by Q V Hunter
The Germans didn’t notice me at first. They’d just started up a drinking song in their rough dialect, drowning out the sound of my horse breaking the brush of the clearing. Two of them lay side by side facing each other on a cloak spread across the grass. They tossed dice. I stared, astonished to see the embroidered imperial crest, with gold bands hemming its purple fabric, used as a casual picnic blanket.
The gamblers looked up. ‘What’s this?’ He addressed me in a coarse Latin.
‘Covered in blood. A refreshing sight! Join the party, messenger!’
They leered at me with eyes reddened by drink. My horse’s nostrils flared. Now I was noticed by the whole group, except for two men busy at the far edge of the glade making noises fit for a brothel. The man face down beneath his partner looked up and met my horrified gaze. For a glazed second, through his mix of pleasure and humiliation, his eyes locked on mine. Another German stood by the couple, waiting for his turn.
Love between men did not offend any Roman, but enslavement of any kind reminded me of my own past. Now I saw with my own eyes that the Emperor of the Western Empire had become no more than a slave addicted to the abuse of our Empire’s enslaved.
Cheeks burning, I turned my horse as quickly as I could and retreated into the shadows of the forest again, retracing my way back to the wide path and taking another turning to the town.
Confusion flooded my mind. All these weeks since arriving in Treverorum, I’d worked to get noticed, be promoted, and earn a real assignment. I’d hoped to be transferred back to the Castra for better training and to be posted closer to my boyhood home. I’d wished that the magister who’d overseen me from an untried slave-bodyguard through my liberating army mission to a freedman ranked among the agentes in rebus would do more than ask me to open mail and listen at keyholes.
I’d been posted to the court in Treverorum to spy out any reasons for rumored discontent or disgust. I was supposed to dig up the roots of low morale roiling the military professionals across the north and west of the Empire.
Today I’d stumbled on why the treasonous comments of generals and war veterans worried ears in influential offices and book-lined studies. Now I understood why, from court to court, burly fighting men called the Emperor Constans’ engagement to Olympias, the daughter of a praetorian prefect, a longstanding farce.
Some of these unhappy soldiers were old enough to remember service under the fearless Constantine. They had been trained to defend their Empire, to the death if necessary. Instead they found themselves answering to Constantine’s effeminate and spendthrift youngest son—who repelled their sense of honor and purpose even as he in turn scorned their medals and their courage.
It wasn’t affection between two men that revolted them. It was Constans’ physical and emotional prostration to the profit and ridicule of the enemy. He made a mockery of Roman valor and service.
The images of the morning stayed frozen in my memory, like stone figures carved a rich man’s coffin, one side depicting a vivid boar hunt, the other a scene of debauchery. A coffin for an empire as well?
I’d seen enough in the glade for my first proper report to the spymaster Apodemius at our schola’s headquarters, the Castra Peregrina in Roma. Unfortunately, the sovereign Constans had seen me. He might be more inclined to sport with a German archer than a vicious boar, but the Emperor wasn’t stupid.
It was hard to know how Constans had slipped from the most promising of the Constantine sons to the least. Almost immediately after his father’s death—even before he’d come of age—Constans had carried off a resounding victory over invading Sarmatians in 337.
His eldest brother, Constantine II, had died in 340 underestimating his youngest brother’s strength. He had tried to snatch Constans’ share of the Empire and failed. It was a conflict that loomed large in my personal history because Constantine II had died in an ambush of Illyrians led by my own ex-master under the walls of Aquileia. Commander Atticus Manlius Gregorius had watched from the banks of the Alsa River as his victorious cavalrymen tossed Constantine II’s body into flowing waters.
It was a victory that the winner Constans didn’t see in person. True to form as a killer by proxy, he had lingered back in Dacia while Commander Gregorius finished the job. Nobody had to tell me that Constans let others fight his battles for him—against boar or brother.
