Swords Around the Throne

by Ian Ross

  ‘I cannot say,’ Serapion whispered. In the glow from the lamp at the end of the corridor his face was sheened with sweat. Castus jolted him by the throat. How had he allowed himself to be so stupid? Desire had blinded him – he had been led by the nose. Or maybe not the nose... Despairing anger burned through him.

  ‘Who was that girl in the bed?’ he demanded, although in his heart he already knew the truth.

  Serapion twisted his mouth into a smile. ‘You really couldn’t tell?’ He almost sounded genuinely perplexed. Animal passion was surely alien to him, Castus realised. ‘I told you,’ the eunuch said, ‘that my mistress was waiting for you...’

  ‘That was not Sabina.’

  ‘The domina Valeria Domitia Sabina is not my mistress,’ Serapion said. Castus almost admired his calm self-control. ‘I serve another. I serve the nobilissima femina Fausta, wife of our Augustus.’

  The shock of his words wrenched through Castus’s body. He wanted to ram the knife hilt-deep in the eunuch’s throat, but a sickening dread was stealing his anger, stealing his killing resolve.

  ‘Where’s Sabina now?’

  ‘Oh, she left in a closed carriage, shortly after noon. She was safely back in Treveris long ago.’

  Castus remembered the words she had mouthed to him on the steps: had she tried to warn him? But then she must have known. She must have been aware of what would happen...

  ‘Believe me,’ the eunuch said, ‘this was not my plan, not my intention. I am a slave, and I must do what I am ordered...’

  ‘So people keep telling me. Why should I let you live?’

  Serapion took a moment to answer. His eyes flickered towards the far end of the corridor. ‘There are three men in the courtyard outside,’ he said, quietly and clearly. ‘They will try to kill you as you leave. If you run, you might evade them.’

  Castus slackened his grip slightly; the eunuch sagged against the wall, breathing deeply. ‘Why warn me?’ Castus asked him.

  ‘You think I’m just a eunuch?’ Serapion said bitterly. ‘You think I’m a clay figure, a homunculus? I am just as human as you, and perhaps you can help me if I help you. We are both slaves in this affair. Perhaps I think you deserve a chance.’

  Pushing Serapion back against the wall, Castus stepped away from him.

  ‘Don’t try to follow me,’ he said.

  Outside the air was as thick and still as before, but the night seemed darker. Castus lingered in the doorway, trying to blink the after-image of the lamp glow from his eyes. There was no other way from the building, unless he went back into the bedchamber and tried to force his way out through the window, and that would certainly make enough noise to summon trouble.

  He took a breath, then exhaled slowly, feeling the strength mass in his limbs. Drawing up his cloak, he wrapped it around his left arm. In his right hand he held the dagger in a low grip. A slight sound from outside, a shuffle of feet on paving, and Castus threw himself through the door.

  Two running strides took him to the fountain, and he turned at bay. There were three of them, just as the eunuch had said: two held shortswords, and the third carried a club that looked like an axe handle. Plainly dressed, but they knew how to use their weapons. Soldiers, Castus guessed; perhaps Praetorians.

  He was still disorientated, stunned by the shock of what had happened in the bedchamber. His heart was beating fast, and he willed himself to calm.

  The swordsmen moved to either side of him, while the clubman advanced head on with his weapon raised. Crouched, the dagger drawn back in his fist, Castus knew that he could not wait for them to make the first strike: once the first moved, the others would be on him. He considered making a dash for the gate, or perhaps the wall – he could fight with his back to something, at least. But then they would just surround him and use the longer reach of their weapons... His only chance was to keep moving, close the distance and tackle them individually. Three heartbeats, three rapid breaths, then he jumped up onto the stone rim of the fountain basin.

  His attackers came on at a rush. Castus leaped to the left, flinging out his wrapped as the swordsman drove a stab at him. The blade passed through the folds of the cloak, and Castus felt the burn of a gash along his forearm before he dragged the sword aside. The momentum of his leap carried him crashing against the man, his dagger already striking up and out. The man screamed, his legs giving beneath him as the dagger blade slashed through his tunic and dug into his shoulder.

