“Family honour is more important than gold.”
“Now who’s playing the joker?”
Flight was preferable to fight, Varro judged. His best hope was to get past the rogue to his rear and run as fast as his legs could carry him, as if the hound of Hades were on his heels. He would try and reach the nearby tavern, The Water Hole. Varro was friends with the landlord and he could duly offer payment to various patrons there to keep him safe.
Varro glanced around at the vicious looking adolescent edging closer towards him, chewing a piece of dried goat and clutching his cudgel, stained with dried blood. Vibius was already anticipating his prey running. He altered his stance and stretched out his arms, to form a human cordon. Vibius would be able to grapple with his victim, long enough for his father to weigh-in and haul him to the ground, where Varro would be helpless. Doomed.
It would have to be fight, not flight. He shivered, despite the heat, as the spy experienced a flashback to being tortured last year. The beating had come first. And then a branding iron had been placed on his stomach. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. His only hope was that the gods might intervene, but Varro thought it unlikely that the gods were awake this early in the morning. He slowly but surely twisted his body and stood with his back to the wall in the alleyway, so at least he could see any attack coming. His fingertips rested on the handle of his dagger. Sweat glazed his skin.
“You deserve to be punished. My brother can do as he will with his whorish wife, but I’m here now to take care of you,” Valerius decreed. His word was used to being law.
“I have an ex-wife who I still pay a monthly allowance to. Haven’t I been punished enough? Despite her drain on my estate I still have sufficient capital to pay you a handsome bribe, if you’d like to reconsider.”
A splinter of fear lodged itself into Varro’s playful tone and he experienced a catch in his throat as he spoke. The three men moved one step closer to their prey, in unison. It was as though a noose was tightening around his neck.
“Instead of a bribe, how about I offer you a new deal? Walk away, or limp away. It’s up to you.”
The calm but resolute voice came from behind Valerius.
Manius. The bodyguard’s broad frame and square shoulders made the Briton resemble a legionary’s scutum. Not for the first time, the former gladiator needed to act as a shield and protect his friend. Usually Varro needed protection from himself - from sore losing gamblers, irate husbands and fellow drunks Varro would insult. Manius was never one to start trouble, but he often proved the last man standing to end it.
The two men had known one another for over a decade. Varro’s father had watched the Briton fight valiantly in the arena and purchased his freedom. Appius Varro invited Manius into his household. In return for teaching Varro swordsmanship and serving as his bodyguard (and drinking companion) the young poet instructed the Briton on learning his letters. Manius’ build was as solid as his sense of loyalty and the Briton had, on more than one occasion, risked his life to save Varro’s. Not because the nobleman was his employer, but because he was his friend.
Manius’ usually open, friendly features became taut, tightening like the tunic across his torso as the bodyguard puffed out his barrel chest.
Valerius Hispo grunted and eyed-up the newcomer in the alley.
“And who are you?”
“Someone who’s carrying a bigger stick than you,” Manius replied, brandishing a large club in one hand and a dagger in the other.
Valerius screwed-up his leathery countenance and grunted again. Unimpressed. The ex-soldier had never been one to back down from a fight, especially when his force outnumbered his opponent. It would be two against one, in terms of bringing the big man down. The gods are on the side of the biggest legions. Valerius had faced down and collected debts from enough noblemen to know that Varro wouldn’t put up much of a fight. Soon it would be three against one.
The air seemed to thicken with tension and violence. There would be blood. Manius just needed to make sure that the father and son turned on him, rather than Varro.
“Enough talk!” Valerius snapped, his tone akin to a drill master.
“Aye, I’ve no desire to stand around here and chew your ear off. Especially since someone has got there before me it seems,” Manius goadingly replied.
It was the final insult, for Valerius. It was time for action, not words. His blood was up. Frothing. Valerius let out a roar and, along with his youngest son Macro, advanced towards Manius.
Vibius breathed a sigh of relief, internally, as it would be his job to deal with the debauched poet rather than formidable bodyguard. He barked out a curse, accompanied by no small amount of spittle, and menacingly raised his cudgel - with the intention of bringing it down upon Varro’s skull.
Valerius and Macro rushed Manius at the same time. The ex-gladiator deftly shifted his body so that his opponents got in the way of each other as they attacked. Valerius lost his footing on the cobblestones as his bloodlust got the better of him. Manius sidestepped Macro’s nail-studded cudgel and sliced his forearm, disarming his assailant. Before the youth had a chance to react the Briton moved inside and butted his enemy. His flinty expression cracked, in shock and agony, and Macro dropped to the ground.
