The Sword and the Throne

by Henry Venmore-Rowland

  ‘Is there a problem, Totavalas?’ I asked, loudly for all to hear.

  ‘It’s Julius Agricola and his wife, Consul. They say they’ve been invited.’

  ‘I don’t remember sending them an invitation,’ I said. This was true enough. I had allowed word to get round that all senators and their wives were invited, but had not sent out any actual invitations.

  ‘Come on, Caecina, if this is another of your pranks it’s not funny.’ Agricola’s face turned redder and redder at the embarrassment. The music stopped. A small crowd had gathered, in the house and in the street, everyone listening in fascination to the exchange.

  ‘Only my friends are permitted to call me Caecina. Our friendship ended when you betrayed me for Otho, a man who murdered his way to the throne.’

  ‘Will the consul not be gracious and forgive his friend?’ Domitia asked.

  ‘If my son isn’t good enough for your daughter, then the pair of you aren’t good enough for me. And as for my “friend”,’ I turned to look him in the eyes, ‘once your term as praetor is over, I don’t want to see you in Rome again. Now go.’

  Agricola took his wife by the hand and led her away, accompanied by frantic murmuring among the guests, and even laughter from some of the sycophants. Salonina appeared at my side, taking me by the hand.

  ‘What kind of man would put someone like Otho over his childhood friend?’ she said scornfully.

  I said nothing, because I knew the answer. Agricola served Otho because he was a Caesar, and for him that took precedence over any friendship, even one as long as ours. I didn’t like it, but at least I could understand it. Perhaps one day I might forgive him…

  * * *

  It was less than a month since we had won Vitellius his throne at Bedriacum, but the empire’s administration is a slow and lumbering machine. Imperial freedmen and clerks still push pieces of paper from one room to the next. If the people of a town in Syria wish to dedicate their temple to the new emperor, such a magnanimous gesture deserves an immediate and grateful response from the imperial bureaucracy. Instead, the request may take months of consultation, discussion and ratification and if an official stamp of approval arrives in Syria a year later, the clerks pat themselves on the back for their thorough and efficient service. Many of the imperial freedmen had been in Rome long before Vitellius, Otho or even Galba had become emperor. Most of them started their careers under the young Nero, while some had seen service under Caligula and Claudius. It was little wonder that the bureaucratic machine creaked so slowly.

  The morning after the party my lictors cleared a path through the crowd outside my door. Clients, would-be clients, beggars, petitioners, all of them clamoured for my attention. The vicious axe-heads, the sturdy rods, the dagger at my waist, they all warned the throng of people not to come too close: impeding a consul carries an automatic sentence of death. I had Totavalas grab a handful of petitions before my little convoy marched down the hill to my new workplace. Not the Senate house, but the Golden Palace where Vitellius had made himself at home. The colossus of Nero smiled beatifically down at us, his arm outstretched in a pose of imperious salutation. The Hibernian was awestruck by his surroundings. So had all Rome been when Nero had begun his building spree in the wake of the Great Fire not five years before. The Golden Palace was a hedonist’s heaven, a complex of beautiful gardens, a massive bathhouse, dozens of bedrooms for Nero’s guests, each assigned a pretty slave girl, or boy for that matter.

  But Vitellius was a family man. Galeria had borne him a son and a daughter, and the pleasures that Vitellius sought were more gastronomic than carnal. There was talk of expanding the kitchens and doubling the palace’s complement of cooks. Already the finest culinary minds from across the empire were flocking to Rome, offering their services. However, it was the west wing of the palace that was calling to me.

  Valens had already found himself an office. I caught a glimpse of him hard at work through the open door; no surprise there. He had always been a material man, and it was the countless opportunities for skimming money from the treasury that appealed to him more than the flummery of the Senate. At the other end of the corridor was another office. My office. And in the anteroom was a desk.

  ‘My desk?’ Totavalas asked.

  ‘Your desk.’

  Totavalas took his seat behind the desk. He looked down at the stylus and wax tablets, waiting to be used. ‘A man could get used to this!’

