by M C Scott
Listening to that, I thought Pantera sounded exactly the kind of man who should have been helping to rebuild Rome after a year of civil war. I didn’t say it, I’m not prone to suicide, but it must have shown on my face.
In a voice that crackled at the edges, Caecina said, ‘Pantera has given himself to Vespasian. We have reason to believe he has committed Seneca’s entire network of agents to the traitor’s cause.’
Standing, Lucius walked around the desk. He was nowhere near as tall as his brother, but far leaner. Fitting his shoulders against the wall opposite, he fixed his gaze on me.
‘Vespasian is en route to Egypt. Mucianus is marching towards Rome with his legions. He will take six months to reach us, or at least to be close enough to do us harm. In that time, we must make Rome secure. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, lord.’ Only an imbecile would fail to grasp that much.
‘Good. In order to bring about this security, we are creating the new Guard, as you know. Tomorrow’s investiture ceremony will include a lottery, in which each of the new centurions will draw the name of an enemy of the state, apparently at random. You will draw Pantera’s name; of those we trust, you alone can identify him.
‘Your fellow officers have orders to kill their target on sight. You, however, will do your utmost to bring Pantera and his accomplices to us alive in order that they may be questioned. Failure to do so will be seen as complicity with his cause. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘Then go. Pantera’s ship docked at Ravenna last night. When we know where he’s going, you will be informed. You may choose two or three good men to accompany you, but you will be circumspect in what you tell them. It goes without saying that this conversation has not happened. Do you understand?’
‘Lord.’
I backed out of the doorway, bowing as much to hide the sweat on my face as out of respect for the two men inside.
That was the night before the lottery. I had lain awake through the hours of darkness wondering how they were going to rig it so that I chose Pantera’s name and by noon I had found out – and I dared not speak of it to Juvens, who had just drawn the name of the man most revered in all the legions.
Everyone has heard of Trabo, tribune of the Guard, but I can perhaps give you a soldier’s perspective. What marked him out was that he was one of us; an ordinary soldier who became extraordinary.
He didn’t come from a senatorial family. His father was barely an equestrian, although he had been a centurion with the VIth, and there was a great-grandfather back somewhere down the line who’d won a neck ring for valour serving under Marc Antony in the wars of the Triumvirate, but that was it.
Trabo joined up at eighteen and from the start he was … you’d want to say unique, but the point is that he wasn’t. He was one of us but he was just that little bit better than all of us at everything.
He could run a little faster, jump that hand or two higher, fight harder. When we put on displays for the generals, his javelin was the one that flew farthest and hit the mark most cleanly. If he’d lived in the old days of Greece, he’d have been an Olympian. In the legions he won silver to put on his belt or about his neck or on his arms, and by his mid-twenties he’d won pretty much every award there was to win and was heading up the ranks.
He made centurion at the ridiculously young age of twenty-five and nobody thought it was ridiculous in his case. He was promoted to the Guard at thirty, which was almost unheard of, but nobody begrudged him his place; he was Roman, you see, and that mattered. I’m Roman, too, but half of my men are Rhinelanders. It wasn’t right, making them Guards.
But that’s a different story. Trabo rose up the Guard ladder in the same way he’d risen up the legionary one and he was a tribune by thirty-five; the youngest for generations, perhaps the youngest ever. He was fiercely loyal to Nero and men said he wept when the boy stabbed himself in the throat. Then Galba took Nero’s Guard as his own when he took the throne, and by all accounts Trabo was as loyal to his new emperor as he had been to his old.
But he was also a friend of Otho’s. Otho had been a member of Nero’s entourage and Trabo had stood guard over him, which, in practice, meant he’d gone drinking, whoring and gambling with him but not had any of the drink, the girls or the money. Well, not as much as Otho had.
For all that, they were both men of principle, both were active, both understood where Rome needed to go and that it wasn’t in the direction Galba was pushing it. When Galba named that mewling catamite Piso as his heir, Trabo was at Otho’s right hand to make sure the mistake was rectified swiftly: Piso died first, but only by a matter of hours; Galba was gone soon after.
