Douglas Jackson - Enemy of Rome

Aulus Vitellius accompanied his family to the carriage that would carry them to safety and watched them ride away. Galeria stared rigidly ahead and little Lucius was already fascinated by the game Domitia Longina Corbulo had invented. Valerius’s Spanish comrade trotted by their side and he was glad the former gladiator would be there to protect them. He should have sent them earlier, he knew, but the truth was he couldn’t bear to be parted from them. Galeria Fundana was his strength, the rock that anchored him to his duty when the call of decadence became too loud to resist. Lucius was his reason for existing. He felt a fat tear trickle down his cheek. He had failed them. Utterly. He had promised to protect them, but now he had sent them out on to the perilous streets of a city under siege. Why? Because when the soldiers came the danger on the street would be infinitely less than here in this great glittering mausoleum. Alone at last — he’d sent all his guards and courtiers with Galeria — he wandered the echoing marble corridors, with their busts and their artworks, his legs shaking with fear and anticipation of what was to come. What did they matter now, all these shining baubles and this overwhelming sumptuousness that threatened to entomb him? When he’d been in debt he dreamed of a palace like this, but like the man who built it he’d been a fool. Vespasian was welcome to it — all of it. Better to have lived on bread and olives than come to an end such as this. He found himself in the entrance hall, with the enormous golden statue of Nero towering over him. He’d never replaced the head, but … His hand went to his neck. Would they? The Praetorians had sent him the head of Titus Flavius Sabinus and he had cringed from its accusing, glassy-eyed stare. The image triggered a new wave of panic. Vitellius staggered through to his private quarters, almost running now and with his heart thundering in his chest. The doors were locked, but he flung his weight at them, bursting them open. There, on the table, Caesar’s sword. He reached for it with shaking fingers and heard the acclamation of the legions as they proclaimed him Emperor at Moguntiacum. CAESAR! CAESAR! CAESAR!

He’d never called himself Caesar, though other men had, but he’d carried Caesar’s sword. Now he pulled it from its scabbard with that soft, familiar hiss. And almost dropped it. He had never seen it like this before, that gleaming, dangerous edge and the needle point. No longer an ornament, but a weapon of war. A killing weapon. How he wished Valerius were here. Valerius would know. Valerius would help him make the final decision. Tentatively, he raised his head and brought the point up to touch the folds of flesh at his throat. One thrust was all it would take. One thrust and it was over. But what if he botched it? Men took hours to die, sometimes days, with a wound like that. Could he bear it? No, there must be another way. He heard a childish mewing and felt a rush of revulsion when he realized it was from his own lips. You are still the Emperor of Rome , the rebuke was a silent scream, for your family’s sake and your ancestors’, act like one. He raised the point again, closing his eyes as the cold metal brushed the pulsing artery in his neck. One thrust. Shouts and the clatter of running hobnailed feet, skidding at the doorway. Do it now.

‘You don’t get away that easily.’ Rough hands tore the hilt of Caesar’s sword from his fingers, nicking his skin in the process. He willed himself to open his eyes and witness his bane, but the lids wouldn’t obey his mind.

‘Look at that,’ someone else laughed. ‘Caesar’s pissed himself.’

‘Don’t bother about that, search him, and do it properly. There’s enough of him — who knows what he’s got hidden away under all that blubber?’

More laughter as they tore at his clothing, dragging his toga back and tearing at his tunic. Vitellius felt a wave of revulsion and humiliation as the toga dropped away and fingers probed at him. Finally, one of his captors grabbed his hands and wrenched them behind his back, the rope cutting deep into his wrists and making him cry out in pain. Another tied a second length of rope in a loose noose around his neck. Vitellius had an image of a bull being led to the sacrifice and his eyes snapped open in terror. Not even in his most terrible nightmares had he imagined it would be like this.

Ten or twelve soldiers were in the room. Most of them stared in bewildered amusement at the corpulent figure who had been their Emperor, while the others tore at cabinets and moved furniture in search of loot. Their leader, a blood-spattered centurion with a horror of a face, held Caesar’s sword in one hand and the end of the noose rope in the other. The Emperor flinched as he jerked it sharply forward.

‘Where’s the treasure?’ he demanded in a guttural southern accent.

Aulus Vitellius raised his chins and looked down his nose at his captors, and attempted to regain some kind of dignity. ‘There is treasure all around you in this house. Take what you will; I have no further use for it.’

‘Statues, paintings,’ the man spat. ‘An idol the size of an insula that isn’t even made of proper gold. I mean portable treasure: money, ornaments, jewellery. The Golden House is supposed to be full of the stuff, chests of golden aurei and rubies as big as my fist.’

‘A myth,’ Vitellius lied. ‘What little money and jewels were in the house went with the Praetorians when they withdrew to the Castra Praetoria. Perhaps you should look for it there?’ The truth was that the wagon carrying Galeria had been fitted with a false bottom. Hopefully, his loyal guards would be burying the chests it held in the garden of the Aventine house. He had no time to enjoy this minor triumph before the centurion delivered a back-handed slap to his cheek that made his eyes water and the tears run again.

‘Old Brocchus has been around long enough to know how to find treasure. You’ll have heard of Cremona?’

‘An infamy.’ Vitellius shook his head. The slaughter of civilians at Cremona had grieved him more than any military defeat.

‘Well, I know a jeweller at Cremona who didn’t have any treasure right up until the minute I rammed a red hot gladius up his arse.’ Brocchus grinned and drew the sword of Julius Caesar and placed the point in Vitellius’s left nostril. ‘We haven’t got a fire to hand,’ he smirked, ‘so how about I start with a few bits and pieces. What’s it to be, the nose or an ear?’

‘You can’t torture him, First,’ interrupted one of the other men. ‘He’s … he was the Emperor. The high-ups are going to want to see him. Maybe even old man Vespasian himself.’

Vitellius felt a moment of knee-trembling hope. He lifted his nostril from the sword point and sniffed. ‘Yes, I have information of the greatest importance for Vespasian. You will be well rewarded if you take me to your senior officers.’

‘He’s hiding something.’ The speaker’s face was poisonous with malignant intent. ‘I think we should roast him until he squeals like the pig he is. We didn’t come here to be fobbed off with a few statues and a fancy sword. No one would ever know.’

‘You could feed a cohort for a month on a pig that size,’ another man laughed.

‘Use him as a table and a century could eat off him with room to spare.’

Vitellius tried not to hear the jibes and the laughter, but each barb stuck deeper than the last, and he almost didn’t hear the reprieve from Brocchus.

‘No, Julius is right. One of you bastards would blab if we killed him. He’s more valuable alive than dead, and I reckon there might be a nice reward for this fancy sword, which, naturally, you’ll all share in.’ The looks told him they didn’t believe it but Brocchus didn’t give a fuck about that. ‘Come on.’ He dragged at the noose and Vitellius was forced to blunder after him, with half the other men following on and the rest continuing to ransack the palace. ‘We’ll take you to the general.’