by Q V Hunter
I was the third man across but halfway over the treacherous white water, a dog barked. I dropped onto my stomach and caught my breath. The light of a curious torch might bounce off my armor and betray me. I pulled my cloak right over my head and waited, knowing at any minute an arrow might pierce my shoulder blades, but there was nothing.
I took a deep breath and looked up. Caelius signaled it was safe to come forward. Crouched over, I dashed to the end of the bridge, praying my boots wouldn’t clank, and dropped onto my haunches to wait for the other men.
There would be a sleeping gateman or two but if Magnentius had bribed well enough, there would also be armed men guarding the town gates. We couldn’t take a chance. We scuttled around the southern wall, loosening stones underfoot and cutting ourselves on thorn bushes planted all around. We finally found a hillock rising against the western length of wall where the shade of early dawn would obscure us.
One by one, we scaled the wall and landed in an alley of small mudstone houses shuttered for the night. We slipped along the lanes, avoiding the center of town, the market square or the front gates near the bridge.
We were searching for a stable where Magnentius have hidden his horses. He might have as many as six with him and maybe pack mules as well.
The drizzle that had kept up all night strengthened to a steady rain. Suddenly the gray skies cracked open with lightning and thunder. Under our heavy cloaks, we hoped to remain inconspicuous but our marching boots and drawn weapons were sure to give us away to any town dweller.
We worked our way through Cularo, alley by alley, and then street by street. One house, larger than the others, stood back from a low wall that gave us cover. We crouched and waited while our scout slipped away in the shadows to search for hidden horses. In a minute or two, he was back.
‘They must be in one of the houses back there.’ He pointed down an alley at our backs.
‘Certain?’
The scout nodded. ‘I found five horses and a mule. Saddles equipped with weapons’ hooks and expensive leather mounts for heavy horse packs. The harnesses have military spoon bits for tight control. Fighting horseflesh, not draft animals.’
‘Spread out,’ Caelius signaled. We were stretching our line in a belt around the neighborhood when a startled cry broke the morning stillness.
‘Aiiiigh!’ One of our men in the rear dropped to his knees. He fell, head forward onto the street. A rustic wooden axe handle stuck up from his back. Blood spurted out around the wedged blade sunk deep through his armor. It was an ordinary woodcutter’s blade, but no ordinary woodsman had slung it.
Gurgling with shock and pain, he stared into a pool of rainwater streaked with his own blood. There was nothing we could do for him without breaking cover. With faces flattened against the alley walls, our eyes looked upwards through the rain, searching for the killer’s unshuttered window.
‘Over there!’ one man whispered. He pointed at a two-story house above the spot where we clustered. A shutter closed over one of the windows. From a second window an army dart shot from an expert hand. It pierced the gullet of the man standing right next to me. He grabbed my arm and almost dragged me down with him, then lost his grip and fell hard on the wet stone.
We scuttled for better cover, leaving my companion gasping for his breath as he pulled at the dart.
Caelius signaled half a dozen men to lay in wait at the front door. The rest us circled to a ground floor window on the rear side. We smashed open the shutters, then half a dozen of us clambered through, holding our shields out to cover us. We’d made enough noise to raise the whole quarter now.
The ground floor room was cluttered with stools, worktables and tools so we stayed close to the window and waited for Caelius’ next signal.
Weapons poised, we crouched for might have been half an hour but there was no sound from the floor above. Now I could make out the dusty corners and a rickety staircase to the upper floor.
Who had attacked us? Cularo sympathizers paid off to distract and delay us? Was Magnentius even now making his escape while we snuck around an empty house?
‘Come down!’ Caelius shouted at last. I guessed he didn’t want to risk any more lives just to storm an attic.
There was no answer.
As patient as we were, how could someone upstairs not feel the tension of a dozen men lying in wait below?
