Rome 4: The Art of War Read online

  About the Book

  Rome: AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors. Three emperors have ruled in Rome this year and a fourth, Vespasian, has been named in the East.

  As the legions march towards civil war, Sebastos Pantera, the spy whose name means leopard, returns to Rome intent on bribery, blackmail and persuasion: whatever it takes to bring the commanders and their men to Vespasian’s side.

  But in Rome, as he uses every skill of subterfuge, codes and camouflage he has ever learned, it becomes clear that one of those closest to him is a traitor who will let Rome fall to destroy him.

  Together, the two spies spin a web of deceit with Rome as the prize and death the only escape.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Time Line: Events leading to the Year of the Four Emperors

  On the Use of Spies

  Maps

  Foreword

  Prologue

  I Local Spies

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  II Internal Spies

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  III Double Agents

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  IV Doomed Spies

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  V Surviving Spies

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by M. C. Scott

  Copyright

  ROME

  THE ART OF WAR

  M. C. Scott

  For Bill and Mark,

  with many thanks

  FOREWORD

  ON 9 JUNE AD 68, in the thirteenth year of his reign, the dangerously dissolute Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus died by his own hand, having been named an ‘enemy of the state’ by the senate, and thereby ending a dynasty that had ruled Rome and her empire for close to a century.

  There followed what has become known as the Year of the Four Emperors, but was, in fact, eighteen months in which four successive men, generally with several legions behind them, claimed the title of emperor.

  The ensuing civil war ripped the empire apart, setting legion against legion, brother against brother, father against son. Most of the destruction occurred far afield in battles prosecuted by absentee emperors who ruled Rome from the relative safety of their legionary encampments.

  But in June of AD 69, Vitellius, the third man to claim the title, entered Rome at the head of sixty thousand legionaries. Thus, as his opponent’s legions marched closer, the nightmare of civil war threatened the capital itself …

  PART I

  LOCAL SPIES

  CHAPTER ONE

  Judaea, June, AD 69

  Titus Flavious Vespasianus – Vespasian

  IT BEGAN, AS it ended, with the scent of wild strawberries. Sharp, sweet, erotic beyond words, it was the scent of Caenis, of her skin, her hair, of the flat channel between her breasts and the ambrosia-sweat that dripped from them on to my face.

  It surrounded me, carried me far from myself. I swept my thumb up and round and brought it to my lips. My eyes sought hers to share my tasting of her. She was kneeling over my hips, drawing me inside with the chaotic abandon that had never failed to startle me when the rest of her life was so ordered.

  She smiled and was fierce: a tigress; she was wild: a harpy; she was perfect: Athena, or Artemis, or the bright god-woman of the moon who spins her foam down to seduce poor men who cannot stand against her.

  I couldn’t keep still any longer. However hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, either, to see if she had met her climax as I met mine. Later, of course, I would find out. Later, I would attend to her need. Later, when I could bear to—

  ‘My love …’ She leaned forward on to me. Her breasts were heavy on my chest. Her lips kissed away the sweat from the sides of my eyes.

  She was resting on her small, sharp elbows and her hair fell on my face, tickling my cheeks. She swept it up, and hooked it over her ear. ‘Must you go?’

  Lost in the undertow, it took me a moment to understand her question. I had to drag back memories of who and what and where.

  Slowly … we were in Greece, on the island of Kos, in exile for the sin of sleeping under the spell of a song.

  The sleep was mine. The song had been the emperor’s and Nero was not kind to men who offended him. Only a year before, Corbulo had been forced to suicide for no greater crime than being a good general, loved by his legions; I was only alive because I had no money and posed no threat and had not, until that point, mortally offended the emperor.

  And so we had run away to Greece together, Caenis and I, and through the long winter we had awaited the messenger who would order me to fall on my sword and surrender my pitiful estate to the crown.

  But then Nero’s messenger finally came, and his order was not the one we had so feared.

  Far from being required to fall on my sword, I, Vespasian, had been given command of the Judaean legions, with a remit to subdue the insurgents who had taken Jerusalem and stolen the eagle of the XIIth legion. If I failed, of course I would have to die, and even if I succeeded there was every chance that I might still face Corbulo’s fate, but for now, I was safe.

  Duty said I must go, but, more, I wanted to: war was my lifeblood, the hard matter of my bones, the joy of my ageing days, and no amount of love could hold me back from it. I tried to speak, to tell her so softly, and could not.

