On Hadrian's Secret Service

by Gavin Chappell

  On Hadrian’s Secret Service

  Gavin Chappell

  Copyright © Gavin Chappell 2015

  Cover art by Medium69

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher and author, except where permitted by law.

  The right of Gavin Chappell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Map of Roman Britain by Notuncurious. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

  Published by Schlock! Publications 2015

  ISBN-13: 978-1511703383

  ISBN-10: 1511703385

  This book is a work of fiction and any similarities to actual persons and/or places are purely coincidental.

  Schlock! Publications

  www.schlock.co.uk

  In the same series:

  On Hadrian’s Secret Service

  Murder in Hadrian’s Villa

  The Hadrian Legacy

  Our Man in Alexandria

  The Games of Hadrian: The Gladiator Gambit

  The Games of Hadrian: The Archimedes Stratagem

  And by the same author:

  Crocodile and Leopard

  The Man Who Sold the Roman Empire

  The Blood Eagle

  Starkad the Viking

  Starkad the Outcast

  Starkad the Old

  Vikings—Voyage to the Edge of the World

  —1—

  Rome, AD 120

  Shadows were lengthening in the City, and the cries of the hawkers echoed back from marble pediments and Ionic columns, from temples and taverns and tenements, as the richly appointed litter was borne through the bustling streets. Inside it, Quintus Pompeius Falco sat back against the plump cushions, bracing himself against the bone jarring rattle as slaves hurriedly carried them towards the Esquiline Gate. As he did so, he listened absently to the anxieties of his stout wife, Sosia Polla, who sat discontentedly at his side.

  ‘… and I really have no idea if this gown I am wearing is at all suitable,’ she was saying, indicating her blue stola with a self-consciously elegant gesture. ‘We have never been invited to the new emperor’s villa before.’

  His imperial majesty Publius Aelius Hadrianus Augustus had decreed that all members of the Senate would celebrate his fourth year as Emperor with a banquet in his opulent new villa outside the City. Naturally Falco and his wife would be attending.

  ‘It’s only just been built, Sosia dear,’ Falco reminded his wife. ‘In fact, I believe construction is still going on in many parts of the grounds.’

  Sosia raised her eyebrows in horror. ‘You don’t mean that we’ve been invited to a building site by this… Greekling? How gauche.’ She made a moue of disgust.

  ‘Please don’t call the Emperor Hadrian a Greekling, dear,’ Falco reproved her sharply. ‘You never know who might be listening.’ Even in a litter, their words could be overheard by the wrong ears. It had happened before to other senators, with tragic, terminal results.

  ‘But that’s just it,’ Sosia said, reaching out to tweak Falco’s new beard resentfully. ‘I really do not know what is happening to Rome, what with all these Greek fashions springing up everywhere. Time was, Roman men went clean shaven, and didn’t wear beards fit to frighten Socrates. Besides, how am I to know what to wear? What on earth do Greek women wear to symposiums?’

  ‘Greek women aren’t invited to symposia,’ Falco teased her. ‘Not respectable ladies, that is. The new emperor…’

  ‘… is barely even a Roman!’ Sosia interrupted. ‘He was born in Hispania, my handmaidens tell me. I doubt he’d even seen the City before Trajan of Sacred Memory adopted him.’

  ‘Better that than that Rome should endure another civil war,’ Falco said with gruff complacency. ‘That’s what everyone said at the time.’ Everyone who still lived, he corrected himself. ‘Besides, Trajan also came from Hispania, and yet like the Emperor Hadrian he was a Roman citizen, and of Italian stock. Long ago Hadrian’s family moved to Hispania from Adria, on the Adriatic. Hence his name.’

  As they spoke, the sweating slaves negotiated them through the bustling suburban streets and out into the sun drenched open countryside beyond.

  ‘But all this pandering to Greek customs and Greek learning,’ Sosia went on censoriously. ‘It’s un-Roman. If the Greeks were as wonderful as everyone keeps saying, why is it that we rule over them? Answer me that.’

