There were over a dozen of them, each anxious to put on a greater show of wealth and extravagance than his predecessor, each eager to find a new dish that might delight the tongue of so fine a connoisseur as this man who had fallen on to the throne and did not quite know how to hold it.
Thus Vitellius, who actually preferred plain fare but had not the strength to say so, was subjected to goose liver and lark’s tongue pate, to stuffed dormice, to whole roasted ostriches, bathed in many-flavoured sauces.
Quinctillius Atticus paid a fortune for a pool to be built in his dining room within which live carp swam, so the emperor could choose the best for himself as it passed under his nose: his steward practised catching the things for half a month beforehand and still failed on the day, the fish having become more adept at hiding than he had at netting them.
Suetonius Mellos went one better and brought in a dolphin from the sea, while Titus Calpurnius bought a black and white striped kind of wild horse from Africa that killed three of his men before they could kill it, and when the survivors had done so they found it a rickle of bones, so that the cook had to kill a mule and substitute its flesh for the other. Everybody was agreed, thereafter, that neither mule nor zebra, however finely roasted, was fit food for an emperor, but the striped hide was worth its weight in gold.
The grim marathon of eating, vomiting and eating again came to an end, and with it, to our great relief, the flood of Guards that had been required to man the streets to ensure the emperor’s safety. Every Guard in the newly made cohorts who was fit to stand had been ordered out during those three days. Nineteen of them had not come back alive.
The bodies had been left openly displayed around the city, rarely in the place where they had been killed. All bore the now familiar marks of the bear-man who was supposed to be ravaging them.
But — finally! — their killer had made a mistake, a series of mistakes, really, and we were on to him.
Over the course of the past half-month, three men had escaped his attacks. Each of them had provided us with a description of a bearded man with sandy hair and light eyes.
And one of them had said, ‘If you shaved his beard off, it was Trabo. I’m sure of it.’
Trabo? Trabo! Of course, it made complete sense, and asked the same question the other two had agreed: yes, it could have been Trabo. Yes, if pushed, they would be sure. Juvens was beside himself with joy. A pale-bearded, big-built man is not that hard to find, even in a city the size of Rome.
It had taken us a few days, but by the ides of September we knew his routines. A dozen men of the Guard were watching the Inn of the Crossed Spears, with orders to send a runner to me and Juvens as soon as Trabo appeared. We weren’t expecting him to head for the inn until late in the evening, and so at dawn I was in the main parade ground, where Clodius Icelus, a Guard in my cohort, was being flogged for repeating one of the many rumours about the killer.
He had ceased to scream, but the wet-iron taste of blood stained the air and the sound of his breathing was a ragged nightmare. I couldn’t walk away from it, any more than I could have walked away yesterday, the day before or any of the other days in the last two months when men had been flogged for rumour-mongering.
There were no bears in Rome, even before the recent revelations, I had been certain of that; no shapeshifting men hunting abroad as beasts at night; no deathly ghuls called forth from the deserts of the east by Vespasian’s necromancers. Vespasian was a man like any other, and I knew he could be beaten like any other; but not if the men who might have been doing the beating were talking themselves into defeat before ever they set foot on the battlefield.
They were scared, I accept that; they drew lots for what had once been routine night patrols of the city and had become instead a venture into a threat-filled nightmare, with strong odds that if you came back alive it was only because someone else you knew had died, messily.
Men gossiped under these circumstances; it was only natural. And it was equally natural that the officers ordered them to be flogged, hoping for silence, knowing it wouldn’t come.
I watched the sun burn the morning’s haze off the city, let the slow silent blue of the sky still my wandering thoughts, and waited for it to end.
And then it was over. The unconscious Clodius was carried to the physicians who had the skills to keep him asleep for three days with serum of poppy and nightshade and then send him back to his unit. Unless he caught blood fever and died, there was every chance he’d be on duty again before the next full moon, but he’d be left behind when the rest of his unit marched out to meet Vespasian’s legions.
They were due to leave at noon, and they weren’t any happier about that than they had been about the night patrols of a city that had become so exceptionally dangerous. Because this was the truth we all faced: Antonius Primus’ armies had stepped on to Italian soil earlier in the month after a string of martial victories over pro-Vitellian forces.
At forty-nine, Primus was nearly twice Caecina’s age, and could not have hoped to inherit the empire from his chosen lord: if nothing else, we all knew that Vespasian had two sons to inherit after him. But you could smell the raw stench of ambition even down the full length of Italy, and Antonius Primus, legate of the VIIth Galbania, self-appointed leader of Balkan legions, reeked of it.
In Vespasian’s name, he was leading five legions toward Rome, plus their auxiliaries, cavalry and anyone else who had tagged along hoping to profit from the carnage. Against them, Vitellius was sending detachments from eight legions, plus cavalry and auxiliary. Over half of the forty thousand men who had marched into Rome in the late spring were marching out again and the Roman people had lined the routes to cheer them on their way with a patriotic fervour that was only partly feigned: their daily prayers were that Rome might not remain a military garrison for the rest of their lives, and the news that men were soon to march out in large numbers had sparked something close to holiday fervour.
Vitellius was proving surprisingly popular. The people liked him, although whether that was simply because he wasn’t Lucius was hard to say. Whatever the reason, he had gone out amongst them after his birthday celebrations and, one smile at a time, was winning his city back from his brother, from his generals, from the torpor and muttered disquiet of his people.
Sending his two leading generals north with the army was part of his strategy.
It was a good idea, ruined by the fact that only Caecina had turned up at the barracks that morning, and in a foul temper.
He it was who had ordered Icelus flogged. He it was who had stood close enough to be coated in a light spray of blood, so that his skin, ordinarily healthy, was mottled with raised spots from which men naturally recoiled.
He was screaming orders now, harassing Guards who were already running to their duty. Disgusted, I had turned away when the light, unmistakable tread caught up with me.
‘If this lot meet Antonius Primus and his legions, they’ll lose. They are sheep with no sense, and they fear the thought of real battle.’
I had been at Cremona with exactly these men when they had fought Otho’s forces through the night and half of the following day. Never in my life do I want to see a battle more real than that one — and we won it.
I was concerned, briefly, that my brows might rise and betray me, but no, my face had schooled itself to the tepid acceptance I most despised and had most frequently used of late.
I said, ‘With luck, Antonius Primus will turn tail when he sees the size of your army and you’ll be back in Rome before the start of winter.’
Mentioning the season was a guess, but it struck the target. Caecina’s eyes closed a moment and opened again only slowly.