The Last Hour: Relentless, brutal, brilliant. 24 hours in Ancient Rome Read online

  A muffled thumping from behind. They would have nothing but boots and fists and the pommels of their swords to break down the door. There was still a little time.

  Ballista unwound the torn cloak from his left arm, let it fall on the damp earth. He took off his boots, then unbuckled his sword belt, and lifted the baldric over his head. He did not want the sword to fall into their hands. Battle-Sun was not just any sword. Forged in the dawn of time, it had passed down through generations of northern heroes until Heoden, king of the Harii, had given it to his foster-son Ballista. Briefly Ballista considered throwing it down into the river, but then he turned and looked for somewhere to hide the blade.

  As he slid the scabbard under a clump of rhododendrons, the ornaments on the belts caught his eye. The embroidered wallet; money had never much concerned him. The Mural Crown, the original decoration awarded so many years ago for being the first man in the Roman army over the wall of an African town. The jewelled bird of prey that had travelled with him so much longer, down from the distant North, a gift from his mother. There was no time for sentimentality. If he survived, he could send a message asking his mother to send another.

  The pounding was louder, more rhythmic, better organised.

  Ballista went back to the edge. More than a hundred feet down to the river, perhaps as much as a hundred and fifty. Dangerous, not necessarily fatal. In his youth he had jumped from cliffs as high. But he had to clear the base of the Mausoleum and the narrow embankment.

  The crack of splintering wood. A hoarse cheer.

  Ballista took twelve long paces back from the lip. Far away was the dome of the Pantheon. Inconsequentially, he noticed it lined up perfectly with the Column of Trajan even further off.

  Shouts. Men crashing through the shrubbery. Getting closer.

  Do not think, just act.

  Ballista forced himself to set off, put one foot in front of the other, gathering speed. A slight misjudgement. On the eleventh step he had to jump and leap out into the abyss.

  CHAPTER 1

  The City of the Dead

  The Kalends of April

  The Hours of Darkness

  B

  ALLISTA CLAWED AT THE AIR as he fell, clutching in panic for some imaginary purchase. The city and the river and the monument – without connection or reason – wheeled before his eyes.

  Death Blinder do not let me die.

  The dark river and the white embankment were rushing up. His limbs were flailing impotently.

  Master yourself or die.

  Ballista stopped thrashing, forced his arms across his chest, gripped his right wrist with his left hand. With a more than human effort, he leant back, brought his legs near together, slightly bent at the knee. His fall controlled, he plummeted feet first.

  Allfather . . .

  The water and the stones were surging up so fast. Had he jumped out far enough? Would he clear the bank? If not . . .

  Be a man . . .

  The pale brickwork was very close. Any second now would come the sickening impact, the snapping of bones, his body splattered like a crushed insect.

  Then the wall of the embankment was flashing past, the river reaching for him.

  Agony as he hit the water. White hot pain running up his legs, flaring in the small of his back, knocking the breath from him. Driven down deep, his feet sank into mud. Sediment blossomed around him. He could see nothing. A surge of fear, as he thought he was held fast by the clinging sludge, then the current took him. The water cleared a little, and a moment later his head and back thumped against the masonry of the embankment.

  Better to stay under until he was some distance from the Mausoleum. But there was no air in his lungs. He had to breath. There was light above him, light and air. Strong in the water, he struck out for the surface. The awful realisation dawned that the undertow had him. He could make no progress. Fear again rising, hard to control. His chest was crushed, on fire. The light getting no closer.

  In the opaque murk of the river, he half saw the looming riverine wall. Twisting, he found the bricks with his feet. A convulsive shove, and this time he shot upwards.

  Breaking the surface, Ballista gulped in the air, coughing and spluttering.

  The great bulk of the Mausoleum was receding. Small figures, black against the sinking sun, were silhouetted at its top. Could they see him? The river was in deep shadow. Had he gone far enough?

