Usurpers

by Q V Hunter

  ‘Well, you were both young. If you did break it, you didn’t pay much attention. You didn’t pay much attention to anything in those days, except all the stories you read upstairs in them books.’

  ‘I never broke it, Verus.’

  We cleared away our plates and spoons. He poured himself a fresh drink and swallowed half of it down. The word ‘sip’ wasn’t in his vocabulary, although he had a sharp tongue for bad table manners when he saw it in his betters.

  ‘More for you, son?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You’re brooding again.’

  ‘Verus, why did the Senator send it to be repaired? You’d think Lady Laetitia would have taken care of a slave’s amulet, if anyone.’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t well by then. She was sick a long time, but boys aren’t the kind to notice what’s going on in women’s quarters, not until she was too feeble to come out to dinner.’

  ‘Are you sure, Verus? Why care about a slave boy’s—?’

  I pulled the cord over my neck and laid the bulla down on the rough wooden surface. It was the same old lump of bronze-covered pottery, embossed with an 'M.'

  Wearing it around my neck, day in and day out, I hadn’t really looked at it closely, if ever, for years and years. It was cheaply fashioned, with the metal covering formed into a hinge over the cord and, thanks to more than a decade of what Verus called ‘roughhousing,’ scattered with dents where the pottery showed through. It was nothing special to anyone but me and hardly ever worth repairing.

  ‘What exactly was fixed, do you remember?’

  Verus shrugged. ‘It was in a box with a note, all tied up with string. And that’s how I returned it to the Senator.’

  I turned it over and over. I was so used to the dents and scratches, the small compressions of metal wide or thicker here than there, I couldn’t figure it out.

  ‘Was it always made of pottery inside?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t say. Yeah, I guess so.’

  I saw the Commander in my mind now, flinging the cord up and down trying to smash the bulla on the ground.

  ‘Verus, have you got a hammer? Or a rock? Just a rock will do.’

  ‘You can’t be serious. All right, you’re a big boy now, you don’t need it. But if you don’t want it, save it for the baby. It’ll be something of the Senator besides a load of dusty books to remember him by.’

  ‘That’s just the point, Verus. The Senator did something to this useless lump that cost him good money. I want to find out what that was. I think the Commander wasn’t trying to take it off me the way I thought. He was trying to smash it open. Get me a hammer.’

  Verus came back with a bag of tools and pulled out a hammer. We went out into the garden where the flagstones were good granite and I laid the bulla down with hesitation. It was my last tangible tie to the old life, to the old man whose stubbornness I’d inherited, and to the courageous warrior whose strength I now hoped would grow in my son.

  ‘You’re sure you want to do this?’

  I held back, the hammer poised in the air. ‘No, Verus, I’m not sure.’

  Then I remembered something buried deep in my childhood memory. I was a little boy again. The Commander was entertaining his friends in the dining room. The couches were full of reclining officers. I was scampering around, encouraged by their jests and songs to entertain them as usual. I heard the Commander turn his handsome features to me. I felt him put his hand around my thin neck.

  ‘Not too heavy, is it?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘It protects you. You must protect it.’

  I smashed the hammer down with all my might. Verus jumped aside as bits of pottery scattered over our boots but it wasn’t a clean hit. I had drunk too much. I pounded again and again, the third time with a more measured swing, hitting the bulla dead center at last.

  I’d shattered nothing but clay and metal. A pile of shards and bent bronze lay where my treasured gift had been only a moment ago.

  I sat back on my haunches and wiped away the clay dust clouding my eyes with my sleeve.

  ‘Well, that’s that.’ It was too late to feel regret. So much else had been lost, my bulla was the least of it.

  ‘That is that.’ Verus tapped me on my shoulder. ‘Let’s go in and have another drink, son.’

  ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Well, don’t sit there staring at it all night.’ Verus leaned over and picked at the flattened bits. ‘I’ll have the gateboy clean this up.’ He pushed at the debris with a crooked index finger Perhaps he felt even more nostalgic for the past than I did.

