Praetorian: The Great Game Page 37

Rufinus could almost hear the panicked twang in her voice now and his smile returned.

  ‘Anyway, I have to get on. See you later’

  The sound of Senova’s sandals slapping on the wood echoed in the vaulted chamber and then muted slightly on the balcony as she made for the stairs and descended them quickly.

  Rufinus stood as still as he could, breath held as he listened intently for activity in the next chamber. There were a couple of shuffles, but no sounds that Rufinus would associate with a person digging deep into secret places to retrieve a hidden object. Then, a moment later, he heard the girl pass to the chamber’s entrance and the sound of a blanket being shifted. The occupant of the next room paused and Rufinus realised that he could still hear Senova as she neared the base of the staircase.

  As that sound turned into a distant echo in the tunnel that ran along the length of the chambers toward the main villa entrance, finally the girl in the next room moved, presumably having waited long enough for Senova to leave.

  Rufinus continued to listen intently as the girl’s footsteps rattled out across the wooden platform and began the tell-tale thud of descent toward the ground.

  Waiting until he heard the sound change indicating that she had reached the first landing, Rufinus ducked back through the blanket and out onto the platform. Just to be sure, he crossed lightly to the edge and took a quick look over, at the staircase below and off to his left. His boxing history had provided him with more talents than simply beating a man insensible: despite his tendency to embarrassing accidents, Rufinus was extremely light on his feet when he needed to be, dancing quietly along in soft leather boots.

  His gaze shifted back and forth among the supports and flights of stairs until it fell on his quarry. There she was. Galla, the slave girl with bronze skin, almond eyes and wavy black hair, hurried down the staircase, clutching her garments tight around her as she descended. He couldn’t say why it was that he knew she was the culprit, beyond the fact that she’d clearly been nervous for some months and was keeping secrets from even her closest friend. But he’d somehow known it was her as soon as the theft had been announced.

  Lightly and carefully he descended the stairs, pausing occasionally to glance ahead and judge how far away she was. As Galla alighted on the ground and disappeared into the tunnel, Rufinus picked up his pace and started to gain on his quarry.

  A few moments later he was in the tunnel. Pausing again, he could hear a number of footsteps echoing through the subterranean corridor and delivered an inward curse. It would be impossible to follow the sound of her and he would hardly see her from here. There was nothing for it now but to hope that she intended to exit the tunnel at the far end, by the common exit.

  Picking up his pace, he turned the corner and rushed along the corridor, ignoring and ignored by the other servants and slaves going about their business in the dim interior. Of Galla there was no sign, and he began to curse himself for not staying closer, however risky it might be. Ignoring the faces that turned to look at him, he started to run, pounding along the corridor with light, slapping footsteps.

  At the far end, he ducked quickly into the staircase and hurried up to the level of the villa’s main structures. At the top, he paused for breath and glanced left and right urgently, trying to spot his prey. A number of figures moved around the garden between here and Pompeianus’ palace, and he almost missed her. It was only the slight movement in the corner of his right eye that drew his gaze as Galla, plain brown stola pulled tight around her, as she veered off from the residential sectors of the villa and toward the golden house and the amphitheatre that languished on the slope below. Rufinus knew the area well from his time patrolling the grounds, but in all that time he’d rarely seen servants there.

  Frowning as he moved, he followed the slave girl along the line of the palace’s outer wall, skirting the golden house and disappearing through a small gate in the wall that lined the perimeter of the inhabited sections of the complex. A short set of steps led down to the dilapidated huntsman’s house, where the half dozen hunt masters who looked after Hadrianus’ hounds and hawks had resided. No upkeep had been carried out on the building in decades and already ivy was attacking the outer walls.

  On she went, around the amphitheatre and to the corner of the huge revetment that supported the terrace of the palace gardens. Here were half a dozen small sheds and stores that the gardeners used, the only place out here where servants ever went. Rufinus shook his head again. Those sheds were in daily use, or every other day at least. She couldn’t hide anything safely in there. And yet as he watched, Galla reached up and tied her hair at the nape of her neck, flexed her fingers and disappeared inside the nearest shed.

