Swords Around the Throne

by Ian Ross

  ‘You’ve been surveying the walls, the defences,’ Nigrinus said quietly. Castus nodded. No surprise that the notary had been informed of his activities. ‘What do you think?’ Nigrinus asked. ‘Would they stand a siege?’

  Castus sipped the thin sour wine, then peered around the room behind him. Darkness cloaked them, and the noise of the men talking around the fish-grill covered their conversation. Nobody was close enough to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘The walls are sound, the gates too. There are men enough to man the ramparts. There are no engines, no ballistae, but Constantine doesn’t have any either.’

  Nigrinus nodded. ‘And the troops, do they seem loyal to... our friend?’

  ‘Hard to say. They’ve been paid, they’ve got good billets, and they’re in a strong position. No reason they shouldn’t hold it. I hear Constantine’s men are already on half-rations.’

  ‘Naturally, I hear the same,’ Nigrinus said with a creased grimace. ‘I’m not interested in what you’ve heard, soldier. I want to know what you’ve seen. Could the city be taken by assault?’

  ‘Of course it could,’ Castus told him, refusing to rise to the goad. ‘But it would be hard. Far better to blockade the place and wait for treachery from within.’

  Nigrinus narrowed his lips, opened his mouth and closed it again. His thinking face, Castus guessed. He felt a knot of irritation twist in his gut.

  ‘What are you planning?’ he hissed, leaning closer over the table. ‘Tell me now... If you want me to kill him...’

  ‘No!’ the notary exclaimed, raising a finger. ‘Nothing like that! And you must restrain your barbarian friend too... No, if anything of that sort occurred it would seem an act of private revenge, or the deed of a madman. Only the rightful emperor can judge, only he can pass sentence. This must be seen to happen, do you understand?’

  Oh yes, Castus thought as he sat back from the table. He understood very well what the notary was saying. He had the brief sickening intuition that this too had been planned, this too was part of the game.

  ‘Then what?’ he said. ‘We just wait?’

  ‘Not for too long. The enemy has agents in Constantine’s camp. If they sense it could be accomplished, they will murder him. Then Maximian will be the only man with imperial authority...’

  ‘Infernal gods,’ Castus said under his breath. ‘You know this?’

  ‘I believe it. Retreating this far south was not entirely accidental. Constantine is far from his base, far from the bulk of his army and the provinces most loyal to him. Here we are closer to Italy, and to Maxentius... If the emperor was struck down by somebody close to him...’

  ‘But it was you who warned him. You sent him the message, and that was how he was able to march south so soon.’

  ‘Not I,’ the notary said. ‘Since I left Treveris I’ve had no contact with the imperial staff. I confess I have no idea how Constantine managed to act so quickly. Perhaps indeed the gods send him messages in dreams... But he is in danger here all the same.’

  Castus nodded. ‘Then whatever we do has to happen soon,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been working, these past days,’ the notary said. ‘Probing. Trying to determine who among the usurper’s people is weakest, who might betray him. So far I have discovered little. But when I do – and be certain I will – then I may need you to act. Are you ready?’

  ‘Always.’ A thought struck Castus. He glanced around the smoky tavern again, then looked back at the notary. ‘What about the emperor’s wife, Fausta? Is she loyal to her father?’

  He caught Nigrinus’s brief flicker of a smile. ‘Perhaps you might know more about that than I?’ the notary said. For the first time he appeared genuinely amused.

  ‘That was you, then, last autumn? Your plan?’

  ‘Oh, come!’ Nigrinus said, feigning an expression of pique. ‘Surely you don’t think I could have arranged anything as crude, as... sordid? Why would I?’

  ‘But you knew about it.’

  ‘I discovered traces of it, afterwards. I believe Gorgonius was behind it. You may kill him, by all means, if you get a chance. As for the nobilissima femina: she is a woman, and young. Barely more than a child. I doubt she has wits enough to rebel against her father. And if she did, what could she accomplish?’

