The King's Cavalry Read online

  Gradually, as he rode and listened, Candless sifted the possibilities. The Circus of Nero was where the infamously bloody games were held in the spring of 65 in the anno domini and that was where the great slaughter of Christians took place, and where Peter, first bishop of Rome had died and was buried ‘between two obelisks,’ said the third monk.

  Paul was beheaded as was his right as a Roman citizen, and Candless listened eagerly to another, knowledgeable-sounding little cleric who trotted alongside on his mule. “It is recorded that the great apostle Paul was executed two years after St Peter, under a pine tree at the Springs of Salvation, on the Ostia road,” he said solemnly. “I have been to the site, at the third milestone on the Via Ostia and there is an oratory at the place, but the actual body of the saint was interred by a Christian matron called Lucina on land between the Via Ostia and the Via Valentiniana.”

  “Do Christians pray there?” asked Candless.

  “There, your grace, and at the Vatican and at the catacombs, on the saints’ feast day,” said the cleric, graciously accepting and discreetly pocketing a piece of silver handed to him by the bishop’s body slave. He added as he moved away: “The emperor is said to have commissioned a fine bronze sarcophagus to honour each saint and will build a basilica over them.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to bring back Paul’s or Peter’s remains,” Candless told Potius, “but I hear there was a great marble coffin opened recently that contained a mass of charred bones and ashes. These evidently come from the martyrs who were turned into human torches at Nero’s festivities, and may include the early bishops, who can say? I think the faithful will be delighted to come to my, that is, our church to pray to them there.”

  Potius nodded, privately smiling at the bishop’s single-minded determination to obtain pilgrim-attracting materials. Candless intuited what he thought, but smiled benevolently and smoothly changed the subject.

  “We are entering the other Holy Land,” he intoned. “Soon we will turn inland on the Via Flaminia, through the gorge of the Furio where the saints walked as we do,” blithely ignoring the fact that he was actually riding comfortably, “over the bridge of Trajan and across the spine of Italia to descend to blessed Rome.” Potius nodded briefly.

  “I’ll keep an eye on the money chest,” he said. “Those Romans would strip us bare.”

  VIII - Captive

  The jailers had not kept me long in isolation. After just three days in the stone cell above the gatehouse of the fortress of Mainz, I was moved into larger quarters with a dozen or so other prisoners. My size and scarred appearance seemed to impress them, and I was left alone. Within a few days the enforced rest had improved both my soreness and my wounded pride, so that when one morning a pair of jailers arrived with spearmen and an announcement that we were to form a working party, I was ready even to do that to get out into some fresh air.

  Ironically, we were to dig latrine trenches on the old campground north of the fortress, an activity I’d been engaged in when I was captured. The guards had no idea who I was. To them I was merely a prisoner waiting for sentencing, and they were roughly amicable. They might have chosen a different attitude had they known that I had personally killed their emperor Maxentius’ father, Maximian, but I sensed they had no great affection for the officer I’d killed, and I kept my peace, worked willingly and waited for an opportunity. When you have slain two emperors yourself, it is wise sometimes to be patient.

  On the fourth day of our digging, I unearthed a Roman tent peg hidden in the dirt. The spearmen were gossiping, not paying close attention and it was an easy thing to palm it and slip it into my tunic.

  The peg was about nine inches long, hammered from iron, pointed like a blade and with a ring at one end, for the tent ropes to be passed through. My first thought was to use it to chip away the mortar of the stones around the cell door but as we were marched back to our prison, I looked more carefully at the exterior bolt on the door.

  It was a small baulk of pig-greased elmwood that acted as a bolt. It ran through three iron brackets, two on the door, one on the casing. This simple lock (and I thanked Mithras that it was not one of the sophisticated iron pin locks the Romans often used) slid horizontally and had a knob at one end to grasp as the bolt was being operated.

  A forearm’s length above the bolt was a shuttered narrow slot that the sentry could open to glance into the cell, and I knew I could use that to escape. Once we were all locked in, I held a series of muttered conversations with my cellmates, got their agreements and waited until the small hours of the morning to carry out my simple plan.

