The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII

Book 7: Empire series

by Anthony Riches

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

'A master of the genre' The Times The seventh novel in Anthony Riches' acclaimed Empire sequence brings Marcus Aquila back to Rome, hunting the men who destroyed his family. But the revenge he craves may cost him and those around him dearly. The young centurion's urge to exact his own brutal justice upon the shadowy cabal of assassins who butchered his family means that he must face them on their own ground, risking his own death at their hands. A senator, a gang boss, a praetorian officer and, deadliest of all, champion gladiator Mortiferum - the Death Bringer - lie in wait. The knives are unsheathed, and ready for blood . . .

Release date: February 13, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 401

Sample

By the late second century, the point at which the Empire series begins, the Imperial Roman Army had long since evolved into a stable organisation with a stable modus operandi. Thirty or so legions (there’s still some debate about the Ninth Legion’s fate), each with an official strength of 5,500 legionaries, formed the army’s 165,000-man heavy infantry backbone, while 360 or so auxiliary cohorts (each of them the equivalent of a 600-man infantry battalion) provided another 217,000 soldiers for the empire’s defence.

Positioned mainly in the empire’s border provinces, these forces performed two main tasks. Whilst ostensibly providing a strong means of defence against external attack, their role was just as much about maintaining Roman rule in the most challenging of the empire’s subject territories. It was no coincidence that the troublesome provinces of Britain and Dacia were deemed to require 60 and 44 auxiliary cohorts respectively, almost a quarter of the total available. It should be noted, however, that whilst their overall strategic task was the same, the terms under the two halves of the army served were quite different.

The legions, the primary Roman military unit for conducting warfare at the operational or theatre level, had been in existence since early in the republic, hundreds of years before. They were composed mainly of close-order heavy infantry, well-drilled and highly motivated, recruited on a professional basis and, critically to an understanding of their place in Roman society, manned by soldiers who were Roman citizens. The jobless poor were thus provided with a route to both citizenship and a valuable trade, since service with the legions was as much about construction – fortresses, roads and even major defensive works such as Hadrian’s Wall – as destruction. Vitally for the maintenance of the empire’s borders, this attractiveness of service made a large standing field army a possibility, and allowed for both the control and defence of the conquered territories.





By this point in Britannia’s history three legions were positioned to control the restive peoples both beyond and behind the province’s borders. These were the 2nd, based in South Wales, the 20th, watching North Wales, and the 6th, positioned to the east of the Pennine range and ready to respond to any trouble on the northern frontier. Each of these legions was commanded by a legatus, an experienced man of senatorial rank deemed worthy of the responsibility and appointed by the emperor. The command structure beneath the legatus was a delicate balance, combining the requirement for training and advancing Rome’s young aristocrats for their future roles with the necessity for the legion to be led into battle by experienced and hardened officers.

Directly beneath the legatus were a half-dozen or so military tribunes, one of them a young man of the senatorial class called the broad stripe tribune after the broad senatorial stripe on his tunic. This relatively inexperienced man – it would have been his first official position – acted as the legion’s second-in-command, despite being a relatively tender age when compared with the men around him. The remainder of the military tribunes were narrow stripes, men of the equestrian class who usually already had some command experience under their belts from leading an auxiliary cohort. Intriguingly, since the more experienced narrow-stripe tribunes effectively reported to the broad stripe, such a reversal of the usual military conventions around fitness for command must have made for some interesting man-management situations. The legion’s third in command was the camp prefect, an older and more experienced soldier, usually a former centurion deemed worthy of one last role in the legion’s service before retirement, usually for one year. He would by necessity have been a steady hand, operating as the voice of experience in advising the legion’s senior officers as to the realities of warfare and the management of the legion’s soldiers.

Reporting into this command structure were ten cohorts of soldiers, each one composed of a number of eighty-man centuries. Each century was a collection of ten tent parties – eight men who literally shared a tent when out in the field. Nine of the cohorts had six centuries, and an establishment strength of 480 men, whilst the prestigious first cohort, commanded by the legion’s senior centurion, was composed of five double-strength centuries and therefore fielded 800 soldiers when fully manned. This organisation provided the legion with its cutting edge: 5,000 or so well-trained heavy infantrymen operating in regiment and company-sized units, and led by battle-hardened officers, the legion’s centurions, men whose position was usually achieved by dint of their demonstrated leadership skills.