  A tiny round dull iron with a small set of teeth on a square hinge appeared through the grit.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Verus said. ‘Will you look at this?’ He picked up the iron circle and peered at it under the lantern light. ‘It’s Lady Laetitia’s missing ring-key to the deed box.’

  Chapter 24, An Oath of His Own

  —The Castra Peregrina, Roma—

  The mists of winter coiled off the Tiberis and through the narrow streets of the city. At dawn, I descended to the Via Appia, slipped under the embankment of the Aqua Claudia aqueduct and mounted the Caelian Hill for the Castra Peregrina. Laetitia’s ring-key dangled on my old cord now, along with Kahina’s ring for Leo and the two rings I’d salvaged for Marcellinus’ widow. It took me some time to get used to these new treasures hidden under my tunic. They were lighter than my old bulla, but I felt as decorated as a German chieftain.

  Everything felt new for me this morning. We were all walking into an uncertain age under a single emperor, the unchallenged reign of Constantius II. His ruthless power had swept all the other imperial brothers, in-laws, usurpers and tyrants right off the board.

  A sleepless night had blown away so much confusion in my mind. It was clear to me now what secrets the Manlius household had sheltered during those long years and what hidden plans had been laid to protect the family’s future.

  If there was no legitimate son, Marcus the slave was always there, known and watched but never named or acknowledged as such. My claims to property or social standing were deposited and buried in the bulla for safekeeping—even from me—in the hope that a rightful heir would come along. I was a lively, curious, quick child. Who knew what trouble I could make as an adult if I learned the truth for no good reason?

  It wasn’t just emperors that might have to strike down upstart claimants.

  Gregorius and Lady Laetitia had endured their childlessness with grace, but they had suffered nonetheless. Bringing her nephew Clodius into the family was Laetitia’s desperate attempt to import the kind of highborn blood society could cluck over with approval. She forgave my poor helpless slave mother her brief liaison with my father and she certainly indulged me. I think Gregorius made it easier for her, though, because he never once betrayed Laetitia again, not with my lonely, abandoned mother or any other woman, even during Laetitia’s long years of illness.

  How sad Laetitia must have been with the passing years as Clodius sabotaged his formal adoption by becoming . . . no Manlius. The longer the delay in his legal status, the more his character rotted like forgotten cheese.

  But it was the Senator, not the Commander, who’d embedded the key into my bulla. It was the Senator who loved me best. Though bound to sealed lips by clan loyalty, he shared his library to bestow all the gifts he valued on me.

  Then Laetitia had died. To Gregorius and the Senator’s great joy and relief, the new wife Kahina gave birth to Leo. That longed-for baby—my own son—assumed my place as the beloved heir.

  It wasn’t only empires that watched usurpers seize the diadem but how I could not keep silent in his interests?

  No doubt the Commander imagined me forever standing by, a grown freedman, serving as physical bodyguard over his household and a moral check on Clodius. Instead, I’d broken clean away and rejected him to carve out a life of my own.

  Yet at the end, the Commander had looked up at me that hellish da
wn in Mursa. He had realized that Leo was defenseless and beyond his protection. It was time for secrets to end and other plans to be laid. He sensed that within minutes, he would fall silent forever. If anyone was left to protect Leo, Kahina and the estates, it was only Marcus, that stubborn freedman, that upstart Numidian bastard, who could be trusted, after all.

  These thoughts jumbled around my mind, as crowded as the market stalls jamming my progress up the last stretch to the Castra’s wall. I shook them off as I cleared myself at the compound gates and went straight to that familiar office full of files, maps and camphor oil where the old man was supposed to debrief me.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ his deaf masseur gesticulated to me, using a sign language all the agentes learned to understand. ‘Been up all night reading reports,’ he spelled out, ‘from Britannia.’

  ‘I thought he was expecting me.’

  ‘Look for yourself.’ He cocked his head towards the inner door standing ajar.

