Defender of Rome Read online

  Still, he’d had no choice but to wait for Julia’s return and if he’d tried to recruit some battered ex-gladiator or retired legionary from a tavern, the likelihood was that he’d only be paying for the dagger that tickled his liver or slit his throat. Left or right? He ran the physician’s directions through his head as he considered the junction of two identical passageways. It had seemed much simpler in the comfort of the villa’s atrium. ‘Just follow the old Via Subura until you reach the Via Tiburtina and carry on until you’re a hundred paces from the Esquiline Gate. He has rooms in the insula on the right. Ground floor.’ In daylight Valerius would have had to fight his way through a surging mass of people, at risk from nothing more than carelessly wielded chair poles or bony elbows, jostled and hustled, melting in the heat, but never directly threatened. Now he was trapped in a pitch dark, verminous labyrinth where every street appeared the same and the only consolation was that the hour was so late the few inhabitants he’d come across had been rolling drunk.

  He turned sharply at a rustling sound, the hand beneath his cloak reaching instinctively for his sword. The rustling stopped, to be replaced by a low whine, and he laughed at himself. Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome, the man who had held the Temple of Claudius to the last man, scared of a scavenging hound.

  Left or right?

  Right.

  He had pleaded to stay in the legions, even though he knew his injury meant he would never again fight in a battle line. No, his father had said, this is our great opportunity: the law, then the Senate; make the name Valerius ring through the marble halls of the Palatine. He’d obeyed, out of duty: the same sense of duty that had made him the soldier he had once been. And he had prospered thanks to the patronage that the Corona Aurea attracted. Every retired veteran, be he general or legionary of the third rank, wanted to be represented by Gaius Valerius Verrens. As with his battles, he won more cases than he lost, because he took a professional care in his preparations and fought hard for his clients, even when he didn’t believe a word they told him.

  The street widened and he saw a pale light ahead. Some sort of open space.

  ‘He is a medical man just arrived from the east,’ Metellus had said. ‘Some say he is a worker of wonders and some say he deals in perfumed smoke and polished mirrors. A Judaean, he works among his people, seeking no profit. He does not advertise his services. You will have to be very persuasive. What does he look like? How should I know?’

  The light came from a noisome drinking den behind an open yard with a stone fountain carved in the shape of a fish. Valerius hurried by, trying to look like just another drunk. But the eyes that watched him were the eyes of predators, not those of ordinary men.

  A man might survive in Subura without being part of a gang, paying a gang or owning a gang, but his hold on life, and his family’s, would be precarious. Red-haired Culleo, bastard son of only Jupiter knew whom, had been running with gangs for as long as he could remember. First as a lookout while others stole, then as a thief, learning to steal bread and fruit and meat from the streetside stalls while the younger boys distracted the owners. With growing strength came greater opportunity and he had become an enforcer. He had killed his first man by the time he was fifteen and cut the throat of his predecessor three years later. He favoured the knife, and he carried two: wickedly curved, long-bladed weapons that he fondly kept killing sharp and which were equally good for stabbing or slicing. Culleo was short and wide, but his build disguised his speed, which was usually enough to frighten other men into dying quietly. Unless a lesson had to be taught he preferred to attack from behind because it was quicker and simpler. In Subura, or at least in the streets around the Silver Mullet, he was the wolf and any man who didn’t belong was his prey.

  The torch Valerius carried attracted Culleo like a moth to the flame. Why would a drunk carry a torch when he could bounce home off the walls he knew as intimately as his mother’s left tit? Once they had spotted him he was theirs. A tall man, though he crouched and tried to hide it, dressed in an expensive cloak. A fool then. Any cloak waved about the Subura was asking to be stolen and a man with a cloak would have other things worth stealing, even if it was only his clothes and his shoes. There was something else, too. From a dozen paces away Culleo’s sharp eyes had noted the little details another man’s might not: the way the fool carried himself, the slight favouring of his right side, and the strong jaw and sharp planes of his face. The description could have fitted twenty other men – apart from one important detail that could easily be hidden beneath the cloak, but Culleo had sensed. Word had been passed down to him from the invisible network that all the gangs knew to obey. Even the wolf must give up a proportion of his kill to the hungry tiger. Culleo knew that if you were to survive in the Subura ‘they’ were to be answered to above all others. He smiled, revealing a carnage of rotting teeth; someone wanted this man dead and was willing to pay handsomely for it.

