by Ian Ross
Rolling, Castus managed to get one arm up onto the chunk of ice and look behind him. Heat flared in his chest, and he shouted incoherently. Out in the open stream of the river, moving from behind the island, was a slim twenty-oared patrol galley trailing a Roman pennant. Oval shields along the rail, and a pair of ballistae mounted fore and aft. As Castus stared he saw the catapult arms jerk, sending another bolt skimming across the frozen water at the Burgundians on the bank. A smaller boat was nosing through the shattered ice into the island channel, oarsmen pulling hard.
He tried to shout again, but the cold locked his throat, then a wave of violent shudders ripped through him and he lost his grip on the ice. Water closed over his head, and he knew only blackness.
Moments might have passed; maybe hours. He was aware of being dragged from the water, the sodden weight of his clothing hauling at his limbs. When he opened his eyes he was hunched on the narrow deck boards of the galley, and all around him were raised shields and levelled spears. A soldier’s face, reddened by the cold, shouting at him.
‘Who are you? Speak Latin? Identify yourself!’
He tried to speak, but he was shivering uncontrollably and gasping for breath. Pulling his shoulders up, he forced himself to meet the soldier’s stare.
‘Aurelius Castus…’ he said, grinding out the words. ‘Protector of the Sacred Bodyguard… of the Emperor Constantine…’ He gritted his teeth, held his head up.
The soldier turned to somebody behind him. His red face twisted into a smile, and when he leaned forward again there was a leather mug in his hand.
‘We’re with the Fifth Cohort Valeria Phrygum,’ he said. ‘Loyal to Licinius.’
Castus took the mug in both hands, breathing in the scent of warmed wine.
‘Drink deep, brother,’ the soldier said.
PART ONE
Chapter I
January AD 312
In a sealed windowless chamber, deep in the bowels of the palace, two men sat facing each other across a low table. One of them was thin, middle-aged, with a bland colourless face beneath greying bowl-cut hair. His clothes were plain and undistinguished, but he wore the belt and brooch of an imperial official. The other man was wrapped in a robe and tight headcloth of white linen, and his face was concealed by a white lacquered mask in the shape of a dog’s snout.
Neither man spoke. The lamp on the table between them guttered in a faint draught, and their shadows twined and twisted around the stone walls. Finally the thin man cleared his throat. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked.
The white dog mask moved side to side.
Julius Nigrinus concealed his satisfaction. As a tribune of the Corps of Notaries he was a highly placed figure in the imperial bureaucracy, but he did not care to be recognised. Sometimes anonymity can be a more potent weapon than fame. Besides, the masked man could be in little doubt of his authority; anyone able to have a man snatched from his bed in the middle of the night and conducted to this subterranean part of the emperor’s palace by armed guards clearly wielded a certain power.
‘But I know who you are,’ the notary went on. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. ‘You are Astrampsychus of Cunaxa, correct?’
‘Merely a name I use for the public, dominus…’ the other man said. His voice sounded muffled from inside the mask, but Nigrinus could tell he had a slight foreign accent. ‘In reality—’
Nigrinus raised his hand abruptly, then shook his head. ‘I am not interested in your real name. Or your appearance. That’s why I had you wear your impressive mask. It’s better if we each conduct ourselves solely in our… public persona, yes?’
The dog snout nodded. Nigrinus could hear the faint hiss and thud of the man’s breath inside the mask. He could smell his sweat, and something else: the rank tang of urine. He suspected that Astrampsychus of Cunaxa was not a man of courage.
‘Over two years ago,’ he said, ‘you were paid by the domina Fausta, wife of our emperor, to place a magical death curse upon the domina Minervina, her husband’s concubine. Shortly afterwards, Minervina fell sick and was close to death. Thankfully, she survived, apparently owing to the prayers of some Christian priests.’
‘Dominus…’ the masked man breathed. ‘I beg you – I did not know the identity of either woman! The ritual was commissioned by a eunuch… I did not recognise the names…’
‘And yet you created this curse anyway? Knowing that the use of magic in this way is a capital crime?’