  I made a noose from a strip of leather cut from a shepherd’s jerkin and fastened it to the tent peg’s iron ring. Someone gently slid open the judas hole from the inside and I went fishing with my iron tent peg ‘pole’ and looped line. The extra length of the pole was critical to help me snag the target, and it worked beautifully. I caught the knob at the end of the bolt, angled the pull of the leather line and slid the bolt open, thanking Mithras that the guards had greased the thing. I tested the door. Free. Someone knelt low to peer around the doorframe, where a sentry would be less likely to spot the movement. He signalled that the man was dozing against the far wall. I stepped out, barefoot and silent, smashed an elbow into the side of the jailer’s head and eased him to the stones.

  The other prisoners, apprised by the lookout, began scrambling for the doorway and one fool stumbled into the hallway and knocked over an unlit brazier, which spilled with a clatter. A sentry around the corner called out a question and four or five of the idiot prisoners began running away, making obvious and unmistakable noise.

  There was no time to go back for my boots, so I ran after the others, then dodged sideways into a spiral stairway that led upwards. I was mounting the steps two at a time, silent in my bare feet when I heard the jangle of metal above me. A guard, alerted, was coming down from the battlements. In the light of a wall-bracket, I saw his sword come first around the counter-sunwise spiral, grabbed for his wrist and heaved, flattening myself against the side. The man flew past me, but retained his grip on his sword even as he collided into the wall below me. I ran on upwards, still weaponless and feeling naked.

  The stairway ended at the ramparts. To my right was one of the twin round-towers of the gatehouse, in front of me was the fine stone bridge across the Rhine. There was a bath house a short distance away, the familiar Drusus cenotaph and the temple of Isis where I had worshipped during my long-ago convalescence.

  The river was wide and dark, just an occasional glimmer in the guttering flare of torches on the bridge. I knew there were troop ships, trading vessels and patrol boats of the river fleet tied along the quays, but I had no obvious means to descend the ramparts to get down to the river bank.

  Below me, in the gate arch, I heard the guard being turned out. They would have men on the ramparts searching, and soon. I went back to the stair door and started to climb where the gate tower joined the rear wall. Being barefoot helped and I jammed my fingers and toes into the mortared niches as I ascended to the roof of the stairway and flattened myself prone on it. A low parapet partially hid me, the darkness did the rest. Few people, I knew, look upwards when seaching.

  Poor as it was, the hiding place saved me for long enough. I heard the guards searching, swearing at being disturbed before first light, heard the ‘all clear here’ and the shouts as the prisoners were rounded up. From what I could tell three were reported missing but the soldiers’ conversations indicated that they were thought to have escaped over the wall.

  Gradually, the castrum became quiet, the troops went back to their barrack rooms, wolf light stole over the eastern horizon and I heard the rumble of a provisions waggon on the quayside below. I risked a look. The canvas-topped waggon would pass under the wall as it rolled along the quay. It would mean a leap outwards of eight or ten feet, and a drop of about 25 feet. If I missed, I’d hit the granite of the quay and would be crippled or dead.

  �
��You’re already a cripple,” I growled, thinking of my mangled foot. “Get on with it.” A quick glance left and right, a painful, toe-crunching scramble down the wall and drop to the rampart, another glance to gauge the speed of the oncoming waggon trundling behind two ambling oxen. Then it was three paces back, the same smart steps forward and up into the castellation, a crouching push with both hands on the freezing limestone on either side, and I was launched.

  In midair, I kicked my legs out and threw my shoulders back and I hit the canvas perfectly, feet and backside first, right between two of the wooden ribs that supported the cover. The fabric took the shock, tore, I plunged through and crashed into a case of amphorae packed in straw. Several of the terracotta containers broke, dousing me in olive oil but the impact was not crippling and I rolled sideways out of the gurgling mess.

