by Ian Ross
Castus was not sure if the comment was intended to be conciliatory. Surely Nigrinus knew of the bad blood between them. The very great quantity of blood spilled between them over the years.
‘I sometimes wonder,’ Nigrinus went on in a blandly musing tone, ‘what a man might do if, say, he got close enough to the tyrant to strike a mortal blow…’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Castus said, shuddering as he understood the implication.
‘I’m only imagining.’ Nigrinus smiled. ‘But it’s intriguing, no? One man, one blow, and this whole war could end. All those lives saved! You saw the field that morning after the battle. Thousands of dead and injured. All of them Roman soldiers. How many more must die, do you think?’
Castus made no reply. His jaw was set tight, and the gap in his back teeth ached with the pressure.
‘Ah, but you think such an act would be dishonourable, I suppose?’ Nigrinus said quietly. ‘Perhaps. Far more honourable for thousands to be slaughtered in battle than for a tyrant to be struck down in his own palace…’
‘If this is what you’re thinking, forget it. I won’t be your executioner.’
Nigrinus spread his hands, still smiling. His voice had a sibilant quality; Castus thought of a snake’s tongue, dryly flickering.
‘That’s a shame,’ the notary said. ‘I doubt the gods would be displeased. It could hardly be said that Maxentius is an honourable man, after all. He is… fond of luxury, they say. A rather sordid individual, a sensualist. And a debaucher, who has dishonoured many women. Your wife among them, in fact…’
‘What did you say?’ Castus turned sharply, rising to a crouch. He saw Nigrinus’s expression of pleasure, heard the faint rasp of his laughter.
‘Oh, yes – although I’m sure the domina Sabina has never told you of that particular episode!’
‘When?’ Castus demanded. ‘How…?’ His mind reeled and dived; he knew the notary was entrapping him, probably even lying, but he was snared. Nigrinus clearly knew it too. Castus stood up, stepping towards the man, but the notary did not flinch.
‘It happened in Rome, years ago,’ Nigrinus said. ‘Soon after your wife’s first marriage. She would have been seventeen, eighteen… Around the time of the Persecution edicts, I suppose. I don’t know how willingly she went with him – but it must be hard to refuse the son of the senior Augustus of the west!’
‘How do you know about this?’ Castus was telling himself to draw back, relax, refuse the bait. But the notary’s words had struck at his weakest spot.
‘Oh, I have my sources. They say Maxentius made her perform some very humiliating acts. Sexually, I mean. Things you’d blush to ask of a whore, let alone a senator’s daughter. Why, they say he even made her—’
‘Enough!’ Castus cried. He paced across to the inner wall of the portico, then back again. Nigrinus watched him, as a man watched a trapped animal. I could do this now, Castus thought. Kill him, as I’ve wanted to do for so many years… But that would truly be the end. He would never see his son again, never see his wife, or Ganna.
‘If you happened to find yourself close to Maxentius,’ Nigrinus said, ‘you might ask about him and Sabina. Discover what really happened.’
‘How would I ever get myself into that position?’
‘I suppose that’s what your wife said to him!’
Castus halted, fearful for just one moment that he would not be able to stop himself from seizing the notary and smashing his body to pulp against the tiled floor. He inhaled slowly, held the breath inside him, compelled himself to remain still.
‘You didn’t need to tell me all that,’ he said as he exhaled.
‘No? Your mind is already made up? Shame – I’m sure the emperor would have been extremely grateful, had you agreed…’
Castus turned away from him and stared at the lake, the deep dark blue of the water and the fire on the distant mountains.
‘I’ll want to bring two of my own men with me,’ he said. ‘You can dress them as slaves and add them to the retinue. They’ll be under my command alone. I won’t take orders from you, and I won’t sacrifice myself or my men for your schemes.’
‘Entirely reasonable, tribune,’ the notary said. He appeared to stifle a yawn, then stretched his back and shoved himself away from the pillar. ‘I shall go and inform my colleagues of your very sensible decision.’
