Hammer of Rome Read online

  ‘It will come,’ Gwlym assured him. ‘The gods ask only that you take it.’

  Cathal turned away, sickened by the contact with this sightless ancient, more dead than alive, who flitted between the dream world inside his head and the black chasm of his reality. Why was he so reluctant to rid himself of the druid? Because Gwlym understood the Romans in a way it would take Cathal decades to equal. And sometimes he spoke the words even Cathal didn’t have the courage to utter.

  Of more import was the return of the messenger he had sent to the Votadini, or more accurately the return of his head, contemptuously thrown at the feet of one of Cathal’s patrols. There would be no alliance there. The same patrol had reported a growing Votadini presence in the hills of the disputed frontier country. Bands of horsemen and spearmen who hovered like buzzards over a rotting carcass, waiting to loot the farms of whatever their former occupants had been unable to carry.

  ‘We have to move faster,’ he urged a sweating Colm, who was supervising the crossing.

  ‘We can only go as fast as the slowest cart, unless you want to leave them behind,’ the older man spat. He hadn’t slept in three nights and was as irritable as a cornered bear. ‘They’re tired, Cathal, and bewildered. They’ve lost everything and they don’t understand why.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time on sympathy,’ Cathal said. ‘If they stay, the Romans will enslave them, if the Votadini leave them alive that long. They must be beyond the reach of either by daybreak tomorrow. How many more to cross?’

  Colm shrugged. How could a man tell when there were so many squealing children and mewling babes? Easier to keep track of a herd of sheep. ‘Five hundred. Maybe more.’

  ‘Then we don’t have time to cross them here. Guide them up the east bank and then take them through the hills. Cross at the meeting of the waters and try to get them as far as Eltref by nightfall.’ It was a longer route, and a more arduous one, but it would keep them away from the Roman spears. ‘I’ll take men to defend the passes and meet you there when I can.’

  Colm muttered his agreement. Cathal left him and walked up the slope from the river towards the roundhouse complex that was his seat of power in the summer months.

  And the confrontation he’d delayed far too long.

  Cathal’s residence was one of seven buildings in the walled enclosure, including his treasure house, long since emptied of gold and silver to keep the tribe’s wealth from Roman hands. His storehouses had also been largely cleared apart from the supplies needed to see them through to the refuge. The horses he’d stolen from the Romans had preceded the gold west, and would be dispersed through the hills for the winter. Too late in the season to breed them. That could wait till next spring. If there was a next spring.

  Wood smoke filtered through the conical thatch of the largest house and he took a deep breath as he pulled back the heavy cloth curtain and entered. Drystone walls windproofed with clay stood to just above head height and provided support for the timbers that carried the roof frame. A ring of stout wooden posts held the planked floor of the living quarters above. In most Selgovae houses the ground level would contain pens for the owner’s hardy cattle and scrawny brown sheep, but Cathal used the area to hold audiences and dispense justice from the wooden throne on a raised dais to his left. The scent of some mouth-watering stew drifted on the air and reminded him he hadn’t eaten for hours. Hare if his nose didn’t betray him. Young Dugald must have had the gods’ own luck when he’d taken the dogs out on the hill earlier. A ladder leaned against the opening into the upper floor and he ran up it with surprising ease for such a large man.

  Olwyn crouched over a cooking pot suspended above the fire, which glowed at the centre of a large flat stone from the river. ‘Just in time,’ she smiled, swatting a spark that escaped to settle on the rushes spread across the wooden floor. ‘Dugald, fetch your father’s bowl.’

  The boy darted for a shelf on the far wall. He seemed to do everything at the run: a dark-haired blur of energy. No sign yet at ten he would ever attain his father’s great build, but then his grandfather had been of middling height, and it wasn’t just strength and skill with arms that made a king.

  ‘A fine hare off the far meadow, Father.’ Dugald grinned. ‘He darted and jinked but Guidri had him in a trice.’ Guidri was the boy’s sight hound, a sleek, tawny mongrel with long legs, a sharp face that tapered to a pointed muzzle, and a vicious temperament. The dog looked up from its place beneath Dugald’s sleeping pallet, fixed Cathal with a malicious glare and bared his teeth with a low growl.

