Rome 4: The Art of War (46 page)

Domitian laughed, drily. ‘My father would not abandon his ambition on my behalf.’

‘I think you would be surprised by what your father would do for you.’

The round, bulging eyes met his. Domitian’s naked brows slid upwards. ‘It might be interesting to test it.’

Fire was scorching the left side of Pantera’s face. With studied calm, he said, ‘If you find death a source of fascination then yes, it might be interesting. Those of us who live in its shadow tend to believe we will see the Styx soon enough and we are best served by avoiding too early a crossing. If you wish to die, lord, now is your opportunity. If you wish to live to serve Rome, the temple awaits. We can barricade the gates when you’re in.’

‘To serve Rome …’ Domitian looked down, chewed his lips. When he looked up again, the wild light was there again in his eyes. I truly had no idea which future he would choose, and was mightily relieved when he spun, and raised his arms to his followers. ‘To the temple!’

The rest were glad to leave. They lobbed their last few missiles and didn’t stop to see who they hit, or where. With Domitian in the lead, we all ran together over the tiles, and down at the end to spring for the small postern gate.

Jocasta hauled it open and threw it shut behind us. She was filthy, and thin and scratched and smoke-stained and radiant.

Caenis was there with her. Vespasian’s little Greek sparrow of a mistress dropped the bar on the big main gate. Others had already
begun to stack tables and wooden beams against the gates, but they must have known that they were nothing more than imaginary boundaries.

I looked round for Pantera and lost him momentarily in the crush of huddled refugees that filled this old, dry, dusty place to capacity. More had joined through yesterday and there were over a thousand now, men, women and children. The gods of the temple had not received so many visitors since the ceremony of the lottery at which Geminus picked out Pantera’s name from the bag, and Juvens had picked mine.

Sabinus was moving through the crowds, making sure the women and children had water, that the men were keeping their courage.

‘Pantera!’

Quinctillius Atticus, the suffect consul, came striding from the libraries. He had made an office there, amidst the three thousand bronze tablets that held the senate’s decrees going back to the start of Rome. Having spent the morning distributing leaflets castigating the emperor who had elevated him to consul, he sought safety now in the constancy and reliability of law.

He drew Pantera back under cover of the porch to a place between the columns, where they could talk. There, Jupiter stood ten feet tall in bronze, a perfect image of all that was good in Roman manhood. Juno stood a dozen paces away, only a little smaller; a matron with the face of a goddess. Minerva cast her arms wide, drawing in the congregated masses to her breast. Within the sacred triangle of these three, Atticus talked in stately whispers that echoed up to the roofbeams and were heard by us all.

‘We need to get out of here. We’re trapped and every man and woman here is named as a follower of Vespasian. If there are reprisals, their families will suffer.’

If there was ever a man who was likely to have drawn reprisals on
his family, it was Atticus. But hundreds of men heard him, and feared for their kin.

‘Lucius is not here,’ Pantera said. ‘And Vitellius has more sense than to start purging the families of Rome. We need to block the temple gates and hold firm until Antonius Primus reaches us.’

Atticus’ hands worked each other, knuckle on knuckle, a knot of anguish. He said, ‘Lucius may return. And Vitellius takes his orders now from the Guard. The priests have shown us a hidden door in the southern wall that leads down to the Hundred Steps. If we leave now, we could be clear of here by noon.’

‘And where would we go, consul?’ Domitian had found us; it wasn’t hard when every one of the thousand men and women was listening in on the conversation.

Vespasian’s son leaned against a wall, his round face still scarlet, babyish without its brows. His gaze, though, was of a man who had tasted blood and found it to his liking. His voice carried easily to the edge of the crowd.

‘The Guard has Rome locked down. The gates are manned; not a rotting corpse can get through but that they search the coffin for men hiding underneath. Antonius will come to our aid. We are as safe here as anywhere. I say we block the gates and wait.’

‘And do it swiftly,’ Pantera said. ‘The Guards are nearly on us.’

The balance hung a moment longer; if the consul had been a leader of men, he could have gathered the crowd and made a run for the south gates and freedom. But the fates do not wait for the faint-hearted and there was a roar and thunder at the front gate that spun everyone round to face it.

