He turned to walk away, but he knew he had planted a seed of indecision.
‘Wait.’
He stopped.
‘All right, give him some water.’
Valerius had the pitcher in his left hand and he poured it over the cloth in the walnut fist, saturating it with water. When he was satisfied he used the damp cloth to moisten Tiberius’s lips.
Through his pain, Tiberius somehow sensed the human contact. The feel of the liquid on his smashed lips took him back to the desert where he had suffered and almost died for his friends. For a moment he was back there, and out of the glare walked the long dead woman who had provided the only warmth of his childhood. She had come to take him home.
‘Thank you, Mother.’
Valerius brought his left hand to the younger man’s cheek in what appeared to be a caress. Neither of the guards saw the narrow, needle-pointed knife that he pushed up into the hollow below the younger man’s right ear and into his brain. Valerius felt Tiberius stiffen and blood flowed warm over his hand to drip on to the already gore-stained sand below. At last, the life force left Tiberius Claudius Crescens, tribune of the Tenth, and, freed of his pain, his body sagged into the arms of the man who had been his friend.
XLVII
‘MMMMHH!’ VALERIUS’S EYES
snapped open as a callused hand clamped over his mouth. Others pinned his arms and hauled him to his knees. As he grew accustomed to the darkness he realized that the tent was filled with legionaries in full armour including the centurion who had been guarding Tiberius who now stood over him with his sword drawn and a look of unfettered savagery on his face. There was a moment when he knew the man wanted to kill him, but it passed and he was hauled into the open and dragged through the camp towards the
praetorium
. The slim figure of Serpentius appeared from between two tents by the side of the roadway. Their eyes met and Valerius knew that all it needed was a signal. But that would mean death. Death for at least some of these men and certain death for the two men who opposed them when the centurion called up the reinforcements he undoubtedly had close by. Valerius had seen enough death for one night. He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head and the Spaniard stepped back into the shadows.
The legionaries hustled him through the flaps and into the big tent where Corbulo sat behind his campaign desk with Traianus to his right and Celsus to his left. The three generals were in full uniform and Valerius suppressed a shiver as he stood before them, naked apart from a loincloth. This was the same tribunal which had sentenced Tiberius
to
his terrible end. Corbulo’s narrowed eyes were the colour of the leaden seas which lapped Britain in winter, and just as cold. The room felt too small to contain the power of his anger. When he spoke, the words emerged through clenched teeth.
‘You gave the traitor a merciful death against my express orders?’
Valerius saw no point in denying the obvious. ‘The manner of his death shamed you. He was a soldier who fought for you and fought well.’
‘An assassin.’
‘A Roman officer doing his duty as he saw it.’
‘A betrayer. Of his general, his legion and his comrades. A betrayer of his friends.’
Valerius bit his tongue at this incontestable truth. Hadn’t it been he who had unleashed Tiberius at Corbulo like a launched
pilum
with his pompous exhortations to mindless duty?
If you are given an order, don’t think about it. Only obey
. If he had listened more closely, perhaps he could have persuaded the boy from his fateful path. Perhaps Tiberius would still have been alive. But he knew it wasn’t true. Even if Tiberius had turned his back on Nero and pledged his loyalty to Corbulo, how could the Emperor’s most faithful general leave him alive without himself being guilty of disloyalty?
‘And now we have a new betrayer,’ Corbulo continued. ‘I took Gaius Valerius Verrens into my trust. I gave him command and gave him my hand in friendship, yet he has deliberately flouted my authority.’
‘Prolonging his agony achieved nothing,’ Valerius met the cold stare without flinching, ‘except to sully your reputation. It was not discipline you displayed, it was wanton cruelty. Tiberius saved your daughter when she was dying of thirst. You owed him a life, just as you owed me a life.’
