On Hadrian's Secret Service Read online

  When the crowds thinned a little, and the guests had withdrawn to their own part of the couch, Falco led his wife up to greet the emperor. Seeing their approach, Hadrian’s bearded face split with a charming smile. Two men accompanied them, dressed in togas that bore the narrow purple stripe of equestrian rank, with the addition of military belts. Their haircuts were military, too. Plainclothes Praetorians, Falco told himself darkly.

  ‘Senator Falco,’ the emperor said, ‘and your lovely wife.’

  Despite herself, Sosia blushed. ‘Your villa is very… impressive, your imperial majesty,’ she simpered. ‘Most… exotic.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ he asked, delighted. Falco noted his provincial accent disapprovingly, although it was not as thick as he remembered Trajan’s had been when the latter had first become emperor. ‘I’ve had the finest craftsmen shipped in from the ends of the Empire, Egyptians and Greeks.’

  ‘No Romans?’ Falco really couldn’t help himself.

  The Emperor Hadrian favoured him with a penetrating look. ‘Of course, we have Roman workmen employed on the project,’ he said. ‘Even some Roman edifices. But Rome has an empire, as well you know, that stretches from the sands of Africa to the forests of Germany. I think it is time we Romans learnt to celebrate that.’

  ‘Or even as far as the heaths of Britain, for that matter,’ Falco suggested.

  Hadrian laughed. ‘I’m afraid Britain has produced very little in the way of impressive architecture as yet,’ he said disparagingly, ‘apart from rude avenues of stones and so forth. But of course—you’re referring to your new posting! Yes, you’ll soon be going to Britain to put down the troubles with the natives. The borders of the Empire are rather less tranquil than you’ll find things here in its indolently beating heart, it has to be said. I shall brief you about it in more detail after the banquet, but in the meantime, may the gods go with you.’

  Falco nodded and began to say something else, but before he could finish, Hadrian was already away greeting more guests. Frowning a little, the senator steered his wife back towards the feasting couch. As he did so, they passed Rufinus Crassus again, and his horse faced wife, whose name Falco could never remember—like Sosia, she was good stock, her lineage being from one of the oldest Roman families.

  ‘I see the emperor gave you his undivided attention,’ Rufinus murmured sardonically.

  Shortly afterwards, Falco and Sosia lay side by side on the feasting couch, chatting quietly amid the hubbub of the guests as they began the first course, peahens’ eggs containing garden warblers cooked in spiced egg yolk.

  ‘Considering you’re going to be dealing with the problems of one of the Empire’s worst hot spots,’ Sosia said, tugging the folds of her gown around herself crossly, ‘the emperor could have spent more time speaking to you.’

  Falco gazed at her and shook his head in wonder. It was clear that she loathed the new emperor—for his provincialism, for his Greek affectations, for everything about him. But nor could she stand the idea that Hadrian had treated them differently from the rest of the senatorial families. She really wanted to have things both ways. Typical of the woman.

  The Emperor Hadrian now lay on the couch near the dais, picking at his meal with his beautiful wife Sabina, the original owner of the villa. As far as Falco could see, the empress was a refined lady in her forties who smiled placidly at all the guests, indulged in polite conversation, and spent absolutely no time making barbed asides to her husband. Perhaps she had the good grace to save that for when they were alone.

  As the banquet continued, the sun set dramatically in the west, throwing long shadows from the pillars and statues in the colonnades outside. Slaves lit torches and lanterns and the guests continued eating in their light while two rhetoricians debated the pros and cons of Epicureanism and Stoicism to the delight of all. Falco noted with approval, as he tucked into a second course (olives flanked by a gridiron of sausages, damsons and dormice coated with poppy seeds and honey), that it was the stoic who won the contest. Stoicism might be a Greek philosophy, but at least it embodied old fashioned Roman virtues—unlike the self-indulgent maxims of Epicurus.

  Dancing girls—none of them a patch on Medea, to Falco’s mind—gyrated amidst the light of the flickering torches. While the banqueters finished off a pig stuffed with sausages and meat puddings, actors and acrobats entertained them in other parts of the Serapeum. By now the banquet was beginning to break up. Several senators had evidently drunk too much wine and were being quietly berated by their wives as their dinner table conversation grew coarse.

