M. Scott - The Art of War

‘Gentlemen!’ Caecina held up a hand. His voice was high for a man’s, sharp and clear. ‘You each have a tab and, on it, a name. You know what to do. Know as you do so that we are, once again, a nation at war with itself.’

That got our attention: I had heard the news the night before, but my fellow officers had not. All along the row, we stood more upright, our eyes fixed on our general.

Caecina pitched his voice well; he knew how to play a crowd. ‘We have news from the east. On the first of July, the prefect of Egypt swore his oath to Vespasian as emperor. His legions did likewise and they were followed by the legions of Judaea and Syria respectively. He is appointing senators, prefects, praetors. He is minting coins in his own image and collecting taxes in his own name. He is choosing senators and consuls to serve his version of Rome and he is recruiting armies to march at his command. In short, he is behaving as if he were already emperor and we the traitors standing against him. He is preparing for war and we must be ready to fight.

‘Eight legions are ranged against us. There will not be any more, because our emperor is loved by his men, but they are enough for us to show once again that we are the best the empire can command.

‘Go now, and prove yourselves first with this one assignment. And then, next spring, we will march against the traitors.’

Rome, 1 August AD 69

Geminus

Dismissed, I had no further duties until I took command of the watch at dusk.

Outside, the rain had eased; we were greeted by grey skies, but the gods were no longer weeping. My fellow Guards surged in a pack towards the barracks on the Field of Mars at the back of the Quirinal hill. All the chatter was of Vespasian’s eight legions and where and how they might be beaten, which was pointless, because we all knew that even if they’d set off on the first day of July with their oaths to Vespasian still hot in their throats, it would take them half a year to reach Rome and they’d get here in the middle of winter when nobody fights.

I didn’t want to hear a hundred men explaining the unlikely detail of how they’d smash the enemy lines single-handed, so I drew back from the rest to take short cuts that turned out to be long cuts, but meant that I was alone and nobody was asking questions, and I was free to learn my way around Rome again.

I grew up here. Rome was my birthplace and my home, but I joined the legions when I was nineteen and that was twelve years ago and I’d only been back once, just before the fire, and that disaster had changed everything.

We lost four out of fourteen districts and Nero’s building programme afterwards was as radical as any we’d seen. He set statues where once were eighteen-storey slums, and slums where once were temples, so that there were areas of the city that felt completely alien to me as I walked through them. Only the seven hills were unchanged; their outline was — is — moulded on my soul.

That day, with the lead lottery done, I came down the Capitol and made my way through the forum. From there, I turned left up the Quirinal, at least notionally heading in the direction of the Guards’ barracks.

This hill is not like the Palatine, home to senators and equestrians and merchants who have too much gold and need to show it off. The Quirinal is a thrifty place that offers residence to impecunious senators, bad gamblers, and the recently arrived who have not yet carved a place for themselves elsewhere.

I like it there; I always have. Free of my colleagues and their inane battle fantasies, I walked faster up the hill.

The Quirinal is like the rest of Rome in that money and status buys you height. As the hill rose, shabby shop fronts gave way to marginally more prosperous dwellings. Villas lined the road, and tucked away to one side halfway up were three parallel streets of small, neat houses funded by the imperial coffers for the widows of fallen generals, and then beyond them the bachelor homes of impecunious but worthy men who had lost their wives: in Rome, few things are left to chance and this proximity was no accident.

I came to a forked junction and took the left-hand path, which led to one of the widows’ streets.

Here were flowers outside the doors, and the doors themselves had legion shapes carved on them: a Capricorn, a Taurus, a Thunderbolt. The women did not grieve openly for their lost menfolk, but the signs were there if you knew what to look for.

I had gone barely ten paces when I heard light footsteps behind me. Six months on campaign and you don’t take these things lightly. I snapped round, blade sighing free.

‘Juvens?’

Marcus Decius Juvens was standing just out of striking distance, a half-smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. He was a good man. I let drop my hand. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I saw you go off on your own and wondered why.’

‘Why d’you think? Did you hear the Runt saying how he’d disembowel Vespasian and all his armies at a single stroke? Or Arminios swearing on his Germanic gods to stand at the gates of Rome and slaughter anyone who tried to come through after the ides of September? Pointless bloody nonsense.’

‘But harmless all the same.’ Juvens looked like Julius Caesar’s more cheerful younger brother, which he claimed was all good breeding and it might have been true. Certainly, he was from ancient patrician stock so refined that he could quote his ancestry for the past eighteen generations without pausing for breath.

Unfortunately for all concerned, his grandfather had lost the family fortune, and although his father had made half of it back, he had been careless enough to become entangled in Piso’s conspiracy against Nero and so, along with fifty others, including Lacan, Seneca, and Piso himself, had been forced to suicide. Juvens senior’s estate, such as was left of it, went to the crown.

He had two sons, of whom the elder, now penniless, subsequently tried to have himself elected consul and was so soundly beaten in the ballot that he retreated into self-imposed exile in Iberia. Our Juvens had survived by virtue of being the second son, too insignificant to be noticed. Scraping together loans at extortionate interest, he bought his commission and bribed his way to one of the furthest legions from Rome: the IVth Macedonica, stationed on the Rhine.

It was a risky strategy; at least half of those who buy their way to a junior commission find themselves dead with a blade in the back at their first skirmish, but Juvens was bright enough, wild enough, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring, hard-fighting enough to be loved by the men before we ever went into battle together.

They owed him money, too; Juvens’ luck at dice was legendary. He paid off his debts in full within his first year. By the time we came back to Rome, rumour said he was almost as rich as his grandfather had been in his pomp.

None of that mattered, at least not as far as I was concerned, because Juvens had proved himself in war. In the past six months he had more than earned the spear Caecina had just given him for personal valour. He was an exceptional commander with an outstanding eye for a battlefield. I had fought twice at his side and would have been happy to do so for the rest of my life, although at that moment, standing like a fool in the widows’ street with my blade half drawn, I wasn’t sure the sentiment was returned: Juvens seemed to like everyone equally, which couldn’t be true.

In blithe disregard of our orders, he asked, ‘Who did you draw in the lottery?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t opened the tab yet.’

The first part of that was a lie, as you’ll learn, and I’m sorry for it, but the truth was that we shouldn’t have been discussing it at all: an open street is the very opposite of ‘private’.