The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  Steinvar laughed. “I thought it was because the trade had stopped between across-the-Rhenus and your caravans.”

  “It was a good trade,” Decebalus said. “Later it will be better. Where is Ranvig?” He didn’t call the lord of the Semnones “the chieftain.” Decebalus was going to be a great king, and he saw no need.

  “Keeping the emperor of the Romans at bay,” Steinvar said. “I speak for him.”

  “That was not an insult,” Decebalus said. “I know you do. But if he can hold the Romans thus, why does he need me?”

  “Because large talk will not be holding them forever,” Steinvar said, serious now. “Not for us, and not for you.”

  Decebalus nodded and drank his beer. “Then we must give the Romans something more than talk, to worry them. Now tell me – what is this plan that Ranvig is so sure will work?”

  * * *

  It never ceased to catch him by surprise, Flavius thought, how deeply the woman had grown into his soul. Fiorgyn sat with her back half to him, combing her hair. Her gown was still down around her waist where he had left it, and he could see the tip of one breast, achingly familiar now, behind the curtain of her hair. She was sitting on a rock under the low overhang of a tree. Lopodunum wasn’t big enough to hold an inconspicuous inn, not for the emperor’s aide and a woman of the Semnones, and they had come of necessity to the final indignity and found a place in the woods for themselves. Flavius didn’t think he cared about his dignity anymore anyway, not with Fiorgyn.

  She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him. He came and knelt before her with his face against her breast. She sat still for a long time, just holding him to her, so still that a rabbit ran out from the undergrowth and sat up and watched them. She put the comb down and brushed her lips through his dark hair.

  “You’ve hardly spoken today. Is there something troubling you?”

  “Yes.” Flavius sounded tired, his voice on the edge of cracking.

  “Is it something you can tell to me?”

  “No.”

  She nodded. So many things they couldn’t tell each other. She couldn’t tell him that Ranvig had had a message from Steinvar yesterday. She had stormed at Ranvig and made him tell her what was in it when he hadn’t wanted to, and he had admitted, grudgingly, that she was not some Roman officer’s doxy who would run to him with everything she heard like so many of the women in Lopodunum. Almost, she wished she were.

  Flavius sighed, lifted his head, kissed her, and pinned her gown back on her shoulders. He couldn’t tell her that there was a plan in motion to kill the emperor. Never. Not even if they weren’t at war. And he had no illusions about the war. It was going on now, even if Ranvig and Fiorgyn weren’t fighting in it. Before and behind them, wherever the main army wasn’t, the attacks went on. Slowly the Agri Decumates was being strangled as Julius Frontinus’s net of forts and roads was laid down on it, but the Germans were a presence felt in cornered patrols and burned-out watchtowers. Lately they had taken to setting fields alight so that the Romans couldn’t forage and so the local folk would be left for the emperor to feed along with his soldiers. It was costing the Romans dear, but still it was only a matter of time until the Agri Decumates fell. And then Flavius would lose Fiorgyn. The realization left him tongue-tied and panicked today. That and the fact that unless they could stop it, the emperor would lose his life, and along with him, Lucius Paulinus and Julia and whatever other poor fools had got in the way. Together he and Correus had thought of a scheme that might curb Vettius. Correus had sent a letter to Rome for the help they needed, but it was chancy. Everything was chancy that summer, thin and insubstantial like a marsh light, dangerous as a knife in the dark.

  He put his hands in Fiorgyn’s hair before she could rebraid it, and kissed her one last time, burying his face against hers.

  * * *

  “Sir, they were out without their armor on. They’re lucky the Germans didn’t get them. I think three days’ punishment drill is entirely merited.” Correus stood at attention before his legate, feeling helpless and steadily more furious. The emperor was still at Lopodunum, but his army was in the field, sweating under Julius Frontinus, laying road northward from the Nicer River to the eastern end of the first great loop of the Moenus. And the legate of the Fourteenth Gemina was busy spoiling his troops, banking away their goodwill like the gold he was stockpiling, against the day he could make his bid for the purple. When Correus gave a punishment, Vettius countermanded it. The legion was a mess, and it would serve them right if the Germans ate them whole.

