‘ Fuck you.’
‘Right, then…’
We spent most of the afternoon setting up what we needed. When we had done, I have to say, it went with satisfying smoothness.
Chapter 32
Rome, the ides of September AD 69
Trabo
I was repairing a wheel that afternoon, as I remember; but then, I spent a lot of those days repairing wheels. It would have been surprising had I not been.
I’m not a wheelwright by trade, but in my guise as a carter men expected me to be able to at least repair the spokes and set the rim true and I had found I could do that readily enough; after twelve years in the legions, I can turn my hand to most things.
It was a satisfying occupation. I liked the smooth feel of wood under my fingers, the smell of the shavings as I whittled a new spoke to fit its socket. I liked the satisfaction in a job well done at the end, as I set the wheel spinning down the hill. That kept the children happy, and impressed some of the less world-weary customers.
More important, it allowed me to sit at the side of any street in Rome without anybody paying me too much attention.
Which, in turn, allowed me to watch the people who mattered most to me.
The first of these, of course, was Jocasta, who was endlessly fascinating. I could have followed her all day and not grown tired of her. And she was easy to follow; far too easy. It may be that she knew I was there, and so was going out of her way to smooth my new mission as her self-appointed protector, but it was also possible that she was just distressingly easy to follow.
Take, for instance, her visit to Caecina that morning: she had made no effort to hide where she was going and none to hide that she had been there afterwards.
Given the nature of her mission as defined in Caenis’ rooms, this seemed to me at first to be the height of folly: she had successfully poisoned Valens and pretty much immediately after, she walked straight into Caecina’s office.
I know she’d said she’d do it, but fuck, I hadn’t thought she’d be so open about it. With the grace of a few hours’ thinking, though, I had realized it was little short of genius: what woman — what man, even — would walk into the heart of the enemy and seduce a general away from his chosen lord? In a city that thrived on subterfuge, there was something brilliant about hiding in the open.
She had done the same when she had invited Caecina, Valens and Lucius to a grand and busy dinner three nights before: she was a widow of high means and part of the social hub around which Rome’s elite revolved. The fact that of the eighteen guests only Valens fell ill, and that three days later, was an impressive — and deeply disturbing — testament to her skills with poisoning.
If she was my first target, then after that evening Caecina was my second. The general had clearly evolved an infatuation, for he called on the lady Jocasta the day after and stayed longer than propriety allowed, and, frankly, I hated him for it, but I couldn’t kill him.
Caecina never went anywhere without a cluster of Guards around him and these were not randomly selected men, drawn from the lottery pool, but the best of the best, chosen for their competence: men like Juvens, Geminus, Marcus Sulius Constans. I might have considered taking on any one of these in a matched fight, but not eight of the bastards at once.
And so I had watched Caecina for the next two days until noon on the ides, when he had emerged from the garrison gates on his high-stepping bay gelding, dazzling in white, with a gilded breastplate and helm and a tall white plume of ostrich feathers piercing the high blue sky, so that he had looked more like an emperor than a general; certainly more like an emperor than Vitellius, who had made the occasional foray into the forum recently, to read speeches clearly written for him by someone else.
Vitellius had had the sense to send Caecina out of Rome, though; sent him north with his legions to assault Antonius Primus and secure victory for his emperor.
Which meant there was nobody left to watch and I thought I might as well go home to the Inn of the Crossed Spears, to eat and drink and sleep awhile before night fell and I could begin to hunt Guards again. I had spent my nights hunting all this time and was becoming adept at finding and killing the men foolish enough to step on to the streets in Vitellius’ name.
The last wheel was nearly finished. A brazier at my side kept a pot of pitch on a low boil. I dipped my brush into it and drizzled hot, black tar into the sockets I’d cut, ramming the spokes home swiftly, so that rubbery pitch oozed up on to the inner surfaces of the rim and the hub. I painted more pitch along the outer rim, enough to make a good waterproof seal, and spun the whole thing a few times on the flat of my palm to let it dry.
There were silver-boys watching: silver-skins or silver-tongues or silver-hands, I didn’t know which, and didn’t really care; they were all one to me, but they liked playing with my wheels and so I stood up, swung my arm right back and hurled the new one down the road, setting it bouncing over summer ruts, gathering speed as it went.
It was the boys’ job to catch it before it shattered to tinder at the foot of the hill. The slower ones raced after it in a racket of high-pitched squeals, more like young pigs than boys. The brighter ones had already stationed themselves halfway down the hill. There were three of these and they stepped out as the squealing reached its peak, and set themselves in the wheel’s path.
The smallest was the leader; even from here, I could see that. Pinch-faced, with dirty blond hair, he ordered the other two and they stepped aside, angling up from him, so that when the wheel came down they were in V-formation, and could catch it effortlessly. They didn’t even bring it back to me for the copper coin I had promised, but passed it to the squealing toe-rags who had skidded to a halt around them.
That’s a lot of trust — or authority — for one small boy and it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, either. I wanted to learn his name, to find out where he lived, perhaps to recruit him to more interesting tasks than catching spun wheels.
I turned to the watching crowd, singing out, ‘All done here! I’ll be back tomorrow, or at least tomorrow’s tomorrow. Bring your wheels and I will mend them. Best repairs in the city!’
I had the patter off by heart now, so I could speak while I packed my gear and my eyes roamed the shadows where the muddy-blond silver-boy had been — and found he had gone. That’s the habit of these boys: they know how to vanish and they’ll only reappear when they want to.
I slung my pack over one shoulder and lifted the container of hot pitch carefully, one-handed, by a loop of iron wire with a wooden grip for a handle. Every inch the wheelwright, I trudged down the hill from the garrison, heading for my corner bench at the Inn of the Crossed Spears where a flagon of wine had my name on it, or at least the wheel mark of a carter, which was as much of a name as I used in those days.
I turned left again and eased my way through the slum, heading towards the Street of the Lame Dog and the inn where Gudrun’s cooking awaited me: lamb stew, with rosemary and thyme.
Amidst all the scents of cooking that assailed the streets, this one stretched out. I built a solid image of it, the smell, the sight, the taste of the first spoonful ‘ Psst! Carter! ’
It was the silver-boy from the hill, the one who had controlled all the others while they caught my wheel.
He was half my height, with his dirty blond hair and grubby nails, and he was beckoning me with an imperious wave of his hand. I could have tried to evade him, perhaps, but I doubt I’d have managed it: there may be places in Rome where a man can escape the Guards, but there is nowhere out of sight of the silver-boys.
With a shrug, I turned sharply right and followed the flag of his old-straw hair as he disappeared into this latest twisting alley. We ran along it at a swift trot, the boy light as thistledown, me hampered by my pack and my half-can of cooling pitch. When the boy turned right and right again, into ever-narrower going, I lost sight of him, speeded up, hurtled round the corner, and ‘ You! ’