  ‘Why indeed?’ said Falco. He affected boredom, although he too had his doubts regarding Emperor Hadrian. Not so much his concessions to Greek fashions and philosophy so much as the fact that his Praetorian Prefect had four senators of consular rank killed the year he came to power—without trial—on suspicion of conspiracy, before Hadrian had even set foot in Rome as emperor. Falco wasn’t the only senator to disapprove of this turn of events.

  Sosia came from an old patrician family that had found itself on the wrong side in that terrible period of civil war that ended when Augustus became emperor. They liked to believe themselves to be the last true Romans still surviving into a latter age. Of course, this had never stopped them from accepting consulates from the emperors, or other important posts in the senate. Falco’s own family, on the other hand, came from relatively obscure origins in the East. Still, there were ways in which he sympathised with what she had to say, even if he wished she wouldn’t say it in public.

  ‘Besides, who was the last emperor to admire the Greeks?’ she added. ‘Nero! And look how he ended up! A simply dreadful year of anarchy after he committed suicide.’

  She was right, of course. When Falco was a young man, the Greeks had been a notorious joke in Rome and the provinces. Always on the make, always looking for new ways to cheat Roman citizens—that’s when they weren’t importing the latest absurd new religions from the East. Most of the Greeks Falco had known during his career had been Imperial freedmen, all oiled ringlets and studied superciliousness. He could think of only one Greek whose winsome ways and lithe body had gained his approval.

  And he had no real desire to attend a banquet thrown by a Greek loving Spaniard, doubtless attended by fawning senators who aped the emperor’s outlandish manners in order to secure his approval. Especially not when he was compelled, by the latest imperial edict, to wear a heavy woollen toga that made him itch and brought him out in a rash—oh, the sacrifices one had to make as a public official! But there was a very important reason why he had to see the emperor in his villa.

  ‘I can hardly set out for my new posting in Britain without popping in on his imperial majesty, now can I?’ he told Sosia jovially.

  Sosia shuddered. ‘I cannot imagine what wrong you have done to be appointed provincial governor of Britain. That remote island at the edge of the world is notorious for its rebellions, and this latest turmoil is no better than any others.’

  Word of unsettled conditions in that most northerly of provinces had been filtering down to Rome for some time now. The current provincial governor’s term of office was drawing to its close, and Falco had an intimation that he must be very glad to be moving on. But should he himself be glad to be replacing the man?

  ‘I shan’t take you with me, or the children either,’ Falco reassured her, touching her gently on the arm. ‘The emperor trusts me to put down the trouble among the tribes, that’s all. You remember I’ve spent some time on the Danube frontier, so I’m no stranger to the edges of civilisation. Men close to him have spoken in my favour, praised me to him.’

 
; Privately he wondered if that was right. If his allies had indeed favoured him, surely they would have secured him a cushier post. Yes, the tribulations inherent in a lifetime of selfless public service!

  ‘You certainly won’t drag me or the boys to Britain,’ Sosia replied, outraged by the very idea. ‘But you’re not worried about making me a widow, or them fatherless. Besides,’—her dark eyes narrowed—‘I know full well who you will take with you. Your freedwoman, the ghastly little trollop! She’s a Greek herself, isn’t she?’

  Her olive face was pale in the gloom of the litter. Pale with fury. As furious as she ever was when the subject of Medea came up. The former slave performed many services for Falco, and she would be much more convenient on campaign amongst the barbarians than his refined, elegant Roman wife. More decorative too, though he kept that thought very much to himself.

  Outside the sacred precincts of Rome, they disembarked from the litter and entered a waiting carriage that would whisk them away to the emperor’s villa. Silence hung over husband and wife as the slave who drove it whipped up the horses, and as they settled in in the interior, hoofsteps began to clatter on the worn paving stones of the Tiburtine Way. They spent the rest of the journey to Hadrian’s Villa in much the same icy hush.

  About twenty five miles from Rome, just outside the town of Tibur[1], the slave turned off the road and guided the carriage down a long drive lined with laurels. This led through the fields in the direction of Hadrian’s Villa. The great house itself nestled indolently amid groves of laurels and neatly cropped lawns on the slopes of the Tiburtine hills.

