by M C Scott
Caecina was talking to me, genially enough.
‘… so thoroughly deserved. I never saw a man swing his century faster to face a new enemy. This is small recompense for your dedication and valour—’
He was good. He caught my hand and slid on a silver arm ring, which was my reward for my part in the battle at Cremona. He pushed it up beyond the elbow with the same kind of deft, impersonal precision the priests use when they cut a bull’s throat.
It was his words that mattered far more than what he did. There was a point in the assault on Cremona when I’d turned three centuries round to face an assault on our right flank and he remembered it as if he’d been there in the mud and the slaughter, hearing every cursed command.
Very likely, he remembered something equally relevant for every one of the hundred and fifty-nine men with me; it’s who he was, and that kind of care for his men was one of the reasons we’d mutinied against Galba when he asked us to, and then followed him to the brink of civil war and back.
Like Corbulo, like Vespasian in the east, Caecina was a soldier’s soldier and we all respected him for it. What the rest didn’t know was what he was like behind closed doors. Nor had I until the night before.
The trophy ring fitted perfectly. Cool silver hugged my flesh, so that I could feel the hard, fast throb of my veins against it. My whole body was shuddering, finely, like a leaf; if anything was going to happen, it had to happen now.
And it did.
As Caecina stepped back, the priest threw more incense on to the altar; much more than before. A broad fan of smoke splayed out, cutting us off from the line of waiting men behind.
I was alone then, with the priests and the altar and this man who remembered everything. I swallowed and heard my own larynx pop. Caecina looked at me as if I’d farted.
From his side, the bass-voiced priest bellowed, ‘Choose! And may the gods guide your hand!’
A black silk bag was thrust forward at waist height. As each man had done before me, I slid my hand through the bag’s narrow mouth, and felt—
Nothing.
I panicked, I will admit that now, to you. This was a lottery. I was eighty-fourth in a line of a hundred and sixty men. I was expecting to feel seventy-seven tokens of folded lead from which I was required to select one. For nearly a day, I had been steeling myself against this moment.
But now it was here, my hand closed on empty air. In shock, I looked up at Caecina and read on his face such intensity of cold, flat anger that I shoved my hand back in again, fumbled about and – there! – felt a single filet of lead lying in the bottom, tucked into a corner hidden by the overlying fabric.
It was the length of my thumb, folded over at either end and sealed in the middle with wax, and when I drew it out I saw that the wax was black and that the imprint of a chariot stood proud on the matt surface. Vitellius was favouring Nero, after all: the chariot had been his emblem, too.
I didn’t break the wax seal; my orders – all our orders, given to us in the officers’ quarters just last night – were to wait, and open them later, in private.
I held the tab out on the flat of my palm to show I had taken it. Caecina, restored to good humour, nodded briskly and I took my eight paces back and that was it: over.
It wasn’t over, of course, it was only just beginning, but it felt like a huge step taken. I wasn’t alone in feeling heartsick, I think; it was on other faces as we shuffled on sideways and sideways and watched each man take his eight steps forward and pick his lead from the lottery.
There was a tedious similarity to the proceedings broken by small differences in the rewards for our endeavours; Juvens, three men after me, was awarded a spear for personal valour, not an arm band, and Halotus, who came eight after him, was given on behalf of his entire century a disc to display on their standard.
Whatever he was awarded, though, each man at the same time took a folded token from the black bag and stepped back, keeping the seal unbroken.
The lead grew warm and soft in the waiting. I kneaded it between my fingers; by the time the lottery came to an end, it was an acorn, which once had been a small, flat lozenge.
‘Gentlemen!’ Caecina held up a hand. His voice was high for a man’s, sharp and clear. ‘You each have a tab and, on it, a name. You know what to do. Know as you do so that we are, once again, a nation at war with itself.’
That got our attention: I had heard the news the night before, but my fellow officers had not. All along the row, we stood more upright, our eyes fixed on our general.
Caecina pitched his voice well; he knew how to play a crowd. ‘We have news from the east. On the first of July, the prefect of Egypt swore his oath to Vespasian as emperor. His legions did likewise and they were followed by the legions of Judaea and Syria respectively. He is appointing senators, prefects, praetors. He is minting coins in his own image and collecting taxes in his own name. He is choosing senators and consuls to serve his version of Rome and he is recruiting armies to march at his command. In short, he is behaving as if he were already emperor and we the traitors standing against him. He is preparing for war and we must be ready to fight.
‘Eight legions are ranged against us. There will not be any more, because our emperor is loved by his men, but they are enough for us to show once again that we are the best the empire can command.
‘Go now, and prove yourselves first with this one assignment. And then, next spring, we will march against the traitors.’
CHAPTER SIX
Rome, 1 August AD 69
Geminus
DISMISSED, I HAD no further duties until I took command of the watch at dusk.
Outside, the rain had eased; we were greeted by grey skies, but the gods were no longer weeping. My fellow Guards surged in a pack towards the barracks on the Field of Mars at the back of the Quirinal hill. All the chatter was of Vespasian’s eight legions and where and how they might be beaten, which was pointless, because we all knew that even if they’d set off on the first day of July with their oaths to Vespasian still hot in their throats, it would take them half a year to reach Rome and they’d get here in the middle of winter when nobody fights.