  He studied his victim’s speed and direction, knowing the cloaked man would increase his pace once he was past the open courtyard. Who would walk slowly through the Subura at night? ‘Iugolo? Fimus?’ He called two of his men from the tavern, one older and massive, with a single eye and a red, weeping socket, and the other wiry, deceptively boyish and, even for the Subura, remarkably dirty. ‘Take the back road by the tannery and cut him off before Tiburtina. If we’re quick we can catch him at the Alley of the Poxed Tart. Don’t move until I get there with the Greek.’ Four against one: was it enough? He could gather more men but it would take time to rouse them from their beds and sober them up. By then the target might be gone. It was enough. The mark was a fool. A sheep to be shorn. No, he grinned to himself, a lamb to be slaughtered.

  Valerius moved fast after he passed the inn, but his eyes never stopped searching for danger. The street narrowed again and the flickering orange torchlight bounced from filth-spattered walls creating the illusion of constant movement, so his senses continually reacted to non-existent threats. A pair of almond-shaped eyes glowed eerily at him from a doorway. Strange how a rat’s eyes reflected red in the torchlight, yet the cat’s which hunted it were like luminous emeralds.

  He almost didn’t see the movement.

  It was just the merest glint of light on metal fifty paces ahead in a place and at a height where there should be none. His breathing quickened. He willed himself to be calm, sought the stillness which had always been his before battle. Let it build slowly, a heartbeat at a time; the countdown to violence. His muscles tensed and his senses sharpened. How many of them? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t run. This was their territory and they would hunt him down in seconds. But they didn’t know he’d seen them and that meant, at least for the moment, they and not he were the hunted. He maintained his pace but his fingers tightened on his sword hilt.

  When they stepped into the street he could have laughed aloud. Only two? A skinny feral child with a gap-toothed snarl, armed with what appeared to be a leatherworker’s awl, and a one-eyed giant wielding a nailed cudgel that was like a toy in his massive hands. Did they really believe he was so easy to kill? One-armed or not, he had fought Boudicca’s champions to a standstill on the field before Colonia. Had walked among the numberless dead on the bloody slope where Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain, had manufactured her destruction. He did not fear these men.

  ‘Go back to your whores or your sisters, whichever it is you bed.’ He spat the challenge, but the boy ignored the threat and capered right and left to block the street while the giant smiled and stroked his cudgel.

  The mocking smile gave Valerius his warning. The smile wasn’t aimed at him, but at someone behind him. He spun, letting the cloak billow wide to create a more awkward target, knowing the torch in his hand would attract the eyes of whoever was coming for him. Two more, less than five paces away and attacking silently at the run over the cobbles. No point in trying to hold them off. It would only give the giant time to pound him to mincemeat ready for the boy to take his eyes out with the sp
ike. It had to be quick. The attacker on the right, a swarthy dark-browed creature, had slightly outrun his companion. Valerius took advantage of the split second it gave him to dash the blazing torch into the brigand’s face and the man fell back screaming and clawing at his burned-out eyes. The momentum of the spin took him into the path of the fourth robber, a confident red-haired bruiser armed with a curving blade that slashed at the Roman’s throat. Valerius brought up his right hand to block the sweeping blow and was rewarded by a puzzled glare as the blade bit into something solid with a sharp snap. Culleo still wore the look of disbelief when the gladius in Valerius’s left hand darted from beneath the cloak. The triangular point punched into the soft flesh below his ribs before Valerius angled the blade upward into the squealing gang leader’s heart. He twisted the short sword free, feeling the familiar warm liquid rush as another man’s life poured out over his hand, and turned to face his surviving ambushers. But the boy and the one-eyed giant were not prepared to die for a cloak, not with their leader quivering in a widening pool of his own blood and the Greek mewing for his mother with a face like an underdone steak and eyes that would never see again. They backed quickly down the alley and vanished into the darkness.

