Praetorian: The Great Game Page 19

  Rufinus baulked. It was a question he’d been pondering the answer to all the way here in the shallow-beamed merchant vessel and his story was convincing; water-tight even. It was a story played out many times in many parts of the empire and he’d repeated it to himself until he could have responded in his sleep.

  Now, facing those dead, hollow eyes, he was entirely unconvinced of his ability to pull this off. ‘It’s… it’s not something I’m prepared to discuss.’

  ‘I can understand that’ grinned Snake-Man. ‘Come on, Dis. Let’s get back. Markets make me twitch and it’s time for a midday nap.’

  ‘Hollow-Eyes’ - Dis? - shook his head slightly. ‘Tell me.’

  Rufinus tried not to look nervous, though he could feel the cold sweat seeping into his tunic and trickling down his neck and back. His palms had gone clammy. Damn it! He had faced a screaming horde of Marcomanni, stepping into the fray and fighting like a lion. He had taken down some of the Tenth Gemina’s most brutal fighters in the ring. He’d even faced the emperor and his officers without panic-vomit. Something about this ‘Dis’ made him shiver, but anger at his own fear began to rise and helped him push his nerves back down.

  ‘I looked after the supply trains coming into camp. Making quite a little nest-egg for myself until my partner got greedy. Wanted me to drop my share to grow his. Threatened to report me to the camp prefect. When I refused, he did just that.’

  Dis shook his head. ‘That’s a few dozen lashes, not dismissal.’

  Rufinus forced himself to grin. ‘Not when evidence can’t be given, ‘cause the only witness turns up without a head.’

  Snake-Man laughed out loud.

  ‘Enterprising solution. They gave you discharge then?’

  Rufinus nodded. ‘There wasn’t enough evidence against me on either count to bring punishment. Not without a witness, anyway. But the prefect told me he was ‘bollocksed if he would have a man he couldn’t trust in his army’.’

  Dis, hollow eyes still expressionless, nodded his head faintly. ‘Perhaps. What’s your name, boy?’

  Rufinus bridled. He was almost twenty-five and far from a boy. Likely of an age with the hollow man before him.

  ‘Gnaeus Marcius.’

  ‘Gnaeus Marcius what?’

  Rufinus felt the nerves pushing their way back up. What the hell did this man know? ‘Just Gnaeus Marcius.’

  Dis breathed out with a hiss. ‘Alright’ he said, sounding thoroughly unconvinced.

  Snake-Man laughed again. ‘Are we done? Good. Now let’s get back to the villa before the heat really hits.’

  The servant in green, who had stood silent and deferential throughout the exchange, gestured to Rufinus and the other man they had selected earlier, a former auxiliary soldier named Fastus, and pointed to the cart behind them. ‘Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. The villa is not far.’

  As Fastus stepped toward the cart, Rufinus frowned. ‘You have not made mention of pay?’

  The servant shrugged as he looked Rufinus up and down. ‘More than you made in your flea-bitten legion. And more than anyone else who’s hiring. Get in the cart.’

  Rufinus nodded and followed, aware of the hollow eyes of Dis watching his every move. As soon as he and Fastus had climbed aboard in the back, among the half dozen amphorae of wine and the sacks of goods, Snake-man and the servant clambered up in front to guide the cart, while Dis and the ‘beast’ joined them in the back. Rufinus felt a momentary confusion as he settled among the supplies. Surely Constans, the Praetorians’ pet merchant, should be doing this? If Constans was no longer dealing with supplies, Rufinus’ job would be near impossible.

  ‘You collect your own supplies? Can you not have them delivered to the villa?’

  Snake turned round as the servant encouraged the horses. ‘The villa supplies are delivered, but we like a few extras of our own from time to time.’

  Rufinus nodded, the worry subsiding once again. Not for the first time he wondered whether he was truly suitable for this task. He was a boxer and a soldier, not a spy or a sneak. The coming days or weeks would be nerve-wracking, and he could do without such doubts.

