Rome's Lost Son Read Free Page A

blanket above.
    ‘Where do you want to question them, sir?’ Thracius asked, thrusting a prisoner down onto his knees, pulling his hair back and placing a bloodied blade on the exposed throat.
    Sabinus stared, forlorn, at the sleek little liburnian, just visible in the growing light, under full sail and oars, running past them a quarter of a mile away at a speed that neither the trireme nor the biremes could hope to match for very long. ‘I don’t need to any more. Finish them.’
    A scream of terrified pleading erupted from the prisoners as the first was despatched, and Sabinus felt a stab of disgust at himself for ordering their deaths solely out of pique at being outsmarted. ‘Hold, Thracius!’
    The centurion arrested his stroke as the tip of his sword pricked the throat of a second shrieking prisoner and looked back at his superior.
    ‘Throw them into the water; they can take their chances with the rest. Then get your men back to our ship.’
    As the marines obeyed the order, Sabinus walked back to the trireme, calculating just how he would frame what he knew would be a very difficult letter to Pallas, Claudius’ favoured freedman and the real power behind the throne of a drooling, malleable fool. Not even his brother Vespasian, who, thanks to the influence of Pallas, was due to become suffect-consul for the last two months of the year, would be able to protect him from the wrath of those in power.
    And their wrath would be justified.
    Sabinus was under no illusions; he had failed catastrophically and the embassy was now on its way to report back to the Great King in his capital, Ctesiphon, on the Tigris.
    There would be no way to hide his guilt. It was a certainty that Pallas also had agents amongst the Dacians and news of the embassy and Sabinus’ failure would reach him within the next month or two. It was also a certainty that Narcissus and Callistus, Pallas’ fellow freedmen and rivals whom he had outmanoeuvred, by making Agrippina empress, and relegated to second place inClaudius’ pliable estimation, would also hear of Sabinus’ failure. They would be sure to use it as a political weapon in the vicious infighting that pervaded the imperial palace.
    Sabinus cursed the weakness of the Emperor that gave rise to such combustible politics and he cursed the men and women who took advantage of that weakness for their own gain; but most of all he cursed his own weakness: the nausea he felt each time he stepped onto a ship. Tonight that weakness had addled his mind and caused him to make a mistake.
    Because of that weakness he had failed Rome.

PART I

    R OME , D ECEMBER AD 51

CHAPTER I
    P ERSISTENT AND SHRILL , the cry echoed around the walls and marble columns of the atrium; a torment to all who endured it.
    Titus Flavius Vespasianus gritted his teeth, determined not to be moved by the pitiful wail as it rose and fell, occasionally pausing for a ragged breath before bellowing out again with renewed, lung-filled vigour. The suffering that it conveyed had to be borne and Vespasian knew that should he not have the stomach for it he would lose the ongoing battle of wills; and that was something that he could not afford to do.
    A new cacophony of anguish emitted from the writhing bundle in his wife’s arms, its movements caught in the flickering glow of the log fire spitting and crackling in the atrium hearth. Vespasian winced and then held his head high and crooked his left arm before him as his body slave draped his toga over and around his well-muscled, compact frame, watched by Titus, Vespasian’s eleven-year-old son.
    With the heavy woollen garment eventually hanging to his satisfaction and the howls showing no sign of abating, Vespasian eased into the pair of red leather, senatorial slippers that his slave held out for him. ‘The heels, Hormus.’ Hormus ran a finger around the back of each shoe so that his master’s feet fitted snugly and then stood and backed away with deference, leaving Titus facing