Today, the Praetorian Prefect had formally welcomed Prince Sasan with a ceremony in the Forum of Aquileia. Tomorrow, Volusianus would see the four survivors of the mission in private. Valens hoped he had made the right decision back in Byzantium. None of them knew anything about the family of Clemens, but they all knew who had issued the orders that had sent them to the Castle of Silence. Valens had sent a message by the fast imperial posting service direct to Volusianus. The danger was that Murena, as head of the frumentarii, took his instructions from the Praetorian Prefect.
‘Another drink.’ Hairan waved the girl over. ‘For who knows what tomorrow holds.’
*
Valens waited in the big basilica off the Forum. Through the open doors came the noise of the market: traders selling wine and olive oil, slaves and cattle and hides. His head ached from last night’s wine, but he did not regret the indulgence. The mission had changed him. Nowdays he drank for the camaraderie, to prolong the evening, not to drown his misery. His parents were long dead. It had not been his fault. Eventually a man has to look things in the face, has to shoulder the unhappiness life brings.
Valens flexed the wrist of his right hand. The wound had healed, but sometimes it still pained him.
Narses came out through the hangings that screened the private room.
Valens felt his heart lift. The Persian had been the first summoned by the Praetorian Prefect, and he was leaving as a free man.
‘Volusianus wants you next,’ Narses said to Valens.
The Praetorian Prefect was seated behind an inlaid desk. Although clad in a fine tunic, Volusianus’s face looked as if it should have been following a plough. But he was alone, and unarmed. That was what mattered. This was going to be alright. Valens had made the correct choice.
Volusianus gestured Valens to a chair. ‘A drink?’
‘No thank you, sir.’
‘Make your report.’
Valens told everything that he could remember – from Rome to the Castle of Silence and back to Italy. Sometimes Volusianus asked questions, sought clarification or expansion. Now and then he jotted notes. All the time the broad peasant face was impassive.
Finally, it was done.
‘May I ask a question, sir?’
‘Of course.’
‘What will happen to Sasan?’
‘The prince is an honoured guest. For now he will be educated here in Aquileia.’
‘Will it not mean war with the Persians?’
Volusianus ran his hand over his face. He looked old and careworn. ‘War is coming anyway.’
‘My men, sir, what will happen to them?’
‘They will be promoted, and you will be rewarded.’ A shrewd look passed over the bucolic features. ‘But first you have another task to perform.’
CHAPTER 37
Rome
MURENA SQUINTED AT THE SUN. He was early. The message he had sent said that he would arrive at noon, and it would not do to be there too much beforehand. It was essential they were alone.
Turning aside, Murena loitered. The Forum was busy. He wore the boots and sword belt of an off-duty soldier. They would draw no attention; Rome was full of troops. Glancing around he saw several in the crowd. Murena half recognised one with long hair and a moustache, vanishing around the Senate House.
Having bought a pastry from a street vendor, Murena sat to eat it on the balustrade that surrounded the Lacus Curtius. He took a bite, but his appetite had gone since the news that morning.
There had been nothing out of the ordinary about Volusianus going north. The imperial field army was still quartered around Milan. But the Praetorian Prefect’s diversion to Aquileia had been unexpected. The report had come from a member of Volusianus’s staff suborned by Murena. Unfortunately, the informant had not accompanied the Praetorian Prefect, and had not known the reason for the trip.
A ragged child was staring at the hardly touched pastry.
‘Hungry?’ Murena held out the snack.
‘What do you want?’ The urchin was suspicious.
‘Nothing.’
The boy snatched the food and disappeared into the crowd without a word of thanks.
The news had been waiting on Murena’s desk at dawn. Volusianus had returned to Rome late last night. With him were four named survivors from the mission to the Castle of Silence. Prince Sasan had been rescued, and was lodged for the time being in Aquileia. Reading the report, Murena felt as if an abyss had opened under his feet.
At least Clemens had not been among those who had made it back. There was still a chance that this was not the end. If Clemens had revealed his secret instructions to the survivors, the Praetorians would have come in the night, and by now Murena would be in the cellars under the palace.
Murena leant over and washed his hands in the water feature.
The possibility remained that Clemens had told his family before he left. That avenue of danger had to be closed today.
Drying his hands on his trousers, Murena looked at the relief sculpture behind the ornamental basin. An armoured warrior was riding his mount into a marsh. One of the tales was that long ago a chasm had appeared at this place. The soothsayers had said a sacrifice was necessary. A young Roman – Marcus Curtius – had offered himself. The fissure had closed over his head. Not a good omen. Murena had done what was right for Rome. Now would he also pay the ultimate penalty?
There was another story. Once there had been a marsh here in the Forum. A Sabine cavalryman – Mettius Curtius – hard pressed by the Romans of Romulus, had braved its dangers, and escaped. That was more encouraging.
Murena looked again at the sun. It was time to go.
* * *
The Vicus Caeseris was quiet – just a couple of pedestrians and a vagrant with a blanket pulled over his head sleeping rough in a doorway. The latter was big and looked well fed for a beggar; perhaps not a tramp, but a day labourer sleeping off a drinking season.
