by M C Scott
‘Lord.’ Drusus bowed. His voice was a deep, chest-churning growl. ‘General Juvens wishes to be admitted with all haste.’
‘Juvens? Here? Why?’ Even Vitellius, with his infantile understanding of strategy, knew that Juvens would not have been there if his men had won; not, at least, without sending word back to Rome first. ‘What’s happened?’
Behind us, I felt the lady empress Sextilia rise from her couch. It seemed likely she was about to speak. Swiftly, I said, ‘Perhaps we may have Juvens admitted, and ask him ourselves?’
Vitellius flashed me a look of undiluted gratitude. ‘Of course. Send him in.’
Drusus bowed himself out.
And so we saw him, in all his misery. My friend, the bright, cheerful, playboy Juvens, was gone. In his place was this grey-faced officer, who fell to his knees at the emperor’s feet.
‘Juvens, rise, man. You don’t need to kneel here.’
The emperor was a kind man; nobody has ever said otherwise. With his own hand, he raised Juvens up, which was when we all noticed the bag, more of a sack, really, he was holding. A faint sweet-vomit stench of decay hung about it that made my skin crawl.
I said, ‘Tell us quickly. It won’t get better by stepping around it.’
‘Have you a plate? A bowl?’
With no forethought, I swept the olives from a silver dish on the nearby table and thrust it at him.
‘Here.’
A month ago, Juvens would have raised his brow just barely and we’d have shared a private joke about the emperor’s silver olive bowls. The Juvens of now took it without looking, knelt once more, and solemnly opened the neck of his sack.
‘Antonius Primus ordered him killed,’ he said, ‘to prove to my men that he was dead, that he wasn’t coming with legions from Gaul to save them. That was when we lost.’
‘Killed whom?’
For a dizzying moment, I thought Lucius was dead, but Lucius wasn’t in Gaul and nobody had ever thought he might be. Valens, though … Valens, whom Antonius Primus had paraded before his own troops, but couldn’t parade before the enemy, in case they mounted an attack and freed him …
Juvens nodded, as if I had said the name aloud. ‘They sent us his head while it was still warm. His eyes were still open. We thought he might speak to us.’
His voice was breaking. He rolled the contents of his sack on to the platter, where, by obliging chance, the neck sat in the depths of the bowl and the face stared up at us: Valens. Dead these three days, by the look of him.
Vitellius was sick.
Drusus, the giant German, whipped a vessel of sorts – a vase? I don’t know – in front of his emperor just as Vitellius heaved out a great, rancid arc of vomit. Drusus caught it deftly, and handed his lord a dampened, rose-scented towel with which to wipe his lips, his sweating brow, his hands.
Valens stared up at us, gape-mouthed, his eyelids sewn shut by an unsteady hand with black silk: a row of unstable exclamations that signalled the end of his life.
It signalled more than that for the emperor: last January, Valens was the man who had persuaded him that he could be more than simply a legionary legate in Germany.
‘This is barbaric!’ Vitellius was still faintly green around the mouth. The rest of him was grey. ‘We are Roman! We don’t butcher our officers.’
‘We do if it prevents further bloodshed,’ Juvens said. ‘The men had convinced themselves that Valens had escaped capture and was bringing up the legions from Gaul, to assault the Vitellian forces from behind. Antonius Primus swore it wasn’t true. He had the living Valens paraded in front of us but he could not bring him close enough for the men to see him clearly in case they tried to free him. And so our men shouted that he was an impostor and they would kill him, too, when they advanced. When he had no other way to convince them, Antonius Primus had his head struck from his shoulders and carried to us on a pole. Then the men believed him.’
‘Did they surrender?’
‘They were permitted to exit the town with their weapons, and not forced under the yoke. They have been sent north, to the German border. Technically, they are not defeated, they merely changed allegiance. But yes, they surrendered.’
‘You swore you would die with them.’
The empress Sextilia Augusta’s voice would have skewered a lesser man, but Juvens was bred for this kind of encounter.
