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

by Harry Sidebottom

  The pavement under Ballista’s feet was wet and foul. Shards of broken terracotta crunched under his boots. With no access to plumbing, the occupants of the tenements emptied their chamber pots down into the streets. If the vessel was cracked, it was tossed out after. Neither the ordure nor its stench need trouble the rich who visited or lived here. Most times they would be carried from their doorsteps in covered litters, scented with precious fragrances.

  Ballista came out into a tiny square. There was a water trough in the middle. He scooped a palmful of water, and sniffed suspiciously, before bathing his tired eyes. Repeated legal pronouncements against fouling drinking fountains were proof of the practice. Houses, statues, tombs; in a city with a million inhabitants, men relieved themselves everywhere, with scant regard for privacy.

  Laughter and shouts, jarring and moronic in their intoxication, echoed from one of the alleys. Where there were drunks, there was likely to be a bar.

  A few steps down the passageway, Ballista realised his error. Four revellers, and two prostitutes, were weaving after the guttering torch held by a linkboy. Too late to turn back, Ballista stepped aside to let them pass.

  The revellers stopped, the whores clinging to them, tittering. Together, deliberately, they blocked the alleyway. The boy held up the torch.

  ‘Where have you sprung from?’ The speaker was young and well spoken. His garland of rose petals had slipped down almost over one eye.

  Avoiding eye contact, Ballista looked at the building opposite.

  ‘Ugh, what a smell – beans and sour wine. I know your sort, no better than a Jew. You’ve been round with some cobbler-crony, scoffing a boiled sheep’s head and a dish of spring leeks.’

  The stucco on the wall was discoloured and patchy, as if it had mange.

  ‘Where’s your pitch? What synagogue do you doss in?’

  The others guffawed.

  Ballista knew their sort; young and rich, slumming it in the subura, out to beat up a passer-by for fun.

  ‘What? Nothing to say for yourself?’

  Ballista eased his back off the wall, noting where each member of the party stood; the linkboy on the right, the talker in front, the companion backing him entwined with a whore, the other two revellers and the final whore clumped on the left.

  ‘Speak up, or I’ll kick your teeth in!’

  Ballista spoke quietly. ‘This does not need to end badly.’

  ‘It will for you, you insolent fucker.’ The man reached out to grab him. Ballista yanked the torch out of the boy’s hand, and thrust it into his assailant’s face. Screaming, the man reeled back, collided with his friend and the whore.

  The nearest reveller on the left hurled himself forward. Ballista brought the torch down on his head like a club. The first blow drove him to his knees. On the second, the haft of the torch snapped.

  The linkboy was on Ballista’s back, fingers clawing at his eyes. Dropping his right shoulder, Ballista rolled him off. As he landed, Ballista kicked him in the back of the head. The youth went down, making no effort to soften his fall.

  The other man on the left had a knife. Ballista gave him no time to think. Feinting to the right brought the knife after him. Ballista gripped his wrist, tugged him off balance, and twisted the arm until he heard it break. The man crumpled into the gutter.

  Three down, two standing, one of them hurt. Both the whores were running. One was yelling for help.

  The two revellers still on their feet stood irresolute, befuddled by drink, and the suddenness and scale of the violence.

  ‘Get the City Watch!’ One of the whores was shouting.

  Ballista picked up the knife.

  The man with the burnt face was moaning, swaying slightly.

  ‘The Watch! Call the Watch!’ The whore was shouting as she ran.

  The man he had beaten with the torch was trying to rise. Ballista kicked him in the ribs. He went down again. With precision, Ballista stamped on the side of his head. Get a man on the ground, Maximus had once said, and you can give him some leather in your own sweet time.

  ‘That is enough.’ The uninjured reveller held out his hands in supplication.

  Ballista brandished the knife, herding the two together.

  ‘For the love of the gods, don’t kill us.’

  ‘On your knees!’ When they were slow to move, Ballista encouraged them with the knife close to their faces.

