Swords Around the Throne

by Ian Ross

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  Te uero, Constantine, quantumlibet oderint hostes, dum perhorrescant... Cautior licet sit qui deuinctos habet uenia perduelles, fortior tamen est qui calcat iratos.

  But let our enemies hate you as much as they please, Constantine, provided that they are in terror of you... Certainly to keep one’s foes bound by pardon is more prudent, but it is more courageous to trample them down in their fury.

  Panegyrici Latini VI

  Qui insultaverant deo, iacent, qui templum sanctum everterant, ruina maiore ceciderunt, qui iustos excarnificaverunt, caelestibus plagis et cruciatibus meritis nocentes animas profuderunt.

  They who insulted God are laid low; they who cast down the holy temple are fallen with greater ruin; and those who tormented the just have poured out their evil souls amidst punishments inflicted by Heaven, and amidst deserved tortures.

  Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum

  (On the Deaths of the Persecutors)

  Historical Note

  In AD 305, the emperor Diocletian stunned the world by abdicating after a reign of twenty years. He left the Roman Empire ruled by the system he had created, later known as the Tetrarchy: two senior and two junior emperors sharing power between them.

  The following year, Constantius, the new senior emperor of the west, died while on campaign in Britain. His troops, in defiance of the protocols of imperial succession, elevated his son Constantine to rule in his place. Galerius, senior emperor of the east, was forced to recognise the usurper, while still supporting his own appointees Flavius Severus and Maximinus Daza.

  Only a few months later, in the city of Rome, Maxentius, son of the former emperor Maximian, seized power with the support of the ancient Senate and the Praetorian Guard. His father soon emerged from retirement to rule Italy at his side.

  By AD 307, there are six emperors in power, ruling a divided Roman world. Each builds his power base, secures his frontiers and prepares his troops.

  All know that the future holds nothing but confrontation.

  Prologue

  Treveris, April AD 307

  It was the hour of the beast hunts.

  Across the oval of bright sand, four long-horned bulls from southern Gaul charged and veered, as a pair of men on horseback and two more on foot lunged with spears and javelins. Above them, the amphitheatre rose in tier upon tier of seats, and the voices and laughter of twenty thousand spectators merged into a low steady drone. The bulls were wounded; the sand was scarred and streaked with red, and the rich stink of animal sweat and fresh blood reached the spectators. But many of them paid only partial attention to what was happening. This was not the main attraction of the day, after all.

  For now, men hunted beasts. Soon, beasts would be hunting men.

  A little below and to the left of the imperial podium, an unremarkable-looking middle-aged man sat alone in the crowd. He was dressed plainly, and wore no ornament besides the red leather belt that marked him as one of the emperor’s functionaries. His bland face showed no expression; his greying brown hair was styled in an ugly and unfashionable bowl cut. For all of his power, and his growing reputation in the imperial offices, Julius Nigrinus, Tribune of Notaries, was still a forgettable figure, and deliberately so.

  He had chosen his position well; it was a good place to speak without being heard. But even so, he did not turn to the man beside him as they talked. Both sat casually, as if enthralled by the violent drama of the bull hunt, and to a nearby observer they would not have appeared to be talking at all.

  ‘Was our source forthcoming as usual?’ Nigrinus asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the other man said, twitching a smile. He had a greasy sheen to his face, and his hair was slickly oiled. His fingers were chunky with cheap rings, and his short cloak was secured with an enamelled brooch portraying a lion mauling a fallen captive. He rubbed his fingers together. The rings glittered. ‘He has an expensive mistress to support!’

  Nigrinus tightened his lips. This man, Flaccianus, was distasteful to him. So, by the sound of it, was his source in that morning’s private meeting of the imperial consistorium. Weak men, Nigrinus thought, with their ungovernable vices.

  ‘So? What does he have to report?’

  ‘A proposal has come from Rome,’ Flaccianus said, rolling the words around in his mouth. His eyes flickered between the bull hunt and Nigrinus’s shoulder. ‘An offer of marriage, between the sister of the usurper and our own Augustus, Constantine. A marriage alliance, in other words. Us and them against Galerius and his people. West versus east.’

