Douglas Jackson: Defender of Rome

Still, he’d had no choice but to wait for Julia’s return and if he’d tried to recruit some battered ex-gladiator or retired legionary from a tavern, the likelihood was that he’d only be paying for the dagger that tickled his liver or slit his throat. Left or right? He ran the physician’s directions through his head as he considered the junction of two identical passageways. It had seemed much simpler in the comfort of the villa’s atrium. ‘Just follow the old Via Subura until you reach the Via Tiburtina and carry on until you’re a hundred paces from the Esquiline Gate. He has rooms in the insula on the right. Ground floor.’ In daylight Valerius would have had to fight his way through a surging mass of people, at risk from nothing more than carelessly wielded chair poles or bony elbows, jostled and hustled, melting in the heat, but never directly threatened. Now he was trapped in a pitch dark, verminous labyrinth where every street appeared the same and the only consolation was that the hour was so late the few inhabitants he’d come across had been rolling drunk.

He turned sharply at a rustling sound, the hand beneath his cloak reaching instinctively for his sword. The rustling stopped, to be replaced by a low whine, and he laughed at himself. Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome, the man who had held the Temple of Claudius to the last man, scared of a scavenging hound.

Left or right?

Right.

He had pleaded to stay in the legions, even though he knew his injury meant he would never again fight in a battle line. No, his father had said, this is our great opportunity: the law, then the Senate; make the name Valerius ring through the marble halls of the Palatine. He’d obeyed, out of duty: the same sense of duty that had made him the soldier he had once been. And he had prospered thanks to the patronage that the Corona Aurea attracted. Every retired veteran, be he general or legionary of the third rank, wanted to be represented by Gaius Valerius Verrens. As with his battles, he won more cases than he lost, because he took a professional care in his preparations and fought hard for his clients, even when he didn’t believe a word they told him.

The street widened and he saw a pale light ahead. Some sort of open space.

‘He is a medical man just arrived from the east,’ Metellus had said. ‘Some say he is a worker of wonders and some say he deals in perfumed smoke and polished mirrors. A Judaean, he works among his people, seeking no profit. He does not advertise his services. You will have to be very persuasive. What does he look like? How should I know?’

The light came from a noisome drinking den behind an open yard with a stone fountain carved in the shape of a fish. Valerius hurried by, trying to look like just another drunk. But the eyes that watched him were the eyes of predators, not those of ordinary men.

A man might survive in Subura without being part of a gang, paying a gang or owning a gang, but his hold on life, and his family’s, would be precarious. Red-haired Culleo, bastard son of only Jupiter knew whom, had been running with gangs for as long as he could remember. First as a lookout while others stole, then as a thief, learning to steal bread and fruit and meat from the streetside stalls while the younger boys distracted the owners. With growing strength came greater opportunity and he had become an enforcer. He had killed his first man by the time he was fifteen and cut the throat of his predecessor three years later. He favoured the knife, and he carried two: wickedly curved, long-bladed weapons that he fondly kept killing sharp and which were equally good for stabbing or slicing. Culleo was short and wide, but his build disguised his speed, which was usually enough to frighten other men into dying quietly. Unless a lesson had to be taught he preferred to attack from behind because it was quicker and simpler. In Subura, or at least in the streets around the Silver Mullet, he was the wolf and any man who didn’t belong was his prey.

The torch Valerius carried attracted Culleo like a moth to the flame. Why would a drunk carry a torch when he could bounce home off the walls he knew as intimately as his mother’s left tit? Once they had spotted him he was theirs. A tall man, though he crouched and tried to hide it, dressed in an expensive cloak. A fool then. Any cloak waved about the Subura was asking to be stolen and a man with a cloak would have other things worth stealing, even if it was only his clothes and his shoes. There was something else, too. From a dozen paces away Culleo’s sharp eyes had noted the little details another man’s might not: the way the fool carried himself, the slight favouring of his right side, and the strong jaw and sharp planes of his face. The description could have fitted twenty other men — apart from one important detail that could easily be hidden beneath the cloak, but Culleo had sensed. Word had been passed down to him from the invisible network that all the gangs knew to obey. Even the wolf must give up a proportion of his kill to the hungry tiger. Culleo knew that if you were to survive in the Subura ‘they’ were to be answered to above all others. He smiled, revealing a carnage of rotting teeth; someone wanted this man dead and was willing to pay handsomely for it.

He studied his victim’s speed and direction, knowing the cloaked man would increase his pace once he was past the open courtyard. Who would walk slowly through the Subura at night? ‘Iugolo? Fimus?’ He called two of his men from the tavern, one older and massive, with a single eye and a red, weeping socket, and the other wiry, deceptively boyish and, even for the Subura, remarkably dirty. ‘Take the back road by the tannery and cut him off before Tiburtina. If we’re quick we can catch him at the Alley of the Poxed Tart. Don’t move until I get there with the Greek.’ Four against one: was it enough? He could gather more men but it would take time to rouse them from their beds and sober them up. By then the target might be gone. It was enough. The mark was a fool. A sheep to be shorn. No, he grinned to himself, a lamb to be slaughtered.

Valerius moved fast after he passed the inn, but his eyes never stopped searching for danger. The street narrowed again and the flickering orange torchlight bounced from filth-spattered walls creating the illusion of constant movement, so his senses continually reacted to non-existent threats. A pair of almond-shaped eyes glowed eerily at him from a doorway. Strange how a rat’s eyes reflected red in the torchlight, yet the cat’s which hunted it were like luminous emeralds.

He almost didn’t see the movement.

It was just the merest glint of light on metal fifty paces ahead in a place and at a height where there should be none. His breathing quickened. He willed himself to be calm, sought the stillness which had always been his before battle. Let it build slowly, a heartbeat at a time; the countdown to violence. His muscles tensed and his senses sharpened. How many of them? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t run. This was their territory and they would hunt him down in seconds. But they didn’t know he’d seen them and that meant, at least for the moment, they and not he were the hunted. He maintained his pace but his fingers tightened on his sword hilt.

When they stepped into the street he could have laughed aloud. Only two? A skinny feral child with a gap-toothed snarl, armed with what appeared to be a leatherworker’s awl, and a one-eyed giant wielding a nailed cudgel that was like a toy in his massive hands. Did they really believe he was so easy to kill? One-armed or not, he had fought Boudicca’s champions to a standstill on the field before Colonia. Had walked among the numberless dead on the bloody slope where Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain, had manufactured her destruction. He did not fear these men.