There was an enormous boom of thunder that shook the house. The rain pounded harder than ever now against the windows and I even felt it spatter my startled face. Perhaps the roof upstairs was open somewhere to the sky and the ceiling leaked. I wiped my cheek clean. My fingers looked dark red through the morning gloom. The man crouched next to me was spattered too. He wiped his own face with impatience and I saw it was streaked red as well.
‘Caelius!’ We showed him a crack between the ceiling planks overhead dripping blood on our shoulders and shields.
Then we heard a few footsteps on the floor above, the scrape of a stool, and a hollow thud, ending with a guttural animal noise.
Caelius signaled a scout to follow him, and they disappeared. The rest of us positioned ourselves to climb the steps after them.
‘Agens Numidianus!’ Caelius shouted to me downstairs, breaking the hush. I crushed past the others wedged with their weapons and shields along the narrow steps. I entered the room to find Caelius and his scout standing with their swords and shields lowered.
They were staring up at a man swinging by his neck from a noose hooked to the ceiling by a fat iron nail. His legs were still twitching and even as we took it in, his body voided into his expensive riding trousers and his clear eyes bulged from their sockets.
I recognized the profile once fingered by millions of Roman subjects, from the lookout towers along Hadrian’s Wall to the markets of Carthago, on coins passed from palm to palm. No one could mistake the barbarian’s curly hair, long-lashed blue eyes, strong nose and prominent chin. His boots just missed the stool he’d kicked aside in his death throes moments before our discovery.
A pile of gaudy silks and furs piled high on a low peasant bed was soiled by a mash of dripping blood and rosy gullet. I approached the second body, holding my nose against the fresh stench of death.
The corpse was Magnentius’ mother. Her throat had been sliced clean across. The windpipe that had once cautioned her sons with prophesies and omens lay silent and gaping in the wet morning air.
‘That’s him, right?’ Caelius barked at me, pointing at the hanging body. All around me, acute tension relaxed into a pregnant silence. I knew what some of the men were thinking, that Caelius and such a large patrol should have been able to take a single man and his mother without losing two crack riders.
In the end, though, this was why I—of all our number—had been necessary for the mission.
‘No, Caelius,’ I corrected him. ‘It’s my sad duty to tell you that this is his gentle brother, Decentius.’
***
There would be no more lavish payouts from Magnentius or Decentius to the peasants of Cularo. So within an hour of dragging the Usurper’s dead relatives into the rain-soaked marketplace, beggars, vendors, cobblers and butchers had crowded around us, flogging fresh information.
They told us that Magnentius had fled into the woods higher up the mountain ravine. Decentius had attacked our men to win his brother more time but it was a futile gesture.
The rain let up at last. We pushed our way up along a track through dense foliage. Morning sunlight glistened off leaves bashing into our faces and branches slapping our trousers.
It took us less than an hour to track the Usurper to a shepherd’s cottage standing in a forest clearing.
We positioned ourselves in a circle around the hut. The lead scout dismounted. Five men followed him at a crawl towards the hut. They tested the door but it was bolted from inside.
Again, we waited. We heard the crash of shattering pottery inside. Ten more men raced forward with a fallen tree in their arms to use as a ram. They were j
ust preparing to force the door when it opened with a bang and before it could bounce back closed, a military boot stopped it.
Magnentius stepped out onto the thick grass and looked up at the bright sun. He bolted the door neatly behind him. He had lost weight and his features were haggard, but I recognized the bold stance. He stood there now with the same vigorous defiance he’d shown donning a diadem and purple cloak at a party in Augustodunum.
‘Name and rank?’ he bellowed at Caelius.
‘You can see our insignia plain as your face. My name is none of your business. We’ve come to arrest you and take you to Constantius,’ our leader said.
Magnentius rolled his head to the side as if his brains needed exercise to answer. He squinted his eyes to focus on Caelius’ uniform. I realized he had been drinking.
‘Agentes. You’ll have to take me.’
‘That wouldn’t be hard.’ Caelius gestured towards the flanks of riders in three rows behind him.
‘You need only one man to run me through. It would be cheaper and faster.’