  Vettius gave him a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s hot work, Centurion, laying road. We must make some allowances, don’t you think?”

  “I think they won’t hold in the field, sir, when it comes to a fight, if they aren’t straightened up now.” Correus stood stiffly and tried to keep his temper out of his voice. “The legionary thinks only in here-and-now. They’re just happy to be let off punishment, but they’ll get used to it and not think what shedding their armor could cost them if the Germans show up. And if they lose their discipline there, it isn’t going to stick anyplace else. And neither will my orders, sir, if you countermand them.”

  Vettius gave him a wave of his hand. “Go on with your road, Centurion, and allow me to decide that. If you don’t give such ill-advised orders, I won’t find it necessary to reverse them.”

  Correus banged his fist into his breastplate in salute and stalked out. Vettius had been just charmed to have that order to countermand. It made Correus the villain, and Marius Vettius the friend of the common soldier, and Correus would still be around to blame things on if the legion disgraced itself. And it was going to if he couldn’t knock some sense into them when Vettius wasn’t looking.

  Correus stood irritably in the dirt road outside the principia tent and squinted northward. It would be another month maybe before they reached the Moenus, and there they would stop to build a bridge. If nothing happened before then, he might be able to solve Paulinus’s problem and his own – if his father got his message, if Julius got there in time, and if nobody killed Domitian in the meanwhile.

  The road moved on. The Roman army were the builders of the empire, and they carried pick and shovel as well as sword and shield. Where they had been, the road stretched out behind. Their marching camps became permanent outposts along the river valley, and signal towers sprang up between. They worked like mine slaves, and Julius Frontinus seemed to be everywhere among them, surveying, measuring, and watching his road grow. He was an engineer by nature, and almost as happy with a pick in his hand as an officer’s staff. Under Frontinus’s watchful eye even Marius Vettius found he had less time to relax; as long as the emperor was in Lopodunum, Frontinus was in command.

  There were no real battles fought for the valley, only a series of skirmishes, ambushes, and night raids – exhausting, bloody, maddening, but more a trouble than a danger to eventual conquest. They were a threat, Correus thought, a promise that wherever the Romans pushed, they would have to push through burned fields and dead bodies in the water, making their progress slow and wearisome. The men were growing quarrelsome from it, and Frontinus personally knocked some heads together, summoned Marius Vettius to his tent, and informed him that his legion was the worst of the lot.

  “Get out of that blond whore’s bed and out into a ditch with your legion, and they’ll come along some better,” he said briskly.

  “It is my privilege to have a woman with me,” Vettius said. “Don’t threaten me, Frontinus, or I’ll make your little command a burden to you.”

  Julius Frontinus looked irritated. He would have liked to have connected his sandal with the legate’s rear, but he expected his emperor wouldn’t like it. “No threat involved,” he said. “But they won’t go on loving you if they get cut up in a fight because you’ve been coddling them. Mull it over. You’re dismissed.”

  Vettius pressed his knuckles to his gilt-and-silver breastplate, even more elaborate than the one Frontinus w
ore, and strolled out, keeping the pleasant, slightly bored expression on his face with difficulty. He wondered if Julianus had been sniveling to the chief of Engineers behind his back. Probably not. Old Appius’s bastard didn’t have enough sense to get ahead by climbing over his commanders. And the Fourteenth Legion was getting out of hand. But their greed for the next promised bonus was growing daily. They would put him on the emperor’s throne, and then their next commander could straighten them out. Or disband them; Vettius didn’t much care.

  The woman was waiting for him in his tent when he got there, curled on the bed while one of the legate’s household slaves brushed her hair. Her name was Gwenhwyfar and she was Gaulish, or so she had told him. He thought she had probably had a lot of names. She hadn’t told him how she had come to be in a whorehouse in Moguntiacum, and he hadn’t asked. Likely she would have lied. She stood up now and stretched and wrapped her arms around him, paying no attention to the slave, and he saw again the hungry look that lay under the innocent face. It was what had attracted him to her in the first place – a woman with a hunger to match his own. He pushed the slave out of the tent.

  She twisted herself around him. “When we reach the Moenus, then there will be a house to live in, and I will have clothes to wear.”

