by Tom Harper
The ancient Romans had built it as a road bridge, but modern Romans preferred not to trust their traffic to its 2,100-year-old arches. She had it almost to herself, except for a few businessmen walking back from work, and a pair of teenagers giggling in front of her. As she watched, they knelt together in front of a rail at the edge of the bridge. The boy took a padlock from his pocket and locked it on to the rail. He said something, and the girl kissed him. Then they both stood, and with one arm around the girl the boy threw the key over his shoulder into the river.
Curious, Abby went over and looked at where they’d been. Locked on to the rail was a gleaming, shaggy coat of literally hundreds of padlocks. Some had hearts and words scrawled on them in black marker pen: messages of love, passion, perpetual devotion. None of them, so far as she could see, was for her.
A tide of loneliness washed through her. She stared at the steel wall the padlocks made, a barrier locking her out. All those people tight together in their loves, and a lonely woman standing there because an anonymous text message might have told her to.
Mark’s right, she thought sourly. I do need a psychiatric evaluation.
She walked back across the river. Halfway along, she caught herself dawdling, clinging to the hope that someone might yet tap her on the arm, sweep her up like a lost teenager and give her the key she needed. Idiot. The bridge was empty. Even the teenagers had gone home. She redoubled her pace and wondered where she could catch a tram back into the city.
As she stepped off the bridge, she noticed a black Alfa Romeo sedan parked on the kerb, engine running. A man jumped out of the passenger seat.
‘Abigail Cormac?’ He had an accent, probably not Italian. Something more guttural. He was wearing a black rollneck jumper and black jeans, with a long black leather coat and black leather gloves. ‘I need to speak to you about Michael Lascaris.’
Michael. The name was a narcotic, overriding all caution. As if hypnotised, she carried on walking towards the car. The man smiled, baring teeth that glinted with gold. He was nodding, encouraging her forward like a cat into a cage. The black butt of a pistol bulged against his stomach where it stuck out of his waistband.
And suddenly she saw how stupid she’d been. I can help, the message had said, and she’d believed it because she was desperate. But people who wanted to help didn’t send you cryptic messages you couldn’t reply to, or drag you halfway across Europe on an obscure treasure hunt.
She turned to run, but she was too close and too slow. The man was beside her in a single step. A black arm wrapped around her, pinning her arms; a second locked itself around her throat and forced her down into the car.
A voice in her ear said, ‘If you struggle, we will kill you.’
XIV
Italy – Summer and Autumn 312 – Twenty-five years earlier …
AND THEN THERE were four.
Galerius died last year, an embarrassing death, which Constantine went to great lengths to publicise. His bowels rotted from the inside out; a tumour grew inside his genitals until (they said) he looked like a man in a permanent state of arousal. Worms infected his body, so that his attendants could lay a piece of fresh meat against his wound and pull it away crawling with maggots. The Christians were delighted.
But Constantine still has battles to fight. The marriage alliance with Fausta has borne neither children nor peace with her usurping family. Last year, old Maximian tried to turn Constantine’s army against him. Constantine forgave his father-in-law; Maximian showed his gratitude by trying to stab him while he slept, but the plan was betrayed. At that point, Constantine lost patience and suggested Maximian drink poison.
But the son, Maxentius, Constantine’s brother-in-law, still occupies Rome and all of Italy, unrecognised and unrepentant. With Galerius dead, Constantine can afford to turn his attention south.
The priests say we shouldn’t go. They went through all the correct procedures: killed the animals in the prescribed manner, dissected the organs, tested the evidence. The guts said it was a bad time for a campaign. Constantine said: what do dead animals know about war? Maxentius has the bulk of his army in Verona, on the north-eastern frontier, expecting an attack from the Balkans. An attack from the north-west will catch him where he’s unprepared. ‘Show me where it says that in the entrails,’ says Constantine.
