Swords Around the Throne

by Ian Ross

  Abruptly the noise from the crowd shifted to a cheer and a growing chant. Nigrinus glanced away from the bound captives, and saw two bears emerging from the gates at either end of the arena. They were monstrous beasts, scarred veterans of the Treveris arena, and the crowd knew them well.

  ‘UL-TOR! UL-TOR!’ the crowd near the southern gate chanted.

  ‘OMI-CI-DA! OMI-CI-DA!’ those in the northern stalls chanted back.

  So it was a contest, Nigrinus realised – which bear would kill his victim first? Already he could see some of the spectators making bets, gauging the odds – was the man-slaying Omicida the fittest champion, or the avenging Ultor?

  The first kill came quickly, and those betting on Omicida lost out. The other bear, Ultor, dropped into a loping run; with unnerving speed it closed with the bound victim. Before Ascaricus of the Cherusci could even scream, the bear had reared up, bellowing, and smashed one paw across his chest. The victim was punched back against the post; then the bear lunged forward, throwing its full weight against him. The post gave way, toppling over and dragging the bound man with it – he was dead before he hit the sand, with the bear’s massive gouging jaws clamped around his face.

  ‘UL-TOR! UL-TOR!’ the crowd in the southern stands chanted.

  Nigrinus looked back at Hrocus. The king sat with a woeful grimace, his beard in his fist. Another throw of the dice, Nigrinus thought, and it could easily have been Hrocus down there, chained to a post, getting his skull crushed by Ultor the bear.

  How strange the turns of fate, Nigrinus thought as he stared in queasy fascination at the scene in the arena. Hrocus was born a king, his father was a king before him. Nigrinus’s own father had been born a slave. Now Nigrinus himself was climbing the ladder of imperial offices, his power growing with every passing year, while Hrocus declined and did not even know it. Was it just fate? No, Nigrinus thought. It was more than that. He knew how the game was played, and men like Hrocus did not.

  A sudden movement caught his eye – the crowd saw it too, and a gasp and a yell came from the stalls. Merogaisus, the second Frankish chief, had managed to break the fastening of the chain that secured him to the post. Roaring, he was heaving and dragging at the post itself, trying to wrench it from the ground. The bear Omicida idled closer, head swinging, drool glistening around its jaws.

  With a straining heave, the Frankish chief ripped the heavy post up out of the ground. He lashed the chain around it, then lifted it above his head and brandished it at the packed tiers of seats all around him.

  ‘And now things become interesting,’ Nigrinus said quietly.

  The bear Omicida was already closing in. Merogaisus cried out in defiance, hefting the ten-foot baulk of wood and chain like an ironbound club. He swung, and the chain came loose and flailed at the bear’s head. The crowd in the stalls was hushed, expectant, many of them on their feet. Nigrinus could see the flicker of bets being laid. Man against beast.

  Swinging his lump of wood and iron, Merogaisus had driven the first bear back. But now Ultor had picked up his scent, and come bellowing across the sand to join the attack. Both animals circled the man, keeping back from the lash of the chain and the sweeping reach of the wooden club. Merogaisus was chanting something, or singing; he was holding the beasts off, but his strength would give out before long.

  Now the crowd was beginning to shout, some of them urging on the bears, others – unbelievably, it seemed to Nigrinus – switching their support to Merogaisus. Only moments before they had been screaming for his death; now they chanted his name, punching the air in unison. Hrocus was on his feet too, joining in the chant.

  Something had to be done, Nigrinus thought. The message of this display was being lost. He could see many in the crowd stretching out their arms towards the imperial podium, begging the emperor’s mercy for the man in the arena. Nigrinus smiled grimly: how the fickle populace loved an underdog!

  One of the bears – Omicida – reared up suddenly and made a lunge, smashing the club from the Frank’s grasp. The crowd let out a vast groan. The other bear, its muzzle still clotted with gore, lurched closer. Merogaisus snatched up the chain and managed to haul the club after him as he backed away. He swung at one bear and caught it across the jaws with the chain; then he jabbed the baulk of wood at the other, driving it back. Cheers and a rhythmic stamping rose from the stalls.