The rank of centurion was pretty much the peak of achievement for an ambitious soldier, commanding an eighty-man century and paid ten times as much as the men each officer commanded. Whilst the majority of centurions were promoted from the ranks, some were appointed from above as a result of patronage, or as a result of having completed their service in the Praetorian Guard, which had a shorter period of service than the legions. That these externally imposed centurions would have undergone their very own ‘sink or swim’ moment in dealing with their new colleagues is an unavoidable conclusion, for the role was one that by necessity led from the front, and as a result suffered disproportionate casualties. This makes it highly likely that any such appointee felt unlikely to make the grade in action would have received very short shrift from his brother officers.

A small but necessarily effective team reported to the centurion. The optio, literally ‘best’ or chosen man, was his second-in-command, and stood behind the century in action with a long brass-knobbed stick, literally pushing the soldiers into the fight should the need arise. This seems to have been a remarkably efficient way of managing a large body of men, given the centurion’s place alongside rather than behind his soldiers, and the optio would have been a cool head, paid twice the usual soldier’s wage and a candidate for promotion to centurion if he performed well. The century’s third-in-command was the tesserarius or watch officer, ostensibly charged with ensuring that sentries were posted and that everyone know the watch word for the day, but also likely to have been responsible for the profusion of tasks such as checking the soldiers’ weapons and equipment, ensuring the maintenance of discipline and so on, that have occupied the lives of junior non-commissioned officers throughout history in delivering a combat-effective unit to their officer. The last member of the centurion’s team was the century’s signifer, the standard bearer, who both provided a rallying point for the soldiers and helped the centurion by transmitting marching orders to them through movements of his standard. Interestingly, he also functioned as the century’s banker, dealing with the soldiers’ financial affairs. While a soldier caught in the horror of battle might have thought twice about defending his unit’s standard, he might well also have felt a stronger attachment to the man who managed his money for him!

At the shop-floor level were the eight soldiers of the tent party who shared a leather tent and messed together, their tent and cooking gear carried on a mule when the legion was on the march. Each tent party would inevitably have established its own pecking order based upon the time-honoured factors of strength, aggression, intelligence – and the rough humour required to survive in such a harsh world. The men that came to dominate their tent parties would have been the century’s unofficial backbone, candidates for promotion to watch officer. They would also have been vital to their tent mates’ cohesion under battlefield conditions, when the relatively thin leadership team could not always exert sufficient presence to inspire the individual soldier to stand and fight amid the horrific chaos of combat.

The other element of the legion was a small 120-man detachment of cavalry, used for scouting and the carrying of messages between units. The regular army depended on auxiliary cavalry wings, drawn from those parts of the empire where horsemanship was a way of life, for their mounted combat arm. Which leads us to consider the other side of the army’s two-tier system.

The auxiliary cohorts, unlike the legions alongside which they fought, were not Roman citizens, although the completion of a twenty-five-year term of service did grant both the soldier and his children citizenship. The original auxiliary cohorts had often served in their homelands, as a means of controlling the threat of large numbers of freshly conquered barbarian warriors, but this changed after the events of the first century AD. The Batavian revolt in particular – when the 5,000-strong Batavian cohorts rebelled and destroyed two Roman legions after suffering intolerable provocation during a recruiting campaign gone wrong – was the spur for the Flavian policy for these cohorts to be posted away from their home provinces. The last thing any Roman general wanted was to find his legions facing an army equipped and trained to fight in the same way. This is why the reader will find the auxiliary cohorts described in the Empire series, true to the historical record, representing a variety of other parts of the empire, including Tungria, which is now part of modern-day Belgium.