  Filling his lungs, Ballista slipped below the surface, and let the river take him.

  The pain in his chest, and the bitter residue of fear, would not let him remain submerged for long.

  Resurfacing, the Mausoleum was appreciably smaller. The figures were gone. Perhaps they were already rushing down to search the dockside.

  The clouded waters surged against the retaining wall. He was being swept past the imperial gardens. There were empty jetties, and here and there the roofs of pavilions showed above the foliage. Downstream was a bridge, and through its arches Ballista could see a line of tall warehouses, and further off the ramshackle huts of fishermen. Beyond the bridge, there would be people. If he wanted to slip away unnoticed, to leave no trail for his pursuers, he had to get out now. With evening drawing in, the pleasure gardens should be deserted.

  A jetty was approaching. Ballista started to swim. His back still ached, and the pain in his chest was undiminished. He put them out of his mind, and angled across the current. He was close, safety no more than a few strokes off, when the impersonal power of the river again seized him. For a few moments he struggled, before surrendering, and letting himself be rolled out towards midstream.

  The Tiber in flood was notorious for the strength of its sudden eddies and whirlpools. To escape, good swimmer though he was, neither technique nor brute strength would serve. Ballista had to think, read the water, turn it to his advantage. No mortal could fight the god of the river and win.

  There was another landing-stage: solid pillars and a ladder.

  Ballista scanned the surface. Inshore the water was racing, bouncing back from the retaining wall, foaming through the uprights of the pier. Ahead floated the bloated carcass of a dog. It dipped, bobbed up again, and was drawn out, away from the bank. Perhaps the beginning of a whirlpool. Against all instinct, Ballista swam away from the shore.

  In moments he felt his pace increase, as the turbulent waters carried him along. He was still going out as the dead dog turned, and was dragged back towards the quay. The stream pulled Ballista in its wake. A half remembered line of Stoicism: A man is tied to his fate, like a dog to a cart.

  This would all be about timing. Ballista watched the cadaver. Fate was not immutable. Some five paces from the nearest pole of the landing-stage, the crosscurrent hit the dog, and sent it spinning downriver.

  Not yet. Wait.The river was in turmoil where the currents collided.

  Fifteen paces, ten.

  Ballista gathered all his strength.

  Now! He launched himself into the maelstrom.

  Three strokes, and the race pushed him sideways. Five strokes. The massive wooden pile just out of reach, the ladder just beyond. Summoning all his resolve, he drove towards them.

  A desperate lunge, and his right hand found the upright. Coated in slime, it offered no grip. He was slipping, the water tugging at him. A mortal could not fight the father of waters.

  A stinging pain, as the head of a projecting nail tore the palm of his hand. Regardless of the injury, he clutched the spike. The river was determined to tear him away. Somehow he hauled himself in, hugged the foul timber, got a leg around it.

  The ladder was to his right, just too far to reach. One push, and he would be there. The water breaking over his shoulders, Ballista could not force himself to let go of his temporary sanctuary.

  This was absurd. His courage could not fail him now. Be a man.

  Still he did not move.

  Do not think, just act.

  He lunged at the ladder, grabbed one of its rungs. With a snap audible above
the roaring water, it shifted. The whole thing threatened to give way. Spurred into action, Ballista swarmed up the slippery, unstable woodwork, and hauled himself onto the decking.

  He lay for a moment, sucking in air, blinking at the sky. High up swallows banked and swooped. A promise of fair weather.

  Rolling over, he crawled to one of the pillars, set his back against the wood.