  Confused, Rufinus moved to a large, gnarled olive tree growing on the slope nearby and ducked behind the bole, eyes locked on the shed. A moment later Galla emerged, though not, as Rufinus had expected, tucking away a small package and scurrying back. Instead, she appeared through the door with an armful of seasoned logs, struggling to keep the burden together.

  Rufinus’ frown deepened again. What in Hades was she up to?

  He paused at the tree until the girl was some distance away, though now she moved slowly, balancing the wood. Rufinus squinted ahead and could just see one of Phaestor’s other men on duty, rounding the far end of the revetment. Good. He’d assumed this place was still regularly patrolled.

  And in that realisation, as Galla strolled past the guard with an armful of logs, Rufinus understood what she was doing. She needed an excuse and she would be going with the logs to…

  Rufinus grinned. His second realisation came hot on the heels of the first and smacked him between the eyes. He now had a good idea how she had hidden the brooch. His smile widened.

  The guard nodded to Galla in passing and continued on towards, and then past, the tree behind which Rufinus lurked. Only a little further along, the girl struggled to change her grip on the logs she carried before turning and disappearing from sight along a tunnel.

  The heating system!

  Rufinus took one more quick look at the former gladiator who had walked past him less than ten paces away, entirely unaware of his presence. As soon as the gladiator had moved on sufficiently, Rufinus ran from his cover and along the side of the great supporting wall until he reached the nondescript entrance to the heating system. The heavy door stood open and unlocked. It would not have been hard for Galla to acquire a key to this service area.

  The tunnel led some twenty paces into the darkness and to the furnace. Here, logs were burned almost continuously to provide the flow of hot air that passed beneath the floors of the some of the residential areas. An oil lamp cast a faint glow at the far end of the corridor, and the light bobbed and then vanished.

  Rufinus frowned and moved as fast as he dared toward the last known position of that light, hands stretched out forward and to the sides to prevent stumbling straight into the rock wall. The light from behind cast a faint glow but it wasn’t enough to see anything other than the faintest changes in shade. His hands brushed the wall to his right and he felt the tell-tale shower of soot. He had reached the furnace.

  Taking a deeply unpleasant sooty breath, he leaned to one side to allow what little light shone from the tunnel entrance to illuminate the area before him. Though the light was extremely dim, given the previous total darkness it allowed him to see the two channels before him. The heated current of air from the furnace would be sucked along those tunnels to warm floors. They were barely wide enough for a human to move through, but just wide enough, for the rare occasions when they required maintenance, when thin slave boys would be sent down there.

  Not muscly ex-boxer guards.

  He ducked low and looked back and forth between the two tunnels. Sure enough, a distant faint orange glow identified the route Galla had taken. For a moment, he wondered whether he could safely wait here for her to reappear with the stolen goods, but quickly dismissed the idea. What if this tunnel connected to another exit? He wou
ld lose her then, for sure.

  With a quiet sigh of dismay, Rufinus dropped to his haunches and began to move into the narrow, claustrophobic tunnel. He was immediately both grateful and sorry that he was in a simple tunic without his mail shirt. The armour would have made noise that he could certainly do without, but it would also have protected his skin.

  As he moved along the passage, his shoulders scraped unpleasantly on the sooty wall and he felt the cramps beginning in his leg muscles as he shuffled in a permanent crouch.

  It seemed like half a year of crawling through darkness and scratching rock, but finally, he saw the glow brighten. As he neared the end of the passage where it opened out to a chamber, he could see the orange flicker of the oil lamp off to the left of the tunnel entrance. The dancing light reflected off the dozens of brick columns supporting the floor above and which formed the hypocaust chamber where the hot air warmed the tiles of the room that stood atop them.

  Instinct saved him.

