The Emperor's Games

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

  * * *

  “The town patrol was putting out the fire when I got there, sir.” The guard pulled himself to attention before the emperor and fought off the desire to curl up and sleep on the floor. He had ridden to Moguntiacum and back at full gallop, commandeering a fresh horse from each fort on the road.

  “And his household staff?” Domitian’s voice was level, but his face was splotched with furious color. Julius Frontinus picked up his sheaf of plans and eyed the emperor warily.

  “There were four bodies in the mess, sir,” the guard said. “They were too far burned to say much more than that.”

  Domitian’s fist clenched. “He should have been better watched. I’ll decide later who’s to blame for that. Dismissed.”

  The guard departed in haste, and Domitian swung around to confront Frontinus. “I made a mistake with Vettius,” he said levelly. “I do not wish anyone else to be telling me that. I trust that’s clear.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Frontinus said. Domitian did not like his mistakes to be remarked upon, a natural enough preference for an emperor.

  “What do you think, Frontinus?” Domitian said suddenly. “Did Vettius have that fire set?”

  Frontinus paused. “I think he’s capable of it, sir, certainly,” he said cautiously. “And capable of having his staff’s throats slit to shut their mouths, too. Unless we catch the, uh, man who did it, I don’t expect it will be proven.”

  “The man who did it is fifty miles from Moguntiacum by now!” Domitian said.

  “Uh, yes. I rather think he is,” Julius Frontinus said. He thought about the men who would likely have been ruined by Marius Vettius’s secrets and decided to keep any further thoughts to himself.

  “I want that legion got into shape now,” Domitian said. “Marius Vettius is relieved of his command. See to that for me, will you?”

  Julius Frontinus saluted.

  “And make a list of his creditors,” Domitian went on. “He’s in over his head, and I want his estates sold to pay it. You may put my name at the top of the list.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll have your staff begin immediately. To what figure is he in debt to you?”

  “I will have to check the accounts,” Domitian said. “You may leave that unspecified for the moment.”

  Frontinus’s mouth twitched. The emperor would see that the most influential of Vettius’s creditors were paid off, and then he’d claim the rest. He expected Vettius owed it to him at that. “Flavius Julianus is one, sir,” he ventured. “He bet on his brother in the race.”

  Domitian gave a sudden sharp bark of laughter. “Yes, see that he gets paid. That will be my penance for not listening to his advice. He can buy back his father-in-law’s land with it. Maybe the old fool will stay clear of shark waters in the future.”

  “Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?”

  “Yes. Tribune Petreius is also relieved of his rank. Boot him back to Rome.”

  “And Marius Vettius?”

  Domitian gave the chief of Engineers a wintry smile. “Vettius is also free to go. If he can get out fast enough.”

  * * *

  Marius Vettius watched Frontinus’s square form stalk away into the dusk. It had begun to rain, and he pulled the door closed with a shiver. The room was strewn with the wreckage of overturned trunks and broken furniture. He hadn’t bothered to set it to rights since the guards had pushed him in when they were through with it and posted one of their number outside the door. The woman Gwenhwyfar hadn’t seemed to care, either. She had tipped a couch back upright and curled herself on its split cushions to watch him pace. Now he slumped against the doorpost.

  “Where will you go?” Gwenhwyfar said.

  He knew, as clearly as he knew that he had lost and it was over, that Domitian would never let it rest that easily. “I wouldn’t get far.” Maybe not even as far as the Rhenus before the emperor’s messenger caught him.

  “I see.” Her voice was low, with an odd excitement in it. The wide blue eyes glittered, like polished stones. “What will you do?”

  He looked at her bleakly. “Take you with me, maybe.” He took a step toward her, and she got up and backed away. “Julius Frontinus was right. I should have kept you out of my bed. I might have seen this coming.”

  There was another knock at the door, and a guard came in without waiting for an answer. He gave Vettius a wax tablet and a thin thing wrapped in a cloth. “You have an hour,” he said, his face expressionless, and went out again. Vettius opened the door after him and looked out. The guard was standing beside it looking the other way. Vettius unwrapped the cloth and turned the dagger over in his hand. He looked at the woman again as she crouched behind the couch.