  Castus fell with him, the trapped sword dragging his arm and pulling him off balance; then the axe handle came down. The blow struck the arch of his back, and he felt the blast of it in his ribs and lungs but he did not buckle. He rolled, ripping the cloak free of his neck. He needed to get back on his feet; the second swordsman was already above him, blade drawn back to strike.

  Rage gripped Castus: he refused to die like this. A wheeling kick, and his boot caught the swordsman behind the leg and tripped him. Up on one knee, the dagger raised, Castus glanced around for the other two attackers. The wounded man was over by the fountain, clutching his shoulder; his friend with the club was circling for a clear strike. Castus twisted himself upright, feeling the blood running hot down his arm. Still no sense of clarity or coordination; he was driven only by a blind desire to survive. The second swordsman had recovered his balance now.

  They came fast, and together. First the clubman, striking out with his weapon levelled at Castus’s face. The man with the sword dodged in from the right. Castus ducked the club, stepped in at a crouch and came up hard beneath the man’s reaching arm. One upward blow and the dagger stabbed through the man’s armpit; Castus twisted his grip and felt the blade enter his heart. The clubman gasped, coughing blood as Castus spun the body and hurled it towards the man with the sword. The club clattered to the ground as the swordsman dodged out of the way of the toppling corpse.

  Snatching up the club, Castus switched the dagger to his left hand. His palm was wet and slippery with blood. He could see the wounded man by the fountain creeping to his feet, sword still in hand. The third attacker was still unhurt, bouncing on his toes as he circled with his blade low and level. Castus swung the club in wide sweeps, but the man refused to give ground.

  One more wide swing, then Castus suddenly hurled the club into the swordsman’s face and darted in after it. He grabbed the man’s right wrist, dragging his arm out; the dagger almost slipped from his bloody grip, but he raised it high and then punched down twice with his left hand, driving it into the man’s exposed shoulder and then into his neck. Something moved fast behind him: the third attacker closing in, and he tensed himself for the killing blow between his shoulder blades; then a scream, and another body sprawled across the paving of the courtyard.

  Castus turned. The third man lay dead at his feet, and Brinno stood over him, stripped to the waist, a bloody blade in his hand.

  ‘I’m sure you could have handled all three, brother,’ Brinno said. ‘But watching you was making me nervous.’

  Castus sank down, braced against his knees and fighting for breath. Pain racked his body from his chest to his groin. He rode out a wave of nausea, then straightened and seized Brinno by the shoulder. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I followed you,’ Brinno said. ‘I saw you talking to that eunuch in the baths and knew you were doing something... I don’t know. I’m sorry, brother – I doubted your loyalty...’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ Castus said. He turned to look around at the courtyard: three dead men, blood spattered on the paving.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’ Brinno asked with a cold frown.

  Castus just shook his head. ‘I have no way of explaining,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to help me get rid of these bodies...’

  ‘No need for that,’ another voice said. Serapion stood in the lamplight at the open doorway. ‘The dead will be disposed of. You need to leave now, though.’

  ‘I told you not to follow me,’ Castus said through his teeth. Despite his warning, the eunuch wa
s still his enemy.

  ‘There’s something I forgot to mention,’ Serapion said, stepping out over one of the bodies. ‘If I were found unharmed, it might look suspicious. As if I somehow helped you to escape.’

  ‘True enough.’ Castus glanced at Brinno, who shrugged.

  ‘Do what you must, then,’ the eunuch said.

  ‘If you insist,’ Castus told him.

  He stepped up to Serapion, and with one swinging blow he slammed his fist into the side of the eunuch’s head.

  Part Three

  15

  From the window, Julius Nigrinus watched the horseman crossing the courtyard below. It was night, and summer rain spattered the paving stones and gushed in torrents from the eaves overhead. Closing the shutters, he turned from the window and seated himself beside the brazier. The small room was already uncomfortably warm, but the coals served to dry the air; Nigrinus felt the damp badly. He was tense with anticipation, but he needed to compose himself; he made it a rule never to let his emotions become visible to others. By the time Flaccianus had stamped up the steps from the courtyard and growled his way past the slaves in the antechamber, Nigrinus was perfectly calm, his face blanked, waiting.