Now the golden-haired Emperor, only twenty-six years old, ruled Gallia, Britannia, Italia, Hispania and Roman Africa, though actual ruling lost out to banqueting. He was indeed not stupid but reports of his cruelty filtered down to my agens post. The Emperor knew exactly what my account would mean if it reached his remaining brother Constantius II, now fighting a real battle against Persia along the Empire’s eastern border.
But I couldn’t worry about that right now. As I galloped the final mile towards the capital’s Porta Nigra, I concentrated on getting aid as fast as I could back to Gaiso. The sentries saw me racing towards them. A signal went up and a few of our original hunting party assembled under the arches, waiting for my news.
I summoned the nursing Gaiso needed and pushed concerns about my report on Constans to the back of my mind—but it wouldn’t stay in retreat. The degree of debasement and risk to the Empire was bound to be as explosive as Greek fire and just as dangerous to my career. I was trained to serve the Empire, not my own safety. How should I word such a dispatch? How should I portray the degradation of the one man appointed to defend the new Christian Church against pagan critics in Roma? How could I do my job without being accused of treason myself?
And with an entire Western Empire at stake, would I be allowed to file the report at all?
Chapter 2, Constantia’s Desire
—Evening, Treverorum Palace—
Gaiso’s thigh, bound firmly with boiled rags soaked in acetum, was still inflamed and tender that evening. His rising fever worried everyone in the palace. Dinner for the staff was perfunctory and subdued—the usual harvest-season smoked game and nut-crusted preserves in honey these northerners like. Their bread was dark and indigestible. I would have given a month’s wages for a succulent fig or some fresh sea catch drizzled with lemon juice. But we ate better than anyone else in this prefecture, thanks to the Emperor’s demands.
I picked at my food, listening to the conversation around me as ordered, but I was also mulling over thoughts darker than any of the careless banter. I quit the meal as soon as was polite and slipped back to my small first-story room overlooking the inner and outer palace courtyards, with my postal cubicle at the arch linking the two.
No doubt Gaiso’s imperial hosts and the higher-ranked of our hunting party were right now digesting a final course in the Emperor’s private dining room. They would be talking about the hunt late into the evening.
In the palace’s outer courtyard, a couple of cooks with arms like anvils prepared the heavy beast. They had lashed it with ropes and spikes to a spit for skinning and defatting. Scabby waifs scrambled for bristles and scraps of hide tossed their way. Some disrespectful joker had tied a length of purple ribbon around its gargantuan neck.
By tomorrow’s midday meal, there would be roasted boar meat for a ceremonial tasting. I wasn’t tempted. This particular creature was a hoary old specimen, famed among the locals for its thick hide, aggressive personality and canny evasions of all previous expeditions. I could still smell its musky fecal stench on my hands.
Treverorum boasted the largest baths north of the Alps, but I was too tired to push through its streets crowded with off-hours wool merchants, arms-dealers and imperial paper-pushers adding to the common throng gawking at the monster pig on display.
I washed and scraped myself clean using water in my basin like an army man. I bolted my oak door, snuffed out my bronze oil lamps and retired to my narrow bed. The autumn sun was barely down and the banquet below my window not yet over, but I hated the shrinking hours and chilly nights of the north.
On festive evenings like these, no one would miss the Numidian
agens. Most of my duties fell in the morning hours—receiving and registering the post and sorting the messages, as well as reading them in secret and making copies as necessary. I skimmed through accounts from the local mint. I kept an eye on army dispatches informing the Emperor of skirmishes along the Rhenus River and I shook my head at religious appeals calling for Constans to settle theological questions.
Was the new Christ really part-God or merely God-like? It boiled down in Greek to a single letter, ‘i.’ The Christian bishops’ tedious debate made me yawn.
I tried to doze, but tonight half my brain feared a footstep outside my locked door. The other half recalled a warm desert night in Numidia Militaris when I held the runaway servant girl Kahina in my arms. I forgot for a few hours my assignment to spy on the fanatic religious outlaws she had joined. I had saved her from martyrdom and unknowingly saved my unborn child, only to lose them both to none other than my former master and unacknowledged father.