He dipped his most formal bow. ‘My lady Augusta, Antonius Primus gave me that option. He said my head could join Valens’ in the sack, or I could bring it to you, with his message. I thought of someone else bringing both heads into your royal presence and it seemed … more honourable to come myself. If you wish me to die now, I will do so, with great pleasure. I will find it hard to live longer with the disgrace of this.’
With no great drama, Juvens stepped apart from us and addressed Drusus. ‘I would fall on my sword, but you have taken it from me. If I may have it back?’
‘No!’
Vitellius’ balled fist slammed on the wall. Now, too late, he was finding his strength as a man.
‘Drusus, I forbid it. No man will die needlessly on my behalf. Too many have done so already. Otho understood, didn’t he, when he killed himself, that too many good men die, and it is not possible to go on in the pretence of ruling?’
A taken breath behind me was silenced by a peremptory sweep of the imperial hand. ‘No, Mother, you will not speak. I am your emperor and I command it. And don’t wail at me, either. If you wish to leave the room, you may do so.’
She went! By Jupiter, Minerva and Juno, the empress snapped a finger to summon her ladies to follow, and was gone.
With a short, sharp, satisfied smile, gone before it was truly there, Vitellius turned back to Juvens. ‘Antonius Primus sent you with a message. Give it to me now, and then you may go with Geminus and plan for the defence of the city.’
Juvens paled, but he was a man of astonishing courage. With his gaze focused on the far wall, he said, clearly, ‘Antonius Primus, commander of the forces loyal to Vespasian, offers his respectful request that you enter into immediate negotiations with Titus Flavius Sabinus, brother to the future emperor, with respect to the details of your abdication.’
‘What details? What abdication?’
‘Perhaps the one I am empowered to discuss?’ said Titus Flavius Sabinus, prefect of the city, quietly from the doorway. ‘If I may be permitted to enter?’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Rome, 17 December AD 69
Caenis
A DAY WAS lost in the discussions between Vitellius and Sabinus without their reaching any satisfactory conclusion.
On the morning of the seventeenth, Sabinus went to meet the emperor once again. On this occasion, the designated place was the temple of Apollo next to the palace and the whole of Rome knew they were there to discuss Vitellius’ abdication. Present were two men of good character to ensure that the agreements reached were fair and reasonable.
Jocasta and I remained in my house together. We talked of small things; of good wine, of the ways to make a pastry with spiced raisins at its heart; of our plans for Saturnalia, nearly upon us, when masters traded places with their slaves, and mistresses served the servants.
Matthias would not hear of such a thing. Jocasta had an old serving woman who felt the same. For both of them, the holiday was no different from any other day. We talked of how things had been in our childhoods. We talked of nothing at all.
On hearing a knock at the door, we both rose, swiftly.
Matthias, answering, padded white-faced from the door.
‘My lady, it is the lady empress Sextilia Augusta, mother to—’
‘She knows to whom I am mother. The entire world knows to whom I am mother. The entire world shares my shame.’
The empress’s voice was sharp and hard; fingernails dragged over fractured glass. The face was sharp and hard to go with it, although less ostentatious than one might have imagined.
I must have seen the lady Sextilia at s
ome point when she was merely mother to two middle-ranking generals, but I cannot recall the event. I had seen her more recently, of course, but only ever entering her litter, and then only from a distance, when she was draped in porphyry silk, with a diadem on her high, tight headpiece.
Here and now, she was dressed in sober white, as if for mourning, with only a silver ring around her perfect, brush-stiff silver hair. She looked haggard and old and tired.
She said, ‘Lady Caenis, forgive my intrusion, but I have come to buy the services of the lady Jocasta.’
‘Buy them?’
I didn’t understand. And then I did, or thought so.
‘What services?’ Jocasta asked, more slowly.
‘Those you used with such effect against Valens. Do I look a complete idiot? Men don’t listen to the bathing-room rumours, or if they do, their talk is all of battles and whores and children got out of wedlock on hidden mistresses. Ours is of each other, and our skills. You are a poisoner. I would buy from you some poison.’