  ‘It was only a bit of fun.’ The young drunk sounded as if he might burst into tears.

  ‘Give me your wallets.’

  Fumbling in haste, they unlaced them, gave them up.

  ‘And those of your friends.’

  Still on their knees, they did his bidding.

  ‘Now, face down.’

  Fastidious, even in their terror, they tried to prostrate themselves as if the filth might somehow not stain their clothes.

  Not that far off, Ballista heard hobnailed boots thudding on paving stones, men shouting, the shrill voice of the whore. She had found the City Watch. It was more than time to leave.

  *

  In a district notorious for loose living, it was proving strangely difficult to find a bar or a whorehouse. There was row after row of hermetically sealed shops and workplaces. Butchers and perfumeries, flower sellers and fullers, every kind of trade, each identified by a painted sign for the illiterates who made up the majority of their clientele. The pervading stench, and the large jars outside for collecting the urine of passers-by, made the sign pointless for the establishments where clothes were cleaned.

  The streets were deserted. Faint sounds – a snatch of song, a burst of laughter, a sudden shout – drifted from the mouths of passageways. Now and then a dog barked. Sometimes it was answered, and briefly the night was full of angry yapping. Ballista wondered what hour it was. The towering buildings blocked the moon and the stars. The bakers were not working yet, so perhaps just past midnight. If so, by the civic calendar, the Kalends of April had begun. It was no surprise that the poor, lacking fancy water clocks, or any other method of accurately measuring time in the hours of darkness, reckoned that the days changed at sunset. Either way, it was the first day of April. Unless Ballista could intervene, by the end of the day the emperor would be dead.

  Disorientated in the labyrinth of the subura, Ballista took streets and alleyways at random. To be lost in the heart of a city was always unsettling. For some reason a passage of Thucydides came into his mind. Three hundred Thebans, trapped and lost in the hostile city of Plataea, fleeing through the darkness and mud of a wet, moonless night. Women and children yelling, hurling tiles and stones from the roofs. Armed men hunting them down. The Thebans blundering to their fate. Not an auspicious thought.

  Ballista tried another alleyway. This one had no shops. There were rickety balconies above, but at ground level were just the blank walls and closed doors of tenements. Further down was a rectangle of yellow light. One of the doors was ajar. A man stood outside pissing into the gutter. Penis in one hand, a cudgel in the other, the man obviously was the doorkeeper for the block.

  Ballista walked slowly and openly towards him.

  ‘Health and great joy,’ Ballista said.

  ‘And to you.’ The words were polite, but the tone grudging.

  ‘I am lost, looking for a lodging house.’

  The janitor pulled up his britches, adjusted himself. ‘You won’t find one open at this time of night.’

  ‘I have money, are any rooms empty in your block?’

  The man snorted. ‘You are not from around here.’

  Ballista fished a large denomination coin from one of the wallets that he had taken from the revellers. ‘How about a space under the stairs?’

  ‘A lot of counterfeit coins down here.’

  Ballista handed it over. The man held it up to the light, studied it close, then bit it.

  ‘That sort of money, you could buy something better,’ the doorkeeper said at length. ‘If it was not the middle of the night.’

  Bal
lista got out another coin. ‘This one is yours too, if you keep quiet. Anyone asks, you have not seen me.’

  ‘City Watch after you, are they? Or is it some householder or wayfarer you have robbed?’

  ‘A misunderstanding.’

  ‘What sort of misunderstanding?’

  ‘I was set upon by some rich youths. Gave as good as I got. Think they might have their servants out after me.’

  ‘Cocky young bastards.’ The man spat. ‘Always causing trouble, think they can do what they like to ordinary citizens. The bucketmen never arrest the likes of them, but you or me throw a pot out in the street, and they break the door down – Open in the name of the City Watch! – kick the shit out of you in front of your wife and children, in front of all your neighbours, drag you off in chains.’

  ‘Quiet as the grave, then?’ Ballista gave him the second coin.

  ‘Fetching and carrying is for old women. I know how to keep my words locked behind my teeth. You will have to go up two flights; the lower floors are already full.’