Chapter XVII
Hot sun, a bright sky, and the broad Tyrrhenian stretched blue to the far western horizon. To the east, Italy was a flat shore and a blur of distant mountains. Between sea and sky, the Ligurian coaster Thetis rode southwards across the swells, her upswept prow and stern alternately rising and sinking, her big mainsail sheeted hard against the pressure of the wind.
Leaning out over the rail, Castus squinted into the salt spray and looked back at the wake. Two sails on the far horizon, but they were moving towards the coast, and neither was the one he expected to see.
‘Triangular, you say?’ the shipmaster rasped, moving up to stand beside him at the rail.
Castus nodded. ‘Like this,’ he said, sketching three corners in the air. He had seen a ship with a triangular sail at Genua just before they had sailed the previous morning. He had seen it again in the evening, coming in shortly after the Thetis had anchored in the bay of Luna. And twice more today it had appeared, flickering across the horizon, dogging their wake.
‘Plenty of boats have sails like that,’ the shipmaster said. He was a short stocky Corsican, with no neck and a windblown grin, a man as blunt and weatherly as the vessel he commanded. ‘We could too, if we was running across the wind; you just swing the yard round and bring the leeward arm down, then brail up the sail to the arm and you’ve got your three corners, so it looks. Ain’t triangular really, though, truth be told.’
Castus squinted at him a moment. ‘But we’re running before the wind, not across it. And so are they, if they’re following us.’
‘Fair enough,’ the shipmaster said, showing his yellow teeth. ‘But you’d be better looking the other way, keeping an eye out for any of them cruisers up from Misenum. They’re more to worry about!’
There had been no sign yet of warships patrolling the sea lanes. The only ones Castus had seen were the pair of liburnian galleys in the harbour at Genua, but they were crewed by Constantine’s men; they had seized the port in the emperor’s name only ten days before, but the citizens of Genua did not appear to mind the change of allegiance. The naval base at Ravenna on the Adriatic had also recently declared for Constantine, so Castus had heard, but with the territories of Licinius on the far shore that sea was still too dangerous to travel.
Pushing away from the rail, Castus made his way towards the stern, leaning into the pitch of the deck. He was dressed in a simple tunic of dark blue wool, with plain leather shoes. The gold ring that marked his citizenship, and the golden torque that signalled his rank and prestige, he had left behind in Verona. He felt almost naked without them, and without the military belt and boots he had worn since he had first joined the army nearly two decades before. He carried no weapon either; there was a shortsword concealed in his bedroll, but it did little to reassure him. Castus had the unnerving sensation that he was going into the heart of the enemy camp dangerously underequipped.
The Thetis was a small vessel, not much bigger than a fishing boat; her scarred and greasy timbers creaked and wailed with every shift of the wind, but she was seaworthy enough and would draw little attention. There were six crewmen, all of them slaves, and they went by nicknames: Fish-hook, Donkey, Gizzard… They roamed naked over the deck, joking in gnarled accents, leaping over the rail sometimes to swim beside the ship, or even dive beneath the hull and surface on the other side.
In contrast to the high-spirited crew, the members of Castus’s little party appeared very subdued. Felix sat in the scuppers with his back to the rail, playing knucklebones with one of the young nobleman’s slaves. Of all the party, Felix seemed to inhabit his assumed role with the great
est ease; Castus wondered if there was any truth in the stories about the man once being a slave. But Felix knew Rome, or so he claimed, and Castus had wanted a guide he could trust. The man had saved his life on the night that Pompeianus had broken out of Verona. Twice, in fact: he had warned him of the attackers in the bushes, and then dragged Castus out of the path of the charging horse. The man was tenacious, and quick-thinking, and those were attributes that Castus knew he could use.
Felix, however, hated the sea. Even now, after nearly two days’ sailing, he kept his back to the waves and tried not to look at the water. He had been badly sick for the first few hours after leaving Genua. Castus himself was immune to seasickness; he had often thanked the gods for that.