  If he could get to the pleasure gardens, he would be able to find somewhere to lay up. First, he needed to see if he could walk. It would take the knifemen some time to get down from the roof of the Mausoleum, and he had been carried quite a distance down-river. There was no time to waste, but he had a few moments respite. He began to check himself over, swiftly, yet with care and methodically. There was a nasty cut on his right palm. It would need washing and dressing. The river was filthy. Without a knife, he could not tear his tunic for a makeshift bandage. It would have to wait. His feet were now bare. They were livid, soon they would be covered with bruises. His legs and back ached. Flexing them proved that nothing was broken. His chest was another matter. Every movement brought a sharp stab of discomfort. Deliberately he took a deep, shuddering breath. The left side of his ribcage hurt, but the pain was not so intense as to indicate that any ribs were fractured. Most likely one or two were cracked, or that some of the muscles between them had been torn.

  Using the pillar, he levered himself to his feet, then lent against it while a wave of nausea passed. The decking where he had sat was stained dark with the water oozing from his tunic and trousers.

  Some atavistic sense for danger made him look upstream. A group of men not far from the Mausoleum, working their way downriver, still a couple of hundred paces off. At least twenty of them, they were searching the bank. They had not seen him yet.

  At the end of the landing stage a paved path ran away into the gardens. To run would be to give himself away. If he acted naturally, at this distance, they might not realise it was him.

  Ballista walked slowly down the jetty. He kept his left arm pressed to his ribs. Each step stung the soles of his feet. He moved out onto the towpath. Halfway across, he heard the shout.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the men break into a run.

  Ballista set off like a hare.

  In moments he was out of sight. The gardens stretched away on either side.

  Should he go left or right? Away from them or double back? Behind him he could hear them baying like hounds.

  Ballista ran left.

  There was a walkway, but it was gravel, and his feet were bare. Ballista hurdled a low hedge, and took off across a lawn. There was a wide grove of trees ahead. The outliers were low fruit trees. He ducked down under the blossom, almost crawling, and emerged into an open space artfully designed to resemble a forest clearing. A tall figure stood in the centre, wearing a headdress of reeds and sporting an enormous erection. There were flowers at his feet. Priapus, carved in wood, served as both scarecrow and warning to evil-minded men who would desecrate this glade. Ballista went around the deity, and into the stand of tall trees beyond. These oaks had been ancient when the gardens had been laid out. Almost at once, he saw one with its lowest branch growing out near horizontal only a couple of feet above his head.

  Ballista jumped, got both hands on the bough. His battered body complained as he scrambled up, the rough bark grazing his arms. From that branch he climbed to another, then one higher still. Finally he wedged himself where a huge limb formed an angle to the trunk.

  Ballista was not sure how well he was hidden. A passage of Tacitus came to mind. Some battle, long ago in the northern forests. The Germans had taken refuge in the trees. The Roman soldiers had shot them down like sitting birds. Sometimes a Classical education brought little comfort. Yet there was a difference between a lone fugitive and a multitude. Most men, especially those bred in the city, never raised their eyes from the ground.

  The passage of time slowed. The air was full of birdsong. Through the foliage, Ballista could see the rustic head of Priapus, the reeds stirring in the evening breeze. He waited. For nine nights and nine days the Allfather had hung from the Tree of Life. No one comforted him with bread, revived him with a drink from a horn. Nine days and nine nights, and the Allfather Woden had learned the secrets of the dead. Ballista waited.

  The sunlight only touched the very tops of the oaks, and the evening chorus faded as the song birds sought their nests for the night.

  Ballista heard the men coming: barked orders and guttural responses. They blundered through the fruit trees. Clearly they felt no need for discretion. Neither the City Watch nor the local police who conducted nocturnal patrols on the right bank of the Tiber concerned them.

  Ballista saw three hairy, somewhat unkempt men walk out into the clearing. They were well spaced, fifteen paces or more apart, like beaters drawing a covert. They wore a motley array of clothes, one had shoulder-length hair, but the swords in their hands, the ornaments on their belts, and the way they moved, all proclaimed military service. One wiped the sweat from his forehead. There was a tattoo on his wrist. Too far to see which unit, but it was the final proof.

  There was little undergrowth below the oaks, and the hunters stepped out quickly, scanning this way and that. One was heading straight for the tree in which Ballista had tried to conceal himself.