  I crept in and saw Apodemius’ head on his desk, his lamps burned out and the morning light catching the sheen of his scalp through his thinning white hair. Above his sleeping form hung that battered map of the known world, so different from Eusebius’ showpiece in its ornate frame. This map practically breathed in and out with pins, punctures, pencil marks and paper scraps. This was the world he monitored from Hadrian’s windswept barrier down to the sands licking the crumbling African fortress I knew so well in Lambaesa.

  Sure enough, most of his legion pins had moved to the Pannonian fields around Mursa, but there were far fewer now. A pottery bowl sitting on his desk spilled over with the pins he must have removed, one by one, as reports of casualties reached him here.

  ‘Magister? It’s me, Marcus Gregorianus Numidianus reporting, Magister,’ I whispered. I touched his sleeve, stood back and stood at attention.

  ‘Numidianus? You’re back?’ He lifted his head and shook it free of sleep. I waited as he signalled his aide to come back with a bowl of clean warm water. He doused his whole head, toweled off and smiled a sort of rueful welcome. He fed his mice some stale breadcrumbs off a plate.

  ‘You look dreadful.’

  ‘I got caught in the fighting.’

  ‘That’s not your job! We don’t train you for that!’

  ‘Was I was supposed to stand on a hill with the camp followers and their babies and just watch?’

  ‘We lost, Numidianus. Eusebius won.’

  ‘With respect, Magister, everyone lost out there.’

  ‘There won’t be an Empire left if this happens again.’

  ‘What is my next posting, Magister?’

  He squinted out the window and winced. He hated working during the daylight hours. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to track Paulus Catena up in Britannia?’

  If my face drained white, Apodemius chose to ignore it.

  ‘He’s on a rampage up there. It started as a purge of anyone linked to the Magnentius leadership or even sympathetic to reform.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘It’s a witch-hunt of torture and death spreading across the whole imperial territory with attacks on all pagan monuments and practices that Magnentius allowed.’

  ‘Where is Marcellinus’ widow? I have things to return to her.’

  Apodemius shook his head. ‘The whole of Marcellinus’ family fled to Magnentius sympathizers in Britannia. They were among the first into Catena’s clutches. If there are any heirs, they’d be suicidal to admit to it now.’

  I thought of that bird-like wife weighed down with jewels and a heavy wig at the party in Augustodunum. She had no more need of rings now.

  ‘Your intelligence seems more than fresh, Magister.’

  ‘I have a two good agents across the channel, but I need more. The Vicarius of Britannia, Flavius Martinus, stood up to Catena, but that crazed wolfhound of Constantius managed to frame him. Now,’ Apodemius pushed a folded packet of reports towards me, ‘I read that Flavius Martinus has committed suicide.’

  ‘There’s no way I’d stay undercover around Catena,’ I said. ‘He has me marked out because I killed—’

  Apodemius waved his hand to cut me off. ‘I don’t want to know. It’s better if I don’t.’

  I fought back rising panic. Had Kahina fled northward right into Catena’s clutches?

  ‘Well, I didn’t think you would jump at the idea. The other option is a little trickier. Perhaps I was too good at impersonating an ambitious Numidian with my two-faced memos over your signature.’

  I’d forgotten Apodemius’ game with Eusebius—his little fiction that I was a double agent.

  ‘The eunuch took your bait?’

  ‘Better than that.’ Apodemius shook himself. He shuffled, stiff and sleepy, across the room to a simple tin box and unlocked its latch with a key hanging in a cluster off his belt. ‘It’s the sort of thing I don’t like to leave lying around on my desk,’ he said. ‘This is Eusebius’ letter requesting you be assigned to the Caesar Gallus’ new court in Antiochia.’

  I scanned the precise and elegant script and wondered if it was Eusebius’ own hand or that of some doe-eyed Egyptian secretary.

  ‘How is it I merit such a dramatic reassignment?’

  ‘I’m afraid the Augusta may have something to do with it.’ He raised his eyebrows in warning. ‘Which is why I'm thinking of keeping you here in the West watching Constantius’ court for a while.’

  ‘May I take some leave first, Magister, to adjust matters here in Roma?’