  Flaccianus threw off his wet cloak, making sure he spattered the notary as he did so. He dumped the leather bag on to the low table.

  ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it till dawn. Hope it’s worth the effort I put in.’

  ‘I hope you were not too inconvenienced,’ Nigrinus replied, forcing himself to take a few slow breaths before reaching for the bag and breaking the seal. Flaccianus stared at him with a sour expression, then slumped down in the facing chair. Nigrinus had ordered him to ride ahead of the normal post schedule, in order to bring him the bag of despatches with enough time to look through it before it was due for delivery. It was risky, but Nigrinus had a suspicion – more of an intuition than he would care to admit – that this time his investigations would bear fruit. The gods knew he needed it; seven months of probing into the imperial communications networks had given him only hints and shadows, suggestions of a conspiracy at work but nothing tangible, nothing that he could use as evidence, nothing sufficient even to bring a suspect to torture and see what he might confess... And Nigrinus knew that the patience of his chief, Aurelius Zeno, was running short. If he failed to find something soon, he would be assigned to other duties, and all the power and influence he had worked so hard to build would be stripped from him. Besides, his subordinates were getting restless.

  ‘How much longer are we going to be doing this?’ Flaccianus said. The rain had dampened his hair, and it flopped over his brow in an oily slick. ‘All this time you’ve had me sneaking about, putting myself in peril, and what d’you have to show for it?’

  ‘Patience,’ Nigrinus said. He was running quickly through the documents spread on the table, sorting them, starting to lever open seals. He was so agitated it was hard to stop his hands from shaking. Surely it was somewhere here...

  Flaccianus made a wet sound with his lips. The heat in the room was making him sweat. ‘All right for you to ask for patience,’ he said. ‘You promised me rewards from all this!’

  Nigrinus glanced up, hardening his expression. He had taken to paying Flaccianus from his own funds, for expenses, but clearly the man wanted more. They all wanted more in the end.

  ‘You never even paid me back for that thing in Colonia!’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Gods!’ Flaccianus flung up his hands in derision. ‘You’ve forgotten it already! I kill a man in cold blood, on your orders, and it means nothing to you?’

  ‘Ah, yes, that,’ Nigrinus said, stooping again to his work. He remembered now: one of the clerks in the financial offices had found information about a supposed plot against the emperor. He had known too little to be useful, no names or real evidence, but enough to alert the plotters and put them on their guard. Nigrinus had tried to buy the man off, but he had wanted to take it further, in the hope of greater compensation no doubt. In the end Nigrinus had ordered Flaccianus to make the man disappear. A regrettable necessity, for the higher good. It meant nothing to him now.

  ‘Do you know how hard it is,’ Flaccianus said, ‘to strangle a man and make it look like he drowned? Do you?’

  ‘You didn’t have to get your own hands dirty,’ Nigrinus said. He glanced up. ‘Do you still have that man you employed for the business? The big idiot?’

  ‘Glaucus? Yes, I do. And he’s not cheap either.’

  ‘Pay him what you need to. We might need him again.’

  Flaccianus sighed and subsided onto the couch, and Nigrinus directed his full attention to the documents. His eyes smarted as he flicked his gaze over close-written scrawls, stylus on wax tablet or sooty ink on wood or papyrus. Nothing. There was nothing. He dragged scrolls from tubes, slipped his pin under wax seals, ran his reddening eyes down columns of figures, lists, brief communiqués, endlessly boring family news...

  ‘I hear Maximian’s going south,’ Flaccianus said. ‘What’s that all about? I though the old man was safely buried in the Villa Herculis?’

  ‘Change of plan,’ Nigrinus told him, not looking up. ‘Maximian goes to Arelate, supposedly as a private citizen, but there’s a field force going with him to watch the western Alpine passes. The former Augustus is supposed to be rallying the provincials to Constantine’s cause, in case his son decides to invade. He’s still very popular down there...’

