by Q V Hunter
She laughed and then named the very man who had changed both our lives for the better. ‘Leo. We named him after Leo.’
I had never seen a Roman die more nobly than Leontus Longus Flavius. If my son grew up as brave as that, I’d be satisfied.
‘I’ll try to protect you and Leo for as long as I can, but that means trying to stay in Roma. As an agentes in rebus my fate is not my own but I promise I’ll try.’
She nodded and extended her hand to me. This time it was not as rigid as marble. I nodded my good-bye.
Outside the gate, I leaned against the fig tree, taking it all in—the feeble Senator, my sickly child, the greedy Clodius and Kahina’s stoic pride. For many minutes, I wept hot silent tears. Then I pulled myself together and headed off to report for duty.
Chapter 5, The Curious Ones
—The Castra Peregrina, Roma—
I headed off for the echoing barracks of the Castra Peregrina on the Caelian Hill. The Castra was originally built to house non-Roman auxiliary troops, the peregrini, before it was given over to the frumentarii for their headquarters. But the hated frumentarii dragged the imperial messenger and road service into such disrepute for corruption and skullduggery that Emperor Diocletian disbanded them in disgrace.
Not that a single citizen was fooled when a few years later, the agentes set up shop in the same sprawling stone compound. Even though we were more honest and professional than the despised frumentarii, the stigma of underhand dealings stuck to our cloak hems like caked mud.
Agentes weren’t admired like generals or trusted like senators. We certainly weren’t idolized like gladiators. Nobody scribbled our names in celebratory graffiti, if only because whatever we did in pursuit of duty, we stayed discreet.
We were also exempt from state prosecution. An agens of Roma had a license to do, well, do whatever he saw fit. As a result, we were feared. As we departed from offices or garrisons, people hissed our nickname, the curiosi, behind our backs.
Generally, agentes were too busy to worry about such insults. The state expected us to courier dispatches and escort officials, to monitor roads and cargo, to inspect traffic warrants, and double-check customs records.
When the Emperor issued a decree, we followed up to make sure it was enforced. From time to time, we had to arrest people—or worse. We were those faceless, nameless men who escorted disgraced officials into exile.
But it wasn’t always self-effacing work. I had heard of an agens who once served as ambassador to the Persian court of Shapur II, the Great.
The fact he never returned alive wasn’t the point.
The point was that everybody in the Dominate counted on the agentes, even when they whispered that we answered only to our own dark hearts.
They were wrong about that. Independent and aloof, we served an ideal of empire that most people no longer tried to live up to. I answered only to Apodemius and he answered only to the Master of Offices. I was proud to be an agens, if only a circitor still near the bottom of five ranks. In my youthful, boastful heart, I liked to see myself as a classical hero, singled out by the gods for a destiny greater than my birth.
But then my feet touched ground and I recalled I’d been a slave, recruited from a border patrol camp in North Africa, and chosen not by the gods but by a former agens-turned-oil trader, Leo. I’d survived a suicide mission intact and won my freedom and a chance—my only chance—for a life. The gods were indifferent, though I clung to my childish amulet hoping they’d remember me from time to time.
I started service as an eques. For nine months I ferried dispatch bags from Aquileia through the Pannonian capital of Siscia to Sirmium, the gateway to the Eastern Empire. Then I rode the route all the way back. I got used to the long, lonely hours in the saddle. We Numidians have horses in our blood. Even if my origins lay closer to humble mules than thundering stallions, I’d held my grip and concentration for weeks on end.
Time and again, I recorded early deliveries. At every stopover mansio on my route, I arrived sober, always grabbed the best horse and spare for myself, and tipped the stable slaves with an open hand.
Then I’d been promoted to the express service and allowed to wear the signal feather in my leather petanus. My ambition matched my speed.
Finally, I got a summons to Roma. There Apodemius told me in a five-minute midnight meeting to shift my sleeping roll up to Treverorum and handle internal distribution in the palace.
The old man had added, ‘Numidianus, this time it’s not just about mail. I want to know everything you hear up there, especially insults, jokes and rumors—no matter how outlandish. All messages to me in code from now on.’