  Maybe so, Castus thought. A sense of hopeless despair rose through him. Truly they were all at the mercy of the gods. He drank more wine.

  ‘The most important thing, for now, is that you hold yourself in readiness, and resist the urge to make any rash attempts of your own,’ the notary said. ‘Things are most delicately balanced. Some clumsy gesture could do more harm than good...’

  Castus glanced at him quickly over the rim of his cup. The notary seemed almost to be talking in his sleep, or to himself.

  ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Nigrinus said, rubbing the heel of his palm across his eyes. ‘I will not be long.’

  He got up, circling the table, and paced quickly through a door at the back of the room. Castus remained seated, sipping wine, but turned his body so he could watch both doors. Laughter came from the crowd around the griddle, and beyond them Castus could see the deep blue of evening darkening into night. He ate a little of the grilled squid on the platter. Then he got up and followed Nigrinus.

  The doorway led to a short narrow passage, then a second door into an open yard. There was a harsh briny stink of rotting rubbish and old fish. Castus stood braced in the doorway, staring around the yard. Two men suddenly lurched through a low opening to the right. Their filthy leather aprons and grey tunics marked them out as municipal slaves, and they were lugging stained wooden buckets.

  ‘Mind yourself, citizen,’ one of them said, and Castus stepped back as the smell of stewing urine hit him. The opening led to the tavern lavatory, and the slaves were collecting the urine for the city fulleries. They stumbled out though a gate in the far wall of the yard, and Castus saw them tipping the brimming buckets into a tub in the alley beyond. Then they lifted the tub on poles between them and moved away down the lane out of sight.

  Stepping to the right, Castus glanced into the lavatory. Flies whirled up from the wooden toilet holes. Back into the yard, he leaned from the rear gate and looked in both directions along the alley. But Nigrinus was gone.

  * * *

  The night was warm, and the air felt greasy with the breath of the sea as Castus passed back through the gate in the harbour wall and up the narrow alleys to the main street of Massilia. Still plenty of people about, mainly soldiers and dock labourers who had been working on the fortifications all day and were now enjoying their few hours of leisure; raucous laughter came from the bars on the alley corners, and from a distant side street came the noise of an argument breaking into violence. But still no sign of Nigrinus. Castus scanned the passing faces, but the notary seemed to have vanished. Let him go, he thought. The man had delivered his message, and there was nothing more to say.

  As he walked, Castus thought over the conversation that had just passed. However much he detested Nigrinus, he had been relying on the notary having some scheme or devious plan to turns events around. Quite clearly he did not, or not yet at least. Perhaps his probing and plotting would get a result in time, but time, from what he had said, was in short supply.

  Along the street to the west the crowds thinned, and by the time Castus emerged into the agora the city around him seemed almost deserted. The broad open expanse of paving was empty in the yellow moonlight, only a few figures moving under the colonnades. Massilia had been a Greek city once, and still preserved the Greek names of her civic spaces, but the agora resembled the fora of any number of Roman provincial towns. Castus crossed quickly, heading for the stepped path that led up from the back of the curia, the meeting hall of the city council, and around the side of the theatre to the large house that Maximian was using as his palace. As he moved from the darkness of the agora colonnade into the narrow cobbled street at the side of the curia, he paused suddenly and s
tared into the shadows ahead.

  For a moment he wondered what he was looking at, but then the low shape hunched at the side of the street shifted and Castus saw that it was a small group of people, all of them in dark cloaks, sitting or kneeling at the base of the curia wall. They might have been beggars, or homeless refugees from the countryside, but all of them seemed to be facing inwards, towards the wall itself. The streets around him were almost silent, and Castus was sure that he could hear a muffled whispering coming from the group. He would need to pass them to reach the steps up to the palace; they did not appear threatening, but the whispering and the uncanniness of their huddling posture made him wary. He loosened the sword in his scabbard once more, then walked slowly towards them.

