by M C Scott
‘Claudius Faventinus. He’s been in since the first hour after dawn.’
Cavernus’ eyes flicked to his right, where a balding Roman was staring with dull inattention into his own wine beaker. He was carrying too much weight to be fit, but not so much that it couldn’t be lost again. Broken veins lined his nose and were spreading on to his cheeks.
‘What can you tell me of him?’ Pantera asked.
‘He was a centurion in the western fleet at Misene.’
‘Discharged with honour?’
Cavernus shook his head. ‘He says so, but nobody else agrees. Don’t trust him. He’d sell his right hand for the cost of the next jug.’
‘Just the man I need.’ Rising, Pantera laid a silver coin on the table. ‘Hold this place for me, will you?’
He gave orders to us in a language that I suppose might have sounded Mauretanian to those listening but was, in fact, the tongue of the tribes of Briton. He spoke it always with the accent of the west.
‘If this man is not what he seems,’ he said, ‘we will need to kill him. Listen, but not obviously. And watch for how he moves.’
He swept across the floor, his white robes whispering behind, and approached the table of a man who was too lost in his own self-pity to notice that he was coming.
‘Claudius Faventinus,’ he said, leaning over, making much of his imagined height. ‘May I join you? I hear the navy lost a good man when you left …’
Pantera left the bar-room shortly after noon, with the three of us following behind.
Out of sight of the inn, he stopped. ‘Follow Faventinus,’ he said to Amoricus. ‘I need to know where he goes, who he speaks to, what he eats, what he drinks, whose bed he shares and what he dreams of while he sleeps. I need to hear everything of his life. Is that clear?’
‘Very.’ Amoricus was a straightforward boy in many respects. He had wanted to be an actor in his youth and we had discovered early that he had a memory better than a Hebrew’s, and a facility for extempore speech-giving that would have left half the city’s actors raw with envy. With better looks and a richer voice, and his balls still hanging on his body …
All that might have been, but was not, was written on his face, but nearest the surface was a delight that Pantera had trusted him with this new task.
With two of us left in his train, Pantera set off on what had become a daily tour of the city. He stopped at a shrine to Bacchus and threw a coin into a fountain, leaning over as the god dictated to look at his reflection in the rippled surface.
In doing so, he reached underneath the rim and retrieved from beneath it a long, thin flake of birch bark, carved along its inner surface in Etruscan script. There are those among the gladiators who will dance to your tune. Gladius.
Pantera dropped the wood into the burning fire of a small shrine to Aphrodite on the next street corner and we watched it bloom with bright flames, so that the letters briefly stood out white against the charcoaled wood before it all fell to ash.
Moving on, he bought a barrel of wine stamped with an oak leaf and a lyre. Some distance away, he emptied it into a gutter, cracked open the barrel and read what was written beneath a coating of clear wax on the inner surface of one of the staves.
Antonius Primus leads three legions towards Rome. He has met no resistance. Six centurions who stood against him from within his own ranks are dead. The rest favoured Otho, and so hate Vitellius. They will stand firm.
The stave was broken into pieces and that, too, was burned before we moved into the more expensive parts of the Capitol hill, above the vast shrine to Isis that housed her principal priests.
There, a message spoken in low tones, through shrouding smoke, by a veiled woman told us that the sun in Egypt seared the sand and that those who wished for water must wait for the end of winter. As an afterthought, she reported that the lily continued to bloom through the summer and probably into next year.
‘Hypatia is in contact with Vespasian, who has the legions of Egypt ready to sail in the spring if we need them,’ Pantera said as we walked away. ‘We’ll need to secure the Misene fleet if they’re to land safely. And Titus is still in love with Berenice, who was a queen in Judaea.’
We absorbed this, Felix and I, and stored it for future reference. It came from you, didn’t it? You are Hypatia? We didn’t understand half of it and told none of it to anybody.
At the foot of the hill Pantera received from a particular date-seller a pebble of fired clay the exact shape, size and colour of a date, which, when either end was twisted, opened to show a hollow core containing a brief message in a cipher that took him nearly an hour to translate.
Written out, it said, The marines at Misene are ripe for the picking. Speak to these men. A list of ten names was added.
At an ostler, he paid for the keep of a horse that did not exist and received a message in a sealed pack.
Three streets away from the stables, Pantera examined the packaging. The heart of the wax seal contained a single black horse hair which proved, on close examination, to be unbroken. On the seal’s surface was the imprint of a galley under full sail: Marc Antony’s sign. Within was a simple uncoded note.
Antonius Primus has stopped at Verona and is making camp. The people of the countryside fear the coming war.
Returning to the market, Pantera bought paper, wrote a reply, folded the paper across and across and slid his knife blade along the folds to divide it into four pieces. Each was bound into a new package, identical to the original.
Back at the ostler, one package was handed back as if it were the first one, unopened, to be sent back to the sender; the seal was the same, but with a new hair set in the centre. It was from Felix, who had the finest, palest hair of us all; only if you knew what to look for would you have seen the difference.