  “I don’t think you’re worth it,” he said. “Let some other man have you.” He gave a dull laugh. “My gift to Castra Mattiacorum. I wish I could think it would be Domitian.”

  She stood up and moved lazily to the couch again, knowing that he wouldn’t kill her now. “If I could have had the emperor, I would never have taken you.”

  “No.” He turned a chair upright and sat down in it, holding the knife.

  She ran her tongue over her lips and watched him intently. “What are you going to do?”

  “Die like a gentleman. It is preferable to having my head cut off.”

  “I will stay with you.”

  He looked into the blue eyes fixed hungrily on his. “No,” he said thickly. “Get out. Get out, or I’ll put the knife in you.”

  She went reluctantly and stood outside the door while the guard stared stiffly ahead under his helmet crest. After a minute or two she went back in. Marius Vettius was slumped forward in the chair with the knife between his hands, driven into the breast. The sleek, fair hair looked grayer than before in the dim light, and there was blood under the knife and at the corner of his mouth. She stood looking at him for a moment with an odd look, almost of satisfaction, on her face. Then she began to pick out her clothes and jewelry from the wreckage of the room.

  * * *

  “There will be a new legate as soon as may be,” Correus said. He stood, irritably tapping his vine staff against his left greave, before the assembled Fourteenth Legion Gemina. “It will not be too soon for me, but in the meantime, I am not willing to hand you over as you are.” He glared at them implacably. “You appall me. There will be an extra hour’s parade every morning until you can drill without putting a pilum into the man in front of you by mistake.” They stirred and muttered at that, and Correus hefted the vine staff and pointed it at them accusingly. “Before we march, this legion is going to be fit for it, if I have to put every man in it on report between now and then. And if it’s not – my recommendation to the emperor is going to be that he break this legion. I don’t think you will care for the freedom, if he does it.”

  The legionaries looked surly at that, but Correus was gratified to see that the cohort centurions and their juniors wore a uniform expression of earnestness. Yes, sir! The cohort commanders, paraded before him, snapped a salute. A soldier from a disbanded legion might get another posting, but he would never, not in all his life, get another promotion.

  Correus nodded grimly and spoke to the officers. “We understand each other. I am aware of where the fault lies, but you are the ones who will have to correct it. The world is most unfair.” He raised his voice again and addressed the legion as a whole. “You have two hours to make sacrifice for the shade of Marius Vettius. Then we are going to march until you look like a legion of the Eagles again. When you do, your Eagle will be given back to you.”

  He nodded to the standard-bearer beside him, and the standard-bearer lowered his staff until Correus could reach the gilded Eagle at the top. There was a gasp from officers as well as men as he reached out and unpinned the standard from its staff. “You aren’t worth an Eagle just now,” he said. He stalked off the parade ground, cradling the golden form and silvered wings in the crook of one arm, leaving the standard-bearer behind him, looking miserably out from und
er his lionskin hood, under an empty staff.

  It rained that afternoon, but Correus took them out anyway, first onto the parade ground and then out on the road that ran between Castra Mattiacorum and the Nicer Valley. When they had realized that each new complaint got them another mile on the march (and, of course, another mile back) they ceased to grumble and merely trudged along through the mud, footsore and eyes front. He turned them back finally and sent them to their dinner, too late to bathe and too tired to make trouble. The next morning they did it again, and by the end of the third day they had become nearly as attentive as proper soldiers should be and with a grudging admiration for the primus pilus who had made every single march with them.

  “You will kill yourself,” Ygerna said, rubbing the burning muscles of his calves while he lay stretched on a couch by the hearth.

  He grunted as a muscle tightened up and cramped. “It won’t work if I’m not with them. The Fourteenth has lost too many commanders. As it is, they’re beginning to come around. They want their Eagle back.” The Eagle was on a post in the Chapel of the Standards, but they were forbidden to touch it. “One of my men caught a man from the Claudia writing ‘Wingless Fourteenth’ on a tent flap with a piece of charcoal, and there was a row and a fight, and they’re both in the guardhouse.”

