The Last Hour: Relentless, brutal, brilliant. 24 hours in Ancient Rome

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘I know where to find you.’

  Ballista clambered out. Every inch of him was hurting. His ribs had stiffened, and every movement again brought a stab of pain.

  The fisherman raised a hand in valediction, and pushed off.

  A man consumed by such vitriolic bitterness could not be trusted. Quite likely he would keep the ring, and raise the alarm in the hope of a reward. He needed watching.

  Ballista was bone tired, and tempted just to sit down on the damp steps. But the City Watch patrolled this side of the river too. He walked up to the embankment, and leant against a corner where a street ran inland. From here he could see the river, and three avenues of approach. A fundamental rule of warfare was to ensure you had a line of retreat.

  The old fisherman did not rush to raise the alarm. He skulled the boat out a way, then lit the lamp, and waited. When he thought the light would have attracted fish, he stood. The boat drifted downstream. With the dexterity of endless repetition, he cast a net. In the gloom, the water flecked white where it landed. The weights on the sides sank. After a few moments, he hauled it in with smooth motions. Fish flapped in its coils. He tipped them into the bottom of the boat.

  Cast your net onto the waters. Ballista could not remember where the line was from. Was it a Christian saying? What was the result? Would a beneficent god provide? Probably only if you had faith.

  The old man had shifted to another spot, but continued his fishing.

  Ballista still watched the man, but his mind moved elsewhere. To get to Gallienus, he had to safely negotiate the streets of Rome. With both the City Watch and the knifemen from the Mausoleum searching for him, he could not blunder about like a peasant newly arrived from the backwoods. His route needed planning with care. He knew parts of the city like he knew the back of his hand: his objective, the Palatine, and away to the south-east, the Gardens of Dolabella,, and the area around the House of Volcatius, where his family waited. The Praetorian Camp, and parts of the Campus Martius, were familiar. As a youth, he had spent much time hanging around here, at the stables of the Circus Factions, where he had got the fisherman to drop him. The problem was the sheer size of Rome. Certain districts were familiar, but he found it hard to stitch them together into a coherent whole.

  Of course he had seen the famous map. It was in the Forum of Peace. He closed his eyes, and imagined a visit. He walked along the portico, the flower beds to his left, the pink marble columns and the statues on his right. He went into the office of the Prefect of the City, and there on the right hand wall was the map. Immense and detailed, the river running through it, like cursive script. The buildings were picked out with red paint against the marble. The map was claimed to show every temple and warehouse, street and alleyway, shop, courtyard, baths, and residence in the city. All to no purpose. It was too immense, too detailed, set too high to study. The map was utterly unusable.

  And it was upside down. South was at the top. It did not fit Ballista’s mental map of the world. When he had travelled south as a hostage, he had gone down into the empire. Arbitrary though they were, the things you grew up with – say reading from left to right – became the correct and natural way, the only acceptable way. Perhaps that would not be a thought welcomed by the old fisherman.

  This was getting him nowhere. Ballista opened his eyes, checked that no one was approaching, and picked out where the old man on the river was fishing. He needed to concentrate, find a simple path, stick to well known landmarks.

  If he struck inland, across the southern end of the Campus Martius, he should find the Theatre of Balbus, reach the Forum of Trajan, and so from there to the Palatine. As he ran through the itinerary, he realised its impossibility.

  The headquarters of the City Watch was in a portico opening off the Theatre of Balbus. Scarpio would not have to hunt for him, Ballista would have delivered himself up, neatly wrapped, like a present at New Year. Even if he got past the Theatre of Balbus, or went another way, after dark the Forum and paths up to the Palatine would be almost deserted. Both Scarpio and the leader of the knifemen at the Mausoleum must know where he would be headed. The handful of approaches to the Palace would be closely watched. Alone, at night, Ballista would be intercepted before he got to Gallienus. He needed help, men at his back.