  Apodemius never liked vacations. As far as I knew, he never took one himself. He waited for a good explanation.

  ‘Commander Gregorius fell at Mursa, Magister. I did put that in my first report.’

  ‘Yes, of course. A shame.’ He slammed his hand on the desk with surprising force. ‘He was just the sort of man Magnentius should have listened to.’

  ‘I never told you, but on the night Magnentius announced himself as emperor, I saw surprise all over Gregorius’ face. If he knew Magnentius was ambitious, he didn’t expect him to go that far that night. We had just finished toasting Constans. And he spent all his time in the Council arguing for negotiation and peace with Constantius.’

  ‘His death was a waste.’

  ‘He died nobly, whatever his allegiances, and not before we had time to settle our differences. If I hadn’t gone into battle, I would not won earned my father’s blessing.’

  Apodemius said nothing. A twitch of a smile crossed his lips as he put Eusebius’ letter back under lock and key. He had known my own recruiter in Numidia, the brave retired agens, Leo the merchant. Perhaps Leo had even told him I was the bastard son of the Manlius house?

  Of course he had. Apodemius had known all along.

  ‘I only need three months, Magister. But I need them.’

  He leaned over and examined my face. ‘You look gaunt. Are you eating enough? I can give you two.’

  ‘I’m very grateful.’

  ‘Oh, just call it an early present for Christ Mass.’

  I cleared away my paperwork with Apodemius’ aides as quickly as I could. In the yard outside the barracks, some men were warming up for exercises. I waved to a couple I remembered from training days. I could hear language lessons going on as I passed the class doorways one by one. Persian, Germanic, then some awful barbarian garble I couldn’t even identify. I was tempted to say hello to an instructor or two, but my stomach growled in protest. I was ready for a good hot breakfast of sausages and flatbread from the street stalls and a long walk through the forum to clear my head.

  But I stopped and turned, tugged back at the gate by an invisible voice. Was that a shout from the wrestling sandpit or a lonely howl from the invisible demons that disturbed my sleep?

  I found myself standing in front of the Castra’s temple to Jupiter Redux. I had no offering in my satchel. I wasn’t even a praying kind of man but my heart felt suddenly full.

  I crossed the silent stone threshold and peered into the interior. The temple was swept clean
but the altar stood empty and neglected. There was no one inside, no penitent and no priest to read the hundreds of plaques and inscriptions covering every inch of marble.

  I walked up to the altar and gazed around me.

  Never before had I felt so grateful to have survived, to have walked away on both legs, to have simply returned—redux. Thousands of other men must have experienced this flooding relief. Thousands of them had sacrificed here before this altar to give thanks to Jupiter.

  At last I understood why this temple stood in front of the Castra, the ancient barracks built for all of Roma’s non-Latin fighters, its peregrini. Some were grateful to have returned to Roma, while others must have prayed they would someday go back covered in glory to their distant families.

  My thoughts were full of such men—the Celts, Hispaniards, Illyrians, Franks, Syrians, Numidians—and of all those soldiers of the East and West whose scattered bones whitened with each passing day on the bloodstained plains of Mursa.

  Standing before Jupiter’s altar for returning men, I suddenly felt more Roman than Romulus or Remus themselves. For we were all part of the Empire’s blood—my Gallic grandmother and my Numidian slave mother, my aristocratic grandfather and my proud and stubborn father.

  I knew no particular prayers for the dead, so I swore an oath to their memory instead. I pledged that I would return to this shrine with Kahina, that I would wash our family name of the Usurper’s taint, and that I would give Leo and his mother a secure and happy life from all the fruits of the restored Manlius estates.

  The key to the deeds slept on my breast. I would find the missing deed box. All I needed was time and a little luck to give both the dead and the living the legacy they deserved.

  After a long while, I emerged squinting into a brighter sun. I headed for the Subura district—nasty, slummy, lively and cheap. I needed new shirts, new socks, some city sandals and a haircut. If I wanted to feel alive again, it would be in the Subura, among men and women who grabbed the gift of every single minute with a passion and greed as if it were their last.