Chapter 6
Rome, 1 August AD 69
Geminus
Dismissed, I had no further duties until I took command of the watch at dusk.
Outside, the rain had eased; we were greeted by grey skies, but the gods were no longer weeping. My fellow Guards surged in a pack towards the barracks on the Field of Mars at the back of the Quirinal hill. All the chatter was of Vespasian’s eight legions and where and how they might be beaten, which was pointless, because we all knew that even if they’d set off on the first day of July with their oaths to Vespasian still hot in their throats, it would take them half a year to reach Rome and they’d get here in the middle of winter when nobody fights.
I didn’t want to hear a hundred men explaining the unlikely detail of how they’d smash the enemy lines single-handed, so I drew back from the rest to take short cuts that turned out to be long cuts, but meant that I was alone and nobody was asking questions, and I was free to learn my way around Rome again.
I grew up here. Rome was my birthplace and my home, but I joined the legions when I was nineteen and that was twelve years ago and I’d only been back once, just before the fire, and that disaster had changed everything.
We lost four out of fourteen districts and Nero’s building programme afterwards was as radical as any we’d seen. He set statues where once were eighteen-storey slums, and slums where once were temples, so that there were areas of the city that felt completely alien to me as I walked through them. Only the seven hills were unchanged; their outline was — is — moulded on my soul.
That day, with the lead lottery done, I came down the Capitol and made my way through the forum. From there, I turned left up the Quirinal, at least notionally heading in the direction of the Guards’ barracks.
This hill is not like the Palatine, home to senators and equestrians and merchants who have too much gold and need to show it off. The Quirinal is a thrifty place that offers residence to impecunious senators, bad gamblers, and the recently arrived who have not yet carved a place for themselves elsewhere.
I like it there; I always have. Free of my colleagues and their inane battle fantasies, I walked faster up the hill.
The Quirinal is like the rest of Rome in that money and status buys you height. As the hill rose, shabby shop fronts gave way to marginally more prosperous dwellings. Villas lined the road, and tucked away to one side halfway up were three parallel streets of small, neat houses funded by the imperial coffers for the widows of fallen generals, and then beyond them the bachelor homes of impecunious but worthy men who had lost their wives: in Rome, few things are left to chance and this proximity was no accident.
I came to a forked junction and took the left-hand path, which led to one of the widows’ streets.
Here were flowers outside the doors, and the doors themselves had legion shapes carved on them: a Capricorn, a Taurus, a Thunderbolt. The women did not grieve openly for their lost menfolk, but the signs were there if you knew what to look for.
I had gone barely ten paces when I heard light footsteps behind me. Six months on campaign and you don’t take these things lightly. I snapped round, blade sighing free.
‘Juvens?’
Marcus Decius Juvens was standing just out of striking distance, a half-smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. He was a good man. I let drop my hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I saw you go off on your own and wondered why.’
‘Why d’you think? Did you hear the Runt saying how he’d disembowel Vespasian and all his armies at a single stroke? Or Arminios swearing on his Germanic gods to stand at the gates of Rome and slaughter anyone who tried to come through after the ides of September? Pointless bloody nonsense.’
‘But harmless all the same.’ Juvens looked like Julius Caesar’s more cheerful younger brother, which he claimed was all good breeding and it might have been true. Certainly, he was from ancient patrician stock so refined that he could quote his ancestry for the past eighteen generations without pausing for breath.
Unfortunately for all concerned, his grandfather had lost the family fortune, and although his father had made half of it back, he had been careless enough to become entangled in Piso’s conspiracy against Nero and so, along with fifty others, including Lacan, Seneca, and Piso himself, had been forced to suicide. Juvens senior’s estate, such as was left of it, went to the crown.
He had two sons, of whom the elder, now penniless, subsequently tried to have himself elected consul and was so soundly beaten in the ballot that he retreated into self-imposed exile in Iberia. Our Juvens had survived by virtue of being the second son, too insignificant to be noticed. Scraping together loans at extortionate interest, he bought his commission and bribed his way to one of the furthest legions from Rome: the IVth Macedonica, stationed on the Rhine.
It was a risky strategy; at least half of those who buy their way to a junior commission find themselves dead with a blade in the back at their first skirmish, but Juvens was bright enough, wild enough, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring, hard-fighting enough to be loved by the men before we ever went into battle together.
They owed him money, too; Juvens’ luck at dice was legendary. He paid off his debts in full within his first year. By the time we came back to Rome, rumour said he was almost as rich as his grandfather had been in his pomp.
None of that mattered, at least not as far as I was concerned, because Juvens had proved himself in war. In the past six months he had more than earned the spear Caecina had just given him for personal valour. He was an exceptional commander with an outstanding eye for a battlefield. I had fought twice at his side and would have been happy to do so for the rest of my life, although at that moment, standing like a fool in the widows’ street with my blade half drawn, I wasn’t sure the sentiment was returned: Juvens seemed to like everyone equally, which couldn’t be true.
In blithe disregard of our orders, he asked, ‘Who did you draw in the lottery?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t opened the tab yet.’
The first part of that was a lie, as you’ll learn, and I’m sorry for it, but the truth was that we shouldn’t have been discussing it at alclass="underline" an open street is the very opposite of ‘private’.
I said, ‘You?’, which made me equally guilty. It was a day when convention didn’t count as much as it had done, when the rules had become suddenly flexible.
I live by rules, I’m not used to bending them. But I wanted to find out if Juvens would be happy to have me at his side in the coming days; I thought I was going to need some friends I could count on and I didn’t have many. Allies? Yes. Drinking partners? Plenty. Men I could go whoring with? More than I could count. But friends? I had none I could name. Except perhaps Juvens, who studied me a moment, grinning, and said, ‘Trabo.’
‘Fuck, no!’ I whistled. ‘He’ll kill you.’
‘Probably.’ Juvens looked ridiculously cheerful; he’d always had a wild side. ‘I have to find him first, but if it’s true he took an oath to see Vitellius dead, he’ll have to come to Rome to do it. I’ll know him when I see him.’
‘And then you’ll kill him. If you can.’
Because this was what the morning’s lottery in the temple had been for: to convey the orders for the execution of a hundred and sixty ‘enemies of the state’.
Arriving in his predecessor’s palace, Vitellius had found a document in the archives, signed by a hundred and twenty officers and men of the old Praetorian Guard, asking to be recognized by Otho for their part in the murder of his predecessor, the emperor Galba.
Vitellius — or at least his brother Lucius — would happily have cut Galba’s throat with his own knife, if someone else had held him still. But it had been done by the Guards, whose duty was and is to defend any emperor’s life with their own, and no emperor was going to feel safe in the company of men who had already been suborned into killing one of their charges and might equally do so again. Which is why they had all been dismissed and the new Guard raised from those of us whose loyalty had been demonstrated on the field.