‘Dominus… I didn’t know. When I discovered, I left the city. Only yesterday I returned for the first time...’
There was nothing very much the man could say in his defence. Nigrinus waited, letting the sorcerer sweat a little more in his constricting outfit.
‘But that isn’t why I had you brought here,’ he said finally, with a light wave. He watched the man’s shoulders sag forward. In the black holes of the mask his eyes were shining.
‘It’s not? Then why…?’
‘I want you to tell me the future,’ Nigrinus said. ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? You contact spirits and they tell you the secrets of the future?’
‘Yes, but… what do you want to know?’
Nigrinus tightened his lips, as if he was considering. Then he smiled.
‘Soon,’ he said, ‘in the coming months, there will be a war. Our emperor Constantine will cross the Alps and invade the territory of his rival Maxentius. All I want is the answer to a simple question. Who will win?’
He heard the intake of breath. Enquiring about the fate of emperors was as much a capital crime as issuing death curses.
‘Have no fear,’ he said, as reassuringly as he was able, and tried to contort his mouth into a smile. ‘I already know of your past crimes, don’t I? Assist me now, and I can see that those crimes are forgotten.’
The sorcerer hesitated, considering. Nigrinus held the blank stare of the mask’s eyeholes. If the man had learned to control himself better, he thought, the outfit would look rather formidable. Nigrinus himself needed nothing like it, of course. His face was his mask.
‘Upon your oath, I won’t be harmed?’
‘I won’t lay a finger on you, I swear. In fact, I can see that you’re rewarded. I too have certain powers, you might say… I can see that you want for nothing.’
A sigh, which sounded almost animalistic from inside the mask, and then the sorcerer lowered his head in agreement.
‘The sack over there contains some… magical items,’ Nigrinus said, ‘which my men found in your lodging house. That should be sufficient?’
With obvious relief, the sorcerer turned and knelt in the corner of the room, taking objects from the sack and holding them up to the lamplight. Nigrinus watched with a sense of dull curiosity. Could people really believe that this quivering charlatan was in touch with the world of the spirits? Were hidden truths really accessed with such poor clutter, those feathers and scraps of cloth, those bundles of sticks? It was rather pathetic.
Julius Nigrinus did not particularly believe in the world of the spirits. Neither did he believe in the gods – or not the way most men did. If the gods existed, they obviously cared nothing about the affairs of mortals. However, he was not dogmatic in his disbelief. He wanted to see what this man would do, and what his exaggerated rituals might conjure up. After all, one never knew. Perhaps indeed there were dark powers beyond death; perhaps they really could whisper clues about the future. Sometimes it paid to be curious. Nigrinus himself had made a career out of it.
Besides, he thought as he watched the sorcerer assemble his arcane equipment, he needed all the clues he could get. The world was finely balanced, and his own place within it felt more precarious still. Just over two years before, Nigrinus had played a vital role in defeating an attempt to usurp the throne by the emperor’s father-in-law. While his operation had not gone quite as he might have wished, he had still managed to expose the treasonous schemes of his own chief, the primicerius of the Corps of Notaries. By rights he should have got
the man’s job. That should have been his reward – it had been promised. But that reward had been snatched from him, at the instigation of men who felt his methods were unsound, unsavoury, perhaps even barbaric. Such men, Nigrinus thought, seldom needed to get their own hands dirty. Instead, an ageing non-entity named Flavius Ummidius had been promoted to Chief of Notaries in his place, a man with little intelligence but many influential friends.
Nigrinus found that he was grinding his back teeth. Yes, he had been robbed, and the years had only stoked the flame of that injustice. But Julius Nigrinus was accustomed to being overlooked, accustomed to the scorn and even the hatred of other men. His father had been born a slave, and Nigrinus had worked his way up from nothing. Not surprising that he was distrusted. They hate me, he thought, because they fear me. That was good. And there would be time to make them sorry for their errors.