Auxiliary infantry was equipped and organised in so close a manner to the legions that the casual observer would have been hard put to spot the differences. Often their armour would be mail, rather than plate, sometimes weapons would have minor differences, but in most respects an auxiliary cohort would be the same proposition to an enemy as a legion cohort. Indeed there are hints from history that the auxiliaries may have presented a greater challenge on the battlefield. At the battle of Mons Graupius in Scotland, Tacitus records that four cohorts of Batavians and two of Tungrians were sent in ahead of the legions and managed to defeat the enemy without requiring any significant assistance. Auxiliary cohorts were also often used on the flanks of the battle line, where reliable and well drilled troops are essential to handle attempts to outflank the army. And while the legions contained soldiers who were as much tradesmen as fighting men, the auxiliary cohorts were primarily focused on their fighting skills. By the end of the second century there were significantly more auxiliary troops serving the empire than were available from the legions, and it is clear that Hadrian’s Wall would have been invalid as a concept without the mass of infantry and mixed infantry/cavalry cohorts that were stationed along its length.

As for horsemen, the importance of the empire’s 75,000 or so auxiliary cavalrymen, capable of much faster deployment and manoeuvre than the infantry, and essential for successful scouting, fast communications and the denial of reconnaissance information to the enemy, cannot be overstated. Rome simply did not produce anything like the strength in mounted troops needed to avoid being at a serious disadvantage against those nations which by their nature were cavalry-rich. As a result, as each such nation was conquered their mounted forces were swiftly incorporated into the army until, by the early first century BC, the decision was made to disband what native Roman cavalry as there was altogether, in favour of the auxiliary cavalry wings.

Named for their usual place on the battlefield, on the flanks or ‘wings’ of the line of battle, the cavalry cohorts were commanded by men of the equestrian class with prior experience as legion military tribunes, and were organised around the basic 32-man turma, or squadron. Each squadron was commanded by a decurion, a position analogous with that of the infantry centurion. This officer was assisted by a pair of junior officers: the duplicarius or double-pay, equivalent to the role of optio, and the sesquipilarius or pay-and-a-half, equal in stature to the infantry watch officer. As befitted the cavalry’s more important military role, each of these ranks was paid about 40 per cent more than the infantry equivalent.

Taken together, the legions and their auxiliary support presented a standing army of over 400,000 men by the time of the events described in the Empire series. Whilst this was sufficient to both hold down and defend the empire’s 6.5 million square kilometres for a long period of history, the strains of defending a 5,000-kilometre-long frontier, beset on all sides by hostile tribes, were also beginning to manifest themselves. The prompt move to raise three new legions undertaken by the new emperor Septimius Severus in 197 AD, in readiness for over a decade spent shoring up the empire’s crumbling borders, provides clear evidence that there were never enough legions and cohorts for such a monumental task. This is the backdrop for the Empire series, which will run from 192 AD well into the early third century, following both the empire’s and Marcus Valerius Aquila’s travails throughout this fascinatingly brutal period of history.

‘Excuse me for bothering you sir. Do I have the honour of addressing Sextus Dexter Bassus?’

The man in the doorway nodded, playing a forbidding look over the two men standing before him in the small but neat front garden of his house, rendered private from the main road that climbed the Aventine Hill by a substantial wall that ran all the way around the property’s modest grounds. His look of irritation was due in no small part to the fact that the unexpected callers had summarily dismissed the slave who had opened the door to them, peremptorily telling him to fetch his master on the apparent grounds of the matter at hand’s ‘sensitivity’.

‘You do. And you are?’

The taller of the two men, who seemed to be doing the talking for them both, smiled in a self-deprecating manner.

‘Me? A man of no great importance, although this may help to establish my bona fides in the matter I am desirous of discussing with you.’ The caller lifted the end of his belt to display a stylised tri-form spearhead decoration in polished silver. ‘This, Dexter Bassus, is the badge of a beneficiarius, a man chosen to give trusted service to one of his military superiors. In my own humble case I am just such a man, in the service of an extremely high-ranking military officer. His absolute need to stay nameless in this matter means that I am in turn required to nurture a similar desire for anonymity. I’m afraid that all I can tell you here, on your doorstep, is that my visit concerns events that occurred in the province of Britannia a little over two years ago.’