Would I have done the same? I think I might. It’s not laudable: a man should be loyal to his superiors, but Galba was a disaster and everyone knew it; he had to go.
Otho would have been a good emperor. If I hadn’t already committed to Vitellius, I would have followed him happily. I don’t regret it; you can’t choose your generals, but you can make the most of what they give you and offer unswerving loyalty in return.
Anyway: Trabo was a legend, a good man with a solid heart, the build of an ox and the skills of a trained killer. Trying to catch him single-handed might not have been a suicide mission, but it was close.
If one man could do it, that man was Juvens; he was the closest we had to our very own Trabo. And so you had to at least consider whether he, too, had slid his hand into a lottery pouch that contained only one tab of lead.
Our eyes met. Neither of us spoke, but on an impulse I said, ‘Do you want help?’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
We were away from the widows’ houses by then, on a connecting street with only the windowless backs of buildings looking on to it. We were alone, and Juvens was walking backwards down the centre of the street where he was less likely to tread in the piles of mule dung.
His wild, reckless grin was gone. ‘If we’re going to be partners,’ he said, ‘you’d better open your tab. I’ll look the other way.’
I knew what was on the tab, and if I was right, Juvens knew that I knew. But we had to keep up appearances. It goes without saying that this conversation has not happened.
And so, in an odd kind of privacy, and not at all as I had imagined, I stood in a middling alleyway between two sets of mildly well-off villas, broke the black seal with my thumb and folded open the much-kneaded lead to reveal the name inscribed within.
‘And?’ Juvens was at my side. ‘Anyone difficult?’
‘Sebastos Abdes Pantera.’ It was the first time I had spoken the spy’s full name. It felt jagged in my mouth.
Juvens’ frown was all confusion and surprise; you could tell he’d been expecting someone better known, or even known at all. ‘A friend?’ he asked.
‘No, a spy. He helped keep the fire from consuming all of Rome.’
‘One of Nero’s men?’
‘We have to suppose so. I’ve only seen him once. He won’t know who I am.’
I didn’t know Pantera then, so I believed that. Even so, my fist closed tight on the lead, squeezing it small.
‘I would offer to swap,’ Juvens said, ‘but …’
But that would be treason. I smiled, thinly. ‘I appreciate the offer. And I’ll still help you with Trabo. I promise you, he will prove the simpler to kill.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rome, 3 August AD 69
Quintus Aurelius Trabo
I HADN’T MET Pantera before that day, and I wouldn’t say my life was incomplete without him.
I heard about the lottery soon after it had happened; everybody did. By the evening of the next day, a dozen different stories were circulating of who had drawn what name, and by the day after that, the complete list was making its way north up the Flaminian Way.
Word reached the drovers sometime after we crossed the river Nar, about a day short of Rome in the cart I was in. Men were reciting names of the hunted and their hunters and mine was first on
everyone’s lips. Set against me was Juvens; the best officer in Vitellius’ army.
So I knew then what kind of calibre of a man they’d put on my tail. It felt like an honour, and did nothing to stop me from heading into Rome. I knew I could beat him: he wasn’t that good.
It stopped raining that day, I remember, the day I came back to Rome. They’d had three days of torrential rain and then the gods unleashed a blistering sun that lifted a haze off the mud and set the flies dancing in their millions.
It would have been easier if we’d been able to move a bit faster, but every man and his mule was on the road, making the most of the weather to bring the smallest bit of mouldy corn and mildewed leather into Rome while there was a profit to be had.
The emperor Vitellius had sixty thousand mouths to feed in a city already starved by last year’s abysmal harvest, and anyone who could cut his crops ahead of his neighbour was likely to see his wheat worth its own weight in gold; at least, that was what we thought.
