Sword of Rome(50)

Meanwhile, the Emperor’s advisers bickered. It had always been clear they had little respect for each other, but now the animosity was in plain sight. Vinius’s strident voice rose above the others. If Galba wouldn’t go on the attack he should barricade himself into the palace, arm his slaves and wait the plotters out. It was so clearly an invitation to the rebels to take the initiative that for a moment Valerius wondered if Vinius was part of the conspiracy. Laco raged that he would have Vinius executed by his bodyguard and the consul called for his lictors.

‘Verrens is right, we must do something,’ the Praetorian prefect shouted. ‘To do nothing is to invite disaster. What if our enemy is marching on the Senate at this very moment? Every minute we waste allows Otho to seem more of an Emperor to the men who are with him and those he needs to convince. He too will be panicking – we should take advantage of that.’

Galba glared. ‘No one here is panicking. We are debating the best course of action.’

Laco bowed an apology, but his face told a different story. His eyes met Valerius’s and he shook his head in exasperation at the ineptitude of the man he’d supported. But, from somewhere, Galba suddenly gained a new confidence.

‘Yet we can take hope.’ The ageing Emperor’s voice rose as he grasped at potential salvation the way a drowning sailor grabs for a passing spar. ‘We still have the support of the people and the Senate. The army, the legions of Germania Superior apart, is still with us …’ As he spoke a new roar interrupted him from beyond the walls. ‘What is it? What is happening?’

A messenger ran up to Laco, and as he listened the Praetorian commander’s face split in a savage grin. ‘They’re saying Otho is dead. Someone saw him killed. I hope the bastard suffered.’

‘This is our moment,’ the Emperor said breathlessly. ‘Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, you are to march to the Praetorian barracks and regain control. Take a strong escort, arrest the ringleaders and bring them to your Emperor.’

Valerius saw Piso go pale. This patently wasn’t what the young aristocrat had expected when Galba had adopted him as his heir. Still, his chin came up and he raised his fist to his chest in salute.

‘There is no guarantee the rumour is true,’ Valerius pointed out. ‘You may be sending him into a trap.’

But Galba was already celebrating his victory. ‘Escort me to the rostrum. I will address my people. Open the gates.’





XX


Serpentius felt himself buffeted by the heaving crowd that followed in the wake of Marcus Salvius Otho. They were five hundred as they passed through the gates of the Castra Praetoria. By the time they reached the parade ground in the middle of the three-storey red-brick barrack blocks their numbers had been swelled to three times that by Praetorians primed for this moment by Onomastus’s agents. The Spaniard, a man of the sharpest instincts, could feel the suppressed violence all around him. He had experienced the power of an earthquake and every instinct told him this was the human equivalent.

Another four thousand men waited at attention on the hard-packed earth of the Praetorian parade ground. Otho’s bearers carried him to a reviewing stand, and Serpentius found a raised doorstep that allowed him a view of the proceedings while he took stock of what was happening. He was not an educated man, but it did not take a Seneca or a Cicero to understand that he was at the centre of great events. In a matter of minutes Otho had transformed himself from a penniless aristocrat discarded by his Emperor into the man with the power to supplant him. A force that had begun with twenty men now numbered the equivalent of a full legion. Not only that, but they controlled probably the greatest military power base in Rome. Not a hundred paces from where he stood was the Praetorian armoury, with enough swords and spears, shields and mail to equip twelve thousand men, and the treasury, packed with the gold to buy the services of twelve thousand more.

All Otho had to do was convince them he was the man to lead them.

From his marginally elevated position Serpentius realized the guiding hand behind the plot had put all the elements in place to make it happen. The centuries arrayed in their lines on the parade ground were made up of rank and file legionaries; there was little sign of the officers or centurions who might have swayed their allegiance. And in a block at the heart of the black and silver ranks another unit had been given the place of honour: the naval militia who had more reason to despise Galba than anyone else in Rome. Someone had issued the men from the rowing benches with tunics of marine blue so that for the first time they had the appearance of a unified military force. They were still unarmed, but somehow the way they held themselves made them more dangerous than the pampered Praetorian peacocks who surrounded them. Whoever had brought them here and placed them in Otho’s hands had made a risky roll of the dice. With his first words the rebel Emperor turned it into a stroke of genius.