In the lee of the little kennel-like deckhouse near the stern, Diogenes was still debating with the Christian priest. The former schoolteacher had not been Castus’s first choice for the mission. He would have taken Modestus, perhaps, or Brocchus: a man with military bearing and muscle. But Diogenes had found out what was planned somehow, and petitioned Castus to join the party. It would be dangerous, Castus had explained; maybe they would not return. Diogenes had been unmoved; perhaps, Castus thought, the man would have his uses after all.
The slatted door of the deckhouse swung open, and Nigrinus clambered out into the daylight, blinking as he raised his head.
‘How is he?’ Castus asked.
‘Still asleep,’ the notary replied, with a sour grimace. ‘Probably dreaming he’s back in Genua, lying in a pile of prostitutes.’
The young senator’s son, Publius Pomponius Bassus Pudentianus, was supposedly the leader of their party. Castus and Nigrinus were his freedmen; the others were his slaves. He was a necessary liability, but since the party had left Verona he had caused nothing but aggravation and delay, and his habit of treating them as if they were genuinely his slaves and dependants endeared him to nobody. Most recently, he had vanished for forty-eight hours in Genua, just as Nigrinus had finally managed to arrange passage on a ship for Sardinia. Castus and Felix had tracked the young man down to one of the city’s most expensive brothels, and he had been so drunk by then that they’d had to carry him aboard the Thetis wrapped in a cloak.
Since leaving harbour, Pudentianus had done little but sleep and vomit. His two slaves tended to him most of the time, but Nigrinus made it his business to check on the young man as well: it was vital for the success of the mission that he remain alive and in reasonable health. It was almost worth enduring the irritations of Pudentianus’s presence, Castus thought, to see the notary so obviously ill at ease.
Clambering past the helmsman and the tiller bars that connected the two big steering oars, Castus pulled himself up onto the little platform beneath the sweep of the stern. Gulls wheeled and darted in the wake of the ship; beyond them, the horizon was clear. No sign of a triangular sail, or any other vessels at all now. Castus wondered if he was becoming delusional. Perhaps, he thought, he simply could not believe how easily the journey was going so far? And it was a relief, he had to admit, to be moving again, covering distance with a firm destination in mind, with hundreds of miles separating him from Constantine and his army, from Ganna and from Sabina, from Lepidus. Out here on the open sea his spirits felt liberated, the sea air singing through him. No, he thought: he should enjoy it while he could, and not look for shadows where there were none.
The plan itself, as Nigrinus had explained it back at the villa on Lake Benacus, was simple in its essence. They would take ship from Genua down the western coast of Italy and across the narrows of the Tyrrhenian to Corsica, and then to the port of Olbia on Sardinia. From there they would hope to pick up one of the big cargo ships from Carthage that often called at Olbia before crossing to Portus, the harbour of Rome. With any luck, they could blend in with the other passengers travelling from Sardinia or Africa, and by the time they reached Rome there would be nothing to say that they had come from the north.
To aid the deception, each member of the party carried coins taken from the prisoners at Verona: copper and silver pieces, minted in Rome and stamped with the head of Maxentius. On the other side was the figure of the goddess Roma and the legend PRESERVER OF HIS CITY. Castus had peered at the portrait of the enemy emperor, surprised to notice that it looked so much like Constantine. But coin portraits were seldom accurate: the tyrant’s father Maximian had appeared much the same.
The real danger during the journey lay in the sea crossing between the Italian coast and Sardinia; Maxentius’s galleys from the naval base at Misenum were reported to be cruising in the straits around the island of Ilva. And then, Castus thought, they had Rome itself to tackle. The eternal city, the mistress of nations: the camp of their enemy. As the plan went, once they had done all they could in the city, they would slip out by different routes and make their way north to Spoletium on the Flaminian Way by the ides of October, hoping to meet the vanguard of Constantine’s army there as it advanced across the Apennines.
It was vague – too vague – and Castus still had little notion of what challenges the city itself might hold. His only concern at the moment was getting the party to Rome without being discovered by the enemy. After that, he would take things as they came.
Dropping back down off the stern platform, he picked his way forward to the lee of the deckhouse once more. As he approached, he heard Diogenes still locked in passionate debate with the Christian priest Stephanus, their voices raised against the whine of the wind.