  Cathal grunted an acknowledgement as he took his seat on his wooden stool. Too much affection made a boy soft. No one was fooled, least of all Olwyn. She took the bowl and filled it with shreds of meat from the thin stew before placing it in his hands with a loaf of flat bread. Olwyn. Blue eyes that sparkled like the waters of the Thuaidh on a summer’s day, hair the colour of ripening barley, and cheeks pink as an orchard’s bounty. Beneath the homespun shift a slim body that still stirred him after a dozen years. A body that had borne her three children. The last had nearly killed her and the bairn survived but a day. A son. And a king could not have too many sons. Strong inside as any man, sometimes in the night the memory of that bairn robbed her of all joy and she would weep, not for the loss of it, but for failing him. He reached out and touched her hand.

  Olwyn. Wife. Companion. Confessor. Adviser. A Brigante princess given in marriage to cement the alliance with the Selgovae. Their initial wariness had quickly been replaced by curiosity, curiosity by lust, and, very soon after, lust by love. Without her he would be as helpless as he would be without the great sword that hung in its scabbard from the wooden frame on the far side of the room.

  ‘Have you brought me anything, Father?’ A tousle-haired miniature of Olwyn poked her head round the partition that separated the room from the adult sleeping quarters. Berta, the second love of his life. Six years old and already a rare beauty.

  Cathal smiled and reached into a pouch at his belt. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Another jewel for your collection.’ He produced a stone he’d picked up earlier by the river. ‘Look, you can see the gold and silver running through it.’

  The girl ran to her father and studied the gift critically before skipping back through the partition.

  Olwyn gave him a searching look that had nothing to do with the stone. ‘You did not come here because of the smell of my cooking.’

  Cathal glanced at Dugald, intently polishing the blade of a hunting knife. They’d agreed not to talk of the Romans in front of the children, but the boy was intelligent enough to understand what was going on around him.

  ‘It is time for us … for you … to go.’

  ‘Go where?’ the shrill voice piped up.

  The two adults exchanged a glance. ‘It will be winter soon,’ Cathal said. ‘We must go somewhere more sheltered where there is ample game.’

  ‘Into the hills?’

  ‘I told you,’ Olwyn whispered. ‘I won’t go without you.’

  ‘We’ve already delayed too long.’ Cathal kept his voice equally low. ‘They will be here tomorrow or the day after. You must be beyond the meeting of the waters by then.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Their patrols are already probing west. That is where I am needed most.’

  ‘Your family needs you most,’ his wife hissed, but there was no anger in it. ‘You will come? You promise?’

  ‘I promise. Rodri and his band are already preparing a winter camp in the sheltered valley at Eltref, near the big loch. They won’t come there, and if they do all the better. We will have plenty of warning and I can destroy them in the mountains. When can you be ready?’

  ‘Let me gather a few things and we are ready now. I’ve had the wagons packed for a week.’

  It was typical of her. Stubborn to the last, but prepared for any situation. ‘You’ll take the high road over the hills. It’s closer to the line of the Roman advance, but faster going, and they haven’t penetrated
that far yet.’

  ‘And we’ll meet at Eltref?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well.’ She whirled away, bustling with energy. ‘Berta, collect the things I told you to gather. You too, Dugald. We’re going on an adventure.’

  Cathal rose and took her by the shoulder. There were words that should be said, but somehow they stuck in his throat.

  She met his gaze. ‘I know,’ she whispered.

  XX

  Rome

  The tiredness came in waves like the knife-wielding Judaean sicarii warriors who haunted his dreams, a heavy, debilitating exhaustion that robbed him of the strength and will that made him the man he was: the emperor he wished to be. Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus felt old. He forced himself up, using his body slave for support and pinning the man with a savage glare that spelled out what would happen to him if he ever dared mention the lapse. Others bathed, dried, oiled, and dressed him in Imperial purple. Still another crimped his dark hair and wove an olive wreath worked in gold into its tresses. Food was brought, and though he could barely stomach the thought of it, he forced down what he could after the taster had done his work. He called on his father to give him the strength to carry out his duties on this day of all days.

