He was a decent man: he eyed me up and down and said a good soldier deserved more and three days later I was the second cook and living in my own apartment room with a girl, Tertia, available if I wanted her. I didn’t want her; I wanted nobody but Jocasta, but it would have looked strange if I hadn’t taken her, so I did.
Tertia was easy and compliant and I grew to like her. She was intelligent enough to keep away when I had company, though that wasn’t often. Jocasta came to see me when she could, but there were days on end when I didn’t hear from her, then she’d turn up out of nowhere and we’d be together like a married couple for three days in a row. I told her about the job, naturally, but I never said that Pantera had got it for me. I thought she knew.
My room was on the eighth floor of the adjacent building, with one window that looked out over the main street and another that looked north, towards the Tiber. If you leaned out of that one and looked to the right, you could just see the temple on the Capitol’s peak, hidden behind the high rise apartment blocks that forested the hill’s flanks.
Inside, I had room for a bed and a chamber pot and a wooden cupboard with a lock on the door where I kept my spare clothes and a knife. I had a good mattress on the bed and linen over it. I thought it homely, and dreamed of somewhere like it, but bigger, where I could live with Jocasta when the war was over.
We talked of it sometimes, but not on that night when she’d seen Caenis’ bronze map and Pantera had told her his plans. I didn’t find out about that until later; when she came, she wasn’t in the mood to talk.
She wasn’t in the mood to do anything but fuck, hard; harder than anything we’d done before. I’d always held back until then, although now I can’t think why. I was afraid she might despise me, I think. There was something untouchable about her, even after we’d spent so many nights in bed and barely slept through any of them. I knew every inch of her body and I didn’t know her at all.
She pushed through the door that night with a look on her face that would have stopped any man in his tracks. I was halfway through undressing and she finished it for me in moments, then kind of punched me down on to the bed and slid over me without taking her clothes off.
I felt bruised all over when she’d done, exhausted, as if we’d just run through the night and then fought a battle. My back was shredded and bloody from the rip of her nails.
Afterwards, when she had mellowed a bit, I risked saying, ‘It’s Pantera, isn’t it?’
She wouldn’t speak at first. In the end, she said, ‘He’s trying to force Lucius into going north by saying he wants him to stay in Rome. He thinks Vitellius will be more pliable without his brother at his side.’
I knew she was close with Lucius. I didn’t know how close and I didn’t ask. She came to me of her own free will and that was enough. If she knew the danger I posed to her, she didn’t speak of it.
I asked, ‘Is he right? Will Vitellius be weaker?’
‘Probably.’ She was nibbling at the side of her nail, looking up at the ceiling. Wherever her mind was, it wasn’t on the eighth floor of an apartment building on the Capitol.
‘How is he going to make Lucius go? It’s not as if he can give him orders.’
‘But he can, you see. That’s the point. He’s going to let him find a letter saying that the last thing he wants is for Lucius to go north.’
‘So he’ll go.’
‘Of course he will. He’s an idiot.’ She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. She had a bruise or two of her own on her back, near the wings of her shoulders, where I had held her too tightly. I traced the outline with the knuckle of my thumb, gently.
She gave a long, hard sigh. ‘I hate them both.’
And in that, I believe she was telling nothing but the truth.
Chapter 38
Rome, October, AD 69
Geminus
‘ One thing’s certain, then. Wherever I go, it will not be north to meet Antonius Primus!’
Lucius was in buoyant mood. He had spent the past four months torturing men to death for news of Pantera, but this was the day I realized that all the while he had had someone inside Pantera’s innermost circle who was feeding him information.
There must have been a point, surely, when this individual could have handed Pantera to Lucius on a plate with a ribbon tied round his mouth, but Lucius didn’t want that. Instead, he had let the spy continue with Pantera’s plans, had listened to them and learned from them, and now he had an opportunity to thwart them.
Which meant he had killed a dozen men slowly as a ruse to make Pantera believe he was being hunted by a man who had no chance of catching him, which was exactly the kind of soulless, ruthless, inescapable logic that left me slick with sweat.
But you couldn’t deny that it had all come to fruition when Trabo sent us a copy of Pantera’s latest letter to Antonius Primus, and Lucius, forewarned, knew enough to outwit his opponent.
Pantera was running a bluff, trying to trick Lucius into going north by saying he didn’t want him there. And so the last thing Lucius planned to do was to leave Rome. If he hadn’t been warned, that letter would have set him off like a hound after a running hind, I’m sure of it, but as it was he dug in his heels and began shaping plans for the defence of the city. And all because Pantera didn’t want him to do that.
I, who had delivered Trabo’s letter into Lucius’ hand, found myself the object of congratulations I didn’t deserve and rewards I didn’t want.
Twice now, Lucius had patted me on the shoulder, which was entirely disconcerting and could only bode ill for later when his mood wore off. I wished Juvens were there to share the accolades; he weathered Lucius’ rare moments of joy far better than I ever did.
‘We have to tell the emperor.’ Lucius was jittery, fizzing with uncontainable energy, pacing back and forth across the full breadth of his small office. ‘He refuses to believe that Caecina has defected and Valens has gone.’ We’d heard nothing of Valens for nearly a month by then; he could have been anywhere. ‘My brother thinks the war is already won and that I am simply making difficulties to embarrass him. This will make him believe otherwise, if anything can. Come on!’ He flung open the door. The dreg ends of October battered him with rain-sodden wind. Miserable Guards stood rigidly to attention, praying, if they were anything like me, not to catch Lucius’ eye. ‘Bring that letter! We’ll find him now.’
Vitellius’ favoured palace was on the Palatine, on the far side of the city from the barracks. Sixteen Guards flanked Lucius and me as we made our way across the city, the minimum that was needed to feel safe these days.
Nobody was popular any more; the toxic pall of war had reached Rome and death haunted the streets. Everyone wanted someone else to die; anybody but me.
I was no different. On Caecina’s defection, when men he had favoured were removed from their posts, I had been promoted to first centurion of the first cohort of the Guard and given permission to move out of the barracks and buy a house in the city, but I hadn’t so much as looked for one yet, for all that I would have been given preferential rates by men desperate to curry favour with Lucius. I preferred to sleep at the barracks and to travel, when I had to, with Guards about me. It occurred to me more than once that if Lucius could have done something to make Rome feel safe again, I would have reconsidered my assessment of him as a dangerous lunatic given too much power without any controls.
We reached the palace unassaulted. This was not Nero’s vast gilded pleasure palace, but a smaller, more functional house that had survived from the reign of Octavian, who became Augustus Caesar.