  Falco, of course, remained entirely on top of things. He drank his wine properly watered and kept a steady head. At his side, his wife was talking at length with the lady next to them about the latest foreign cults to gain popularity in the City, while the lady’s husband, a senator whose name Falco could not remember, looked bored and openly yawned a couple of times. As Falco lay back, silently sympathising with the man, he felt a touch on his arm. He looked up.

  Rufinus Crassus loomed over him. ‘Come with me, Falco,’ the young man urged. He had a guarded expression on his bearded face.

  ‘But the emperor…!’ Falco said. ‘It would be the worst of snubs to depart in the middle of things! And my wife will…’

  ‘It’ll not last long, man,’ the youthful senator said. ‘Tell your wife that we’re talking business. Ursus Servianus wants to speak with you.’

  Puzzled, Falco slipped away from his wife. She acknowledged him only vaguely as he patted her on the shoulder and whispered a hurried explanation. Rufinus led him out onto the portico beside the pool, now a mysterious place of darkness and flickering shadows, pleasantly quiet and cool after the bustle within the Serapeum. The gibbous moon rode high overhead accompanied by a glittering star, while a chill wind blew down the colonnade, although otherwise the night was warm. They crossed a lawn and passed under another colonnade which led to a moonlit garden of laurel trees and box hedges, quartered by gravel paths. On the far side of this, Rufinus halted.

  ‘Where is he, then?’ Falco asked. He hadn’t seen Ursus Servianus leave, but when they had departed, the banquet had rapidly been becoming an incoherent affair.

  Two slaves scurried past.

  ‘Down here,’ Rufinus said, indicating a flagstone while he stared disapprovingly at the passing slaves. ‘What we want to talk to you about is not for ears that pry or eyes that spy.’

  Falco looked stupidly down at the flagstone. What in Pluto’s name was Rufinus talking about? What could possibly be special about this flagstone, one of many in the plaza? But then the young senator leaned down quickly, slipped his hand into a groove, and hauled the flagstone upwards. There was a grinding sound of stone on stone. All of a sudden Falco realised that it was a trapdoor. Darkness within was profound, but Rufinus had brought a torch from the Serapeum and now he lifted it up to reveal a flight of steps leading into the ground.

  ‘Down there,’ Rufinus urged him.

  Falco was about to complain, but in the torch’s flickering light he noticed that Rufinus’ jovial, youthful face was set and grave. Without any further words, he followed his companion through the trapdoor and trailed the gleam of his torch down the flight of steps. A chill closed around him.

  As the descent into the cold bedrock continued, he nerved himself to speak. ‘Surely you should have a golden bough if you’re leading me into the Underworld?’ He laughed nervously and it echoed back from the rock. The tunnel was dank and he almost slipped on the steps as he addressed his companion.

  Rufinus looked back. ‘Indeed. As you might have heard, not only is the new emperor building an empire in miniature aboveground, beneath it he has made himself an underworld.’

  Falco remembered the rumours. So this was the famous Hades of the emperor, his underworld!

  ‘But what on earth for?’ he asked. It seemed a remarkable extravagance to go to merely to replicate the world of mythology. Did Hadrian have nothing better to do? He had no time to spe
ak to men who would be fighting for him on the edges of the empire, but apparently all the time in the world to dig tunnels in the rock for no very good purpose!

  Rufinus did not look back. ‘Slaves use these passages,’ he called back, his voice echoing weirdly, ‘so they can pass from one section of the villa to another without being seen. Happily, the tunnels are not locked, so we can also use them for our own purposes.’

  Falco wanted to ask him what these “purposes” might be, but he was worried that he would not like the answer. He decided to change the subject.

  ‘My wife will be concerned about me,’ he said. ‘This has been very interesting, and I’ve known a little of how Aeneas felt when he descended into Avernus. But I really think we should be getting back.’

  But then Rufinus stepped through an arch at the bottom of the steps and took the torchlight with him. Falco stood still for a second in the cold and dark, one foot raised to go down another step. The only light was that oozing dimly from ahead. He would break his neck if he tried to go back up those wet steps without light.

