The Course of Honour (37 page)

With a cry of relief, Caenis had already opened her arms.

 

They were both older, and so much slower, but some things were the better for that.

Afterwards they both lay awake the greater part of the night. The lights were out. They lay close, and still, neither wishing to disturb the other yet each aware from the steadiness of the other's embrace and occasional quiet movements that they were both awake. After many hours, when Caenis was easing the pressure on her arm, Vespasian finally spoke.

‘Well, my lady!'

‘Well, my general!'

His lips brushed her forehead as she gave him his new title. ‘I'm coming back. Same as ever. Promise.'

She buried her face in the angle of his neck, her hand moving lightly over the familiar lines of his chest, his shoulder, his strong upper arm. It was then he said, ‘I never thanked you for the sausage; the one at the British parade.'

Caenis had forgotten all about that. ‘Oh Titus! I was so glad I saw you that day.'

He remained silent for so long her heart raced with anxiety. ‘That day was very odd, lass. I didn't seem to be myself.' He wrapped both arms around her, gripping her tight, then abruptly confessed, ‘I wanted rather badly to come to you that night.'

Caenis felt she had intruded unintentionally on some private anguish.

He was determined to tell her: ‘I actually walked out from the banquet on the Capitol and stood for a long time in a colonnade, willing myself to go back in. It would have been right,' he declared. ‘Being with you; after the Triumph.'

Caenis made a low distressed sound, horrified to remember how at the time she had misinterpreted what he felt—and grateful that she had. To know this then would have been unbearable; it was difficult to tolerate even now. He released her a little, because he knew her so well that he realised even before she started to move that she wanted to kiss him.

So she did, trying to forget that he had made her want to weep.

When she was kissing him, she heard that soft groan of pleasure, no different now than when they were young. She supposed it might be flattery, but even if it were, the fact that he thought her worth flattering warmed her heart.

There was something about kissing Vespasian in the dark, when all the rest of the household thought them sensibly asleep. One thing led rather conveniently to another, one caress demanded more until, both laughing, they acknowledged what they both had been hoping from the start, as with every tenderness but yet the distinctly urgent passion of two people who were parting for a desperately long time, they moved closer than ever together and once again made love.

 

‘This is perhaps not the moment to ask—'

‘Lass, I am always free'—said Vespasian politely (though she was quite right; it was not an easy moment)—‘for a chat with you . . .'

‘Whatever did you do with the sausage?'

‘Ate it,' he responded, after a short pause. ‘What did you expect?'

‘
In the street
, lord?' Caenis demanded, as she had done once before.

And Vespasian answered, as he had done the first time, ‘In the street!'

A four-baton general with full triumphal honours and the dignity of nearly sixty years: it seemed impossible that he would ever change.

 

 

 

 

When the Caesars were Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius
And their successor

 

 

 

 

H
aving wintered in Greece, Caenis spent the following spring by herself, travelling north through Dalmatia to Istria. When there seemed nothing to stay for, she returned to Rome.

During this time Vespasian reached Antioch, the chief city of the eastern Empire, where he made his first rendezvous with the new Governor of Syria, Licinius Mucianus (whom he described to Caenis as a bed-hopping wart posted here as an exile rather than a reward) and their ally, King Agrippa of Judaea (whom Vespasian crudely called a shifty bunch of ringlets on the make). He then marched his Fifth and Tenth Legions south to Ptolomaïs, which lay a short way north of Mount Carmel on the coast. There Titus joined him from Egypt with the Fifteenth. Campaigning began in Galilee, which had been heavily fortified by the rebels; after an easy assault on Gabara, Vespasian tackled Jotapata, a natural stronghold on a precipice where heavy numbers of enemy troops were dug in. He captured Jotapata in July.

