The Mask of Command

by Ian Ross

  But in the man’s voice, in his stance and attitude, Castus recognised the truth of his intuition. For a moment he remained silent, studying the warrior before him, until he was sure.

  ‘I knew one of your people once,’ he said. ‘Brinno, son of Baudulfus.’

  Bonitus blinked, visibly startled. His lips tightened, and Castus noticed that he had reached instinctively for the hilt of his sword.

  ‘Brinno was my brother,’ he said, frowning. ‘He died fighting for your emperor.’

  ‘I was with him at the time,’ Castus said. ‘He fell in battle, in the lands of the Alamanni. He was a true friend, and a brave warrior.’

  Bonitus stared at him, his fingers still brushing his sword hilt, his face flickering between surprise, suspicious disbelief and an obvious desire to know more. Castus was aware of the silence around them, the baffled looks passing between his officers and men. Though there was little physical resemblance between Bonitus and Brinno, something in his stance, the attitude, was strikingly similar. But where Brinno had been eager, carefree and open, his brother was cold and reserved, with a sense of darkness held tightly within him. Castus held the Frankish chief’s gaze, compelling him to believe what he had said.

  ‘My brother was much older than me,’ the Frankish chief said warily. ‘I did not know him as I should. But he was well treated by the Romans. He was given much honour, even though he came as a captive, like this one here.’ He flicked his hand at the bound Chamavi prisoner, with a sneer of mild contempt.

  Castus remembered the story Brinno had told him, long before: how the Salii had been defeated by Constantius, father of Constantine, and Brinno himself taken as a hostage to Treveris. Only when his father had proved loyal to Rome had the young man been admitted to the Protectores, the emperor’s own bodyguard.

  ‘The empire treats its friends well,’ he told Bonitus.

  The Frank gave a derisive snort. ‘Heh! You think, really? Twenty years my father kept his promise of friendship with your emperors. Even before that, he respected your ways – he even gave to me a Roman name! I keep his promise still. But our lands are poor and threatened always by the sea. Our enemies press on us. In your provinces there are many better lands, where no people live. When I send messengers to your governor, asking that my people may cross the river and settle these lands, what does he say?’

  Castus sucked his cheek, trying not to betray a reaction. ‘I know nothing of this,’ he said.

  ‘Your governor Tiberianus sends away the messengers! He tells us to stay on our side of the river. He says that if we cross over, Rome will be our enemy and we will have war. How is this for friends, heh?’

  Castus nodded slowly. He saw now why these war boats and their heavily armed crews had come up the river to meet him.

  ‘The clarissimus Tiberianus does not command the troops on this river,’ he told Bonitus, all too aware of the others all around him, listening intently. ‘I will report what you have said to the Praetorian Prefect in Treveris, and to the new Caesar, Flavius Crispus.’

  Bonitus grunted and nodded curtly. He was still studying Castus, assessing him. He seemed to come to a decision, throwing back his shoulders.

  ‘If you were truly a friend of my brother,’ he said, ‘then you and I also should be friends.’

  ‘Let it be so,’ Castus said. He hesitated for a moment, anxious not to make some awkward gesture. Then he stepped forward and stretched out his hand.

  The Frankish chief clasped his palm, a sudden fierce pressure. It was enough; both men stepped away again. Bonitus turned abruptly and strode down the gangway, calling out to his crew. With a brief glance back, he stepped up onto the rail and dropped down into his own boat as the Frankish oarsmen bent over their oars once more.

  *

  It was less than an hour until noon, and finally the mass of Chamavi on the far bank had opened, lanes forming to allow the little knots of figures down to the boats. Castus watched, squinting into the glare off the water. Mothers hugged children, fathers stood aloof, gazing fiercely at the Roman ships. Then the first of the boats put out into the stream, loaded with its human cargo.