Later, at the big, busy livestock market by the Tiber, an ox-cart drover, a muleteer and a travelling bladesmith each accepted a silver coin to deliver their packages unbroken. With the silver coin went a phrase: ‘It is many years since Antony lost at Actium. May there be many more before such a battle comes again.’
Thus, simply, was Pantera’s reincarnation of the Antonine messenger service ordered. The men were dour, closed-faced individuals; I wouldn’t have picked them out of a crowd, but Pantera had talked to them all in the course of the past month and they all worked for him with a devotion as great as any of us.
Felix and I held back when he spoke to them; it wasn’t that he didn’t trust us, but we all knew that Lucius was becoming more desperate by the day and that if one of us was taken alive, it was better for everyone if whoever was taken didn’t know the details of the men Pantera had sought out.
What that means is that while I could describe them for you, and where he met them, I couldn’t tell you their names, or what they were paid, or whom they delivered to.
Were we watched? Of course we were. The silver-boys followed us everywhere and Pantera did nothing to lose them, at least not while we went about our daily message round. If one of them had chosen to betray him, they could have done so. But he wasn’t arrested, which means they didn’t, right?
In the mid-afternoon, after one such conversation, Pantera said to Felix, ‘It might be that there is no bear hunting the streets tonight.’
‘Trabo is taken?’ We knew he was the bear, you see.
Pantera shook his head. ‘No, but he may be occupied elsewhere. Still, it would be unfortunate if the Guard were to be spared, don’t you think? If two or three of them were to die, marked by the bear, it would keep them on their toes. Make sure you are not seen.’
‘Of course not.’ Felix, who lived to kill, grinned like a child who had expected hard labour and instead had been sent to play in the fields. He left us, quietly, unobtrusively, cheerfully.
Pantera sent me back to the Inn of the Crossed Spears with orders to keep an eye out for Trabo and to protect him if he needed it. I did as I was bid, but Trabo didn’t come there that night, and, for all that there were so
many Guards obviously waiting for him, there was no violence to speak of.
They hadn’t laid a finger on him since July and they showed no sign of getting any closer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rome, the ides of September AD 69
Geminus
YES, WELL, THAT wasn’t for want of trying, was it?
You have to understand that the best part of July and all of August passed in what felt like a flurry of activity during which, in fact, we achieved precisely nothing.
After that first day’s near misses, we were back to relying on informers, and, as I said before, if you offer a fortune for a sighting of someone who can change his appearance more or less at will, a lot of people will discover they have seen someone who must be him.
For the first four or five days after that first street fight, Juvens and I spent half of each day interviewing men, women and children who charged us handsomely for their dross, then rushing about the city following their lies. Eventually, Lucius lost his temper, and had the latest two beaten until they confessed that they’d fabricated their evidence. Then he had their hands cut off, saying they had attempted to rob the treasury which was a tenuous extension of the truth if ever we heard one.
One of them died as the executioners tried to cauterize the stumps. The other one was sent home with his hands in a sack about his neck and word soon got round that making things up was unwise. After that, the flow of information dried to a dribble, but it was coming in then from Lucius’ sources in the city. He spent a lot of his time studying the papers Nero had left that described Seneca’s network.
You wouldn’t have thought Nero was a fastidious man, or prone to extensive record-keeping, but his notes were surprisingly full and Seneca had clearly been something of a personal obsession. There was more detail of his agents, his network, his ciphers and codes than any one man should have possessed and Lucius was like a pig in an acorn field; he could barely believe his luck. He thought if he read it all he’d be able to build his own network in a far shorter time, and pretty soon he set about doing exactly that.
He found men he could trust and paid them good silver and it began to yield results. Near the end of August, we heard that Pantera was using the guise of a Berber cripple. We scoured the city for Berber cripples and found a few but none of them was him. I think we might have got close once or twice, but always the news we received was that little bit too late, or was mildly ambiguous, or sometimes turned out to be just plain wrong, and on those occasions the fact that we’d rushed halfway up the Esquiline to a particular tavern at a particular time of day probably helped Pantera to work out who it was that was feeding us the information. It didn’t make any material difference, anyway; we still wasted weeks chasing down cold trails with no sign of that changing.
Added to that, whoever was slaughtering the Guard carried on whittling away at our men until they wouldn’t leave the barracks after dark unless we ordered them and then never in groups of less than eight. We had to hire in whores and then ration them and then deal with the resulting fights. The whole summer was a nightmare, really.
September fell on us like a winter tree.
One day it was August, and my worst problem was the nightly predations on the Guard and the frantic rumours that arose from them, and the next it was the first of September, which was the emperor’s birthday with all the havoc that entailed.
It brought Vitellius back from the southern hills whither he had gone to escape the heat and smells of the city in summer. That much was good: if the people had not quite forgotten they had an emperor, they were forgetting that his name was Aulus Vitellius, not Lucius. So he came back for a day of processions and fanfares and pomp and majesty … and feasting. So much feasting.
Afterwards, the rumour was that Vitellius spent his life feasting at other men’s expense when in truth it was only this one birthday, which spread out over the ensuing days like a fat man on a bath bench, so great was the number of senators desperate to show their loyalty to their emperor.
