuck me but there were a lot of them — far more than there had been in Nero’s day. They were patrolling in their eights, one after another after another, looking uncomfortable, out of place in a city that wasn’t their home, amongst people who fell silent whenever they walked past.

But they passed by, that’s the point. They were hunting Trabo, tribune of the Guard, and none of them cast a second glance at a bearded carter. I grinned at them like a fool and they stared right through me and walked on. I know how slaves feel, now. There’s a power to that invisibility if you can harness it.

To be safe, I pulled my hat down so the brim shaded my face and struck off through the evening crowds. In summer, the streets fill up at this time; the day’s trading is largely done and the vendors are winding up their awnings and taking their stock into the back rooms to lock it away for the night.

For me, the big difference was that this evening was the first time I’d been in Rome when nobody knew who I was. The crush wasn’t nearly at its height, but even so I was having to push my way through a solid wall of flesh when for the past ten years crowds had just… parted.

I had to remember not to shove the bastards aside in the emperor’s name. I was talking to myself in my head: ‘Stoop, round your shoulders, smile, back away, don’t push, don’t push. Don’t hit him, either. You can’t afford to start a fight.’ It was frustrating, I can tell you. I’m not slippery like Pantera, I’m not naturally given to double-dealing and lies, but I found that if I treated it like a game, it was bearable.

At a certain point, with the sun low on my right, I finally turned up the first shallow slopes of the Quirinal hill.

The stench of dung and rotting vegetables, of old fish and dead dogs, lessened a little as I went up, or I told myself it did, and if it was mostly a lie, I was glad of it.

The taverns here were cleaner, their inmates increasingly more freedmen than slaves, more officers than men. In all senses, the crowds were more colourful, and more than a little drunk. I turned right into a narrow side road lined on either side by neat houses in white limed brick.

Small, self-contained, with few rooms and fewer slaves, these were the widows’ houses, paid for by a gift of Augustus that no emperor had dared revoke. Summer flowers bloomed in tended troughs outside swept doorways. There was no great wealth displayed, but there was a delight in order that made my heart sing.

Each door was marked with a sign that identified the legion or emblem of a departed husband. Eighth along on the left a pair of oak leaves was engraved above the lintel: that was the sign I had been given. There were no Guards outside, none obviously watching. I walked on past to the western end of the street and the Inn of the Crossed Spears.

It’d always been a favourite of the Praetorian Guard and clearly still was. It was heaving with men in uniform and men who had only just shed their uniforms. And tonight, of all nights, the management had hired a troupe of acrobats, which meant, in turn, that all the charlatans of the street had slunk out of their hiding places and come to make the most of off-duty men with ready money.

There was an astrologer, one of the many who hadn’t fled the city yet. Not far off was a salt-haired, owlish little dream-teller, and beyond him an ice-blonde Nordic woman who dealt in philtres and curses, ready to etch the name of a rival on a slab of lead to be thrown into an open grave that ill fortune might follow the one named, just as ill fortune followed those named in the lead lottery two days before in the Capitoline temple.

What I discovered in this inn, listening to the men talking, was that a dozen of those named in the lottery had already died, men who had been less careful when they returned to Rome, who’d probably been there for months and thought themselves safe.

Each name branded itself on my liver, each death was like wood hurled on to the fire that burned in my heart, sending it roaring until my blood fizzed in my ears and my head rang. I made myself breathe slowly, look around, smile, join the jokes.

I passed the dream-teller and threw a coin, laughing, and then, in a flush of pretend goodwill, bought a drink for myself and three junior officers of the Guard who stood in a cluster nearby. They were strangers to Rome, these men; they didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them, but I knew their like and how to play them with the right mix of deference and reverence, and the offer of wine; I was them once, or their like.

The risk seemed to work, for the officers clapped me on the shoulder and bought me a drink in return, and I had that giddy feeling of unnatural luck, as if the gods had cloaked me in more than simply four months’ growth of beard and a worn leather hat. I accepted the beaker of raw wine that was pressed on me, though I spilled more than I drank, and I used the centurions as a shield while I kept my eye on the oak-leaf door halfway along the widows’ street; I could just see it from where I stood without straining.

Presently the centurions went on their way. I was heading back to buy another drink when a hand caught my wrist.

‘Do you dream of oak leaves, carter?’

It was the dream-teller. Small, dry, with a face like old driftwood crusted with salt-white hair, the man was impossible to age. I shook his hand off my arm and would have struck him, but I remembered who I was: a drunken carter.

‘I dream of wine,’ I said, thickly, ‘and then women.’

‘Do you so?’ Sharp eyes stitched across my face, pinning the lie. ‘When you are ready to dream of oak leaves, come and find Scopius and he’ll tell you the fortune they bring.’

I was a carter; my only need for fortune was in good sales. Tugging on my hat, I forced a grin.

‘I’ll be gone before that, old man, while you’ll be lucky if you’re still alive. All soothsayers are to be out of the city by the first of October, or they’ll sew you in a sack with a snake and a dog and throw you in the Tiber.’

‘They won’t sack me.’ Scopius had the gaze of an owl, if an owl had eyes the colour of a dusk sky. ‘I’m a dream-teller, not an astrologer. I know nothing about the stars, only about the dreams that grow beneath them. Come back when you’re ready, carter.’

It was the edge he put on that last word that destroyed my evening. If he knew, who else?

Alert now, with an itch between my shoulder blades, I turned away and pretended a fascination with the acrobats.

In the short time I had been distracted, they’d stretched a tightrope across the street from one wall to the other, and now they were dancing along it, leaping up on to each other’s shoulders, building a six-man pyramid with the lower three all balanced on the rope.

I thought at least the small one on top and definitely the blonde one in the middle row were girls. Looking more closely, I became sure of it; their tunics were short about the thigh to let them move freely, and belted tight. Their breasts were not full, but they were there, pliable, and firm and lovely.

The top girl, a dark-haired androgyne, leapt high into a neat-tucked somersault and I don’t think I was the only man suddenly to think of bedding her. It was five months since I last had a woman and here was one, near naked, athletic as you like, almost within reach. I thought of the gold in my belt, and what it might buy me. There were houses in Rome, one on the side of the Capitoline in particular, that I had heard of, where you had to show your fortune even to get into it, but once in… there was nothing you couldn’t do, if you were prepared to pay for it.

I had to think of the war and Otho’s death to drag my mind away from that and from the acrobat girls. I got myself another drink and sat down at the entrance to the courtyard to watch the door with the oak leaves carved above the lintel.

It was a lifetime’s instinct, I think, that told me I was not the only one interested in it.