‘Why?’ Jocasta looked suddenly guilty, like a young Vestal caught in the act of fornication, for which the penalty was death.
She had not denied the old woman’s accusations, if they were accusations. They sounded more like compliments; in the upturned world Rome had become, nothing was impossible.
‘Because of my two sons, the wrong one inherited the throne. Or perhaps neither son was worthy. Lucius has allowed himself to be lured south on a fool’s errand, taking with him more men than Rome can afford to lose. And he has left behind the spineless fool I gave birth to first, may the gods curse the day of his creation.’
‘My lady, Vitellius is a good man. He—’
‘He is a weak and vacillating idiot. If he were not reminded moment by moment by his men that he is emperor, he would forget. And he thinks he will be allowed to abdicate!’
I said, ‘My lady, he will. Of that I am certain.’
‘By Sabinus, yes, but Sabinus is as weak as he is. You should see them, two weak men together, each trying not to damage the pride of the other by stating clearly what must be said. My son is finished. He can go now on the pretext of abdication and await Antonius Primus’ mercy, or he can cling on a few days longer, and die at the hands of the Guards.’
‘Antonius Primus will not be emperor, lady. Vespasian will honour any agreement made in his name.’
‘Ha!’ The old crow’s laugh was hoarse and full of acid. ‘Vespasian is in Egypt. He will be here when? Next September? July if he hurries? And in the time before that, who will rule Rome? Antonius Primus or Mucianus and his train of catamites. I do not expect mercy from either man; each knows his duty. They will do what must be done so Vespasian can rule in benevolence. I choose to make my own fate. I have had a long life and a good one and it is time for it to end. And so I ask of the lady Jocasta that she sell me that which will bring about my demise most swiftly. I have gold.’ The skin was fine as paper on her hands, bare covering to the knotted old-blue veins. She wrested two gold coins from her purse. Neither showed her son on the face.
‘No, lady.’ Jocasta’s hand on hers was white, with the knuckles green. ‘I will take no money. But I will ask that you are sure of what you do, and that you tell no one else. My reputation may not rely on much, but it relies on not being known as the poisoner of an empress. Mucianus would know how to deal with that, too.’
‘That is your price?’
‘Your word that you will tell no one that this is your choice, not the hand of fate. Yes, that is my price. I trust your honour.’
‘Which is more than my son does.’ She was smiling, archly and with anger in her eyes, but it was more of a smile than I could have summoned in like circumstances. ‘You have it here? What I need?’
‘No, lady, but I will bring it to you tonight, if I have your word that I may safely do so.’
‘Oh, you have my word,’ said the lady empress of Rome, with hollow emphasis. ‘Nothing will keep me in my shame and you are my clear exit. I will leave now.’
She gave a bow of her head, such as the men do. ‘Don’t escort me. I can find the door, and it is best if few see us together. Sabinus is returning even as we speak. You will find him in choleric mood, I fear. But he will get his way. Vitellius has never learned how to say no to anyone.’
Later: Sabinus home in foul mood.
‘He says he’ll go tomorrow as long as the Guard does not dissuade him tonight. I offered him a hundred million sesterces, a villa in Campania, all his slaves and freedmen with him, if he will only renounce any claim to the throne, and he wants to ask the permission of his Guardsmen!’
Sabinus had come to my house, and not alone. The two consuls suffect were with him: Quinctillius Atticus, who looked severely distracted: a man in love, or in lust, with the object of his desire too far away; and Caecilius Simplex, a man blighted with rat-like features who never looked anything other than avaricious.
Rome was buzzing. News of the emperor’s maybe-abdication had taken to the streets and run amok in the market places, the baths, the forum, the houses of the matrons and the equestrians, the inns and taverns of the freedmen and slaves; there was not a man, woman or silver-boy who did not know that by tomorrow they might well be ruled by a new emperor.
If the current emperor chose to leave them.
The men of power thought that he would. You could tell that by the fact that the two consuls, together with a delegation of twenty other senior senators, had openly walked past the Guards on watch outside my house, saluted them and instructed them to leave.