  Nearby, a man groaned. I am shamed to say that it took me some time to realize that the voice was my own, and that it bounced back
to me soft with the echoes of goatskin, not crisp from a plaster wall; that the scents around me were not of strawberries at all, but the autumnal fragrances of the legionary encampment: old fire smoke, men’s sweat, honed iron and rusting armour.

  Everything was rusted here, in Judaea, because I was here in my tent, not there on Kos, and here was … a mile south of the Syrian border, and more than a year had passed since I had last lain with Caenis.

  I was a general in command of Nero’s armies: three legions were camped with me and two more with Mucianus half a day’s march away.

  I had been wounded twice in the past year. I had led the charge from the front more times than I chose to remember and I had won back a province as I had been ordered to do; all but Jerusalem was once again under Roman rule and death had not taken me yet.

  I tried to open my eyes, and failed, and in the moment’s half-held breath between sleep and true awakening I knew two things: that I was alone in my bed – my act of emission had been solitary and wasted – but I was not alone in my sleeping quarters. An intruder was in there with me and he had not come with kindness in his heart.

  I was not armed, that was the hard part. My sword was on my kit box at the far side of the tent, and might as well have been in Greece. A knife hung from the crossed poles of my camp bed, closer, but still too far away for me to reach it without being seen to move.

  Beneath the thin linen that covered me, I was naked as a child, with the stain of my own lust fresh on my loins. A shadow stood poised in the grey-milk light to my left.

  What I did next was all instinct. I bunched both hands into fists, took a deep, rollicking breath, rolling a little, as a man does in disturbed sleep. For good effect, I whistled and grumbled on the exhalation.

  And then I shouted.

  ‘Haaaaaaaaaa!’

  It was more of a scream, really. On the battlefield, I would have been ashamed of its pitch; my men knew me as their general who roared like a bull.

  Here in the close confines of the tent the noise crashed around, coming from all places at once, and it was powerful enough to scare a man who was already on the edge of his fear.

  I couldn’t sustain it long, but it gave me time enough to hurl myself off the bed and tumble across the floor away from the deadly shadow.

  I hit my head and scrabbled for my pack, which had to be close. My hands closed on cold metal: the long thin plates of the banded legionary armour that has come into use these last few years.

  You have to understand that in battle I wear what my men wear, and usually I am glad of it, but this once, a general’s solid breastplate would have been better. I fumbled for a weapon, but the shadow charged at me, snarling.

  ‘No!’

  I jerked aside, and felt a blade sting as it skittered over my ribs. I was bellowing like a bull now, no words, just a noise that might keep this hound of Hades away from my throat long enough for me to find … ha! The hilt of my gladius. This, too, was what the men carried into battle, and it was perfect: short, savage, sharp enough to gut a man.

  I thrust it forward, kneeling, and felt it slide across a leather jerkin, but I had already punched my left shoulder and forearm forward in a following blow. Perhaps a year ago I could not have done this, but I was battle fit by now, my body as much of a weapon as my shield. I felt muscle yield, the impact of bone, solid against me, the slide of leather. I drew my arm back for another thrust and—

  A sudden flare of firelight, dazzlingly bright. Shapes shifted within it, and even as I wrenched my head away I felt the body beneath me flinch under a blow I had not delivered, felt hands grab past me to hold arms that were not mine, heard a voice I knew, but could not immediately place, shout, ‘Alive! Keep him alive!’

  Thus, rescued, I, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, senator, second son of a tax farmer and current commander of the armies of Judaea, rolled away, and sat up.

  On the far side of my tent was a flurry of contained violence, in which I took no part.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Judaea, June, AD 69

  Vespasian

  ‘MY LORD?’

  I was sitting hunched on a folding camp stool in front of a brazier in the outer, more public, section of my tent.

  My hands were wrapped round the old silver mug that was my grandmother’s gift when I first left home. I’ve had it with me on every campaign since Britain; I have it still.

  It’s my mirror as well as my drinking vessel. Once in a while, it shows me a handsome man, flushed with victory. That night – I suppose it was morning by then – a ruddy-faced farmer stared back at me with haunted eyes, cheeks too broad and chin too sharp, hair grey as a winter’s dawn and two fat brows creeping to kiss in the folds of a frown.

  I had faced death in battle so often that I had come to think myself immune to fear. That morning, I had learned that I was not.

  Sweat ran like rain off my face, while the rest of me was shaking with cold and fright. I wrapped my arms about my ribs, testing the bruises and the long line of the knife cut, and discovered that someone had draped my campaign cloak about my shoulders.

