Scaurus gestured to Marcus to have the chest locked and replaced on the cart.
‘Which, I’ll admit, is what’s been troubling me all the way from Britannia. There’s not much point in our carrying it this far if any attempt to put it in front of the emperor is likely to end up with us all looking down the spears of unhelpful palace guards. So tell me, Decimus, exactly how is it that you think we’re going to be able to carry this gold into the imperial palace?’
The smile returned to Albinus’s face.
‘Ah, well that’s a secret that’ll have to stay mine and mine alone for just a little bit longer. Let’s just say that the praetorian prefect isn’t the only man in the emperor’s court with ambitions above his station. All will be revealed in good time.’
He turned back to look down the road towards Rome, the city’s walls glowing amber in the late afternoon sun’s soft glow.
‘And now I suggest that we get your boys here into their barracks, and give you and the men who’ll carry the gold into the city time to have a wash and a brush-up, and get them into some clean clothes. Armour, muscles and dirt may be good at keeping the bandits at bay, but they’re going to look a little out of place to the Watch, wouldn’t you say, not to mention Commodus himself?’
‘There’s another one having his blade confiscated. There are going to be a lot of happy muggers in the Subura later on tonight when all the men that have been disarmed at this gate try to make their way home!’
The leader of Albinus’s bodyguard, a bull-necked man with a decidedly military look called Cotta stood up from the crouching position in which he had been peering around the corner of the side street’s last house and shook his head in amazement as he looked back down the length of the column of men waiting behind him. The sixty Tungrian soldiers selected to carry the gold chests were flanked on either side by the twenty men of Albinus’s bodyguard, most of whom had adopted deceptively relaxed postures and were exchanging banter with the local children, who had quickly overcome their wariness and were swarming around them in the hope of begging small coins. Cotta saluted Albinus crisply, pointing back towards the gate.
‘There’s no way through there, Senator, unless we want to be relieved of our weapons and probably worse …’
Marcus nodded at the words, reflexively putting a hand to the dagger buried deep in the folds of his toga. Albinus and Scaurus were similarly armed, and every man in their twenty-strong bodyguard had at least one knife concealed about his person in addition to their heavy clubs, mostly strapped to upper arms and thighs beneath their tunics. The Watch standing guard at the Viminal Gate, one of the north-eastern entrances to the city inside the walls, were clearly taking their time processing the queue of humanity wishing to enter Rome, and searching every man, woman and child with equal thoroughness, and a lengthy queue was building up at the arched gateway. Even in the darkness, hours after the sun had set, the traffic into and out of the city via the gate’s opening was as busy as if it were midday, and Marcus was grateful for Albinus’s bodyguards both for the protection they provided the unarmed Tungrians and the light from their blazing torches. He looked up and down the queue’s shadowy length with an expression of irritation.
‘I still don’t understand why passage inside the walls is being restricted like this. When I left here the gates weren’t guarded, and hadn’t been in my memory. Who needs to guard the gates of a city that rules every scrap of inhabitable ground for a thousand miles in every direction, and where the city itself has long outgrown the walls that once surrounded it?’
Albinus laughed wryly, clapping a big hand on his shoulder.
‘Well now, Centurion, you sound just like a senator whose opinions I used to admire so greatly when he spoke on such matters, before he was murdered by the praetorian prefect, along with his entire family, simply to silence a potential dissenter and take his estate into the imperial treasury.’ He looked Marcus up and down in the torchlight as if sizing him up for the first time. ‘You may not look very much like him, but in mannerisms and inflection you could be Appius Valerius Aquila’s son for all I know.’
For a second Marcus wondered if he was going to make the obvious conclusion, and identify him as the dead senator’s only remaining descendant, but instead the big man waved a hand at the gate.
‘The answer to your peevish question is simple enough, Centurion, if you consider the politics of the day and our mission tonight. Perennis controls not only the praetorians, but also the Urban Cohorts and the City Watch. And if the former tend to spend most of their time sitting around in barracks waiting for a riot or a gang fight to give them a reason to break some heads, the Watch are more used to mixing with the people, which is why he’s using them to control what comes into the city, if you take my meaning.’
Scaurus leaned forward, his voice lowered to little more than a murmur.
‘You’re saying that he has them looking out for this …’
He rolled his eyes to look at the nearest of the gold chests, standing in the middle of the side street with a half-dozen brawny Tungrians waiting stoically around it, ready to heft its deceptively heavy weight back into the carrying position. Albinus nodded with a knowing grin.
‘Indeed I am. And were we to progress to the front of that most unpleasant-smelling queue we could most certainly expect to be ordered to open the chests. At which point, whilst we greatly outnumber the men on guard, we would quickly find ourselves outnumbered by their reinforcements, surrounded, arrested and dragged away to the local Watch station — ’ he lowered his voice and adopted a solemn expression ‘- never to be seen again, I expect.’
The tribune raised an eyebrow.
‘Unless …?’
Albinus’s grin returned.
‘Unless, of course, something were to happen to distract the Watch from their important duty. As it happens, one of the men who passed through the gate just now, having been thoroughly searched of course and found to be carrying nothing more threatening than his own cucumber, is even now acting to provide us with just such a distraction.’
He paused for a moment, staring up at the night sky above the looming city walls before speaking again.
‘The problem with owning property in the city, of course, is just how prone one’s buildings are to the risk of fire. It only takes the slightest hint of a spark in the wrong place to send an entire apartment block up in flames, a cooking stove overturned in a ground-floor tavern, or perhaps a candle catching at a piece of wind-blown fabric. And of course, once one of the blasted things is alight everything around it is at risk. It’s a good thing we have the Watch to deal with such emergencies, wouldn’t you agree?’
As if on cue, a faint chorus of frenzied shouts sounded over the queue’s grumbling murmur and Albinus nodded smugly. After a short wait, during which the shouting from beyond the walls grew steadily louder, a glow became visible above the wall’s rampart, and dirty grey smoke started to rise into view, illuminated from below by the fire’s flames. The initial signs of the fire quickly strengthened, the grey stain that obscured the stars rapidly thickening as the fire took hold of whatever it was that was burning fiercely beyond the wall.
‘Any time about now, I’d say, or at least I bloody well hope so …’ Just as Albinus spoke, the half-dozen men standing guard at the city gate were summoned by a panting runner, and the senator nodded his head sagely, pointing to a mongrel in the act of emptying its bowels in the shadow of the gate. ‘Ah, it seems that the fire is stronger than first believed. At a guess the next-door building has gone up in flames too, and I’d bet a gold aureus to the turd that dog’s so busily curling out that it’ll be another one of my properties. When the gods decide to punish a man they certainly do so thoroughly, don’t they?’