Douglas Jackson - Defender of Rome

‘Go back to your whores or your sisters, whichever it is you bed.’ He spat the challenge, but the boy ignored the threat and capered right and left to block the street while the giant smiled and stroked his cudgel.

The mocking smile gave Valerius his warning. The smile wasn’t aimed at him, but at someone behind him. He spun, letting the cloak billow wide to create a more awkward target, knowing the torch in his hand would attract the eyes of whoever was coming for him. Two more, less than five paces away and attacking silently at the run over the cobbles. No point in trying to hold them off. It would only give the giant time to pound him to mincemeat ready for the boy to take his eyes out with the spike. It had to be quick. The attacker on the right, a swarthy dark-browed creature, had slightly outrun his companion. Valerius took advantage of the split second it gave him to dash the blazing torch into the brigand’s face and the man fell back screaming and clawing at his burned-out eyes. The momentum of the spin took him into the path of the fourth robber, a confident red-haired bruiser armed with a curving blade that slashed at the Roman’s throat. Valerius brought up his right hand to block the sweeping blow and was rewarded by a puzzled glare as the blade bit into something solid with a sharp snap. Culleo still wore the look of disbelief when the gladius in Valerius’s left hand darted from beneath the cloak. The triangular point punched into the soft flesh below his ribs before Valerius angled the blade upward into the squealing gang leader’s heart. He twisted the short sword free, feeling the familiar warm liquid rush as another man’s life poured out over his hand, and turned to face his surviving ambushers. But the boy and the one-eyed giant were not prepared to die for a cloak, not with their leader quivering in a widening pool of his own blood and the Greek mewing for his mother with a face like an underdone steak and eyes that would never see again. They backed quickly down the alley and vanished into the darkness.

Valerius studied the remains of the torch smouldering in his right fist. It was smashed beyond use. He sheathed the gladius and, with his left hand, pulled the smoking bundle free from the carved walnut replica that had replaced the missing right. The artificial hand had been designed to carry a shield, but did the job of torchbearer just as well. It was a little singed, with a deep score across the knuckles where the red-haired bandit’s knife had struck, but it had done its job. He checked the bindings of the cowhide socket to which the hand was attached. If they loosened, the leather chafed against the flesh of his stump, but normally a little olive oil ensured it sat comfortably enough.

He’d thought he would never fight again, but he soon realized that many men were just as capable of defending themselves with their left hand as with their right. He had toured the ludi, Rome’s gladiator schools, until he found the man he needed: Marcus, a scarred old fighter who had won his freedom by his skills in the arena. Now he trained with the gladiators most mornings and he prided himself on becoming a better swordsman with his left hand than he had ever been with his right. The first thing Marcus had taught Valerius was how the wooden hand could be used to block an opponent’s swing and expose him to a counter-thrust.

Which way to the Via Tiburtina? He walked on without looking back. Let them rot; it was what they had planned for him. The blinded man was still pleading for his mother when someone cut his throat an hour later.

Valerius had noticed a subtle change since he returned from Britain where, in the same instant, he had been both betrayed and saved by the woman he loved. For a time death had seemed preferable to the loss of Maeve and his hand, but as the months passed he realized that she had provided him with a precious opportunity. Before he had served with the men of the Twentieth legion, he had been young, naive and selfish. The naivety and the youth had been soldiered out of him, leaving a new Valerius, toughened both physically and mentally, the way the iron core of a sword is hardened by the combination of heat and hammer. But he had still been selfish. Only now could he see how wrong it had been to expect Maeve to leave her home, her family and her culture and follow him to Rome, where she would have been shunned as an exotic, uneducated and uncultured Celt. Gradually he had resolved to live his life differently. That was why he had finally agreed to his father’s demand that he return to the law, when he wanted nothing more than to breathe the stink of old sweat and a damp eight-man tent, eat cold oatmeal for breakfast and lead men into battle. And why, if it was offered, he would take up the quaestorship of a province: the next step on the cursus honorum and his road to the Senate.

The road widened as he approached the Esquiline Gate. The apartment block Metellus had described could be any one of three dilapidated structures on his right and at first Valerius despaired of finding the Judaean. On closer inspection, he noticed that the ground floor of the centre insula contained a shop selling exotic eastern spices and herbs. No goods were on show at this time of the night, but on the wall below the window the trader had marked prices for his wares. Since every physician was a herbalist of some sort, Valerius could think of no better place to begin his search. A chink of light at the edge of the heavy sackcloth covering the shop doorway told him at least someone was awake, and he could make out the subdued murmur of voices.

A natural wariness made him hesitate. The Judaeans were a haughty people, from a province that had been under imperial rule for fifty years but had achieved neither prominence nor importance. Trade with the Empire had brought Judaea prosperity and drawn thousands of its inhabitants to Rome, presumably including the man he sought. They were respected as drivers of hard bargains and despised for the barbarism of their religion, which a dozen years earlier had incited Emperor Claudius to expel every Judaean from the city. Now they were returning, but mostly kept to their own districts. It was unusual to find a Jew carrying out business in the centre of Rome.

He approached the curtain and took a deep breath.

What he’d mistaken for murmured voices turned out to be a kind of low, rhythmic chanting from the rear of the building. A single oil lamp spluttered in an alcove by the doorway, casting a dull light and emitting foul-smelling black smoke that clouded the upper part of the room. Sacks and boxes lay stacked against the walls and a table with a set of brass scales stood in the centre of the floor beside a chest covered by a white cloth. This building was one of the older insulae in Rome, constructed perhaps fifty years earlier; solid at least, unlike the shoddy thin-walled skeletons of more recent times, but showing its age where the plaster had dropped from the lime-washed walls. In the far corner to his left was another door, and it was from this that the chanting emerged, but not, he thought, directly. Again he hesitated, reluctant to interrupt a family gathering or religious ceremony, however barbarous. But his sister’s life was at stake.

‘Hello.’ The word echoed from the stark walls.

Silence. A sudden, total silence that almost made him wonder if the chanting had only existed in his mind.

‘Hello,’ he shouted a second time, feeling foolish now and sorely tempted to just turn and go.

After a moment, the silence was replaced by an odd rumbling sound, like muted faraway thunder, and a small head crowned by a shock of jet curls appeared round the corner of the doorway. Two walnut eyes studied him with frank curiosity.

‘Greetings to you.’ The tawny girl looked about six, and he gave her his most reassuring smile. ‘I am looking for the physician who lives in your building.’