The Great Game (44 page)

Rufinus’ entire experience of these visitors was gained from watching as they moved from about within the palace, escorting them to and from rooms, overhearing snatches and fragments of conversation, always social and never damning. The secretive gatherings to which they were invited were always centred in a triclinium at the heart of the palace with solid walls and no suitable position from which to observe. The visitors would arrive of an afternoon, change and bathe, then retreat into the triclinium where they would stay late into the night before retiring to bed. The next morning they would mount their carriages and return to their homes and estates.

The only people to enter the room during those meetings were two of the palace slaves, bringing food, drink and other luxuries as requested, and all matters discussed within the room were put on hold at such times. The level of privacy of these meetings was almost total.

It was frustrating to Rufinus to watch these clandestine gatherings going on right under his nose while unable to overhear
any details. Even those guards Lucilla trusted were posted outside the vestibule that led to the dining room, with two doors between them and the quiet conversation within. In addition, it appeared that one of the guests played the lyre with accomplished skill, adding another layer of cover to any potential talk of sedition.

A quick investigation throughout the corridors and rooms of the palace that surrounded the private dining room had drawn a blank. There was simply no way to be in earshot of the conversation within. The room being designed for use in winter, it was buried within the complex, with no windows or outside walls.

Still, it was, to Rufinus, an advance worthy of note just to be able to name people to watch. Initially thrilled at having something useful to pass on, Rufinus had quickly engineered an excuse to visit the merchant Constans in Tibur after the second such meeting, giving him a detailed account of those present to pass on to Paternus and Perennis. He had waited tensely until Constans’ visit the next week and had been deflated to receive the reply ‘Satisfactory. Continue with investigation’.

And so Rufinus had continued to make notes of the tiniest change in any of the visitors’ entourage, their attitude, even their mode of dress, all the while fighting the frustration of failure. He had begun to feel that perhaps there was nothing to all the talk of plots and conspiracies among the Praetorian commanders and that perhaps these private meetings were nothing more than simply an opportunity for Lucilla to spit invective and complain about her brother among sympathetic people.

The turning point came with the advent of the warmest and sunniest summer anyone could remember and a party held in the Canopus to celebrate the festival of Vertumnus, the first such gathering since the days of Hadrianus. It had been a grand night with good humour, a steady flow of wine and platters of sweets, fruits, vegetables and endless roasted delicacies, all officially celebrating the God of abundance, though in Rufinus’ eyes more celebrating the wealth and position of the hostess.

The great water garden with its arbours, decorative statues and caryatids resounded to the sound of music and conversation, and flickered with the shadows of dancing girls and occasional, carefully-obfuscated romantic interludes. Lamps had been lit between the columns so that the festival could go on through the night and even the guards’ shifts had been shortened and staggered
so that they and the villa’s free servants could make merry in their own separate celebration elsewhere. Rufinus knew that a similar gathering was occurring as a poor mirror of this party in the roughly-chiselled grotto of the Inferi up the hill and across the olive grove, where burning torches would be illuminating the drunken cavorting of guards and servants.

The officers of the guards, though - Phaestor and Rufinus - were permitted to attend the nobles’ festival, along with half a dozen of their more trusted men, in an attempt to restrain the more unruly guests and deter any trouble.

Rufinus had tried to keep his eye on the invitees and to make notes of those present, though only half-heartedly. While Lucilla continued to host her secretive gatherings for that select group of luminaries, the Vertumnalia was a festival celebrated across rural Latium and had clearly been organised as a social occasion, a fact attested by the sheer scale of the noise, the quantity of expensive wine brought in by cart the week before, and the unexpected quantity of sweat-prickled flesh visible among the more inebriated nobles and their partners.

The usual suspects were present, of course, in addition to men and women of importance from Tibur, a few of the senators and nobles from Rome with a grudge against Commodus, and landowners from nearby estates who were well known to the mistress.

