Rome 4: The Art of War

by M C Scott

  We were left to wait in the atrium, where couches were set about the central pool. Behind, a small garden was alive with lilies and citrus trees. The late afternoon sun lay low in the sky. The shadows had clear-cut edges. I watched Pantera move to the place where light and shade combined to make him least visible.

  As I said earlier, his instinct is to cleave to shadow, whereas I have always thought that there is an advantage to being in good light; I can learn as much from a person’s reaction to me as I can from seeing them.

  So we were there, him half hidden, me in the last light of the sun, and both watched a curtain slip aside from a doorway on the far wall.

  How shall I describe her, Vespasian’s love?

  Like her freedman, Caenis was small and slightly built, and she had an easy grace. Olive-skinned, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, she was Greek, I thought, although Greeks are not often enslaved these days, so perhaps she was at least partly Dacian; that would have accounted for her oval face and green-brown eyes.

  And she was sharp; already her gaze had glanced past me and found Pantera. I should have expected that: for many years she was amanuensis to Antonia Tertia, known as the Younger; the elegant, cultured woman who was daughter of Marc Antony, niece of Augustus, mother to Claudius, grandmother to Caligula.

  Which means that, while still a slave, Caenis had been clerk and confidante to one of the empire’s most powerful women; she was always going to look first into the shadows, and only afterwards study what was in the light.

  More important, she was loved enough in her youth to have been freed by her mistress, and she was loved enough in her later years to have been installed here, in the widows’ quarters, where few men’s attention fell.

  And her lover had sent Pantera to see her safe.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rome, 3 August AD 69

  Antonius Matthias, freedman of the lady Antonia Caenis

  WE HAD HEARD the tumblers in the street outside. My lady was writing a letter to the master, I think; she wrote him a great many letters through that summer. She was his eyes and ears in Rome. Did she send them? Some – not most, but enough – made their way east with messengers she could rely on.

  The evening in question, the first we knew of anything amiss was the sound of the crowd surging past, raucous, crude, boorish, loud; all that my lady least liked about Romans en masse. It’s true that she was born here and she had only once been outside Rome and that was to the island of Kos, lately, with her lord, but she had Greek blood in her veins and that is always more civilized, don’t you agree? We both knew that Athens bore herself with a dignity that Rome could never match. That night was proof in point.

  We ignored the commotion until we heard someone come close, heard the slurred words and the splash of urine as they pissed on the side of the house, and then they knocked.

  My lady would have gone to the door right then – she has the courage of a lion – but I persuaded her to step back and let me answer.

  I opened to a man of no consequence and was closing it again when I saw the ring: the oak leaves in gold. I could not turn away any man who bore that. And so I invited them in and took them through to the atrium, where were the couches for visitors. My lady called out and I answered and she came to meet them.

  She saw the lady Jocasta first, of course. She was breath-taking, if your mind turns that way, the kind of woman some men lose their heads for: tall, elegant, very graceful in a composed way. She had the true patrician gaze of the noble woman, the one that disdains everyone below them, although I am pleased to say she had the good breeding not to turn it on my lady Caenis.

  In looks, she had a neck like a swan, a high, arched brow, and her hair … in years to come, men will take out the poems they wrote to her hair, and re-read them and remind themselves of their fecund youth.

  It was raven black, with the blue-brilliant sheen of a perfect feather, and as she walked she pulled out the garish pins that had held it up and let it fall back and back and back past her shoulders, until it swayed halfway down to her waist. Even I, who have never looked on a woman as more than a friend, could not help but imagine her naked. Even my lady was struck by her beauty; I heard the suck of her breath.

  But Jocasta was right in what she told you; my lady had been trained by the best. The lady Antonia taught her long ago that the stranger standing in the shadows is always more interesting – and far more dangerous – than whoever is in the light, and nine times out of ten she was right.

  I had signalled her with my eyes, but she was already looking towards Pantera. She knew there was a man, you see; she had heard him at the door and so she was looking for him as she walked out of the side room, and, after that one striking moment of looking at Jocasta, she found your Pantera.