  Back and forth the boats went, and the men on the ships tracked them. Downstream, the six Salian vessels had anchored out of range of the Roman artillery but still within sight, their crews watching what was happening. Castus sent a message for Dexter to check each hostage as they landed, and establish his identity if possible. Only the sons of warriors and chiefs could be accepted. Noon drifted past, and another hour was gone before Castus saw the banner waving from the Roman shore.

  ‘Release the prisoner,’ he said. ‘Put him in a boat and carry him across to his people.’

  The young barbarian shouted in pain and relief as his bonds were severed. His face was still blanched with distress, but when he glanced back Castus saw the ferocious hatred in his eyes. Then the young man dipped his head and the soldiers wrestled him over the rail into the waiting boat, none too gently.

  Already the horde on the northern bank was beginning to break up, fading back into the flat landscape. Ragnachar remained beneath his banner, his household warriors around him, until the boat drew into the shallows and the young captive was passed into the arms of the men who ran out to carry him to dry land. Castus watched the distant scene: the father reunited with the son. Ragnachar bent down and embraced the young man, then smacked him hard across the face and turned away.

  ‘A good day’s work, dominus,’ Senecio said, and wiped his face with a rag. ‘Usually it’s emperors who do that sort of thing.’

  Castus caught the angle of his words and looked up quickly. Senecio would not meet his eye.

  ‘I have a mandate to protect the frontier,’ he said. ‘I’m doing that.’

  But the navarch’s comment stirred apprehension in his gut. He had said and done nothing, he was sure, that exceeded his authority. He had made no new treaties, only reconfirmed old ones. And he had acted in the name of the emperor. Still, he recalled Bassus’s instruction, the strange warning the prefect had given him many days before. All power descends from the Augustus Constantine. All power is channelled through the Caesar Crispus. There is no other conduit.

  Pacing along the gangway to the forecastle deck, he watched the last of the barbarian throng drifting away from the riverbank. Downstream, the six Salian boats were already under way, oars beating slowly. Castus stared at the flat horizon where the sinuous river met the sky; he could still make out the figure of the Frankish chief, Bonitus, standing at the prow of the lead boat. Just for a moment, he caught the raised palm, the gesture of salute.

  ‘What do you make of him?’ Castus asked Senecio.

  The navarch squinted into the glare of sun at the six boats as they moved around the bend in the river.

  ‘There’s not a Frank alive I’d trust,’ he said. ‘But that one... He’d be a loyal ally, I think. Or a very fierce enemy.’

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER IX

  Treveris, September AD 317

  As the blade descended towards his neck he tried not to flinch. Keen steel rasped up his nape, and he kept his head straight and his eyes closed. Luxorius had nerved himself against most fears, but sharp metal still made him queasy. In the deepest recesses of his pained memories, he knew all too well what blades had done to him.

  ‘The dominus will be attending the festivities today?’ the barber said through his nose, running the razor over the smooth dome of the eunuch’s skull. His tone was not especially respectful; palace barbers were slaves, but thought highly of themselves, and few men cared to be polite to eunuchs anyway, whatever their station.

  ‘The birthday of the young Caesar?’ the tonsor went on. ‘Just fifteen years old! Who would imagine such a young man holding all that power, eh?’

  Luxorius made the slightest of noises against his closed lips, but it was enough to make the barber pause, wipe his blade, clear his throat and then get on with his work. Everyone knew that eunuchs reported all they heard to
their superiors, after all. Best to keep one’s views on the powerful to oneself.

  Inhaling slowly, Luxorius felt the blade stroke across his temples. He was glad that the hair on his face had never had a chance to grow; the thought of a razor playing around his mouth was enough to make him squirm. But he was scrupulous about his appearance, and always made sure that his head was perfectly shaved. Especially, he considered, before imperial celebrations.

  The barber stepped back with a stifled grunt of relief, swung his body this way and that to check his work, and then wiped the razor again. Luxorius took a dampened cloth from one of the attending slaves, wiping his head and neck, then submitted to a few dabs of the scent the barber called saffron dew. When all was done he stood up, shook out his tunic, and arranged his cloak around his shoulders.