There were over a dozen of them, each anxious to put on a greater show of wealth and extravagance than his predecessor, each eager to find a new dish that might delight the tongue of so fine a connoisseur as this man who had fallen on to the throne and did not quite know how to hold it.
Thus Vitellius, who actually preferred plain fare but had not the strength to say so, was subjected to goose liver and lark’s tongue pâté, to stuffed dormice, to whole roasted ostriches, bathed in many-flavoured sauces.
Quinctillius Atticus paid a fortune for a pool to be built in his dining room within which live carp swam, so the emperor could choose the best for himself as it passed under his nose: his steward practised catching the things for half a month beforehand and still failed on the day, the fish having become more adept at hiding than he had at netting them.
Suetonius Mellos went one better and brought in a dolphin from the sea, while Titus Calpurnius bought a black and white striped kind of wild horse from Africa that killed three of his men before they could kill it, and when the survivors had done so they found it a rickle of bones, so that the cook had to kill a mule and substitute its flesh for the other. Everybody was agreed, thereafter, that neither mule nor zebra, however finely roasted, was fit food for an emperor, but the striped hide was worth its weight in gold.
The grim marathon of eating, vomiting and eating again came to an end, and with it, to our great relief, the flood of Guards that had been required to man the streets to ensure the emperor’s safety. Every Guard in the newly made cohorts who was fit to stand had been ordered out during those three days. Nineteen of them had not come back alive.
The bodies had been left openly displayed around the city, rarely in the place where they had been killed. All bore the now familiar marks of the bear-man who was supposed to be ravaging them.
But – finally! – their killer had made a mistake, a series of mistakes, really, and we were on to him.
Over the course of the past half-month, three men had escaped his attacks. Each of them had provided us with a description of a bearded man with sandy hair and light eyes.
And one of them had said, ‘If you shaved his beard off, it was Trabo. I’m sure of it.’
Trabo? Trabo! Of course, it made complete sense, and asked the same question the other two had agreed: yes, it could have been Trabo. Yes, if pushed, they would be sure. Juvens was beside himself with joy. A pale-bearded, big-built man is not that hard to find, even in a city the size of Rome.
It had taken us a few days, but by the ides of September we knew his routines. A dozen men of the Guard were watching the Inn of the Crossed Spears, with orders to send a runner to me and Juvens as soon as Trabo appeared. We weren’t expecting him to head for the inn until late in the evening, and so at dawn I was in the main parade ground, where Clodius Icelus, a Guard in my cohort, was being flogged for repeating one of the many rumours about the killer.
He had ceased to scream, but the wet-iron taste of blood stained the air and the sound of his breathing was a ragged nightmare. I couldn’t walk away from it, any more than I could have walked away yesterday, the day before or any of the other days in the last two months when men had been flogged for rumour-mongering.
There were no bears in Rome, even before the recent revelations, I had been certain of that; no shapeshifting men hunting abroad as beasts at night; no deathly ghûls called forth from the deserts of the east by Vespasian’s necromancers. Vespasian was a man like any other, and I knew he could be beaten like any other; but not if the men who might have been doing the beating were talking themselves into defeat before ever they set foot on the battlefield.
They were scared, I accept that; they drew lots for what had once been routine night patrols of the city and had become instead a venture into a threat-filled nightmare, with strong odds that if you came back alive it was only because someone else you knew had died, messily.
Men gossiped under these circumstances; it was only natural. And it wa
s equally natural that the officers ordered them to be flogged, hoping for silence, knowing it wouldn’t come.
I watched the sun burn the morning’s haze off the city, let the slow silent blue of the sky still my wandering thoughts, and waited for it to end.
And then it was over. The unconscious Clodius was carried to the physicians who had the skills to keep him asleep for three days with serum of poppy and nightshade and then send him back to his unit. Unless he caught blood fever and died, there was every chance he’d be on duty again before the next full moon, but he’d be left behind when the rest of his unit marched out to meet Vespasian’s legions.
They were due to leave at noon, and they weren’t any happier about that than they had been about the night patrols of a city that had become so exceptionally dangerous. Because this was the truth we all faced: Antonius Primus’ armies had stepped on to Italian soil earlier in the month after a string of martial victories over pro-Vitellian forces.
At forty-nine, Primus was nearly twice Caecina’s age, and could not have hoped to inherit the empire from his chosen lord: if nothing else, we all knew that Vespasian had two sons to inherit after him. But you could smell the raw stench of ambition even down the full length of Italy, and Antonius Primus, legate of the VIIth Galbania, self-appointed leader of Balkan legions, reeked of it.
In Vespasian’s name, he was leading five legions toward Rome, plus their auxiliaries, cavalry and anyone else who had tagged along hoping to profit from the carnage. Against them, Vitellius was sending detachments from eight legions, plus cavalry and auxiliary. Over half of the forty thousand men who had marched into Rome in the late spring were marching out again and the Roman people had lined the routes to cheer them on their way with a patriotic fervour that was only partly feigned: their daily prayers were that Rome might not remain a military garrison for the rest of their lives, and the news that men were soon to march out in large numbers had sparked something close to holiday fervour.