Rome needed wool, too, so I was a carter’s assistant, driving a team of four oxen yoked to a frame with wheels tall as two men, and slung between them a cart that carried forty bales of wool.
What did I look like? Well, not a tribune of the Guard, that’s for sure. It had been four months by then since Otho died; that is, since he took his own knife and killed himself so that other men might not have to die in his stead. There never was a man like Otho and I grieve for his loss with every waking day.
Me? Yes … I was perhaps a little taller than the average carter’s assistant, a little broader in the shoulder. All right, a lot broader. I wasn’t going to let my battle fitness go just because I wasn’t training every day in the Guard; there are ways to stay fit that don’t involve wearing lead weights and running up the hills of Rome.
I was dressed like a carter, that’s what counted: a fifth-hand woollen tunic, good strong boots, a hat with a broad brim – and a beard.
The Guard is ever clean-shaven; that beard was my best disguise. My belt was a good one, too: a hand’s breadth of ox-hide that would have cost a fortune in leather-starved Rome where the sacrifices were flayed and their hides sent straight to the tanners and from there straight to the legions.
In any war, the makings of armour become as scarce as food, and this war had grumbled on for over a year now; everything was in short supply. So if nobody looked too closely at the face behind the beard of the carter’s assistant, it was because they envied the breadth of my belt, or were already trying to estimate the worth of the eighty bundles of unwashed fleece in the cart behind, or had been knocked back by the stink of raw lanolin that had the flies dancing in ecstasy for a full three yards all around us.
The carter didn’t know who I was, of course. He didn’t want to find out. We parted as we had joined, with a hand-shake and a nod, not long after the cart had passed through the gate that lies north of Augustus’ tomb.
So that was me, Quintus Aurelius Trabo, formerly a tribune of the Praetorian Guard, now an outlaw with a price on my head, coming home.
So much had changed since I had left, and so little. It was spring when I marched out of the city in the van of Otho’s legions, barely two months after Galba’s assassination.
I’ve searched my conscience over my part in that and I’m not ashamed. It was bloody and vicious and brutal, but even now, I wouldn’t undo any of it. The old man was a martinet, a throwback to the old days of the Republic, a disaster in the making.
Otho, on the other hand, knew how to think, and when to act. He was young, not yet quite forty, and had the resilience, courage and foresight that Rome needed then and, if you’ll take my opinion, she still needs now. He was generous with his money and intelligent about how it was spent. He had honour and battle sense and the ability to talk up or down to the idiots in the senate when they needed it.
When he died, my world died with him, and I’ll admit now that I thought hard about joining him in his honourable oblivion. I might have done it, too, but he had given me a letter to deliver and told me not to return to Rome too soon, to allow some time for things to settle. I knew what he was about, but I promised him I’d do whatever he asked and keeping that promise was one of the two things that brought me back.
The other was just as important. You’ll have heard the rumour that I took an oath over his still-warm body to avenge him? It’s true. That was the reason I carried a knife in the top of each boot and enough gold in the back of my belt to fund a small army, which was exactly what I planned to do.
It was early evening by the time we reached Rome. We’d set off at dawn, but the road had been so bloody slow we’d lost the best part of a day travelling less than ten miles. The first thing I saw when we were through the gates was the way the low sun glanced off the slow summer waters of the Tiber, lighting up the city. A weaker man, or one with less business ahead of him, would have wept at that.
I left the carter more or less at the place where the fire started five years ago. Then, it was all old wood and straw; it’s not at all surprising that it went up in flames. Now, the streets are wide apart and there are water butts at every junction, and gongs to call the Watch if anyone sees so much as a spark.
I wandered round, getting my bearings, and struck off towards the Quirinal, and the Guard barracks that sits at the back of the hill. It had been my home for ten years and I wanted to be near it, even if I couldn’t go in. Plus I had Otho’s blessed letter to deliver. I’d promised that I would do everything I could not to endanger the recipient, so I planned to reconnoitre on the first day, to see if the address was being watched. Daft as it seems now, I hadn’t thought other people would be doing the same.