  At the sound of his steps on the cobbles one of the figures sat up and turned to look at him. He got a brief glimpse of a face beneath the hood of a cloak: a girl, or a young woman. Somebody spoke, low and quick, and at once the strange gathering broke up. Castus stopped and waited, his hand on the hilt of his sword, as the five figures scrambled from their kneeling position against the wall and hurried up the street away from him without glancing back.

  When they were out of sight he paced quickly across the street to the point where they had been crouching. Now he could see the low square opening in the stones of the wall: an airshaft, or perhaps a window into a chamber in the basement of the curia building. As he got closer and stooped down he saw the iron bars closing the opening. All around it the stone was scratched with words. Castus squinted, trying to make out the shapes of the letters in the dark and string together their meaning. It did not take him long.

  DEATH TO THE HATERS OF THE GODS said one scrawl. CHRISTIANS TO THE LIONS.

  As he glanced down at the barred window again, Castus saw a movement from the darkness inside. A face rose from the gloom, thin and hard as a mask, beneath the white curve of a bald head. The face stared back at him from a moment, then sank once more into the black shadow of the prison.

  Oresius, Castus remembered. The priest of the Christians. And those huddled figures kneeling at the window, whispering to him: were they his followers? Castus suppressed a superstitious shudder. Why did Christians always seem drawn to dark places and secret rituals? But then he remembered the magical ceremony in the necropolis of Treveris. Christians were not the only people attracted by shadows.

  Standing back from the wall and squaring his shoulders, he turned to continue on up the street towards the stepped path and the palace. Before he could move, he heard the sound of a shout echoing from the streets behind him, the clatter of hooves on cobbles. A rider was crossing the forum, heading for the theatre and the longer curving road up to the palace, and as he rode he was crying out to the citizens in the forum colonnades.

  Castus ran the few paces back down the street towards the forum. By the time he reached the colonnade the rider had already gone, galloping hard towards the palace. But his words seemed to hang in the air; Castus had heard them clearly enough, and knew what they meant.

  Constantine was here. His scouts had been sighted outside the walls.

  The siege was about to begin.

  22

  The sun had not yet broken the eastern horizon when Castus threw open the shutters of his sleeping chamber on the upper floor of Maximian’s palace. Leaning from the window, breathing in the cool air of the departing night, he looked down the slope over the pale curving wall of the theatre and saw the massed roofs of the city coming into definition, grey against deeper grey as the light grew. The slopes of the surrounding hills were still covered by sea mist, and the harbour was a vague expanse of white, with the masts and rigging of the anchored ships standing up from it like the stumps of a dead forest.

  In the chamber behind him a slave was moving silently, setting out the basin of cold water and the platter of bread, cheese and onion. Stepping back from the window, Castus waved the slave away. He dipped his head over the basin, dashing water up into his face, then straightened again, gasping. Standing in the centre of the room, dressed only in his loincloth, he stretched his back and knitted his fingers at the nape of his neck, flexing the muscles of heavy shoulders. He breathed in deeply. The next few hours would be terrible; the next few days could be worse.

  In the anteroom outside he dressed quickly: tunic, boots and breeches, then the padded linen vest and the cuirass of silvered scale armour. Brinno came from his own room, and the two Protectores checked the straps and lacing on each other’s armour before putting on their belts. Neither spoke. Brinno wore an expression of sour and savage discomfort. Armed and equipped, helmets beneath their arms, they walked together down the steps and through the cool shadows of the courtyard behind the kitchens, then out onto the broad front portico of the palace.

  The imperial retinue was already assembling. On the paved area between the portico and the upper wall of the theatre, fifty men of the horse guards stood beside their mounts. Along the portico were gathered the commanders of the military units and the ministers of state, all the members of the consistorium in their stiff court garments. Castus was surprised to see a group of women at the margin of the group: Fausta, dressed in a heavy cloak that looked like a shroud, and Sabina among the others at her back. He took up his position below the steps of the portico. Scorpianus, the Praetorian Prefect, marched from the house. To the east the sun was just breaking the horizon, washing the portico with golden light as a voice rang out from the doorway.