  He was by the pool, a little back, where the reflections from the water wrought ripples in the air, making of him a shimmering shadow, an almost-not-there spirit. Their eyes locked for a moment, and he gave a small bow. Then my lady spoke.

  ‘He is alive?’ No name was mentioned. Caenis glanced meaningfully back to the blue silk curtain that blocked Domitian’s doorway; the young lord, you understand, lived with the lady when his father was away.

  He was safe with us, and kept himself to himself, but the one thing guaranteed to draw him out of his studies was his father’s name, and I could tell she didn’t want him to come out yet; not until she knew why these two had come. He’s a sensitive boy, and there’s no saying how he would have taken bad news of his father.

  Jocasta understood at once. She said, ‘My lady, he is alive and well and sends you his earnest regards. Is there somewhere we may speak in more detail?’

  Her necklace was gone with the hair pins and she had wiped the paint from her lips. Without them, she was a different woman. Caenis took her at her word and led them through to the garden.

  Here, songbirds, tame to my lady’s hand, followed her about. The small fountain, barely up to knee height, shaped like a rising carp, spilled water into the central pool, making sound enough to cover a quiet conversation from all but those engaged in it.

  My lady put her back to an olive bough, seeking the security of its strength as she often did in those early days. ‘Swiftly, then, what brings you here? Is he wounded?’

  This time, Pantera answered. ‘My lady, he was in good health when I left him. He was injured in the knee by a sling-stone while assaulting one of the minor cities of Judaea in the winter, but you know of that.’

  Caenis did know of that; it didn’t prove that Vespasian had sent this pair, but it was at least a step in the right direction.

  ‘Then why has he sent you here to— Oh!’ Her hand flew to her mouth. She is so fast; she thinks things through in a flash. I could tell that even Pantera was impressed. He tipped his head in invitation to her to continue.

  She put her fingers together, as she does when she is marshalling an argument. ‘For reasons that will be obvious to you,’ she said, ‘I cannot leave Rome, nor can Sabinus, nor Domitian. You know this: to be safe, we must continue to declare our support for the emperor Vitellius. If we are seen to run, it will be taken as a sign of disloyalty and our lives will be forfeit. This is obvious, and he for whom we care most would not ask you to take us away from Rome. Therefore, he has sent you to offer us protection: he would do that.’

  Pantera smiled a little, bowed, even paid her a compliment. ‘My lady, I knew you must be exceptional for your general to have loved you so long, but he did not tell me you had the sharpest mind in Rome. I came expecting to spend the entire evening discussing that which you have just laid out so clearly: you cannot safely leave Rome, but none the less your safety is my first priority. Whatever else happens, it matters most to the general that his family remains unharmed. Perhaps, now, we can discuss how that may be done?’

  She saved his life with her quickness, didn’t she? That may not be a good thing, with all that came afterwards, but I don’t think she would have done it differently, even i
f she had known.

  At the time, she said simply, ‘It is best, I believe, to speak as we find. If you are to be our protector, it might be constructive if the general’s son were to be privy to the conversation.’

  And so, after all that, there was nothing to be done but to call for Domitian, and let Pantera learn how different was the second of Vespasian’s sons from his brother.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rome, 3 August AD 69

  The lady Antonia Caenis

  DOMITIAN. WHAT CAN one say of him, who is son to me in all but name and blood?

  I am offering no insult, I think, if I tell you that Domitian was not in a sociable frame of mind on the evening Jocasta and Pantera came to my home with their so-clever illusion.

  If one were to be truthful, it would be more accurate to say he was never in a sociable frame of mind, but within the confines of our family this rarely posed undue embarrassment. I was happy to leave him to his solitary games of dice, right hand against left, to his collection of insects pinned to a board, to his early sleep and late rise and the occasional day when he could go from dawn to dusk without once noticing my existence.

