Pantera stood nearby, his face and tunic mottled with blood. I saw his hands make a small, sharp movement and there was a pained, inaudible mumble that ended in a grunt.
‘Louder. Who sent you?’
‘ Lucius Vitellius! ’
The name bounced off the silence. Half the camp had heard what had happened and had come to watch. They were standing in lines, armour bright, glaring hatred at this man who had been their friend.
There was nothing more to be learned. My mouth was dry and my spit had the iron-sweet taste of another man’s blood. How many men had I killed in battle, without pause for thought? How few had I killed like this, hanging by their wrists from a high hook, drained of all that made them men?
It could have been worse. Fundanius might have been a traitor and a failed murderer, but he had not lost his eyes to hot irons, or his fingers to a dull, serrated knife; his skin had not been peeled slowly from his back, nor his limb bones crushed and wrenched from his torso.
In honesty, there had been no need for more than a cursory beating and even that had been as much to satisfy his pride as to appease the rage of the men.
He had nothing to gain by lying and all he could tell us was what we already knew: that a successful general on the eastern borders of the empire was deemed a mortal threat to the men who now ruled in Rome.
I was not safe in Judaea.
Pantera knew it, had known it from the moment Vitellius had taken the throne.
Like Corbulo, I had been too successful. I had subdued the rebels in Judaea as I had been ordered to do and now I commanded the absolute loyalty of three victorious legions plus the goodwill of at least five others.
Vitellius, by contrast, was an indolent hedonist who had happened to find himself at the head of four Germanic legions at a time when their generals needed a figurehead to put on the throne, and even then they’d offered it to someone else first, and been turned down: Vitellius was everyone’s second choice, and the world knew it.
And so now that world was looking to the east, to the eight legions of Judaea, Syria and Egypt, to see if they, too, would choose to name their own emperor.
Out there on the parade ground, with the milk-dawn sun just colouring our flesh, I was surrounded by the men of those legions, who knew exactly the power they held.
The ones nearest to me shifted and shuffled when I looked at them. Demalion caught my eye and didn’t look away. He thought his face was closed, when in fact expectation was written all across it, and he was hardly alone; the same look was printed on the face of every officer I could see.
A centurion had been sent against them, Roman against Roman, and it offended their sense of the world even as it churned their blood to battle froth. They wanted vengeance and restitution and action; before all of these, they wanted blood.
The assassin sensed their mood. He lifted his bruised head and spat a few spiteful words at Pantera. Even at this distance, half a dozen paces away, I could hear the venom in his voice, if not the detail.
I thought it a last foul defamation, ‘Fuck you all and may you rot for ever,’ the kind of thing condemned men the world over say to their executioners before sentence is carried out.
But Pantera was interested, suddenly, in ways he hadn’t been before. His face grew still. He asked a question and got another spit-thick answer which was clearly not enough. With barely a nod, he reached back to the brazier, selected an iron and slid it into the fire’s red heart.
He pumped the bellows himself. The heat sent the nearest men back a pace. Everyone was still now; this was more than just the routine questioning of an assassin.
With a look of weary distaste, the spy slid his right hand into a leather glove and lifted the iron from the fire. The tip was white hot.
The assassin’s skin blistered along his cheekbone in a line towards his eye. The smell of singed flesh tickled the air. Pantera’s lips moved, but it was impossible to hear his question over the high shriek of his victim. The iron moved away. The question came again, and this time Fundanius drew breath to answer.
I think I stepped forward. Certainly I leaned closer to listen, to ask my own question.
‘What did he-’
‘ Lord! ’
Pantera and Demalion dived at me together. They collided in a crack of bone and flesh and brought me down, held within the solid shield of their bodies.
Above, a flash of silver caught the sun. I heard a grunt tinged with triumph and then, amid the sudden uproar, a howl of defeat that sent bile shooting sour up my throat.
I know the sound of a cohort shocked into fury. There were only two possible reasons to hear it now and I wasn’t dead, which meant…
I shoved myself free, rolled to my feet, spun round to the whipping post.
Publius Fundanius, failed assassin, hung limp from his wrists, a squat-bladed throw-knife lodged in his throat. Blood traced a faltering arc from the wound; even as I watched, it slowed to a dribble.
He was gone beyond reach: dead; slain to secure his silence.
‘Who did this? Hold him! Bring him to me now!’
Rarely have my men seen me angry. They fell back before the force of it.
‘ Now! ’
It is not hard to find a traitor who throws a knife when he stands in a row with loyal men on either side, before and behind. Before the echoes of the last word had become dust in the sand, the crowd parted and two centurions dragged a third between them.
‘Albinius?’
I would not have believed it, and yet could not do otherwise, for a wide, scarlet gash marked his throat, still leaking blood, and his own right hand was scarlet to the wrist.
‘Albinius?’ I said again.
I knew this man. True, he was a Syrian, but he wasn’t some new conscript, brought in under duress and hating us for it; he was a volunteer of fifteen years’ service, a cohort commander. He had fought at my side for the past two years. He had led, come to think of it, the third cohort of the Xth legion, into which Fundanius had so recently been promoted.
He was not dead yet; he had killed his co-conspirator cleanly enough, but, as with many others, his courage had failed him when it came to killing himself.
I took his ruined face by the chin, ungently lifted it. His eyes were losing focus, but they came to rest on my face. He smiled, and there was in it no shame, or apology, but a tinge of triumph and such loathing as I have only before seen on a battlefield, and then rarely.
‘Albinius, why?’
He shook his head and tried to speak, but the words whistled shapeless from the cut edge of his windpipe.
He could not have told us anything even if we could have kept him alive long enough to force from him a name, or what he had been paid, how much and in what coin, to persuade him to betray his general so completely. By his own hand, he was beyond revenge, or use.
The men were restless, needing blood, and, now, I could give them what they wanted. My gladius floated to my grip, light as a wheat stalk. With barely another thought, I drove it into Albinius’ chest, striking just below the left nipple, aiming up and in and back towards the point of the right shoulder, as I had been taught too many years ago to remember.
As it always does, my blade jammed between the ribs and I had to use both hands to wrench it free. Blood bloomed bright about the wound in his throat, foaming on the final breath.
The traitor’s eyes glared their last light, and grew dull.
I said, ‘Leave the carcasses outside the gates for the jackals. No honours.’
The men about me saluted in silence, but they didn’t rush to do my bidding. Instead, the expectation I had read earlier on the faces of the officers was multiplied right along the row.
If I didn’t act swiftly, they’d hail me imperator, there, on the spot, and I’d have to execute them all for treason, or lead them into civil war.