‘The statues!’ Protocol was gone. Pantera was already shouting orders, and to hang with those who outranked him. ‘Pull down the statues and set them across the gate.’

‘The statues of
the gods?’ Domitian’s eyes flew wide. ‘The statues of Jupiter? Of Juno? Minerva?’ Hoarse, disbelieving. ‘They’re
sacred
.’

‘And they’re made of bronze: they’ll withstand rams and fire, perhaps for long enough to let Antonius reach us. Unless you can dismantle the temple and use the stone from the columns in time, there’s nothing else to hand.’

The light was dying; evening slid in across the sky and the fires burning out on the hill were brighter now than the sun. Domitian was level with Pantera and me. The shifting shadows blurred his face; he was a child again, briefly, and then a man. He nodded. ‘The gods have brought us this far. If they wished to stop us, they would have done it by now.’

He raised his head. He was not the bull-voiced warrior that was his father, nor even his brother Titus, who was a golden Ares, but his voice was strong enough, and the gods allowed that it did not break back to the high notes of childhood.

‘Jupiter in his wisdom sent the rainstorm yesterday that kept us safe. Now he offers us his body, to use in our defence. In his name, we shall take the bronze statues and set them across the gates. Later, when Rome is ours, we shall offer sacrifices on this day every year, to thank him!’

He was Vespasian’s son; his word was enough to get the huddled refugees to make a stand, but it took Pantera and me and, surprisingly, Horus to arrange them into coherent groups, ten to wrap ropes around each statue to topple it, with another three dozen strong men ready to take it as soon as it lay flat and carry it to the gates.

There, Jocasta directed the laying out, as in state, of each vast figure: Jupiter lay on his back, then Juno was set across him, head to toe, to prevent any uncivil, possibly sacrilegious suggestions of fornication.

These two blocked the main gates. Minerva blocked the smaller postern gate at the side, all alone.

There was
a vantage point on the temple roof where it reared high enough to give a good view out across the hill; already two or three ragged ladders leaned against the walls leading up to it. With nothing left to do at the gates but pray to the gods who held us, we three climbed up and were in time to see Juvens lead his men from the barricades and across the Asylum from the Arx to the final hill.

They came as a storm-pushed wave; dark shadows of men in the darkening night, with fire all along their right side, casting their helmets in red, their faces in amber, their raised blades in gold.

Locked together, arm in arm, shoulder on shoulder, they ran at the smoke-blackened gates.

The force of their impact was a thunderclap loud enough to wake the dead, or the slumbering gods. Their shouts ripped through the throats of us who watched, leaving our chests shaking, our hands bunched tight.

The gods held. Under Juvens’ shouted commands, the Guards took thirty good paces back and came again. And again. And again.

They were demons, dragged from the underworld, come to assault the citadel of the gods; and they failed.

Rome, 19 December
AD
69

‘STOP,’ JUVENS SHOUTED
, and then again, because nobody was listening, ‘
Stop!
Fall back. This is pointless. We could run at those gates all night; they’re not going to fall.’

‘We could burn them?’

The voice came from the dark and could have been anybody’s. Already the priests’ houses had fallen in on themselves, the flames dancing to nothing. The glowing embers were bright, but not bright enough to identify a man in a crowd.

It didn’t matter who had spoken; it wasn’t a good idea.

Irritably, Juvens shook his head. ‘Can you not smell the damp? They’ve soaked the wood. It won’t burn unless we pile half the city in front of it and I’m not going to destroy Rome just to get to an ageing fool and an adolescent boy. We’re going back down the hill. There are other ways up to that temple.’

Juvens had time to plan his new strategy on the long run down the
north face of the Capitol. At the foot, he divided his men into three groups.

‘Right, Sextilius, you’re leading a feint back up the hill. Go up by the Gemonian steps so it looks as if you’re trying to sneak up. At the top, start gathering wood to burn down the front gates. I don’t think you’ll succeed, but no harm in trying. Let them see you, but make it look as if you’re trying to hide. Got that?