  It was still early, the sky growing paler but the sun not yet up. As the eunuch paced out into the colonnades of the palace enclosure he felt the cold in the air, the tightening grip of autumn. Soon would come the first teasing threat of winter. He pulled a woollen cap down over his ears and tried not to shiver. This would be the fourth northern winter he had endured, and each one seemed colder than the last. Surely he would never adapt to these uncivilised temperatures.

  In his blood, Luxorius carried the memory of the far south, the desert lands. He had been born in Coptos on the banks of the Nile, in the Egyptian Thebaid. The years of his distant youth he recalled now only in scattered images: the serrated shadows of palm leaves, the dusty mud-brick walls of the old town, the slow silty water of the great river and the cool chambers of his parents’ house. Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, the Caesar Galerius had marched south along the Nile valley to crush the uprising in the Thebaid; Coptos was one of the rebel strongholds, and the emperor had made an example of it. When the town fell, Galerius ordered the walls torn down, the houses razed to the ground, the entire adult population slaughtered and the children sold into slavery.

  Luxorius had been a handsome youth, or so the slavers who bought him at auction said. They paid a good price for him, but they knew that good-looking young eunuchs could be many times more valuable. Castration was illegal within the empire, though there were places just across the frontier, in the country of the Nobadae, where the operation was performed.

  Little of what followed remained with Luxorius now. He remembered the dirty flyblown village, the mud hut with a blanket across the door. Inside, the old man with the creased face and bad teeth, waiting with his wire garrotte and the curved knife laid in a basin of vinegar. Beyond that was only blood, agony and shame.

  It had taken a year for Luxorius to recover fully from the operation. The slavers had taken him north, to the great market of Alexandria, where they sold him again, for a vast profit, to a merchant from Cyrenaica. And from there, many years later and after much education, he had reached Rome. The Rome of Maxentius, who had defeated and humiliated Galerius, destroyer of Coptos and murderer of his family; Luxorius had been only too happy to take up service in the imperial palace.

  And now Maxentius was long dead, his memory damned. Galerius too was gone, and Luxorius was a slave no more, the free servant of a new master. Or, perhaps, a new mistress.

  Fausta’s instructions to him back in Sirmium had seemed simple enough. Luxorius prided himself on an ability to make things happen: the ambush of the young Caesar’s carriage on the road through Raetia had been a feat of organisation, with not a few attendant hazards, but Luxorius had arranged it all, negotiating through middle-men with the barbarian brigands and passing them the information, and the calculated misinformation, needed to spur them into action. It would have been a success, too – if the new Dux Germaniae had not arrived so promptly on the scene the boy would have been slain, the brigands gone and Luxorius’s work would have been complete.

  After that, opportunities had been far slimmer. Crispus had been well guarded for the rest of the journey, and since his arrival in Treveris a month before he had been surrounded by the court retinue and immune to chance accidents. Luxorius had pondered poison, even straightforward assassination, but the result would have been too obvious, the chain of culprits too easy to trace. Those members of the imperial retinue Luxorius had so far encountered seemed depressingly immune to intrigue and disloyalty. And, meanwhile, there had been developments.

  Only two days before, the news had arrived by express courier from distant Sirmium: the emperor’s wife had given birth to a second son, to be named Constantius. A reason for glad rejoicing throughout the entire world, one would think – unless one was prone to devious thoughts. Who else now but Fausta, mother of the emperor’s youngest heirs, would want to strike at the golden Caesar Crispus?

  No, the eunuch thought as he neared the great audience hall; no, he would have to go about his task far more subtly from now on.

  The first pale autumn sun was flickering across the palace pediments as he crossed the chilly courtyard and entered the vestibule of the audience hall. A crowd was already gathered before the tall doors; their hushed voices mingled and echoed into a roar of sound under the coffered ceiling. All of them were imperial officials, waiting to greet the young Caesar, and Luxorius made his way between them, smiling and nodding to right and left.

