by Ian Ross
‘Constantine Augustus! The gods preserve you for us! Your salvation is our salvation! In truth we speak! On our oath we speak!’
For what seemed a long time there was only breathless silence. It had been months, maybe years, since Castus had felt so utterly alone. He thought of his men, of Diogenes and Modestus, Rogatianus and the other few survivors of that desperate foray across the river valley three months before. He had left them at Colonia Agrippina, only the day after he received the imperial summons. He remembered them cheering him, drinking with him before his departure. Would he ever see them again? He thought back to the days of the campaign against the Bructeri, the long marches after that battle in the valley, the burning towns and the columns of slaves. The enemy had put up no further fight, but it had been hard, wearying toil all the same, a tedium of sweat and blisters, dirt and badly healed wounds, of realising the loss of men he had not known had fallen. All that was behind him now. The life of the legion was behind him, perhaps for good. The simple life he had always known, and loved.
‘Aurelius Castus.’ The voice was high and lisping, as if it came from the dead air. ‘As it has come to our notice that you have performed with valour upon the field of battle, and upheld with great courage and loyalty your military vows, it is the desire of the Divine Wisdom that you be received into the body of the Protectores of the Sacred Bodyguard. Approach the altar and make sacrifice.’
Four steps, and the low altar was before him, the images of the gods lit by a twisting flame. A grave-faced attendant stood beside it with a gold platter; Castus kissed his fingers and touched them to his brow, then took a pinch of incense and sprinkled it onto the flame, trying not to cough as the fumes rose.
‘Now recite the oath.’
Tight-chested, he drew a long breath. For a moment he feared his voice was gone; to speak into that vast hush was surely an act of madness. The honour being conferred upon him seemed a vast weight – most men were not elevated to the Protectores until they had served twenty years or more. It was a distinguished position: the Protectores were an elite corps, the closest bodyguards of the emperor, all of them individually selected. Castus felt the pressure of an immense expectation upon him, but he found the words, the phrases of the terrible vow he had been taught. He raised his hand, and heard his voice reciting them.
‘I swear to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, to Sol Invictus, to all the immortal gods and goddesses of Rome, and to the emperor himself, that I shall be loyal to the Emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus, his children, household, and descendants throughout my life, both in word, deed, and thought, holding as friends those they hold as friends and considering those as enemies whom they judge to be enemies.
‘I shall not be sparing of my body or my soul or my life, but as Protector of the Sacred Bodyguard I will face every peril in the emperor’s service in accordance with this vow. If I should recognise or hear spoken, plotted, or done anything contrary to this, I will report it and be an enemy of the person speaking, plotting, or doing harm to the emperor or his family. Whomsoever they judge to be enemies, or who imperils them or their safety by arms or by civil war, I shall not cease to hunt him down by land and by sea with iron in hand.
‘If I should do anything contrary to this oath or fail to do what I have sworn, I impose a curse upon myself encompassing the destruction and total extinction of my body, soul, life, children, and my entire family, so neither earth nor sea may receive their bodies nor bear fruit for them.’
A brief pause, then the same voice spoke again. ‘You may approach the Presence.’
They had given him soft-soled shoes that pinched his toes, and he walked without the familiar grate and stamp of hobnails. He kept his gaze on the floor ahead of him, then ascended carefully the first two steps of the dais.
‘Kneel, and perform the Adoration of the Purple.’
Castus eased himself down on one knee on the cold stone. Before him was the hem of the imperial robe, spread upon the marble floor of the dais. He stooped forward, and took hold of the heavy cloth. His fingers felt clumsy, the scar on the back of his right hand still raw and livid. He lifted the hem of the purple robe to his mouth and lightly kissed it, then let it drop.
‘You may receive the codicil.’
Still kneeling, Castus raised his hands with palms spread. He was aware of the whisper of bodies moving quietly around him, and then his hands were draped with a strip of white linen embroidered in gold. He lifted his veiled hands towards the seated emperor, and felt something placed upon them. When he lowered his hands, a thin roll of vellum sealed in purple wax lay upon the linen strip. His letter of appointment.