‘But your cosmogony is opposed to all reason! As Aristotle said, nothing can come from nothing… so how can you claim that your god existed before everything else and somehow created the cosmos from a void?’
‘What is impossible with men is possible with God!’ the Christian declared. ‘God is uncontainable and immutable, therefore nothing can exist outside God – a common craftsman can fashion inert and pre-existing matter; only God can create matter from nothing!’
‘Nonsense! Is your god immune from the laws of nature, then? Or are you suggesting that he somehow shat the universe into existence?’
Castus grinned ruefully, then climbed around the far side of the deckhouse and forward to the mast. In the bows, one of the sailors stood poised with a three-pronged harpoon, catching fish for the evening meal. Off to the west, the sun was slipping down towards the horizon, and the waves were fired with gold. A stirring sight, Castus thought. So why did he still feel so wary? Again he glanced back to windward, and just for a moment the low sunlight seemed to flash off the white peak of a following sail.
*
The mission to Rome was a closely guarded secret, or so Castus had been told. But he already knew that the information had leaked to the imperial court; he’d had proof of that before he’d left the villa on Lake Benacus. A eunuch dressed in court robes of deep wine red had been waiting for him outside his room when he’d returned from dinner; he had provided no information but only requested that Castus follow him. Already Castus could guess the identity of the eunuch’s mistress.
Years had passed since he had last spoken to Fausta, nobilissima femina, the wife of the emperor Constantine. He had seen her often enough, both at official functions and around the palace in Treveris, and with Sabina so often in her retinue he had heard a lot about Fausta as well. If she’d paid any special attention to him, she had been careful never to show it, and he’d acted likewise.
He found her in her private chambers, seated on a couch with several other ladies and eunuchs around her; she dismissed them all with a gesture, and in a flurry of silks and scents they were gone. Castus heard the eunuch who had brought him softly closing the door behind him.
‘Be seated, please,’ Fausta said, offering him a place on the facing couch. Castus crossed the room and sat down. He was very conscious that he was alone with the emperor’s wife, although he knew that he would be observed, and anything he said overheard.
Fausta had been only seventeen when they had last met. She was around twenty now, a grown woman; the chan
ge in her appearance and manner were remarkable. Castus had noticed before that she had shed the plumpness of adolescence, the soft roundness of face that had given her a childish look at times. Now he saw how poised she had become, how regal. He noticed the hard clarity in her deeply lidded eyes. The ‘gilded piglet’, the crueller courtiers had called her once, in Treveris. She was far from that now.
‘You are being sent to Rome, I hear,’ she said.
Castus did not attempt to deny it.
‘Have they ordered you to murder my brother?’
‘In a manner of speaking, domina,’ he told her. ‘I said no.’
‘I’m glad.’ Her expression barely altered, but Castus sensed her warming towards him. ‘I did not think you were the sort of man for that.’
What sort of man, he wondered, do you think I am? Being in her presence again brought back charged memories. He had last spoken to her before the siege of Massilia, during her father’s attempt to seize power from Constantine. Maximian had died by his own hand soon afterwards, and Castus had been the last man to see him alive.
‘My brother,’ she said, ‘is not the monster that so many here like to believe. All this talk of sorcery – complete nonsense! He’s entirely devoted to the traditional superstitions. Quite the champion of piety, in fact.’ She paused, moving her lips slightly, as if deciding how much she ought to say. ‘I was never very close to him,’ she went on. ‘He’s more than a decade older than me, and by the time I was able to think of him as my brother he was sent off to join Galerius as a staff officer. But every man I’ve known has been ambitious for power, excepting slaves. I can’t blame him for wanting what my father had, or what my husband also desires.’
Castus nodded slowly, still uncomfortable under the frankness of her gaze. She had put her trust in him once, back at Massilia; Sabina had been her gift to him, a reward for service. But there had been more between them than that. Both of them, in that warm, scented, dimly lit chamber, were aware of the deeper connection they had once shared.