  Forcing himself to relax back into the cart, he fixed his eyes on the street at the end of the market place - a wide, spacious area lined with fruit trees and full of stalls and the cries of traders. The narrower thoroughfare sloped gently away in the direction, Rufinus was pretty sure, of Rome, high insulae towering over both sides and providing a deep shade that was a welcome respite from the sun that had beat down mercilessly in the marketplace all morning.

  The cart reached the edge of the paved market and turned into the street, the servant, having clearly done this a hundred times, expertly guiding the vehicle and its two horses toward the middle, angling the heavy wooden braking-pole into the groove that ran down the centre of the hill. The wooden bar hit the stonework with a crack and then proceeded to issue a blood-curdling tortured shriek as it fought the momentum the cart was beginning to pick up. Rufinus winced at the noise and squinted into the shade ahead, watching as a carved monumental gate approached, where the street levelled out for a time before angling off to the left.

  ‘What a bloody awful noise.’

  Snake leaned back.

  ‘You’ve heard nothing yet. This is a gentle slope. Wait till we get outside the walls!’

  Rufinus clenched his teeth against the shrieking of the wooden brake and watched as the gate, more reminiscent of the great triumphal arches of the capital than a portal in a city wall, loomed and then passed quickly overhead.

  Testament yet again to the servant’s skill at guiding the horse and cart, he hardly slowed as the cart approached the turn, one wheel leaving the ground for a heart-stopping moment before coming back down with a jolting thud. As Rufinus, eyes wide, grasped the cart’s side, his knuckles whitening, he noted with a rising sense of panic that the route ahead was now horrifyingly visible.

  Unlike Rome or most of the cities Rufinus was used to, the built-up area of Tibur appeared to end precisely at its walls, perhaps due to the strictures of the landscape and the precipitous nature of the slope outside them. The road they faced snaked back and forth down the incline with a number of hair-pin bends, passing drum-shaped mausolea and huge square tombs and columbaria, looping around a large temple complex, and then swinging wildly to a drop he could just make out as being quite steep before it hit the plains below and levelled out, seemingly a thousand feet down.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  The fang-toothed beast opposite gave him a very unpleasant grin and Fastus, the other new recruit, shared Rufinus’ wide-eyed panic as he too gripped tight. ‘You lot must be pissing insane!’

  The driver appeared to have let go of the brake entirely now and was letting the cart run down the long, straight slope, the horses sounding a little panicked, attached to what was, to all intents and purposes, a runaway vehicle. The cart hit an errant loose cobble a third of the way down the stretch and lurched and bounced, throwing the occupants into the air. The brutal giant hurriedly grasped an amphora of wine that had come loose and held it down, tightly but gently as though it were his child. Fastus was noisily sick over the side of the cart until the bouncing board hit him in the chin and smacked his teeth painfully together.

  Rufinus watched with rising horror as the first sharp bend approached at break-neck speed. He was beginning to wonder whether he had been over-kind about the driver’s talent and thought perhaps the man had simply been lucky early on, and was now just trying his best to descend the hill in the shortest time possible.

  Just as Rufinus thought nothing more could be done and they were doomed, at the point where he had a foot extricated ready to leap from the runaway vehicle, the driver hauled on the reins and jammed the heavy wooden pole into the rut, here more of a hastily-carved trench than a carefully constructed channel.

  The cart slewed and lurched sickeningly as it flew into the bend, horses shrieking as they tried desperately to keep control. Fastus was sick
again, this time directly onto his feet in the centre of the cart, much to the amusement of the needle-toothed giant.

  As soon as the heart-stopping turn began it was over, the wheel thumping back down to the road with a bone-jarring smack, the driver laughing gaily as he urged the beasts on down the next straight.

  And so the descent went, past towering tombs and tall cypress and the low perimeter walls of estates, somewhere a little over halfway down the hillside, a large complex of porticoes and temples with what appeared to be a theatre in the middle. Each corner was precisely the same: death-defying and painful, taken at speeds that would make charioteers blanch. Each straight was the same: the driver trying to make up for the speed he lost in the turns by driving the vehicle at breakneck speeds as it jolted and bounced, shaking the organs out of its occupants.

