Chapter 9
Rome, 3 August AD 69
Jocasta
Second meeting: eighteen months later; still in Nero’s reign. Pantera was alive and his enemy was dead. So was another man, one who had come to matter to him more; a king who could have saved his people. It was a year since that one had died and the hurt was still fresh in Pantera’s eyes when I met him.
It was autumn, time of first frosts. Trees were cast in bronze and black; roads were etched with ice, and dangerous. I had arranged to meet Pantera in the Mariner’s Rest, a tavern at the port of Ravenna, where the eastern fleet of the Roman navy waited out every winter.
Outside, two dozen warships wallowed at anchor and gulls slid on hard, salty air. Inside, the innkeeper kept a vat of hare stew against the cold. The smell of juniper berries and rich flesh was earthen in its power.
The room was packed with legionaries and marines. Pantera pushed through to where I was sitting at a table in the corner and we waited while the stew was placed before him. Unlike the first meeting, this one saw us both somewhat disguised. He had the dress of a moderately successful merchant; I was a tavern wench, hair down, coarse tunic cut low.
The Rest wasn’t a bar that entertained many women, and so those few of us who were there caused something of a stir. When I leaned in to kiss Pantera’s cheek, the men at the neighbouring tables glared their hatred at him, wanting to see what he had that they lacked. He smiled at them, blandly. They looked away.
The stew was truly excellent. After two months at sea, I imagine anything would be good that didn’t taste of fish, but this was better than that: something to come back for.
I let him savour the first burst of flavours, then said, ‘Who has died?’
Spoon halfway to his mouth, Pantera raised a brow. ‘The two sailors at the corner table, the Gaul and the Greek, are planning the detail of how they will take you when I leave.’
Nice try. I shook my head. ‘They won’t do anything while Barnabus watches over us.’
Barnabus was the tavern’s owner, barman and door guard. I glanced across at him. He smiled at me and nodded; we knew each other well.
‘Ex-navy?’ Pantera asked. The marines of Ravenna had a reputation that made the legions seem restrained.
I said, ‘He was captain of his own ship before he retired and bought himself a wife. I caught the man who raped his daughter and delivered him here.’
‘Alive?’
Of course. I nodded. ‘Nobody will touch me in here. And out there’ — I tipped my head towards the world beyond the door — ‘they won’t find me. But it was a good distraction, a worthy try.’ This was neither the time nor the place for our previous long, weighted silences, so I continued without waiting for him to speak. ‘You sent a message saying you were coming back to work with me to make Nero’s successor. If you are in mourning, it may affect what we do. I need to know the details. Who was he?’
Menachem. The name stuck on the two sides of his tongue, closing his throat.
My informants had been effusive in their eulogies of the warrior-king on his milk-white Berber mare, his black hair flowing from his helmet, and the thin loop of his crown dazzling in the morning sun. A legionary of the XIIth killed him, they said: Demalion, with Pantera’s own bow.
The story told itself anew on Pantera’s face: the shock of the death, the emptiness after, the slow climb back to normality, if his life could ever be described as normal.
It was not my place to be kind to him. I said, ‘I need to hear you speak his name. To know you can.’
Pantera set down his spoon. ‘Menachem. His name was Menachem ben Yehuda ben Yehuda. He made himself king in Judaea.’
‘He made himself king?’ I asked. ‘Or you made him?’
‘I helped show him how it could be done, but he was the raw material that made it possible. He was born to it. I have never met his like.’ He looked down; we both did. His finger, clearly unbidden, had sketched a horse in spilled wine on the tabletop.
It was not a good horse. He swept it away with the heel of his hand.
‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Not in the carnal sense. But I found in him a man worth following. I could have lived in his service and not felt my life wasted.’
‘I envy you,’ I said, and it was true.
Pantera raised one brow. ‘I thought you had found the same in Nero?’
‘Nero?’ I was genuinely puzzled.
‘Why else does he use Seneca’s network as his plaything?’
Now, I was horrified. ‘Do you seriously think I have taken all that Seneca built and handed it to Nero?’
‘I think that Nero thinks that you have. Certainly he has made full use of all your resources this past year in Parthia and in Britain.’
If ever I was going to strike a man, it was then. Pantera saw it; his entire body grew tense. But I am not so impulsive as that, not so caught up in the chaos of my own feelings that I would have given him the satisfaction of driving me to violence.
Softly, with venom, I said, ‘The empire has had use of our resources; it has always been so. Nero can still be guided. Until or unless we remove him, we must offer him aid in the interest of the greater whole.’ I leaned back, still angry. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come back when you could have stayed in Judaea?’
He shrugged. ‘Last winter, in Caesarea, we heard the news of Corbulo’s death.’
Well yes, that was old news; nobody in Rome thought of Corbulo by then, except with faint regret for what might have been.
Pantera said, ‘I have met his replacement. Someone who can do what Corbulo could have done, but better than he could have done it.’
‘Really?’ If I was cynical, I had good reason. Do you know how often I had heard that?
‘He’s a war-hardened general and he’s only the first generation in the senate. His brother’s a notorious sycophant, but he himself hasn’t had time to become corrupt or venal and he certainly isn’t weak.’
‘Vespasian?’ I laughed and that shocked him, but there was a look of discovery in his eyes, as if he had learned something new about me, and interesting.
Drily, I said, ‘I’m the daughter of a consul and sister to a celebrated poet; of course I know Rome. I know every second son and disgraced cousin, I know their strengths and their weaknesses and how they might be bought. Certainly, I know Titus Flavius Vespasianus.’
‘Then you must agree that he is all that Corbulo was, and more?’
And so I understood at last the fire in Pantera’s eyes. Losing Menachem, he had lost everything, but now he had once again found his soul’s dream: a man he could respect, a man he could follow, a man he could serve and not feel himself demeaned.
Seneca had always told me that Pantera was looking for this, and that when he found it no one sane would stand in his way.
But I am Jocasta, not Seneca, and I did not love Pantera; nor was I afraid of him. I did not intend to let his obsession ruin Rome.
I said, ‘This is a man who didn’t even want to be a senator until his elder brother shamed him into it. And you think he wants to be emperor?’
The smile he threw me was gone so fast that if I’d blinked, I’d have missed it. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t. Which is exactly why he’ll be so good.’
‘Only if he has what it takes to see it through,’ I said. ‘A half-cocked civil war will be worse than no war at all.’
‘If he can be made to want it, he has what it takes.’ Pantera leaned across the table, took my hands in his own. You know him, you know how unusual that is. The men at the neighbouring tables were one step closer to killing him for it.
Ignoring them all, he said, ‘I’ve seen him with his men. He’ll sweep through Judaea and the legions will adore him. They’ll follow him to Hades if he asks them. All we have to do is make sure he asks at the right time.’