That was the first occasion I had been authorized to use code.
As I walked through the city now, I wondered if this time some juicy tales about the Emperor Constans and that inquisitive eunuch Eusebius might earn me more than a brief juice break with our schola’s master. Or would I get just a curt command to turn on a nummus and head off to the Persian front or the wilds of western Hispania?
This time I didn’t want to leave Roma. I had new worries at home.
A thunderstorm clattered above and then discharged buckets on my weary head. Within a minute, I was drenched. I could have been forgiven for sheltering in a tavern, but I was anxious to get bedded down. Even weighed down by my pack, I made good progress walking east from the Manlius House—only because the pounding rain swished and eddied over the tops of gutters and washed the streets clean of beggars, bazaar stalls and delivery carts.
I got to the Castra gates in time to get assigned a tiny cell. I cleaned out some mouse droppings and the last guy’s fruit peelings from under the cot. Finally, I headed to the dining hall to eat.
The room was crammed full of noisy men. Some of them were bronzed black by service in Egypt and Mauritania. Others were pale and coughing hard from service in the north, riding messages to garrisons in north Britannia or ships bobbing next to Londinium on the Thamesis River.
‘Back from Treverorum’?’ one man hailed me with a broad smile. I didn’t ask his name and he didn’t want to know mine. Sometimes it was better that way. You never knew when you might run across one of our schola wearing the guise of a complete stranger or comporting himself in some inexplicable way for a secret reason. It was easier to keep a straight face on mission if you weren’t pals.
Still, we were all colleagues. I was grabbed in jest by my sword belt and yanked down on a bench to devour my grub with a band of hard-drinking customs inspectors reporting in from Aquitania.
‘ . . . It’s the wine traffic that’ll keep us there once the tin and lead are played out,’ one was saying across the table.
‘Decent stuff?’ I asked.
‘The reds are unbeatable. The Treasury should tax more for them.’
‘Much action from the Celts?’
My dinner companion’s ruddy good health said more about inspecting vineyard accounts than manning palisades. ‘It’s a mix. There are nine tribes speaking a gabble of dialects, but more Iberian than Celt. They’re all right. Pretty settled down now. It’s a soft assignment in a mild climate, nothing like it. I hope I’m not getting transferred now . . .’
After the filling meal, I laid out my cloak and riding trousers to dry near a warming brazier. Then I washed, dove under an army blanket and closed my eyes. The dice games in the corridor under the flickering sconces outside my door were like a familiar lullaby. I had spent my boyhood napping outside a patrician family’s dining room and my teens listening to soldiers’ campfire chat in the field. Wherever you were, there were always some guys who never went to bed.
I fell asleep within seconds, a useful talent for a rider.
A sharp rapping on my door woke me up. ‘Marcus Gregorianus Numidianus! Meet-up with the boss!’ It was Caius, a page-slave of about ten, who darted between our low-slung buildings like a child’s wooden wagon on a pull string.
I combed my hair and recovered my trousers and my working satchel. This
time there was no secret mouse summons. I ran to the main building through the drizzle thinking that this was the second time I had a debriefing with Apodemius well after into the night. I had first met him in a sunny North African villa but perhaps he did his routine work only after bedtime. Another fellow was leaving the darkened exit of the main reception room. As I passed him in the shadows, he murmured, ‘His joints are acting up. Don’t expect any laurels.’
I took a deep breath and went up to the old man’s study.
‘Hello, come in, Numidianus. Got your seals? Pass them over.’
Apodemius was sitting in his padded chair with his bare feet soaking in a bucket of steaming, scented water. I glanced around the study lit by the flames of a couple oil-lamps. All around me I saw paper—rolls stored in cubicles, neat towers on the old stone floor, stacks on his desk and scraps of it pinned to a large, map painted and fixed to a cork backing.
A marble bust of an elderly man stared at me from the shadowy windowsill. For the life of us, not a single agens had been able to find out who that man was. We joked among us that this Venerable was no doubt the most successful agens of all time—totally anonymous for all eternity.