  As he reached the entrance and poked his head out into the chamber to look at the lamp, lying untended on the floor, he was already continuing forward into a roll as the log swung at where his head would have been. Instinct born of years in the ring took over. Galla’s swing had put her off balance as her target disappeared in a tight roll beneath the blow. Still soundlessly teetering, she tried to bring herself back round, but Rufinus was already up and facing her as she turned. Her eyes widened and the last thing she would remember would be the sight of Rufinus’ scuffed knuckles thundering towards the bridge of her nose.

  The young guard rose to a crouch: all the low hypocaust chamber would allow. Galla crumpled to the floor with a thud that raised soot and dust which billowed in clouds, obscuring the light cast by the lamp.

  He peered down at her, shaking his head. He had been struggling, somewhere deep down, with the knowledge that turning her in would effectively condemn her to death, and possibly torture first. But the catalogue of her sins was building up. She had thieved from Lucilla, apparently on more than one occasion. She was planning on running away, becoming a fugitivus, with an accomplice from the villa. And now she had tried to smash his head in with a seasoned length of ash, his sympathy was waning with every breath.

  Ignoring her, sure that she would be out for at least an hour, with at least a broken nose, if not a broken cheek bone, he turned instead to examining the room they were in. The columns of neatly cemented bricks stood in ordered rows, fifteen deep and more than twenty long. The room above must be sizeable, though here, below the floor, Rufinus could move only with a strange crab-like crouched shuffle, almost double at the waist.

  There were small niches where workmen could rest lamps or tools while carrying out maintenance, and his eyes were drawn almost immediately to the soot-stained draw-string bag that rested on one of them.

  Shuffling across the chamber, he retrieved the bag and returned to the brighter glow of the oil lamp, still alone and guttering on the dusty floor. Carefully, he opened the drawstring and tipped the container so that the flickering orange glow danced upon the glittering, shining metalwork and precious stones within.

  Rufinus drew in a deep breath and his eyes widened. The brooch was there at the top of the bag and unmistakable, partly due to its quality and partly the distinctive black and white cameo of Venus. But it was far from the only expensive item in the bag. There were perhaps eight or nine pieces in there, presumably stolen over the year that Galla had served at the villa With another deep breath, he drew the string closed again. A quick glance at the body led him to wonder how he would get the slave girl back out through the narrow passage. He would have to drag her back along the passage by the arms. Unceremonious and quite painful for her, but that would be the least of her worries in the coming days.

  He suddenly became aware that voices were echoing through the hollow box-flue tiles around him and cocked his head to one side.

  Lucilla’s voice!

  The realisation surprised him. Where was he?

  A second voice cut in and Rufinus recognised the faintly effeminate, lisping tone of the chamberlain, Menander.

  ‘Perhaps you should select another brooch for the occasion?’

  ‘No, Menander, it has to be the Livia brooch. Symbols are important to the people. I will wear the Livia brooch and the coronet and sceptre that Verus accepted when he was raised to rule with my father. I will be the living embodiment of Roma. The brooch must be found. I will skin every living thing in the villa’s grounds if I have to.’

  Rufinus, his breath held, listened with widening eyes. He was beneath the triclinium: the dining room where Lucilla’s secret gatherings were held! All this time at the villa trying to get closer and closer to the centre of power, and even the lowliest slave feeding the furnace or repairing the brick stacks had access to what he’d sought so desperately.

  He almost laughed at the simplicity of it as he tied the bag of stolen jewellery to his belt. The conversation above seemed to have ended. He heard Menander making conciliatory and supportive noises that faded as the two of them moved away and out into a corridor.

  Rufinus’ face split into a wide grin as he crossed the room and grasped Galla’s wrists. Unable to stop smiling, he began to drag her along the passage and back out into the damp winter air.

  The world was about to become very unpleasant for the thief and her accomplice, but all thoughts of the grisly fate that awaited them could not shift the grin from his face.

  Next time those secretive guests came for their private, conspiratorial meeting, Rufinus would learn everything he needed to know.