‘My brother always does what the soothsayers recommend,’ Fausta observes. It’s hard to tell if it’s a rebuke – or a suggestion. Five years on from the wedding, the ripeness of adolescence has started to go hard, like a date left in the sun. When her father tried to have Constantine murdered, it was she who came to the bedchamber and warned her husband. Now we’re tilting at her brother, and those long-lashed eyes are as blank and innocent as ever.
It’s a miracle you were able to kill the old man with poison, I think. That whole family have it running through their veins.
And so we cross the Alps, like Hannibal six centuries earlier. Constantine proves a better augur than his priests. At Segusio, the gateway to Italy, we set the town on fire with the garrison inside it. The lesson’s not lost on the garrison at Turin: they don’t wait to be surrounded, but sally out to meet us on the battlefield. Constantine reads their plan, squeezes their flanks, then smashes their centre back against the walls with his cavalry so hard that the press of corpses knocks down the gate.
How do you beat Constantine? The citizens of Milan don’t know – they just open the gates and surrender. At Verona they fight harder and almost break our line. Constantine has to throw himself into the fray, stabbing and hacking and punching with his men as if he’s going to cut his own way to Rome one body at a time. A spear flies within an inch of his face: for a second, all history hangs in the balance.
The spear misses. We win the battle. The road to Rome lies open.
These are blessed times. September proceeds to October and the sun shines, golden light on golden leaves. The skies above our march are blue, the air crisp. We see the world clearly. Away from the ritual flattery of court, Constantine’s a real man again: when I think of him now, this is how I like to remember him. Joking with sentries with mud on his boots; leaning over a map by lamplight, firing questions at his generals; riding his white horse at the front of the column, while the army’s sure stamp shakes the road. The world may be dying around us, but we know we’re marching to make it new.
‘Rome is nothing,’ Constantine says one night, lounging on the couch in his tent after dinner. He gets thinner, sharper on campaign. The soft flesh around his cheeks and chin melts away. ‘Name me one emperor in the last fifty years who stayed there more than a month.’
I sip my wine and smile. We both know that what he says is true – and not. Rome is too far from the frontiers to make a usable capital, which is why we’ve spent our lives eyeballing barbarians from Nicomedia and Trier and York. The tides of history have gone out and left the city of Rome stranded like a whale: bloated, flailing, with only its own self-regard to sustain it. And yet she remains the queen of cities, the heart of our civilisation, the wellspring of the empire’s dreams. To possess her conveys a power that has nothing to do with supply lines and garrison forts.
‘Are you having second thoughts?’ I tease him.
‘We’ll take Rome.’ He’s so certain. Ever since I’ve known him, Constantine’s had an aura about him that makes you believe things that ought not to be possible. But on this campaign, it burns brighter than ever. It’s like cutting into a cocoon and seeing the butterfly, still liquefied. Some days, I look at him and think I hardly know him.
He bites into an apple. ‘Do you remember the road to Autun? When we were campaigning against the Franks, three years ago?’
It takes me a moment, but then it’s there. Marching at noon, a blue sky with a high haze. Suddenly we looked up, and saw a perfect circle of light. In its centre, the teardrop sun glowed molten gold, and from its burning heart four rays burst out, forming a cross.
As a man, the army dropped to its knees and gave
thanks to the god of the Unconquered Sun, Constantine’s patron. For a whole day after, a wild-eyed mood overtook the army, as if we had been touched by the hand of the god. But we slept, we ate, we marched and gradually the impact faded. Just another of those occasional wonders, like blood-red moons and lightning storms, by which the gods remind us of their grandeur.
‘I remember we still had a hard fight against the Franks,’ I say.
Constantine laughs at me. ‘Always looking ahead to the next battle.’
‘It’s never far off.’
He props himself up on his elbow, spinning the apple core in his fingers. ‘But what if we could make a different world? A world where summer meant playing with your children and drinking wine, not strapping on your boots and going to war?’
‘Then you’d be a god.’
