Saviour of Rome [Gaius Valerius Verrens 7]

by Douglas Jackson

  He smiled at his sister. ‘I hoped you would.’

  Valerius felt Tabitha’s touch on his arm and Olivia faded back into the crowd. And then they were alone. The rituals complete. The sound of the guests quietly fading, but for the occasional cry of passion or protest. The servants silent. It seemed unnatural at first. They had spent so much time at the centre of a whirlpool of ceremonies and celebrations it was difficult to believe they were together at last.

  Tabitha looked slowly around the room, the walls lit by a dozen flickering oil lamps. They’d discussed the decoration together, but this was the first time Tabitha had seen the results. The painter had turned the wall plaster into a series of framed panoramas so it appeared the occupants were looking out from a window across open country. One of them showed a desert scene, so Tabitha would always have a connection to her homeland. Another, a mountain vista that reminded Valerius of a journey he’d once made with Serpentius through the high Alps. There were fields and forests and beaches so lifelike you wondered why the birds and animals didn’t move.

  She came to him and laid her head on his shoulder. When they were close it always amazed him how someone who could dominate a room with her beauty and the force of her personality could be so small and vulnerable. The warmth of her body seemed to seep into him and he allowed himself to relax for the first time since the ceremony.

  ‘Come,’ he said, leading her towards the bed in the centre of the room.

  She took her place on the coverlet and studied him with a look of enquiry that transformed into a smile of pure mischief. ‘Is this when I am supposed to struggle and squeal as if I am afraid of the terrible thing that is about to happen to me?’

  Valerius laughed. ‘Is that what Olivia told you?’

  ‘She said that is what a virtuous Roman maiden would do, even if she was not so virtuous.’

  ‘But you are not a Roman maiden.’

  ‘Or virtuous. So …’ she looked significantly at the Knot of Hercules at her waist.

  The silken loops seemed to fall away beneath his fingers. When it was undone he moved to join her on the bed, but she slipped over the edge and stood facing him with her head at the height of his chin. When she looked up, the reflection of the oil lamps in her eyes made them seem as if they were filled with fire.

  ‘An Emesan maiden would dance for you, and her dress would be made up of veils which she would remove one by one, revealing a little more of herself each time.’ Her voice was husky with passion and Valerius felt as if there was a stone in his throat. ‘But since I am a Roman wife I am at my husband’s command. Ask what you will of me.’

  Valerius felt a sudden wave of desire and he had to resist the urge to carry her back to the bed and … ‘Remove your stola.’

  She did as he ordered, but very slowly, her fingers plucking nervously at the cotton as she unwound it from her body.

  ‘Now your dress.’

  Tabitha unfastened the brooches at her shoulders and allowed the dress to fall away, her eyes never leaving his. Beneath she wore a translucent white shift that clung to her body and hinted at the tantalizing swellings and hollows beneath.

  ‘All.’ He almost choked on the word. ‘I want to see it all.’

  Her hands reached for the bottom of the shift.

  Everything they did and everything they felt was as new and fresh as the first time, but with an intensity neither had experienced before. A lifetime on earth is but an hour in Elysium. Valerius had no idea how long they spent there, only that when he woke it was daylight and the world seemed a brighter, better place and a new Gaius Valerius Verrens had taken his place in it. He had never felt so alive. It wouldn’t have surprised him to pull back the sheet and find he had a right hand.

  He smiled and lay back and a beautiful nymph’s face appeared above his. ‘You look very pleased with yourself?’

  ‘A certain lady gave me reason to believe I have every right.’

  She slipped on top of him, so he could feel the firmness of her breasts against his chest, and something interesting was happening lower down.

  ‘I wish it could be like this for ever.’

  He was about to say it could be, then he remembered the summons from the Emperor.

  ‘He will take you away from me,’ Tabitha sighed when he told her.

