‘Oh, and of course he’ll disband the Guard he created because obviously Vespasian will want to make his own out of the men who have just won him Rome. Welcome, Antonius Primus and the bastards who lost to us at Cremona last spring and got lucky a month ago. Remember the lottery? Draw out a name, find your man and kill him? It’ll be the same again only our names will be the ones written on the folded lead. We may as well fall on our own swords now.’
‘Be my guest.’ I was angry. Not the fast, furious anger that comes in a rush of blood to the head and is easily dissipated by a brief flash of violence, but a slow-burning, steadily rising fury that had brought me to a point of terrible clarity.
‘Is it treason,’ I asked, ‘if your emperor wants to abdicate and you stop him? Or is it treason if you let him set down his claim to the throne and walk away? Is the office in the man or does the man own the office?’
Juvens lifted his head slowly. He peered at me as if I had fallen out of focus. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘Completely so. We made the emperor. We choose when to unmake him. And today is not that day.’
I stepped away from the door and wrenched it open. Breakfast fires danced and flickered in the dark. Dawn was a faint blue line on the eastern horizon; night still held the city. ‘You can come or you can stay here and fall on your sword.’
A thousand men stood within earshot. They were armed, and cloaked against the cold; their helmets were a dully undulant sea, glimmering here and there, touched by torches that guttered and flamed at their margins.
A signaller waited nearby, summoned an hour ago. I grabbed his horn, strode to the podium and sounded the summons to war.
The air was short: three rising notes and three falling, repeated three times. By the end of the second phrase, every Guard in the barracks was in parade order, waiting.
Two and a half thousand impatient men stood in front of me, and the battle rage rose from them thick as fog from a winter river, harsh as salt in a wound, pliable, malleable, mine to mould to my intent.
I sucked it in with the air I needed to speak. Never in my life had I addressed so many in one place at one time. I had to guess the pitch, the strength of voice that would make it carry.
‘Men of the Imperial Guard…’ Perhaps too loud, but it made the point. ‘Today of all days, you choose your own destiny. Will you go craven into the night? Or will you stand up for all you have fought for? Will you fight one more day, and another, and the one after that, until you see-’
I had to stop; I could not shout over their noise. Antonius Primus must have heard them, and Lucius, a day’s march to the south.
The holler was ragged at first, but resolved, slowly, into a single sound: my name.
‘Gem-in-us! Gem-in- us! Gem-in-us! ’
This, too, was an entirely new experience. My own rage grew, blossomed, tempered by a pride I had never imagined, and the power of it transported me beyond myself.
I raised my hands to call for quiet and the men hushed in a moment. I looked down across two and a half thousand faces and they beamed at me as if the sun rose only in my eyes. I had never loved anyone as I now loved these, my men. I took a breath, knew exactly how to pitch my voice to best effect.
‘Men of the Guard. Our emperor needs our help. This is what we shall do…’
Chapter 53
Rome, 18 December AD 69
Horus
I was living through a waking nightmare. I had ridden harder, for longer, on less sleep in the past night than the cumulative total of my life.
Daylight saw me back in Rome, with the blazing hell of Tarracina seared on the backs of my eyes.
I had no idea if Julius Claudianus and his gladiators had any chance of beating Lucius’ Guardsmen, but I knew they would try and that the trying would be vicious, bloody and terrible for those who didn’t die swiftly.
The belief that, for the foreseeable future, the safest place in the empire was at Pantera’s right hand had sustained me through the night and it sustained me now, as we passed through the gates at the head of the Appian Way and into the southern suburbs of Rome.
The horses were left with an innkeeper who seemed, if not to expect us, then at least not to be overly surprised at our hasty arrival and similarly hasty departure. He had an urn of soup ready, full of thick, floating things best not explored; we took the bowls he gave us and drank from them as we moved swiftly through the waking city. Slaves were up and about, cloaked against the winter’s cold, but few others.
In some dark, unnamed alley we stopped to urinate against a walclass="underline" a line of four men — Pantera, Trabo, Borros and me — darkly dressed, not recently shaved, pissing in arcs on to the bricks. A sudden wall of noise rose from below, where the forum awaited the day’s gathering.
Pantera’s head snapped up. ‘That’s Vitellius. He’s early. Run!’
We ran. It was mostly downhill, but still, I was spitting blood from my lungs on to the dirt by the time we reached our destination.
The Forum Romanum: once a market place, now the centre of civic life in Rome; a plaza, surrounded by ancient temples and newer civic buildings; a place of constant building since the days of Rome’s republic.
The temple of Vesta and the circular House of the Vestal Virgins lie on the eastern edge, settled between the regia, where once kings lived, and the Palatine hill. Pantera scrambled up on to a broken wall alongside the regia.
Borros and Trabo scrambled up the sheer surface in an act of magic that I couldn’t possibly repeat, but I was lifted up one-handed by Borros, so that I could see at least as far as the place where the emperor stood, surrounded by grim-faced — one might even say murderous — Guards.
A very large number of Guards.
In fact, looking through the ranks of those gathered, there were easily as many Guards as there were citizens and they were not listening to Vitellius read from his prepared script: they were watching the men around them.
Nobody, particularly, was listening to the emperor. It was humiliating enough that he read to us when any man of worth should have been able to speak extempore in times of need. Worse was the fact that he made no effort to send his voice to the crowd. He seemed to be speaking mainly to the Guard officer next to him, and that without conviction.
His son was there, poor stammering waif who no sane man had ever believed would live long enough to take the throne, and might now not live long enough to see so much as the new year. The boy was dressed in funereal grey, and now that I looked at him in the poor winter light I saw that his father was the same.
It’s true: amazing as it may sound, Vitellius had come in mourning to his own abdication. And he was weeping!
Emperors of Rome are proud men. Of course Augustus wept when his Varus lost three legions in the forests of the Rhine, but that was a proud weeping, as of a father for the loss of a beloved son.
No emperor, not even Nero, wept for pity at his own misfortune. If he hadn’t been surrounded by stone-faced Guards, there was a fighting chance that Vitellius would have been booed out on to the streets, bundled into a sack and thrown into the Tiber. As it was, he snivelled on to the end of his speech; short, perfunctory and inadequate.
I hadn’t heard a word of it, because by then I was fixated on the Guard officer who stood so menacingly at his side. It was Geminus.
This was a new Geminus, prouder, more erect, more savage even than when he had slaughtered my beloved Cerberus, more driven; a Geminus who bore in the chiselled angles of his face all the authority that Vitellius lacked.