War was coming, he thought, that was true enough. And whatever was said publically in Treveris, the outcome was uncertain. Constantine was undefeated in the field, but so was Maxentius: the ruler of Rome had already seen off two imperial expeditions sent against him, without having to fight a battle. His armies were massive – Nigrinus had seen reports of up to two hundred thousand fighting men in Italy – and, if his troops were largely raw conscripts, Maxentius also had many thousands of experienced veterans from the Danube armies too.
But whatever happened, whoever was victor, Nigrinus was determined to make the most of it. This time he would do something that could not be denied, something brilliant and terrible. He would lay his enemies low. He would blast open every door that stood in his way. But he needed information; he needed to know which way to move. And at this point, he thought to himself, he would consider any option…
Down in his gloomy huddle, the sorcerer had constructed a rough tripod from woven sticks, only about two feet high, and piled greasy rags and feathers beneath it. Now, as Nigrinus watched, he lit a taper from the lamp and kindled his little pyre. He crouched, tipping his mask up to blow on the twisting flame, and Nigrinus saw the silvery bristles on his exposed chin. The reek of burning filled the chamber, singed feathers and dirty smoke; a cough kicked at the back of Nigrinus’s throat, and he stifled it.
Some time ago, this man Astrampsychus had made quite a name for himself, putting on his clandestine magical performances all across Gaul, and even here in Treveris. Doubtless that was how Fausta, the emperor’s wife, had got to hear of him. Nigrinus twisted a smile. Such things tended to impress weaker minds: slaves, eunuchs, women. Even a few of the imperial staff had been taken in. It was convenient that the sorcerer had made his reappearance now, and that Nigrinus’s informers had picked up his trail before he came to public attention. The business of the death curse on the domina Minervina had not been common knowledge, and it was best that it stayed that way. The emperor’s wife, after all, was supposed to be above suspicion.
‘CHAORA CHTHORA CHARABARAX!’ the sorcerer hissed, kneeling upright above his fuming little altar with his arms raised to the low ceiling. ‘IAO CHANUMBRA! O Chthonic gods! O Dis Pater! O Mother Hecate! Gods and Daemons of the Underworld! I adjure you to aid this divination. Rouse yourselves! Bring yourselves...!’
Smoke and stink were filling the room, and Nigrinus was struggling not to choke. His eyes were beginning to water. But he was fascinated, his gaze locked on the sorcerer’s strange ritual. The man in the white robes appeared transfixed, swaying as he knelt, his hands fluttering in the smoke from the spitting blaze beneath the tripod.
‘ABRAXAS ABRAHATAS AOI AMARHA AMAAROTH! Wake, demons, wake spirits! Bring me truths, I adjure you…’
Had the chamber got colder suddenly? Nigrinus realised that he was hunched forward in his seat, holding his breath. It seemed darker now too – but no, it was just the thick fumes in the air guttering the lamp flames. The blaze beneath the tripod seemed only to light the figure of the sorcerer, the smoke wreathing around him, until he seemed suspended in a shifting fog. His voice as he cried out his incantations was no longer the frightened breathy mumble of before; it was stronger, metallic-sounding, and seemed to come from somewhere deep beneath the stone floor of the chamber. Impressive, Nigrinus thought as he struggled to draw breath. Very impressive. But he was fighting the urge to run from the room.
The incantation had shifted now to a strange groaning mumble, the sorcerer fanning the smoke upwards towards his mask. The sweat ran down Nigrinus’s brow and he felt slightly sick. Suddenly the flames beneath the tripod leaped – something thrown upon the fire no doubt – and then snuffed out. Reeling smoky darkness filled the room. The sound of the sorcerer’s rasping breath came from down near the floor.
Nigrinus leaned forward and jogged the lamp on the low table, stirring the flame back to life. Now the smoke was clearing a little he could see the sorcerer slumped in the corner and the tripod fallen sideways over a heap of blackened ashes.
He coughed into his fist. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘The spirits have given an answer to your question,’ the man replied, his voice weak and hoarse from behind the mask.
‘What did they say?’
‘The spirits have told me… Once battle is joined, the enemy of Rome shall perish…’
Nigrinus waited a moment, hoping for more. He wiped his brow. ‘That’s all?’
The dog mask nodded.