Two hours of surreptitiously scribbling notes whenever he could find a few moments alone, watching the guests with narrowed eyes that he hoped made him look more like a guard on the alert than a spy within the ranks, and eavesdropping on endless dull conversations had grated. Talk revolved around the latest minor political appointments, new hairstyles gracing the inflated heads of Rome, the games, of which there seemed to be an almost constant run sponsored by the new emperor, the plays filling the theatres of the capital, the dearth of good fish sauce following the accidental sinking of a galley of finest garum from Baetica in the harbour in Ostia. The subjects under discussion were varied, the quality singularly pointless and dull.

In the end Rufinus had sighed, rolled his shoulders, given up all hope of subterfuge and intrigue and simply settled on relaxing and attempting to enjoy himself, lifting his cup and toasting the God of
growth for the detailed attention he seemed to have paid to vines in particular this year.

With a smile, he had reached out to a passing tray bearing slices of roasted and stuffed hare and honey-glazed ham, just as the servant turned sharply and hot-heeled it away at the shout of another guest, the tray slipping out of his reach just as Rufinus’ fingers dipped in. He had had to arrest his suddenly free momentum and almost pitched into the ornamental pool with its golden fish and terrapins.

Angrily, he managed to stop himself in time, though not without dipping a boot in the edge, feeling the cold water soaking straight through the lace holes, making the leather unpleasant and raising a snort of laughter from a senator and his wife who had apparently decided the ornamental fish pond would make the perfect cross between a public bath and a marital bed.

Hobbling across the seething, writhing, heavily-occupied paved area beneath the arbour, he moved out of the hectic party and leaned against a tree in the dark recesses of the artificial valley, at the northern end of the Canopus where the crowds thinned and petered out. Here, he removed his boot and tipped it up, watching a trickle of dirty water emerge, half expecting a golden fish to flop out. It seemed that no matter how proficient he became in the military world and no matter how high he climbed in the ranks, he would never be able to shake the clumsiness that had plagued him since youth – a clumsiness that had inadvertently led to Lucius’ death that day out in the forests of Tarraconensis. His expression darkened at the memory that refused to let him rest.

Shaking his head at the fates and their tendency to ruin even the most basic relaxation, he had put his back against the tree and drawn up his leg, knee bent, to replace his shoe when he paused, still as a rock, breath held.

The unearthly, pale figure of Lucilla had emerged from the cavorting mass and slipped quietly around the side of the portico, like one of the spirits of the departed, flitting through the night, almost appearing to drift in her gauzy silver and white garment. As he watched in astonishment, she picked up the silver-stitched hem of her stola and hurried back along the outer side of the Canopus, her sandals crunching on the parched earth.

Rufinus remained still and watched as the mistress of the villa followed the outer edge of the Canopus and then disappeared up the
slope to the west, climbing steadily along the line of the retaining wall and heading towards…

Rufinus had blinked as he watched two tiny lights dancing around the base of the decorative and delicate academy tower. Why would anyone go there? It had been one of Rufinus’ favourite haunts when hiding from the torrential rain last year, but had been abandoned and let fall to rack and ruin since the days of Hadrianus. Certainly not a place where party guests would go, even for a little privacy.

Would Phaestor have set men to watch the place? He would have men on duty in that area of the estate, but the tower was not on a patrol route. Decades of disuse had made every floor above the ground one unstable and dangerous and the wooden staircase had long since vanished. The guards on duty would be further north, near the temple of Antinoos, or south, near the academy buildings. In any case, wherever they were, the estate guards would not be carrying lit lamps. Such a thing made it practically impossible to catch interlopers and shattered a man’s night-vision.

What was going on? Clearly it was something that required secrecy and distance from the guests, and it involved Lucilla. Therefore, it needed to involve him!

His eyes flicked around the landscape as he contemplated his next move. He could follow her, but the white wall of the Canopus portico would show him up clearly, and the run up the hillside would also be out in the open. Whoever was waiting up there for Lucilla would almost certainly see him.