I didn’t want to hear a hundred men explaining the unlikely detail of how they’d smash the enemy lines single-handed, so I drew back from the rest to take short cuts that turned out to be long cuts, but meant that I was alone and nobody was asking questions, and I was free to learn my way around Rome again.
I grew up here. Rome was my birthplace and my home, but I joined the legions when I was nineteen and that was twelve years ago and I’d only been back once, just before the fire, and that disaster had changed everything.
We lost four out of fourteen districts and Nero’s building programme afterwards was as radical as any we’d seen. He set statues where once were eighteen-storey slums, and slums where once were temples, so that there were areas of the city that felt completely alien to me as I walked through them. Only the seven hills were unchanged; their outline was – is – moulded on my soul.
That day, with the lead lottery done, I came down the Capitol and made my way through the forum. From there, I turned left up the Quirinal, at least notionally heading in the direction of the Guards’ barracks.
This hill is not like the Palatine, home to senators and equestrians and merchants who have too much gold and need to show it off. The Quirinal is a thrifty place that offers residence to impecunious senators, bad gamblers, and the recently arrived who have not yet carved a place for themselves elsewhere.
I like it there; I always have. Free of my colleagues and their inane battle fantasies, I walked faster up the hill.
The Quirinal is like the rest of Rome in that money and status buys you height. As the hill rose, shabby shop fronts gave way to marginally more prosperous dwellings. Villas lined the road, and tucked away to one side halfway up were three parallel streets of small, neat houses funded by the imperial coffers for the widows of fallen generals, and then beyond them the bachelor h
omes of impecunious but worthy men who had lost their wives: in Rome, few things are left to chance and this proximity was no accident.
I came to a forked junction and took the left-hand path, which led to one of the widows’ streets.
Here were flowers outside the doors, and the doors themselves had legion shapes carved on them: a Capricorn, a Taurus, a Thunderbolt. The women did not grieve openly for their lost menfolk, but the signs were there if you knew what to look for.
I had gone barely ten paces when I heard light footsteps behind me. Six months on campaign and you don’t take these things lightly. I snapped round, blade sighing free.
‘Juvens?’
Marcus Decius Juvens was standing just out of striking distance, a half-smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. He was a good man. I let drop my hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I saw you go off on your own and wondered why.’
‘Why d’you think? Did you hear the Runt saying how he’d disembowel Vespasian and all his armies at a single stroke? Or Arminios swearing on his Germanic gods to stand at the gates of Rome and slaughter anyone who tried to come through after the ides of September? Pointless bloody nonsense.’
‘But harmless all the same.’ Juvens looked like Julius Caesar’s more cheerful younger brother, which he claimed was all good breeding and it might have been true. Certainly, he was from ancient patrician stock so refined that he could quote his ancestry for the past eighteen generations without pausing for breath.
Unfortunately for all concerned, his grandfather had lost the family fortune, and although his father had made half of it back, he had been careless enough to become entangled in Piso’s conspiracy against Nero and so, along with fifty others, including Lacan, Seneca, and Piso himself, had been forced to suicide. Juvens senior’s estate, such as was left of it, went to the crown.
He had two sons, of whom the elder, now penniless, subsequently tried to have himself elected consul and was so soundly beaten in the ballot that he retreated into self-imposed exile in Iberia. Our Juvens had survived by virtue of being the second son, too insignificant to be noticed. Scraping together loans at extortionate interest, he bought his commission and bribed his way to one of the furthest legions from Rome: the IVth Macedonica, stationed on the Rhine.
It was a risky strategy; at least half of those who buy their way to a junior commission find themselves dead with a blade in the back at their first skirmish, but Juvens was bright enough, wild enough, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring, hard-fighting enough to be loved by the men before we ever went into battle together.
They owed him money, too; Juvens’ luck at dice was legendary. He paid off his debts in full within his first year. By the time we came back to Rome, rumour said he was almost as rich as his grandfather had been in his pomp.
None of that mattered, at least not as far as I was concerned, because Juvens had proved himself in war. In the past six months he had more than earned the spear Caecina had just given him for personal valour. He was an exceptional commander with an outstanding eye for a battlefield. I had fought twice at his side and would have been happy to do so for the rest of my life, although at that moment, standing like a fool in the widows’ street with my blade half drawn, I wasn’t sure the sentiment was returned: Juvens seemed to like everyone equally, which couldn’t be true.
In blithe disregard of our orders, he asked, ‘Who did you draw in the lottery?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t opened the tab yet.’
The first part of that was a lie, as you’ll learn, and I’m sorry for it, but the truth was that we shouldn’t have been discussing it at all: an open street is the very opposite of ‘private’.
I said, ‘You?’, which made me equally guilty. It was a day when convention didn’t count as much as it had done, when the rules had become suddenly flexible.