  The day in question was one of those. I knew it already, but if I had not I would have read it in the brittle smile fixed on Matthias’ face as he held back the blue curtain that screened Domitian’s private chamber from the atrium. I indulged myself in a moment’s silent cursing, and then, as I must, forced a smile.

  ‘Domitian, welcome. These people have come from your father. They have news.’

  My eyes signalled him a warning. The boy – he is eighteen and I really must start thinking of him as a man, but he has the round-faced, smooth-skinned look of one who has barely begun to shave and his voice is still light, like the touch of soft rain, and it’s hard to think of him as anything but a child – the boy chose once again to ignore me.

  He was gazing at Jocasta, which was a surprisingly normal response. You’ve met her, so you know how striking she is. Any man would favour her with a second glance. Domitian, being … Domitian, stared straight at her for an uncomfortably long time, and then said, ‘You can’t have been near my father. Titus would have kept you.’

  There was a moment’s scandalized silence. If he would only smile as he said these things, but no, he thought it and so he said it and there was no humour anywhere in it. I shut my eyes; a coward’s way out, I admit, but there are times when the solitude of darkness is one’s only respite. I looked again only at the sound of Jocasta’s flute-like laugh.

  She said, ‘You flatter me, lord, but it is true; I have not been with your father. My business kept me in Rome. Pantera, whom you see here, is the one who has journeyed by fast ship from Judaea.’

  Lord. Nobody except Matthias had ever spoken thus to Domitian. Flushing, he bowed. ‘Madam, you honour me. Will you come and take wine? I see you are not yet served.’

  It was stiff. It was awkward – a series of phrases stolen from other mouths and stitched together without any true understanding of their import – but it was said, and it was real and it took a great effort for me to keep my hands by my sides that I might not clasp his face and kiss his brow in my joy. Both would have dismantled all the good just made.

  Matthias didn’t need my nod to go and fetch the wine; he backed away, bowing, and I followed Domitian back through into the garden area where the late, rich sun gilded everything in tones of amber.

  We stood amid the citrus and lilacs in silence until the wine was served; it wasn’t expensive, but it was white and sweet and had been cooled in the well so that beads of water formed on the outside of my best glass beakers.

  Domitian studied Pantera and Jocasta, each in turn; there was nothing subtle about his inspection. At its end, he said, ‘So the rumours are true? My father is mounting civil war against Vitellius and Lucius?’

  I hope I didn’t show my relief at that. He may be strange, but one could never call Domitian stupid. I had always suspected that, in his strange, solitary way, he was brighter than his brother; it was just that he spoke too little for us to be sure.

  I saw surmise and surprise flicker across Pantera’s face, gone before they took hold, replaced by a kind of interest. ‘Yes.’ He matched Domitian for the baldness of his speech. ‘They have asked me to keep you safe; you and the lady and your uncle Sabinus.’

  Domitian sneered. ‘My uncle Sabinus, who is calling my father an idiot, a reprobate and a fool? My uncle Sabinus who has sworn to shed his own blood in defence of Vitellius’ claim to the throne? Does he want you to keep him safe? And if he does, can you do that and still foment revolt?’

  There was another pause; this time, I believe Pantera was fighting not to smile.

  ‘As to the first: does your uncle wish to be kept safe? I have yet to ask him. To the second: can we keep him safe while fomenting revolt? We can try. We are not without resource.’

  ‘Even though your name was in the lead lottery on the Capitoline two days ago? Geminus drew it.’

  And that surprised us all.

  Pantera’s eyes flicked to me. ‘I hadn’t heard.’ He made it sound like a statement when it was really a question.

