The Great Game (24 page)

PART THREE: VILLA HADRIANA

XII – Descent into intrigue

‘SHOW me your teeth.’ Rufinus blinked. He’d heard such requests at the slave market, of course. It was a standard check for the health of potential purchases and allowed a buyer the opportunity to gauge the level of acquiescence and servitude he could expect. A captive who’d barely been broken would resist or grind his teeth: all things to watch for in matters of long term suitability.

But he wasn’t a slave. He was a mercenary. One of four lined up against the wall where the copy of the acta diurna of Rome was displayed, giving the small portion of the literate public the opportunity to keep abreast of matters of public record in the capital. He was a mercenary: a citizen and a free man and being treated like human cattle.

He opened his mouth to the man’s probing fingers and gave serious consideration to biting them off. The fingers tasted of sour wine, which came as no surprise, given his breath.

The man in the green tunic turned to look at the three men behind him. The one who was in charge looked to the men at his shoulders and, as they nodded, he joined them.

‘You’ll do.’

Rufinus glanced over the man’s shoulder at his three companions. The old goat who had checked his teeth was clearly either a slave himself or a recent freedman, some sort of senior servant. The other three were equally obviously hired swords.

The one nominally in command, in the centre, had the swarthy look of a man of Bithynia or Pontus or some such eastern nation. He had, against the odds, an engaging smile and a pleasant manner, his voice friendly and welcoming. Rufinus was not fooled for a moment. There was a hint of steel in those deep brown eyes and the short beard and equally cropped hair barely covered a criss-crossed network of old scars. His arm had a patch of pink replacement skin in the position one would expect a gladiator’s mark, though whether a rare recipient of his freedom or an unrecovered escapee remained to be seen.

The ’thing’ at his left was pale enough as to almost appear green when he stood in the shade of the nearby stall. He stood a head taller than the tallest man Rufinus had ever seen, long, braided black locks hanging down one side of his head, the other side brutally shaved and scarred. His muscles were the size of small dogs and appeared to live an independent life, moving about their own business beneath his thick, scarred skin. The few times he’d opened his mouth, Rufinus had goggled at the needle teeth, filed down to jagged points. Unlike the leader, who bore a long blade slung on his back, this brute had what appeared to be two hunter’s skinning knives on his belt. The sight of him made Rufinus’ blood run cold, not least because the sight of the hunting gear brought sudden, unwelcome memories of Lucius on that last morning of his life.

But despite the naked brutality of the ‘thing’ and the snake-like charm of the leader, it was the third figure that, if pushed, Rufinus would say was the one to watch. He’d met them all in the ring from time to time. The brute was usually the easiest for all his size. Huge and strong was no excuse for slow and stupid. The snake was alright as long as you were always alert and watched every move, prepared for the unexpected. There were other types he could easily categorise too. But the rarest was the hollow man.

The third man, a Gaul, German or Briton by the look of him, was short and thin, dressed in plain grey tunic and breeches, with unremarkable short, naturally wavy hair and a beard of long stubble. An unremarkable legionary-pattern gladius was slung at his side and he stood casually. His eyes marked him, though. Rufinus had looked into them and immediately realised this third man would be deadly even unarmed. Those eyes were the eyes of the hollow man; the eyes of a man who had suffered so badly some time in his past, had lost everything in one turn of a knife. They were eyes that held no fear, no love, no warmth and no hope. A man like that would disembowel the world if it were possible.

‘Yes. You’ll do.’

‘Hold’ said ‘Hollow-Eyes’ quietly.

The others stopped in their tracks and the leader turned to look with amused interest at his friend. ‘Hollow-Eyes’ took a single step forward.

‘How did you come to leave the eagle?’

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.