  Stilling his breathing, Ballista watched the man. Allfather, do not let him look up.

  The man stopped beneath the oak. He stretched, rolling the stiffness out of his neck, then looked to either side, waiting for the others to catch up: a trained soldier dressing the line.

  Suddenly the man glanced up, as if aware he was observed.

  Ballista shut his eyes.

  The noise of men moving further off. From the base of the tree no sound.

  Ballista peered down.

  The soldier was rubbing his shoulders. A veteran on manoeuvre, with no immediate threat in sight, he waited stolidly.

  A whistle, and the line moved on again.

  Ballista did not move, hardly dared breathe.

  Soon the noise of their passage diminished.

  The centurions of few regular auxiliary units, and none in any legion, would tolerate such a slovenly turn out. Perhaps they were not soldiers, but deserters. The gods knew there were enough of them. Not all that long ago, back in the reign of Commodus, a man called Maternus had raised an army of them. He had terrorised Gaul and Spain, sacked whole towns, even tried to kill the emperor himself.

  The sound of the hunters was lost in the sighing of the wind through the broad canopy of leaves. There was no telling how soon they would return. Ballista clambered down from his perch. His ribs and feet hurt. The cut on his palm throbbed. He needed to rest, but had to find somewhere more secure. Putting aside the pain and fatigue, he retraced his steps.

  Coming out on the path through the gardens, he turned left, away from the river. The heat of the day was still in the smooth paving stones. It seemed to burn the tender soles of his feet.

  Abruptly, the paving gave way to a track of beaten earth, and the gardens on either side ended. The land here was rough heath. The necks of dozens of half-buried amphorae protruded from the earth. Some had been dug up and broken. There was a scatter of white bones. It was a graveyard of the poor, one of the many that ringed Rome. Not of the destitute; they would be pitched into mass graves. Here the corpses of slaves, pulled from their narrow cells, would be brought by other servile members of their household, and the urban plebs would be carried in a cheap box. It stood right next to the shaded gardens, where the living and the affluent strolled and talked, and ate delicacies off silver plate. No wonder that the inhabitants of the eternal city held mixed feelings about the suburban areas. They were places of pleasure, of parks and pavilions, where you took your leisure. At the same time, they were where the city dumped its rubbish, deposited its dead, where the condemned were executed, and funeral pyres burned.

  Ahead was a necropolis for the better off. Ballista had long
got used to the Roman custom of fashioning tombs that resembled houses, and of building them together, as a city of the dead. There were two streets running away to the left. He turned into the second.

  Never hide in a solitary structure. It would draw your pursuers like a magnet. But in one among many, you would have some warning, hear the search working towards you. Not all these tombs were tended. Ballista passed several with gaping doors. He stopped at the fourth or fifth that had been opened, one set back down a narrow passage.

  Undesirables lurked in such surroundings; vagrants, down on their luck prostitutes and their clients, midnight hags in search of ingredients for their arts. If disturbed, they might raise the alarm. He was uncertain if he was in a condition to stop them.

  He took a deep breath, causing a spasm of pain in his ribs. It would be as the Fates decreed.

  Cautiously, he entered the tomb.

  For a time he stood, braced for an outcry or attack, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  A smell of dust, of mould and faint decay. No movement in the still air. The tomb was empty.

  Wearily he folded himself down to sit with his back to a wall, and thought what had brought him to this place, and of the man that he had left to die in the Mausoleum.

  Scarpio, the Prefect of the City Watch, had said the informer would only talk to an individual. Ballista must go alone, and, as there was no knowing how far the conspiracy had spread, he must tell no one. The informer was an ex-slave and a thief. Pilfering from the changing room of the baths on the Caelian Hill, the day before, he had heard two men approaching, and had hidden. Only one of the men had spoken, but the eavesdropper claimed that he had caught every word.