  ‘It could be anything. Perhaps he wants to give me a position at court?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed certain. ‘I saw it in Emesa and with Queen Berenice. To the Emperor a man like you is a weapon, one to be used sparingly and only in time of dire need, but a weapon all the same. Any new honour would come through Titus. If the Emperor has sent for you it is to send you into danger.’ She raised her head and kissed him full on the lips. ‘We must make use of what time we have.’

  Much later he heard a whisper.

  ‘Promise me one thing, Valerius.’

  ‘If it is in my power.’

  ‘Come back to me.’

  III

  Valerius felt dwarfed by the enormous marble-clad buildings that towered over him like cliffs as he climbed the gentle slope of the Victory Road on the north flank of the Palatine Hill. His mood was wary, but approaching the seat of the Empire’s most powerful man held no terrors for him. He’d first walked this path almost ten years before, at the Emperor Nero’s bidding, resigned to what seemed certain death. In the years since, he’d gained honourable scars and grey hairs in three wars, been duped, betrayed and dishonoured, lost friends and lovers, but finally, he hoped, found peace.

  He’d changed and so had his city.

  When he looked out over the Forum towards the Esquiline Hill, the sea of red-tiled roofs was pocked with gaping blackened holes, the ongoing legacy of the great fire of eight years earlier. The owners of the burned-out buildings were either dead or didn’t have the resources to rebuild their holdings. To his right lay the great Golden House villa complex Nero had built on the charred remains of an entire district, and the lake where he had staged grandiose naval engagements in which ship-borne gladiators fought to the death. To his left, the Capitoline and the reborn Temple of Jupiter, greatest and best, the vast structure at last close to completion after two years of work. Valerius had played his own, unwitting, part in the destruction of the temple and he had an irrational sense that its resurrection went hand in hand with his own recovery after the horrors of Jerusalem. The project had been the first act of Vespasian’s reign, funded by the fiscus judaicus, a tax on Jewish males across the Empire who were continuing to pay for the failed rebellion in their homeland.

  He announced himself to the black-clad gate guards. Once they’d satisfied themselves he was on the list of visitors, they passed him through into the gardens of what had originally been the palace of Tiberius. Here he was met by the Emperor’s secretary, Junius Mauricus, an ambitious young man who greeted him with the coolness of one who resented Valerius’s ease of access to his master. Valerius responded amiably enough. No point in making an enemy of an official whose freedman predecessor was now a member of the Senate. Mauricus led him along the familiar marble corridors with their alcoves filled with busts of Vespasian’s predecessors. Nero was there, and Claudius, alongside Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula, but Valerius noted that neither Galba nor Otho nor Vitellius had been given space. Their absence puzzled him, because Vespasian had never struck him as a vengeful or vindictive man. The Emperor had offered Vitellius his life if he laid down the purple, even though the former governor of Germania was as responsible as any man for the civil war that had come so close to bringing down the Empire. The memory of the corpulent emperor who had been his friend reminded Valerius of the probability that Vespasian had summoned him to be ordered on some clandestine mission that would take him into danger again.

  He knew he could refuse. Titus had hinted as much when they’d inspected the part-built villa north of Fidenae. ‘You deserve all this and more, Valerius, for the service you have done the Empire and my family, never forget that.’

  But without Ve
spasian’s support would the Senate have endorsed Valerius’s senior military tribune’s share of the vast spoils of Jerusalem where he had served Titus in an entirely unofficial capacity? Neither could Valerius forget it had been the Emperor who had reinstated his award of the Gold Crown of Valour, the honour bestowed by Nero. Valerius had always thought of the Corona Aurea as a gaudy bauble, but he’d been strangely moved when Domitian, Vespasian’s younger son, had ordered it taken from him. Domitian had been jealous of Valerius’s relationship with Domitia Longina Corbulo and falsely accused him of charges of treason that had left him facing a death sentence. Only Domitia’s intervention had saved his life, but that intervention had lost her to him for ever.

  Would it be Syria, Parthia or the Danuvius frontier, all areas where he had previously fought and survived? Germania was another festering sore, still volatile in the aftermath of the Batavian revolt that had seen two legions wiped out and another four humiliated. Sporadic outbursts of rebellion meant eight legions had to be stationed there that could have been of greater use elsewhere.