  He became aware that he was breathing hard, and his hands were sweating. He let the last document, an administrative report from the office of the Prefect of the Grain Supply in Rome, slip from his fingers. Something had escaped him – somehow in all these millions of words and figures some vital scrap of information had eluded his eye. And now he was left with nothing. He felt the black weight of defeat in his gut.

  ‘You know,’ Flaccianus said with a crafty smile, ‘it’s often occurred to me that I could do well for myself if I let certain people know what you’ve been up to recently.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Nigrinus’s voice was hoarse, the words clipped hard. He stared across the table at the agent, who remained smiling.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Flaccianus said. ‘Just an idle thought...’

  ‘Then let it stay idle. Such thoughts are ill conceived.’ He tried to control himself, and not let the churning sense of despair that possessed him show in his manner or expression. But he felt as though the air was slowly being sucked from the room. Think, he needed to think... He needed cool, calm reflection...

  With a sharp gesture he shoved the lamp away from him. Flaccianus raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Is that it?’ the agent said. He shrugged, and reached for a tablet lying beside the lamp. His gesture drew Nigrinus’s eye.

  ‘Wait,’ Nigrinus told him.

  Hardly daring to breathe, he dipped his head and angled his gaze over the tablet beside the lamp, fearing that all he had seen was a trick of the light. He picked up the tablet, slowly and carefully, and held it close.

  There. Sure enough, the angled lamplight picked out the traces of something beneath the wax, showing where the stylus had dug deep. Nigrinus felt a glow of victory rising through him. He smiled; he wanted to laugh. Flaccianus too was bending closer, frowning, quizzical.

  ‘There’s writing on the wood, under the wax,’ Nigrinus breathed.

  ‘You think? But how can you read it without destroying the message on top?’

  ‘Precisely...’ The message itself was almost laughably dull, a simple list of crop yields for various estates in Italy over the last year. He should almost have guessed – nobody would be sending such banal stuff by the imperial post... But doubtless the list concealed a code, and whoever was expecting the message would recognise if it did not arrive intact.

  He held the tablet up to the lamp flame, watching the wax begin to soften and sweat. If there was some way to make the wax transparent... But already the writing was beginning to blur.

 
; ‘Pass me the ink, and a fresh sheet of papyrus,’ he said. He carried the tablet to the window, and held it in the damp draught through the shutters until the wax had hardened again. Then he went back to the table and dipped a soft rag in the pot of ink. Slowly, carefully, he wiped the inky rag over the surface of the tablet. Flaccianus was watching him, wide eyed.

  A moment for the ink to dry a little, then Nigrinus laid the papyrus sheet over the tablet and rubbed his thumb over the back. He exhaled. Sweat was prickling along his hairline. He took one edge of the papyrus and lifted it gently, peeling the sheet from the tablet. When he looked at it, there was a near-perfect reverse print of the writing. Good enough to copy onto new wax, with every mark and flourish preserved, when the original was destroyed.

  Holding the tablet close over the lamp flame, Nigrinus watched the wax begin to melt and run. He was being so careful not to scorch the wood that he did not notice as runnels of hot wax coursed over his fingertips. A few heartbeats, and it was done. He seized a scraper and ran it over the face of the tablet, scouring away the oily residue of the wax to expose the wood. Only then did he focus his eyes on the three short lines of writing that the wax had concealed.

  He drew a sharp breath, and his brow turned cold.

  ‘What is it?’ Flaccianus whispered.

  Nigrinus placed the tablet face down on the table.

  ‘It seems the game has changed,’ he said. He was still digesting the importance of what he had read.

  Flaccianus sat back; clearly he knew Nigrinus too well to expect an explanation. ‘Well,’ he said, and gestured at the tablet. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘I don’t need you to be impressed. I need you to do what I tell you. We have to go south, and soon.’

  ‘With Maximian, to Arelate?’

  Nigrinus nodded quickly.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Flaccianus said as he got up to leave.

  ‘Of course I know what I’m doing,’ Nigrinus said. ‘Just pray that nobody else does.’