‘The Emperor has promised you a swift, clean death but he wants your confession.’
Magnentius snorted. ‘I don’t need any Constantine to determine my death. People like me know how to die for Romans. We’ve been doing it long enough.’
Caelius ordered his men to drop the battering ram and move on Magnentius. I kept my eyes fixed on the familiar figure braced on thick legs like a cornered bull. He waved an arm at Caelius and said, ‘No, stop. Wait.’
Caelius stayed their advance with an upright palm. ‘You surrender?’
‘I want that man to come forward. No, not you, that one.’
Magnentius was pointing straight at me.
‘Come here.’
I dismounted and walked through the swishing grass until I was only a foot away from him, just as I had that night I first presented my papers to him in a circle of dinner guests.
‘You’re that agens, Numidianus.’
I stood silenced, overpowered by the force of his rage so close and unable to proceed with the arrest.
‘Well? What do you think of me now, boy? What’s your advice, messenger? What would Trajan do, huh? Wasn’t I first and foremost a soldier?’ He shouted to the morning sky. ‘Wasn’t my tent flap open to every soldier? Where are all the men who followed me, who loved me, now?’
I found my voice at last. ‘Where you led them, General, dead on the fields of Mursa.’
‘I can read your expression. You wish I were lying there with them, don’t you?’
‘We’ve come to arrest you, General.’
‘I’m not kneeling to Constantius! Will you run me through, boy, here and now? I haven’t the strength, though damned if they’ll say I didn’t have the courage.’
‘No, Imperator. We have orders to escort you alive to Mediolanum.’
‘Imperator,’ he mimicked. ‘I said RUN ME THROUGH NOW!’ he bellowed at me. ‘Suddenly you’re afraid?’
‘Leave him alone. Why him?’ shouted Caelius.
‘Because this is the boy who finished off that buggered wimp Constans, that’s why!’ Magnentius lurched forward and made a grab for my scabbard. ‘You’re the imperial killer, aren’t you?’ He screwed up his eyes for a better look at my features under my helmet. ‘Yes, it is you, the quick-witted escort who covered Gaiso’s back.’
I glanced away, too full of pity to witness Magnentius’ bloodshot eyes filling with tears. He peered over my shoulder at the men circled all around the clearing and yelled, ‘Gaiso? Are you hiding back there, hunting with these bastards? Is that how they found me?’
‘Gaiso is dead, Imperator.’
‘You see?’ Magnentius waved at the expressionless faces staring down from their saddles. ‘You heard this agens call me “Imperator”? I’m no criminal! Yet you deny me the same treatment as Constans, you African bastard, with your famous “imperial blade,” just because I wasn’t born into the right family, while that little runt you put out of his misery ran around with purple ribbons in his hair. I’m ordering you to run me through NOW!’
He had stood so proud and fine that night in Augustodunum, appearing all of a sudden in his imperial raiment to the startled admiration of his new subjects. I laid a hand on his shoulder to help him surrender.
‘Damn you, African! I don’t want your pity. I want your sword!’ He shook me off and grabbed my scabbard with his left hand. He slid out my spatha with his right. Holding the point against his belly, he made a sudden dash at the hut. Slamming into the door and pressing with his last gasp, he impaled himself on my blade.
Chapter 22, Returning an Empress
—On the Last Leg of the Via Flaminia—
For a young woman transformed overnight into a deposed empress and virgin widow, Justina seemed amazingly composed as I escorted her home to Roma. Some might say she was lucky even to be alive, much less dressed in fresh robes and with her hair done up in a crown of braids and curls under her travel veil.
Perhaps Justina was born under a luckier constellation than the rest of Magnentius’ court. All witnesses called up before the Emperor had argued in favor of mitigating any punishment because of the young woman’s maternal Constantinian pedigree and her father’s devoted service as a governor for the Empire.
But remembering the child I’d escorted to Aquileia, I knew it was her personal innocence and steadfast courage that had won her reprieve.