  Perhaps it was the strain of the office? His father had aged visibly in the last few years of his reign. But his father had been seventy and Titus was in the prime of his life at the age of forty-one. He knew he worked excessively hard to carry on the old man’s work and the culture of effort and responsibility he had instilled in his sons. It had been Titus’s good fortune that as well as the position, he inherited the support of the army, which respected him for his victories as a general, the Senate, who would back him as long as he was strong, and the people, who loved him for being his father’s son.

  A slave handed him a cup of wine and for a moment he felt invigorated. It would hardly be surprising if the great cataclysm which had devastated the Bay of Neapolis had drained him in the same way as it had drained Rome’s coffers. He had walked the evil-smelling pumice fields while the ash that had buried city, town, village, hamlet, villa and farmstead alike still drifted like filthy snow from a sky the colour of old lead. Countless thousands of dead lay beneath the all-enveloping carpet, so deep that not even the most devoted loved one would ever find them. Rich or poor, the volcano had not differentiated; they all died the same horrifying death. It had cost him friends and advisers, men like the heroic Gaius Plinius Secundus, the most intelligent man he had ever known, who had been killed in a forlorn attempt to save his friends.

  Yet the dead, however exalted, were only a temporary burden. It was finding a way to feed and house the starving, homeless living that had taxed Titus, his officials, and the Empire’s resources. There weren’t enough craftsmen in all of Italia to replace the buildings that had been lost. He’d been forced to strip the Empire’s fragile frontiers of legionary engineers and the army’s experts in construction of every kind. Housing had been the first priority; temples and monuments could come later. Next came roads to carry the countless sacks of grain, olive oil and dried meat from Africa, Hispania and Aegyptus. Then docks to speed up the distribution of timber, lead, brick and roof tiles and all the other supplies needed to build rudimentary housing, but especially food and water for people stranded and on the brink of starvation. Midway through the reconstruction of Neapolis he had been forced to abandon his supervision of the project to deal with the aftermath of a fire that devastated four districts of central Rome. Bad enough to have such destruction at the beginning of his reign, but the blaze had the mob muttering doubts about whether he had offended the gods in some way.

  A shuffling outside the doorway. ‘Everything is ready, Caesar.’

  Thank Jupiter, at last. He picked up the skirts of his toga and strode out into the corridor where they were waiting. A half turn to inspect the head of the long procession that would accompany him and a rustle as they bowed their heads. Some of them would be honouring the title, some the man, but he would not let that concern him today. This was his father’s day. Domitian, his brother and fellow consul, stood at their head, accompanied, somewhat unusually, by his wife Domitia. Titus noted a hint of a smile on her lips as she raised her head; a look of support. Behind them the senior members of the Senate, aged dotards, mingled with Titus’s amici, the men he could trust beyond measure and beyond politics. Glabrio, the redoubtable Clemens, his cousin Flavius Sabinus. More familiar faces, but ones that brought a flaring of the Imperial nostrils. Lucanus, Tullius and Rutillius Gallicus, whom he suspected of sedition he could not prove, too powerful to snub, who must be kept close.

  ‘Very well.’ He turned back to the master of ceremonies. ‘We will continue.’

  Slaves ran ahead sprinkling the marble floor with flower petals and scented water, but careful to keep them from his path lest he should slip. Two more waited by the doorway, flanked by two of his personal guard. As he reached it the soldiers saluted and the slaves swung open the double doors. A glare of direct sunlight made him blink and he was met by a wall of sound.

