Sword of Rome(8)

When they were done, his captors left him with his thoughts and the damp already beginning to eat into his bones. He closed his eyes, willing his heart to stop thundering. A face swam into focus. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Had his informant got it wrong? Had he been betrayed? He ran the conversation of the previous day through his mind.

‘Whoever sent you has misread the situation entirely. Nymphidius is a country-bred boor who struts like the cock of the dungheap because he believes Nero is finished, but he does not control the Praetorian Guard.’

‘Then who does?’

‘Offonius Tigellinus.’

‘They said he had gone into hiding.’

‘Is that so different from staying in the shadows?’ His old friend had raised a cultured eyebrow. ‘It does not mean he has lost his power. He understands the position better than anyone in Rome. He fears the outcome, but he can still influence it. If any man can bring Nero down it is Tigellinus.’

The information should have reassured him, but for a moment his guts churned with panic, as if the entire hill were pressing down on him. Eventually the feeling passed, and he huddled into the corner where, despite his closed eyes, true sleep evaded him. Instead, he found himself in a half-light world where dream and imagination swirled and eddied until he wasn’t certain where the one ended and the other began. A female presence hovered on the edge of his consciousness. Some instinct told him it was the shade of the Trinovante girl who had betrayed him almost a decade earlier, or Fabia, the beautiful courtesan who had given her life to save his, but he knew his mind was shielding him from the truth. There it was, a narrow, sculpted face with a wide mouth and flashing chestnut eyes: Domitia Longina Corbulo. Her message was that she released him from his vow, the vow to avenge the death of her father. But how could someone else release a man from a solemn pledge made over his general’s still warm body?

Three days, or was it four? There was no way of telling, with a filth-spattered bucket for his waste, and food and water pushed through the hatch whenever someone remembered. At some point he found himself reliving his first meeting with Servius Sulpicius Galba, the man whose ambition had brought him to this place, and quite possibly his death.

Eighteen months earlier, in the chaotic hours after Corbulo’s suicide, Valerius had fled Antioch with Serpentius and Domitia, one step ahead of Nero’s executioners. When they reached Alexandria the general’s old friend and rival, Titus Flavius Vespasian, had taken Domitia into his protection. But Vespasian was less certain what to do with the two men who were now being blamed for Corbulo’s death. In the end, they had been exiled to a remote desert outpost, where they spent six months training the general’s Nubian cavalry for his assault on the rebel province of Judaea. Their exile only ended when Vespasian summoned them to carry a message to Carthago Nova in Galba’s province of Hispania Tarraconensis. Then, no one had any inkling that a geriatric patrician with a reputation as both a snob and a skinflint had ambitions for the purple. But with Corbulo, most loyal of the loyal, forced to fall on his sword, Nero’s generals knew that the only way any of them would be safe was if their increasingly erratic master could be deposed. By the time Valerius reached him, Galba had allied himself with Vindex and his rebels.

On first acquaintance, Servius Sulpicius Galba was a dried-out stick of a man with all the attraction of a well-gnawed bone. Tall, thin and stooped, he had a broad forehead and a gnarled skull that gleamed like a legionary’s helm, and he wore the permanent expression of someone who had just sucked on an unripe lemon. He seldom smiled, because to do so would reveal the absence of any teeth, and his hooked patrician nose was perfectly shaped for looking down on those he felt were beneath him

Valerius had pondered how to address the man who aspired to be the next occupant of Nero’s throne. ‘Caesar,’ he bowed.

‘I am not your Caesar,’ Galba snapped. ‘I will govern Rome for the people and the Senate, not for personal aggrandizement. The Empire needs stability and firm management and I will provide it. This has always been my destiny. Only a patrician, a man of maturity and long military experience, is capable of providing the leadership Rome needs. You have Vespasian’s letter?’

Valerius reached into his pouch and handed over the scroll. Before opening it, the old man peered at the seal, checking it hadn’t been tampered with. His bony hands shook as he read it and Valerius wondered how any man could believe those hands capable of steering the Empire on the steady course it needed. His head had been filled with an image of Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, a true leader: resolute, firm and battle-tested; loved by the men he pushed to the very limits of their mental and physical endurance. Corbulo would have made a great Emperor, but he would never have taken the purple while Nero lived. By ordering his death, Nero had deprived himself of the one man who had the power to hold the Empire together. This old man would never have dared to stir from his bed while Corbulo lived. Yet here he was, and it seemed he held Nero’s fate in his hands, because he produced a sour, tight-lipped smile.