  The carter, a fat, balding man whose breath stank of wine was clearly drunk and had not even halted his plodding oxen. He turned blearily in dumb shock and I reached through the canvas folds and grasped his throat. “Keep moving or I’ll choke you then smash your skull to paste,” I hissed. He babbled something incomprehensible but it seemed affirmative and the draught animals continued to move. I yanked a dagger from his belt and prodded him with it. “Keep moving, keep quiet,” I ordered.

  “In the back,” I said several minutes later. By this time I had found a hammer. The drunk wobbled so I pulled him backwards, tapped his skull into unconsciousness, tied and then gagged him with strips cut from his filthy tunic. I stole his boots, cloak, straw hat and thin purse and kept urging the oxen forward along the quayside as I did so.

  Another half mile downriver, I saw what I wanted, a neat little patrol boat that would be used by two or three customs officers or tax officials to inspect river traffic. I tied off the oxen’s reins, prodded each with the goad and slipped out of the waggon as it continued its steady progress, leaking olive oil in a thin stream down the centre of the stones.

  The wolf light had brightened and now full dawn was spreading on the other side of the wide river. No sentry in sight, but one could easily be sleeping aboard any of the several vessels at the quayside. I headed for the tidy little cutter which stood 50 yards apart from the bigger troop ships. Lapstraked and built of fir, it was a light, handy vessel that would be fast even handled by just one man. Ideal.

  The riverfront warehouses were separated here, the closest building looked to be a customs post, sturdily built of square-cut Roman stone. I sidled up to it from a blind side, listened, then cautiously peeked through the window hole. The leather covering was pulled back, and I saw several bunks, two of them occupied.

  There would likely be a third man, but he was not in sight. No time to waste. I slipped across the quay and dropped as lightly as I could into the cutter. Everything was shipshape. The blue lateen sail was furled, oars were stowed neatly, the vessel was tied off fore and aft to bollards on the quay. All my years as a river pilot and saltwater sailor stood me in good stead.

  In moments, the practised, smooth movements of the familiar had everything released, the little vessel seemed to bob eagerly. I pushed off from the seawall, took a turn of a painter and lashed the tiller, then grabbed a pair of oars, dropped them into the tholes, bent my back and pulled out of the wharf eddy and into the strong-running current.

  I left the shore, still undetected, rose, hoisted the triangular sail to catch the breeze then settled at the stern, tiller in one fist, mainsheet in the other. The little craft came alive under wind and current and away I scudded downstream on the mighty Rhine, smirking.

  IX - Rome

  The sight of Rome had Candless and Potius gaping in awe.

  Their troop had come over the central spine of Italy, along the worn stones of the Flaminian Way, named for the consul who built it to serve the settlers he’d placed in eastern Italia. The travelers had their first view of the Tiber’s green-grey waters at the ancient Milvian Bridge. This structure alone deeply impressed the weary travelers, a fine, six-arched, humped stone bridge that was defended at the south end by a square, Travertine tiled bastion with double arches and stout oak and iron gates. Its suggestion of power and purpose subdued the group’s spirits as they clattered through, but even this was not yet Rome.

  Their first sight of the city proper came two miles later, as they rode into view of the Aurelian Walls, and then their jaws really dropped. This construction of concrete, tile, brick and mortar finished only 37 years before lay as an impregnable-seeming bulwark that enclosed all seven hills of the ancient city as well as the vast Fields of Mars and a Tiber-side residential district.

  The walls were overwhelmingly imposing. They stood five times the height of a tall man, were twice as thick as the length of the same man lying down and 12 miles in circumference. The emperors Aurelian and Probus had ordered them built to keep out the invading Germanic barbarians and the walls were reinforced with a square tower at every 30 paces: 383 great towers in all to hold the wall’s defenders, and 18 main gates to allow legitimate passage.

  This construction marvel had been hurled up in a scant five years, partly as a defence against the Germanic threat, partly as a demonstration of Roman power and partly as a message of defiant Roman loyalty. They seemed to say: “Rome will never be conquered. You may reach the gates, but they will not open to you.” Here and there existing buildings had been incorporated into the defences: the Castrense Ampitheatre, Cestius’ Pyramid, a part of the aqueduct that stuttering Claudius had built to bring sweet water to Rome, but nowhere did the walls offer weakness.

