Battle for Rome

by Ian Ross

  This did not feel like a homecoming. Castus had walked the three blocks from the palace, trailed by an unnecessary group of slaves carrying the meagre baggage he had brought back with him from his journey. After making his report that morning, he had taken the opportunity to bathe, change his clothes and have his hair cut. After going two months unshorn, his newly short-cropped scalp felt exposed in the chill breeze. He rubbed a palm over his shaved jaw, relishing the sensation of looking like a Roman soldier again instead of a barbarian.

  But no amount of bathing and cleansing could unburden him of the weight of loss. Brinno’s death still pressed upon his heart. Fourteen men had left Treveris two months before, and only Castus had returned.

  Throwing his cloak back from his shoulders, he approached the house. The door opened before him, the porter and two other slaves stepping out to greet him. In the gloomy vestibule they took his baggage, and ushered Castus to a stool where he could sit while a boy removed his boots and placed soft-soled house shoes on his feet. Another slave brought a basin of warm water for him to wash his face and hands, while another held a linen towel for him to dry himself. All of it performed in sober silence. Castus unpinned his cloak and passed it to the door porter, then moved on into the heart of the house.

  It was not a grand residence, by the standards of Treveris; in this area of the city there were scores like it, rented out to military officers, palace officials and their families. A suite of rooms on two storeys, around a brick-pillared central courtyard, the mosaic paving and painted walls just enough to give it an air of prestige. But it was several times the size of the quarters Castus had occupied as a centurion, let alone the spartan cell he had occupied in the precinct of the Protectores. And then there were the slaves.

  They were waiting for him, gathered in the covered walks surrounding the courtyard. Castus scanned them quickly, barely taking in the faces. A dozen people, most of whom he did not recognise. How many of them did he own? He stepped into the alcove near the entrance door, where a shrine of Juno and the household gods stood with a clay lamp already burning before it. With his back to the throng of slaves he dipped his head, eyes closed for a moment in a prayer of thanks for his safe return. Then he took a pinch of incense and scattered it over the flame. The smoke curled around him, and he tried to stifle his cough. When he turned, the gathered slaves raised their arms in salute, greeting him with one voice.

  A small man with a tight nervous smile stepped up to Castus, a scroll case and a heavy bunch of keys in his hands. Metrodorus, Castus remembered, the freedman he had employed as procurator to oversee his household while he was away. He had never liked the man, but he had a reputation for honesty; Castus placed his hand briefly over the keys and the documents, nodded in acknowledgement, then walked on around the courtyard, the assembled slaves dropping their eyes as he passed.

  Was it only in his blunted perceptions that they seemed to shrink back from him, to regard him with a sort of cringing distaste? He was the stranger here, the intruder; even after his bath, he felt he carried the scents of a different world, the sweat of long travel and hard living, the salt of blood and combat. As if he carried on his broad shoulders the burden of that other life, of which those gathered here know nothing: the life of warfare, which had made him, and raised him to this uncomfortable privilege.

  Castus had never been particularly concerned about owning slaves himself; the few that were provided by the army had always sufficed. But decent households needed them, so his wife had explained. Twenty at least, in her opinion. Her father, she told him, had kept two hundred in his Rome townhouse alone. Castus fought down the sense of annoyance that was already rising through his fatigue. He had left instructions for Metrodorus to grant Sabina any necessary expenses – by law, he was not allowed to give her money directly, and after her father’s execution for treason and the seizure of her property she had little wealth of her own. But he had also asked her not to use his money to fill the house with extra bodies.

  He took a deep breath as he approached the doors of the reception chamber at the far side of the courtyard. He composed himself, tried to smile.

  Valeria Domitia Sabina was seated on a folding stool in the middle of the chamber, a maid flanking her on either side. As he stepped up to the threshold, Castus felt a catch in his breath. For a moment he could only gaze at her, his mouth dry and his heart stilled. There was something austere, something almost aggressive in her beauty. He had forgotten how dangerously glamorous she could appear – when she wanted to. The words of a dying man in a ruined town came back to him: he had not forgotten Ulpianus’s strange warning.