  ‘Don’t get too used to it, this is just your imperial office.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’

  ‘Your job here won’t be too difficult. In the palace I want you to be my fixer, making sure the other freedmen are doing their jobs efficiently, and making the two of us a nice profit in the meantime.’

  ‘Grand. And outside the palace?’

  ‘Take a look in the top drawer,’ I said, anticipating his reaction. The Hibernian’s expression turned from puzzled to amazed when he discovered the hefty pouch. There was a metallic clunk as he dropped it on to the desk.

  ‘Call it a signing-on bonus,’ I said. ‘Now look in the next drawer.’

  Out came another bag of gold. ‘Don’t tell me, this one’s a loyalty bonus!’

  ‘Not exactly. I want you to set up a ring of spies and informers in the city. Knowledge is power, and never more so than in Rome. If there’s a spice shipment that’s ripe for some extra taxing, I want to know about it. If a senator is plotting something, you must be the first to hear about it. Most importantly, I want to know what Valens is up to before he knows himself.’

  ‘Understood, Consul.’

  ‘And you don’t have to call me consul when we’re alone. Call me Severus, you’ve earned that right.’

  Totavalas smiled. ‘Understood, Severus.’

  There was a knock at the door. A small, furtive-looking man appeared.

  ‘My apologies for disturbing you, Consul, but the man you sent for has arrived.’

  ‘Thank you, Demetrios. Totavalas, meet your new secretary.’

  ‘Secretary?’ Totavalas looked worried. ‘I can’t afford a secretary yet.’

  ‘Don’t fret, man. Vitellius is paying. Is everything ready?’ I asked the little Greek.

  ‘Yes, Consul. I have two guards on standby, they’ll be outside when you need them, and one of the palace cooks has just fired up his oven.’

  ‘Good man. We’ll probably need a slave with a mop too.’

  ‘Very good, Consul.’

  ‘Right, bring him in.’

  The Greek left to carry out my instructions. Totavalas looked at me quizzically. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘A little unfinished business from Hispania,’ I said. ‘Have you had your breakfast yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  ‘Then we may need two mops.’ I heard footsteps along the corridor. ‘I’ll wait for him in my office. Send the man through, then have the guards come in when I call them.’

  I left the anteroom, closing the door behind me. My office was much larger, with a fine balcony that looked out westwards over the forum. Leaning on the rails and looking upwards I could see the temple to Jupiter, Best and Greatest, looming over us all at the top of the Capitoline Hill. I prayed silently to the god, lord and master of the heavens, hoping that he would understand and forgive what I was about to do. My anger at Quintus’s death had not passed with time, it had merely bubbled and boiled beneath the surface. I wanted revenge on someone, somehow, and there was a promise I had made a long time ago to the man who gave Galba the tools to strip me of my hard-earned rewards.

  Behind me the door opened, and the man shuffled in.

  ‘Consul?’ he said questioningly. I didn’t move, letting him see nothing more than my back.

  ‘Your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Melander, sir.’

  ‘Do you know why you’re here, Melander?’

  ‘I have a letter here, from the emperor himself,’ the clerk said proudly. ‘He even used mud from the battlefield he was so
keen to write to me. But I can’t think why he wrote to me of all people.’

  ‘This is a new age for Rome. We want the best and the brightest to govern the empire. It came to my attention that you are one of the finest clerks in your province. Am I right?’

  ‘So some have said, Consul,’ Melander said bashfully.

  ‘But talent is all very well. There is one quality I prize above all others. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘No, Consul, but I hope I have it.’

  I smiled at the irony. I had been rehearsing this moment in my mind ever since the death of my friend; all those long days as we marched to Rome, the entire empire waiting for me, my prize. Still the clerk suspected nothing.

  ‘Loyalty,’ I said, then turned to confront the greasy Hispanian. His olive skin paled, a look of horror settling on his face as he recognized me. For a moment he stood there dumbstruck. Then he saw my hand reach down towards my dagger. That got him moving. He was out through the door in a flash. There was a scream and the sound of two bodies smacking together.

