Then the other legions arrived and the fighting started and the men inside would not let the town’s councillors surrender, and even if they had the men outside wanted to take the town by force, because then the rules of war meant every spoil within it became theirs by right.
And so by summer Cremona was a small town burned to charred roofbeams and the stubs of walls with a great banner of smoke lying heavy across it, holding in the stench of burned flesh and hair and bone, and the sounds of women, screaming.
And then this autumn, after the eclipse on the night of the eighteenth of October, it all happened again.
They shouldn’t have gone there. Really. Anywhere but Cremona. It didn’t deserve that.
Antonius Primus’ advance forces got there first, but the bulk of his men were eighteen miles behind. He sent for them and they ran the whole way and then insisted on fighting. Caecina’s forces, meanwhile, arrived at the end of their hundred- mile march and they, too, insisted on fighting a battle that stretched into the night, where Roman fought Roman and men were able to switch sides to sabotage the enemy simply by picking up the shields of fallen men and listening to others speak the watchword.
You know by now how Antonius Primus himself was in the front line and when his men were routed by an early attack he killed a retreating standard-bearer with his own sword and picked up the banner and carried it to the front and shamed his men into standing and fighting back.
Maybe that’s why they won. Who knows? In battle, one brave man can turn a whole field; they teach us that as we train, and it’s true.
So maybe Antonius Primus really did win single-handedly. Or maybe our men had lost heart when they lost Caecina. Or the terrain was against them, or perhaps it is true that at dawn, after a night’s hard fighting, when the men of Antonius’ eastern legions turned to raise a shout to the rising sun in Mithras’ name, our men thought they hailed reinforcements and lost all heart.
But in the end the reason doesn’t matter. It’s the facts that count and the fact was that in this, the biggest and most important battle between Vitellius and Vespasian, we had lost.
Chapter 36
Rome, October, AD 69
Jocasta
‘ We won! ’
Domitian, who had never seen war, punched the air, dancing. Around him on the couches or standing by the pool in my atrium were Sabinus, Caenis, Pantera and me. We had all lived through too many wars to contemplate another with anything but horror.
‘What?’
Domitian rounded on us, his eyes alive with scorn. He had become more animated, more mobile, more expressive these past months. It’s possible, I agree, that I might have had something to do with that. I was kind to him. I didn’t reject him. I also did not sleep with him, ever.
Now, when his gaze fell on me, his scorn became uncertainty. ‘Would you rather we had lost?’
I said nothing. Caenis was the one who answered, and she did it gently.
‘We would prefer there to have been no battle at all,’ she said. ‘For every victorious man there is another dead, with his wife a widow, his children fatherless, his life gone, and all to satisfy the pride of legionaries who would rather fight than yield to the inevitable.’
‘But it wasn’t inevitable.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ Pantera pushed himself to his feet. He was shaggily blond now, not the shimmering, almost-silver gold of Felix, the boss-eyed assassin who padded after him, but more like aspen leaves at early autumn; it gave him a more youthful look.
Cleverly woven leather made a neckpiece and silver rings set with small, glittering gems adorned nine of his ten fingers so that, did you look at him unclosely, you’d have said he was someone’s ageing catamite, not older than twenty-five; fading, but not yet having lost all his beauty.
Of course, this wasn’t true, but even I had to stare at him hard to remember who he really was, so you can understand why Lucius hadn’t taken him yet.
He had been sitting on the floor by my feet until then, close enough for his shoulder to press against my knee. We were becoming easier in each other’s company; not yet friends, but allies, at least.
Standing now, he said, ‘Nothing in war is inevitable. If Caecina’s legions had reached Cremona sooner, they would have swung the balance. We were lucky, and a good war doesn’t depend on luck. So…’ He stepped half a pace to his left and was no longer in shadow. ‘We must make sure we don’t rely on luck next time.’
The change in Pantera had not all come from Gudrun’s dye pots; the strains of all that Lucius planned to do to him weighed on his cheekbones, hollowing the flesh beneath them. He was leaner, fitter, sharper. The set of his mouth did not allow for compromise, if it ever had.
‘To that end, perhaps it would be useful if we surveyed the terrain and the positions of the legions and looked at what may be coming between now and the year’s end. Caenis? Can it be done now?’
It could, evidently, whatever ‘it’ was.
With a small and secret smile, Caenis nodded to Matthias who rang a silver bell, and in moments her Spartan atrium had sprung to life with servants carrying things in from a side room, setting them down, and shifting them around until everything fitted together. Matthias fussed over the end result for a moment, then stood back and clapped his hands.
The room emptied again, leaving behind only those of us at the heart of the conspiracy: Pantera, Sabinus, Caenis, Domitian, and me.
On the marble floor, in the clear space by the pool where Caenis’ writing desk had lately stood, was a new waist-high table, and on it was something I had heard of from the old days, but never seen: a scaled model of Italy, about the length of a man lying down.
Mountains stood proud, the indented seas dipped deep, painted pale blue across their floors so that when Matthias poured water into them from a copper jug, they seemed truly to be minor oceans, shimmering with promise.
Caenis stood beside it. She was a small woman, but she dominated any room she was in. Her eyes were bright and thoughtful and never rested anywhere long enough to be impolite, but always long enough to see what was there to be seen.
Her hair shone and was modestly kept, with few pins and no veil. Her skin was perfect. Her hands were steady and not yet knotted with the arthritis that affects so many who have once been slaves; she had been a clerk, well trained and well kept, and it showed.
She said, ‘It is good, at last, to be able to offer something concrete to our endeavour. This map is over one hundred years old. It was a gift to the lady Antonia from Marc Antony, her father. Sadly, the old symbols and figurines that showed Antony, Caesar and Octavian, with their legions and fleets, are long gone. In their place, I have had more made.’
So saying, she opened a silk bag, and lifted out on to the edge of the table three dozen lifelike models of mounted horsemen, carved in wood.
They were all identical, or as close as human hand could carve, but as she set them out on the terrain she laid across each shoulder a cloak of blue for Vespasian or green for Vitellius, these being the colours each was known to favour in the chariot races. Those legions whose affiliation was not yet known she coloured white.
Thus did she bring the map to life: a river of blue-clad men surged towards Rome with streaks of green standing thinly in their way. The greatest mass of green was in Rome, of course, where the Guard remained, but most striking of all was the vast mass of twenty-five thousand blue-clad men led by Mucianus making their inexorable progress towards us from Syria.
When Caenis stepped back to let the rest of us come forward, she was rewarded by our growing delight. There was a childlike pleasure in moving models on a map, and one as beautiful as this made it an art form. We could plan campaigns and move the men to suit our whim, and test feints and mock retreats and see where the terrain would hamper us.