Rome 4: The Art of War Read Online Free PDF Page B

wait under the combined gaze of the three, each one cast in bronze, three times life-sized, standing amongst the columns in mute tolerance of us mortals who milled around their feet.
    It was cold, then. We had stopped marching and the rain sank into our bones. I was a stinking mass of fulled wool and wet linen; a drenched dog would have smelled better.
    The priests had lit extra braziers against the cold, and were burning incense on them by the fistful. I breathed in feathers of blue smoke that tickled my nose to the edge of a sneeze until, eventually, we officers were summoned forward into the central sanctum. In there, I didn’t sneeze at all.
    Since I was a boy, I have been struck silent by this place, by the weight of empire bearing down on the roof beams. Built by the good king Tarquin at the founding of Rome, dedicated by the hero Horatius, a shrine of some sort has stood on this site since the city was no more than a spark in one man’s imagination.
    Legend said that if the temple were to fall, Rome would fall with it:everyone knew this. Nobody, of course, expected it to happen.
    ‘Sextus Geminus! Formerly of the Fourth Macedonica!’
    My head snapped up; it does when you hear your own name. I looked to the altar and there, staring at me, was Aulus Caecina, legionary legate of that very IVth Macedonica, the general who had driven us through the Alps at a time when everyone else said winter had made the routes impassable. If any one man made Vitellius emperor, it was him. I have never quite known how to be in his company, and knew now least of all.
    At least he was alone. There were priests on either side of him, of course, but no other officers. I had been afraid that Lucius might have been there; seeing Caecina alone was the first good thing that happened that day.
    I did what eighty-three men before me had done, and seventy-six did after. I took eight good paces forward, knelt before the bright, hot fire, and stretched out my left hand.
    A priest standing at Caecina’s right side thrashed the air about my head with a laurel branch, sign of victory. Another priest, smaller and broader in the beam, glanced down at his notes, filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Sextus Geminus! First centurion, fifth cohort, the new Praetorian Guards!’
    So that was my new rank. It was the same as the old one, except that the Guard was … the Guard. Better paid, kept in Rome, responsible for guarding the emperor’s life with our own.
    Caecina was talking to me, genially enough.
    ‘… so thoroughly deserved. I never saw a man swing his century faster to face a new enemy. This is small recompense for your dedication and valour—’
    He was good. He caught my hand and slid on a silver arm ring, which was my reward for my part in the battle at Cremona. He pushed it up beyond the elbow with the same kind ofdeft, impersonal precision the priests use when they cut a bull’s throat.
    It was his words that mattered far more than what he did. There was a point in the assault on Cremona when I’d turned three centuries round to face an assault on our right flank and he remembered it as if he’d been there in the mud and the slaughter, hearing every cursed command.
    Very likely, he remembered something equally relevant for every one of the hundred and fifty-nine men with me; it’s who he was, and that kind of care for his men was one of the reasons we’d mutinied against Galba when he asked us to, and then followed him to the brink of civil war and back.
    Like Corbulo, like Vespasian in the east, Caecina was a soldier’s soldier and we all respected him for it. What the rest didn’t know was what he was like behind closed doors. Nor had I until the night before.
    The trophy ring fitted perfectly. Cool silver hugged my flesh, so that I could feel the hard, fast throb of my veins against it. My whole body was shuddering, finely, like a leaf; if anything was going to happen, it had to happen now.
    And it did.
    As Caecina stepped back, the