Murena took station across and down the street, and watched the closed door and shuttered windows of the wine shop. A few more people wandered past; none went to the shop. The slumberer did not stir.
When the sun was almost directly overhead, Murena moved to the door. He listened intently. Once, he thought he caught the murmur of a voice from behind the boards. That was no cause for concern. They were both expecting him.
A final glance up and down the street, and Murena knocked on the door. The sounds of bolts being drawn, and the vintner opened the door.
‘Gaius.’ The wine seller spoke as if something was wrong with the name.
‘Health and great joy.’ Murena went inside.
The tradesman shut the door.
‘Bolt it,’ Murena said.
The man seemed uncertain.
‘As my message said, we need to talk undisturbed.’
The vintner shot the bolts.
The room was dark. The single small lamp on the counter barely illuminated the nearby racks of amphorae. The big barrels standing along the left-hand wall were in deep gloom. As ever, the shop smelt agreeably of wine and sawdust. Today there was a hint of spikenard. There was no end to the ingenuity men invested in flavouring wines.
‘Is Tullia here?’ Murena asked.
‘She is in the back.’
‘What I have to say concerns her husband.’
‘Tullia!’ The vintner moved back behind his counter. He was rubbing his palms down the front of his leather apron.
She emerged from behind the curtain with her arms tight across her body, as if holding herself together.
‘Health and great joy,’ Murena said.
Tullia did not reply, but moved quickly to stand by her father.
‘It is about Clemens.’ Murena moved between them and the entrance to their living quarters.
‘You bastard!’ Tullia spat. ‘You sent him to his death!’
That answered Murena’s question. There was no further need for words. He drew his sword.
‘Help!’
&
nbsp; Murena smiled. No one would hear their cries. They were trapped behind the counter. He moved forward. Finish them, then quickly check there was no one in the back, and be gone before the alarm was raised. Nothing incriminating left behind.
‘Help us now!’
Above the shouts, Murena heard hurried footsteps. The hanging was torn open. A soldier with shoulder-length hair and luxuriant moustaches stood there, sword in hand.
Now someone was pounding on the front door.
Shifting away from the newcomer, Murena flicked a glance towards the sound. In the corner of his eye he saw two figures slide out from behind the huge barrels. He knew them at once. The big Persian Narses and the young officer Valens. Of course, the one with the moustache was Hairan.
The Hatrene was blocking the rear exit.
‘Throw down the weapon,’ Valens said.
Murena backed into a corner, covering himself with his blade.
Narses went and unbolted the door. The bald figure of that mad bastard Iudex entered.
‘It is finished.’ Valens spoke softly, as if calming a horse.
Odds of four to one; Murena knew he was right. Hairan ushered Tullia and her father out of the room. The other three spread out and watched Murena.
An image came into Murena’s mind of Acilius Glabrio cornered on that dark, windswept roof. He envied the senator the poison concealed in the ring. Like Acilius Glabrio, he would not be taken alive.
Still, it was a hard thing to do. Murena thought of the cells, and the pincers and the claws.
Without warning, he turned and dropped to his knees. Wedging the hilt of his sword against a barrel, he threw himself forward.
At first it was little worse than a punch in the stomach. Then the pain overwhelmed him. As his body toppled sideways, he felt the blade twisting in his guts.
Murena lay very still, clutching the steel, as if that might ease his last agonies. His lifeblood was hot on his hands.
He was dimly aware of the men standing over him.
His face was in the sawdust. His shallow breaths lifted flakes from the floor.
‘Why?’ someone asked from far away.
Murena could not answer.
EPILOGUE
Constantinople
I call upon thee, O Lord; make
haste to me!
Give ear to my voice, when I call
to thee!
Let my prayer be counted as incense
before thee,
And the lifting up of my hands as
an evening sacrifice!
THE OLD SENATOR DID NOt lift his hands very high. God and man allowed a certain latitude when you were in your eighty-third year. At least it was Sunday, and one did not have to kneel.
The Church of the Holy Apostles smelt of paint and sawdust. As the others senses failed, his sense of smell seemed to have become more acute. It was no great recompense. He could barely make out the rotunda at the end of the nave and its thirteen sarcophagi. Three of them were occupied by the skulls of Luke, Andrew and Timothy. Relics had not been found of the other nine Apostles, and, of course, the Emperor was not dead yet.
‘Take, eat; this is my body, which shall be broken for you.’
Declining the supporting hand of his eldest grandson, he approached the Eucharist as he had been taught. Not with his arm extended, or his fingers parted, he made his left hand a throne for his right to welcome the King. He cupped his palm, and received Christ’s body.
‘Amen.’
Carefully he blessed his eyes with a touch of the holy body, then, careful not to drop a morsel, he put it in his mouth and ate.
‘This is my blood, which is shed for you; when you do this, you make my remembrance.’
He did not stretch out his hand for the chalice, but bowed his head in homage and reverence, and sanctified himself by partaking of Christ’s blood. While his lips were still moist, he touched them with his fingers, and blessed his eyes, his scarred old forehead, his nose and ears.
Returning to his seat, he leant upon his grandson’s arm.