  “That is good?”

  “Absolutely. The other legions are going to make their lives a burden to them until they get their Eagle back. It’s improving their frame of mind no end.” He rolled over. “Thank you. I think I will be able to walk tomorrow. Did Julius get on the road this morning?”

  “Yes,” Ygerna said, amused. “Grumbling every step of the way, ponies, goat, and all. He wanted to stay.”

  “Those are expensive ponies. I can’t keep them on the frontier with a fight coming. I’m lucky I got them out of that race in one piece.”

  “Is there a fight coming? A real one, I mean. A battle?”

  “Oh, yes.” Correus looked gloomy. “We’ll tie up with Rufus, and I expect Ranvig will go to the Chatti. Then we’ll try to finish them off. That’s why I’m worried about that legion full of summer soldiers that Vettius created.”

  Ygerna’s small white face was serious. “Are we going to lose? If your legion doesn’t hold?”

  “No. I don’t think so. They’ll hold by the time I get through with them.” He yawned. The fire felt good. He could feel the cold beginning to creep out of his toes. “I hope,” he added. “Want you well back, though.” His eyes began to close.

  “Correus, you can’t sleep here.” Ygerna prodded him with one hand. He hadn’t slept for the whole of the night and day spent on that mad ride to burn down Vettius’s house in Moguntiacum, and not much since.

  “Mmm.” He turned his face into the crook of one arm. Ygerna prodded him again, but he didn’t move. She got his cloak and pulled its gold and scarlet folds up over him. At least he had taken his armor off.

  He woke midway through the night to find Ygerna wrapped in a cloak, poking at the fire. “That is what we have slaves for,” he said sleepily.

  “I wasn’t tired. And Eumenes is in worse shape than you are. I wanted to send him to the camp to have the surgeon see to that arm, but he wouldn’t.”

  “He can’t. It would draw too much notice. And it’s healing all right. I checked. Otherwise I would have sent him somewhere else to have it done. Typhon, I feel like I’ve been sleeping on bricks.”

  “I tried to make you move.”

  “Did you? I don’t even remember.”

  “You were dreaming again.”

  He remembered them: strange, mad, half-lucid conversations in which he argued unendingly over something he couldn’t remember now, with Flavius, with Ranvig, with Forst, with the surly, slovenly ranks of the Fourteenth Legion. Huddled in his cloak, he sat up and put his hands out to the fire. The room was icily cold and dark except for the saffron glow of the fire. It was a German house, and the villages east of the Rhenus had never adopted Roman principles of heating.

  “Was it bad?” Ygerna cocked her head to consider his face. Her black hair was unpinned for the night and hung in two long plaits over her shoulders. Her dark winged brows drew together as she looked at him. “You will make yourself sick, Correus. You are trying to put your hand on things that are not your business.”

  He smiled. “Did you make a magic in the fire to see that? Or was I talking in my sleep?”

  “I do not need a magic to see when you are bone tired. Or when you have been tearing yourself apart because you can’t make other men see things your way. Your brother, Flavius, for instance. Or the chieftain of the Semnones. Or that fool Forst, who is still here on the frontier trying to decide if he is a German or not. You get angry when their good sense is not as good as yours, and then you have dreams. You cannot save the world, Correus. You are not the great god Jupiter.”

  He smiled at that, ruefully. “My delusions do not run that high.”

  “No? Then why do you fight with Ranvig in your sleep? A man must know what he can change and what is in the gods’ hands or in another man’s Fate. That is what the Druids say.”

  “Don’t quote the Druids to me, Ygerna. That is what the Druids say when they don’t want their own concerns meddled with.”

  “All the same, they are right about that. You are going against What-Will-Be, and that never works. Lucius, yes. And your legion, yes.” Ygerna looked at him solemnly. “But Flavius will get burned by this woman if he chooses. He doesn’t want you to stop him. Forst will have to find out for himself where his road goes. And you can’t change Ranvig from what he is, any more than you could have changed Nyall Sigmundson.”

  “Nyall was different. I see no god’s hand on Ranvig.”