There were a few other items peculiar to the old man—a latrunculi game board with black and white pieces set in an unfinished game, various ointments and unguents on a shelf near his couch and a cage of spoiled mice, the apodemi that reminded us all of his secret signature.
As he dried off his knobby feet, I opened my satchel and brought out copies of the official seals that had passed through my hands in Treverorum.
As trained in the Castra workshops, I’d taken a mold of each seal impression using a special white clay. Then I had refashioned duplicate seal dies from the imprints using a plaster mixed with fine-ground lead. This meant that I could melt down the wax of anyone’s seal, read and copy his letter, and re-secure it without being caught. It was standard procedure, but this was my first time passing on my handicraft. I felt nervous watching Apodemius glance through my handwritten labels as I lined them up.
‘The Emperor Constans. The Lord Chamberlain Eusebius. The notary known as Paulus Catena and . . .’ I laid the last seal down with the emphasis my discreet cleverness had earned, ‘the Augusta Constantia.’
‘Good, good.’ He waved them from his thoughts. ‘Now, I’ve read your reports on the mint’s production. I thought your observations on barbarian relations with the state markets up there not entirely laughable. I also note that Commander Gaiso was due for a visit. He interests me. Report.’
I chose my words with care. I stuck to the facts but omitted nothing that might be useful. While I regaled him with the excitement of the boar hunt and the Lieutenant Commander’s athletic skill, Apodemius massaged his swollen ankles with camphor lotion. I would have bet my best tunic that nothing I said interested him. I stopped at one point, sure that it was all pointless nonsense.
‘Go on, go on, I’m listening.’ He lifted himself onto his stiff legs and limped back and forth between the cluttered corners of his cramped room. The needlework cushion on which his pointy old pelvis often rested was faded beyond recognition. Under years of his restlessness, the stitching of his leather chair had burst. Clumps of sheepskin stuffing poked through. I felt embarrassed, as if I’d caught sight of an old man’s hairless flanks in the public latrine, his greying undercloth flopping around his ankles.
I tried not to think of Eusebius right now in his smart and fragrant offices up in Treverorum. I plowed on with my report. ‘And when I was racing back to get help, that’s when I stumbled on this startling scene of—’ I hesitated.
‘The Emperor buggering his Germanic archers.’
‘Well, yes . . . but no, actually, not quite, Magister.’
A slight hesitation in his pacing betrayed a sliver of interest.
‘You see, Magister,’ I hesitated, ‘there was buggering, but it was the prisoner-of-war doing the—’
‘Witnesses?’ His voice turned sharp.
‘The other prisoners, Magister. Laughing, making sport of him. Of course, I don’t speak Germanic, but if you’ll excuse the expression, the Emperor seemed the butt of their jokes.’
‘No, no, boy, witnesses. I meant Romans, of course.’
‘There were no Romans there, in the forest. But the eunuch Eusebius knows what I saw. So does that notary, Paulus Catena. Eusebius warned me Catena might act to protect Constans from this report to you by framing me with some crime to shut me up. Already he had arranged for me to join the Emperor’s playmates like a prisoner myself.’
‘I’m not surprised. Does Catena have anything on you?’
I thought momentarily of Constantia’s overpowering perfume, but answered, ‘Nothing, Magister.’
Apodemius flipped over a timer on his desk and the sand started to run down again. He rattled his bucket at me with a white, knobby hand and settled back down into his chair. I fetched a fresh pot of boiled water from his discreet, deaf attendant standing watch at the door outside. The steaming water hit the medical concoction in the bucket with a hiss.
‘Numidianus, tell me something I don’t know.’ He sighed with pleasure as his feet plunged back into the water.
‘The Augusta wants to escape Treverorum. She mailed an appeal to Constantius.’
‘Nothing new.’
I tried again. ‘Eusebius asked all about you.’
This amused him. ‘Well, that’s hardly news, but tell me the gist, Numidianus. We haven’t got all night. There’s a man in from Vindabona waiting outside.’