  He’d refused the temporary cryptoporticus tunnel his advisers had wanted to construct to keep him apart from the mob and ensure his security. Twelve lictors were gathered in ceremonial formation with the bunched birch rods of the fasces that proclaimed the Emperor’s imperium and control over life and death. Beyond them, he could see directly across the crowds and the open space to the wonder of the world his father had planned as his great memorial. Standing hundreds of feet high, it was the most magnificent arena the world had ever seen and the greatest feat of architecture. The outer wall alone consisted of three and a half million cubic feet of glistening travertine stone, held in place by three hundred tons of iron clamps. It rose, arcade upon arcade, each pierced by arched windows divided by statues of emperors, gods and generals. Every detail had been reflected upon and agreed by Vespasian or Titus, every bust, every column, every door and every window, an endeavour which had lasted ten long years. If anything would secure his father’s divinity for a thousand generations it was the amphitheatre which would bear his name.

  He must have halted, because Domitia Longina appeared at his side. ‘Caesar? Are you well? You look pale.’

  ‘It is all right, my dear.’ Titus managed a smile as he resumed a steady pace. Members of his personal guard took step beside him, swords drawn and eyes beneath helmet rims seeking out any potential threat. Titus rested Domitia’s arm on his, ignoring the tsk of disapproval from behind. ‘I am merely overwhelmed by the magnificence of what we have created.’

  ‘I fear it is more the matter of the hundred days that follow which overwhelms you, Titus.’ She used his given name without fear of the consequences and he warmed to her still more. Small, barely reaching to his shoulder, she had a confidence, a presence, that made her seem much taller. Walnut hair, flecked with almost imperceptible strands of grey, framed high cheekbones, and dark eyes that never quite betrayed what she was thinking. Cool and poised, very different from the half-dead shipwreck survivor he had first encountered on a sun-scorched Aegyptian beach a decade and a half earlier. One might even say he’d saved her life. At the time she’d been under the protection of his friend Gaius Valerius Verrens. Titus sensed there was more to their relationship than protection, but that was none of his affair. Domitia Longina retained a beauty that still turned men’s heads, much to the fury of her husband, but for reasons he had never fathomed, and that slightly disturbed him, Titus had always taken a more fatherly than carnal interest in his brother’s wife.

  ‘Perceptive as ever, my dear.’ He turned his smile on the cheering crowds behind the protective lines of Praetorian guards. ‘How could any man stand a hundred days sitting amongst the least cultured people in Rome, watching men slaughter each other, bored witless by leaping athletes and tumbling acrobats, and seeing so many wild beasts devouring and being devoured that one blends into the next. All this while one’s Imperial backside turns numb on a block of c
old Apuan marble?’

  ‘You are right.’ Domitia waved artlessly to the cheering bystanders and the acclamation grew to a roar. ‘Caesar should not have to endure it. Your father would not have done. He would have shared the responsibility with you, taking perhaps one day in seven. Two at the most. As you must share it with my husband. He is, after all, also the son of Divine Caesar.’ She glanced back at Domitian, three paces behind, his suspicious eyes never leaving them. ‘He adores the games and the adulation of the crowd. You would earn his eternal gratitude.’

  What was going on here? His smile remained fixed, but Titus’s mind puzzled over Domitia’s purpose in volunteering her husband’s services. Was she trying to manoeuvre some advantage Titus couldn’t discern? Did his cunning brother have some ploy in mind to gain greater public approval during the celebrations? Then some barrier dropped in her eyes to reveal a certain gleam … and he understood. Domitian did not love the games any more than he did, and would find the ordeal just as grim. Titus would appear on the days of the most important ceremonies and allow his brother to officiate on those of lesser significance. No advantage for you, little brother, just frustration. And Domitia? Domitia, who Titus had always suspected loathed her husband, would win seventy days of freedom from Domitian’s unpredictable and, the Emperor suspected, threatening presence. It was exquisitely done. On the one hand begging an honour for her husband that could not lightly be turned down by either party. Two would profit, the other could only fume impotently at his fate. Domitian would never discover the true motive behind his wife’s advances on his behalf, and even if he did suspect, what could he do?

  He felt much better now, his mood lightened and the exhaustion only a memory. ‘Come, brother.’ He turned to wave Domitian forward. ‘Join us. I have decided it is only right that you should share the honour of officiating over the opening ceremonies. In fact you should reap the greater part of it.’