  ‘Husband,’ she said, standing up with a rustle of silk. Earrings of gold and pearls framed her face, a heavy gold necklace looped around her throat. Her hair was plaited into a mass of tight narrow braids, gathered in a golden net. Her face was a beautiful mask. She stepped up to him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and he smelled that familiar perfume, musk and saffron, that had so intoxicated him when they had first met years before.

  ‘Welcome home,’ she said. Her hand lingered for a moment on his neck. But as she stepped back Castus noticed that she would not meet his eye.

  Sabina led him to the back of the room, where couches and a low table were already set out for dinner. Castus settled himself warily, feeling not at all hungry. The evening had grown dark, and now the slaves closed the doors and the folding shutters against the cold damp breeze from the portico. Other slaves brought braziers to warm the room, oil lamps on tall iron stands, and amber wine in goblets of blue glass.

  Castus reclined on the couch, sipping his wine, but his body was still locked into the rhythms of many days in the saddle, many weeks on the road. His hands as he gripped the glass felt clumsy and calloused, and he was aware of his chapped lips and wind-reddened face. Opposite him, his wife sat immaculate and reserved. How, he thought, had he come to be married to such a woman?

  ‘We heard of your return this morning,’ Sabina said. There was a slight catch in her voice, a ruffle in her silky poise. ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

  Castus glanced quickly at her, a sound trapped in his throat. The black embers of grief flared briefly in his chest. His wife had never much cared for Brinno.

  How much else did she know of what had happened, and what he had been doing? The mission to Licinius had been a strictly held secret. He had left Treveris back in early December under the cover of a routine escort duty to the Rhine and southern Gaul. But he had been away for two months, and it was not surprising that people had started to ask questions.

  He had found Licinius at Sirmium in southern Pannonia, only ten days after his crossing of the frozen Danube. It had been a brief meeting: he had delivered the package as ordered, then waited only a day and a night before receiving the reply. Another sealed document, but Castus could guess that what it conveyed was positive. Licinius had sent twenty of his own mounted guard, plus a hundred auxilia of the Raetovarii, to escort him safely and swiftly back to the borders of Constantine’s domain. Even now, Castus thought, that reply was doubtless being read and discussed in the chambers of the palace, plans made, strategies put into motion…

  ‘You must tell me all about your travels – later,’ Sabina said, with a strong note of suggestion in her voice. When the slaves cannot overhear us, she meant. Castus detected the hint of coldness in his wife’s voice, the quiver of tension behind the façade of her courtesy. He stared at her across the table, trying to read her expression. He knew well her aristocratic disdain, although he had somehow managed to forget about it over the months of separation. This was something deeper, though. She was angry; angry at him, and only waiting for a moment when that anger could be safely kindled into rage and recrimination.

  For so long Castus had dreamed of this homecoming, picturing it in his mind over and again: the joy of his return, the warmth of Sabina’s welcome. How could he have been so mistaken?

  ‘So,’ he said, as mildly as he could manage. ‘Tel
l me what you’ve been doing.’

  The slaves were bringing food from the kitchens now: eggs in fish sauce, then steamed trout with asparagus, then peaches in syrup and cumin. Castus regarded the meal without enthusiasm; the cooks must have laboured at it all day, but he ate each delicately flavoured dish as if it were a bowl of beans.

  As they ate, Sabina told him of her activities. She had spent much of her time at the palace, in the household of the emperor’s wife, the nobilissima femina Fausta. Castus listened as she filled him in on the affairs of the court, the alliances and the rivalries, those who had risen in favour and those who had plunged into disgrace.

  ‘Nepotilla’s husband’s become a Christian,’ she told him. ‘Or so they say. Apparently he’s not a genuine believer, but he thinks it’ll help his promotion. The rumour is that the emperor favours the sect more each day. Some say he’s become a Christian himself!’