  For decency’s sake, I should have pulled it tight and belted it, but I made a decision a long time ago not to hide myself from my men, and so I let them see for themselves the crusting on my thighs and the shivers that racked me, and the heavy, hollow breathing, like a horse that had just lost its race.

  It wasn’t enough though; they were waiting for more and the press of their patience was giving me a headache.

  I looked up, squinting against the brazier’s heat. ‘Demalion?’

  Demalion of Macedon had been my personal aide for the past two years. He was the only man I knew who would have had the compassion to think of a cloak at a time like this.

  Demalion is tall and dark of hair and would be heart-breakingly comely were he not so weighed down by old grief. When I first took him on as my aide, I promised myself that if I ever saw him smile, I would open the flask of Falerian I had brought with me when I left Caenis.

  ‘My lord?’

  Not tonight, evidently, for the man who stood just beyond the rim of the fire’s red glow was not smiling, and was not Demalion.

  If Demalion was striking, Pantera – the spy, whose name meant ‘leopard’ – was the kind of man who could blend into the background in a crowd of two.

  And, of course, he was the one who had broken into my tent and led the capture of the assassin; I should have known him sooner.

  What can I say of him? If you know Demalion’s story, you will know how Pantera and I first met. After the re-formation of the XIIth, he joined me for some of the Judaean campaign and I made use of him, or him of me; I never knew which, although in an odd kind of way I trusted him more than many of the men around me.

  He was a spy, subterfuge was his world, but he had a kind of integrity that seemed real to me and I believed that he spoke the truth when he chose to speak.

  He wasn’t saying anything just then. He was simply standing on the other side of the fire, a shadow beyond the rim of light, with nothing exceptional about him. He was of middling height, of middling build, with hair of a middling brown and middling skin tanned by wind and sun, neither as dark as the Syrians nor as pale as the northmen of the Germanies.

  It was only when he moved that he set himself apart: despite all his injuries, he had a feline grace about him that had my hair standing on end, such as I have left.

  ‘Pantera,’ I said. No joyous reunion this, everything quiet; he demanded that, somehow. ‘I thought you were in Rome?’

  ‘I was. I left at the end of April.’

  Which would have been when he heard news of Otho’s death; when Vitellius was acknowledged emperor.

  I didn’t ask why he had left then, nor why he had come to me now; the answers were obvious, and I hated them.

  Even so, to have travelled from Rome to our camp in two months was impressive, but I couldn’t find anything to say that didn’t sound patronizing and so instead I tipped my head toward
s the tent flap, and the growing sounds of chaos outside.

  ‘Where’s Demalion?’

  ‘Making the assassin ready for questioning.’

  Two questions answered, and neither of them had I asked: yes, the intruder was an assassin; yes, he had survived his capture. Such economy of thought.

  ‘A centurion?’ I asked, but it was more of a comment than a question. It’s always the centurions who are sent to do the dirty work; they make the most dedicated and efficient killers.

  In any case, this one was hardly the first. Galba had sent one to kill me when he first made himself emperor just after Nero’s death. Otho, his murderer and successor, would no doubt have got round to sending another if he hadn’t been so busy trying to fend off Vitellius. And now Vitellius, or more probably Lucius, his younger, more ambitious, more ruthless brother, had sent yet another to accomplish what the others had failed to do.

  Truly, any questioning was only for the men, to assuage their need for retribution; we knew the answers, or so I thought. My only real doubt was whether, without Pantera, he would have been stopped in time.

  But the legions expect certain things, and there are rituals that must be observed, not least by a general whose life has been saved by the diligence of his staff.

  I set down the mug and lumbered to my feet when I would have just as happily gone back to bed. ‘What do I need to know before we go out there?’

  That was the thing about Pantera, you could ask him these things and expect a decent answer.

  ‘Not a great deal. His name is Publius Fundanius. He was a local man, a Syrian, recently promoted to the third cohort of the Tenth. Seneca always said that the best agent was the officer of the enemy you turned to your own ends, but the second best was the local man, who knew the lie of the land and could chart his way about it. With this man, Vitellius had both woven into one; a local man who was also an officer in your ranks.’

  ‘What did they offer him?’

  ‘A commission in the new Praetorian Guard.’

  ‘But he isn’t Roman.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter any more. The new emperor is in the process of turning the entire First Germanica and the Fourth Macedonica into Guards.’