Rome 4: The Art of War (42 page)

Then she invited Pantera to join her inside, and I was left with the choice of following the painted catamite back to the inn or following behind the litter like a whipped hound. I followed the litter and heard the sounds of Pantera’s ablutions as he transformed himself from renegade into respectable citizen. I learned nothing of Jocasta’s motives, or her plans.

At Sabinus’ house, I stood back while she and Pantera paid their respects and joined the slow-moving avalanche of nobility
that was making ready to slide down the hill towards the forum.

It was a stratified crowd, each layer determined by class and station: every Roman knows where his place is, or hers, and they segregate by instinct, the way great flocks of birds mesh in flight.

Jocasta was somewhere in the middle while Sabinus and Caenis were the almost-royal almost-couple at the fore, although I knew by then that all was not well with them. Right at the start, just before they set off, Caenis had signalled to Pantera, calling him over.

‘Domitian is gone.’ She was small amongst all these big, overweight men. Her nose was blue with cold, her hands white about the fingers. She pushed them up her sleeves as much to hide them from view as to keep them warm. For all that, she looked proud until he asked her where she thought the boy was. She looked worried, then. ‘I don’t know. He went out last night and didn’t come home.’

Pantera, of course, couldn’t tell her what he knew; she was worldly wise, but Domitian was as a son to her, and nobody wants to learn that their son has spent the night with Mucianus’ catamite.

I could see now why Pantera had sent Horus away. If the boy had been there, you’d have known, wouldn’t you, what they’d done? A boy doesn’t know how to hide these things. And this was Caenis’ big day. You wouldn’t want some filthy Alexandrian whore spoiling it.

So Pantera bit his lip and said, ‘We’ll find him. Stay with Sabinus. There’s no point in hiding now and you’re as safe with him as anywhere.’

He caught Borros’ eye and nodded and the big Briton vanished into the shadows. As far as I could tell, he’d spent half the summer following Domitian and knew his habits. If he hadn’t had to go south the previous night, he would have been
waiting outside the House of the Lyre and would have seen to it that the boy returned home in the morning.

Pantera fell back beside me, the only one left of the small band he had led out of Tarracina in the night. We walked along near the back of the group.

‘How many, do you think?’ Pantera asked.

I had been doing a head count while he was speaking to Caenis. ‘More than four hundred,’ I said. ‘Most of them old men, beyond fighting age.’

‘That’s what I thought. If we meet trouble, they’ll have to head to the Capitol. Be ready.’

It was that kind of morning: nothing was certain. We kept to the back of the group that surged down the Quirinal hill towards the Basilica Julia and the forum. They were not all men: I had counted a number of women besides Caenis and Jocasta, perhaps one tenth of the whole.

Neither Pantera nor I had any status and we could not be seen anywhere near the front of this column, but nor could we safely let Sabinus out of our sight: Pantera’s word to Vespasian still held, and in any case Sabinus was now the key to the bloodless coup we had always planned.

He wasn’t hard to follow: we stayed to one side and kept parallel to the group, ranging along alleyways, rooftops, walls, scaffolding, anything to give a clear view of the route ahead.

We saw the smoke as we came over the brow of the hill on to the long incline; a thin thread, dark against the morning’s haze, rising from the foot of the hill.

‘
Fuck!
’

Pantera leapt into a run and I was with him. No one who had lived through the fire in Rome could have done anything different: the memories will be with us for life, vivid and appalling. Without effort, I imagined Jocasta roasted, burning, dying slowly. It gave speed to my feet.

We turned
a corner and saw a small, stilted figure running up the hill towards us. It was Matthias from Caenis’ house, with Toma and Dino close on his heels.

He fell at Caenis’ feet, bringing the whole great mass of men and women and senators to a halt.

In front of them all, he panted out the news that an entire century of the Guard had been to the Street of the Bay Trees and assaulted Caenis’ house, battering down the door with a ram.

They had not found whom they sought, but they had torched it anyway and now they were moving on to every place in the city where Pantera had been seen: to the White Hare, to the House of the Lyre, to—

‘To the Crossed Spears?’ Pantera’s very bad at hiding his worry when he thinks he’s been responsible for someone else’s death.

