The rock-strewn hillsides echoed with their laughter.
XXIII
They rested for a day at Fanum because Valerius’s wound was acting up but next morning he felt fit enough to take the Via Aemilia towards Ariminum, with the hills a constant presence to their left, the misty grey of their peaks combining with leaden cloud to make land and sky a single claustrophobic entity. As they rode further north, Valerius felt the atmosphere around them change very gradually. It wasn’t something in the air, but in the people they passed. Faces that had been indifferent became first wary, then openly fearful. Beyond Bononia the road reached out into a flat plain of rich, dark-earthed farmland. Yet despite the evident prosperity they met few fellow travellers, apart from local farmers who scurried away when they saw them, and they found every door and window shuttered and closed against them. Valerius said it was as if they were approaching the heart of a plague-hit province. At the outer reaches the fear was little more than a shadow, but the closer you got to the centre the more it took form, until it materialized as a traveller dying by inches at the roadside or the disturbed earth of a new-filled grave. They found one Imperial way station closed and seemingly abandoned, and by the time they reached Regium Lepidum their animals were close to breaking down.
‘If we can’t change the horses here, we’ll end up carrying them,’ Serpentius complained.
The staging post at Regium formed part of an auxiliary cavalry base on the outskirts of the town. By now they were well used to the nitpicking pedants in charge of these places: petty officials who studied every word of the warrant, seeking a mistake that would allow them to refuse two mere civilians. This one was no different. The gate guard led them to a sour-breathed ex-legionary seated at a wooden table beneath a rough shelter overlooking the post’s exercise ground and horse lines. The man had a suspicious cast to his eyes Valerius didn’t like, and a wariness beyond the usual bureaucratic temporizing.
‘From Rome, eh?’ The clerk sniffed and threw the warrant back across the tabletop. ‘Not worth the paper it’s written on. First Nero, then Galba, now this Otho, and who’s to say he’s still the Emperor, eh? Or that whoever signed this is still in a position to enforce it? We hear there’s a new man, the governor of Germania, and he has the legions to back up his claim. It would be more than my job’s worth to hand out horses on the strength of this. Why should I risk that?’
‘Because if you don’t I’ll personally ram it down your throat,’ Serpentius pointed out cheerfully.
The man glanced towards the exercise ground, where two stable boys were collecting manure.
Valerius shook his head. ‘My friend here would eat them alive.’ He looked around the outpost and the depleted horse lines. ‘The post seems very quiet. Just a few guards and no one on the parade ground. That’s unusual in a cavalry fort. Who garrisons this place?’
Normally, the official wouldn’t have submitted, but the times weren’t normal. The thin one with the scarred head looked well capable of carrying out his threat, even if Didius and Philo intervened, which they wouldn’t. Traders, the warrant said … ‘Perhaps I can spare you a couple of remounts,’ he said carefully, pointing to the rail where his spare horses were tethered. ‘Take the two closest to us.’
Valerius nodded to Serpentius, and the Spaniard went to check the animals, which turned out to be a pair of bow-backed, short-legged specimens fit only for pack duty and as worn out as the mounts they had arrived on. ‘I think I’ll take a look at these.’ He pointed to the far end of the lines where a dozen or so fitter-looking cavalry horses stood with their noses in bags of hay.
The man rose from his chair in protest. ‘They—’
‘You didn’t answer my question.’ Valerius pushed him back into his seat.
‘Two troops of the Ala Siliana …’
So that was why the man was so nervous. The Ala Siliana had served under Vitellius when he was proconsul in Africa. Valerius, as his military adviser, had led them on punitive expeditions against the tribes in the hills south of Thevesitis, and ridden with them again in Egypt when they had been sent there as part of Titus Vespasian’s cavalry forces. Vitellius and the Siliana’s commander Tiberius Rubrio had been friends, and if the governor of Germania Inferior was looking for a powerful ally in Italia, Rubrio was the man he would turn to.
‘And where are they now?’
The administrator shrugged hopelessly. How had he become trapped up to his stupid neck in politics? He was only an insignificant bureaucrat whose sole joy was to make life difficult for people even less significant than himself. ‘They rode north the day after they heard Vitellius’s army was marching. They said Rome only has one Emperor, Aulus Vitellius, and I should remember that if I knew what was good for me. I didn’t know what else to do.’