Varro reached up and caught hold of the young man’s wrist. Holding his dagger in his free hand the nobleman flinched not in skewering the blade into his shoulder. The hyena yelped and howled, before Varro whipped his elbow around and struck Vibius’ cheek, flooring him quicker than a boxer taking a fall and throwing a fight. The poet had learned to cut someone down, over the past year, using more than just a witticism or satirical verse.
Cudgel struck cudgel. The sound resembled the clop of a horse’s hoof. The was no second clop, however. Manius was too quick. Too purposeful. Too powerful. The bodyguard swiped low to connect with his opponent’s kneecap, felling the old soldier. Before he could recover Manius kicked the debt collector in the side, cracking a couple of ribs, and then broke a finger on each of his hands. When you put someone down, make sure they stay down, a veteran gladiator had once advised. To further immobilise Macro the stony-faced bodyguard stamped on his groin. Macro groaned, doubled-up on the ground - dry retching as if he had just eaten a plate of bad oysters.
The two friends left Valerius and his sons for dead - and tramped home. Rufus Varro wanted nothing more than to climb into his bed, whilst others in Rome rose from theirs. The city was coming to life. Shutters were being slammed open. Carters hollered out, demanding right of way. Slops were being poured out of windows, splashing on the flagstones beneath. The smell of fresh bread wafted through the streets, although unfortunately it couldn’t quite wholly flush away the odours of stale wine and ordure pervading the air. Slaves, some scurrying like mice and some as leaden-footed as oxen, carried out errands. Shrewish housewives harried their husbands out the door to go to work - and then traded gossip with their neighbours whilst hanging out the washing.
Manius acted on the instructions of Agrippa - and his own brief - and shadowed Varro the previous evening. After stealing a few hours of sleep, the Briton woke before dawn to be ready for when Varro re-appeared the next morning. He duly noticed the trio following his friend and tracked them all accordingly. He wondered if Varro was of interest to the men for being a spy, as opposed to cuckolder.
“I am grateful to you Manius. One day I will get to save you, I’m sure of it. In the meantime, I really should grant you a pay rise,” Varro amiably remarked, breathing normally again after the breathlessness of the ambush.
“I would normally say that’s the drink talking, but not even you drink this early in the day. How was your night with Cornelia? Did she say anything to implicate her husband?”
“She said enough. Flavius will soon be waking up to a fate that’s worse than just a bad hangover. I just need to make my report to Agrippa, but then the assignment will be over. I am looking forward to catching up on some sleep and reading. I will be staying in Arretium
for a few weeks. You and Camilla will be welcome to join me. I need some time away from Rome, some peace and quiet to make some plans,” Varro expressed, with a mixture of palpable relief and fatigue - albeit he forgot one of his own maxims:
Man plans, and the gods laugh.
3.
Fronto woke his master around midday. The wizened estate manager had first loyally served Rufus’ father, Appius Varro. Fronto kept watch over the young nobleman and his finances. Due to some shrewd investing, income still, just about, exceeded outgoings for the estate. Thankfully, during the past year, Varro had courted fewer mistresses, thrown fewer parties and gambled fewer nights away.
“I have just received a messenger from Marcus Agrippa, summoning you to his house immediately. No rest for the wicked, or idle, it seems,” Fronto remarked. “It’s a glorious day outside.”
“It’d be even more glorious if I was left to sleep and only saw the end of it. Does Agrippa never sleep? He oversees an entire network of spies, from Alesia to Alexandria, yet why does he only seem to bother me?”
Varro yawned and ran a hand through his mussed-up hair. His eyes were ringed with tiredness, or despair. As much as he whispered a curse directed at Agrippa under his breath he would duly submit to his request. Or order. It wasn’t wise to keep a consul waiting, whose best friend and co-consul was a demi-god, he wryly considered.
After washing himself Varro went to put on his tunic, the one he wore the day before but, upon smelling Cornelia’s scent on the garment, he chose another. Before leaving he checked himself in the large silver plate mirror on his wall, as he smoothed down his hair and tightened a belt around his slim waist. Varro appeared younger than his thirty plus years, as much as his face had grown leaner and harder over the past year. “Yet your eyes are kinder,” Lucilla had judged recently, intrigued or impressed. A few grey hairs marked his temples. Staining them. Varro grinned and chided himself after, for a moment or two, he was tempted to pluck them.