  ‘The emperor!’ somebody was shouting. ‘The emperor!’ Nigrinus turned to the podium. There was Constantine, standing stiffly, his golden robe blazing in the sun, one hand raised. Nigrinus stood up, instinctively raising his hand in salute.

  ‘He will grant him freedom?’ Hrocus was asking. ‘Constantine will allow the Frank to go free?’

  Down on the bloody sand, Merogaisus too had seen the emperor. For a moment he stood motionless, the heavy club raised, the two beasts prowling just beyond his reach. Then, with a shout of rage, he tossed the club aside. Head back, fists raised to the crowd and the emperor alike, he cried out in his own language, a single phrase repeated. Then he ran at the nearest bear with his arms outstretched.

  ‘What did he say?’ Nigrinus demanded.

  ‘He said,’ Hrocus replied, then raised his voice: ‘Roman slaves! Watch how a free man dies!’

  Omicida made one savage bellowing swipe, and the man was down.

  Shocked silence filled the amphitheatre, and in that unnatural hush, before the great eruption of angry noise, Nigrinus was sure he could make out the last cries of the dying man as the bears tore into him.

  They sounded, he thought, like mocking laughter.

  Part One

  One Year Later

  1

  May AD 308

  The sea was grey as old meat, veined with dirty white foam.

  Three hours out from harbour, the round-bellied Gallic merchantman Pegasus butted across the choppy swell, her deck crowded with legionaries huddled under their rain capes. On the western horizon, the coast of Britain was vanishing into the haze, while three more vessels followed in the wake of the Pegasus, carrying the rest of the Third Cohort, Legion VI Victrix across the sea to Gaul.

  On deck, beneath the bulge of the leather sail, the briny sting of the sea breeze could not erase the reek of bilge water, vomit and urine rising from the hold. Two of the legionaries stumbled up from their crouch in the scuppers to lean into the breeze, bracing themselves expectantly against the rail.

  ‘Other side!’ a heavy voice said. ‘Downwind. Unless you want it in your faces!’

  One of the soldiers glanced back, too sick to speak; before either could move their centurion had seized them by their capes and hauled them back across the pitch of the deck. Staggering, they plunged against the leeward rail, just in time to blow the meagre contents of their stomachs out over the waves.

  A fresh whip of wind spattered rain across the deck – it had been raining constantly, on and off, since the ship had left Rutupiae. Centurion Aurelius Castus planted his feet firmly on the slope of the deck, pushed back the hood of his cape and tipped his broad face into the rain. He felt the wind shift, and the straining cordage overhead wailed. Unlike most of his men, Castus seemed immune to the effects of seasickness. Half of his sixty-strong century had spent the first few hours of the voyage vomiting helplessly over the side. Later, after a brief meal of barley porridge and vinegar wine, it had been the turn of the other half. But Castus felt no discomfort from the motion of the waves: his men, he knew, joked between themselves that he lacked a stomach, or any internal organs. Their centurion had a solid body, to match his solid head.

  This was not the first time Castus had been aboard a ship, but most of the soldiers under his command had been recruited in northern Britain, and had never before left the island. For them the ocean was a new and terrible experience. Castus himself was from distant Pannonia, born on the banks of the Danube, and his fifteen years in the army had taken him from the wilds of Caledonia to the delta of the Euphrates. The Ocean, he knew, was a powerful deity, and should be respected. B
ut he also knew that the Gallic Strait in early summer held only a minor risk of storms, whirlpools and sea monsters.

  Castus ran a hand across his cropped scalp, and rainwater dripped down his neck. He was young for a centurion, only just over thirty, but he had enlisted young too and his long career in the army had toughened him beyond his years. Squinting into the greyness of the open sea, he tried to make out the green smear of the distant shore. Would they make it to harbour before nightfall? He picked his way aft, swaying between the uprights, stepping carefully around the huddled bodies of his men and the heaps of baggage and stores secured in their rope netting. The captain, a bearded Spaniard from Gades, was perched beside the steersman on the raised stern platform.

  ‘You’ll see the Gallic coast soon, centurion,’ the captain called as Castus approached. ‘Unless this wind picks up, we’ll have a nice smooth crossing all the way to Bononia!’