  “Even so, you won’t change Ranvig. Content yourself with being a fear to your soldiers. I watched them march. They looked like a centipede that is fighting with itself.”

  He banked the fire and made sure that the stone hearth around it was free of kindling in case it spat. “This is a useless conversation. Come to bed.”

  She got up and followed him. Too much conscience, she thought. More than she had, or his brother, Flavius, or Lucius Paulinus. Enough to be a burden.

  * * *

  He was up before light in the morning and waited for his legion on the drill field in case they should think that their commander grew tired of the pace he had set. It was clear that morning, but it had rained all through the night, and the roads were sloppy with it. There was already traffic in the vicus streets. Somehow everyone knew without being told that there would be fighting soon. Velius Rufus’s army was camped on the other side of the bridge, with the lands that had once been Marbod of the Chatti’s behind them, dark with blood and burned steadings; and with Marbod caught between Rufus and Domitian. The hangers-on would leave now, the nervous among them, lest the blood should come closer. A carriage splashed by, the mules’ hooves and the iron-rimmed wheels spraying muddy water. The sun was out for the first time in days, and the curtains were only half-drawn. Correus could see Vettius’s woman leaning out, her body curled like a cat on the cushions and her wide blue eyes watching the wet timber buildings of the vicus as they passed. A fat man with dark curling hair rested one pudgy hand on her shoulder as if in possession. Correus remembered where he had seen him before: with Marius Vettius after the race, making claim on a debt that Vettius hadn’t been able to pay. Maybe he was going to Rome, to be there when Vettius’s land was sold.

  * * *

  Roscius Celsus stood on the edge of the crowd and squinted his eyes, trying to see the men gathered around the emperor’s procurator as he called the next lot. His agent had instructions to bid on one of the farms, but Celsus was staying prudently out of the procurator’s sight. He was a wealthy man and had no desire to drive up the price with his presence.

  “It is done,” a voice said at his elbow, and Celsus turned to find Faustus Sulla beside him. “Done, and the vultures have come for him.” Sulla nodded his head at Gentilius Pau
linus standing a little way off. Others of the men who had been part of the ill-fated plot were scattered through the crowd.

  “They have every right,” Celsus said mildly. “You are here yourself.”

  “And Domitian is still wearing the purple,” Sulla said blackly under his breath. “If it hadn’t been for Vettius, we might have done it! But to make a profit—”

  “At least Vettius is no longer with us, and he was one of our quarrels with the emperor,” Celsus said. “And the better price I get, the less profit the emperor will make.”

  “The docks are clear of Vettius’s thugs now, but nothing else has changed.” Sulla’s eyes were darkly angry. “The prisons are still full, and there are more informers than there are toads in the spring. Your friend Suffuscus died, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I know,” Celsus said. “This is a most unwise conversation.” Men around them were beginning to look their way. “There is nothing to be done now, not for a long time. You will have to swallow that, or you will make it worse.”

  Sulla bit back his retort and pushed his way through the white togas of the crowd. He was a born assassin, Celsus thought, a tyrant hater with too hot a head. Someone would kill Domitian eventually, but if Sulla showed signs of doing it now, they would have to do something about him. Celsus edged his way through the crowd toward Gentilius Paulinus, wondering if he would ever be entirely free again of this brush with murder.

  * * *

  The emperor Caesar Domitianus Augustus sat leaning on his elbows over the map spread out on the tabletop. All this summer’s forts were marked in brown ink, while the campaign of his father, Vespasian, was in black. The projected frontier was a wiggly line of cross-hatchings that followed a path from the Rhenus just above Bonna through Chatti lands and the Taunus Mountains to take in the territory of the Mattiaci (who were still afraid of Marbod and wavering between the Chatti and Rome). After that it crossed the Moenus at Castra Mattiacorum and drove south along the Nicer, then east to end at the current Danuvius frontier, west of Castra Regina. It had the practicality of being more easily defensible than the old lines and the satisfaction of completing a task left unconcluded by his father and ignored by his brother. When it was done, he would add “Germanicus” to his name, Domitian thought, pleased.