He was a born soldier. More from what Titus told her than any indication Vespasian gave himself, Caenis knew that he possessed all the powers of analysis and organisation to bring off whatever was required. His talents flourished in the army, where no one cared who a man's ancestors had been provided he measured up to the current task. Set in charge of the brilliant Roman military machine, he was
an ideal leader. Action fired him; he threw his energy and intelligence into the campaign, always accessible to the men, always aware of their mood. His down-to-earth character made him one of them; his competence made him a general they were proud of. It was already obvious how things in Palestine would go.

Caenis sailed to Italy. She travelled across country, pausing at Vespasian's Reate estate. It was on her return to his house in Rome that the notorious incident with Domitian occurred. He was eighteen now. Caenis sympathised with his grudge that his brother had been singled out for special advantage in Judaea; the natural close partnership between Vespasian and Titus had become impossible to conceal. Caenis and Domitian had never liked each other but she greeted him with more than usual kindness, turning her cheek as usual for his kiss. Domitian curtly offered his hand instead.

Caenis shook hands without a word. She never presumed to demand from other people the compliment Vespasian had chosen to give. She never complained. Yet it was noticed. Domitian would be condemned by the historians on her behalf.

 

By the end of his first year Vespasian had subdued most of Galilee. It was at Gamala, while the Romans were pressing a hard siege, that his enthusiasm carried him so far forward that he found himself trapped with only a handful of men at the centre of the citadel; they had to fight their way out backwards, inching step by step down to safety behind a wall of locked shields. Of course, by the time Caenis heard this it was old news, she realised that. ‘Don't panic!' he wrote cheerfully. ‘Eat a decent breakfast and
calm down
!' Caenis ate breakfast and half her lunch, then panicked and was sick. By now she had found out too about the arrow he had caught in his foot at Jotapata; this did not reassure her. He captured Gamala in October.

Vespasian retired for the winter with two legions, later travelling with Titus inland to Caesarea Philippi for three weeks of state banquets and thanksgiving sacrifice. Caenis was by then missing him dreadfully, for the dark days and bitter weather seemed to emphasise
the quietness of their house in Rome and the coldness of her bed. Letters became infrequent due to the closed sea-crossing, though at least when they came there were sometimes more than one. Alone in Rome she received fewer social invitations, and lost interest in the theatre without his being there too. She wished she had known he would winter at Caesarea where the climate was pleasant at that time of year and King Agrippa—who had such close family ties to Antonia—was apparently being most hospitable. Despite the sensible discussion she had had with Vespasian in Greece, she would after all have gladly endured a summer on her own in Syria in return for spending time with him now. She wanted more than ever to be there.

It was only gradually that she realised Vespasian and Titus did not quite so badly need her. They were being entertained by King Agrippa in some style. Part of the entertainment comprised his radiant sister, Berenice.

Queen Berenice of Judaea was high-born, courageous, wealthy, and acknowledged throughout the Empire as the most beautiful woman of the age. She was forty, but at the height of her looks. Caenis must be nearly sixty, and had never been a beauty.

‘Damn,' she accused her mirror mildly.

She trusted him; of course.

 

There seemed no alteration in the tone of Vespasian's letters. They had always been more anecdotal than sentimental. (He omitted anecdotes about Queen Berenice.) At the end he always mentioned that he missed Caenis; the statement became as regular as his official military stamp.

He used their correspondence like a man marshalling his thoughts. He summarised for her the strong Roman position in Galilee, and his proposals for taking Judaea, Idumaea, and Peraea next spring before the great effort that would be needed for the siege of Jerusalem; the capture of Jerusalem must be the crown of his campaign. When the Judaeans were not fighting Rome they were fighting one
another; Vespasian wondered why the most inhospitable tracts of territory were so endlessly disputed. Perhaps while they were struggling against sun and wind, locusts and famine, it made small difference for the inhabitants to struggle against each other too. Dwellers in richer pastures found peace more convenient . . .

Suddenly once, as if it were by accident, he began a letter ‘Oh Caenis, my dear love—' He had never done that before. In the rest of the letter he sounded wearier than usual, but that was no excuse. She knew then: nobody could ever be trusted.

