Enemy of Rome

Начало книги

‘You are sentenced to death.’

The verdict sent a jolt through Gaius Valerius Verrens as if he’d been drenched in ice melt. All the air seemed to be sucked from the sweltering tent and the three officers facing him behind the rickety campaign table shimmered like a desert mirage. In the centre, Vedius Aquila, commander of the Thirteenth legion, continued to outline the prisoner’s crimes. Valerius could see his lips moving, but their meaning was lost in the void between. This couldn’t be happening.

The civil war that had torn the Roman Empire apart since the death of Servius Sulpicius Galba almost nine months earlier should have been over. Galba’s murderer, Otho, was dead, his army defeated on the damp plain between Cremona and Bedriacum by forces loyal to the governor of Germania, Aulus Vitellius. Now Vitellius sat on a golden throne wearing an Emperor’s cloak and an Emperor’s laurels, his position confirmed by the Senate and people of Rome. Division, deception and the betrayal of old loyalties are the very stuff of civil war. Valerius Verrens counted Vitellius as his friend, but he’d fought for Otho at Bedriacum, as deputy commander of the First Adiutrix legion. He’d watched the First fight like champions, but its cohorts had been annihilated when the army’s left wing collapsed. An eagle was won, but the First’s eagle had been lost, and the loss of an eagle was the loss of a legion’s pride, its honour and its soul. Valerius somehow escaped the final massacre, only to discover that another man now disputed Vitellius’s claim to the throne. That man was Titus Flavius Vespasian, proconsul of Judaea, whose Egyptian and Syrian legions, preceded by a vanguard from Moesia and Pannonia, were now marching on northern Italia.

Читать дальше →