  ‘Constantine?’ Castus said, a mouthful of food catching in his throat. He swallowed heavily. ‘Not likely.’ He remembered well that strange moment over two years before, on the road north from Massilia, when the sun god had beamed his blessing upon Constantine from the sky. Now the emperor revered the solar deity above all others; his coins bore the proud image of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. So it should be, Castus thought. The idea of some bizarre and unsavoury foreign sect appealing to the master of the western world was a joke, a slaves’ fable.

  Sabina just shrugged, apparently uninterested. One of the maids approached her couch, leaning to whisper in her ear. ‘The child is awake,’ Sabina said. ‘Would you like to see him now?’

  Castus sat up quickly on the couch, not caring if he appeared too eager. Another slave came from the darkened passage outside the dining room, a blonde woman with a dimpled chin. Castus had not seen her before, but she carried a swaddled bundle in her arms. She bowed slightly as she approached, drawing the shawl away from the baby’s face. Castus caught his breath. In the soft glow of the lamps his son gazed back at him, black-eyed, completely unfamiliar. These last two months had transformed the boy; he was half a year old now.

  For a moment Castus felt only a strange baffled wonderment, his breath stilled, his body too tense to move. It was unwise, he knew, to develop feelings of attachment towards infants; so many of them died in their earliest years. But he could not help himself. They had named the boy Aurelius Sabinus, their names combined; Sabina had wanted to call him Honoratus, after her dead father. Perhaps, Castus wondered, she would have loved him more if they had.

  He reached across to the swaddled bundle, and the baby stared back at him. Castus wondered if his own father had ever gazed at him in this way. Had that terrible old man ever felt this sense of tender awe? Sirmium was only a day’s ride from the town on the banks of the Danube where Castus had been born. He could have gone there and found his father, stood before him and told him that he was a grandfather now, and his son a Protector of the Sacred Bodyguard. He had considered it, but he had not. Castus had not seen his father since the day he had attempted to kill the man with an ironbound bucket, then fled to join the legions. Most likely, he thought, his father was dead by now. If not, he could not bear the thought of meeting him.

  No, this child was his own, and he was not his father. Everything would be different now. He smiled, and felt his chapped lips crack.

  The baby’s eyes widened, pools of black in the lamplight, then he smiled too. Castus felt the warmth rising through him, the joy of recognition. The moment lasted a heartbeat, maybe two, then the child’s face creased, his mouth opened and he let out a wail of pure anguish.

  Castus sat back quickly. Gods, am I really so terrifying?

  ‘You are unfamiliar, that is all,’ the nurse said, wrapping the child in her shawl again, soothing him. Her accent was Germanic, Castus noticed; a memory stirred in his mind and then sank. The nurse was carrying the baby away now, the other slaves bringing more wine, and Castus snatched up his goblet and drank quickly.

  Sabina had barely glanced at the child. It was demeaning, of course, for any freeborn woman to nurse her own offspring, but Castus knew that his wife’s lack of interest in their son went deeper than that. The pregnancy had been hard; it had almost killed her.

  How different things had been when they were first married. The six months after the wedding had been filled with a passion that Castus had never before known. To have found himself married to a daughter of the Roman aristocracy had been strange enough, but that such a woman would be genuinely drawn to him, aroused by him, had been stranger still. His wife’s moods, her maddening attitudes, were not surprising, Castus told himself – she had lived all her life in mansions and palaces. If she was sometimes arrogant and self-absorbed, it was only a legacy of her upbringing. He knew that there was more to her than that. He knew she was courageous – she had proved that in Massilia. He admired her intelligence, her effortless beauty and her curious subtle wit; she confused him, and he found her utterly enthralling. When he was away from her, he was clumsy and stupefied with desire. Brinno had laughed at him for it: how unmanly, he had said, for anyone to be so enraptured by his own wife…

  Their happiness had not lasted long. By the autumn of that year Sabina was already growing impatient with him, caustic and frustrated by the limitations of her new life. He would listen to her describing the lost splendours of Rome, the stolen wealth of her family – the houses on the Aventine and the Caelian, the African estates at Thagaste and Thabraca, the villas in Lucania and Illyricum, all seized by Maxentius after the execution of her father and her first husband – and he knew that he could offer her little in consolation. Pregnancy had seemed at first like a release, but she had treated it as a further imprisonment. By the following summer Castus had been spending much of his time away from Treveris, or on duty at the palace. Their lives had resumed their separate courses. It pained him to have known such love – to know it still, despite everything – and to be daily reminded of the unbridgeable gulf between them.