With a snarl the general rose from his seat, almost overturning the desk. ‘You dare preach at me? Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo is proconsul of Asia, conqueror of Armenia and three times holder of the triumphal regalia; more important, he is your general. I said once you were too soft. I was wrong. You are weak. A general cannot afford to have weakness at the heart of his command. A general cannot be seen to
condone
indiscipline, just as he cannot afford to ignore disloyalty. You leave me no choice. You say I owe you a life? Then I give you the life of your friend Tiberius Crescens, to whom you granted an undeserved mercy. But by disobeying my direct order you forfeit your own.’ Traianus gasped and Valerius felt as if he’d been doused in ice water. He had known what he was risking when he helped Tiberius into the afterlife, but in his mind it had never come to this.
He listened to Corbulo continue. ‘You will be taken from here at dawn to be beheaded before the assembled army. I give you a soldier’s death. Be grateful.’
‘I am a Roman citizen.’
Corbulo flinched as if he had been struck.
‘I am a Roman citizen,’ Valerius repeated. ‘I demand the rights accorded by my status and my class.’
‘You are a Roman soldier and subject to military justice,’ the general said with finality.
‘My orders came direct from the Emperor. Only the Emperor can pass judgement on me.’
Corbulo’s face reddened and Valerius waited for the order for his immediate execution, but Traianus whispered something in the general’s ear and he subsided into his seat.
‘Very well, but you would have been wiser to accept my mercy, because when the Emperor confirms my sentence there will be none. Gaius Valerius Verrens, you are hereby declared incorrigible. You will be fed and watered, but no man will speak to you on pain of death. You will lose all privileges and be held in chains until confirmation arrives from Rome.’
The trek back to Antioch was a month-long torment of pain, filth and numbing boredom for Valerius. Each day his guards placed him in chains in one of the supply carts at the rear of the column and for hour upon hour he would shift from one painful position to another until his entire body became a mass of bruised flesh. At the halt, he would be lifted from the cart barely able to move and placed in an unfurnished tent at the centre of the Tenth Fretensis’s marching camp.
The
centurion followed Corbulo’s orders to feed him – a bowl of rough porridge and a goatskin of water were thrust through the tent flaps each night – but, whether through neglect or purpose, he was not allowed to wash or shave. After the first week he was ashamed of his stink; by the end of the second he no longer noticed, apart from the sweet scent of decay from the leather socket covering the stump of his amputated right hand. The worst of it was the silence. His guard, well warned of the consequences, never exchanged a word with him, conveying their orders with rough pushes and thumps of the wooden staves they carried. At first, the slaves of the baggage train treated the high-born prisoner with curiosity, but after the first man to get too close had his jaw broken they kept their distance. Only once, on the eighteenth day, did Valerius have the comfort of conversing with another human being. How he distracted the guards Valerius would never know, but somehow Serpentius was able to reach the tent wall and whisper a greeting.
‘Your friends have not forgotten you.’
‘Tell my friends I thank them,’ Valerius smiled for the first time in weeks, ‘but that is precisely what they must do.’
But Serpentius would not be deterred. ‘Tomorrow at noon Caladus and twenty men of his squadron will approach the baggage train for supplies. I will be with them. It will be the work of a moment to disable the guards and put you on a horse. We would be gone before anyone could react.’
‘And then?’
‘Armenia, or Cappadocia.’
‘To be outlaws.’
‘You would be alive.’
Valerius sighed. ‘I brought this upon myself, Serpentius, and I knew what the consequences could be. Tell Caladus and his men that I honour them, but I will not let them sacrifice themselves for me. As for my friend Serpentius, though he has the disposition of a bad-tempered hyena, he should know that I will never forget his companionship and that buried in the corner of my quarters in Antioch he will find a leather bag containing fifty gold
aurei
, which should be some compensation for all the misery I have brought him.’ Serpentius gave a low whistle
at
the size of the amount, which was equal to a legionary’s retirement bonus for twenty years’ service. ‘He should use it to toast my memory and then return to the wretched mountains he came from, there to live as a king, or a bandit, as he pleases.’
‘I will use it to toast your freedom.’
‘No, Serpentius. I don’t believe it will come to that. Gaius Valerius Verrens is a Hero of Rome, and he will meet his fate as a soldier.’
‘Then I will use it to finish what Tiberius started.’