  Filled with trepidation, he followed the stink of burnt pitch through the arch. He stopped dead a second time.

  He had come out into a vast tunnel, freshly hewn from the bedrock, its wet floor littered with fallen chips of limestone. Rufinus stood waiting for him, glancing over his shoulder with an impatient expression on his face, holding the torch up high like a statue. The rock walls towered on all sides, and a ceiling of rock arced high overhead, while the tunnel vanished into darkness in either direction. Falco stared about him in amazement. He could never have believed that such a huge cavity of the earth lay beneath the villa’s lavish grounds. It made him shudder to think that such vast wormholes might riddle the seemingly solid rock. He strongly wanted to deny it, to give the lie to that crushing weight of rock above him.

  In that brief moment he almost believed that Hades was a real place, not just an old fable from the poets.

  ‘Where… where is Servianus?’ he nerved himself to ask at last.

  ‘This way,’ was all Rufinus would say, and with that he led Falco down the tunnel at a brisk walk.

  Groups of hurrying slaves passed them several times, glancing curiously at the two senators, but wisely not asking questions. At last Rufinus led Falco through an archway and they came out into another torch-lit chamber.

  Here Julius Ursus Servianus sat on a hard rocky seat, as calmly as if he was at his own table at home. The elderly senator had with him a jug of wine and a small pot of olives, no doubt filched from the feast above, and was casually chewing at an olive.

  ‘You’ve decided to join the party, then,’ he said gruffly, and patted the rock beside him. Falco sat down. Young Rufinus remained standing stock still in the archway, keeping an eye on the echoing passage beyond it.

  ‘Join?’ Falco said. ‘Precisely what party am I joining, by Jove?’

  ‘It was we who pulled the strings, Rufinus and I,’ Ursus Servianus told him, pouring his visitor a hospitable goblet of wine. ‘We got you your new posting because we thought you were… sound. A man who we could rely on.’

  Falco gave a shrug and leant back against the cold stone wall. ‘I suppose I have that reputation,’ he said, accepting the goblet. ‘I must admit I was surprised to find myself posted to the province of Britain considering the ongoing troubles, and considering how far I have proceeded in my career, but you know that I have dedicated my whole life to public service.’

  He took a sip. It was an excellent vintage.

  ‘Don’t be so pompous, man,’ the old man barked. ‘We know full well how far you’ve travelled along the course of honour. We know you prospered under Trajan of Sacred Memory. We know that you led the Fifth Legion against the Dacians with great success. You distinguished yourself in the siege of Sarmisegethuza. We know that you are devoted to the cause of Rome.’

  ‘As are we,’ Rufinus said earnestly, turning away from the open archway.

  ‘Then why this secret meeting?’ Falco asked. He placed the goblet on the stone beside him. ‘What is it that you wish to discuss with a man like me, who as you say is dedicated to Rome, that can’t be said openly? Bear in mind that we won’t be able to remain away from the banquet for long without having suspicion cast upon us. The emperor has his Praetorian Guard, and doubtless other agents.’

  ‘Pretty soon you will be a long way away from any of the suspicions that you might be subject to in the environs of the City,’ Ursus Servianus said, pouring himself a goblet and draining it in one gulp. ‘Soon you’ll be at the overall head of three legions, out there on the frontier. But that could change. From the margins of the empire you could return in triumph to the beating heart of Rome.’

  Falco’s eyes grew wider as he listened to the plan that his fellow senator began to outline. Ursus Servianus’ face was avid, intent, transformed into a shifting mask of tragedy by the flickering of Rufinus’ torch. As Falco became more and more fascinated by Ursus Servianus’ words, he hoped that this transformation was not an ill omen.

  What the man was saying could only indicate a change in the course of his career.

  —2—

  Eboracum[3], Roman province of Britain

  The newly built stone walls of the fortress towered proudly against the northern stars. Outside the barracks room office, the night was still and cold. The breath of passing sentries misted in the gloom. Within the walls of the camp all was orderly and disciplined. Long straight lanes between red tiled barracks blocks and storehouses led to the parade ground at the centre of the fortress. The latter stood just outside the headquarters building. Here the current provincial governor was readying himself to move down to Londinium before departing from the province. Meanwhile, in the offices of the commissary, a middle aged man sat at his desk, deep in thought.