I loved all three—especially the unseen child—but secrecy, resentment, jealousy and most of all, my own ambition kept me at arm’s length. My son would be better off raised as a legitimate heir to the House of Manlius, not a freedman’s bastard. Kahina had protested she could never love her betrothed, but I knew her mettle. She would honor the bravery and name of Commander Atticus Manlius Gregorius, despite his disfiguring, crippling wounds.
She had no idea she was marrying not only my former master but also my natural father. He had no idea his legitimate heir by Kahina was actually his own illegitimate grandson. I knew he was my father, but when he tried to evade his promise to free me, I’d broken away from him in bitterness. I was too proud to ask him to confess the truth. I would let him live with his conscience, as the rebuffed, discarded owner of an ungrateful slave and unacknowledged son.
I was the only person who knew every one of these secrets that bound the four of us together. I kept them buried in my heart. I gambled everything I cared about now on proving an ex-slave could rise in station to become a trusted imperial agent.
I heard a swish of robes passing my door but no footsteps—or at least, no honest feet shod in respectable leather. I didn’t trust men who wore brocade slippers or jeweled sandals in this climate—and there were a lot of them around every corner and corridor of this brand new capital.
I drifted off at last, to the comforting sensation of a reliable horse to ride and no spying eyes watching my every move . . .
Then I woke up. This time those were indeed solid boots striding up to my door. Someone gave it a sharp, single knock.
‘Numidianus, you’re wanted!’
I pulled my tunic shirt back on and found an aged porter in heavy wool layers waiting outside, coughing up phlegm.
‘The Augusta Constantia has a message to dispatch to the East. Go pick it up.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not authorized to enter the imperial suite. Tell her maid to bring it down to me in the main reception hall. I’ll register it for tomorrow morning’s bag to Mediolanum.’
He was a wily old coot, familiar with the goings-on in the regal residential wings. He gave me an unpleasant wink with a rheumy eye. ‘Sorry, friend. She asked for “the Numidian”. And as far as I can see, you’re the only damned African between here and the Circus latrines.’ He leaned on my doorframe and wiggled his eyebrows.
‘It sounds wrong to me. Check with Eusebius. He never sleeps.’
One didn’t cross Eusebius in this palace. The eunuch was the praepositus sacri cubiculi, senior chamberlain of the imperial quarters, the ‘man’ who led the silk slipper cohort. Needless to say, we hadn’t had eunuchs back in the army, but I’d seen immediately that where Eusebius was concerned, rank or office didn’t matter.
What Eusebius lacked in masculinity, he made up in guile. He was smart, observant and powerful. In many, he inspired fear. I tried to forgive it in his case because he’d lost the essentials of manhood, either through a misfortune of birth or some unlucky encounter with the Fates.
‘Eusebius is busy.’ The old man waggled his eyebrows again.
‘He’s always busy—’
‘She asked for you, she wants you.’
‘Inform the Lord Chamberlain anyway. I’m coming.’
Anyone in imperial service learns quickly that state artists tend to flatter their subject matter. I’d seen the Augusta’s features in both marble and paint, but only once in the flesh. She was crossing the threshold of the inner courtyard to clamber into a litter festooned with swags and gilt.
The two Emperors’ sister had all the ingredients for beauty—a slender figure, black hair fixed in three or four rows of curls piled high at the front of her brow over the same large eyes and neat nose of her younger brother Constans.
She was lucky. She could have inherited the heavy, upturned chin and hooked nose that gave busts of Constantius II the aspect of a crab’s claw.
I had also noticed a piercing glint to those dark-lashed eyes and a mean set to the rouged lips that wasn’t alluring.
Error or not, my summons to her rooms tonight gave me a better chance to check the Constantine female line up close.
I straightened myself up, but had no time to don full armor. On the way to the imperial bedrooms, I passed the winter triclinium, where the raucous diners were still at it on their cushioned couches. I continued into less familiar corridors and announced myself. Two of Constantia’s ladies escorted me into a shadowy marble foyer to wait.
The sculptor’s art, no matter how accurate the line and scale, also misses out on smell and sound. Lamps and braziers gave off light and warmth, but my nose sensed the Augusta before I saw her. A whiff of jasmine conjured up my Mediterranean childhood.