‘Well, they’re certainly very diplomatic, your spirits.’
He stood up, his head spinning for a moment. He settled his cloak around his shoulders, then took a pace towards the door.
‘Wait here,’ he told the slumped figure in the corner. ‘My assistant will come shortly to reward you and see you out.’
He crossed the chamber, and gripped the iron ring of the door handle. The thought of fresh clear air was delicious.
‘One last thing,’ he said, turning once more as if the thought had just struck him. ‘When you placed the curse upon the domina Minervina… how was it done?’
The sorcerer had sat up, dragging his robes around him. The mask seemed to hang from his skull. His voice came slowly, wearily, from within. ‘A figurine is made,’ he said. ‘A homunculus. Formed with clay from a dug grave mixed with the blood of a black cockerel. Items from the victim are placed within it – hair, or nail clippings – and certain words pronounced over it. Then iron nails are driven through the figurine in particular places. Head, heart, loins, stomach.’
‘And then?’ Nigrinus said. The words came out as an eager gasp.
The mask rose, the vacant eyeholes staring back at him. ‘Then the figurine can be placed in a tomb,’ the sorcerer said in a tone emptied of all feeling, ‘or hidden somewhere close to the victim. In their bedchamber, for example. Beneath their bed, or where their food is prepared.’
‘Interesting! And this is… effective?’
‘Almost always, dominus.’ The mask sagged again.
Nigrinus left the man sitting there and went out into the dark stone corridor, drinking the cold air down into his lungs. He coughed again as he pulled the door closed. His assistant was leaning against the far wall. Nigrinus nodded to him, then paced quickly along the corridor to the bottom of the stairs.
Night air breathed down from above, and Nigrinus stood for a while with his eyes closed and his head tipped back, inhaling deeply. He felt the dull fog of superstitious dread rising from him and dissipating. When he was fully calm and in possession of himself once more, he thought back over what the sorcerer had said. Behind him he heard a door slam, and the shuffle of feet on stone.
The enemy of Rome shall perish. Like a riddle. But so equivocal as to be useless. And yet, he thought, perhaps it meant something after all. If only he could find the right application for it… Maxentius was the master of Rome, Constantine his enemy. Yet Maxentius was a usurper – the tyrant, as those in Constantine’s camp were learning to call him. Could he somehow be thought of as Rome’s enemy?
With the vague intuition that he could make something of this yet, Nigrinus turned and pac
ed quickly back down the corridor. His assistant was just leaving the chamber, a bundled sack under his arm. He was a dull sort of man, but at least he lacked the imagination to be treacherous. Nigrinus had experienced problems with his subordinates before.
‘What should I do with this lot?’ the man said, jogging the sack.
‘Burn whatever’s left,’ Nigrinus told him. ‘Throw the remains in the river.’
The assistant nodded curtly and moved towards the stairs. Nigrinus waited a moment for him to disappear, then eased open the door and stepped back into the chamber.
The lamp was still burning on the table, and the air was heavily charged with oily smoke. Only a few bent twigs and a blackened mark on the floor remained of the sorcerer’s strange ritual. Of the sorcerer himself, nothing. Nigrinus nodded in appreciation.
He was just about to leave when something caught his eye – down in the corner, trapping a curve of shadow; Nigrinus bent and picked it up. The white dog-snout mask, still trailing the cord that had secured it to the man’s head. It seemed tawdry now, a flimsy theatrical prop. Nigrinus studied the features of the mask. He had not broken his oath; he had not lied at all. Astrampsychus had been given his reward, and had been shown out. Nigrinus had not laid a finger upon him. And the dead want for nothing.
Turning the mask, he peered inside it. The dark hollow was spattered with fresh blood. Nigrinus flinched, squeamish, and tossed the thing away from him into the corner again. Then he snuffed out the lamp.
Chapter II
The imperial city of Treveris had rarely looked less impressive. Grey slush lay heaped along the sides of the streets and formed mounds under the dripping eaves of the porticos, threaded with the black runnels from the thawing drains. The light was fading, and the evening air smelled of damp smoke and latrines.