‘Damn!'
exclaimed Caenis, not so mildly. She remembered Antonia saying that losing them to women never mattered; it was giving them up to politics that was final. Mark Antony's daughter should have known better, her freedwoman thought, as she envisaged another exceptional Roman general making a fool of himself with another ravishing foreign queen.

Caenis had intended to return a dignified answer, merely answering what he had asked her about events in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain. It was a complete mistake that she added at the end how keenly she was missing him, a plea which she in turn had always spared Vespasian. It was a mistake, but when she noticed she did not erase it. She felt he owed it to her to accept the truth for once, even though she understood—since she had always been a shrewd woman—that the moment was wrong and the declaration most likely to drive him away.

All his subsequent letters addressed her simply as Antonia Caenis, with the old-fashioned formality he normally used when he wrote. She noticed he was putting in more jokes. She could not decide whether that was good or not. She guessed it was guilt.

 

For anyone with an interest in political events whose attention was not dominated by the situation in Palestine, what happened that spring in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain, was fascinating. Nero's fourteen years had clearly reached their convulsive decline. After more than a century of Empire, and of executing their own kin, the Julio-Claudian family had thinned its own ranks to nothing. Nero's only child, a
daughter, had died in infancy. There was no alternative heir. Rome hung on the brink of a climactic upheaval, into which this time the whole Empire would be drawn.

It was generally accepted that the lethargy and debauchery of the Senate, the private self-interest of the second-rank knights, the truculence of the mob, and a general decline in traditional values made a return to the Republic impossible. Perhaps the Empire was now too big. It needed an established administration, not subject to constant electoral change, while something in the current Roman character positively sought one guiding figurehead. It took little imagination to see that the next contest for the throne would involve more than murdering an ill-placed relative or suppressing an unwelcome will.

Vespasian suggested to Caenis that they should correspond in her old code. She found he had left the key for her, with one of his secretaries. That he had kept his copy for so many years was oddly reassuring. That he had left it ready merely seemed peculiar.

First there was a rebellion in Gaul. It was led by a man called Julius Vindex but put down by the Governor of Upper Germany who had at his disposal an armed frontier force. The worsening situation in Gaul, together with wild rumours circulating in Rome about Nero's Grecian tour, caused many frantic messages from Rome before the Emperor finally dragged himself back to Italy, showing off his trophies and his pretty Greek mantle spangled with golden stars.

Vindex was not in himself a major problem. His most daring personal offence in Nero's eyes, one which the Flavians adored, was that in an open dispatch to the Senate he had accused the Emperor of bad musicianship. But his revolt was important because it revealed widespread unrest in the provinces and heralded how the legions away on remote frontiers were about to take the issue of who governed them into their own hands. Any danger now lay not in the personal ambition of an individual general, as Rome had presumed from Julius Caesar on, but in the spirited resolution of the whole Roman army. The movement which first twitched in Gaul would flare throughout the Empire, gaining impetus in outposts as far flung as Moesia on the Black Sea, and Egypt, in Spain, in the Balkans, in Britain. The four legions in Syria
and three more in Judaea would also be wanting their say. What this contest was to prove once and for all was that an acceptable emperor could be found outside the traditional Claudian family, that he could be created by the army, and created outside Rome.

Vindex rebelled in March. By April a far more significant candidate had arisen: Sulpicius Galba, one of the old breed of aristocrats. He first declared his support for Vindex against Nero but was subsequently hailed Emperor by his own troops in Spain, acquired the loyalty of the Praetorian Guards leaving Nero defenceless, then began a long, successful march to claim his position formally in Rome.

In May Caenis was called from her breakfast by an extraordinary incident. Nero was at the gates of Vespasian's house. He had arrived in the sacred chariot of Jupiter, which he had collected from the majestic Temple of Jove on the Capitol.