He considers that. ‘You know what the Christians say? They say their god, Christ, came into the world to redeem it. To bring peace instead of war.’
If that’s so, he conspicuously failed. I don’t say it. It would damage something between us.
‘All the empire wants is peace. From the humblest peasant in the field to the proudest Senator on the Palatine – peace. Do you know what made a small city on the Tiber into the greatest power in history? A longing for peace. To be able to walk on a road without being afraid of what might come over the hill. We pushed back the frontiers of civilisation until they stretched to bursting.’
Through a gap in the curtains, I can see his son, Crispus, poring over his Greek homework with his tutor. Constantine speaks Greek, but he can’t write it: he’s determined his son will do better.
‘The cross in the sky that day was a message, Gaius. God stretched out his hand and called me to glory. To be his instrument bringing peace to the world.’
He swings his legs off the couch and stands. I follow.
‘We’re going to win the battle against Maxentius, and we’ll win it in a way that no one can doubt where it came from. Please God, it’ll be the last battle we have to fight.’
‘Please God,’ I agree obediently. And that night, when the camp is asleep, my brothers and I meet in a cave and pour bull’s blood into the earth to make sure of it.
* * *
On a chill morning, at the very end of October, our army arrays for its last battle. Ahead of us stand an army, a river and a city. The order’s important. Rather than sheltering in the safety of Rome’s invincible walls, Maxentius has brought his legions out and crossed the Tiber. Apparently he consulted the augurs who told him that if he took the field for battle, Rome would be liberated from a tyrant. And no man is a tyrant in his own mind.
An hour before dawn, Constantine parades the army. Tombs line the road: he climbs up on a brick mausoleum, its marble long since stripped away, and addresses the men. Even I don’t know what he’s going to say. Standing there, with dew seeping into my boots and the moon waning, drawing warmth from the men pressed around me, it feels like the dawn of all things.
‘The supreme God on high sent me a dream,’ Constantine announces. His armour gleams like a star against the deep blue sky. Beyond the fields, dawn cracks open the horizon. ‘God’s messenger came to me with a sign. He told me that if we fought under His sign today, and in His name, we would surely conquer the tyrant and win a victory for the ages.’
Some movement at the base of the tomb. A soldier climbs a ladder and passes up what looks like a long spear draped in white cloth. Constantine takes it, and, as he lifts it, the cloth comes away revealing a new standard. A tall pole plated in gold, with the imperial banner hanging from a golden crosspiece. A wreath spun from gems and gold wire crowns the top, and set within it, silhouetted against the dawn, the superimposed letters X-P.
‘This is God’s sign.’
He times it perfectly. The sun comes over the top of the tomb and wraps him in its radiance. Glittering shafts of light shoot from the jewels in the standard and play over the faces of the watching army. In that moment, even I might believe.
Maxentius’s soldiers don’t survive the first charge. Normally, you wouldn’t send cavalry at well-formed infantry, but Constantine guesses that these men – levies and auxiliaries, mostly – don’t have the stomach for a fight. We charge down the slope and the human wall crumbles. Maxentius tries to flee across his pontoon bridge, but in the chaos of the rout the ropes break and he’s pitched into the water. We fish him out half a mile downstream, when the corpse washes against the pilings of the Milvian Bridge. I cut off his head myself for Constantine to show the citizens of Rome.
Constantinople – April 337
I sit on the bench in the courtyard of my house. My fingers pluck at my belt, twisting it so that the brass lion on the buckle catches the sun. I slide my thumbnail into the cuts and scratches in the metal. This was my cingulum, the sword belt I wore that day and ever since. But is it the same belt? The leather’s worn out three or four times and been changed, made longer; several of the plates have fallen off and had to be replaced. Just as Constantine and I are the same men we were on that campaign, and yet strangers to ourselves. The old lion’s brass skin is scuffed and dull.
There’s a commotion at the door. I wait for my steward to tell me who it is, but he doesn’t come. Instead, four soldiers in blood-red tunics and burnished armour burst in from my dreams and a scarred centurion says, ‘Come with us.’