‘Aurelius Castus.’ It was a shock to hear that voice again. He remembered it well, that same hard flat tone. The last time he had heard that voice, it had been screaming at him from the bloody spume of the flooded valley as the arrows whined around them. Did the emperor remember that Castus had ordered his men to retreat? If he had, that lapse had been forgiven now.
‘We accept you into our Corps of Protectores, with the rank of ducenarius,’ the emperor said. ‘May the gods give you strength in our service.’
Castus was still staring at the letter in his palms, but he could tell that the emperor had barely moved as he spoke. Not a trace of emotion in the words.
‘Stand,’ the lisping man said quietly, ‘make your salute, and retreat.’
Moving carefully, clasping the rolled codicil, Castus raised himself from the steps and took ten paces backwards, never once glancing up or turning himself from the emperor. Then he lifted his hand in salute.
‘Constantine Augustus!’ he said, and his words rang back at him. ‘The gods preserve you for us! Your salvation is our salvation!’ In the echoes of that sound the whole vast chamber seemed to stir into life, men moving to either side of him as the purple drapes descended once more.
Castus felt the tension break inside him. He was trembling, and the sealed imperial letter in his fist was growing damp with sweat. He was a Protector now, one of the elite guardians of the emperor himself. The swords around the throne. And nothing in his life would be the same again.
Part Two
7
January AD 309
‘You know what they’re calling you now, don’t you?’
Nigrinus gave a thin smile and shook his head.
‘The Flycatcher,’ Flaccianus told him, smirking. ‘I overheard them, but wasn’t sure what they meant at first – it had to be you, though.’
‘I can think of worse names.’
‘Seems you’re getting quite a reputation for yourself these days.’
‘What is a man without a reputation?’ Nigrinus said, shrugging. With a slim gold pin he speared one of the pickled olives from the dish on the table between them. ‘They find what I do undignified, is that it? The eagle does not catch flies.’
Outside the sealed room, the night was cold and the wind skittish, rattling at the shudders and moaning in the deep courtyard. It was late, and the sprawling imperial palace was mostly closed and darkened in sleep. Only in this minor wing of the School of Notaries was there light and subtle speech.
‘It’s more probably that thing you do with your mouth, when you’re thinking,’ Flaccianus said. He thinned his lips, then opened and closed his mouth, like a fish.
Nigrinus gave a sour grimace. He lifted the olive to his mouth. ‘Well, if my brothers in the imperial offices suspect I am merely catching flies...’ he said thoughtfully, before chewing and swallowing, ‘then it only makes them more careless, and my task more interesting.’
‘But isn’t that what you want?’ Flaccianus said. His fingers flexed and closed with a rattle of cheap rings. ‘To catch them, I mean?’
‘If they are doing wrong, it is my sworn duty as notary of the emperor to prevent them. Didn’t you take the same oath, when you joined the agentes in rebus?’
Flaccianus was laughing silently, his glistening cheeks bulging and contracting in the glow from the sing
le lamp. ‘Everyone takes the oath,’ he said. ‘Not everyone follows that particular clause so avidly.’ He helped himself to an olive, his fingers dabbling in the dish of oil. Nigrinus tightened his lips in disgust, then put down the pin and pushed the dish away from him.
‘What’s the news from the consistorium meeting?’ he said, turning to the stack of documents that Flaccianus had brought him, wax tablets and scrolls piled on the tabletop in the lamplight.
‘Mainly talk of the conference at Carnuntum,’ Flaccianus told him. He had noticed Nigrinus abandoning the olives, and drew the dish over to his side of the table. ‘It’s definite that Licinius has been proclaimed as the new western Augustus. Our Constantine has been officially demoted to Caesar, although nobody expects us to pay any attention. And Maxentius is officially declared a usurper and enemy of the people. Who is Licinius anyway?’
‘Old military friend of Galerius,’ Nigrinus said, running his fingers over the documents. As an agens in rebus, an imperial courier, Flaccianus was permitted to examine the mail, but forbidden to tamper with it in any way. Nigrinus, however, had managed to lean on him. He had a remit to investigate the communications of the household of the former Augustus Maximian, and identify any potentially treasonous dealings with the usurper Maxentius in Rome. A delicate task, and necessarily conducted in secrecy.
