by Q V Hunter
‘Imperial business!’ I cried, moving forward to clear her off.
‘Piss off, German slut!’ Gaiso was not above trampling her. His fine horse reared over the woman but she didn’t flinch.
‘I’ve got something for you, Officer, something worth a year’s earnings in gold. Maybe more.’
Her Latin was guttural and ungrammatical. Her sneer needed no translation.
‘We’ve got silver for an honest woman with information, but no time for worn out bags like you. What are you selling, besides a night of stink and toothless snoring?’
She took her pretty time untangling the sack’s drawstrings and brushed off the stones so as not to dirty her already filthy patched skirt. She smiled, enjoying Gaiso’s mounting temper at her delay. With knowing and self-satisfied precision, she extracted her bundle and spread it out on the road.
To his credit, Gaiso’s mouth dropped open. He leaned forward in the saddle with a look of amazed satisfaction. The woman had spread out a multi-layered cloak. The underside was made of heavy white damask embroidered with trails of gold ivy. The outer layer was made of deep purple silk velvet, imported from beyond the eastern border of the Empire where such rare silks were woven somehow from the cocoons of precious worms.
‘The fancy owners of this stole my client’s farm clothes while we was sportin’ in bed, didn’t he?’
Gaiso leapt from his saddle, took the girl in his arms and kissed her with the passion he usually showed for larger, four-footed prey.
‘Give her a whole pouch,’ he cried. He leapt back on to his horse, clutching Constans’ regal garment by one hand and pressed its stiff, high collar still riddled with strands of curly golden hair to his armored chest.
The trail was hot again, hotter than ever. Gaiso ordered that we take three hour’s rest in Aginnum. Then we remounted, aiming to make it to Tolosa by dawn. I don’t think our animals or we could have done more mileage without a full day of rest before tackling the wide slopes that range east to west along the foothills of the Mountains of Pyrene.
We finally hit the Via Aquitania and decided to overnight at Tolosa’s main hostel. It was there, of all places, that we stumbled on some two dozen stragglers abandoned by Constans in an effort to lighten his pace.
A mixed bag of now-penniless, low-ranked imperial valets and toadies mashed in with German archer love-boys, they’d run out of pocket money and sold their clothes and finery for food and shelter. Now they were borrowing from local cardsharps to gamble their way out of a ramshackle tavern on the outskirts of the towns.
‘Which way did Constans go?’ Gaiso ordered his cavalrymen to stretch a couple of the court secretaries up between a stand of trees to encourage their tongues but they were too drunk and wrung out by their sudden flight to be of any use. Gaiso left them hanging to dry out.
He turned to the Germans. Using an auxiliary from the Ioviani as interpreter, he questioned them but got only jeers and rude taunts in response. Money was all they wanted. Gaiso ordered that two of them be whipped until they talked. He chose the two prettiest lads, but it turned out that not only did they not know Constans’ route, they hardly knew enough Latin to understand the hunter’s interrogation.
‘Obviously capture didn’t improve their linguistic skills,’ Gaiso said, giving up after an hour.
‘From what I witnessed in Treverorum,’ I explained, ‘they weren’t encouraged to converse with anyone but his Excellency. And with him, conversation was hardly the point.’
Gaiso spat out the day’s dust and wiped his grimy face clean of sweat with a chamois rag. ‘Fetch me some clean drinking water,’ he told an aide. While the youth scuttled off, he muttered to his lieutenants, ‘I can’t believe we’ve lost him. These dregs who masquerade as “men” are like stag spoor on a hunting trail.’
‘Two days to get over that range and we’ll have crossed into Hispanic Tarraconensis,’ said one horseman.
Then one of our best scouts lost confidence in his own tracking. ‘Do you think these pathetic leftovers are a decoy, Commander? Sent southwards to draw us away? Perhaps I’ve misread those hoof marks. They could belong to a cohort moving winter quarters or a party of officials with a diplomata to use the highway?’
His doubts went ignored when just then, one of Constans’ courtiers scuttled up to us to the rear of our conference and whispered, ‘For gold coins, I’ll send you on your way and you won’t regret it.’