  ‘This way.’ Mauricus led him through double doors into the familiar receiving room, with its raised golden throne and the great marble statue of Laocoon and his sons. The last time Valerius had been in this room, the then Emperor Galba had ordered him on a mission to negotiate peace with Aulus Vitellius. Before he could set out, the Praetorian Guard had butchered Galba and it was in his successor Marcus Salvius Otho’s name that Valerius eventually rode north.

  Vespasian could have no illusions about how precarious his seat on that golden throne might be. Yes, he had the support of the eastern legions, and the army Vitellius had led from Germania had been vanquished, but he still had to win over the vast majority. The Emperor had appointed Titus prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and replaced its cohorts of legionaries from Germania loyal to Vitellius with his own men. Yet there were many in the Senate with long memories and fine bloodlines who resented the rise of a man they called the Muleteer: Vespasian having been forced to sell those animals in a period of financial distress.

  ‘Gaius Valerius Verrens, Caesar.’ Mauricus announced him in a strong voice that echoed from the bare walls.

  The throne was empty and it took a moment before Valerius realized the Emperor was standing over a table close to the balcony that overlooked the Forum. A wooden model of central Rome covered the table top. Valerius had seen it once before, when Nero had outlined his plan to build his great Golden House on the ashes of thousands of houses in the Third and Fourth districts. The normal, unadorned toga Vespasian wore and his lack of regalia told Valerius this was to be an informal audience.

  ‘Ah, Verrens. A welcome face in a day that has not been filled with them.’

  ‘Caesar,’ Valerius bowed. Vespasian would be in his sixty-third year; stout, balding and more careworn than Valerius remembered, but still outwardly unaffected by his lofty status. He could be hard on those he considered fools, but he had been the same as a general. He could also be generous and forgiving to those he liked.

  ‘Come,’ the older man smiled. ‘We do not stand on ceremony among friends. Mauricus? Send for my son.’ The blue eyes twinkled. ‘My elder son.’ Vespasian was perfectly aware of the enmity between Valerius and his son Domitian. ‘While we are waiting perhaps you would like to see this.’ He beckoned Valerius over to the table. ‘You recognize it?’

  ‘Of course, Caesar.’

  ‘Cities develop.’ The Emperor nodded absently. ‘Sometimes naturally, sometimes steered by the hand of man. My predecessor Nero, for instance, before the great fire, gave orders for any street requiring rebuilding to be created around an open square to combat just such a cataclysm. In that respect, at least, he left Rome the better for his reign. The Domus Aurea, however,’ he picked up a substantial building in the centre of the model, ‘I view differently. Some would say the scale matches its creator’s vanity. It is not in my nature to criticize my predecessors. I will only say that, from an architectural point of view I find it out of proportion with its neighbours and I have plans for it, but first …’ He replaced the building and picked up a sunken oblong that represented Nero’s lake. He looked around with a puzzled frown. ‘Now, what did I do with it. Yes, here it is.’ Sitting on the balcony was what looked like a small upturned barrel on a similar oblong of wood, which he placed in the position previously occupied by the lake. ‘There.’ He studied Valerius with a smile. ‘My gift to Rome.’

  Valerius blinked. On closer inspection it was a model of an arena. An enormous amphitheatre that dwarfed everything in the city except the even vaster Circus Maximus.

  ‘You think me a hypocrite, Verrens?’

  ‘No, Caesar.’ Valerius almost choked on the words. ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘It will seat up to eighty thousand spectators. I fear there will be no great military advances during my reign, so I must give my people spectacle instead of victory. Of course, I may be dead by the time it’s complete. Titus! I’ve just been showing Verrens how we’re going to fill in Nero’s boating lake.’

  ‘Consul,’ Valerius bowed as Titus entered the room by a hidden doorway.

  ‘Have you told him how you’re going to pay for it, Father?’