The orders came from his own chief, Aurelius Zeno, the primicerius notariorum. But it could also be a dangerous task, if the surveillance were discovered. Which was why Nigrinus had seen fit to widen his remit and investigate all communications between the palace and Italy, including those of Aurelius Zeno... One could never be too careful about these things, after all.
He selected a tablet, and with a practised flick of the gold pin he lifted the seal without breaking the wax impression. Only the emperor’s officials were permitted to use the imperial despatch service, and most of them used it for their own private correspondence as well. A tolerated abuse, and a useful one.
‘What of Maximian?’ he asked. Constantine’s difficult father-in-law had also attended the conference on the Danube. Its ostensible purpose: to restore the harmony of the empire. Real purpose, Nigrinus thought: a blatant bid by Maximian to have his own power restored.
‘Apparently he left empty-handed,’ Flaccianus said, idly sifting through a few of the documents. Nigrinus batted his fingers away. Flaccianus pursed his lips in assumed pique. ‘He did make a last bid to tempt Diocletian out of retirement.’
‘He did?’ Nigrinus looked up from the rather boring love letter he was scanning. ‘And?’
‘Diocletian said...’ Flaccianus began, and then chuckled. Not a pleasant sound. ‘He said... If you could see the size of the cabbages I’ve grown with my own hand at my villa at Spalatum, you wouldn’t ask such stupid things of me!’
Nigrinus smiled, despite himself, and had to look away. Diocletian had always been the intelligence behind the partnership of emperors. Maximian was all bluster and rage, good at leading men but impulsive, boorish and often rash. Nigrinus was glad that Diocletian had kept himself out of these current turmoils. He had always regarded the old senior emperor as an admirable figure, a titan in a world of comparative dwarfs. Let him remain with his cabbages. Heroes should know when their day is done.
‘So Maximian is coming back here to us,’ Flaccianus said, ‘to rejoin his household-in-exile.’
‘To rejoin his loving son-in-law and devoted daughter, you mean. Such is the line to take. Meanwhile, we must assume that the breach with his son remains officially irreparable.’
Nigrinus snapped open another of the tablets. More dull stuff, something about villa renovations. He tried to force himself to concentrate, but would far rather do this alone. Any amount of code might be concealed in such mundane material – although anyone genuinely planning treason would be unlikely to communicate it via the imperial post; all he could hope for were the ripples of conspiracy, the shadow of a plot. He was sure that such a conspiracy must exist; if it did not, it was his job to create it.
‘According to this,’ he said, studying the tablet, ‘the wife of Gregorius, comes rei militaris, claims that her husband had a dream in which he fell into a vat of purple dye.’
Flaccianus sucked in breath. ‘That might give a man ideas above his station!’ he said. ‘Very dangerous things, dreams.’
‘Yes, people should really try not to have them,’ Nigrinus said vaguely, his eyes flickering over the text on the tablet. ‘Or, if they must, they should try not to tell their wives about them... What of matters in Rome?’
‘There are food riots,’ Flaccianus said. ‘Maxentius sent in the Praetorians to put them down, which the plebs loved, of course. They’re beginning to regret their choice of usurper.’
‘He had no alternative, as long as Domitius Alexander holds Africa. He can choke off the grain supply whenever he wants.’
Domitius Alexander was another problem. The former governor-in-chief of the African provinces, apparently a feeble old man, had allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor by the provincials and the garrison. Just what the world needs now, Nigrinus thought: another emperor... So Alexander was an enemy of Maxentius, who believed that he should control Africa, and needed the grain. But was he yet an ally of Constantine? Nigrinus reminded himself that he should research links between those at Constantine’s court and the supporters of the African usurper.