  ‘Our Lord and Emperor Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus, Herculius, Pius, Felix, Unconquered Augustus!’

  Maximian walked from the house into the blaze of sunlight, and the assembly sank to their knees before him, their acclamations blending into a vast rush of sound.

  ‘Maximianus Augustus! Eternal Augustus! The gods preserve you for us! Your salvation is our salvation!’

  When Castus looked up he saw the emperor standing above him. No longer did Maximian resemble a wine-sodden old actor, no more a harried and desperate figure. Now, with the sunlight gleaming off his gilded breastplate and greaves, his golden helmet in the form of an eagle, crested with tall feathers, his gold-embroidered purple cape and tunic, he looked entirely like an emperor.

  Descending the steps slowly, with ponderous gravity, Maximian paced between the ranks of the horse guard. A four-wheeled open carriage, decked with laurels and drawn by six white horses, was waiting for him at the top of the road that curved down to the forum. Maximian climbed aboard, standing stiffly, not making the slightest gesture to acknowledge the salutes and cries of his people. Then the entourage formed up into a column, the horses moved forward, and the emperor began his progress through the city.

  Below the theatre the city was still in shadow, but the eaves of the houses and the pediments of the larger buildings around the agora blazed gold above the procession as it turned into the wide main street. Castus, marching beside the emperor’s carriage, saw that few civilians were showing themselves. Except for the knots of soldiers at the intersections, grey-faced, red-eyed and unshaven, the city seemed deserted by its citizens. The procession moved in near silence along the main street, Maximian standing motionless on the carriage, one hand resting on his sword hilt, gazing ahead of him.

  At last the arches of the Rome Gate rose before them. The carriage drew to a halt and the emperor climbed down, waiting a moment for his guards and ministers to form around him, then throwing back his cloak and striding to the entranceway and the steps that led up to the ramparts. Castus followed the throng as they clattered up the narrow stairway. He was feeling almost breathless; the morning was already growing hot, and the air felt still and clammy as a warm damp rag pressed against his face.

  The stairs turned, then climbed again and brought them out into the open sunlight of the walkway above the gates as the horns blared from the towers on either side. Blinking, Castus shuffled between the other men, trying to take up a position far to the rear of the group. He noticed Scorpianus peering at him. The Praetorian Prefect gave
a quick smile, shook his head, and gestured for Castus to move forward and join the men flanking the emperor. Sallustius moved aside to give him room.

  Low sun almost eclipsed the landscape outside the gates. In the still air the purple banners hung limp from their poles.

  At first Castus could see only the dust cloud raised by the approaching riders, a haze of gold as it rose into the rays of the sun. Then, as he stared, he made out the small group of horsemen. Unlike the men gathered above the gate, none of them wore armour; they were dressed quite deliberately in civilian garb, the clothing of peace. They drew nearer, and Castus recognised Probinus, Constantine’s prefect, riding in the lead. And in the small group behind him rode Constantine himself, dressed in a white tunic and purple cloak. Castus felt a surge of sickening dizziness. In the bright light of day he was exposed before the eyes of the rightful emperor. His treachery was clear for all to see. Stand straight, he told himself. Head up, chest out. Helmet beneath one arm, thumb hooked in his belt. There was no point in trying to hide now.

  The group around Constantine halted and Probinus rode on alone. As the dust cloud faded, Castus could see the troops gathered further along the road. Cavalry guards, their spears winking in the dawn sun. Beyond them, on the sloping ground so recently cleared of olive groves, the infantry were assembled, blocks of men appearing from the haze, lines of shields emerging from grey shadow. Squinting, Castus tried to estimate their number. Six thousand, maybe? They outnumbered the defenders, but not by so much. He tried to pick out the individual shields, identify the legions. He saw the black shields of I Minervia, the bright green of XXII Primigenia. No sign of VI Victrix’s winged victory emblem, and Castus was glad of that. The thought of Diogenes, Modestus and Rogatianus throwing themselves into the assault on the city was painful.