  As head chamberlain to the Praetorian Prefect, Luxorius occupied a reasonably superior position in the offices of the palace, although the hierarchies were rigidly maintained and there were many above him. But there were plenty of his own station, and a small contingent of eunuchs who constituted their own private subspecies. Luxorius attempted to make himself agreeable to everyone, but it amused him to observe the jealousy and ambition, the gossip and the spite that ran like fissures through each tight little circle of officials.

  Interlocking spheres, Luxorius thought as he stood with hands linked before him, trying not to shiver in the cold draughts sweeping across the mosaic floor. The society of the palace was made up of them. His own duties were routine enough, overseeing the Praetorian Prefect’s personal household, but they brought him into contact with a wide spectrum of other officials. With a certain diligence, he had managed to expand his circuit of connections beyond that of the eunuchs and the prefect’s own staff.

  ‘Grace and peace to you, brother,’ a man said, stepping up beside him.

  Luxorius smiled as he touched the monogram amulet around his neck: the Greek letters X and P conjoined, Christ’s sigil. ‘Grace and peace,’ he said. ‘May the Lord’s name be forever praised.’

  The newcomer was Arsacius, master of letters to the young Caesar. An exalted position, but he allowed the eunuch to embrace him lightly and kiss him on the cheek.

  Luxorius had joined the Christian faith only the year before. Not through any particular religious convictions, but rather from expediency. Both the emperor Constantine and his son were believers, as were Prefect Bassus, and several other highly placed men. But most people, more scrupulous or less ambitious, still held back from it, uncertain of its virtues or legitimacy. Christianity was becoming, Luxorius thought, a sort of elite club in the higher circles of the administration, and membership brought certain rewards of access. Unlike in the east, or in Rome and North Africa, the new religion had so far made very little progress here in the north-west, but even the provincials of Gaul were beginning to notice its potential benefits: the congregation in Treveris had almost doubled, just in the month since the new Caesar’s arrival.

  ‘Is there any more word about events in the north, brother?’ Luxorius asked, keeping his voice low, his expression pleasant.

  ‘Only yesterday, yes,’ Arsacius said, and the eunuch heard the smile in the man’s voice. ‘A letter from the governor of Germania Secunda. He’s received a delegation of prominent citizens very concerned at the actions of our new dux, it seems.’

  ‘Oh? But surely defeating the barbarians and driving them back across the river is precisely his purpose?’

  ‘So one would think!’ Arsacius said. ‘However,’ he went on, dropping his voice even
further, ‘many seem to feel that our commander did not punish the barbarians sufficiently. They even claim that he favours them in some way, and has promised to allow barbarian immigrants to cross the border and settle within our territory.’

  ‘Has he?’ Luxorius asked.

  ‘I doubt he knows exactly what he has or has not done!’ the other man replied, chuckling. ‘He seems, I would say, a rather unsophisticated sort of officer. But he has asked to send us a delegation of ambassadors from some barbarian people or other. I seem to remember he was selected personally for the position by his eminence the prefect... Could he have been intended to annoy the provincials, do you think?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say!’ Luxorius said, widening his eyes. ‘But surely the settlement of barbarians within the empire has a certain provenance?’ Sometimes he found it helpful to feign ignorance; it was expected of a eunuch, when discussing matters of state.

  ‘Indeed so,’ the master of letters said, with a condescending chuckle. ‘It was done by the emperor’s father, and by Probus I think. The great Marcus Aurelius too. But those were defeated men, prisoners. The concern now is that large bodies of free immigrants will be permitted to settle on Roman land, in their own communities. Something which many of our provincials hold in abhorrence... Although it would bring in greater tax revenues, no doubt, and provide a source of first-class military recruits that would ease the burden of conscription...’

  But now a stir ran through the assembled crowd of officials, and both men fell silent. The tall inlaid doors of the audience hall were opening, and a moment later the blare of trumpets came from within. The senior members of the imperial staff paced forward through the portals and into the hall, followed by the others, all in order of precedence.