  Beyond the walls, the wilds of Britain rolled endlessly beneath the moon, towards the hills that snaked along the western horizon. Less than a hundred years of Roman rule had done little to civilise the northern regions of the province. The further one went, the weaker grew Rome’s grip. In the far north, Rome had no influence at all.

  Despite the famous victory the legions had won over the Caledonians thirty seven years ago, when Commissary Centurion Julius Probus had not long been out of swaddling clothes, the conquest had ground to a halt shortly afterwards. Trouble had flared up in Dacia[4], and Britain’s subjugation had been abandoned. The result? A turbulent province, where those tribes officially within the empire were constantly at risk of being incited into rebellion by those not fully tamed. Not enough legions to control the place, or to protect those tribes loyal to their Roman masters. And as a result, the supply lines—one of Probus’ main concerns—were constantly threatened.

  It was the tribes, of course, who posed the real threat to the empire, but was the loyalty of the legions and the senators who led them to be relied upon? How faithful were they to the emperor, when he was so far away in Rome? These were the thoughts that had already been passing through the mind of Probus before he began reading the report before him. All these worries notwithstanding, it would appear that one enthusiastic young tribune—doubtless a chinless wonder out from Rome with no more than a few years’ experience of commanding auxiliary troops—had been rigorously defending Rome’s honour.

  With a muted grunt, the centurion took a metal scraper and scraped the waxen tablet clean. Then, from force of habit, he peeled away the wax itself and scratched the wood beneath until any impression of the message would be rendered unreadable. He did this almost automatically. Once he was finished he dropped the tablet on the desk to one side and stared into space.

  ‘Jupiter’s balls,’ he muttered at last. It was intolerable. Utterly intolerable.

  A thickset man, at first glance he seemed to be broader than he was tall, and he had a short beard and thick eyebrows. He wore a rough, wine stained red military tunic—a half empty beaker of well-watered soldier’s wine sat on the table beside him, and he sipped from
it from time to time—and even in the office he wore a military belt heavy with buckles, metal plates and strap ends, that jingled when he rose and when he sat down again. His sheathed sword lay balanced on the stool opposite him.

  This missing auxiliary troop was certainly a worry, and it wasn’t just because a young tribune had gone with it. It was no skin off Probus’ over large nose if another wet between the ears rich boy had been lost with his first command. What mattered was what the situation told him about the unrest in Brigantia and parts further north. As far as any of his agents could tell, it was a new resurgence of ancient, incomprehensible feuds that had had their origin when the Selgovae first marched south to fight with one of the sub tribes of the Brigantian federation, to carry off their cattle and their women, in that long ago age of legend before the coming of Rome. And yet in itself all that was unimportant, the kind of foolishness one might expect from the Britons as long as their native stiff neckedness remained unbowed by Roman manners and Roman clothes, Roman bathing and Roman banquets.

  It saddened Probus that in order for Rome to triumph over these virile northern peoples, it would be necessary to bring to them all the luxuries and degrading corruptions of the City. He detested the time he had to spend in Rome. Every time he went there it seemed more decadent than the last.

  But what mattered most was the part played in the disappearance of this auxiliary troop, while out in Selgovae territory, by those sinister forces north of there, the Caledonian tribes who remained aloof and free from Rome and its civilisation—and its corruption. The local squabbles of Brigantian tribes and the Selgovae could easily be settled, or so it seemed to Probus—and he was in an ideal position to find out. But if, as he suspected, they were being stirred up by the untamed peoples of the North—those blue painted savages among whom, it was rumoured, the druids still practised their unholy rites—why, that was an entirely different matter.

  But nobody in Eboracum knew what the situation was, and that was why the simple business of a tribune missing in action had been passed to the commissary centurion, the so-called gatherer of grain. Of course, anyone who knew anything about the legions knew that Probus’ task was to glean a different kind of grain from wheat, or even the meagre barley, rye, and spelt that could be garnered among the heathered uplands of Britain. Intelligence was what he gathered. And yet his investigation had been unproductive in this matter, that of Tribune Gaius Flaminius Drusus .