  “You are not dressed in rags now.”

  “I am not dressed as a great man’s woman should be.” She put her mouth against his ear and smiled when she felt his fingers tighten on her. “When we reach the Moenus, I will need more clothes.”

  “There won’t be anything at the Moenus until we build it.”

  “Then you can build me a house.”

  “That will take money.”

  She tilted her head back and smiled at him, eyes heavy-lidded. “Then you will have to have more money. Won’t you?” He kissed her and felt her mouth open under his. When they had made love – an odd, consuming passion that made him feel it had been almost a contest to see who should master the other – she opened her eyes and smiled again, drowsily. “Your commander – the tall one who builds the roads – he has been watching me. Maybe I will go with him.”

  “He doesn’t like you,” Vettius said. “Don’t try it.” He grasped her wrist hard. “I won’t fight him for you, and he won’t give you anything.” But there was something in the languid eyes that made him a little cold in spite of himself. Almost more than money, she liked blood.

  * * *

  Ygerna sat down on the bed at the inn in Lopodunum and hastily pulled the seals off her letter. Berenice had written. Now if the older woman had only understood what it was that she was asking…

  My dear child,

  I am grateful for your letter. I am very lonely too these days, and court news passes me by, and I read your story with much interest. It had a very sad ending.

  It would be such a shame for that to happen. Very dangerous, too, of course, to stop it and then leave loose ends lying about. We have had a fire here, and the whole kitchen wing is gone. The slaves were going to put out the fire when it was only half-burned, but I told them to let it go right down to the ground. It is always better to start fresh, my dear, don’t you think, than to try to clean everything up when a mess is left. One always finds things that aren’t properly understood, and that makes trouble. A good fire is a cleansing, I always say.

  The rest was small talk and good wishes. Ygerna went back and read the beginning, her dark brows creased together. Then she saw it. Berenice couldn’t solve the problem. Correus’s scheme was going to have to do that, if it could. But Berenice had seen the danger in the aftermath. Ygerna folded the letter and pushed it down into the bottom of her sewing box.

  * * *

  Berenice, daughter of Herod Agrippa, once a queen, once an emperor’s mistress, sat placidly on a milestone by the road that ran past her country house and watched her kitchen burn. The big slave beside her gave her a puzzled look, but he knew better than to question his mistress when she wished to be uncommunicative. She had said to let it burn, so they were letting it burn. But she had set the fire herself, and he’d seen her do it.

  Berenice raised her mantle to her mouth and coughed as the smoke drifted in their direction. There was a half smile on her face under the mantle. Her cook had been asking for a new kitchen. Now he could have one. And no one who might read her letter in its journey north would wonder why she would lie about a kitchen fire. It was always as well to cover one’s tracks. She had lived in too many palaces not to have learned that. So many palaces, she thought, and all such a long time ago. What was it that kept her in Italy now that Titus was dead? Pride, maybe. If she went back to her brother Agrippa now, it would make another scandal, and they would look so foolish, at their age.

  But with Titus gone, and Ygerna gone, too, to be with her soldier husband in Germany, she was so lonely. Maybe it would be better to make her peace with the priests and be old in Palestine among her own kind. She could make her peace with God too, she thought. It was probably time for that.

  * * *

  Frontinus’s army reached the Moenus, with the road stretched out behind it, studded with eleven turf-and-timber forts, and another piece of the Agri Decumates was locked into the control of Rome. The Germans were still loose in it, in the pocket between the new boundary and the Rhenus, and the Chatti were across the Moenus, but it was safe enough along the road, so Correus sent for Ygerna. They would halt to raise a fortified bridge to join them with the army of Velius Rufus, which was driving its own road of forts southward from the Taunus Mountains and pushing the Chatti ahead of it. It was at that juncture, named Castra Mattiacorum for the hapless tribe of the Mattiaci in whose territory it lay, where Domitian planned to set up new headquarters. The innumerable folk who were making a living in the army’s wake began to pack their baggage again. The road that ran from Moguntiacum along the Moenus River to Castra Mattiacorum was jammed with carts and wagons.