Bassus leaned forward, his eyes narrowing.

‘If this is about my brother—’

A raised hand stopped him in mid-sentence, the self-assured nature of the unnamed messenger’s gesture making him start backwards a fraction despite himself.

‘There’s nothing more to be said out here, I’m afraid, Dexter Bassus. If I might just come inside for a moment, I’m sure that everything will become clear …’

Bassus looked past the beneficiarius at the man waiting patiently behind him who was, if not completely ragged in his state of dress, demonstrating a robust attitude towards the requirements of both fashion and the regard of his fellow citizens. His eyes were roaming the modest garden with a faraway look, as if he’d never seen such a thing in all of his life.

‘And who’s this? Another one of your “high-ranking officer’s” men?’

The other man laughed, evidently amused with the idea.

‘Silus? Not likely! Silus is a man of the streets, and not accustomed to the workings of the Palatine, if you take my meaning?’

Bassus’s eyebrows raised at the mention of the hill upon which the imperial palaces and the throne’s sprawling bureaucracy had taken root.

‘The Palatine?’

The caller smiled thinly.

‘I can say no more. As to my companion here, I keep him handy whenever I travel through the city alone, especially at this time of the evening. And there are risks connected with my visit to your house that go well beyond the simple danger of robbery with violence. I can make it no plainer for you, I’m afraid – either we discuss this matter in a more private place, such as your study, or both Silus and I will simply vanish from your door, never to trouble you again. I will tell my sponsor that you chose to be uncooperative, and he in turn will resign himself to your never knowing the truth about what happened in Britannia. It really is very much up to you.’

Bassus thought for a moment, clearly torn between caution and curiosity.

‘You can come in, but that man has a look to him that I don’t care for. He can wait in the garden.’

Silus smiled, a disquieting vision given the state of his teeth, and his employer mirrored his expression with a nod of agreement that was almost a bow.

‘How delightful for him! Silus is enormously fond of gardens, given his rather plain accommodation in the Subura district. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to enjoy the fruits of your gardener’s labour in this pleasant evening’s warmth, while you and I discuss our business with a little more privacy than can be achieved on your doorstep.’

Bassus waited until the bodyguard had strolled away to sit on one of his stone benches before ushering the mystery visitor through the doorway and into the cool of the house. The man took two steps and stopped, looking about him with evident approval.

‘Very nice, Dexter Bassus, very nice indeed! Someone in your household clearly has the most exquisite taste in interior decoration … The lady of the house, perhaps, or possibly a particularly talented slave? Whoever it is, you’re a lucky man!’

Bassus grunted a perfunctory agreement and ushered the visitor into his private office, scowling at the room’s door as it creaked loudly on its hinges. He indicated a chair facing his desk, behind which he installed himself while the other man lowered himself into a sitting position with a slight grimace.

‘My back isn’t all that it used to be, I’m afraid. All those years on horseback criss-crossing the empire at the emperor’s behest have quite taken the spring out of me, as you can see …’

He waited a moment, as if inviting Bassus into his conversation, but the other man only stared at him in bemusement.

‘I know, not the subject you invited me in to discuss, and I apologise. A man who has previously enjoyed robust good health does have the irritating habit of sharing the smallest aches and pains with all and sundry when they eventually catch up with him.’ He smiled into his host’s darkening frown. ‘Yes indeed, to business! You are, Sextus Dexter Bassus, the brother of one Quintus Dexter Bassus, are you not?’

Bassus shook his head, his voice laced with irritation.

‘We’ve already established that!’

The visitor leaned back in his chair with a smile, steepling his fingers.

‘Forgive my unavoidable disagreement, but in point of fact, Dexter Bassus, we have not. When I mentioned Britannia out there on your doorstep, you promptly asked if your brother was involved, but you didn’t ever actually mention his name. Precision is a quality for which I am known, and I cannot afford to allow that reputation to be sullied by a moment’s inattention. So—’

‘Yes!’ Bassus sat forward, slapping the desk and fixing his guest with a hard stare, his patience clearly at its limits. ‘I am the youngest brother of Quintus Dexter Bassus, who was, before you spend another lifetime working your way around to the question, the tribune and commanding officer of the Second Tungrian Cohort in northern Britannia. He died two years ago in the uprising that overran the frontier wall built by the Emperor Hadrian, and he left me, his only surviving sibling, as the owner of this house. Does that cover all of your questions?’