XV
Rome – Present Day
‘IF YOU STRUGGLE, we will kill you.’
The man forced her into the car and pushed her down on the back seat. A cloth went over her head: a smell attacked her, and she wondered if it was chloroform. She tried to hold her breath, but her heart was beating too fast.
It was only aftershave, she realised, sickly sweet and drenching the blindfold with the smell of lilies. The car started to move. A hand on the back of her head kept her face pressed against the leather seat.
This is how it happens, she thought numbly. They come in the night and take you. Maybe they kill you, maybe they’re satisfied just to rummage around and break a few bits. But you’re never the same. She’d heard the story a thousand times in the field: brown eyes, blue eyes, always the same dead tears.
The car drove. All Abby could do was focus on the sounds around her: the rattle of a loose seatbelt; the revolutions of the engine; the occasional tick of the indicator. If she’d been a spy in a film, she might have counted off seconds and turns to work out their route. But she was frightened and far from help: it was all she could do to keep the panic from overwhelming her.
She heard a siren in the distance. Hope gripped her. Had someone seen her? Called the police? Arranged a rescue? The siren grew louder until it must have been right behind them. She felt their car slow down, then drift towards the kerb. She wanted to rip off the blindfold, leap up in her seat and shout for help. The hand on her head pushed down harder.
And then it passed. The Doppler wail stretched into the distance and faded away. She was alone again.
She vomited on the leather seat.
The car stopped in darkness. The hand pulled Abby up and dragged her out. She was still blindfolded, but she knew they must have turned a light on when she heard them swearing about the mess she’d made of their seat.
I can understand what they’re saying, she thought. It took her another moment to realise they were speaking Serbo-Croat. She closed her eyes, though under the blindfold it made no difference.
They led her up a flight of stairs, handling her carelessly, knocking her shins and stubbing her toes on obstacles she couldn’t see. Then the floor levelled off. She heard the sweep and thump of doors opening and closing. At last she stopped. The hand pulled the blindfold off her head.
She thought they must have brought her to a museum. She was standing in the middle of a black, windowless room. Silver spotlights in the ceiling picked out exhibits on the walls: slabs of white stone carved into friezes of gods and beasts, tendrilled plants or simply stern inscriptions. Most had rough edges, as if they�
�d been hastily chiselled away from some larger structure. A desk stood in the middle of the room, steel legs and a black marble top with nothing on it. Behind it, in a leather chair that dwarfed him, sat a slight man with greying hair. He was wearing a black suit and a white, open-necked shirt. He looked as if he was getting ready to go out for the evening. In his lap, he cradled a chrome-handled pistol.
He pointed the gun at her, smiling as he saw her flinch away.
‘Abigail Cormac. Have you ever wondered why you’re not dead?’
She just stared at him. ‘Who are you?’
He waved the gun towards the pieces on the walls. ‘A collector. A dealer. I buy and sell.’
She looked at his face: the sharp cheekbones and angular jaw, the eyes sunk so deep no light reached them. It was infinitely more real than the snatched, blurry photograph she’d seen in the British Library; also some years older. The skin had toughened, the hair retreated. He’d grown a small beard that had flecked grey. But there remained some quality, the same ferocious intensity, that even the camera couldn’t blur.
‘You’re Zoltán Dragović.’
The eyes narrowed. His bloodless lips stretched tight. He trained the gun back at her and flipped a catch on the side. She heard the guard behind her take a step sideways.
‘Are you going to shoot me?’ Get on with it! she wanted to scream. End this now! ‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘To answer my questions,’ he snapped. The gun didn’t move. The chrome barrel threw starbursts of reflected light on the walls. ‘Like, for example, why you aren’t dead already?’
‘I don’t –’
‘You should have died in Kotor Bay. I sent a man – his name was Sloba. I want to know why didn’t he kill you?’