Gaiso sneered at the intruder from his seat on a tree stump. ‘Tell me what you know or lose your tongue, bastard.’
The man turned white, changed his mind and tried to run, but a lieutenant and scout grappled him to the ground.
‘Pay me,’ he shouted, but the lieutenant kicked him in the jaw. The scout gave him a sound stomp of a boot into his flabby stomach. It wasn’t enough to cow the courtier. An angry glint flashed from his eyes.
‘Money first.’
Gaiso pulled his short blade and held it to the man’s mouth. The courtier flung his head from one side to the other, but Gaiso grabbed his jaw and would have gone to work on his tongue in the next second without hesitation, so the man blurted out, ‘They’re heading north by the Garona right there,’ he said with a snort and a cock of his head towards the river nearby. ‘In less than three days, they’ll reach the port of Burgidala and head for the East and safety with big brother.’
‘Impossible. All ships are dry-docked until the fifth of March, the Feast of Isis. He’d be in danger of shipwreck if he left port.’
‘Even the winter winds soften for a price, Commander, for a price,’ the courtier said with a sneer.
I weighed this and turned to Gaiso. ‘It’s just possible. Cicero sailed once in November from Actium to Brundisium. Ovid was dispatched into exile by boat to Tomi in December.’
Gaiso shook his head. ‘Then we’ve lost him. The most important hunt of my career.’ He kicked the informant in the temple with frustration. ‘Still, if we set off now . . .’
I thought again. There was something ‘off’ about the greasy little man’s confession. He’d given us the information in anger and fear but now he looked smug. ‘Perhaps Constans did not take the river route . . .’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘I overheard Emperor Constans boasting one night in Treverorum that an oracle predicted he would die in the safety of his mother Helena’s bosom.’
‘So?’
‘So . . . it is possible that Constans has sought sanctuary in the exact opposite direction from the one this man indicates. Perhaps he’s going to a place on the southeast coast known as Vicus Helena, named for a temple there dedicated to his mother. You see, the bosom of his mother?’
‘But why head to a place the oracle said he would die in?’
‘It’s only my guess, but Constans is playing with irony, a sort of bluff, Commander. He was once a clever strategist. Consider that when Constans ambushed his brother Constantine II from the fortified town of Aquileia, he won. Perhaps Constans is putting his faith in a fortified town once again. The Vicus Helena is a fortification of some kind, even if fallen into decay. And at least we can be sure that Constans had heard of it.’
We were within a day’s ride of the fortress on the coast. The next morning the walls of Vicus Helena stood silhouetted against the Great Middle Sea. Goats along the main road turned their bearded chins in the direction of the sounds of our hooves as we raced past them across a narrow plain between the mountains far to our right and the sea ahead.
We rushed down the final slope towards a coastline teased by fog. The peasants fell to their knees as we passed and the looks on their faces told me my guess was right. Their knowing fear filled Gaiso’s nostrils with the guilty stench of his terrified quarry.
The Temple of Helena stood on a small hill. Our squadron encircled it. Gaiso ordered half a dozen of us to follow him into its cold marble foyer.
‘Constans!’ Gaiso shouted at the altar far ahead of us in the darkened reaches at the far end.
> Years before Constans had forbidden pagan ritual. Yet the chilly stones of the somber, neglected inner chamber still stank of incense and a century of spilt blood. The stones echoed only a faint, ‘Constans!’
Perhaps I’d been wrong after all. Perhaps this final day’s ride was only a fateful detour allowing the deposed ruler his escape.
Gaiso would not forgive me for that.
There was a scuffling sound, like a rat crossing the hard flagstones. There in the dark reaches behind the sacrificial stone basin crouched Constans, his pampered curls matted with dust and great sweat circles staining his stolen tunic.
‘Come out and fight!’
‘’I’ll take exile,’ Constans yelled back.
‘I’m here to arrest you,’ I started to announce but Gaiso drowned me out.
‘Fight for your throne, you bugger!’
