We absorbed this, Felix and I, and stored it for future reference. It came from you, didn’t it? You are Hypatia? We didn’t understand half of it and told none of it to anybody.
At the foot of the hill Pantera received from a particular date-seller a pebble of fired clay the exact shape, size and colour of a date, which, when either end was twisted, opened to show a hollow core containing a brief message in a cipher that took him nearly an hour to translate.
Written out, it said, The marines at Misene are ripe for the picking. Speak to these men. A list of ten names was added.
At an ostler, he paid for the keep of a horse that did not exist and received a message in a sealed pack.
Three streets away from the stables, Pantera examined the packaging. The heart of the wax seal contained a single black horse hair which proved, on close examination, to be unbroken. On the seal’s surface was the imprint of a galley under full saiclass="underline" Marc Antony’s sign. Within was a simple uncoded note.
Antonius Primus has stopped at Verona and is making camp. The people of the countryside fear the coming war.
Returning to the market, Pantera bought paper, wrote a reply, folded the paper across and across and slid his knife blade along the folds to divide it into four pieces. Each was bound into a new package, identical to the original.
Back at the ostler, one package was handed back as if it were the first one, unopened, to be sent back to the sender; the seal was the same, but with a new hair set in the centre. It was from Felix, who had the finest, palest hair of us all; only if you knew what to look for would you have seen the difference.
Later, at the big, busy livestock market by the Tiber, an ox-cart drover, a muleteer and a travelling bladesmith each accepted a silver coin to deliver their packages unbroken. With the silver coin went a phrase: ‘It is many years since Antony lost at Actium. May there be many more before such a battle comes again.’
Thus, simply, was Pantera’s reincarnation of the Antonine messenger service ordered. The men were dour, closed-faced individuals; I wouldn’t have picked them out of a crowd, but Pantera had talked to them all in the course of the past month and they all worked for him with a devotion as great as any of us.
Felix and I held back when he spoke to them; it wasn’t that he didn’t trust us, but we all knew that Lucius was becoming more desperate by the day and that if one of us was taken alive, it was better for everyone if whoever was taken didn’t know the details of the men Pantera had sought out.
What that means is that while I could describe them for you, and where he met them, I couldn’t tell you their names, or what they were paid, or whom they delivered to.
Were we watched? Of course we were. The silver-boys followed us everywhere and Pantera did nothing to lose them, at least not while we went about our daily message round. If one of them had chosen to betray him, they could have done so. But he wasn’t arrested, which means they didn’t, right?
In the mid-afternoon, after one such conversation, Pantera said to Felix, ‘It might be that there is no bear hunting the streets tonight.’
‘Trabo is taken?’ We knew he was the bear, you see.
Pantera shook his head. ‘No, but he may be occupied elsewhere. Still, it would be unfortunate if the Guard were to be spared, don’t you think? If two or three of them were to die, marked by the bear, it would keep them on their toes. Make sure you are not seen.’
‘Of course not.’ Felix, who lived to kill, grinned like a child who had expected hard labour and instead had been sent to play in the fields. He left us, quietly, unobtrusively, cheerfully.
Pantera sent me back to the Inn of the Crossed Spears with orders to keep an eye out for Trabo and to protect him if he needed it. I did as I was bid, but Trabo didn’t come there that night, and, for all that there were so many Guards obviously waiting for him, there was no violence to speak of.
They hadn’t laid a finger on him since July and they showed no sign of getting any closer.
Chapter 30
Rome, the ides of September AD 69
Geminus
Yes, well, that wasn’t for want of trying, was it?
You have to understand that the best part of July and all of August passed in what felt like a flurry of activity during which, in fact, we achieved precisely nothing.
After that first day’s near misses, we were back to relying on informers, and, as I said before, if you offer a fortune for a sighting of someone who can change his appearance more or less at will, a lot of people will discover they have seen someone who must be him.
For the first four or five days after that first street fight, Juvens and I spent half of each day interviewing men, women and children who charged us handsomely for their dross, then rushing about the city following their lies. Eventually, Lucius lost his temper, and had the latest two beaten until they confessed that they’d fabricated their evidence. Then he had their hands cut off, saying they had attempted to rob the treasury which was a tenuous extension of the truth if ever we heard one.
One of them died as the executioners tried to cauterize the stumps. The other one was sent home with his hands in a sack about his neck and word soon got round that making things up was unwise. After that, the flow of information dried to a dribble, but it was coming in then from Lucius’ sources in the city. He spent a lot of his time studying the papers Nero had left that described Seneca’s network.
You wouldn’t have thought Nero was a fastidious man, or prone to extensive record-keeping, but his notes were surprisingly full and Seneca had clearly been something of a personal obsession. There was more detail of his agents, his network, his ciphers and codes than any one man should have possessed and Lucius was like a pig in an acorn field; he could barely believe his luck. He thought if he read it all he’d be able to build his own network in a far shorter time, and pretty soon he set about doing exactly that.
He found men he could trust and paid them good silver and it began to yield results. Near the end of August, we heard that Pantera was using the guise of a Berber cripple. We scoured the city for Berber cripples and found a few but none of them was him. I think we might have got close once or twice, but always the news we received was that little bit too late, or was mildly ambiguous, or sometimes turned out to be just plain wrong, and on those occasions the fact that we’d rushed halfway up the Esquiline to a particular tavern at a particular time of day probably helped Pantera to work out who it was that was feeding us the information. It didn’t make any material difference, anyway; we still wasted weeks chasing down cold trails with no sign of that changing.
Added to that, whoever was slaughtering the Guard carried on whittling away at our men until they wouldn’t leave the barracks after dark unless we ordered them and then never in groups of less than eight. We had to hire in whores and then ration them and then deal with the resulting fights. The whole summer was a nightmare, really.
September fell on us like a winter tree.
One day it was August, and my worst problem was the nightly predations on the Guard and the frantic rumours that arose from them, and the next it was the first of September, which was the emperor’s birthday with all the havoc that entailed.
It brought Vitellius back from the southern hills whither he had gone to escape the heat and smells of the city in summer. That much was good: if the people had not quite forgotten they had an emperor, they were forgetting that his name was Aulus Vitellius, not Lucius. So he came back for a day of processions and fanfares and pomp and majesty… and feasting. So much feasting.
Afterwards, the rumour was that Vitellius spent his life feasting at other men’s expense when in truth it was only this one birthday, which spread out over the ensuing days like a fat man on a bath bench, so great was the number of senators desperate to show their loyalty to their emperor.