  Truthfully, I said, ‘I hadn’t either, but Domitian goes abroad in the evenings and listens to the slave-talk that I hear less than I used to. Slaves know everything.’ Of Domitian, I asked, ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘That Pantera, the leopard who saved Rome from the fire, is the target of Lucius’ ire. That Geminus, who knows him, was made to draw his name in the lottery. That he is to be taken alive, not killed like all the others.’ Domitian’s smile bore a satisfied edge. ‘They think they have kept this a secret, but the man who cut the lead tablets with the names on is lover to Aponolius, who is also lover to Demetra who can be paid in small coin for small facts, particularly if she thinks them unimportant. So’ – this to Pantera – ‘what will you do?’

  Pantera shrugged. ‘First and most easily, I can change my appearance. Given half a day’s work, my own mother wouldn’t know me. Once changed, with my lord’s permission, I can be hired as servant to the lady Caenis, that I might not arouse suspicion. As you have said, nobody notices the slaves—’

  His head snapped up. From somewhere outside came the sound of a songbird; a high, trilling whistle. It sounded almost normal, but nobody in the room believed it so.

  ‘Guards.’ I crossed swiftly to the rear door. ‘That’s the warning the street boys give. You must go. Lucius has not yet dared to touch me, but if the Guards find you here he will have no scruples. There’s a way out from the rear door, a slaves’ route, that takes you into the ghetto. You will go under my protection.’

  Pantera glanced a question. I said, ‘We slaves protect our own. Even those who are no longer strictly slaves. If you go straight for a hundred paces and then go left beneath the two houses that meet above the road, you can—’

  ‘I’ll take them.’

  In the short time my attention had been turned the other way, Domitian had donned his good, dark cloak. He was standing by the door, ready to go out.

  ‘I know the routes as well as anyone. I’ll do this. For my father. Trust me.’

  I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t trust him. Nor, I am certain, did my guests. They exchanged a brief, wordless conversation at the end of which Jocasta, mellow-voiced and lovely, said, ‘May I suggest that my lord takes me alone and permits the spy Pantera to go out of the front door to lead the Guards away? If they have seen him enter, they need to see him being sent away or your aunt’s life and liberty will be forever endangered.’

  Domitian gave a credible impression of a grown man whose opinion was frequently sought on matters of imminent danger. Gravely, he said, ‘That is wise. I will keep you safe and escort you home. Pantera should go out now, and when he is free once more he can come to the Street of the Lame Dog which runs behind the inn where the acrobats meet. Ask one of the boys for the Fly-catcher. He’ll let me know where you are.’

  The Fly-catcher? I
had no idea they called him that. I wanted to ask more, but there was no time; Pantera had agreed and was making preparations. The lady Jocasta was standing tight-lipped and silent. She gave Pantera a glittering smile, full of meanings I could not discern, and then followed Domitian out of the small rear door used by the servants, which led out into the slum that sprawls across the lower reaches of the Quirinal and Palatine hills.

  Pantera watched them leave, then said, ‘How long have we got before the Guards are here? I assume the whistles give detail within the warning, or do we just know they are on their way?’

  I didn’t ask how he knew; for this, too, there was no time. ‘At first whistle, they were coming down the Quirinal hill from the barracks behind. Each new whistle brings them a street closer. They are, if I have heard correctly, five streets away, up the hill. If they run, they will be here in the time it takes to lace your sandals.’

  ‘They’re running. I can hear them.’ He was standing by my new front door with his ear pressed to the wood. With one hand, he was sliding back the bolts at top and bottom of the door. With the other, he was loosening a knife I had not seen he carried strapped to his forearm.

  Turning, he threw me a grin that reminded me so much of Vespasian that it hurt.

  ‘Throw me out,’ he said. ‘Be theatrical. I have talked my way in with news of the general and it is clear I have never been near him; and in any case, you agree with Sabinus that Vespasian is a fool. I was offending your honour, abusing your servants, threatening to steal your wine and your silver. Make it loud and make it real. Can you do that?’

  ‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘I can do anything.’

  ‘Good.’ He hurled back the door. ‘Now!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rome, 3 August AD 69

  Geminus

  ‘THERE! THE CENTURION … Pantera … whoever he is. The widow’s throwing him out! See? On the other side of the acrobats. Get him!’