  The Via Flaminia itself pierced the walls at one of the five postern gates, cunningly built to allow defenders to sally out unobserved. There, a brutal-faced centurion accosted Candless. “Your business?” he demanded.

  “I have come from Britannia to see the emperor,” said Candless loftily, although he was uncomfortably aware that his dust-covered and travel-stained robes and self were hardly likely to impress.

  “You say that, but you could have come from anywhere,” said the centurion rudely. He glanced to one side, to a sentry passage just inside the wall where, discreetly out of view, a contubemium of eight spearmen stood rigid, awaiting orders. Candless realised that his own armed guard made a threatening sight and the centurion was assessing the risk and perhaps the need to call out reinforcements. The bishop coughed to gain a moment and gather his thoughts but before he could speak, Potius had kicked his mount alongside.

  “Mervio!” he called. “That you, Mervio?”

  The centurion turned at his name and his weathered slab of a face split in a grin. “You dog, Potius! What are you doing here?” Candless relaxed, and sat patiently listening as the two old sweats exchanged news of what they had done since they served together on the Danube. Finally, Candless was able to wave his small procession onwards to clop through the vast arch between the flanking towers and enter the walls, admiring as they did the reliefs to Publius Aelius Calpurnianus whose consular road ended at this spot.

  Candless, as ordered by the slab-faced centurion, sent his men to pitch their tents in the military camp inside the wall while he and his personal servants headed on foot for the residence of Bishop Militades, the recently-elected pontiff. The guide supplied by the gate guard led them through the city unerringly, although it was a place of more than a million people, a swarming beehive labyrinthe of narrow streets and crowded, towering tenement buildings, some of them four and five teetering storeys high.

  At street level were the porticoed shop fronts and taverns with their heavy shutters that opened directly onto the cess-stinking streets. There were butchers’ shops with piled shambles of offal outside where lean, yellow dogs snarled and fought over unspeakable entrails; shoemakers who sat in their door holes tapping and stitching as clients waited, idly chatting, for repairs to be made to their footwear. Here was a barber scraping a client’s cheek as it was stretched smooth over a small apple; there a baker piling floury bran loaves on shelves; over there a dyer’s shop where jars
of soapwort, tartar salt, saffron, nut-gall and madder were arrayed, ingredients to create the brilliantly-coloured silks and linens sought by fashionable ladies. Every street and dingy, dark alleyway presented a living tableau of traders and services on offer.

  Patrolling the alleys and streets were dozens of food vendors who hawked cooked chicken and sausages, olives, cheeses and fruit to the throngs of pedestrians. They competed for attention with the jugglers, beggars and scribes who also made their livings on the streets, just as did the fishmongers who wheeled water carts full of live fish brought from the huge aquaria on the fifth floor of Trajan’s Market.

  Above street level, the big-bayed tiers of the apartment blocks presented a standard appearance, the first level of their stone stairways chopped through the line of shops before vanishing inside the structures. The buildings’ layer after layer of brick, rubble, and timber rose above the street in a climbing series of balconies and loggias that reminded the Pict of the seabird colonies on the cliffs of his homeland. There was a difference, he noted grimly. The towering blocks of the rookery-like insulae, that housed nine of every ten of Rome’s million-plus inhabitants, looked to be of the most dangerous, tottering construction, and here and there was the proof – a tumbled, burned-out tenement that had spilled into the street.

  Some of the rookeries collapsed from hugely-inferior building techniques when level after shaky level was piled up on an inadequate footprint, others were destroyed when the massive timbers needed to support the weight of the upper storeys caught fire, for none of the insulae had chimneys. People cooked on open fires and heated their rooms with primitive braziers. It was inevitable that there were several house fires in the city every day. If the building was not set afire accidentally, there was a good chance it would collapse of its own poor construction and be consumed as the cooking fires were spilled.