  Sosia twitched back the curtain and gazed in disapproval at the opulent gardens and the half seen temples and colonnades which covered acres of country. Birds soared through the evening blue skies, twittering swifts hastening back to their nests. ‘It is a building site after all,’ she confirmed gloomily to her own satisfied displeasure.

  Falco caught the scent of box and cypress mingled with stone dust, heard the exotic cry of peacocks undercut by the distant clink-cling-clink of hammer on stone. In many places, Hadrian’s walls were still under construction. It seemed to Falco that their builder was still entrenching himself in his newly acquired empire.

  ‘His imperial majesty has only recently begun work on his villa,’ he reminded his wife. ‘It is a work in progress, and no less impressive for all that. They say that when it is finished, the gardens will represent the entire known world, and will include places such as the Lyceum, the Academy, and the Prytaneum of Athens, the Canopus of Lower Egypt, and the Vale of Tempe.’ He laughed. ‘I have even heard it said that, in order not to omit anything, he is making himself a Hades.’

  ‘He sees himself as a god,’ Sosia hissed. ‘A Greek god, too! One of those shockingly libidinous characters from Homer…’

  Over her disapproving shoulder, Falco gazed through the opening in the curtains. As the slave drove them along a gravel track, temples and theatres, libraries and palaces could be seen amidst the immaculate lawns, the neatly clipped hedges and laurel groves. As Sosia had indicated, many of these scaffold-surrounded buildings were indeed still under construction.

  The villa had originally been the property of the Emperor Hadrian’s wife, Sabina, who had been ward and kinswoman of the former Emperor Trajan, and it had included a traditional old Roman villa. Falco saw no sign of the latter amongst so many buildings of Greek and Egyptian architecture.

  At last they came out into a large plaza surrounded by colonnades and porticoes. It was taken up chiefly by a long, still, rectangular pool of greenish water, lined with statues. Here they were met by a flustered looking major domo who directed them to the nearby baths, where he encouraged them to unwind and wash the dust of the journey from their tired limbs. To Sosia’s genuine delight, there was a separate bath house for women.

  Falco turned to dismiss the slave who had driven the carriage only to discover that he had vanished. He stared around him in puzzlement. Here they were in the middle of a plaza, and he could see no sign of his slave, or the carriage either! The fellow must have made himself scarce with more dexterity than was customary for him. Falco might consider commending him for his speed and efficiency when he next saw him—assuming he hadn’t been spirited away to the Underworld for his many sins. He chuckled to himself.

  Two slave girls had already escorted Sosia into the women’s bath house. Dismissing the mystery of the vanishing slave for the moment, he allowed the major domo to lead him into the men’s baths.

  In the tepidarium, he encountered two good friends, Rufinus Crassus and Julius Ursus Servianus, who he knew of old from the Senate.

  ‘Falco!’ Rufinus greeted him as he joined them lounging naked in the warmth of the room, preparing to take a hot bath in the caldarium. Rufinus was a relatively young man, in his late twenties, who could raise no more than a fuzz of beard in fashionable imitation of his emperor, although his physique was still impressive. He regarded his fellow senator with dancing eyes. ‘You’ve also come to see his imperial majesty, I take it?’

  ‘I hear you got that posting in Britain, old man,’ added Ursus Servianus gruffly, shaking his head. Another Spaniard, Ursus Servianus was brother in law of the emperor himself. He was much older than Rufinus, and unlike most senators this summer—not to mention, unlike his brother in law—he had a traditional Roman hairstyle, and his lean, cadaverous face was clean shaven. ‘A bad business, what’s going on up amidst the heather. I was posted there as a young tribune, you know, not long after the Boudicca affair.’ He shook his head. ‘They’ll make a man of you, those blue arsed savages, if it’s the last thing they do.’

  ‘You’re the right man for the job, Falco,’ said Rufinus soothingly.

  ‘I’m more nervous about the imperial banquet,’ Falco joked.