I live by rules, I’m not used to bending them. But I wanted to find out if Juvens would be happy to have me at his side in the coming days; I thought I was going to need some friends I could count on and I didn’t have many. Allies? Yes. Drinking partners? Plenty. Men I could go whoring with? More than I could count. But friends? I had none I could name. Except perhaps Juvens, who studied me a moment, grinning, and said, ‘Trabo.’
‘Fuck, no!’ I whistled. ‘He’ll kill you.’
‘Probably.’ Juvens looked ridiculously cheerful; he’d always had a wild side. ‘I have to find him first, but if it’s true he took an oath to see Vitellius dead, he’ll have to come to Rome to do it. I’ll know him when I see him.’
‘And then you’ll kill him. If you can.’
Because this was what the morning’s lottery in the temple had been for: to convey the orders for the execution of a hundred and sixty ‘enemies of the state’.
Arriving in his predecessor’s palace, Vitellius had found a document in the archives, signed by a hundred and twenty officers and men of the old Praetorian Guard, asking to be recognized by Otho for their part in the murder of his predecessor, the emperor Galba.
Vitellius – or at least his brother Lucius – would happily have cut Galba’s throat with his own knife, if someone else had held him still. But it had been done by the Guards, whose duty was and is to defend any emperor’s life with their own, and no emperor was going to feel safe in the company of men who had already been suborned into killing one of their charges and might equally do so again. Which is why they had all been dismissed and the new Guard raised from those of us whose loyalty had been demonstrated on the field.
Thus it was that on that day, the day of our investiture, each of us hundred and sixty new centurions had been given the name of one of the transgressors – there were plenty to go round beyond the hundred and twenty of the old Guard – with orders to kill on sight.
If it were only that, I might have been happy, or tranquil at least. But it was not. The emperor’s brother, Lucius, had called me into his office the night before and that was when my life had changed for the worse.
It was the last hour of the dusk watch and I had been walking past Caecina’s quarters in the barracks above the Quirinal hill when I heard him call my name.
Turning, I had found the general standing in the doorway, beckoning me. I followed him into the legate’s office, and there, seated behind a small table next to the only brazier, was Lucius Vitellius. Even then, he was considered the most dangerous man in Rome. The emperor, as we have said, was pot-bellied, lame and prone to drinking through the night. Darker and more saturnine, his brother Lucius was abstemious, fast as a snake and twice as vicious.
I knelt so fast I cracked my knees on the marble floor. I had no idea if I was actually required to kneel before the emperor’s brother, but you’d have to think it wise at least to begin there.
A moment’s silence followed, and then a sigh. ‘Get up, centurion!’
The voice was soft, rolling, almost friendly. I have heard inquisitors speak like that before they break a man. Rising, I kept my eyes on the floor.
Lucius said, ‘You were in Rome on the night of the fire five years ago, is that correct?’
‘It is, lord. I was sent back from my legion by—’
‘Thank you, we don’t need details. We need someone who can identify the spy, Pantera, also known as the Leopard. He was with Nero on the night of the fire. I am told he controlled much of the defences?’
I was about to deny any knowledge of who did what – that night was a flame-filled horror of which I remember mercifully little, although my dreams since have been plagued by the stench of burned flesh, and the sound of children screaming – but there was a moment after, in the strange calm of the morning …
‘Lord, does he bear a scar on his face above one eye, and is he stiff in the left ankle?’
Lucius glanced at Caecina, who nodded.
They both stared at me, so I went on with what I knew. ‘I was with Nero in his flower garden at dawn the following morning. I was on duty there. He and this man – Pantera
– had a … discussion …’ Do you say to the emperor’s brother that a man argued with an emperor and did not die for it? Nero was different then; there were still people who were not required to kneel in his presence.
I took a glance at Lucius and decided these were details he didn’t need. In fact, now that I studied him properly, he looked like a man who’d had little sleep with no promise of more to come.
His hair hung black to his brow and there were dark circles under his eyes. If he’d been shaved, it was not in the past day. It was said that the emperor planned to leave Rome soon, to escape the stench of a city in summer, the press of an empire’s attention, the constant clamour of those who craved his smile, his word, his law.
In his place, it was said, he planned to leave his brother to carry the weight of the empire, and what man can say that wasn’t the worst of burdens?
Not my business. They wanted to know about Pantera and so I told them what I knew.
‘There was a boy Nero wanted that the others didn’t want him to have. Pantera bought him with a promise.’
‘What kind of promise?’
Caecina asked that, and this was not the affable general, the man-amongst-men who led from the front all the way from the Rhine, beloved by his officers and men alike, and known for his leonine courage and humour. This Caecina was angry, clearly, but it wasn’t clear with whom. He radiated a kind of hard, brittle danger; nothing so crude as a blade in the belly, more the threat of crucifixion, or worse.
I was always taught that, if in doubt, it was safest to fall back on formality. Crisply, I said, ‘In return for the boy’s life, Pantera promised to find the man who set fire to Rome, and to kill him.’
Lucius lifted a lazy brow. ‘Did he succeed?’
Caecina said, ‘We believe so, lord. He killed the arsonist, and then, later, helped to return their stolen eagle to the Twelfth legion.’