  Retying the wallet, Ballista adjusted the knife in his belt, just to let the man see he had a weapon.

  ‘I will be gone early. Would you wake me an hour before dawn?’

  ‘Conticinium, it is; when the cocks have stopped crowing, but men are still asleep.’

  Few surroundings could be more be more depressing than the interior of a cheap subura tenement. Unless you were habituated to them, the mingled smells of damp and mould, of dirt and squalor, were choking. Over everything was the reek of boiled cabbage and stale cooking oil. As all tenants ignored the prohibition on kindling fires and cooking, it was a marvel that conflagrations did not break out more often.

  There were no windows in the stairwell. The janitor had lent Ballista a tiny clay lamp. The oil it burned was rank, giving off more smoke than illumination. Its wan light revealed stained and cracked walls. As Ballista trudged up the uneven stairs, huddled shapes grunted and shifted under the flights. A child peered out from around its sleeping mother.

  The landing on the second floor was empty. Two closed doors, flimsy looking and sagging on their hinges, led to apartments. The higher you climbed a tenement, the less salubrious the accommodation. At the top, on the sixth or seventh floor, were garrets, only fit for rats, right up under the tiles.

  The space under the next set of steps was unpleasantly stained, with a malodour of urine and other people’s copulation. A beggar could not be a chooser. Ballista folded himself into its narrow confines. He rolled his cloak as a pillow, and put his knife next to it. The doorkeeper had seen the wallets on his belt, and he might not be the only one in the building tempted to rob a sleeping man.

  Pinching out the lamp, Ballista tried to get comfortable. His legs were too long for the space, and he had to stick them out into the corridor. Sleep was hard to imagine. In the near total dark, he turned over what had happened at the Praetorian Camp. Informed by Scarpio that the City Watch had orders for his arrest, of course the praetorians had tried to detain him. Volusianus had not been there. Was the Praetorian Prefect aware of the charges? If he was, no doubt he would be surprised. Long ago Volusianus and Ballista had served together at Spoletium, the battle which had brought Gallienus and his father Valerian to the throne. Yet the events of the night gave credence to the charges of incendiarism and murder. Ballista would not be the first soldier to run amok in the city. A life of violence could produce unlooked-for results. It was the duty of the Praetorian Prefect to help keep order on the streets of Rome. The actions of his men did not have to imply that Volusianus was privy to the conspiracy. The prefect was on the Palatine, at the side of Gallienus. Neither could be reached tonight.

  Ballista fidgeted, but comfort eluded him. Gallienus and his entourage would not leave the Palace for the Colosseum until the third hour of daylight. They would go by the public streets, but once on the move they would be ringed by guards. Some emperors had been more amenable, but Gallienus did not care to be bothered by petitioners when crossing the city. Ballista had heard him cite the example of Mark Antony. Bothered by requests, Antony had stopped, smiled amiably, gathered the written petitions in the folds of his toga, and then thrown them all in the Tiber. At least Gallienus did not have his guards thrash those who dared approach him, as had some tyrants. When he reached the Colosseum itself, security would be tight. An emperor might show himself to his subjects at the Games, even banter with them through a herald, but without authorisation no one could get near to the imperial box.

  It had to be before Gallienus left the Palace. As with the custom’s post at the bridge, Ballista would try to use the rhythm of the Roman day. At dawn, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of citizens thronged the narrow ways up to the Palatine, crowded the great vestibule and the reception area before the gates. Ostensibly all went merely to pay their respects, but every one hoped to catch the eye of the emperor, to receive some favour or gift. If he could lose himself in the multitude, slip past the praetorians, and get to the Palace, he could bribe a doorman to take a message to Demetrius. The Greek youth, Ballista’s one time secretary, was an imperial favourite and would be able to secure him access to Gallienus. Whatever people said about the habits of the emperor, Ballista knew that in a crisis Gallienus shrugged off his air of indolence, and acted like lightning.