  Who could he trust? Maximus and Tarchon, of course, Grim and Rikiar as well, but they were out of reach at the House of Volcatius. The German Guard were further away still in the Gardens of Dolabella. His own former secretary, Demetrius, was now intimate with Gallienus, and thus already in the Palace. Over long years of service, Ballista had become friends with several fellow army officers. Castricius, Aurelian and Rutilus were with the forces gathered around Milan. Tacitus was on his estates somewhere up near the Danube. Ballista cudgelled his brain: a reliable army officer stationed in Rome, preferably one of the protectores, Gallienus’ trusted inner circle.

  The broad, ruddy face of Volusianus, the senior Praetorian Prefect, suddenly came to mind. The ex-trooper Volusianus had risen from the ranks by courage, discipline, and steadfast loyalty to Gallienus and his father. Volusianus was a proper soldier. The prefect would be in his quarters in the Praetorian Camp, and that was in the opposite direction from the Palatine.

  Ballista levered himself off the wall, and set off north, following the dark river.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Field of Mars

  The Stadium of Domitian

  B

  ALLISTA MOVED NORTH, the great shining river rolling through the darkness on his left. In the main he kept to the embankment, just cutting a block inland every now and then, not to leave a straight trail. There were not many people about. The air here was full of the scent of hay and straw and the warm, sweet smell of horses and their droppings. He passed between the shuttered stables of two of the racing factions: the Whites, the favoured team of his youth, and that of the Greens, where the mad Emperor Caligula had often dined and slept, and built a stall of marble and a manger of ivory for his favourite stallion.

  He knowledge of this district was good, the areas he intended to traverse less so. His vague plan was to head up to the ornamental parkland at the top of the Field of Mars, turn east, cross the Gardens of Lucullus, and so reach the camp of the praetorians. By the time he reached the horses’ exercise track called the Trigarium, he realised that he must make a detour. The boots which he had taken from the nightwatchman were too small. They had blistered his already tender feet. Every step was painful. He was limping. It could draw attention, and soon he would be unable to walk. He needed new boots – a weapon would be good – and he must have money. He needed a whore. Where there were whores, there were clients and pimps, and they carried coins. Money could buy you anything in Rome: advancement, divorce, the death of a rival; certainly a blade and a pair of boots.

  Away from the river, the southern end of the Field of Mars was studded with temples and theatres and bath houses. Respectable by day, after dark they were the playground of the raffish. Since the reign of Alexander Severus, the baths remained open at night. Men and women bathed naked in the soft light of the lamps. Masseurs kneaded and oiled bare flesh. Wine was drunk by the amphora. An incitement to vice, thundered philosophers and other stern moralists. Outside, the arcades of the monumental buildings sheltered prostitutes of both sexes and all types, none more than the Stadium of Domitian.

  Ballista turned into a street running away from the river, and, at once, recognised his mistake. Two blocks away a patrol of the City Watch were heading towards him. Otherwise the street was almost deserted. To turn back was to invite suspicion. Ballista quickened his pace, forced himself not to limp. When they were still about fifty paces off, he turned left into the first side street. It was long and empty. His footfall echoed from the walls. If he ran, they would hear, almost certainly chase. He glanced back from under his hood. The bucketmen had turned in after him.

  Ignoring every instinct to flee, he tried to walk as fast as could still seem natural.

 
The City Watch followed. Their axes and buckets and sword belts rattled and banged. He had seen that there were eight of them. How many usually constituted a patrol? Ballista had no idea.

  He turned into another street, somewhat wider, and completely empty. On either side were the blank walls and locked doors of imposing buildings set back in gardens. The walls were scalable, but almost certainly there would be guard dogs. Ballista muttered a prayer.

  The gods did not listen. All too soon he heard the tramp and clangour of the patrol behind him. There were side streets. Ballista took one at random. This time, as soon as he was out of sight, he broke into a run.

  ‘After him!’ someone shouted.

  The street opened into a small square with a fountain in the centre. Three alleys led off the square. Two stretched away into the darkness, while the other ran just a few paces before ending in closed gates, in front of which stood an empty cart. Only a fool would trap himself in such a place. Yet sometimes it was best to hide in plain sight. Ballista vaulted up into the cart, and hunkered down in its bed.

