‘Who…?’
But as he spoke, a figure swung round the side of the small doorway that led to the latrines. General Pompeianus was naked apart from a towel wrapped around his waist, his dark, oily hair wet and pulled back with a band of white linen. His swarthy features were split with a conspiratorial smile.
‘Not sure what you mean, sir’ Rufinus replied desperately, his voice cracking under the strain.
‘Even minus the beard and the lion’s mane, you’re fairly recognisable, young man. To those who pay attention, anyway. I might still have been unsure but… let’s say you would be unwise to mention places like Vindobona if you are hoping to fool anyone as to your identity.’
Rufinus felt the panic rising again. He’d been in the villa less than an hour and already his cover had been seen through.
‘General, I…’
‘Cease the panicked prattling, young fellow. I’m the least of your worries. Interesting, though; from decorated war hero to Praetorian guardsman to hired thug in such short order. Did you piss on the emperor or something?’
Rufinus felt the colour in his cheeks rising and cursed silently. ‘No sir, it’s just that I…’
Pompeianus laughed. ‘Oh calm down.’
He paused.
‘RUFINUS!’ he bellowed at the top of his voice.
Rufinus felt his blood run cold and rushed toward the betowelled figure.
‘PRAETORIAN GUARDSMAN RUFINUS!’ the general yelled again.
As Rufinus reached the general, he put out a restraining hand and laughed. ‘There’s no one here to learn your secret, young Rufinus. No one dares come in when I’m here. And equally no one pays the slightest attention to anything I say. I might as well be a ghost.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Paternus, yes? Your presence reeks strongly of Paternus.’
Rufinus, suddenly and painfully aware just how much on the back foot he was, nodded meekly, hoping he hadn’t just ruined everything and signed his death warrant.
Pompeianus laughed lightly. ‘It is a very Paternus move. The man is a soldier through and through. Needs more information so he sends a soldier to find it for him. Perennis is a much more devious character.’
Rufinus blinked. ‘Perennis?’
‘He’s the one who asked me to stay here, when I was about to leave my wife’s loving side and return to Syria for a year of peace and quiet. He recognises the relative ease of corrupting the powerful compared with the difficulty of eavesdropping on them. Much more subtle. I have to say, though, that Paternus may very well have chosen the right path, for all its military inflexibility. You will likely get into places from which I am forbidden. I would ask, though, for the sake of professional courtesy, that you share anything you discover with me?’
Rufinus’ mind reeled. Once more, just when he thought he was getting the hang of things, the rules had changed. The coming weeks were beginning to look more complex with every discovery he made.
XIII – Settling in
THREE days after his arrival at the villa the rains came, and came with Neptune’s vengeance, dropping half the Mare Nostrum on the plains of Latium, flooding irrigation channels, leaving fields under shallow lakes and driving the population indoors. Six days now the rain had battered the land incessantly, day and night.
The people hid in their homes, those with money relaxing on their heated floors, those with none huddling around fires that belched black smoke, fed with damp wood in the ever saturated environment.
Except for the guards of the Villa Hadriana.
Rufinus stepped in from the pounding rain, tipping his head forward and ruffling his short hair before smoothing his hands through it, squeezing the water out in torrents to the floor where it joined the constant dripping of his clothes. He had been given a mail shirt from the villa’s storeroom and had the cost deducted from his first month’s wage, though today he had foregone the armour, due to the weather.
More than the cost, Rufinus confirmed to himself, casting a soldier’s eye down the battered item. The shirt had certainly seen better days, small sections having been repaired by a man with little talent for armoury and no eye for neatness. Plus the damn thing had never been particularly well cared for by its doubtless half-dozen previous owners. The links were already pitted with the marks of old rust when he’d received it and he’d spent a good hour of every evening rolling the mail in a barrel of sand to abrade the rust.
He grasped the old red military scarf at his neck and wrung it, watching the water pour onto the floor amid the growing pool.
One of the villa’s inviolable rules was that no new staff, whether servant or slave, guard or gardener, was to be alone and unescorted through their first month. Ostensibly, the rule was to prevent people becoming lost in the complex or falling foul of the wolves that occasionally forayed into the grounds in winter when the pickings were meagre. In truth it was a matter of security. Lucilla and her people were an untrusting group – with good reason, Rufinus being here secretly as he was.
The rule, however, had proved to be more of a guideline than a law when the rains began in earnest. Rufinus, assigned for six days of each week to patrol the grounds, alternating weekly between day and night shifts, soon realised that wandering the soggy grass in the downpour was a task he would be performing alone. Fastus was assigned to the same duty but, with alternating different weeks, they rarely even saw one another.
They wasn’t the only two patrolling the estate, of course, but the others moved around the grounds sporadically, sheltering here and there in abandoned buildings or arched substructures, stamping their feet in the cold while supping from jars of imported Greek mead, watching the endless rain and occasionally laughing as the figure of Rufinus passed by like a drowned rat somewhere below.
He’d briefly given thought to following suit and sheltering from the weather most of the time, keeping one eye on the landscape, but he was new and had to earn a basic level of trust. Being found hiding from the rain in the south theatre’s arches would hardly do his reputation good. What he needed most of all was not to stand out in any way, good or bad.
Blend in with the rest.
With a little judicious investigation, Rufinus had discovered that he could follow a route from the bath house around the periphery of Pompeianus’ residence, all the way back to the barracks’ entrance, with only perhaps thirty heartbeats of hurrying through the rain between covered areas. As such, he’d now ended each day’s patrol with an hour-long visit to the baths where he could leave his clothes on the heated tiles to dry while warming and cleaning himself. It was a workable routine and negated the worst of the cold and damp.
He’d been quite grateful not to bump into the lady Lucilla’s somewhat estranged husband again since that first afternoon. The conversation they had shared that day had been stilted and uncomfortable, Rufinus unwilling to discuss too much of the little he knew, Pompeianus clearly with a great deal more inside knowledge of the estate and his wife’s dealings, but unwilling to share with a recalcitrant newcomer. Since then they had mercifully missed one another on their bath house visits.
Rufinus was still mulling over the possibilities that Pompeianus’ involvement raised. The two men were clearly both looking into the same things in their own ways, but Perennis’ clandestine meetings with Lucilla and his ‘patronage’ of Pompeianus left too many questions unanswered for Rufinus to comfortably trust the Syrian. Perhaps as time went on he would unfold enough truth to be able to share with the man, but not yet.
Finishing wringing out his clothes, Rufinus stepped inside the bath house proper and shuffled across to the alcoves, four of which were already filled. Quickly, as he unbelted his tunic, he checked them. Phaestor’s clothes he recognised, and the other three clearly belonged to members of the guard or servants. No sign of Pompeianus’ costly tunic and toga.