  ‘This is Maximian’s daughter, Fausta? She’s of marriageable age?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Fourteen or so,’ Flaccianus said, in an artfully strangled whisper. ‘But the strange thing is that I did think our Augustus was already married...’

  ‘Did you?’ Nigrinus replied, no trace of warmth in his voice. ‘Apparently you were mistaken. And if you thought such a thing you had best unthink it. Such a suggestion could soon become dangerously undiplomatic.’

  Flaccianus shifted in his seat and let out a slow chuckle. It was unconvincing; Nigrinus could tell that his warning had struck home.

  ‘What of the emperor’s opinion?’ he said. ‘Is it known?’

  Flaccianus sucked in his greasy cheeks, then shook his head. ‘Our source could report nothing,’ he said. ‘He’s only a silentiarius, after all, a mere court usher...’

  ‘He takes my money all the same. Next time, tell him I want everything. He’ll be well paid.’

  ‘And what do I get out of the arrangement?’

  ‘You are an officer of the agentes in rebus,’ Nigrinus said blankly. ‘Providing information is your job.’

  ‘Yes. But not to you, brother.’ Flaccianus yawned, long and insolent. ‘I don’t know who you’re working for, do I?’ He stood up. ‘You must excuse me, I need to piss.’

  Nigrinus watched the other man as he bobbed his way down the steps to the lavatories. It galled him having to do business with a man like Flaccianus, but if he wanted inside information, he had to use lateral channels, however distasteful.

  Everyone has a flaw, everyone a weakness. Learn their weakness and you might turn them to your purpose. Such had always been Nigrinus’s maxim, and it had served him well so far. Flaccianus, for example, had certain sexual tastes which Nigrinus found despicable, but they at least made him a malleable informer.

  Down in the arena the last of the bulls was on its knees, blowing bloody froth. The stalls were full of motion now, people shifting from seat to seat, vendors moving between them with baskets of hot nuts and flasks of iced water. High at the rim of the amphitheatre, pump-nozzles emitted hazy gusts of perfume. From somewhere came the sonorous drone of a water organ.

  Turning in his seat, Nigrinus gazed up towards the imperial podium. He could just make out the figure of the emperor in the blueish shade beneath the white and gold canopy. The podium was ringed with a cordon of bodyguards, white-uniformed men of the Corps of Protectores. They wore no armour, but carried their swords openly, forbidding anyone to trespass on the sacred imperial precinct. Constantine sat tall and erect on his folding stool, his gold-embroidered robe falling stiffly from his shoulders, his heavy-boned face blank and grave. Already he had perfected the statue-like immobility and calm that people expected of their emperors. Only thirty-three, and already ruler of a quarter of the Roman world.

  Nigrinus himself was proud to have played a small part in that success: the operation he had directed in northern Britain two years before had
been vital in getting Constantine posted to join his father’s field army, who then acclaimed the son on the father’s death. An effective operation indeed, although at one point it had looked dangerously close to unravelling: some idiot of a centurion stumbling back across the frontier with stories of treason and conspiracy. Nigrinus had managed to hold that problem down; he had not even been forced to kill the centurion. Such people can have their uses, after all.

  Everyone has a flaw, everyone a weakness.

  But what, he thought, of the emperor’s council, the senior ministers of the consistorium, the military commanders and the eunuchs? All of them had their ambitions, their schemes and alliances. All their secret vices, their closely held treacheries, their closet corruptions. And Nigrinus made it his business to discover as much of what these men concealed as he could. Such knowledge was a tool; it was also a defence.

  A sudden brassy surge of trumpets broke into Nigrinus’s thoughts, and he turned his attention back to the arena. The dead bulls were being hauled away by gangs of slaves with ropes and chains, while other slaves heaped fresh sand to cover the slick of blood. Meanwhile, on the balcony above the northern gateway, a rotund figure in a blinding white ceremonial toga was commencing an oration. The crowd, hushed momentarily by the trumpets, soon resumed their mumbling. Nigrinus put one finger in his ear and tried to concentrate on what the orator was saying.