I listened as I walked; the talk of the streets is always interesting. They were still talking about the lead lottery, of course, or the death lottery as it was becoming known, but there were those, even amongst the merchants, who were still harking back to the fact that the emperor had made Guards of men who were not born and bred in Rome, as if this somehow diminished their own worth – the carters, the drovers, the merchants – as citizens of a great city.
This is old news now, and people are used to it, but back in the summer men were still reeling over the thought that it was possible for the legions to name an emperor outside the city and then give him his prize. That had never been done before, see, and the opinion of the gutter was that it wasn’t a clever thing to have done then. Not any of it.
Everyone hushed up when the Guard came, and fuck me but there were a lot of them – far more than there had been in Nero’s day. They were patrolling in their eights, one after another after another, looking uncomfortable, out of place in a city that wasn’t their home, amongst people who fell silent whenever they walked past.
But they passed by, that’s the point. They were hunting Trabo, tribune of the Guard, and none of them cast a second glance at a bearded carter. I grinned at them like a fool and they stared right through me and walked on. I know how slaves feel, now. There’s a power to that invisibility if you can harness it.
To be safe, I pulled my hat down so the brim shaded my face and struck off through the evening crowds. In summer, the streets fill up at this time; the day’s trading is largely done and the vendors are winding up their awnings and taking their stock into the back rooms to lock it away for the night.
For me, the big difference was that this evening was the first time I’d been in Rome when nobody knew who I was. The crush wasn’t nearly at its height, but even so I was having to push my way through a solid wall of flesh when for the past ten years crowds had just … parted.
I had to remember not to shove the bastards aside in the emperor’s name. I was talking to myself in my head: ‘Stoop, round your shoulders, smile, back away, don’t push, don’t push. Don’t hit him, either. You can’t afford to start a fight.’ It was frustrating, I can tell you. I’m not slippery like Pantera, I’m not naturally given to double-dealing and lies, but I found that if I treated it like a game, it was bearabl
e.
At a certain point, with the sun low on my right, I finally turned up the first shallow slopes of the Quirinal hill.
The stench of dung and rotting vegetables, of old fish and dead dogs, lessened a little as I went up, or I told myself it did, and if it was mostly a lie, I was glad of it.
The taverns here were cleaner, their inmates increasingly more freedmen than slaves, more officers than men. In all senses, the crowds were more colourful, and more than a little drunk. I turned right into a narrow side road lined on either side by neat houses in white limed brick.
Small, self-contained, with few rooms and fewer slaves, these were the widows’ houses, paid for by a gift of Augustus that no emperor had dared revoke. Summer flowers bloomed in tended troughs outside swept doorways. There was no great wealth displayed, but there was a delight in order that made my heart sing.
Each door was marked with a sign that identified the legion or emblem of a departed husband. Eighth along on the left a pair of oak leaves was engraved above the lintel: that was the sign I had been given. There were no Guards outside, none obviously watching. I walked on past to the western end of the street and the Inn of the Crossed Spears.
It’d always been a favourite of the Praetorian Guard and clearly still was. It was heaving with men in uniform and men who had only just shed their uniforms. And tonight, of all nights, the management had hired a troupe of acrobats, which meant, in turn, that all the charlatans of the street had slunk out of their hiding places and come to make the most of off-duty men with ready money.
There was an astrologer, one of the many who hadn’t fled the city yet. Not far off was a salt-haired, owlish little dream-teller, and beyond him an ice-blonde Nordic woman who dealt in philtres and curses, ready to etch the name of a rival on a slab of lead to be thrown into an open grave that ill fortune might follow the one named, just as ill fortune followed those named in the lead lottery two days before in the Capitoline temple.
What I discovered in this inn, listening to the men talking, was that a dozen of those named in the lottery had already died, men who had been less careful when they returned to Rome, who’d probably been there for months and thought themselves safe.