Rome 4: The Art of War by M. C. Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

could run a little faster, jump that hand or two higher, fight harder. When we put on displays for the generals, his javelin was the one that flew farthest and hit the mark most cleanly. If he’d lived in the old days of Greece, he’d have been an Olympian. In the legions he won silver to put on his belt or about his neck or on his arms, and by his mid-twenties he’d won pretty much every award there was to win and was heading up the ranks.
    He made centurion at the ridiculously young age of twenty-five and nobody thought it was ridiculous in his case. He was promoted to the Guard at thirty, which was almost unheard of, but nobody begrudged him his place; he was Roman, you see, and that mattered. I’m Roman, too, but half of my men are Rhinelanders. It wasn’t right, making them Guards.
    But that’s a different story. Trabo rose up the Guard ladder in the same way he’d risen up the legionary one and he was a tribune by thirty-five; the youngest for generations, perhaps the youngest ever. He was fiercely loyal to Nero and men said he wept when the boy stabbed himself in the throat. Then Galba took Nero’s Guard as his own when he took the throne, and by all accounts Trabo was as loyal to his new emperor as he had been to his old.
    But he was also a friend of Otho’s. Otho had been a member of Nero’s entourage and Trabo had stood guard over him, which, in practice, meant he’d gone drinking, whoring and gambling with him but not had any of the drink, the girls or the money. Well, not as much as Otho had.
    For all that, they were both men of principle, both were active,both understood where Rome needed to go and that it wasn’t in the direction Galba was pushing it. When Galba named that mewling catamite Piso as his heir, Trabo was at Otho’s right hand to make sure the mistake was rectified swiftly: Piso died first, but only by a matter of hours; Galba was gone soon after.
    Would I have done the same? I think I might. It’s not laudable: a man should be loyal to his superiors, but Galba was a disaster and everyone knew it; he had to go.
    Otho would have been a good emperor. If I hadn’t already committed to Vitellius, I would have followed him happily. I don’t regret it; you can’t choose your generals, but you can make the most of what they give you and offer unswerving loyalty in return.
    Anyway: Trabo was a legend, a good man with a solid heart, the build of an ox and the skills of a trained killer. Trying to catch him single-handed might not have been a suicide mission, but it was close.
    If one man could do it, that man was Juvens; he was the closest we had to our very own Trabo. And so you had to at least consider whether he, too, had slid his hand into a lottery pouch that contained only one tab of lead.
    Our eyes met. Neither of us spoke, but on an impulse I said, ‘Do you want help?’
    ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
    We were away from the widows’ houses by then, on a connecting street with only the windowless backs of buildings looking on to it. We were alone, and Juvens was walking backwards down the centre of the street where he was less likely to tread in the piles of mule dung.
    His wild, reckless grin was gone. ‘If we’re going to be partners,’ he said, ‘you’d better open your tab. I’ll look the other way.’
    I knew what was on the tab, and if I was right, Juvens knew thatI knew. But we had to keep up appearances. It goes without saying that this conversation has not happened .
    And so, in an odd kind of privacy, and not at all as I had imagined, I stood in a middling alleyway between two sets of mildly well-off villas, broke the black seal with my thumb and folded open the much-kneaded lead to reveal the name inscribed within.
    ‘And?’ Juvens was at my side. ‘Anyone difficult?’
    ‘Sebastos Abdes Pantera.’ It was the first time I had spoken the spy’s full name. It felt jagged in my mouth.
    Juvens’ frown was all confusion and surprise; you could tell he’d