‘I die for Rome.’
‘I die for Rome.’
‘I die—’
Valerius forced himself to watch every blow, and by the time the last condemned man was brought to the pit edge he could feel tears streaming down his face. The crowd, in that way of the mob, had begun by cheering every blow, but had quickly been won over by the courage and bearing of the victims. Their cries for mercy were ignored. Serpentius looked across the field of death to where his Emperor sat stone-faced, watching the last of the spectacle. ‘Bastard,’ he spat.
By then, Valerius only had eyes for Marcus Salvius Otho.
XIV
Rhenus Frontier, November, AD 68
The wine tasted sweet on his lips, but there was a hint of fruit, too. A Nomentan, he guessed, but how could one be sure? Still, much better than the tanner’s piss they had served on the galley that brought him down the Rhenus. The journey from Italia had been pleasant enough, though long. He had found the air of the high Alpine passes oddly invigorating, but the food of the locals execrable. Who could live on cheese, no matter how many hundred ways it was presented? Things improved markedly when he joined the Classis Germanica ship at Basilia, where the Rhenus wound its way from the Alps into Germania Superior, and the rising waters had carried him swiftly and in no little comfort. The week-long delay at Moguntiacum, a hundred miles upstream from the palace at Colonia Agrippinensis, had been inevitable but worthwhile. Hordeoinius Flaccus, the legate who had just taken over from Verginius as governor of Germania Superior, had been keen to show off his troops and keener still to hear the latest news from Rome.
Aulus Vitellius selected another roast duck – his third – ripped off a leg and sighed with pleasure as he bit into the firm meat. And now he was here at last, with the tiresome ceremonies confirming his appointment behind him. When he had picked the bird clean a slave appeared with a bowl and he washed his grease-slick fingers before drying them on a fresh cloth. ‘Now remind me of our dispositions,’ he said to the man in the place of honour on the couch to his right.
Gaius Fabius Valens had barely touched the food, content to watch the unequal epicurean battle unfold as the new governor of Germania Inferior ate his way through enough rations for three or four men. Dark and intense, Valens was as thin as his host was fat, with an air of suppressed anger that made other men wary. It was said that he had personally removed the head of Vitellius’s predecessor, and, if he was being honest, the new governor admitted he found Valens a little frightening. When the general spoke, it was sparingly and through clenched teeth, as if he were unwilling to part with the words.
‘My own legion, First Germanica, is stationed at Castra Bonnensis, which you passed on the left bank of the river.’ Vitellius nodded. He remembered the large fort dominating the river bend five miles upstream. ‘Numisius Rufus commands Fourteenth Gallica at Castra Novaesium, the same distance to the south, and Fifteenth Primigenia and Fifth Alaudae, legates Lupercus and Fabullus, hold the swamp country further downstream at Vetera opposite the Frisii, who like our old foes the Chatii and the Cherusci have been suspiciously quiet this year.’
Vitellius called for more wine, using the delay to run the names and positions of his legions and the Germanic tribes they kept honest through his mind. ‘You believe I should be concerned?’
Valens shook his head. ‘The campaigning season is past and the tribes have withdrawn to their winter encampments. Our only concern would be if the river ice reaches a thickness that would allow them to cross, but it is more than twenty years since it last froze over completely.’
The governor shivered, not with fear, but at the thought of its becoming any colder than it already was. Colonia Agrippinensis was a surprisingly civilized place and not at all what he had expected. Most Roman settlements on the Rhenus frontier were like Castra Bonnensis, large forts built to hold a legion and its associated auxiliaries. Over the years a small town would grow up around the gateway to supply the wider needs of the seven or eight thousand men within: bars, brothels and bakers, tanners and tunic makers. Colonia was different. The city had originally been a settlement for the Ubii, a Germanic tribe forced from the eastern bank of the river by their more powerful neighbours. But nineteen years earlier the unfortunate Ubii had been displaced again, when Claudius had ordered the establishment of a colonia, a planned town, settled by retired legionaries. Which was why Colonia Agrippinensis was like a little piece of Italia dropped on to the damp, gloomy flatlands of Germania: a tidy grid of streets enclosed by a defensive wall, with plastered houses, a forum and, most important, the governor’s palace, a comfortable two-storey villa built round an open square. But there the similarity ended. The land around Colonia was a veritable swamp, the air damp enough to swim in and, in November, cold enough to shrivel a man’s extremities, even when he was wrapped in a voluminous woollen toga. The heated floor made it bearable, but even so the wind whistled through every gap. As the whole world knew, Aulus Vitellius was a man who liked his comforts. A full belly was all very well, but cold feet? Belatedly, he realized Valens was still speaking.