  The cart smelt strongly of onions. Through a crack in the boards, Ballista saw the City Watch clatter into the square, come to a halt, swearing. One of them, a big fellow, overweight and already panting, went to the fountain, and started to drink from his cupped hands.

  ‘Gaius, get back here.’ The speaker was evidently the leader.

  ‘How do you know it was him?’ Gaius sounded put out.

  ‘He ran.’

  ‘Scarpio didn’t even know if he was on this side of the river. Be a busy night if we try and arrest every man in a hooded cloak who does not want to talk to the City Watch.’

  ‘Stop your moaning. You three go with Gaius. The rest with me. Meet up in the square of the Dolphin. Gaius, get your fat arse moving. No stopping for a drink or a pie.’

  Ballista stayed still, listening to the sounds of them moving away. So, the old fisherman had not reported him. His heart lifted. The City Watch had lost his tracks back by the warehouses in Transtiberim. If they did not know his whereabouts, neither would the swordsmen from the Mausoleum. Surely both would expect him to make straight for the Palatine. The way to the Praetorian Camp should not be guarded. Once he had talked to Volusianus, and found an escort of praetorians, neither Scarpio nor whichever man to whom the hired killers answered would have a hope of stopping him reaching the emperor. Within an hour of Gallienus being informed, Scarpio would be in the cellars of the Palace. Once the imperial torturers got to work with the pincers and claws, Scarpio would soon confess the names of his fellow conspirators. In stories men bit off their own tongues rather than implicate others. In the awful agonies of reality – twisted in pain, reeking of their own blood and urine – anyone, no matter how strong or how resolute, would give up his closest friends, his own father or beloved son.

  Once he had seen the emperor, Ballista would take a horse from the imperial stables, and he could be at the House of Volcatius in no time. His family would be safe. As soon as the conspirators had been detained, he would petition Gallienus for permission to retire to their house in Sicily. In the first flush of gratitude, Gallienus would not refuse. Then they would all be safe – Julia, his sons, Maximus and Tarchon – all safe in that beautiful provincial backwater; out of sight and out of mind, far from the dangers of Rome, the court and the army. For a moment he was transported to the terraced garden outside the villa, high on the slopes of Tauromenium, looking down on the Bay of Naxos.

  This was no time for bucolic daydreams. He needed to concentrate, have his wits about him. If he failed, they would all die.

  Ballista clambered down from the cart. Gods below, these boots pinch and hurt.

  Slowly and carefully, Ballista doubled back the way he had come. The tall buildings blocked his view of the moon. But the night was still young. There was more than enough time. When he thought that he had put enough distance between himself and the patrol, he began to try to work his way eastwards. In open country his sense of direction never failed him. It was different here in Rome, at the bottom of canyon-like streets, with the stars out of sight.

  Eventually he emerged onto a broad thoroughfare. A few groups of men strolled its length. Some passed wineskins or amphorae from hand to hand. At the end of the street the graceful arches of the Stadium of Domitian reared into the sky, their pale marble gleaming in the moonlight. At night many of the arches on the ground floor were occupied by prostitutes. Some had an improvised curtain, the rest relied on the shadows for a modicum of privacy. Business was moderately brisk. There was nothing furtive about the clients as they came and went. Other men, hard faced and brutal, stood about. Sometimes they spoke to each other, or went to collect money from the girls they pimped.

  Ballista ambled along, as casually as his blistered feet allowed. A beggar sat on the other side of the street. He was neither old nor young, barefoot, but clean enough, and, although thin, did not appear to be starving. Propped at his feet was a slate with a crude drawing of a shipwreck. Ballista went and sat next to him.

  ‘Health and great joy.’

  ‘Fuck off, this is my pitch.’

  ‘You mistake me. I am thinking of having a girl.’

  The vagrant looked at him with silent suspicion.

  ‘You got any use for a pair of boots?’ Ballista tugged the horrible things off, the relief blissful. ‘Too small for me. If they don’t fit you either, you can sell them.’