  ‘I was just coming to that. Come, we will sit in the sunshine on the balcony. Bring wine,’ he called to a slave hovering nearby. ‘I find the sun eases my old bones.’ He eased himself on to a padded couch beyond the window and Valerius and Titus joined him. ‘How will we pay for it? I expect we will borrow. I’ve squeezed the Jews once to rebuild the Temple of Jupiter; I doubt even they can afford twice—’

  Titus saw Valerius frown and interrupted his father’s flow of words. ‘You’re wondering why we don’t use the treasures of Jerusalem?’

  ‘It would seem a possible solution,’ Valerius agreed.

  Titus grimaced as he remembered the aftermath of the siege: the great temple a tower of flame, the bittersweet scent of roasting flesh and the long lines of wagons filled with plunder. ‘All that gold. I thought it limitless at the time. A thousand kings’ ransoms …’

  ‘But we’ve discovered that even a king’s ransom doesn’t go very far when it comes to running an empire,’ Vespasian resumed. ‘I will be candid with you, Verrens: it turns out that this empire I have inherited is on the very brink of financial disaster. The treasury empty, officials white-faced and trembling with fear when I approach, and the mints tell us that the silver denarii issued by Nero during his tenure are considerably less silver than they should be. It means every denarius we do have is worth twenty per cent less than its face value.’ He sipped his wine and sent a meaningful glance in the direction of the treasury in the Temple of Saturn on the far side of the Forum. ‘Eventually I will be forced to raise taxes and squeeze the provinces, but that will make me unpopular. An emperor cannot afford to be unpopular so early in his reign, particularly a New Man whose father was a tax farmer. But the problem is not silver—’

  ‘It’s gold,’ Titus intervened for a second time. ‘And that is why we have asked you here. I’m afraid your Empire must ask one last service of you, Valerius.’

  ‘Your Emperor,’ his father corrected. ‘The problem lies in the goldfields of Hispania Tarraconensis. During the late war, particularly after the death of Servius Sulpicius Galba, the legions of the province were riven by division over their loyalties, firstly between Vitellius and Otho, and later between Vitellius and myself.’ The shrewd blue eyes held Valerius. ‘I attach no blame. When Vitellius marched from Germania in such overwhelming force every man was forced to make a choice. At that time there was no certain outcome and no certain legitimacy.’

  As a lawyer Valerius could have argued that this was semantics. Otho had been hailed Emperor by the Senate and people of Rome, but since Vespasian had been in the same position as Vitellius when his own legions marched on Italia it didn’t seem politic to make the point.

  ‘Even individual cohorts of the same legion were split over who to support,’ the Emperor co
ntinued. ‘With no guidance from Rome, and little more from Tarraco, individual unit commanders were forced to act on their own authority, with varying degrees of success. In the north, around Asturica Augusta, local tribespeople, who had long been thought to be fully Romanized, sensed this weakness and attacked our convoys and supply depots. The supply of gold dropped to a trickle, most of it from the mines around Carthago Nova in the south.’

  ‘Naturally, the treasury officials were concerned,’ Titus said. ‘But they assumed the mines were operating as normal and storing the gold until it could be safely dispatched. They have been proved wrong. Although the supply has increased, it is still much less than it was before Galba left Spain, and much of the backlog is unaccounted for. We have had various excuses about lower yields, labour problems and continuing trouble from bandits.’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ Valerius addressed Vespasian. ‘You have been Emperor for two years. Surely the legions are no longer divided? A proconsul with five thousand legionaries at his back should be able to get the mines working again and teach the natives a lesson.’

  ‘That may well be true, young man, but there are no five thousand legionaries. At the end of the civil war the Batavian revolt was at its height and threatening to ignite the entire Empire. I was forced to assign the First Adiutrix and most of the Tenth and Sixth legions to join Petilius Cerialis on the Rhenus. I cannot release them until we are certain the entire area is pacified and the threat from east of the river extinguished. Our entire presence in Hispania consists of a few auxiliary units, a vexillation of the Sixth based at Legio in the north and another from the Tenth at Carthago Nova, and they are scattered across the country providing security.’