So Pantera bit his lip and said, ‘We’ll find him. Stay with Sabinus. There’s no point in hiding now and you’re as safe with him as anywhere.’
He caught Borros’ eye and nodded and the big Briton vanished into the shadows. As far as I could tell, he’d spent half the summer following Domitian and knew his habits. If he hadn’t had to go south the previous night, he would have been waiting outside the House of the Lyre and would have seen to it that the boy returned home in the morning.
Pantera fell back beside me, the only one left of the small band he had led out of Tarracina in the night. We walked along near the back of the group.
‘How many, do you think?’ Pantera asked.
I had been doing a head count while he was speaking to Caenis. ‘More than four hundred,’ I said. ‘Most of them old men, beyond fighting age.’
‘That’s what I thought. If we meet trouble, they’ll have to head to the Capitol. Be ready.’
It was that kind of morning: nothing was certain. We kept to the back of the group that surged down the Quirinal hill towards the Basilica Julia and the forum. They were not all men: I had counted a number of women besides Caenis and Jocasta, perhaps one tenth of the whole.
Neither Pantera nor I had any status and we could not be seen anywhere near the front of this column, but nor could we safely let Sabinus out of our sight: Pantera’s word to Vespasian still held, and in any case Sabinus was now the key to the bloodless coup we had always planned.
He wasn’t hard to follow: we stayed to one side and kept parallel to the group, ranging along alleyways, rooftops, walls, scaffolding, anything to give a clear view of the route ahead.
We saw the smoke as we came over the brow of the hill on to the long incline; a thin thread, dark against the morning’s haze, rising from the foot of the hill.
‘ Fuck! ’
Pantera leapt into a run and I was with him. No one who had lived through the fire in Rome could have done anything different: the memories will be with us for life, vivid and appalling. Without effort, I imagined Jocasta roasted, burning, dying slowly. It gave speed to my feet.
We turned a corner and saw a small, stilted figure running up the hill towards us. It was Matthias from Caenis’ house, with Toma and Dino close on his heels.
He fell at Caenis’ feet, bringing the whole great mass of men and women and senators to a halt.
In front of them all, he panted out the news that an entire century of the Guard had been to the Street of the Bay Trees and assaulted Caenis’ house, battering down the door with a ram.
They had not found whom they sought, but they had torched it anyway and now they were moving on to every place in the city where Pantera had been seen: to the White Hare, to the House of the Lyre, to ‘To the Crossed Spears?’ Pantera’s very bad at hiding his worry when he thinks he’s been responsible for someone else’s death.
It was then that I realized how close he was with the dream-teller and his Nordic wife, how much they meant to him. Or, perhaps, how much their welfare weighed on him. He had already caused the bad deaths of his little gelded priest and then the men in Tarracina; he wasn’t the kind who could bear much more of that.
Matthias shook his head. ‘Not there, not yet. Maybe not ever. It wasn’t mentioned and they did a lot of talking. I think Gudrun and Scopius will be safe for now; the silver-boys will tell them if the Guards come close.’
Pantera wasn’t listening. He had seen something and the look on his face made me turn so fast I nearly fell over.
Four hundred men turned with me, and saw, flowing up the hill from the forum, far faster than winter snow, a column of the Guard.
The day was soft with the promise of rain, but their naked blades were shafts of brilliant light, bouncing to the rhythm of their feet.
Sabinus raised his hand for the halt, which was entirely unnecessary given that not one of the men behind him was armed. Even if they had been, none was of the mettle to give fight to a century or more of angry Praetorian Guards.
‘To the Capitol!’ Pantera vaulted on to a nearby wall so they could see better where he pointed. ‘Turn right and get up on to the Capitol now! If you can reach the Asylum, you’ll be safe.’
This last was something of an exaggeration but the heart of Sabinus’ crowd was easily swayed and the thought of safety drew the mass of men and women up the steep slopes of the Capitol as fast as their indignation had previously swept them down toward the forum. Watery sunlight seeped through the heavy sky as they ran, sending their shadows as long, lean fingers ahead.
If the Palatine was palatial, the Capitol was holy, at least at its heights, which is to say the houses on it were far older and in greater need of repair; and that the temples commanded all the best positions, set higher than the towering tenement slums which leaned against each other at such alarming angles on the slopes leading up to them.
We passed many of those. Standing amongst the small, much-patched dwellings were crumbling temples of minor deities and flat, paved areas used for the reading of augurs and auspices. A smell of fear and old blood clung to the damp December air. A light rain began to fall. If it was a comment from the gods, nobody knew what it said.
Climbing ever upward, the procession, or perhaps by now it was a scrum of refugees, slowed as it reached the steepest part of the hill. Pantera and I moved back among them, selecting men from the throng, choosing those with hair not yet silvered, who looked as if they might have seen at least some recent military service.
‘Block the path,’ we told them. ‘Don’t let the Guards past. They’ll put a cordon at the foot of the hill, but we need to hold the heights until Antonius Primus gets here. It won’t be more than two days.’
They didn’t listen; they didn’t know who we were, and they weren’t the kind of men to take orders from strangers: I would have been the same.
Eventually, exasperated, Jocasta seized planks from a nearby scaffold and, helped by three other women, began to erect a barricade across the route. My heart exploded with pride, but still she wouldn’t look at me. She achieved more than we had done, though. Shamed, the men we had picked out formed into groups and the single barricade soon became a wall, blocking the way up.
The greater mass of Sabinus’ refugees forged on past the head of the Gemonian steps, across the saddle of the Asylum and past the teetering row of priest’s houses to the temple proper.
This was the beating heart of Rome. In ancient times, when the Gauls assaulted the city and nearly took it, Marcus Manlius had held out on the Capitol for months, acquiring as he did so the name Capitolinus. From our point of view, the old tale was a reminder that he who holds the heights holds the city. We were there now, but we had to get into the temple and then hold it and neither of those was a trivial task.
Seen close up, the building itself was like a fortress, with huge walls and thick gates; assaulting it would have taken a proper military force, which we didn’t have. To be blunt, if the priests inside were inclined to close the gates against us, we knew we had no means of opening them.
But gongs and cymbals had attended our march, much as the silver-boys’ whistles would have attended something similar down in the city, and now, as Sabinus approached the main gate, a small postern door opened in the wall some distance to his right. A middle-aged priest emerged, robed in scarlet, hesitant and unhappy in the ever-increasing rain.
‘Who seeks entry?’
It was a rote question, asked of all who came there, and this much Sabinus could manage. His voice carried across the two hills.
‘Sabinus, brother to Vespasian, your emperor. We come in his name and seek sanctuary against the forces of rebellion.’
The priest blinked. He might have spent his days in an ageing stone edifice on a hill, but rumour reached the gods as fast as it did anyone else and he must by then have known the details of Vitellius’ failed abdication.