He made centurion at the ridiculously young age of twenty-five and nobody thought it was ridiculous in his case. He was promoted to the Guard at thirty, which was almost unheard of, but nobody begrudged him his place; he was Roman, you see, and that mattered. I’m Roman, too, but half of my men are Rhinelanders. It wasn’t right, making them Guards.
But that’s a different story. Trabo rose up the Guard ladder in the same way he’d risen up the legionary one and he was a tribune by thirty-five; the youngest for generations, perhaps the youngest ever. He was fiercely loyal to Nero and men said he wept when the boy stabbed himself in the throat. Then Galba took Nero’s Guard as his own when he took the throne, and by all accounts Trabo was as loyal to his new emperor as he had been to his old.
But he was also a friend of Otho’s. Otho had been a member of Nero’s entourage and Trabo had stood guard over him, which, in practice, meant he’d gone drinking, whoring and gambling with him but not had any of the drink, the girls or the money. Well, not as much as Otho had.
For all that, they were both men of principle, both were active, both understood where Rome needed to go and that it wasn’t in the direction Galba was pushing it. When Galba named that mewling catamite Piso as his heir, Trabo was at Otho’s right hand to make sure the mistake was rectified swiftly: Piso died first, but only by a matter of hours; Galba was gone soon after.
Would I have done the same? I think I might. It’s not laudable: a man should be loyal to his superiors, but Galba was a disaster and everyone knew it; he had to go.
Otho would have been a good emperor. If I hadn’t already committed to Vitellius, I would have followed him happily. I don’t regret it; you can’t choose your generals, but you can make the most of what they give you and offer unswerving loyalty in return.
Anyway: Trabo was a legend, a good man with a solid heart, the build of an ox and the skills of a trained killer. Trying to catch him single-handed might not have been a suicide mission, but it was close.
If one man could do it, that man was Juvens; he was the closest we had to our very own Trabo. And so you had to at least consider whether he, too, had slid his hand into a lottery pouch that contained only one tab of lead.
Our eyes met. Neither of us spoke, but on an impulse I said, ‘Do you want help?’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
We were away from the widows’ houses by then, on a connecting street with only the windowless backs of buildings looking on to it. We were alone, and Juvens was walking backwards down the centre of the street where he was less likely to tread in the piles of mule dung.
His wild, reckless grin was gone. ‘If we’re going to be partners,’ he said, ‘you’d better open your tab. I’ll look the other way.’
I knew what was on the tab, and if I was right, Juvens knew that I knew. But we had to keep up appearances. It goes without saying that this conversation has not happened.
And so, in an odd kind of privacy, and not at all as I had imagined, I stood in a middling alleyway between two sets of mildly well-off villas, broke the black seal with my thumb and folded open the much-kneaded lead to reveal the name inscribed within.
‘And?’ Juvens was at my side. ‘Anyone difficult?’
‘Sebastos Abdes Pantera.’ It was the first time I had spoken the spy’s full name. It felt jagged in my mouth.
Juvens’ frown was all confusion and surprise; you could tell he’d been expecting someone better known, or even known at all. ‘A friend?’ he asked.
‘No, a spy. He helped keep the fire from consuming all of Rome.’
‘One of Nero’s men?’
‘We have to suppose so. I’ve only seen him once. He won’t know who I am.’
I didn’t know Pantera then, so I believed that. Even so, my fist closed tight on the lead, squeezing it small.
‘I would offer to swap,’ Juvens said, ‘but…’
But that would be treason. I smiled, thinly. ‘I appreciate the offer. And I’ll still help you with Trabo. I promise you, he will prove the simpler to kill.’
Chapter 7
Rome, 3 August AD 69
Quintus Aurelius Trabo
I hadn’t met Pantera before that day, and I wouldn’t say my life was incomplete without him.
I heard about the lottery soon after it had happened; everybody did. By the evening of the next day, a dozen different stories were circulating of who had drawn what name, and by the day after that, the complete list was making its way north up the Flaminian Way.
Word reached the drovers sometime after we crossed the river Nar, about a day short of Rome in the cart I was in. Men were reciting names of the hunted and their hunters and mine was first on everyone’s lips. Set against me was Juvens; the best officer in Vitellius’ army.
So I knew then what kind of calibre of a man they’d put on my tail. It felt like an honour, and did nothing to stop me from heading into Rome. I knew I could beat him: he wasn’t that good.
It stopped raining that day, I remember, the day I came back to Rome. They’d had three days of torrential rain and then the gods unleashed a blistering sun that lifted a haze off the mud and set the flies dancing in their millions.
It would have been easier if we’d been able to move a bit faster, but every man and his mule was on the road, making the most of the weather to bring the smallest bit of mouldy corn and mildewed leather into Rome while there was a profit to be had.
The emperor Vitellius had sixty thousand mouths to feed in a city already starved by last year’s abysmal harvest, and anyone who could cut his crops ahead of his neighbour was likely to see his wheat worth its own weight in gold; at least, that was what we thought.
Rome needed wool, too, so I was a carter’s assistant, driving a team of four oxen yoked to a frame with wheels tall as two men, and slung between them a cart that carried forty bales of wool.
What did I look like? Well, not a tribune of the Guard, that’s for sure. It had been four months by then since Otho died; that is, since he took his own knife and killed himself so that other men might not have to die in his stead. There never was a man like Otho and I grieve for his loss with every waking day.
Me? Yes… I was perhaps a little taller than the average carter’s assistant, a little broader in the shoulder. All right, a lot broader. I wasn’t going to let my battle fitness go just because I wasn’t training every day in the Guard; there are ways to stay fit that don’t involve wearing lead weights and running up the hills of Rome.
I was dressed like a carter, that’s what counted: a fifth-hand woollen tunic, good strong boots, a hat with a broad brim — and a beard.
The Guard is ever clean-shaven; that beard was my best disguise. My belt was a good one, too: a hand’s breadth of ox-hide that would have cost a fortune in leather-starved Rome where the sacrifices were flayed and their hides sent straight to the tanners and from there straight to the legions.
In any war, the makings of armour become as scarce as food, and this war had grumbled on for over a year now; everything was in short supply. So if nobody looked too closely at the face behind the beard of the carter’s assistant, it was because they envied the breadth of my belt, or were already trying to estimate the worth of the eighty bundles of unwashed fleece in the cart behind, or had been knocked back by the stink of raw lanolin that had the flies dancing in ecstasy for a full three yards all around us.
The carter didn’t know who I was, of course. He didn’t want to find out. We parted as we had joined, with a hand-shake and a nod, not long after the cart had passed through the gate that lies north of Augustus’ tomb.
So that was me, Quintus Aurelius Trabo, formerly a tribune of the Praetorian Guard, now an outlaw with a price on my head, coming home.