‘You would kill my friend?’
He heard the Spaniard’s snort of disbelief. ‘General Corbulo has just sentenced you to death. How can he be your friend?’
‘Corbulo is only doing what he sees as his duty as a commander,’ Valerius explained patiently. ‘Just as Tiberius was doing his and just as I was doing mine when I led three thousand men to their deaths at Colonia. He is a strong leader and a strong leader does not flinch from hard decisions. His anger is as much because I have forced him to this as it is about giving Tiberius a quick death. He thinks I am a fool and I believe he would rather I didn’t die, but …’
‘So you won’t come?’
‘No, Serpentius. I have walked in the shadows for so long that I do not fear what is to come. Sometimes I am tired of life and tired of living.’
‘Then at least take this.’ The tent rustled as something was pushed under the leather. ‘Remember what they did to Tiberius and do not let it come to that.’
Valerius reached down with his left hand and fumbled for the object. His fingers closed over a small knife, such as a lady might use to peel her fruit. Or a man to open his own veins. He loosened the ties on the leather socket over his right arm and pushed the knife down until it was completely hidden before tightening them again.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered. But he might as well have been talking to the wind.
They placed him in a damp, windowless cell beneath the proconsul’s palace at Antioch and he counted the days by the food his jailers
provided
. Stoicism had been ingrained since his days on Corsica studying under Seneca, and he searched the many texts he had learned by heart to find some positives in his predicament. But, gradually, captivity and solitude took their toll and wore away at his defences. The rattle of the plate heralding each new day was a constant reminder that each might be his last. Like a drowning man clinging to a branch he took to using every moment to go over his life and asking himself what he might have changed. Not his time with Maeve, or the cost each of them paid for it, because some things are as inevitable as the next day’s dawn and their fate had been to meet at a time and a place that invited tragedy. Could he have been more of a son to his father, who had estranged himself from the family for so long? Only by sacrificing the respect that had finally brought them together at the very end, so, again, no. His life, it seemed, had been a series of perpetual dilemmas, and he had followed the only path open to the man who was Gaius Valerius Verrens. Perhaps every man’s life was the same. It meant he could die without regret, if die he must.
He worked the little knife free from the leather socket. He had told Serpentius that Corbulo was his friend, but was that completely true? Could a man so iron-willed ever be said to have friends? Yet there had been nights, as they contemplated the tokens on Caesar’s Tower in comfortable silence, when he had felt an innocent pleasure in another man’s company he had never known before. The mists cleared and finally he realized what it was, this thing that had been gnawing at him. No, he couldn’t have altered the relationship with his father, but he could regret that he had never been able to share the same companionable bond that came so naturally with Corbulo. Strange that he should have more in common with Tiberius, the man he had befriended and killed, than anyone alive.
The sound of the bolt snapping back brought him back to the present. Was this the time? He had the little knife in his hand and now he resolved to use it, not to kill himself, but to force his captors to kill him. Better that than being led docilely to the block like a white bull to slaughter on the temple steps. He gripped it in his fist, ready to take the first man who entered. The door swung back and a hooded
figure
entered, gasping as he rose up in front of her with the knife in his hand.
‘What have they done to you?’ Domitia Longina Corbulo drew back the hood and stared at the matted beard and straggling hair. The stench in the tiny room made her gag. ‘I came as soon as I could. They discharged Serpentius on the first day. I think some would have had him killed, but my father refused. He took lodgings in the town and found a way to reach me.’
‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe. Did no one tell you that to speak to me was to die?’
Domitia bristled. ‘Of course they told me. Do you really believe that Domitia Longina Corbulo would be dictated to by fools?’
‘It was your father’s order.’
‘Then he is a fool, and I will tell him so. To think that my own father would kill his bravest and best for something as simple as an act of mercy. But you should not have provoked him, Valerius. He means to execute you.’
Valerius nodded. ‘Yes, there will be no pardon from the Emperor.’
‘If I could …’
‘No,’ he said solemnly, reaching out to touch her face. ‘Not even if the outcome was certain.’