  ‘...O great and heaven-sent Augustus, on this day that we celebrate the birth of Rome, the Eternal City, Mistress of Nations, we praise you for restoring to us the divine peace and prosperity of our lands!’

  Nigrinus snatched a quick glance back at the imperial podium: Constantine still sat stiff and motionless, staring forward. What was he thinking? Was he even listening? Around him his advisors and eunuchs lolled, some of them whispering together.

  ‘For is it not so that in the days of your father, the deified Constantius, the Kings of the Franks gave oaths that their people would never again trouble the serenity of our empire?’

  A stir ran through the crowd: at the centre of the arena floor a dark opening had appeared. Sand sifted down into the void below. The noise in the stalls died away once more into an expectant hush, broken by a vast collective hiss and yell as the platform was winched up from the arena cellars.

  ‘And is it not so, most Divine Intelligence, that as soon as the dire news of your father’s illness and demise crossed the narrow seas, these same savage men, these men ungovernable by honour, broke their promises of peace and once again bared their savage jaws against our kin?’

  Between twenty or thirty prisoners stood huddled on the platform, Nigrinus guessed; all that remained of the Frankish war parties that had crossed the Rhine the previous winter. They were naked, their bodies pale, starved-looking and covered in bloody welts and bruises. For the last three months they had been kept in the darkness of a dungeon, only to be flung into this blaze of light and noise, this roaring oval of thousands of hateful eyes and mouths.

  The voice of the orator was almost drowned by the yelling.

  ‘O greatest of emperors, then you came to our aid, falling like a comet from the western sky and destroying their warlike bands! And now, O great one, allow us to see and admire the terror of justice falling upon those same barbarians!’

  From the dark gates in the wall, snarling wolves were being herded out onto the sand by men with whips and tridents, scores of them loping and ranging around the margins of the arena like grey smoke. The prisoners were still clustered on the platform at the centre of the oval: a couple were kneeling, awaiting their fate, while others stood locked in terror, cupping their genitals; Nigrinus noticed that they had been chained together in pairs by the neck.

  A cry went up from the crowd: one shackled pair of prisoners had made a stumbling bolt for the wooden barriers that ringed the arena. The nearest wolf, attracted by the movement, leaped towards them. Others followed at once; then the whole pack was in motion. Nigrinus made a sound between his teeth.

  As soon as the first two men went down the rest scattered, fleeing clumsily in all directions, hampered by their neck-chains. The wolves loped in amongst them, yelping and frenzied, and the killing became rapid and bloody. Nigrinus saw one beast tear out a man’s throat with a single flying lunge; another pair brought a running fugitive to the ground, clawing at his arms and chest. Blood sprayed and spattered on the sand.

  Nigrinus could clearly make out the sound of cracking bones and rending flesh. He could smell the hot blood, the reek of offal and faeces, the sickening taint of death in the air. He felt his guts tighten, and glanced away. He had no qualms about the idea of death, mutilation and extreme violence, but still felt an instinctive squeamishness about having to watch it. It was childish, he knew, quite unmanly. He forced himself to raise his eyes and watch, dispassionately, as the men died on the sand. The arena is a stern teacher, he told himself.

  There was a presence at his side; he thought it was Flaccianus returning, but instead another man was leaning from the row behind him. A hefty, bearded man in red clothing, wearing many gold ornaments.

  ‘What is the purpose of this, can you tell me?’ the man asked in a thick Germanic accent, flinging out a fat hand towards the slaughter.

  ‘King,’ Nigrinus said in greeting, making the barest of salutes. Hrocus, King of the Alamannic Bucinobantes, had been hanging around the court of Constantine, and his father before him, for nearly a decade, but was still entitled to a shadow of courtesy. He had, after all, been one of the first to acclaim Constantine as emperor, back in Eboracum.

  ‘These men are warriors!’ Hrocus exclaimed, sounding genuinely pained. ‘They surrendered in good faith, so I believe. Why does the emperor waste them like this? They would make good soldiers, loyal to him. Instead they are just used as sport – this I do not understand! It is ridiculous...’

