Saviour of Rome [Gaius Valerius Verrens 7] Read Online Free PDF Page A

certain. ‘I saw it in Emesa and with Queen Berenice. To the Emperor a man like you is a weapon, one to be used sparingly and only in time of dire need, but a weapon all the same. Any new honour would come through Titus. If the Emperor has sent for you it is to send you into danger.’ She raised her head and kissed him full on the lips. ‘We must make use of what time we have.’
    Much later he heard a whisper.
    ‘Promise me one thing, Valerius.’
    ‘If it is in my power.’
    ‘Come back to me.’

III
    Valerius felt dwarfed by the enormous marble-clad buildings that towered over him like cliffs as he climbed the gentle slope of the Victory Road on the north flank of the Palatine Hill. His mood was wary, but approaching the seat of the Empire’s most powerful man held no terrors for him. He’d first walked this path almost ten years before, at the Emperor Nero’s bidding, resigned to what seemed certain death. In the years since, he’d gained honourable scars and grey hairs in three wars, been duped, betrayed and dishonoured, lost friends and lovers, but finally, he hoped, found peace.
    He’d changed and so had his city.
    When he looked out over the Forum towards the Esquiline Hill, the sea of red-tiled roofs was pocked with gaping blackened holes, the ongoing legacy of the great fire of eight years earlier. The owners of the burned-out buildings were either dead or didn’t have the resources to rebuild their holdings. To his right lay the great Golden House villa complex Nero had built on the charred remains of an entire district, and the lake where he had staged grandiose naval engagements in which ship-borne gladiators fought to the death. To his left, the Capitoline and the reborn Temple of Jupiter, greatest and best, the vast structure at last close to completion after two years of work. Valerius had playedhis own, unwitting, part in the destruction of the temple and he had an irrational sense that its resurrection went hand in hand with his own recovery after the horrors of Jerusalem. The project had been the first act of Vespasian’s reign, funded by the
fiscus judaicus
, a tax on Jewish males across the Empire who were continuing to pay for the failed rebellion in their homeland.
    He announced himself to the black-clad gate guards. Once they’d satisfied themselves he was on the list of visitors, they passed him through into the gardens of what had originally been the palace of Tiberius. Here he was met by the Emperor’s secretary, Junius Mauricus, an ambitious young man who greeted him with the coolness of one who resented Valerius’s ease of access to his master. Valerius responded amiably enough. No point in making an enemy of an official whose freedman predecessor was now a member of the Senate. Mauricus led him along the familiar marble corridors with their alcoves filled with busts of Vespasian’s predecessors. Nero was there, and Claudius, alongside Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula, but Valerius noted that neither Galba nor Otho nor Vitellius had been given space. Their absence puzzled him, because Vespasian had never struck him as a vengeful or vindictive man. The Emperor had offered Vitellius his life if he laid down the purple, even though the former governor of Germania was as responsible as any man for the civil war that had come so close to bringing down the Empire. The memory of the corpulent emperor who had been his friend reminded Valerius of the probability that Vespasian had summoned him to be ordered on some clandestine mission that would take him into danger again.
    He knew he could refuse. Titus had hinted as much when they’d inspected the part-built villa north of Fidenae. ‘You deserve all this and more, Valerius, for the service you have done the Empire and my family, never forget that.’
    But without Vespasian’s support would the Senate have endorsed Valerius’s senior military tribune’s share of the vast spoils of Jerusalem where he had served Titus in an entirely