‘Eusebius says you could use his help up north. He wants to share information with you—your network of agentes for his web of eunuchs. He claims he reports to Constantia, officially spies for Constantius on Constantia, and unofficially, keeps the best secrets for his own trade. He says the Empire isn’t worth holding together and it’s every man for himself.’
‘Well, it’s certainly Eusebius for Eusebius. His property holdings would embarrass Crassus.’ For the first time this evening, Apodemius looked straight into my eyes through the flickering shadows with a smile. ‘You know what they say about the Lord Chamberlain Eusebius? That Constantius II enjoys some influence over him.’ His smile faded in an instant. ‘But no matter how powerful Eusebius grows, I wouldn’t trade secrets with that vile, immoral spider for all the gold in Constantinopolis.’
‘I didn’t doubt it, Magister.’
‘Is that all? Leave the seals with me. I’ll have my secretaries check them for changes against the others in stock and copied if necessary.’ He pulled his woolen cloak tighter around his shoulders and waving me away, hunched over his bucket and his thoughts.
I’d committed something worse than skimming customs tax or lying in lust with a senior agens’ wife.
I had bored him. I had failed to make any impression.
‘You told me to keep my ears open, but—’ I hesitated before trying one last thing, even though it seemed some kind of joke, ‘I saw something strange. The boar we killed was staked through for skinning and roasting in the courtyard. I saw that some joker had tied a purple ribbon around its neck.’
‘Dear gods! Lieutenant-Commander Gaiso saw this?’
‘Gaiso? I don’t know. He was down in the courtyard the next morning talking to Catena.’
‘Try to remember! It’s important! Did Gaiso see the ribbon?’
I couldn’t recall if the ribbon had still been there when Gaiso and Catena stood talking. I couldn’t recall which way the hunter had been facing. I had failed.
‘Did Eusebius see the ribbon?’
‘The boar was under his window the whole time.’
‘Has Gaiso left the Treverorum?’
‘Not yet, I think. His wound will delay his return to service for another week at least.’
Apodemius told me to step outside and instruct the agens from Belgica to go to bed. I returned to find him hunched over a pile of reports, muttering to himself. ‘Yes, a ribbon, something about a ribbon. Here it i
s. A ribbon tacked to a brothel door. And there was something else. Where is it? A purple ribbon dumped on a pile of kitchen compost.’ He riffled and sorted through paper of all thickness and scents, sent in from all corners of his network. ‘A purple ribbon festooning an idiot’s cap in Comum . . .’
I waited, watching the sand course down into the lower glass of his clock. Suddenly Apodemius looked up. ‘Come over here, son. No, bring the stool. This isn’t the army.’
I sat opposite him now, on the other side of his desk. For an ex-slave, this was heady stuff indeed. He wasn’t bored any longer.
‘You need more training, Numidianus. A month or more here, then you’ll be ready. It’s dangerous but you’re worth risking.’
Was that a compliment or was I deemed expendable?
‘Thank you, Magister. I think.’ I didn’t like the sound of this nor the silence that followed as Apodemius studied yet another coded report and scratched at the scabby, sun-blotched pate gleaming through his rumpled white hair in the lamplight.
‘What training have you completed? I haven’t time to look it up.’
I ticked off my courses. ‘Seventy-two-Hour Riding certificate, Wrestling Rank, eight, Seal Molding and Invisible Writing, Basic Code Breaking, Sword Award ten out of ten with merit—’
‘Yes, I recall you were a bit of a boaster. You had a good memory, too, for literature, if I recall.’
‘Greek and Latin, Magister.’
‘Done your Long Document Memory Training?’
‘Not yet.’ It didn’t sound like fun.
‘Silent Assassination Skills? Disguises and Dialects? Arrest Procedure?’
‘I was hoping to move from circuit supervisor up to Customs, Magister.’
He laughed. ‘Hah! All you new boys want Customs, as if I didn’t know that’s where the money hides. Quick money, early retirement.’ His canny blue eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not wasting your talents on Customs, ever.’
‘Please, I need to stay around Roma. There are family concerns and temporary problems that need to be sorted out. The security of the Manlius estate is at risk.’