  Julius, having traveled from Rome with two mud-spattered ponies hitched to the front of a wagon, and two more, biting each other, tied on behind, took a look at the conglomeration of army supply carts, baa’ing herds of sheep, and a troupe of traveling actors on muleback, and said a quick prayer to Poseidon Horse-Father. There was a goat in the back of the wagon, bleating conversationally to itself, and Julius shot it a look of hatred. He gritted his teeth and edged the ponies out onto the road. An old woman trundling a crate of chickens on a handcart pushed past them, and the ponies snorted and started trying to kick in the front of the wagon.

  Julius jumped off the seat onto the near pony’s back and grabbed an ear. “You’re a foul beast. Bide still. You can still be a pony-hide rug tonight.” He whispered his threats in loving tones, and the pony blew down its nose and stopped kicking. Julius looked over his shoulder at the other two. They were behaving no worse than usual. The goat was nibbling thoughtfully at Julius’s spare cloak, and one of the tethered ponies whickered softly and rubbed its nose against the goat’s curving horns. Julius sighed and kicked the lead pony. “All right, then, get moving, you bastard son of a milk cow.”

  It had been, as he told Correus when he finally nursed the ponies and cart into Castra Mattiacorum, a proper bitch of a trip, and the next time Correus wanted a team of chariot ponies dragged across the Alps, Correus could let him do it the right way, on lead lines, with a spare groom, or he could do it himself. With the goat.

  Correus grinned. Julius had filled out some and grown another half an inch, he thought. He was still thin, but he was tough and wiry, and his arms and shoulders were muscular. His character seemed to have undergone no change. “Where have you put them?”

  “They’re tethered up in the civilian quarter, like you said, with all the other riffraff.” The vicus, the civil settlement that grew outside an army post, had mushroomed almost overnight at Castra Mattiacorum. The fort was built just beyond the drab huts of an unprepossessing native settlement, and the vicus had swallowed the native village whole. Most of the village had been abandoned when the Romans came a
nyway, and now the entrepreneurs who had flocked from Moguntiacum had adapted it to their uses.

  “That’s fine,” Correus said. “Keep ’em there, and keep ’em looking like cart horses.”

  “Well, they don’t,” Julius said. “Not to anyone who knows a horse from his hind end. Not that any carter would have them,” he added glumly. “They kicked in the wagon twice. They wouldn’t pull it at all until Diulius thought of putting the goat in with ’em.” He sounded as if he wished Diulius hadn’t. “The goat’s the mascot. Diulius uses it to keep the race ponies happy when he ships ’em. Have you ever slept with a goat?”

  “No, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to go on doing it. We can’t leave them alone, and I don’t intend to sleep with them. Keep ’em out of sight as much as you can. Nobody’ll look close as long as they’re muddied up. The man we’re after doesn’t take his amusements in the vicus, anyway.”

  “What are you up to? I saw all the notices for a race. They were pinned up in Moguntiacum, and they’re all over the vicus.”

  “The ponies are a substitute entry,” Correus said, “but this isn’t going to work if anyone gets a look at them.”

  Julius gave him a baleful look. “When I entered a substitute horse, Forst said he’d beat me.” He sounded aggrieved.

  “You weren’t riding your own horse,” Correus pointed out. “And the stakes are a lot higher this time.”

  “All right,” Julius said grudgingly. He turned in the tent doorway. “They had better be. I wouldn’t sleep with a goat for the fun of it.”

  When Julius had gone, Correus set his helmet on his head, picked up his vine staff, and went to find Rhodope. The Mattiacorum vicus was a hodgepodge of dog kennels, stables, wine stalls, and temples to every god worshiped between the Tiber and the Nile. There were tents, native huts, and timber-built houses constructed of the leavings from the fort and the work that was progressing on the bridge a mile away. Correus had commandeered a reasonably serviceable native house on the outskirts for Ygerna and the children, and installed them in it with Eumenes for a watchdog. A few other officers’ wives had arrived, and those of the camp followers who hadn’t found other occupations could make a living either by building living quarters for officers’ families and Ranvig’s delegation, which had arrived in the emperor’s train, or by working on the bridge itself. There was a raw look to it, but Castra Mattiacorum was a town already.