It was wise to appear pious. The imperial edict banning traditional sacrifices had been widely ignored. But the Emperor was not young and he looked far from well. A comet had been seen in the night sky. That presaged the death of a king. Constantine had three sons and two nephews. There would be a struggle for the succession, and all five candidates were Christians. For an octogenarian the future mattered little, but it was important that his family had every chance to weather the coming storm.
The conversion of Lucius Domitius Sasan to the new religion of the Emperor had involved no inner struggle nor revelation. It had been a matter of quiet policy, like so much in his life. He had never been an aficionado of gladiatorial fights, and the public executioners could always find different ways, equally cruel, to dispatch criminals other than crucifixion. Resting on the seventh day struck him as a sensible idea.
Of course, if the Christian god was as all-seeing as his priests claimed, he would not be deceived by such subterfuge. Sasan would be condemned to an eternity of hellfire. The Psalms made that clear.
Let the mischief of their lips
overwhelm them!
Let burning coals fall upon them!
Let them be cast into pits, no
more to rise!
And Sasan might have exalted company. It was whispered that Constantine had turned to the Christians only because their priests had offered him the hope of absolution. Beheading your eldest son, and having your wife suffocated in a hot bath, would weigh on any conscience. It would be a strange deity that overlooked such sins in his judgement of a soul.
Thank God, the service was over. Sasan was hungry. Fasting did not agree with him.
Outside, the late evening sunshine fell in bands under the portico. Sasan’s grandson led him to the litter that would convey him back to his house overlooking the Bosporus. It was pleasant there by the water. The house had been one of those gifts offered by Constantine to those senators prepared to leave Rome for his new capital. Sasan’s domicile, like his piety, was a result of worldly calculation.
The summons to the consilium of the Emperor just before Easter had been an unexpected honour. Constantine was preparing for war with Persia. Quite what advice Sasan might have been expected to proffer was a mystery. He had been an eleven-year-old child when he had left Persia seventy-two years before. His role as a diplomatic hostage had been eclipsed long ago when Hormisdas, the brother of the King of Kings Shapur II, had fled to Rome.
Sasan had been grateful that Hormisdas further removed him from attention. Until recently he had enjoyed the company of Hormisdas. But now he kept his distance. Constantine had proclaimed his own nephew Hannibalianus King of Kings. The projected campaign in the east was to place Hannibalianus on the throne in Ctesiphon. Hormisdas had become unnecessary, perhaps something of an embarrassment, and had not been invited to the consilium. Perhaps Sasan, as a member of the Persian royal house, had been thought to give some spurious legitimacy to the whole affair.
Truth be told – and one must abhor the Lie – Sasan knew his effect on relations between Rome and Persia had always been negligible. The year after he had been rescued from the Castle of Silence there had indeed been a war. Thousands of men, women and children had suffered and died. Roman troops had sacked Ctesiphon. But the war had been fought by Odenaethus, the ambitious Lord of Palmyra, who had commanded Rome’s eastern provinces. It had not dragged the Emperor Gallienus from the west. Odenaethus had campaigned alone to free Valerian from Persian captivity. The Lord of Palmyra had failed. There had been no attempt to set up the young Prince Sasan as King of Kings. The war would have been fought if Sasan had remained a prisoner in the Castle of Silence.
When first brought into the empire, Sasan had been provided with a household and ordered to live in Aquileia. For four years he had enjoyed growing up in the elegant northern Italian town with its views of the Alps and the gulf of Tergeste. He had been glad to be alive, and content to
be schooled as if he were a scion of some obscure but wealthy Roman family. Above all he had hoped to be forgotten.
That hope had been disabused when the army of the newly proclaimed Emperor Aurelian had marched through Aquileia. Aurelian had taken him to Rome, given Sasan citizenship, awarded him the toga of manhood, then declared him a senator. Imperial generosity had provided a house on the Esquiline, and a wife from a senatorial family. Whatever calculation had provoked Sasan’s brief return to the public gaze had died with the assassination of Aurelian.
As Emperor succeeded Emperor, Sasan devoted himself to books and the arts. History was his passion, but he had no desire to make it himself. A dutiful husband, he had fathered four children: three sons and a daughter. He had seen them grow, marry, produce eight grandchildren. Apart from an annual trip to the Bay of Naples, he had hardly left Rome until he decided to take advantage of the largess of Constantine, and come to live by the Bosporus. Two sons had predeceased him, but their deaths apart, it had been a long and thankfully uneventful life.
As the litter made its stately way through the streets, Sasan thought of that wilder journey long ago down from the Elburz Mountains and across the Steppe. The wound of Valens, the young officer who had saved his life, had healed. After Aquileia he had never seen any of them again. Not Valens or the odd Manichaean Iudex, not his fellow Persian Narses or Hairan the handsome young man from a desolate city. Ten men had ridden out of Zeugma to rescue him. Six had died in the attempt, including the traitor. They would all be long dead now.
When he still publicly worshipped the traditional gods of Rome, he had made libations to their shades. Even now, in the privacy of his home, occasionally he tipped a little wine on the ground.
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