  Rufinus was beginning to think he’d pulled a muscle in his neck through the constant bouncing of his head, as they made the last turn, Fastus noisily testing to see whether he was completely empty yet.

  The final bend brought them out onto a long, straight road, marching off to the west between fields and groves of olive trees, copses and thickets of vegetation. A milestone whizzed past in a blur, and the only thing he caught was the large XIX on the side, a number he assumed referred to the distance of Rome.

  ‘Cheer up sicky,’ the driver shouted back into the cart, grinning at the pale green face of the other new hireling. ‘Only a mile to go now.’

  Fastus gave the driver a grimace and then turned to Rufinus, perhaps hoping for a little sympathy from a man in a similar situation. Rufinus gave him none. In his position it was important to stay as insular and tight-lipped as possible until he had a better understanding of the lay of the land in the villa.

  ‘What happens when we arrive?’ Rufinus asked Snake.

  The man turned and smiled his oily smile. ‘You get signed in by the clerk, make your mark on the documents, get assigned a room and then, after the noon rest, you get shown around the grounds so you can get your bearings.’

  Rufinus nodded, keeping his teeth clenched against the battering they were receiving from the bumps in the road and the insane speed of the servant driving the cart.

  Without any warning or attempt at slowing, the driver hauled on the reins and the cart slewed to the left off the road and onto a drive, surprisingly of better quality. Metalled and constructed of flat flags, this access road to the former Imperial villa had been constructed a mere fifty or sixty years ago and had borne the brunt of only private traffic, as opposed to the centuries old and well-travelled main road behind them.

  Rufinus glanced over the side of the cart at a small stream running alongside, followed its course ahead, and found himself looking up at a small city. His eyes widened.

  ‘Jupiter, Juno and Minerva!’

  ‘It’s a sizeable complex’ the Snake man replied over his shoulder. ‘I’m told that Hadrianus used to keep a full imperial court here permanently. It’s not the same these days, of course. The lady’s court only occupies maybe a third of the place. And even then that’s far more space than they really need.’

  Rising from behind an arcade of decorative cypress trees, trimmed into perfect cones, Rufinus was surprised to see the high, fine and delicate arches of a theatre. The arcade of trees split not far from the structure, one branch running off out of sight along the hill among beautiful white buildings and red roofs, the other striding off to intersect with the road along which they travelled.

  ‘The place has a theatre?’ he asked in astonishment.

  The driver peered over his shoulder and snorted. ‘Two. One at each end of the complex, in case you desperately need to see a play and you can’t be arsed to walk far. And there’s a stadium and an amphitheatre.’

  Snake turned to him. ‘We use those for practice, though Hadrianus was a bit of a wet one and didn’t much like his gladiators. The theatres are both massive, like the gardens, but the amphitheatre’s about the size of a Roman’s dick.’

  Rufinus blithely ignored the insult. The three hirelings and the slave were clearly all of non-Roman origin and Fastus, for all his Latin name, had been an auxiliary trooper and so was clearly no Roman. He was suddenly very aware of the eyes of Dis, the ‘hollow’ man, resting firmly upon him with an unmoving gaze. Turning away, he watched as the road descended a slope and passed beneath a massive structure with a gentle curve, cresting the hill above. The four-storey monstrosity was a series of arched and terraced vaults, supporting the delicate colonnade at the top. Each arch above the first level had a low fence and, from the clothing and blankets hanging over them, Rufinus guessed he was looking at the slave quarters. The lowest level was, of course, solidly blocked off to prevent occupants from wandering off.

  The monumental entrance road to the villa seemed to hug that great structure and then disappear from view to the left, but the cart rattled past the place and turned two gentle corners off to the right, the driver slowing to a more sensible pace as the route led them beneath the huge three-storey structure and then right past a tall, curved building. On, they rattled until finally, the driver pulled on the reins and stopped the cart outside a squat structure with a double door.

  ‘All out’ the servant barked, and the mercenary guards clambered down from the wagon, Rufinus and Fastus shuffling along to drop from the back to the gravel beneath with a crunch.

  ‘Right’ said Snake, rubbing his hands together. ‘Follow me.’