‘Apparently Maxentius has also thrown out the high priest of the Christians,’ Flaccianus said. ‘He officially ended the persecution in Italy, declared their religion legitimate, allowed them to appoint a chief priest, but then they immediately fell to fighting among themselves. Seems that now we’re not persecuting them, they’re busily persecuting each other – one half reckons the other half surrendered their faith for a quiet life, or something. So Maxentius banished their man and installed his opponent. He’ll have no peace with them!’
‘Indeed not,’ Nigrinus said. He felt a laugh gathering in his chest and suppressed it. ‘Anything that vexes our enemies is a boon.’ But Constantine also favoured the Christians – would they cause such turmoil in his domains too?
There was nothing of interest in the documents, or nothing that his tired eyes could decipher. A shame: he always thought he would pick out the telling word or phrase, the key to the lock of treason. And with treason there came possibility...
‘If you are the Flycatcher,’ Flaccianus said as he gathered the documents back into his satchel, ‘what does that make me? One of the flies? Or am I a spider, perhaps, who helps you construct your webs?’
He was smiling, unctuous. Nigrinus said nothing – he needed no help constructing his webs. And a man like Flaccianus was strictly expendable anyway, he and all those others like him, weak and venal men, liars to their oath.
‘You do rather well by me,’ he said. ‘As I rise, you too shall rise. One hand, as they say, washes another... And for someone with such tastes as yours, I’d say I have proved remarkably open-handed to you.’
‘Tastes?’ Flaccianus said, and stretched his mouth in a yawn. Nigrinus looked away. ‘Oh, that... Why, that’s no cause for shame. I’m a man; my blood is red. Anyway, the deified emperor Tiberius is said to have enjoyed much the same sort of thing.’
Nigrinus fought down an expression of disgust. Surely, he thought, Flaccianus did not train infants to swim around him as he bathed and suck at his genitals, as that most depraved old emperor was said to have done? That was in the biography by Suetonius, he reflected. Such a quaint old style too, the Latin of two hundred years past. Emperors could never get away with such gross perversions now: the solemn mantle of state weighed too heavily upon them. The awesome burden of power. Or did they merely lack imagination these days? And perhaps such enormous gravitas made them brittle too...
‘There is an anecdote about the emperor Domitian,’ he said in a musing tone, still thinking about the biographies of Suetonius. ‘He enjoyed catching flies too. But apparently the black tyrant claimed that the lot of
emperors is never happy. Nobody ever believes in conspiracies against them until the conspirators are successful, which tends to leave the emperor dead.’
‘An interesting conundrum – for the likes of you. After all, treasonable action is seldom called treason by posterity, if it succeeds.’
‘Exactly,’ Nigrinus said with a tight smile. Very occasionally Flaccianus surprised him with his acuity. He leaned back on the end of the couch, steepling his narrow fingers. ‘So, to profitably uncover a conspiracy, one must first wait for the seeds of treason to bear fruit. The more fruit, the better the crop when harvest comes.’
‘But if you wait too long...’
‘Then the treason is out in the open, and you have no secrets left to reveal.’
‘And then you have to decide which way to jump...’
Flaccianus’s smile died as he took in the full implications of what he had just said. He shuddered slightly, and glanced towards the shuttered window as if feeling a draught. But Nigrinus was nodding, slow and cold.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ he said quietly. ‘Just follow my orders, in all things, and matters will be well.’
Flaccianus stood up, gathered his satchel and wrapped the dark cloak around his shoulders. The lamp guttered.
‘Oh, and take those olives with you. I don’t want them any more.’
8
Snow had fallen in the night. Castus could feel it tightening the air as he rode out with the hunting party before dawn; the frozen crust muffled the sounds of the horses’ hooves as they moved through the empty streets, skirting the forum, down to the river gate. Ice groaned and cracked beneath the arches of the stone bridge, and first light revealed a snow-blown landscape of white and grey as the hunters climbed into the hill country to the north-west of Treveris.
By the time it was full daylight the party had reached the boundary of the imperial hunting reserve. A score of riders, with as many men on foot accompanying them, and as they neared the villa lodge at the edge of the reserve they could hear the whine and yowl of the dogs kennelled there. An hour later they were spread out across open country, and the day was bright and cold around them, every sound crisp-edged.