  He’d seen active service before, of course, he was no stranger to war. He had been on the Danube with Trajan, and more recently he had served as provincial governor in the frontier province of Lower Moesia. The Britons didn’t scare him. He’d fought Dacians—not to mention the wild Sarmatian nomads who had swept in from the steppes to supplant the Dacians after the latter’s wholesale extermination. ‘What will we be eating?’ he added. ‘The finest Greek cuisine, eh?’ He made a noise of disgust.

  The two senators exchanged wary glances. ‘We’ll certainly have a lot to talk about after the meal,’ Rufinus observed. ‘Now let us see what the new emperor’s steam bath is like.’

  As soon as their ablutions were complete, they went to join their respective wives, and not long afterwards they and several other senatorial couples who had appeared from the gardens were all announced into the Serapeum, the great domed temple that opened out onto the far end of the great pool. Falco gathered that it doubled as the imperial banqueting hall.

  ‘Have you seen the slave?’ Sosia asked him, looking troubled as she often was about domestic matters. ‘After a good long soak I came out to give him his orders and he had vanished, carriage and all. Has he run away?’ Her voice held an anxious note. Being unable to control one’s slaves led to one being talked about.

  ‘Surely not,’ Falco reassured her. ‘He won’t get far in the imperial villa! The Praetorian guards will soon feel his collar if he wanders around the grounds without permission. Don’t make a fuss, my dear,’ he went on in an undertone, ‘this is an important occasion.’ He shrugged. ‘I think he must have been shown to the slave barracks. He did seem to vanish, it’s true…’ he added with a laugh.

  His words were cut off as the major domo boomed out, ‘Quintus Pompeius Falco, senator; his wife Sosia Polla!’

  They swept into the great marble hall, which was already thronged with toga clad senators and their stylish wives. Beneath the great monumental dome, the temple was a vast, echoing space, nowhere near as large but every bit as impressive as Falco remembered the Pantheon back in Rome, before the recent fire had transformed it into a fire blackened ruin[2]. Dwarfed by its immensity, the senators and wives stood in little knots
, talking quietly. It seemed that the latest parties were the last to arrive.

  A cool breeze drifted in from the plaza. On the far side was a dais on which stood two Egyptian columns and an image of the god Serapis. In the middle, a fountain poured water into a tank from which a channel led into the great pool outside, and over it all loomed a bust of the goddess Isis.

  Sosia drew a little closer. ‘Egyptian gods,’ she emphasised with distaste. ‘Nothing Roman here but we guests, it seems, and the good Latin soil.’ Falco hushed her sharply.

  Out from behind the pillars strode a cavalcade of Nubian slaves dressed in Egyptian loincloths and headdresses. Forming two lines they blew a loud brassy blast on trumpets. Shortly afterwards a figure appeared from the shadows on the dais, a tall, bearded man, elegant in appearance and strongly built. Falco was relieved to see that rather than dressing as an Egyptian pharaoh or a Greek philosopher, the Emperor Hadrian wore a simple woollen toga with a thick purple stripe, identical to those worn by all the senators gathered in the room. Uncomfortable, in this weather, but at least it was solidly traditional.

  ‘Welcome, friends, by Hercules welcome!’ The emperor boomed a greeting to the guests. ‘Welcome to my humble little villa! How glad I am that you’ve all agreed to celebrate the passing of the fourth year of my term in office.’ Hadrian spoke of his position as if he was nothing more than a publically elected magistrate, rather than the most powerful man in the known world.

  ‘They tell me he really wears that notorious beard to cover up some quite awful facial blemishes,’ Sosia whispered spitefully in Falco’s ear as groups of people began to drift up and greet the emperor. ‘Nothing to do with admiring the Greeks. It’s simply a cover. Quite literally!’

  Smiling rigidly at a passing couple, the current quaestor and his blowsy wife, Falco steered his wife over towards a great semi-circular couch overlooking the tank of water, where they could recline while waiting for their meal.

  ‘That’s enough, dear,’ he told her firmly.