  Approaching the door, he knocked loud and paused for a moment. As the other four men fell into place behind him, the wooden portal swung open to reveal a short, unhappy looking man with a shaved head and pale yellow tunic.

  ‘Out of the way’ said Snake, grasping the slave’s shoulder and roughly pushing him aside as he strode in. The great monster with the needle teeth followed him, while Dis paused and gestured for the two new recruits to go next before bringing up the rear. The slave nervously hurried to close the door and lock it again.

  Through two small, decorous but unfurnished rooms the mercenary captain led them, into a garden that had clearly once been a work of art. It had become heavily overgrown but showed signs of recent restoration. As they passed between the bulbous hedges that had once been topiary, the slave in the yellow tunic reappeared in a leather smock and began to prune bushes.

  Rufinus tried to reel in his thoughts. The place was fascinating, and its occupants would likely be varied and interesting, but he couldn’t afford to allow his gaze to stray too far from the goal until he was much more familiar with the place.

  On the far side of the garden they moved inside once more, to a short hallway with offices on both sides, each alcove separated from the hall by a wooden rail and desk. Only two of the offices showed any sign of use, and it was towards one of these that Snake led them.

  ‘Captain Phaestor. You were quicker than expected’ the thin, intense-looking man behind the desk announced as the small party approached. He put away whatever he was working on, his nose twitching, and cradled his hands on the desk, sharp, beady dark eyes following their movements. Rufinus was put in mind of a rodent not only by the man’s appearance, but also by his mannerisms and movements.

  ‘We had Pev driving us.’

  ‘Ah. Any injuries?’

  ‘Cut the banter. Sign these two in and let them make their mark. I want to get on.’

  The clerk nodded and shuffled around his cubicle, finding records and preparing his stylus, the ink-coated pen held over the thin wood sheet.

  ‘Names?’

  There was silence for a moment until Snake, or Phaestor as he was called, gestured for them to comply.

  ‘Gnaeus Marcius’ he replied steadily, noting once again the eyes of Dis falling suspiciously upon him.

  The clerk scribbled the name, tutting at a blot of ink that formed.

  ‘Publius Fastus’ replied the other recruit, leaning forward. The clerk recoiled from the smell of vomit that surrounded the man. Rufinus hardly noticed it, having spent h
alf an hour in the cart surrounded by the miasma.

  ‘Alright. You’re signed in. Any time you leave the villa, you need to sign out with me. You will not be permitted to leave the villa without a signed chit from either captain Phaestor or one of his adjutants, the villa’s major domo, or one of the nobles. The complex is extensive and has only a low perimeter wall. Passing that wall without a chit will result in disciplinary measures. You will be told what structures are open to you. There will be some that you are only allowed in during the course of your duties, some you have free access at all times, and some that you will never be permitted to enter. Needless-to-say, being found in a building that is outside your jurisdiction will result in disciplining. I daresay that Phaestor will relate his own rules to you, but those are some important ones that apply to all hired hands, regardless of role. Do you understand?’

  Rufinus nodded, alongside Fastus. The clerk had rattled out the words by rote, a speech he had honed years before and repeated on a semi-regular basis.

  ‘Here is your agreement of service. If you wish to read it through, do so quickly, then make your mark at the bottom.’

  Fastus peered myopically at the sheet for a moment, shrugged in complete incomprehension, and made a cross at the bottom. Rufinus picked his up and began to study it.

  ‘It says you belong to the mistress while you work here unless you piss it all up; then you belong to me.’

  Rufinus ignored Phaestor’s urging, but quickened his pace as he scanned the salient points. The conditions were less than satisfactory for a man of intelligence or breeding, but precisely what he had expected, and perfect for the average applicant. Ridiculously, he almost signed his full name at the end and had to pull himself up short at his two-word pseudonym.

  ‘Alright then, mister ‘reads-and-writes’. Follow me.’

  Leaving the rat-like clerk busying himself with his new records, the five mercenaries strode on back across the hall and out through another door.

  ‘You don’t get your first pay until the end of the month, so if there’s anything you need until then, tough shit unless you can persuade one of the others to lend you a few coins.’