  Valerius studied the remains of the torch smouldering in his right fist. It was smashed beyond use. He sheathed the gladius and, with his left hand, pulled the smoking bundle free from the carved walnut replica that had replaced the missing right. The artificial hand had been designed to carry a shield, but did the job of torchbearer just as well. It was a little singed, with a deep score across the knuckles where the red-haired bandit’s knife had struck, but it had done its job. He checked the bindings of the cowhide socket to which the hand was attached. If they loosened, the leather chafed against the flesh of his stump, but normally a little olive oil ensured it sat comfortably enough.

  He’d thought he would never fight again, but he soon realized that many men were just as capable of defending themselves with their left hand as with their right. He had toured the ludi, Rome’s gladiator schools, until he found the man he needed: Marcus, a scarred old fighter who had won his freedom by his skills in the arena. Now he trained with the gladiators most mornings and he prided himself on becoming a better swordsman with his left hand than he had ever been with his right. The first thing Marcus had taught Valerius was how the wooden hand could be used to block an opponent’s swing and expose him to a counter-thrust.

  Which way to the Via Tiburtina? He walked on without looking back. Let them rot; it was what they had planned for him. The blinded man was still pleading for his mother when someone cut his throat an hour later.

  Valerius had noticed a subtle change since he returned from Britain where, in the same instant, he had been both betrayed and saved by the woman he loved. For a time death had seemed preferable to the loss of Maeve and his hand, but as the months passed he realized that she had provided him with a precious opportunity. Before he had served with the men of the Twentieth legion, he had been young, naive and selfish. The naivety and the youth had been soldiered out of him, leaving a new Valerius, toughened both physically and mentally, the way the iron core of a sword is hardened by the combination of heat and hammer. But he had still been selfish. Only now could he see how wrong it had been to expect Maeve to leave her home, her family and her culture and follow him to Rome, where she would have been shunned as an exotic, uneducated and uncultured Celt. Gradually he had resolved to live his life differently. That was why he had finally agreed to his father’s demand that he return to the law, when he wanted nothing more than to breathe the stink of old sweat and a damp eight-man tent, eat cold oatmeal for breakfast and lead men into battle. And why, if it was offered, he would take up the quaestorship of a province: the next step on the cursus honorum and his road to the Senate.

  The road widened as he approached the Esquiline Gate. The apartment block Metellus had described could be any one of three dilapidated structures on his right and at first Valerius despaired of finding the Judaean. On closer inspection, he noticed that the ground floor of the centre insula contained a shop selling exotic eastern spices and herbs. No goods were on show at this time of the night, but on the wall below the window the trader had marked prices for his wares. Since every physician was a herbalist of some sort, Valerius could think of no better place to begin his search. A chink of light at the edge of the heavy sackcloth covering the shop doorway told him at least someone was awake, and he could make out the subdued murmur of voices.

  A natural wariness made him hesitate. The Judaeans were a haughty people, from a province that had been under imperial rule for fifty years but had achieved neither prominence nor importance. Trade with the Empire had brought Judaea prosperity and drawn thousands of its inhabitants to Rome, presumably including the man he sought. They were respected as drivers of hard bargains and despised for the barbarism of their religion, which a dozen years earlier had incited Emperor Claudius to expel every Judaean from the city. Now they were returning, but mostly kept to their own districts. It was unusual to find a Jew carrying out business in the centre of Rome.

  He approached the curtain and took a deep breath.