It was then that I realized how close he was with the dream-teller and his Nordic wife, how much they meant to him. Or, perhaps, how much their welfare weighed on him. He had already caused the bad deaths of his little gelded priest and then the men in Tarracina; he wasn’t the kind who could bear much more of that.

Matthias shook his head. ‘Not there, not yet. Maybe not ever. It wasn’t mentioned and they did a lot of talking. I think Gudrun and Scopius will be safe for now; the silver-boys will tell them if the Guards come close.’

Pantera wasn’t listening. He had seen something and the look on his face made me turn so fast I nearly fell over.

Four hundred men turned with me, and saw, flowing up the hill from the forum, far faster than winter snow, a column of the Guard.

The day was soft with the promise of rain, but their naked blades were shafts of brilliant light, bouncing to the rhythm of their feet.

Sabinus
raised his hand for the halt, which was entirely unnecessary given that not one of the men behind him was armed. Even if they had been, none was of the mettle to give fight to a century or more of angry Praetorian Guards.

‘To the Capitol!’ Pantera vaulted on to a nearby wall so they could see better where he pointed. ‘Turn right and get up on to the Capitol now! If you can reach the Asylum, you’ll be safe.’

This last was something of an exaggeration but the heart of Sabinus’ crowd was easily swayed and the thought of safety drew the mass of men and women up the steep slopes of the Capitol as fast as their indignation had previously swept them down toward the forum. Watery sunlight seeped through the heavy sky as they ran, sending their shadows as long, lean fingers ahead.

If the Palatine was palatial, the Capitol was holy, at least at its heights, which is to say the houses on it were far older and in greater need of repair; and that the temples commanded all the best positions, set higher than the towering tenement slums which leaned against each other at such alarming angles on the slopes leading up to them.

We passed many of those. Standing amongst the small, much-patched dwellings were crumbling temples of minor deities and flat, paved areas used for the reading of augurs and auspices. A smell of fear and old blood clung to the damp December air. A light rain began to fall. If it was a comment from the gods, nobody knew what it said.

Climbing ever upward, the procession, or perhaps by now it was a scrum of refugees, slowed as it reached the steepest part of the hill. Pantera and I moved back among them, selecting men from the throng, choosing those with hair not yet silvered, who looked as if they might have seen at least some recent military service.

‘Block
the path,’ we told them. ‘Don’t let the Guards past. They’ll put a cordon at the foot of the hill, but we need to hold the heights until Antonius Primus gets here. It won’t be more than two days.’

They didn’t listen; they didn’t know who we were, and they weren’t the kind of men to take orders from strangers: I would have been the same.

Eventually, exasperated, Jocasta seized planks from a nearby scaffold and, helped by three other women, began to erect a barricade across the route. My heart exploded with pride, but still she wouldn’t look at me. She achieved more than we had done, though. Shamed, the men we had picked out formed into groups and the single barricade soon became a wall, blocking the way up.

The greater mass of Sabinus’ refugees forged on past the head of the Gemonian steps, across the saddle of the Asylum and past the teetering row of priest’s houses to the temple proper.

This was the beating heart of Rome. In ancient times, when the Gauls assaulted the city and nearly took it, Marcus Manlius had held out on the Capitol for months, acquiring as he did so the name Capitolinus. From our point of view, the old tale was a reminder that he who holds the heights holds the city. We were there now, but we had to get into the temple and then hold it and neither of those was a trivial task.

Seen close up, the building itself was like a fortress, with huge walls and thick gates; assaulting it would have taken a proper military force, which we didn’t have. To be blunt, if the priests inside were inclined to close the gates against us, we knew we had no means of opening them.

But gongs and cymbals had attended our march, much as the silver-boys’ whistles would have attended something similar down in the city, and now, as Sabinus approached the main gate, a small postern door opened in the wall some distance to
his right. A middle-aged priest emerged, robed in scarlet, hesitant and unhappy in the ever-increasing rain.

‘Who seeks entry?’

It was a rote question, asked of all who came there, and this much Sabinus could manage. His voice carried across the two hills.

‘Sabinus, brother to Vespasian, your emperor. We come in his name and seek sanctuary against the forces of rebellion.’