‘Not quite.’

Bassus sat back again with an expression of dismay that was bordering on something more than irritation.

‘I think I should have you thrown—’

The messenger spoke over him without any change in his expression.

‘Yes, I think you probably should, Dexter Bassus, but you’re not going to show me the door, not yet. For one thing, you don’t know to which of the empire’s esteemed military men, a well-regarded senator by the way, you might be giving offence, and for another …’ He smiled faintly at the big man. ‘The circumstances of your brother’s death were never made clear to you, were they? Or, indeed what happened to his wife, your sister-in-law. You’ll remember her quite well, I’d imagine, given that this was her house?’

Bassus looked at him with a different expression, his anger of a moment before replaced by something approaching horror.

‘No …’

The visitor pursed his lips and shrugged without any discernible sympathy for the man sitting opposite as his bad news sank in.

‘Well, as it happens, very much yes, I’m afraid. The lady in question survived the barbarian attack quite neatly, and as you would expect, eventually remarried. Her new husband is an officer in the First Tungrian Cohort, a nice young man, indeed in point of fact, more of a gentleman really, the son of a senator. He’s almost supernaturally skilled with just about any weapon you can name; the result, I am reliably informed, of his having trained with both a soldier and a gladiator throughout his youth. Recently, however, he’s fallen on hard times …’ The beneficiarius leaned forward to confide in his host, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. ‘His father was unfortunate enough to get himself executed for treason, you see. You might recall the excitement in the city at the time, when Appius Valerius Aquila was accused of plotting against the emperor? There was no truth in it, but since when did that ever stop an emperor like Commodus when he takes a fancy to a man’s estate? I believe the Aquila villa was even possessed of a small private arena, which I would imagine made it impossible for the young emperor to resist, given his known predilection for a gladiator.’

He sat back again with a smile that was bordering on the beatific.

‘So, to sum up, your brother dies, by his own men’s swords I should add – he seems to have been a little too keen on the stricter aspects of military discipline from the sound of it – and leaves his young wife, the legal owner of this house, a widow. She then marries a rather dangerous young man who seems to go through anyone and anything that gets in his way, like a spearpoint through tunic wool, and they manage to survive the rest of the war with the tribes. Not to mention at least one attempt by the imperial authorities to bring him to justice. And now they’re here.’

Bassus jerked bolt upright in his chair.

‘Here?’

‘Well not here, as such, but they are less than a mile away, living in the military transit barracks on the Ostian road. And yes, I can only imagine what must be going through your mind …’

A loud crash echoed through the house followed by the sound of a woman’s voice raised in protest from the room above them. The beneficiarius raised his eyebrows, tipping his head to the study door.

‘Trouble in the kitchen, from the sound of it! Mind you, I expect your wife will be on top of the problem. Probably better if we leave her to it?’

The sound of footsteps sounded on the floorboards above them, and then down the stairs as the woman of the house evidently came from whatever she had been doing to investigate. Silence fell, and the beneficiarius leaned forwards again with his eyebrows raised in question.

‘So, Sextus Dexter Bassus, the question is this: what do you think we should do about this change in your circumstances? After all, it probably isn’t going to be very long before this rather excitable young man appears at your door with his wife and demands that you vacate her property …’

Bassus looked down at his hands for a moment.

‘I’m not like my brother … he was always the forceful one. Do you think …’

‘Do I think what, Dexter Bassus? Do I think I could help? Possibly. You want this whole problem to go away, I presume? It wouldn’t be cheap.’

The answer was instant.

‘I have money! Not enough to buy a house like this, but enough to reward you generously for any help that you could provide in … relieving me of this problem. Would five … no, ten thousand sestertii be enough?’