  Smooth, Castus thought; a couple of the nearer legionaries glanced up in queasy confusion.

  ‘How much longer?’ Castus asked.

  ‘Two hours, perhaps three, if Neptune and Boreas allow. Your men should look to the west – this might be the last they’ll see of Britain!’

  An ill-omened comment, Castus thought, and several of the men had overheard it. Hands fluttered, making warding signs against evil, and lips spat. Even so, a knot of soldiers rose to their feet and stood at the leeward rail, gazing back at the last trace of green on the western horizon. They raised their hands in salute, crying out to their native gods: to Brigantia Dea, and Mars Cocidius. To Fortuna the Homebringer. Most were leaving behind families, wives and children. They were going to a distant war, in an unknown land. Many of them wept openly.

  Castus too stared back at the retreating shore. He had no farewells to make; he was leaving little. For nearly four years Britain, and the old legionary fortress of Eboracum, had been his home. He had served there with the Sixth Legion since his promotion to centurion; he had led men into battle for the first time in that province, known victory and defeat, honour and shame. But he left now with few regrets. The last two years had been quiet, and the legion had spent its time in construction work, renovating and rebuilding the fortress, tearing down the leaking old barracks and erecting new ones, and reconstructing the headquarters building, where the emperor Constantine had first been acclaimed by the troops, on a suitably grand scale.

  He would miss little of that, Castus thought. His friends in his own cohort were travelling with him, and the only person he was sorry to leave was a woman. Afrodisia was a prostitute, but he had grown fond of her over the years. It had surprised him, when they finally parted, how fond she had grown of him too.

  But that was the past. The Third Cohort of the Sixth had been summoned across the sea to Gaul, to join the imperial field army on the Rhine: reinforcements for the coming campaign against the barbarians. Castus relished the prospect. He had feared, at times over these last two years, that life was done with him, that the world had turned and left him to sink into a languorous peace, old age, slow death. But away on the Rhine there was war, and war was his purpose. It was his only trade, and he knew he was good at it.

  The Pegasus ploughed on across the heaving waves, and Castus gripped the backstay and gazed towards the eastern horizon. With every rise and fall of the swept-up prow the shore of Gaul drew closer. Silently, so none might see, he shaped a prayer to Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Let me not return this way too soon.

  Dawn was cold and damp, and in the camp on the hillside above the port of Bononia the men of the Sixth Legion stumbled and cursed among the tent-ropes and fires as they prepared to march. They had come ashore at nightfall, salty-wet and hungry, and had had only a few hours’ sleep. To add to their grievances, they had shared the camp with a detachment from the other British legion, II Augusta. The Second had arrived before them, and cunningly positioned their latrine pits upwind of the tent lines of the Sixth.

  ‘Bastard Secundani,’ said legionary Aelianus. ‘And they’ll be churning up the road ahead of us, I suppose, all the way to Colonia.’ The Second had taken the first march, and had left an hour in advance.

  ‘That or making us eat their dust, if the rain stops,’ said legionary Erudianus, sniffing at the sky. ‘Smells to me like a dry spell coming on.’

  ‘Quiet!’ yelled the optio, Modestus, pacing back up the line of shuffling, red-eyed soldiers. He reached the front of the column and saluted to Castus.

  ‘All present, centurion.’

  Castus nodded, turned to the men behind him and raised his stick. His century was leading the cohort that morning, but no word was needed, no order given. Everyone knew they had a stiff march ahead of them: at least twelve days across the flat plains of Belgica, full-step marching all the way, to Colonia Agrippina on the Rhine. They had done more than that coming down from Eboracum to the south coast of Britain, but this was an unfamiliar new country for most of them. Castus let the stick drop, turned and set off. Behind him the column of his own soldiers, then those of his friend Valens and the other centuries beyond them, creaked and stamped into motion. Nearly five hundred men, with pack mules and baggage wagons, army slaves and artillery section, and the straggle of civilian hangers-on that had already attached themselves to the rear of the column before the last files tramped out of Bononia.