  The meal was done, the dishes with their half-eaten food cleared away. Sabina sat up, lifted her glass, still half full of wine, and drained it in one long draught.

  ‘I shall retire to the bedchamber,’ she said as she stood and wrapped herself in her silk shawl. ‘You should speak to Metrodorus about the accounts, I suppose...’

  Castus frowned as he watched her leave the room, strongly tempted to forget household convention and follow her, but the smirking freedman was already approaching with his scrolls and tablets. It was only some time later that Castus could finally dismiss the slaves and pace down the draughty darkened corridor to the bedchamber at the back of the house.

  Sabina was in the inner room, seated close to the brazier in her sleeping tunic. Her loosened hair was like a spill of ink in the lamplight, and a handmaid stood behind her, running a comb through it and humming under her breath. Castus motioned to the woman, who bowed, placed the comb on the side table and left the room. Now, at last, they were alone.

  But Sabina remained silent. Charcoal crackled in the brazier. Castus felt the silence pressing on his ears.

  ‘Who was the nutrix with the baby?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘Elpidia? She’s new. The old one had no milk, so I asked Metrodorus to buy another.’

  He paced up behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders, the smoothness of her neck. He felt the cold links of her necklace, the warm silk of her hair.

  ‘So you went to Pannonia,’ she said. ‘To Licinius.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ He had tightened his grip without intending it.

  ‘Everyone knows,’ she snapped, and reached up to seize his wrist. ‘Everyone in the palace. You know how these things get passed around. You went through barbarian country and they killed everyone but you… You could have died! You could have died and I would have been a widow and not even known!’

  She stood up quickly, throwing off his hands, and stalked over to face the wall. Castus heard her sniff; she was
trying not to cry.

  ‘What would you have had me do?’ he said. ‘Refuse? I’m a soldier. It’s my duty. You know this…’

  ‘Duty!’ she cried, fierce with anger. ‘Always duty… What about me? What about your son? You should have told me…’

  ‘I could tell nobody,’ Castus growled. He scrubbed at his chin, then ran a palm over his cropped scalp. His body felt racked with frustration, and he paced to the far wall and back.

  ‘What do you think it’s like for me,’ she said, ‘left alone in this draughty little house by myself, not knowing whether you’re alive or dead, or where in the world you might be? Can you imagine? Are you even capable of imagining that?’

  She spun around to face him. The distance closed between them suddenly, and she was standing before him, blazing with cold, contained fury. For a few moments Castus found he could not speak.

  ‘Oh, but what do you know except duty?’ she snarled. ‘Never duty to me, your wife! Never duty to your family!’

  ‘Consider for a moment,’ Castus said, slow and heavy, ‘that not everything in this world is about you.’

  ‘What do you know of me! Nothing!’ She raised her hand and punched his shoulder, then tried to shove at him. He grabbed her wrist, his fingers closing around the thin bones of her forearm. Wide-eyed, she stared back at him. ‘How could you ever know me?’ she spat. ‘You’re just a soldier, an uneducated peasant! How could you understand anything of what I feel?’

  She swung at him again with her free hand, and he drew his arm back in a reflexive gesture.

  ‘Oh, have I insulted you now?’ she said. ‘Have I insulted your precious honour? Hit me if you dare – isn’t that what husbands do?’

  He released her, shoving her away, and her choked cry of anguish echoed around the painted walls of the chamber. She swiped at her dressing table and the contents fell clattering onto the floor. Castus sat on the bed. He thought of the things he could tell her, but would not. The days of riding in the wilderness of Germania, the battles in the frozen forest, and the dead town in the white mist of dawn. Brinno’s death, and his own plunge through the river ice. Would she even care to know of these things? Would they mean anything to her?