‘Your message?’ I held out my hand, so different from his. Mine are manicured three times in a month; his, never.
‘I didn’t write it down.’
‘Of course not. Here.’
The wax was perfect; just warm enough to take the mark readily, not so warm that his words smeared out of recognition before he was done.
Pantera wrote, To the emperor Vespasian, from his servant, greetings. Your kin are well. Caecina leads Vitellius’ forces against Antonius Primus who marches five legions in your name. Both naval fleets will soon be ours: Ravenna within days, Misene within a month if all that we attempt bears fruit. Rome will be yours by Saturnalia.
Discretion personified, I fed the birds, holding out my cupped palms with handfuls of crumbled nuts. Doves and finches clung to my fingers and pecked freely. I didn’t look up until the transcription was done and the upper half of the wax tablet wiped clean of the original message.
‘Will you write it for me?’ Pantera handed him the tablet. ‘My script is not small enough.’
To be carried by a dove, the script must be tiny or the message short. I can write letters so small they look like ant tracks across a page, and only the best-eyed scribes can read them. I can make and break these straightforward ciphers as fast as normal men can write and I can write in any hand; if I see it once, I can mimic it to perfection the way some men can speak in voices not their own, or alter their appearance.
I had, for instance, penned every one of the letters ‘from Vespasian’ that were circulating amongst Antonius Primus’ troops, and, by dint of double agents, had also reached Caecina’s legions, to let the troops know what was on offer should they choose to defect.
Here and now, I wrote in my own hand and finished with a salutation in plain, unencoded text that Pantera had not written.
Blessings upon you, Emperor of Rome.
‘For decency,’ I said. ‘If he will truly be emperor by the year’s end, you need to begin to treat him as such.’
‘I have always treated him as such,’ Pantera said, flatly. ‘When can you send it?’
‘Now is as good a time as any. The bird can still fly some way at dusk and there are places to rest in the forests of the south. If you wait, you can see it go.’
The chosen dove was one of the slate greys pacing the breadth of the wicker cage. It crouched at the sound of my voice, and it was the work of moments for me to fold the fine paper to exactly the breadth of my thumbnail, roll it into a cylinder and slide it into the tube fixed to the bird’s leg.
Done, I lifted my hands and opened them. The bird stood tall, took in its surroundings, bobbed its head at its fellows and then launched skyward on a racket of wings that sent the pair left behind into a clattering alarum.
Pantera watched the bird until it was a pinprick in the unstained blue of the sky. He left then, with little more said.
On the way down, the stairs were busier, not so much with traffic ascending or descending as with men and women who had moved away from the rest for the semblance of privacy while not yet abandoning the party.
Downstairs, the bower garden was busily full. The serving boys were now naked to the waist, the girls’ tunics were kilted shorter, and opened to show the first curves of their breasts.
The music was pitched to a different note; it wove through the vines, the citrus branches, the standing and lying couples, drawing the sexual tension to breaking point, and holding it there. The masks were gone now, and the pretence; and those who preferred to display in public were making the most of the wide couches set at angles to the great many-stemmed candlesticks.
A woman sat astride a man, head thrown back, her nipples clamped between his rigid fingers, their tight-locked hips moving with increasing urgency. Nearby a man stood with a woman held in front of him, her back to his chest, his fingers working at her groin. She pulled his head to hers, and bit on his ear. Elsewhere, a boy knelt, a girl lay naked on a couch, a trio of young, lithe bodies made a triangle of lust.
Pantera noted the names of those he could identify, and the figures of those he couldn’t.
At the door, the giant Belgian accepted another gold coin and waved him away, smiling.
Chapter 34
Rome, the ides of September AD 69
Jocasta
I went to Trabo in the evening, a little before dusk.
He was in the Retiarius, one of those foul little taverns where men gather after the circus to dissect the fight. There hadn’t been many of those lately; Vitellius’ first and only love was for the chariots. He had no interest in watching men gut each other publicly, so the tavern supplied its own battles: slaves or hired men who wrapped themselves in boiled bull’s hide and hacked at each other with blunted blades, or sharp ones if the watching men paid enough.
It smelled of piss and that metallic sweaty stench of too many men locked in too small a space on too hot an evening. The fight that night was between an albino Thracian and an ebony-black slave brought in from the hinterlands behind Egypt.
Trabo wasn’t watching the fight, although it took me some time to discover that. I was dressed as a tavern whore and working the room was necessarily a slow business; men to fend off, men to let down gently. I couldn’t afford to cause a riot and while I have no qualms about protecting my virtue by force if I have to, on that particular night I had to make sure it didn’t come to that.
When I had been through the entire room and failed to find him, I headed upstairs to the third floor, where were the better-smelling rooms with clean straw on the floor and fewer lice. The one in which I found him was surprisingly wholesome. The blanket on the bed was clean, after a fashion, and the walls had been newly whitewashed in the spring.
Trabo had eaten of their stew and had a flask of wine to hand. He was seated on the bed, writing a letter, when I entered.
‘Jocasta!’
His sword met me, face-high, as I stepped in through the door. He lowered it, but did not sheathe it. He was gaining wisdom, I think, or just so unsettled that he didn’t know whom he could trust any more. ‘What brings you here?’
‘I came to apologize.’ I pushed the door shut behind me, slid the bolts across. ‘May I sit?’
‘What? Yes, of course.’ He swept away the writing from the bed, set it neatly on the floor. That was Trabo all through; impetuous, but neat-minded. The combination had a lot to recommend it. ‘And wine? Would you like wine? I only have one beaker, but…’
‘We could share it?’
I sat on the edge of the bed. I had dressed in a rough tunic without adornment, and pinned my hair up with cheap bronze pins. I pulled them out and leaned forward to set them atop his letter, which let me scan the first lines.
To Geminus from Trabo, Greetings. I leave at first light on a horse Pantera has provided. He
I straightened, sat on the bed. Trabo looked as if I had just slapped him across the face. He was standing there with his sword in one hand and his beaker of wine in the other and didn’t know which to thrust forward first.
‘Geminus got to you through me,’ I said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’
‘You know about that?’ He was so relieved, it was heart-breaking. He leaned back against the wall — he almost fell on to it, really — and slid down until he was sitting on his heels with his hands laced around his knees. He looked more haggard than I’d ever seen him. More than when Pantera had a knife to his throat and he was within three breaths of dying.
Do I believe Pantera would have killed him back in Caenis’ cottage? Without question or hesitation, yes. Do you think Pantera doesn’t kill? He’s ruthless; he kills whoever gets in his way.