  III

  WHAT HE’D MISTAKEN for murmured voices turned out to be a kind of low, rhythmic chanting from the rear of the building. A single oil lamp spluttered in an alcove by the doorway, casting a dull light and emitting foul-smelling black smoke that clouded the upper part of the room. Sacks and boxes lay stacked against the walls and a table with a set of brass scales stood in the centre of the floor beside a chest covered by a white cloth. This building was one of the older insulae in Rome, constructed perhaps fifty years earlier; solid at least, unlike the shoddy thin-walled skeletons of more recent times, but showing its age where the plaster had dropped from the lime-washed walls. In the far corner to his left was another door, and it was from this that the chanting emerged, but not, he thought, directly. Again he hesitated, reluctant to interrupt a family gathering or religious ceremony, however barbarous. But his sister’s life was at stake.

  ‘Hello.’ The word echoed from the stark walls.

  Silence. A sudden, total silence that almost made him wonder if the chanting had only existed in his mind.

  ‘Hello,’ he shouted a second time, feeling foolish now and sorely tempted to just turn and go.

  After a moment, the silence was replaced by an odd rumbling sound, like muted faraway thunder, and a small head crowned by a shock of jet curls appeared round the corner of the doorway. Two walnut eyes studied him with frank curiosity.

  ‘Greetings to you.’ The tawny girl looked about six, and he gave her his most reassuring smile. ‘I am looking for the physician who lives in your building.’

  Without a word she took his hand and led him through the inner doorway into a narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor they turned into a poorly lit room where a thin, grey-bearded man sat hunched over a wooden bench crushing herbs in a crude mortar, each circle of the heavy stone pestle accompanied by the rumble Valerius had heard earlier. The man looked up and nodded and the girl hurried out.

  They studied each other for a long moment, the way men do on meeting for the first time, the older man seeking any sign of threat or danger and Valerius trying to reconcile the shrunken figure at the table with the conflicting stories Metellus had gabbled.

  He guessed the Judaean’s age at between fifty-five and sixty. The heavy, tight-curled beard would be with him until he died, perhaps a little whiter. Deep lines that might have been carved by a knife point etched hollow cheeks and a high forehead, providing a permanent reminder of a life of toil, trial and, Valerius suspected, physical suffering. The folds of a thick eastern coat engulfed his thin frame, yet beneath the robe lay a suggestion of power conserved for more important days. The eyes, solemn and steady and the colour of damp ashes, had an ageless quality, and their depths contained conflicting messages: wariness, which was only sensible in the circumstances; understanding, but of what? Humour was th
ere, held in reserve for a more appropriate moment, and knowledge for the time it was needed. But a single quality stood out above all. Certainty. This man knew precisely who and what he was.

  ‘Salve. You are welcome to my home.’ The greeting was formal and the curious lisping accent turned the v into a w.

  Valerius bowed. ‘Gaius Valerius Verrens, at your service. I apologize for the late hour and the lack of an appointment, but I have come on a matter of urgency.’

  The beard twitched, but Valerius couldn’t be certain whether it was in irritation or acknowledgement. ‘May I offer you wine?’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ the Roman said, not impolitely, but aware that he was unlikely to enjoy anything served in this household. He glanced at his surroundings. Small cloth sacks, each with its clear label, were stacked in heaps along the rear wall. Shelves filled with stoppered jars. Odd-shaped objects whose origin he didn’t like to speculate. The scent of herbs and spices filled his nostrils, but there was something else too, a heaviness in the atmosphere that told him other people had shared this room only a few moments earlier. He wondered again about the chanting, and noted that the Judaean had made no attempt to introduce himself. The grey eyes studied him and he found himself resenting the frank, penetrating gaze. ‘My sister …’ he blurted.

  ‘Is sick.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you come to me for help … at this hour? Are all your Roman physicians asleep?’ The man smiled gently to take the sting from his words.

  ‘As I say, it is urgent. Olivia …’

  ‘I am sorry.’ The Judaean shook his head. ‘I regret I cannot help you. It is forbidden. I may only work within my own community. You understand? With my own people.’