‘There’s a boat waiting for me down at the port,’ Constans whined. ‘Let me retire in Carthago.’
‘FIGHT!’ Gaiso couldn’t disguise his disgust. ‘Even the grossest pig puts up some kind of resistance,’ he said.
‘I’m supposed to arrest him, Gaiso!’
‘Well, go ahead,’ he shrugged. ‘I can’t just slaughter a Constantine. It’s against my training.’ He stood undecided under the dead-eyed gaze of the statues of Zeus and Hera. He sheathed his sword and started back in the direction of the small sunny square outside.
‘We’ll starve him out,’ I said.
‘Wait!’ Constans yelled. ‘Drop your weapons and I’ll come out.’
Gaiso signalled the men circled around us along the edges of the open space. Following his lead, we all unsheathed our blades and laid them in a pile at the door of the temple.
‘Send your men back to the foot of the hill,’ Constans screamed.
Gaiso signaled the men to retreat. We waited as they disappeared down the steep slope and just out of sight.
I brace myself to make the arrest as trained. But Constans panicked. Racing out of his craven position, even tripping in the borrowed trousers too big for his delicate stride, he made straight for Gaiso. Once in his youth, he’d been an admired fighter but now, he brandished only a ceremonial sword wrought in the softest gold. It was practically a toy, better meant for opening letters and gracing his banqueting wardrobe than piercing the leather cuirass of a senior veteran but Constans had won important battles in his early career. He was expert enough to make his thrust pay off if he could reach Gaiso in time.
From under his helmet, Gaiso didn’t hear Constans’ leather slippers skipping across the marble, but fifteen feet away, I wore only my Pannonian hat and I did.
I reached into my boot where Apodemius’ small Christmas gift was safely fastened at the folded cuff. Opening out the knife in a single move, I intercepted the running Emperor just inches before he had plunged his weapon into Gaiso’s back.
My short blade sunk deep at an angle and the force of his momentum finished my knife’s work as it slid through Constans’ spoiled belly, disemboweling him before our eyes. His intestines gushed out of him like huge white worms. His blood spurted onto the polished marble as he groaned into a sagging pile of flabby limbs and dusty hemp cloth.
A cavalryman ran back up the slope and tried to lift the dying sovereign into his arms, perhaps out of belated respect for the Constantine family. Within a minute, Constans’ eyes had rolled backwards in their sockets. He breathed his last.
I extracted the small knife. I expected the blood smearing my palms to shine royal purple, but it was only a dull bluish red.
‘Is that in your mandate, Agens,’ Gaiso asked, ‘to save my life, not once, but twice?
I smiled. ‘You were right not to murder an emperor, Lieutenant Commander, even in self-defense. Politics can change with the month, the week, and even the hour. But an agens cannot be prosecuted for any crime. We answer only through our schola to the Magister Officiorum. It is the law.’
‘Which makes you fellows so handy to have around,’ Gaiso said, but added with a grim expression, ‘and also so dangerous.’
Chapter 9, A General’s Oath
—Mediolanum, February, 350 AD—
Gregorius had counted on a future in exile for Emperor Constans, not death. When he heard the news that Gaiso had been the hunter, but that Agens Marcus Gregorianus Numidianus had been Gaiso’s catch dog, he turned his back on me in silent dismay. Amidst the cheers and garlands heaped on the Lieutenant Commander, Gregorius walked without a word right past our returning party and out of Magnentius’ council chamber.
No one noticed but me.
In all the tumult of rebellion, I’d found no private opportunity to warn Gregorius of his father’s debility, Clodius’ venality or the estate’s vulnerability. Now, it seemed, regicide was too much for the Manlius House to discuss—much less digest or celebrate. As I watched the Commander’s lonely retreat back up to the Herculiani tents lining the slopes, I feared he could never acknowledge me as his son after this. At the very least, estrangement between us made it all the harder for me to protect him from the risks of this rebel action.
Yet danger seemed remote for now. Gallia held its breath, then nothing happened, and soon daily life resumed.