The Guards had duly walked away and now twenty-two of Rome’s civic leaders were cramped around the statues and four unadorned columns of my only public room. The place reeked of nervous sweat and wine-soured breath.
Fortified by their presence, Sabinus was at his most frus-tratedly choleric.
‘A hundred million sesterces! A man could drown in that much money. How much does he need, when nobody is ever going to visit him?’
‘None at all,’ I said. ‘Which is his problem. He wants to be liked, and if he abdicates his authority, he will be universally despised.’
Not least by his mother, although I didn’t say that. Her scent still hung in the room, not quite lost in the crush of sweating, middle-aged men with their paunches hidden in the folds of their togas and their nerves not hidden at all, or their excitement.
‘Vitellius is universally despised already,’ Quinctillius Atticus, the man famed for the carp pool he had had built in his dining room for the emperor’s birthday, dragged his mind back from the faraway landscape it had been enjoying for long enough to comment.
He was a solid man of middling height and he wore his senatorial dignity as armed men wear their weapons. This was not the first time he had made advances to Sabinus, but never before openly, in the face of the Guard.
If anyone was looking for a testament as to how fast Vitellius’ support was falling away, it was there, in the fact that this man, second in authority to the emperor, had chosen to be here with Sabinus, and not at the palace with Vitellius.
Atticus said, ‘We are on the brink of Saturnalia. If Antonius Primus continues to make progress, he could be on us before the festival’s end. Vitellius is no longer emperor in anything but name, and if my lord Sabinus, prefect of this city, cannot persuade him to leave by words alone, then he should rouse the Urban cohorts and the Watch, both of which are under his command, and assault the palace.’
‘Ha!’
Sabinus’ laugh chimed with Domitian’s. The boy had been out on one of his jaunts and, arriving to a full house, had slid in at the back of the group. I sent him warning glances: be careful; think before you speak.
He ignored me.
His voice, being higher, carried more clearly than his uncle’s. ‘The Urban cohorts were staffed by Vitellius when he took power; the men are from the same legions as the Guard. They may nominally give their oath to my uncle, but in practice they will be loyal to Vitellius.
; ‘The Watch, meanwhile, is a hopeless gaggle of retired men who train annually in fire-fighting and dream of long, lazy nights without work. It is worse to stage an assault that won’t work than to wait and let the threat of Antonius Primus and his legions do it for you.’
Speaking, he had moved to the centre of the room: younger son of the man they all now considered their emperor; the only one of the emperor’s sons resident in Rome.
After due pause, when he was sure he had the full attention of all those present, he said, ‘Uncle Sabinus, when did Vitellius say he would give his answer?’
‘Tonight. He will speak to the Guard on duty in the palace and tell them of his intention. If they agree – I say it again: he is asking their permission! The emperor is asking the permission of his Guards! – he will send me word of his intent.
‘Assuming he gains their agreement, he will walk to the forum in the morning, and tell the assembly of his decision to stand down. He will give his dagger to the consul Caecilius Simplex’ – Sabinus bowed to the rat-faced consul – ‘who will take it in the name of Vespasian. At the same time, those of us who are loyal to our new emperor shall gather at my house on the Quirinal, administer the oath to the Urban cohorts and the Watch, and then go together to the forum and thence to the palace, which we shall occupy in my brother’s name.’
‘If the Guard doesn’t stop you,’ said Quinctillius Atticus. ‘We still have no idea what they will do, and they could stop everything.’
‘They must not be allowed to. Where is—’ Surrounded by men he did not yet trust, Sabinus cut himself off. His gaze met mine and then Jocasta’s. ‘Our friend? The one who is recently returned to Rome? He will know how to contain the Guard.’
‘He might, if we knew where he was,’ Jocasta said. ‘But if he’s not with you, then we have no idea at all where he is.’
CHAPTER FIFTY
Rome, 17–18 December AD 69
Horus
SATURNALIA ONLY REALLY begins each year on the night of the seventeenth of December.