From the approaching jangle of bracelets, belts and earrings, I knew she must be nearby, even before she emerged from behind a filigreed screen.
Back in Roma, my mistress Lady Laetitia once confided to me that if we men put on helmets, breastplates and leg guards for battle, the ladies of the Empire arm themselves with their finest jewelry in defense.
If so, the Augusta was wearing full battle gear tonight. She wrapped her person in a carapace of gold collars, bracelets and even a leather belt studded with light blue topazes, golden amber, garnets and green emeralds. Yes, she’d braced herself into a female version of imperial armor but I doubt she intended to give the first impression that I actually got—that of a tired, drawn creature shackled in overpriced chains and handcuffs.
There were hollow circles under her eyes, underscored by the Belgican fashion in heavy eye-makeup. She smiled with small, very white teeth.
‘Did I disturb your rest, Numidianus?’
‘I’m honored. You have a message for me to dispatch?’
‘For the Augustus on the Persian front. A private message.’
I nodded my head. ‘All imperial messages are secure, Augusta.’
She smiled to herself. ‘Aren’t you surprised I asked for you?’
‘As you please, Augusta.’
‘There are other messengers on duty, aren’t there?’
I bowed my head and waited. Questions from above tended to be rhetorical. Years of early slavery in a patrician household had taught me to listen and observe.
From underneath lowered lids, I took in the lurid decor of her private rooms—walls warmed with fur hangings tied with gilt ropes, a folding table strewn with delicate unguent flasks and at least one silver-handled whip. Her window curtains were sewn from flaming orange brocade held in by gold braid fastened with pheasant feathers. Her personal dining couch was upholstered in the black and white stripes of an animal I didn’t even recognize.
The whole effect was more feral than imperial.
‘My message isn’t quite finished,’ she called to me. ‘Follow me while I add a few more words.’
I trailed her into an adjoining chamber dominated by a wooden bed ornamented with ivory carvings and pink-belled seashells. She sat down in her sloped chair at a makeup table and resumed writing.
/> ‘It’s a comfortable room, but not as nice as my suite in Mediolanum. I’m always cold here,’ she pouted.
‘As you say, Augusta, Mediolanum is much warmer.’
‘Goodness knows, no one needs an augusta near any damned Rhenus defense line. That’s what I’m writing my beloved brother. Do you like my mural? I commissioned it.’
A painting behind her bedstead depicted an orgy scene. Satyrs cavorted with nubile half-dressed women, offering them grapes, goblets, and far more personal assets.
‘Charming, Augusta.’
‘Oh, look at it more closely. Use that lamplight if you wish. You may kneel on my bed—it won’t break, even under a young man’s strong pressure.’
Across the polished expanse of mosaic tiles, she tossed a friendly smile over her shoulder and added, ‘It’s been tested.’
I realized she was proud of her lovely, straight teeth. Then she licked her rouged lips, as if she’d detected my admiration, and went back to finishing her letter.
I stayed well clear of the embroidered bedclothes and kept my eyes fixed on the dogs painted in the lower corner. They reminded me of the hunting dogs closing in on Gaiso’s doomed boar.
‘I’m not close to my little brother, but I hold the Dominus Constantius very dear. You guarantee that this will remain private?’ She warmed her sealing wax over a flickering flame.
‘Your letter?’
‘Yes, of course my letter.’ She gave a low chuckle. ‘What did you think I meant?’
‘Yes, of course, Augusta.’
Her voice took on a taunting edge. ‘How can you guarantee my letter will even leave these walls?’
‘I assure you—’
‘You can assure me because you’re the “nobody” who reads everything that goes in and out of this palace.’ She threw her head back and laughed through those bright, sharp teeth. ‘Am I right?’
Before I could answer, she sauntered over and gave my shoulder a light tap with her letter. ‘You see, Eusebius tells me everything. He’s my eyes and ears, on every floor and in every corner of this palace. He reports to me. He’s my spy.’