  The great game played on, and he was finally gaining the upper hand.

  PART FIVE: ENDGAME

  XXIII – Secrets revealed

  RUFINUS looked down at the stacked logs, trying not to think about where he’d gathered them, collecting dead wood around the clearing where the decaying bodies of Galla and her accomplice hung rotting on their crosses. He swallowed noisily at the memory. The bone-chilling wind whistled along the tunnel behind him, battering his back and shoulders, making the flame of the small oil lamp gutter in its niche.

  The flickering light had begun to play its part when Rufinus threw the first bucket of soil onto the inferno that heated the triclinium, and now he struggled to break the wax seal on the jar of petroleum oil pilfered from the stores. With a satisfying noise, the seal gave way and he tipped the contents over three of the logs. Job complete, he turned his attention to the recently extinguished furnace fire and blackened tunnel beyond.

  It was all a matter of timing. He had experimented with the heating system for the floor of the Greek library over the past two weeks, though that room was considerably smaller. Tentative measurements made it roughly half the size of the dining room above the corridor down which he now peered. Dumping a bucket of water on the library furnace had been his first mistake. The gust of roiling black smoke had sent him choking back out of the furnace room, and he‘d watched with dismay as trails of black rose into the sky from the outlets on the roof. When he’d worked out that a bucket of the local sandy soil could extinguish the fire quickly without the billowing smoke, his experiments had begun in earnest.

  Half a dozen times he extinguished the fire and paced the library floor in bare feet, testing the heat. Though the results varied a little depending on the room’s ambient temperature and prevailing weather conditions, it generally took almost half an hour for the floor to become noticeably cooler, rising if the room had been preheated for a length of time.

  Half an hour was all he could rely on. Likely the occupants of the imperial triclinium would have footwear and therefore would be slow to note a difference in the heat but, again, he could hardly rely on that.

  Given the relative difference in the area of the two rooms, he’d estimated that a quarter of an hour was the longest the fire could remain out beneath the triclinium before the occupants began to notice the falling temperature. Perhaps less than quarter of an hour, to err on the si
de of caution.

  Then had begun the second phase of the experiment: how fast could the heat begin to flow once he was done. Wood took too long to fire, as he’d clearly expected, no matter how dry and seasoned it was. Adding a wadding of straw sped up the process, but it was only when he accidentally spilled oil from his lamp onto the pile that he realised petroleum was the solution to a speedy conflagration.

  Finally he was satisfied. As long as the materials were ready in advance, he could extinguish the flames, wait two hundred heartbeats for the tunnels to clear of choking, toxic fumes, then hurry down the narrow passage to the chamber. He would then have to count five hundred beats, after which he’d have to rush back to the furnace and ignite the fresh pile of logs, shoving them into place with the long, iron tool. Seven hundred beats in total between extinguishing and the lighting the next pile, allowing a further two hundred beats for the heat to reach the hypocaust.

  Less than quarter of an hour, with no room for mistakes.

  When these gatherings took place, the visitors were invariably locked in the triclinium for the evening, receiving an evening meal and constant flow of wine and snacks, retiring to their own rooms late. Five hundred heartbeats listening out of an entire evening of potentially useful conversation! Of course, if the plot was not to take place for some time, there may be other opportunities to repeat, and even refine, this eavesdropping process.

  But still: five hundred beats of a whole evening.

  The second task was to work out the timing for the evening in general. Given an entire night of conspiring, when would be the best time to listen in? He’d thought long and hard, and begun to observe conversational habits in the villa for several days, from nobles to slaves, from angry rants to loving trysts. And over those days, a pattern had emerged that seemed to be a general trend in the conversational process; a pattern that might give him the edge he needed.

  People would meet and exchange brief pleasantries to begin with. Sometimes the encounter would end with this meaningless chatter. But in proper conversations, this would be followed by a second exchange, a little more in-depth – perhaps enquiring after a third party or querying the subject’s plans.