I would rather have tenfold grey hairs than be as vain as a courtesan - or poet… I’ve wasted time. Now time wastes me.
If Varro was still a poet, he was an old rather than young one he concluded. Perhaps part of the attraction of being a writer was the conceit that he could cheat time - and death - by living forever through his work. Agrippa had offered him a lifeline a year ago, by arranging for Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to act as his patron and promote his poetry.
“If Maecenas takes you under his wing, you will soar,” a fellow poet, Quintus Perilla, had enthused. “He knows everyone worth knowing. He has the ear of Augustus. Your verses could be read throughout the empire. You could be famous!”
“I’ve suffered from enough poxes during my life. I have no wish to add “fame” to the list,” Varro had drily replied to his companion. Agrippa was keen for the nobleman to continue to play the poet, however. The cover helped him infiltrate the best households in Rome - and the bedchambers of the best, or worst, women in the capital. Varro had lost count of the amount of times that noblewomen had drunk down his verses like wine and he had taken advantage of them. Or they had taken advantage of him.
Varro’s life as a poet had not only led him into the finest houses on the Palatine. He had also regularly caroused with his fellow versifiers in various venues of ill-repute in the Subura. He gambled and whored as if inspired by a muse to do so. Sucking the marrow out of life. Washing it down with a cellar’s worth of Falernian. He wasted his time and talent. Poems were started but seldom completed. Instead of challenging himself to write an epic poem he found himself composing second-rate couplets, to leave on the pillows of his mistresses before he crept out of their beds in the middle of the night.
Yet there were times in his youth when Varro felt he was but acting the epicurean - and his heart wasn’t really in it. There was a hole in his soul, which even poetry couldn’t feel. He grew tired of the company of preening authors. They were self-regarding rather than self-aware. Their only virtue seemed to be that they were not actors or, worse, mimes. When he looked into the mirror back then Varro witnessed a figure worthy of loathing. Life was a tragedy rather than comedy. There were no happy endings.
Lucilla had saved him. Ironically, they had met at a poetry reading. Varro no longer needed to play the lovelorn poet because he was in love. He didn’t need to be Catullus. He yearned not for a Lesbia to inspire him. She taught him how to smile and laugh again, when sober. Varro had never met a woman who he had admired so much. He still hadn’t. During their courtship and the early years of their marriage Varro was content, at peace. Boredom and contempt, directed towards himself or the dung-heap of the world, no longer gnawed at his soul. Yet life has a tendency to get in the way of happiness. Lucilla nearly died giving birth, twice. The babies were stillborn. A doctor warned him that, should his wife become pregnant again, she might die. He stopped making love to her. Lucilla felt diminished, depressed. The divine spark dimmed in her fine eyes. Varro tried to lose himself again in drinking - and whoring. He proved serially unfaithful, seducing mistress after mistress with little regard for whether his wife knew or not. He told himself it was in his, or man’s nature, to be unfaithful. Dishonourable. A scorpion must sting, a magpie must steal. It was man’s lot to be weak - or wicked. Lucilla, out of revenge or a desire to be loved, eventually took lovers too. They divorced. Out of guilt, or from a sense of decency and devotion, Varro granted Lucilla a generous allowance each month.
The nobleman reverted to a life of debauchery. The hole in his soul throbbed once again. Swelled. Varro was a ship, caught in a storm, not knowing when he was going to reach port. If he was going to reach port. He was a wastrel, who occasionally wrote the odd half-lauded verse. Varro hoped wine would wash away his sins. He hoped that an endless procession of courtesans and mistresses would make him forget about his wife.
You can have a noble face but an ignoble heart -Varro considered, as he continued to take in his reflection. Especially when living in Rome. He flicked his hair away from his forehead and ran a finger along the serpentine scar on his brow. He winced, as if experiencing physical pain, as he touched the film of skin and remembered Cassandra. Lucius Scaurus had brutally murdered his own wife, but Varro had blood on his hands too. The spy had been the one who had seduced the woman and used her to glean intelligence on her husband. Varro had been the one to promise her false hope, that they would live happily ever after. Varro had been the one unable to protect her from her husband, when he slit her throat. Guilt now filled the hole in the soul. But guilt was good. Because it was better than nothing.