  A few words, and the emperor would be saved. A few words and Ballista’s family would live. But could he get past the guards? Tall and broad, with shoulder-length fair hair, he stood out in a Roman crowd, every inch the northern barbarian.

  Ballista’s eyes had grown accustomed to the ambient light that filtered up the stairs from the doorman’s lamp. The lime wash on the walls had a pale, scabrous glow. He needed to disguise his appearance. He had no change of clothes, and there was nothing to be done about his height or build. But his hair was another matter. Even with the hood of his cloak up, it showed. He crawled out from his refuge, sat sprawled on the floor, and picked up the knife.

  Gathering his locks in his left hand, he paused. This was harder than he had thought. Among his own people long hair was a mark of noble birth. His dynasty were as often known as the long-haired Himlings, as the Woden-born. In all his years in the empire, wearing his hair to his shoulders was one aspect of his identity that he had never compromised. He answered to different names, spoke other languages, but never had he cut his hair short like a slave, like a nithing.

  This was ridiculous. His vanity counted for nothing against what was at stake. He sawed at his hair. It was harder to do, and took longer than he expected. Eventually, surrounded by cuttings, it was done. With no reflection, he had could not tell what it looked like. Probably terrible, rough and sticking out in clumps, but it was shorter. Somewhere on the way down to the Forum in the morning he could buy a hat. Stooping, his appearance would be somewhat altered.

  Ballista crept back under the stairs. Keeping the knife where he could reach it, he struggled to find some way of lying that was not intolerable. How many hours until conticinium? Sleep was impossible.

  *

  The body of the woman under him was soft and warm. She was eager, but someone was knocking on the door of the bedroom. Why must they disturb his pleasure?

  The knocking was louder, someone was shouting.

  Ballista jerked awake.

  ‘All right, all right. Hold your horses, I am coming.’ The voice of the doorkeeper came up the stairs.

  Ballista slid out from his lair. Every bone in his body ached.

  Bolts were being drawn, chains undone.

  Ballista tucked the knife in his belt, then tried to stretch the stiffness out of his limbs. His ribs hurt like Tartarus.

  ‘Open in the name of the City Watch!’

  The words made Ballista’s heart jump in his chest.

  ‘I have opened.’ The doorkeeper said truculently. ‘What do you want? Lost one of your buckets?’

  ‘Less of your lip. A fugitive was reported coming in here an hour or so ago.’

  ‘Isn’t
no one come in here. See for yourself door was bolted.’

  ‘Aiding a bandit is a capital offence. Want to be nailed on the cross next to him?’

  ‘Don’t know nothing about it.’

  Ballista moved along the landing to the rear of the building.

  ‘On your head be it. We are going to search the block. How many floors?’

  ‘Seven. You’ll be here until dawn.’

  Ballista stood in front of the door to the rear apartment.

  ‘How many residents?’

  ‘Only the gods know.’

  ‘You are not . . .’ The rest of the watchman’s words were lost as the remainder of his squad clattered through the door. In a moment their noise was augmented by the wailing of a child, and a woman shouting.

  Ballista judged the distance as best he could in the near darkness, and kicked the door. The landlord having gone to the least expense, it flew open, almost flying off its hinges. Drawing his knife, Ballista stepped carefully into the room. In the gloom, he could just make out a woman. She sat up from a low bed, and yelled. ‘Thief! Marcus!’

  A movement alerted Ballista to the man. He had something in his hand, probably a blade.

  ‘Calm, my friend,’ Ballista said.

  ‘Fucker.’ The man edged closer. It was definitely a knife, a long kitchen knife.

  ‘Whoa,’ Ballista spoke as if he were soothing a horse.

  The man stopped.

  Behind him, Ballista could hear the City Watch pounding up the first flight of stairs.

  ‘I am not here to rob you.’ An idea struck Ballista. To save time, he cut the thongs that secured one of the wallets to his belt. He tossed it over. In the dark the man missed the catch. The wallet fell to the floorboards with a heavy chink.