With leaden inevitability, his gaze fell on the service track.

In the days when that section of the villa had been in regular use, servants had been required to move from the main central region to the tower for cleaning, supplying and bringing food and drink to those in occupation. Since no nobleman liked to survey his fine estate and have his eyes light upon dirty, ragged slaves, the villa had been supplied with networks of subterranean access tunnels and, where these were impossible, such as between his current position and the tower, narrow paved tracks lined with tall poplars that obscured those using the route.

The hidden path began only four or five paces from the tree against which he leaned and ended directly below the tower, a ramp rising over hollow vaults along the edge of the tower’s square foundations. It was perfect in almost every way, barring his
knowledge that the ramp was unstable. The only time he had set foot upon its gravelled surface, stones had fallen from the ceiling of the arched vault below and he had felt the floor shift beneath his feet before hurriedly descending once more. Pompeianus had told him that a gentle shaking of the earth some ten years ago had made the vaults dangerous and they had never been restored. Even the goats that occasionally wandered the grounds that side of the estate eschewed the ramp.

Taking a deep breath and hoping no one would be paying attention to the scattered trees near the Canopus’ end, Rufinus scuttled across to the poplars that hid the service track and made his way swiftly along it, aware of the loud slap of his hob-nailed boots on the slabs. Irritably, he paused and quickly removed the boots, dropping them to the ground and racing barefoot along the tree-lined avenue toward the grey bulk of the tower, lit by the silvery moonlight.

A few moments later he passed the last poplars and ducked between two supply sheds, unused for so many years that the vines and ivy trained up their walls to disguise their presence had completely taken over the structures and begun to crack apart the walls and shatter the tiled roofs.

Grimacing at the dusty gravel and gnarled roots that made his feet hurt, Rufinus took a deep breath and hurried across the twenty feet of open space to the base of the ramp, aware that the speed of his hidden run must have brought him more or less level with Lucilla, who had taken the stable yet much longer garden slope.

Hissing quietly as a nettle stung his foot, he wondered whether he could have continued to wear his boots and moved slower with more stealth. But it would only have taken one of the lamp-bearing folk on the tower with good hearing to pay attention to the sound of running footsteps and his secret approach would have been for naught. The imagined consequences of such an event made him acutely aware of the belt around his middle that bore no sword, given that he had been a guest at a noble party. The blade’s absence felt like a missing limb at times like this.

Gingerly, he moved to the inner side of the ramp, his arm brushing the tufa of the retaining wall that formed the platform of the gardens above. His very first gentle footfall saw the surface beneath him give slightly and his heart lurched as he looked up the seventy
feet or so of steep slope that would bring him up to the tower’s foundations.

Another step and the floor felt solid. Gripping the stonework to his left, he continued to climb, each footstep tentative and fear-laden, almost half-seeing some level of sag in the ground beneath him. Around halfway up the ramp, he felt enough gravel shifting beneath him that he could see a fragment of light as a tiny hole opened up through to the vault below. A small piece of tufa stone fell silently through the air and clicked off its companions in the small pile below. Rufinus held his breath for a moment, though the sound seemed to have gone unnoticed by the figures above.

Another quick glance and he noted there were four figures gathered around the two lamps, muttering quietly. As he watched, he saw one of them beckoning to someone out in the gardens. Lucilla had arrived.

Clenching his teeth and worrying at the volume of his heartbeat, Rufinus climbed the last steps of the ramp, ignoring the unsteadiness of the shifting dirt beneath his feet, finally arriving at a point where his head was a mere foot below the parapet. A slight movement to the left gave him an adequate view of the gathering through the delicate latticework of the parapet.

Lucilla arrived, out of breath and livid. Fury lent a colour to her face that was visible even through the plastered white lead that coated her skin. She gestured angrily at the figures of Annianus, Stina, Plautia, and Annia, their serious faces dancing orange in the glow of the lamps.