When he was a child Varro was precociously intelligent, gifted. He read voraciously and dreamed of being Hector reborn - heroically fighting for a cause - even if he and the cause were doomed. Or he pictured himself as Aeneas, pious and courageous. Goodness, not glory, mattered. Perhaps there was still something of that boy in the careworn man framed in the mirror.
Perhaps…
Varro stroked his jaw and chin. He would arrange for Aspasia to shave him this evening. He liked to be clean shaven and equally he liked the way the slave girl felt on his skin. He would close his eyes and breathe out, forget himself, as she straddled him on the chair and ran her fingers down his back. The comely, fawning girl would give him a massage too, knead out the tension in his shoulders. Aromatic oils would glisten on their burnished skin. He would kiss her, taste the sweet grapes on her soft lips. She would laugh at his jokes, even if she didn’t wholly understand them. The dusky beauty knew that it would be an act of lust, not love. If only more of his mistresses over the years had been as wise as the slave girl, it would have prevented a myriad of awkward scenes and broken hearts.
Varro brushed his fringe to cover the scar and tore himself away from his reflection. His gaze was distracted by a portrait of his father, which hung on the wall next to the mirror. For many years, Varro could barely bring himself to look at the image of his father in the eye. Disapproval shot out from his painted aspect. The Medusa turned fewer people into sto
ne, Varro half-joked. His painted lips even seemed more pursed sometimes, in shame, as Varro came home late from another night in the tavern. His father, an esteemed general and senator, loomed large in his early life - albeit Appius Varro was also largely absent, away on campaign or attending to diplomatic assignments in far-flung lands. His father returned every now and them, to deliver a lecture to his errant son. He would listen avidly as Appius Varro told him about the history of Rome and the importance of honour. “Rather fail with honour than succeed with fraud,” his father would speciously preach, quoting Sophocles. But there were times when the boy wanted to know more about his late mother, rather than Cato the Elder and Aristotle. Varro never knew his mother and barely knew his father. So, the young man was drawn to the Socratic lesson, to know thyself.
Rufus Varro knew himself, more than most. Which was why he didn’t particularly like himself, at times.
4.
“Good work,” Marcus Agrippa laconically remarked after hearing the agent issue his report. If less was more then the consul sometimes said too much, Varro fancied.
Agrippa sat upright in his chair, his back as straight as a column. His expression was often serious, but seldom severe. His aspect, beneath a heavy brow, was often hard but seldom callous. The statesman still exhibited a soldier’s build and he was dressed in a plain tunic rather than finely woven toga. Varro had grown to admire the consul over the past year. He was a man of action - but a man of forethought too. Agrippa was comfortable talking to legionaries and legislators alike (although Varro noticed he, quite rightly, preferred the former). When Agrippa gave his word, he liked to keep it - which was not altogether in keeping with usual political practise. More than the gods, Augustus Caesar had reason to give thanks to Agrippa for his gilded fate. Caesar’s ancient had first defeated his enemies – Marcus Brutus, Sextus Pompey and Mark Antony - and now he was helping to re-build Rome after the ruinous civil war. The general had won the war for his friend. Now as co-consul he was winning the peace. Agrippa’s aqueducts quenched the thirst of Rome and his management of the grain supply fed the city. The re-designed circus maximus entertained the capital and his public gardens and statues were helping to turn a city filled with rubble into one clothed in marble. Temples had been restored to their former glory. The second man of Rome had, quite literally, got his hands dirty too by improving the sewerage in the city. The “new man” was worth ten times the amount of “best men”, including himself, who belonged to old patrician families. The soldier and son of a common farmer had come a long way, which bred as much opprobrium as admiration in Rome, unfortunately. “Success breeds as many enemies as friends,” the co-consul had once philosophically remarked to his agent. Yet Agrippa ploughed on regardless. He worked tirelessly for the good of Rome. But Varro sensed that duty - and a devotion to his old schoolfriend - was not his sole motivation. Agrippa buried himself in his work to help him forget that he had buried his first wife, Caecilia. More than Octavius, soldiering, the dream and ideals of Rome, she was the love of his life. Although he had re-married (Caesar had prompted his co-consul to marry his niece, Claudia Marcella, to further his dynastic ambitions), Agrippa seemed to resemble a grieving widower more than loving husband at times. Yet still he ploughed on, either doing his duty in public or working in the shadows, through a network of agents, to defeat Caesar’s enemies.
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