  The guards brought the clerk back into the room, wicked smiles on their faces, men chosen for their strength and lack of scruples. Totavalas watched from the doorway. I advanced on the clerk.

  ‘You sold me out the moment you knew I wasn’t coming back to Hispania, didn’t you? I didn’t see a single denarius of the money you stole for me. You’ve probably tucked it away safe somewhere, bought yourself a nice new villa I’ll bet. I was Galba’s blue-eyed boy until you betrayed me.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ the man pleaded, ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t think—’

  ‘You’re damn right you didn’t think. You didn’t think about the promise I made.’ I lifted the dagger, pointed it first at his face then slowly lowered it towards his crotch. The wretched man wriggled and squirmed, but the guards had him in a vice-like grip.

  ‘Tell these men here what I promised to do to you if you betrayed me.’

  He was crying now, too petrified even to speak.

  ‘I’m going to slice off your balls,’ I said. ‘That’s the first thing I’ll do. Then you’re going to eat them. I’ve even had one of the emperor’s cooks lined up to roast them for you. What a lucky man you are. Most of Rome would give an arm and a leg to have something prepared by an imperial chef. Hold him still, lads.’

  A rummage under his toga and vicious sawing action brought the little buggers free. A high-pitched scream pierced the air; a small patch of blood began to stain the man’s toga, while more dripped steadily on to the floor.

  ‘And for the final course,’ I reminded him, staring the traitor in the face, ‘a sharp stake served Parthian style, rammed so far up your arse you’ll feel it tickling your throat.’ The man was wailing and writhing, his severed balls lying in the palm of my hand.

  ‘Have these delivered to the kitchens, and take this filth to his private dining room. Then finish the job.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ a guard answered, taking the warm handful from me and dropping them into a pouch. Totavalas stepped quickly aside to let the men and their flailing captive past. He looked at the pool of blood on the flagstones, then up at me.

  ‘Was that really necessary?’ he asked.

  I looked him squarely in the eyes. ‘A promise is a promise.’

  XX

  Totavalas spent the next few days in the city itself rather than in the Golden Palace. Not, I hasten to add, because he had a weak stomach, but because he was busy making useful contacts in the lower reaches of the city. As a freedman, and a barbarian freedman at that, he could go places where I couldn’t: dark alleyways and dirty buildings on the Aventine, the hill that loomed over the city docks and the place where the rougher elements of the plebs lived, or at least did their business.

  I’d like to say those were happy days for me. Looking back on it, you’d think I didn’t have any reasons to complain. I was the first consul in my family for three generations, married to a beautiful wife, blessed with a son, lived in one of the grandest palaces in Rome and at the beginning of a glittering career. Salonina had even floated the idea of proposing little Aulus as a match for Vitellius’s daughter. It certainly wasn’t a bad idea.

  But Salonina, she was part of the trouble. Or to be fair to her memory, I wrongly thought she was part of the trouble. Valens was himself looking for a wife, and there were any number of ambitious women in Rome who would sacrifice a cheerful, doting husband to ally themselves with one of the emperor’s trusted lieutenants. But in the meantime, my wife was the first lady in Rome, after Vitellius’s wife Galeria of course. But Galeria didn’t have the flair for entertaining that Salonina did. The trouble was I felt that she was married more to her social circle than she was to me. On the occasions that I could drag myself away from the Golden Palace or the Senate house there was always some soirée, poetry reading or dinner going on at home. Then I would have to play the dutiful husband. And when we were rid of our last guests, Salonina was in no condition to fulfil her wifely duties. There were still another six weeks of pregnancy to go. It was women’s politics, I understand that now. What I mistook for social climbing was actually Salonina fighting my corner but in her own way, charming and flattering the great and the good in ways that I could not. My only consolation was that in another month or so my turn to lead the business of the Senate would end and Valens would have the tedious duty. Then the pair of us would journey to my estate in Vicetia and await the birth of the child, together.