The beneficiarius shook his head with a hint of sadness.

‘More than enough to employ a man like Silus, much more, but then a man like Silus isn’t going to be capable of dealing with this problem. This will require a team of men, and one in particular with the cunning to lure this young man into a carefully designed trap. A man like me, to be precise.’ He inspected his fingernails for a moment. ‘And I have a sum more of the order of twenty-five thousand in mind.’

The room was silent for a moment while Bassus digested the offer, and silence hung over the house beyond the study’s stout wooden door. When he answered his voice was edged with incredulity.

‘Twenty-five thousand sestertii? But that’s—’

‘Everything you have? Not quite. At this point in time, you have this lovely town house, and your good health to boot. There might well come a time not far in the future when you have neither, unless this young man is stopped from carrying through his plans to dispossess you of his wife’s property.’

Bassus nodded disconsolately.

‘Very well, half now and half when the job is complete and proven to my satisfaction.’

He stood, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, going round the desk and stooping to prise a floor tile up from its place, reaching into the gap beneath it to pull out a good-sized purse. To his surprise the visitor stood up, stretched with a grimace and then called out in a loud voice.

‘Very well, Silus, we’re in here!’

With the same slow creak of hinges in need of oil, the study’s door opened, revealing the bodyguard standing stock-still in the frame. His face and tunic were spattered with blood, and a long dagger dangled from his right hand in an almost nonchalant manner. Bassus gaped at him, finding his voice after a long pause.

‘You …’

Words failed him, and the nameless messenger nodded helpfully.

‘Killed your cook, her husband the butler, their daughter the kitchen servant and lastly your wife? That does seem to be the inescapable conclusion. And yes, obviously you’re next, now that you’ve paid to have young Marcus Valerius Aquila murdered. Your desire for the problem to go away will be honoured in full, but just not for your benefit. More for mine, really.’

Bassus shrank back against the wall behind him, his face twisted in terror as Silus advanced into the room, looking to his master for the signal to make the last kill.

‘You … you were just waiting for me to show you where the money was!’

The anonymous visitor smiled again, shaking his head with a sad smile.

‘Not really. Did you not wonder how my price just happened to coincide precisely with the amount of money you have left from that which you inherited when your brother died? There actually was enough there to buy you a nice place, wasn’t there? Not quite this pleasant, but good enough and in a respectable area. Greed got the better of you, I’d imagine. Why buy a house when you already had one, since your brother’s wife showed no sign of returning home, eh? I’ve known what you’re worth down to the last sestertius for a while now, and where you hide the money, but robbery was never my aim. I didn’t want to steal your money, I wanted you to pay me to deal with the Aquila boy, a job which I can assure you I’ll carry through to the full extent of your rather heavy purse and beyond, if need be.’

Bassus shook his head in disbelief.

‘So why …?’

He waved a hand at the bloody knife, his mouth opening and closing silently.

‘Why kill you all? Because I need this house as part of the plan to fulfil your last orders, that’s why, and you and the rest of your household would at best have been inconvenient loose ends.’

A waved hand set Silus in motion, walking slowly around the desk with his dagger held ready. He raised the knife, speaking to Bassus in a matter-of-fact tone that was clearly calculated to soothe the panicking victim in his last moments.

‘Keep nice and still mate. It’ll be a lot quicker and less painful if you do.’

Bassus looked about him frantically for a way out of his predicament, but before he could make any move the knife man stepped forward quickly, whipping his dagger up and thrusting it deeply into the point where his cowering victim’s neck and shoulder met in the classic street executioner’s stroke.

‘Ah! You bast …’

Clutching reflexively at the wound with blood squirting between his fingers, he tottered, stepped forward one seemingly drunken pace, and then stopped, swaying on the spot. Eyes rolling upwards as consciousness failed, he slumped to the floor and lay still, a puddle of blood spreading from the wound with one small rivulet trickling down into the underground hiding place from which he had taken the purse. The beneficiarius looked down at him with an expression of pity.

‘How disappointingly stupid. He fell for the beneficiarius story the moment he saw this meaningl