As the Western Empire’s new Magister Officiorum, Marcellinus took charge of the imperial transition. The first weeks of the Magnentius Era were like a bloodstained honeymoon between the great barbarian soldier and the dioceses surrounding his new headquarters in the palace at Mediolanum.
I accompanied the rebel leadership from Augustodunum attached to the official staff, but not counted as one of the conspirators. Agentes in rebus were tolerated as a fact of life in the Empire. We served courts, customs offices and road networks with an impartial face—equally useful, equally intrusive—no matter whose mail we delivered or which road we inspected. And we watched and listened. For the first time in my career with the agentes, I copied and coded reports to Apodemius every single night for the dawn dispatch bag to Roma.
Some days the reading was downright gruesome.
Over the first few weeks any provincial mayors or religious leaders who’d resisted Marcellinus’ plan for a new era of ‘peace, reform and prosperity’ died in their sleep.
The smarter money, led by Marcellinus’ business cronies primed from Londinium to Carthago, soon fell into place.
Pro-Magnentius mayors and councilors took their seats across the face of Gallia and the key prefectures of northern Italia. Christian bishops kneeled and powerful landowners donated. Each day, fresh delegations carrying tribute arrived at Mediolanum’s outer gates and asked for an audience to hail the new sovereign.
Nightly, I coded their names and addresses for Apodemius to pin onto his map measuring Magnentius’ success. As the lists lengthened, I pondered how long the financial chief had been paving Magnentius’ road to the throne with bargains and bribes. I suspected that this usurpation had been in the works for at least six months, and I filed every piece of evidence to support that theory back to the Castra in Roma.
My daily duties and my evening’s secret paperwork kept me busy, but I had to appear disinterested. I took precautions, but patience and modesty weren’t my virtues. If I showed too much interest in positioning myself at the center of decision-making, I’d be uncovered as more than a postal director. If I pushed too hard or fast for information, I’d be transferred.
I kept my head down and made no effort to consort with Gregorius or Gaiso. I left all communications among the Ioviani and Herculiani staff to army couriers. I followed protocol to the letter.
The first time my expertise in communications brought me to the great man’s attention was when I advised his improvised council, or consistorium, that Constantius II would probably have received news of the rebellion in no more than sixteen days from the night of the birthday party in Augustodunum.
The Emperor of the East was pinned down fighting the Persians for Nisibus, but the announcement that he had lost the West would have flown to him on the battle
field via Constantinopolis and the postal hub in Antiochia.
I registered the officers’ shock at the efficiency of our schola. None of these senior men had served in the East. They had underestimated the advantage the Eastern state services enjoyed in both climate and wealth. Mail moved faster in the bright sun and clear skies, between Sirmium and Mesopotamia.
So they’d been warned, but they showed panic just yet. Constantius was famous for putting the protection of the Empire before family. For fear of losing the East to the Persians’ invasion during the height of a battle season, he had allowed his younger brother Constans to defeat and kill their elder brother Constantine II without lifting a finger in support of either sibling.
He might do the same again. After all, what had changed? The Persian challenge still kept Constantius pinned down. The rebels could hope this gave Magnentius time to consolidate his civil administration and put reforms in place. But who knew how long the Persian king would keep Constantius preoccupied? The Roman forces might prevail at last or the Persians might offer a negotiated peace.
And after that, Constantius was sure to turn his vengeful gaze westwards.
Each day, at the first glint of sunrise, I trotted up the marble steps of the imperial residence in Augustodunum with more letters for the General—from governors in Roman Africa, Hispania and soon, Britannia—guarantors of manpower if it came to civil war.
And to the undoubted quiet satisfaction of Apodemius back in Roma, I was not only standing behind ‘the Usurper’ at his new headquarters, I was discreetly reading over his formidably brawny shoulder. I noticed that whenever he was alone, Magnentius studied maps of the pivotal territory that hinged our western provinces to Constantius II’s eastern territories. This territory included Pannonia and Upper and Lower Moesia on the Peninsula of Haemus, home of the Danubian legions under the weathered command of a renowned commander, Vetranio.
Vetranio was proving as coy as General Silvanus up with the Rhenus garrisons.