  Departure had been shambolic, but after a couple of hours on the road the thin grey rain had stopped, the sun had broken over the cloudy horizon, and the usual routine of marching was shaking some order into the ranks. At noon they came up with the rearguard of II Augusta, and passed them as the men of the other legion stopped for their midday meal. Jeering laughter and shouted insults from both sides; there had been bad blood between the Second and Sixth for over a hundred years. The Second were based in the southern province, in Londinium and the coastal forts, and they regarded the Sixth as semi-barbarians from the hairy north. Two years before, the invading Picts had beaten the Sixth Legion in the field and driven them back into their fortifications; the men of the Second still believed that their own detachment had defeated the marauders single-handed and saved the province.

  ‘Centurion, keep your men in line!’ Tribune Aurelius Jovianus of the Second was the appointed praepositus, commanding both legion detachments. He was supposed to be impartial.

  ‘Of course, dominus,’ Castus said, saluting as the tribune rode on by. He swatted at a couple of his men with his stick, and glowered at the soldiers of the Second lined up on the verge until they fell silent.

  ‘Smarten up,’ he said in a carrying rumble. ‘Double pace – let’s show these bastards what soldiers look like!’

  His men needed no further encouragement.

  Two days, then three days. The roads rolled out before them, spreading their web of gravel and churned mud across the plains of Belgica. Castus did not care for the look of this country: much of it was farmland, wide flat fields of wheat and barley. But much more was untended, waste acres that had not been ploughed for generations, now high with tangled weeds and scrub bushes. It gave the landscape a maudlin, sepulchral look under the heavy grey clouds.

  ‘The tragedy of Gaul,’ said the narrow-faced balding soldier marching beside him. Diogenes had been a schoolmaster before he had been recruited into the legion; Castus had recently promoted the rather unmilitary man to tesserarius, keeper of the watchwords, which granted him immunity from the more strenuous fatigue duties, and also perhaps excused some of his more unusual comments.

  Castus gave a questioning grunt.

  ‘That used to be some of the finest arable land in the western provinces,’ Diogenes explained. ‘Then, about thirty years ago, in the time of the emperor Probus, barbarians invaded from across the Rhine. By the time the owners had got their peasants and slaves back to the land, they owed too much in tax arrears to afford to farm it. So they let it run to seed, claimed it wasn’t theirs.’

  ‘Stupid,’ Castus said. ‘So everybody loses?’

  ‘Indeed. And if
anyone was tempted to try and cultivate it, you can bet that some good neighbour would be only too ready to inform on them to the tax officials. Once again, you see, centurion – the curse of private property!’

  Castus had become accustomed to Diogenes’ strange views over the years, his philosophies. One of these was the idea that private property was the sole cause of the empire’s decline; if everything was owned by the emperor, Diogenes believed, all would be equitable. A situation which seemed to Castus very much like army life, which sadly was not a very good example of fairness.

  ‘But if we look just over there,’ Diogenes explained, with new enthusiasm, ‘we see the future of the Gallic provinces!’ He pointed away across the weed-grown scrub to a nearby field in cultivation. Rows of dark figures were at work, bending low over the crop.

  ‘Barbarians!’ Diogenes announced. ‘Prisoners, taken in war and settled here by the emperor. Probably Franks or Alamanni, I should think. They work the land for free, and send their sons for military service in our armies.’

  ‘And everybody wins?’ Castus said, sceptical. Surely the idea of surrendering large areas of Roman land to the barbarians could not be a good one, whoever they were supposedly working for? Was this really the future?

  ‘Perhaps, indeed,’ Diogenes went on, in a musing rhetorical tone Castus had learned to recognise, ‘those barbarians in the fields are the brothers of those we are now going to fight? Convenient, one might say! No doubt our enemies of tomorrow have done some terrible deed, to deserve the vengeance of empire?’

  ‘No doubt,’ Castus said in a tone that forbade further rhetoric. Diogenes was a strange sort of soldier, but he had proved himself brave, and tougher than he looked. Even so, there was a limit to how much Castus could take from him, and directly questioning the motives of the emperor and his army was pushing towards that limit fast. There had been enough of that sort of scepticism in Britain two years before, although all knew it was warranted. Diogenes, sensing the limit’s approach, wisely fell silent.