‘Priscus, you’ll take thirty men and go round to the Hundred Steps on the south side. See if you can emulate the Gauls, but if they start pouring down hot oil or sand, pull away. This is not about getting through, it’s about splitting their attention.’

‘Where are you going?’ Priscus was young and ardent and too curious for his own good.

‘We’re going up through the tenement towers on the northwest face. There are one or two that stretch nearly to the height of the walls and they’re in complete darkness, shaded by the temple walls. If we can get up there with a few ropes and some planks, we can build a bridge across to the temple and get over the wall in force. All we need to do is open the gates from the inside and Sextilius will be there, ready to run in.’

Sextilius was a year from retiring; Juvens and I both knew he had bought an inn and a girl and was looking forward to a long and profitable old age, which was why he had spent all summer avoiding the lotteries that sent men out to die on the streets, and we had let him. He owed both of us now and Juvens was calling in the favour.

Sextilius gave a sour smile. ‘I and my men will be there.’

If there was ever a place Nero’s building programme should have reached, the northwest foot of the Capitoline was it. Here, the tenements sprouted up along crooked alleys that smelled sourly of pig ordure and human urine; row upon row of
unstable, old-wood, up to eighteen-storey blocks that leaned and leaked and loomed up into the night in a fire-fighter’s nightmare of brisk inflammability.

Juvens had marked in his mind the tallest of the blocks, but standing at the foot, peering up, it was impossible to tell which one had the pale roof that had shown so clearly from the level top of the hill. He made a guess and prayed aloud to Jupiter that it might be right, and changed his prayer half made and sent it instead to Mars, who was more likely to listen than the god whose temple he was assaulting.

He kicked in a door and found an entrance hall where the smell of urine was so strong it made his eyes water. His men piled in behind him, coughing. It was the third night of Saturnalia; the only souls left in the tenements were the very young, the very old, or the very pregnant.

‘Who are you?’

Standing in the nearest doorway was a dark-haired, wide-faced woman with a belly so ripe it looked ready to split apart. She stood with her hands on her hips, her spine arched back, her face fierce.

Juvens bowed. ‘My lady …’ She was almost certainly a whore, but he had been trained in manners from infancy and would not lower his standards now. ‘We are Guards in the service of the emperor. We need to ascend to the roof of this building, that we might prevent the enemies of the empire from bringing their war to Rome.’

‘Real Guards? Not bandits?’ She didn’t believe him, and why should she have done when the Guard had never penetrated that deep into the slums? She nodded over her shoulder. ‘The roof’s that way.’

The stairs were narrow and uneven. In places rats or rot had taken away a tread entirely and Juvens, running up, had to lengthen his stride mid-leap to avoid the gap. His men followed in train behind and the instructions filtered back down, level
by level, to those still waiting to ascend. ‘Mind out! That one! Jump!’

Juvens counted seventeen landings before the last. Breathless, he stepped into darkness. He carried no torch, but Gaius Halotus, three men behind, was carrying a smoking pitch-pine torch that sweetened the air and shed just enough light to see how tiny was this place, how close the walls, how fragile.

‘No windows?’ Halotus was a big man, huge on this claustrophobic landing. Doors led off, but were locked; Juvens tried them as soon as there was light enough to negotiate the old, dried turds and smears of vomit. He shook his head. Halotus pulled a face, looked around at the walls, picked a place where the mortar looked most rotten, leaned back and kicked.

Three bone-jarring, teeth-rattling strikes later the wall had a window, or a door, or whatever you might like to term the jagged opening that let in the clean night air and showed that they were two blocks too far north.

‘Fuck.’ Juvens leaned out. The temple was tantalizingly close, a wall not more than a few feet higher than where they stood, but just too far to reach.

The adjacent building was a bare five feet away, but the slope of its roof was tilted towards them, and without the ability to take a run there was a real risk of falling eighteen storeys to the ground below. His stomach swooned at the thought.

‘Do we have planks?’

‘Not enough, but we can make some.’ Halotus had only a passing relationship with his civic duty of care for the city. Before Juvens could stop him, he had ripped a door from its hinges and was thrusting it through the newly made hole in the wall. It bridged the gap with a hand’s span on either side; still terrifying, but workable.