  Not that Salonina ever sensed my unhappiness. She was spending all her time with the matriarchs of Rome. It was only when I was enjoying a rare moment with Aulus that it struck me how alone I really was. We were in the courtyard, playing with wooden swords that had the centre hollowed out and filled with lead to strengthen the arms and wrists.

  ‘Do you miss Britannia, Father?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked, breathing hard. My shoulder was on the mend and I was finally free of the sling, and the arm had grown weak through lack of use.

  ‘You don’t talk much about the time you spent in Gaul, and you don’t seem all that happy here.’

  ‘Britannia’s a cold, wretched, dismal island on the edge of the world. Rome has culture, civilization.’

  ‘Or do you mean it has more theatres and bathhouses?’

  ‘True enough. The Britons stink like animals. But if they will let their livestock sleep in the hut…’

  ‘But what about your legion, Father? Did you like it there?’

  ‘Like it? It’s the only decent life for a Roman. A hard day’s march, a good scrap with the tribes in the north,’ I said, more to remind myself than to tell Aulus.

  ‘Will I fight barbarians too?’ The boy slashed about with his sword at imaginary enemies.

  ‘I hope so, one day. Not for another ten years though; I wouldn’t want you going north as young as eighteen. Let’s sit down a minute, eh? My arm’s not ready to take on a little lion like you quite yet.’

  A slave brought us some water and we drank it eagerly. Aulus still had more questions.

  ‘And will I join your legion?’

  ‘The Twentieth? I don’t see why not. They sent a detachment to reinforce the emperor when we left the Rhine. They should be approaching the Po by now. It’ll be good to see some friendly faces again.’

  ‘I’d like to make some friends,’ Aulus said wistfully.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ I said. ‘When I was growing up, nobody wanted to know my family. An old name with no money counts for very little in Rome these days. I had Julius Agricola though. And Domitia, she had the two of us eating out of the palm of her hand!’

  ‘I’m not going to marry Julia now, am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Their daughter? No, not now. Her father and I had an argument, you see.’

  ‘I’d still like to meet her though. I don’t have any friends in Rome; Mother hardly lets me out of the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aulus. She’s been busy making new friends.’

  ‘They’re your f
riends too,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘No they’re not,’ I scoffed. ‘A bunch of self-important, prattling gossips discussing the latest Parthian silks and the cost of a good house slave? Give me a bunch of legionaries any day. Their manners may not be the best, but you don’t need manners in the tavern, or on the battlefield.’

  ‘Who are your friends then, Father?’

  I paused to think. Valens was no friend, nor was Vitellius, not really. ‘Totavalas,’ I said.

  ‘That’s one,’ Aulus said.

  I concentrated hard. The Agricola family no longer counted. Quintus, the friend I did not deserve, lay in a shallow grave at Bedriacum. ‘Publilius, definitely. And Cerberus and Pansa.’

  ‘Four.’

  Who else was there? Most of the friends I had made in Gaul were dead too, killed by Roman swords and spears. And it had been six, no seven years since my days in Britannia. The men I had known in my legion would be dwindling with every passing month, some lost to retirement, others to disease or a tribesman’s knife.

  ‘Can we finish our game later, Aulus? I’ve had a long day.’

  ‘Come on, Father, you haven’t even got to five yet!’

  ‘Later, Aulus!’ I barked. My son dropped his sword and fled. It was only then that I realized I had lifted my hand as if about to strike.

  There was a gentle cough. It was one of the slaves, asking if I could return to the palace. Apparently there was a batch of papers that I had forgotten to sign, and they had to be done today or some town somewhere wouldn’t be getting their tax rebate that year or some such trivia. It was late evening by the time I returned from the tavern where I occasionally took some of the underlings for a drink. It helped show them that I was a caring master, not a cold fish like Valens. Tired, hungry and swaying very gently, I was ready for a hearty supper and some time with my family. Only there was no supper, just a gaggle of stuffy, middle-aged women sitting like statues, listening to a Greek poet perform some banal ode.