Rome 4: The Art of War by M. C. Scott Page B

house and spend the next few days chasing shadows.
    Running, I prayed to Jupiter Best and Greatest, and, miraculously, my prayer was answered, for as I turned the corner I saw Pantera himself being summarily ejected from the house with theoak leaves by a small, dark-haired woman with a voice like a harpy.
    I skidded to a halt and signalled the men to spread out into the crowd. I had Juvens with me, plus Artocus and Saturninus, two solidly reliable men of the IVth Macedonica, whom, with Lucius’ agreement, I had commandeered for the duration of our hunt. We had all fought together in the recent past; we knew each other’s signals and likely movements as well as we knew the marching patterns of our morning parades.
    Within two paces, each of us had slowed to a walk and were threading through the men, women and children who filled the street.
    Juvens was nearest the door: Juvens, the least predictable of our team, who treated this entire undertaking as if it were a new and exciting adventure, which, as I frequently said, only showed how utterly he had failed to grasp the situation.
    I was in command of this unit, though, not him, and so I pushed slowly through the heaving, sweating mass of humanity, and peered through a tangle of acrobatic limbs, and saw that Pantera was now out on the street.
    I sound as if I was sure it was him, when in truth I hoped it was, which is different. It might have been Pantera, but then again it might not; I had no idea how accurate was Lucius’ information, and in my experience, if you pay good coin for something as intangible as a sighting of a stranger few people can recognize, there will be a great many such sightings for exactly as long as it takes you to come up with some valid system of verification.
    Lucius was far from gullible, but he did have an air of hurried desperation about him and desperate men often listen closest to those who tell them what they want to hear.
    The man who might have been Pantera fell forward, shoved by the woman in the house. As the door slammed behind him, hetucked neatly, rolled forward and came up on his feet, like one of the acrobats.
    He looked furtive, but not theatrically so, if you get my drift. He had a quick look round in case anyone had seen him doing something that wasn’t the usual act of a drunken man, but when he found that the crowd was apparently still absorbed with the show he spat out a mouthful of dust, brushed himself clean and sauntered off down the street towards the Inn of the Crossed Spears.
    I got a decent look at him then and became more hopeful we’d got the right man. Certainly he had the right build and height and his hair was the colour of old leaves, just as I remembered it. It had been burnished a little by the summer’s sun, but then if he’d been in Judaea that made sense.
    The others were looking for my lead so I signalled with the flat of my hand stretched out straight like a javelin, which means ‘Follow’, and we all four began to thread our way through a crowd that didn’t want to move, even for Guards.
    Particularly, you might think, for us, the newly made Guards, newly brought here, newly prone to pillaging the city that had become our home. The officers of our new Guard were Roman, mostly, but the men were from the provinces and to them Rome was just another city under occupation.
    I’ll accept that the Urban cohorts and the vigiles of the Watch were doing their best to keep order, but they were four cohorts each against four legions and, worse, they were led by Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, and he had quite enough difficulties of his own to contend with. Being brother to a traitor meant he had to spend his every waking hour proving loyalty to Vitellius, and calling his cohorts on to the streets against the emperor’s new Guard was hardly going to help his cause.
    The end result was that here, in Rome herself, the pax Romana hung by an absurdly fine thread, and this evening in particular,hot, sultry,