The priest blinked. He might have spent his days in an ageing stone edifice on a hill, but rumour reached the gods as fast as it did anyone else and he must by then have known the details of Vitellius’ failed abdication.

But he bowed, hands on his chest, in the Persian fashion, and said, ‘Be welcome, brother of the emperor. And all those who seek sanctuary with you.’

The relief? You could have cut it up and served it on a plate to the emperor; to either of the emperors. When the priests opened the temple gates the entire group piled inside, leaving behind only the stalwart few manning the barricades and even they set up a rotation and went in for a while each.

There was food in there, and water, rest and shelter from the downpour; we’d run up the hill in rain but it had become a thunderstorm by the time we reached the temple. Sabinus said, and nobody disagreed, that it had been arranged by the gods to protect us.

Certainly, it was better to sit inside and listen to the rain batter the roof tiles than to stand out in all that weather, holding a cordon around the foot of the hill, which was, we were told, what Geminus’ Guards were doing. Pantera said as much to Sabinus when he was able to get him away from his throng of sycophants.

‘If the rain stays like this, the Guards won’t be able to hold their cordon on the hill. There will be gaps you could drive a ten-
horse chariot through. We can get you out then, and away to Antonius.’

That made perfect sense to me, but Sabinus was a politician, not a military man; his strategies were all for the look of things, not the practical necessities of survival.

He smiled at Pantera the way you might smile at a slave you pitied, and shook his head. ‘To abandon the Capitol now would be to abandon Rome, and I am my brother’s representative: I can’t do that. Use your powers to keep us safe, and I’ll use mine to make sure that we have an empire to come out to when the rain lifts.’

He had practised that speech, I think. It came out sounding rehearsed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t sincere.

We left soon after and went out to check the first line of defences just past the brow of the Arx.

Jocasta was still there, overseeing the creation of a second layer of barricades formed from old timbers and carefully balanced masses of old masonry that could be sent flying down the hill by five men heaving on a lever. She was striding up and down the line with her tunic belted like a man’s and her dark hair flying free in the rain. She was filthy and bedraggled and she looked as beautiful as I had ever known her; and happy.

It was heart-breaking, and all the more because she didn’t so much as look my way and there’s a limit to how much of a fool I’m prepared to make of myself, even for her. I smiled once, and then pretended to study the battlements she had made.

Pantera, watching her, said mildly, ‘You should be in Britain. There, the women lead the armies.’

She threw him a cheerful glance that knotted my stomach. ‘I’m told it is cold and wet and the children are born with webbing between their fingers and toes, like ducks.’

I learned later that Pantera had had a daughter once, to a woman of
the Dumnonii. It perhaps explained the strange look on his face, the longing and sorrow and yearning mixed.

‘Not true,’ he said. ‘It’s no wetter than here. You would thrive there. When this is over, I’ll take you—’

‘Someone’s coming!’ a man shouted up from further below. Every inch the military leader, Jocasta spun on her heel and ordered the defenders to the levers, ready to send rocks hurtling downhill. They were actually leaning on the first lever when a new call came: ‘He seeks the Leopard.’

‘Expecting someone?’ Jocasta pushed a hank of hair out of her eyes.

‘Possibly.’ Pantera put his hands to his mouth and shouted, ‘Ask for a name!’

‘Borros!’ shouted Borros, and pushed up to the barricade, and was shown the only safe place where he could clamber over without risking damage to his manhood from a series of sacrifice-knives set upright in the planking.

Reaching us, he said, ‘The Guard has set a cordon about the foot of the hill, but they can’t hear anything over the rain and you can walk ten feet from them and they see nothing. If Sabinus wants to leave now, we could have him down the hill and out of the city to be with Antonius Primus by morning.’

‘He won’t leave,’ Pantera said, and stepped away from the barricade. ‘I’m sorry to have sent you on a fool’s errand. Come away from the rain and have something to eat.’

I couldn’t wait to be free of Jocasta’s blank stare. I followed Pantera back up the hill and into a priest’s quarters in one of the small, ramshackle houses in the row that led up to the temple. It was little more than an alcove with a bed and a brazier, but as private as any we had found when the greater mass of the refugees was clustered in the main rooms of the temple.