After weeks of hearing everyone out, the Emperor Constantius gave Justina permission to return to her parents. Perhaps he felt sorry for his cousin, if such a stony soul could feel compassion. Perhaps he just didn’t want more Constantinian blood on his hands. More likely, he was simply drained of vengeful fury by the sight of Magnentius’ heavy corpse lying across the back of a horse as our hunting party rode back into the imperial courtyard in Mediolanum.
Escorting Justina back to Roma was the last task of my posting to the court of Magnentius the Usurper. We were making good time on the road. I hadn’t spoken to her for hours. Only one more day’s ride separated us from her father’s townhouse. As the agens of her small escort unit, consisting of a few men scavenged from the surviving tribunes and legati of a northern legion, I carried the road permits and negotiated our lodgings station by station. The other officers, their army careers damaged but their lives spared, didn’t personally know the young woman in their care nor did they take much notice of her now that Magnentius was dead and discredited. To them, Roma was just a stopover before another field assignment.
But I did know her and I watched over her with anxiety.
Justina had asked for the company of two maids I didn’t recognize and they hid behind the curtains of her carriage, bumping over the Cursus paving stones. I kept my horse on the soft margin of the road. Our little party made few stops along the route, choosing the most comfortable mansiones through the Apennines where I reckoned she wouldn’t be recognized or harassed.
We ate well enough and I assume she slept well, too. If any more precocious visions disturbed her rest, she kept them to herself, for which I was grateful. Women with second sight unnerved me. I was a man trained to analyze every last detail that lay in front of my eyes—not on my pillow.
I was having trouble sleeping. Night after night I woke up in a cold sweat, back on the fields of Mursa with screams filling my ears.
That’s not to say Justina made the whole journey in silence. From time to time, her lively conversation as I rode alongside her carriage window helped the horrors of the last few weeks recede a little. I had to remind myself she hadn’t lived through the carnage at Mursa or seen Magnentius plunge himself onto a blade.
Nor had that large-living husband ever really included her in his boisterous, barbarian life. She remained as poised as ever, mentally untouched by her husband’s colossal failure. She was already considering her future with the pragmatism of the Roman society matron she was sure to become any day soon.
How could it be that I was not even a decade ol
der than she, yet I felt weighed down in broad daylight by entrails and blood? I felt phantom hands clutching up at me from the filth. I saw men’s faces splitting open with terrifying butchery over and over again?
I shivered with the horror of it all. I’d seen too much of the world to ever share her lighthearted joy in a sunny November morning. I fought back memories of the shrieks of men being maimed and dismembered across the plain that deadly night.
Now I rode at Justina’s side, listening to her chat, reminding myself that even though Atticus Manlius Gregorius was gone and all the West stood like an orphaned child hungering for Constantius’ healing attention, my companion was right to look forward.
Was any survivor as haunted as I felt those brilliant mornings on the road? I knew what was best but my resolve was weak. I must not make the mistake of Orpheus turning around at Eurydice’s call from Hades. I could not afford to look over my shoulder. These ghosts would beckon me time and again, urging me to turn my gaze back at their lost dreams and lives.
I had to resist their plaintive call. I had to face what was to come. Only the future was important now, only the prospect of a single Empire made frail by brutal civil war but at least unified under one man.
And yet, I still saw them there, bleeding, pleading . . .
‘Where are we meeting my father?’
‘Someone from your household will wait at the Porta Flaminia to escort you through the city, my lady.’
‘I hope Pater comes himself. I’ll be glad to see Roma again, even though it’s rundown and the streets are so badly designed.’
‘Didn’t you like Aquileia?’
‘How could anything be as grand as Roma?’
‘They say Constantinopolis is a fine city with astonishing plumbing, broad avenues and beautiful new buildings.’
Justina shrugged. ‘Plumbing’s important. So are baths, and sports grounds and stadia and all that, but lovely, smelly, old, crowded Roma is the heart and soul of the globe.’