Douglas Jackson: Sword of Rome

‘When will you leave?’ Otho’s voice cut through his thoughts.

‘At dusk.’ He had considered heading downriver to Massilia and taking passage on a merchant ship, but he knew Nero would have agents watching Ostia and every other Roman port for Galba’s couriers. ‘We’ll travel by dark, staying close to the Via Aurelia until we clear Aquae Sextiae. The coast road will be watched and it will be safer to take to the mountains. Better to get there alive than not at all.’

Otho nodded distractedly. ‘Arrange for your servant to switch saddle blankets with my mount, but make sure he does it out of view of the escort.’

He saw Valerius’s look. ‘Five thousand gold aurei sewn into the lining. A poor exchange.’ He smiled. ‘Atlas will be glad to have someone else carry the load, but it grieves me to part with it.’

But Valerius’s mind was already reaching out towards the distant mountains that lay between him and his destiny. He was going into the unknown again, but he hadn’t bargained on carrying an Emperor’s bounty.

Rome, 6 June, AD 68

The city glowed like multi-hued gold in the pale early evening sunlight. Beyond the walls and the low rise of the Aventine, the greater mass of the Palatine Hill dominated their view. The marble palaces of the Emperors gleamed as if they were studded with diamonds and, just visible beyond them, the pale bulk of the temples of Jupiter and Juno on the Capitoline were backlit by a sea of fiery red: the terracotta roof tiles that covered plebeian and patrician alike. Valerius hitched his cloak to better disguise the wooden hand that identified him as clearly as any banner. He could visualize the seething mass of humanity that fornicated and farted, plotted and squabbled beneath those roofs. The stink of corruption, physical and political, permeated every inch of the seven hills, but still he smiled. ‘It’s good to be back.’

‘Then why are we standing here in this stinking gutter when we could be inside the walls with a warm bed and a warm woman?’ Serpentius growled.

Valerius shook his head in mock dismay. ‘Trust a Spaniard to be always thinking of his own comfort, even if it will eventually kill him. In case you hadn’t noticed, the gate guards are searching every man for weapons, and experience tells us there’ll be a spy on every second street corner. Before I go into the leopard’s lair I want to know whether he’s eaten or not.’

‘And how do we find that out?’

‘From an old friend.’

‘Does he live far from here?’

‘Not far, that’s why we came to the south gate.’

The Spaniard sniffed, testing the air until he found what he wanted. ‘Well, I’ll be in the tavern over there until you come back.’

Early next morning, Valerius was making his way along the Vicus Patricius when six Praetorians appeared from nowhere to surround him. He looked around for Serpentius, but the gladiator had vanished at the first sight of the black cloaks.

‘You are under arrest.’

‘May I be permitted to ask why?’

‘On the orders of the Emperor.’ The decurion’s words sent a shiver of unease through Valerius.

‘Very well.’ Valerius raised his arms. As the Praetorian searched him for hidden weapons he noticed that the few passers-by who risked a glance in his direction did so with a mixture of fear and pity, but most didn’t even look. Clearly, no one wished to be tainted by association with whatever crime he was accused of. The decurion’s eyes turned shrewd when he saw the wooden hand and Valerius knew he had been recognized. Only time would tell whether it was for good or ill.

When the soldiers were satisfied, they marched him up the cobbled Nova Via before turning right on to the Clivus Palatinus, and the palace complex that sprawled across the hill. It had been four years since he last visited this place, for the interview with Nero that had led him on the fateful mission to track down the Rock of Christus and almost cost him his life.

His captors pushed him through a guardroom and from there into the depths of the hill to an evil-smelling, windowless cell. He was not surprised; death had always been a potential outcome of this quest. Gaius Valerius Verrens had faced death many times, not least in the flame-scorched furnace of the Temple of Claudius as Boudicca’s champions broke in to slaughter the last of Colonia’s defenders. It was there that his right hand had been taken, and now the Emperor’s guards removed the walnut fist on the leather stock that had replaced it. He had steeled himself to accept whatever horrors they planned for him, but when the mottled stump was revealed he cried out as if he could again feel the long Celtic sword carving through flesh and blood and bone.

When they were done, his captors left him with his thoughts and the damp already beginning to eat into his bones. He closed his eyes, willing his heart to stop thundering. A face swam into focus. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Had his informant got it wrong? Had he been betrayed? He ran the conversation of the previous day through his mind.

‘Whoever sent you has misread the situation entirely. Nymphidius is a country-bred boor who struts like the cock of the dungheap because he believes Nero is finished, but he does not control the Praetorian Guard.’

‘Then who does?’

‘Offonius Tigellinus.’

‘They said he had gone into hiding.’

‘Is that so different from staying in the shadows?’ His old friend had raised a cultured eyebrow. ‘It does not mean he has lost his power. He understands the position better than anyone in Rome. He fears the outcome, but he can still influence it. If any man can bring Nero down it is Tigellinus.’

The information should have reassured him, but for a moment his guts churned with panic, as if the entire hill were pressing down on him. Eventually the feeling passed, and he huddled into the corner where, despite his closed eyes, true sleep evaded him. Instead, he found himself in a half-light world where dream and imagination swirled and eddied until he wasn’t certain where the one ended and the other began. A female presence hovered on the edge of his consciousness. Some instinct told him it was the shade of the Trinovante girl who had betrayed him almost a decade earlier, or Fabia, the beautiful courtesan who had given her life to save his, but he knew his mind was shielding him from the truth. There it was, a narrow, sculpted face with a wide mouth and flashing chestnut eyes: Domitia Longina Corbulo. Her message was that she released him from his vow, the vow to avenge the death of her father. But how could someone else release a man from a solemn pledge made over his general’s still warm body?

Three days, or was it four? There was no way of telling, with a filth-spattered bucket for his waste, and food and water pushed through the hatch whenever someone remembered. At some point he found himself reliving his first meeting with Servius Sulpicius Galba, the man whose ambition had brought him to this place, and quite possibly his death.

Eighteen months earlier, in the chaotic hours after Corbulo’s suicide, Valerius had fled Antioch with Serpentius and Domitia, one step ahead of Nero’s executioners. When they reached Alexandria the general’s old friend and rival, Titus Flavius Vespasian, had taken Domitia into his protection. But Vespasian was less certain what to do with the two men who were now being blamed for Corbulo’s death. In the end, they had been exiled to a remote desert outpost, where they spent six months training the general’s Nubian cavalry for his assault on the rebel province of Judaea. Their exile only ended when Vespasian summoned them to carry a message to Carthago Nova in Galba’s province of Hispania Tarraconensis. Then, no one had any inkling that a geriatric patrician with a reputation as both a snob and a skinflint had ambitions for the purple. But with Corbulo, most loyal of the loyal, forced to fall on his sword, Nero’s generals knew that the only way any of them would be safe was if their increasingly erratic master could be deposed. By the time Valerius reached him, Galba had allied himself with Vindex and his rebels.