  ‘How many warriors are there in Germania?’ Nigrinus asked, leaning back and speaking over his shoulder. ‘How many among the Franks, and your own people, and all the other nations beyond? A multitude. And nearly all of them tied by treaty to keep the peace with Rome.’

  ‘Yes? What of it?’

  ‘Making an exhibition of a few prisoners,’ Nigrinus went on, summoning a smile, ‘not only reassures the citizens of the provinces that the emperor can enforce his demands. It also reminds the barbarians across the river that Rome takes promises very seriously. And that reminder is worth a legion of men.’

  Hrocus grunted, clearly not convinced. It must be hard, Nigrinus thought; those men dying down there were very similar to his own people, and spoke almost the same language. But it was true: displays like this worked. Now all the tribes of the Franks had presented their submission; only the Bructeri remained, and they too would be subdued soon enough, this year or the next.

  Down on the sand, most of the prisoners were already dead. The last few cowered in a knot to one side. Some were screaming for mercy, but their voices were lost in the vast noise of the baying crowd that surrounded them. The wolves, however, were slinking off to the other side of the arena, apparently tired of their work. One, its muzzle bloodied to its ears, was intently trying to eat the body of its victim; two of the guards tried to drive it away as a wave of boos and angry yells echoed around the stalls.

  But soon enough the guards with their whips and jabbing tridents had forced both prisoners and wolves back into motion, and the animals despatched their last few victims with sullen efficiency. One of the final prisoners, dragging himself free from the corpse of his chained partner, made a dash for the arena wall. Nigrinus watched the man approach, then vanish beneath the wooden palings that ringed the oval of sand; the man hurled himself upwards and managed to grasp the top of the fence, but the wolves were already upon him. Then he fell back, out of sight, and a mist of blood sprayed up to spatter over the clean white tunics of the closest spectators.

  ‘Why do they laugh?’ Hrocus asked, baffled. The cheers and jeers rang out from the stalls around them.

&nbs
p; ‘Fools will laugh at anything,’ Nigrinus told him. Shock will do that too, he thought. He had heard of men laughing in battle as their friends died around them. Some of the spectators were giggling, or cackling like the mad. Relief, perhaps, that it was the barbarians being torn apart by wolves, and not them.

  Now the drone and warble of the water organ filled the bowl of the amphitheatre once more. Already the guards were herding the wolves back though the gates, while slaves dragged away the mangled corpses of the dead Franks and shovelled more sand over the trampled morass of blood and viscera that remained. It was time for a new spectacle, before the attention of the crowd wandered.

  ‘Ah!’ Hrocus declared, slapping his meaty hands together. ‘Now I hope for naked tarts, dancing on platforms!’

  But the king was to be disappointed.

  Two smaller trapdoors opened in the arena floor, and to another blare of trumpets the platforms rose from the darkness below. Each was mounted with a tall wooden post, and to each post a man was chained by the neck. Twisting in his seat, Nigrinus read the placards fixed to the tops of the posts: ‘MEROGAISVS – KING OF THE CHAMAVI’, ‘ASCARICVS – KING OF THE CHERVSCI’.

  The spectators began yelling again, standing in their seats, the men in the lower stalls screaming abuse at the bound captives.

  ‘Now they are fools,’ Hrocus said, shaking his head sadly. ‘I could have told them! I could have said: Don’t attack Rome... Now look at them!’

  But the two Frankish chiefs appeared defiant still. One, Ascaricus, hung his head so his hair covered his face, but his lean muscles were hard as he gripped the post behind him. The other Frank, Merogaisus, was a huge man, his yellow hair and beard dirty and matted but his eyes glaring. His body was striped with blood from a recent whipping. As he felt the hatred of the crowd he began shouting back at them, straining at his chains.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Nigrinus asked Hrocus.

  ‘He’s saying,’ the king replied, ‘that he wants to be armed. Give me a weapon, Roman dogs. Let me fight and die like a man...’