  ‘You drunk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are a strange one.’ The beggar took the boots anyway. ‘Name, race, free or slave?’

  Ballista chuckled. ‘Spend a lot of time in court, do you?’

  ‘That is how I got here. What is your occupation?’

  ‘Onion seller.’

  ‘That explains the smell.’

  ‘Any new girls here?’

  The beggar was trying on the boots. ‘They brought down a tasty little Christian earlier. Condemned to the brothels, dragged her over to the third booth, the one with the two bruisers outside. Naked as the day she was born, about fourteen, lovely little tits and arse. Virgin, so they said. If I had any coins, I wouldn’t mind being one of the first to plough her delta.’

  ‘No one stops a man buying what is openly for sale.’ Ballista wanted to keep the beggar talking. The City Watch and the knifemen were looking for a man on his own. Hide in plain sight. ‘No one prohibits anyone from going along the public road.’

  ‘Too true, my friend, and a whore will do all the things your wife won’t.’

  Ballista nodded, as if struck by the sagacity of the words, but all the time his gaze was moving over the Stadium and the arches.

  The mendicant was warming to his theme. ‘Try to get your wife to suck your cock, take it from behind, leave the lamp on so you can see what you are getting.’

  Some of the arches, Ballista noted, were more out of the way than others.

  ‘As for mounting up, so she can do the work . . .’

  To forestall the enumeration of every sexual position and foible, Ballista pointed at the picture of a shipwreck the by the beggar’s feet. ‘That what happened to you?’

  ‘Indeed. I coursed over the great sea with swift-sailed craft, reached many far-off lands. I did not peddle fripperies, luxuries which corrupt, but sold goods which people could use. My honesty was praised everywhere – Ostia, Carthage, Piraeus.’

  How was it that even a Roman reduced to the meanest condition could talk about himself as if the hero of an epic poem? Ballista thought it might stem from learning to read and write from Virgil’s Aeneid.

  ‘Always paid my taxes, straightforward in my dealings with everyone, would always help a man if I could.’

  One of the arches was isolated, the two on either side empty, just the one pimp nearby.

  ‘Then my ship went down in the Hollows of Euboea, all the cargo lost. There was a court case.’

  A client left the arch that Ballista was watching.

  ‘What good are the
laws, when money rules? A poor man has no chance.’

  It was time to act.

  ‘A judgement in court is nothing but a public sale. The aristocrat who sits on the jury casts his vote according to who pays him. That was the end which the Fates had spun for me at my birth.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Ballista interrupted, getting to his feet, ‘when I come out, I will give you some coins for a girl or a meal.’

  Lost in self-pity, the beggar ignored Ballista’s words. ‘All judges hand down decisions for a price . . .’ He continued to chunter, as Ballista walked away. ‘Togate vultures, every one of them.’

  Ballista pushed through the curtain and into a makeshift cubicle lit by a cheap lamp.

  The whore was pulling on her toga, preparing to leave. ‘Always time for a handsome man.’ Her smile did not touch her eyes. ‘Even if he does smell of onions.’

  ‘Take off your clothes.’ Ballista shrugged off his cloak.

  ‘Eager, aren’t you?’ She began to unwind the folds of the heavy material. ‘I like a man who knows what he wants, doesn’t hang about wanting to talk.’

  The cheap clay of the lamp was moulded with a relief of a woman copulating with a swan; Leda and Jupiter. It was an unlikely location for the King of the gods to take his pleasure.

  ‘All of them.’

  She let her tunic fall to the ground, and stood naked, tilting a hip, and thrusting out her breasts. She was not young, and time had not been too kind to her.

  ‘Like what you see?’ she said. ‘Now the money.’

  ‘That is not going to happen.’

  ‘What? You think you’re getting it for free? You off your head? One word and Marcus will cut off your balls.’

  ‘Call him in.’ Ballista crowded over her. ‘Speak naturally.’

  ‘Marcus!’

  The pimp was sharp. Distrust was inherent in his profession, or perhaps he had detected something in her tone. He came through the curtain, knife already in hand.