I was in command of this unit, though, not him, and so I pushed slowly through the heaving, sweating mass of humanity, and peered through a tangle of acrobatic limbs, and saw that Pantera was now out on the street.
I sound as if I was sure it was him, when in truth I hoped it was, which is different. It might have been Pantera, but then again it might not; I had no idea how accurate was Lucius’ information, and in my experience, if you pay good coin for something as intangible as a sighting of a stranger few people can recognize, there will be a great many such sightings for exactly as long as it takes you to come up with some valid system of verification.
Lucius was far from gullible, but he did have an air of hurried desperation about him and desperate men often listen closest to those who tell them what they want to hear.
The man who might have been Pantera fell forward, shoved by the woman in the house. As the door slammed behind him, he tucked neatly, rolled forward and came up on his feet, like one of the acrobats.
He looked furtive, but not theatrically so, if you get my drift. He had a quick look round in case anyone had seen him doing something that wasn’t the usual act of a drunken man, but when he found that the crowd was apparently still absorbed with the show he spat out a mouthful of dust, brushed himself clean and sauntered off down the street towards the Inn of the Crossed Spears.
I got a decent look at him then and became more hopeful we’d got the right man. Certainly he had the right build and height and his hair was the colour of old leaves, just as I remembered it. It had been burnished a little by the summer’s sun, but then if he’d been in Judaea that made sense.
The others were looking for my lead so I signalled with the flat of my hand stretched out straight like a javelin, which means ‘Follow’, and we all four began to thread our way through a crowd that didn’t want to move, even for Guards.
Particularly, you might think, for us, the newly made Guards, newly brought here, newly prone to pillaging the city that had become our home. The officers of our new Guard were Roman, mostly, but the men were from the provinces and to them Rome was just another city under occupation.
I’ll accept that the Urban cohorts and the vigiles of the Watch were doing their best to keep order, but they were four cohorts each against four legions and, worse, they were led by Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, and he had quite enough difficulties of his own to contend with. Being brother to a traitor meant he had to spend his every waking hour proving loyalty to Vitellius, and calling his cohorts on to the streets against the emperor’s new Guard was hardly going to help his cause.
The end result was that here, in Rome herself, the pax Romana hung by an absurdly fine thread, and this evening in particular, hot, sultry, with a crowd on the edge of a riot, there was a sense of unfocused danger that gnawed at my guts.
Around me, the acrobats were finally running to the end of their repertoire and the crowd was reaching a peak of uncontrolled rapture.
The two girls, one dark, one fair, were lifted by the two tallest men and hurled high in the air. Blazing torches followed them, spinning in the soft moth-light of dusk, and were caught, each at the apex of its arc, so that the girls hurtled down again, a torch in either hand, to be caught in their turn, lightly, by their menfolk. The applause was wild, chaotic and deafening.
What can I say? You’d have to be made of stone not to have been dazzled by such a display, not to imagine what it might be to take the girls, one or both, there on the street, or at the very least, to lift them high and carry them into one of the upstairs rooms of the tavern.
They would have been compliant; you could just see how their bodies screamed it. And the expression on their faces, alight with the joy of the throw, was so like men in the afterglow of battle, full of what they have achieved, or women in the afterglow of…
I bit my tongue and wrenched my gaze away — and Pantera was gone.
‘ Fuck. Where is he?’
‘Vanished while we were distracted,’ Juvens said, grimly. ‘You might even think that last show was put on for his benefit.’
‘He’s not far,’ Artocus grunted. He was one of the few who had paid scant attention to the acrobats. Uncharitably, I thought that if it had been a boy who had been tumbling high in the sky he would have found it less easy to keep his gaze averted.
Still, he was a reliable man on the battlefield and now he said, ‘Your man turned left at the head of the street. The lane there runs back up the hill to where the senators live.’
We were moving before he’d finished the sentence.
Chapter 14
Rome, 3–4 August AD 69
Trabo
So there you have it; I came to the inn to deliver a letter and what should I find but a man running from Vitellius’ Guards, which was, if you’ll forgive me, of more immediate interest.
I didn’t know they were following Pantera and his name wouldn’t have meant anything to me if I had heard it, but I knew this man had led Jocasta into that cottage and come out without her and that was interesting in itself, never mind the four Guards trying to catch him.
Jocasta? Yes, I knew her from the first moment in the inn. Even dressed like a whore, she shone like a peacock amongst sparrows. I’ve known her all my life: I grew up with her, played with her in my grandfather’s gardens on the heights of the Quirinal, me and her against our brothers, or the other way about.
She was turbulent even then, prone to scathing verbal attacks and wild, dangerous play. That day, seeing her play-acting the whore, I realized there was a level at which she was not playing at all, that I was seeing her as she really was: wildly dangerous.
And she’d been left inside the widow’s house while the fake centurion she had entered with was laying a trail away from it, in the way the hind lays a trail away from her fawn, leaving it safe in the long grass.
I did wrestle for a moment with my conscience, but Otho had said it was of utmost import that his letter be delivered discreetly and there was nothing discreet in walking up to a house the Guards were watching, so I stepped out of the courtyard and followed the stranger up the Quirinal towards the more prosperous residential area.
Here the streets were broader, and slave-carried litters drifted slowly up and down; white ships becalmed on the sea of dusk. With wider streets and no crowds to hide in, the Guards had to become more tactful, less bullish. They slid up the sides of walls, making the most of the shadows, and separated, so as not to move in bulk.
But it was the fake centurion who led the dance and I tell you, it was a masterclass in distraction. I watched that man weave round statues, duck into doorways, walk freely up the street and then pause and dive into side streets and out again before turning and retracing his steps while the odd, disjointed tail of men following him never quite caught up.
It was growing dark and each of them made the most of it. The Guard became shadows, hunting a ghost. Up ahead, halfway up the Quirinal, a brazier glowed red in the centre of a small walled courtyard set bang in the middle of the street; a shrine to the cult of Isis that stays active through the night, as you know.
The courtyard had gates at each of the four directions; Pantera could have cut straight across from the lower gate to the upper, but if he’d done that he’d have been caught in the fire’s glare while everyone else remained hidden in the dark. To avoid that, he had to go round one side or other; or so we all thought.
The Guards, seeing their chance, gathered into two pairs. One duo circled sunwise, the other counter-sun, or that was the plan. Pantera let them get halfway, and then ducked through the eastern gateway and doubled back at a dead run across the courtyard.