Swords Around the Throne

by Ian Ross

  ‘Am I your emperor?’ Maximian growled.

  ‘Yes, dominus,’ both men said in unison. Castus kept his eyes locked on the tiled floor, but he could sense the emperor looming over him.

  ‘Yes? So if I ordered you to go and kill Constantine, you’d do it?’

  A pause. Castus felt the blood rushing to his head. The prospect was dizzying – terrible and enticing at the same time. Escape from Maximian’s court – but then what? Would he even be believed if he tried to report the truth?

  Maximian was still waiting for an answer. Scorpianus bent closer, spoke under his breath.

  ‘What?’ the emperor said, frowning. ‘Oh, maybe not, then. It seems even my own guards are not to be trusted!’

  ‘Your divinity, that wasn’t what I meant... We have other agents, more versatile...’

  ‘Versatile!’ Maximian spat the word. ‘Send that bastard Constantine to me and we’ll fight it out, man to man! Then we’ll see who the gods favour...’

  Castus slowly eased out a breath. There was another man speaking now, and it took a moment for Castus to recognise the surprised-looking civilian who had visited the torture room with Scorpianus and the eunuch. He recalled his name: Aelius Macrobius, the governor of the Viennensis diocese.

  ‘Our latest reports, most sacred emperor,’ the man said, his voice smoothly urbane, ‘suggest that Constantine is moving south with only a small contingent of men, no more than three or four thousand. He has been obliged to leave the bulk of his army on the Rhine, to guard against the barbarians. Also, he has no siege engines and only a limited supply train – his men are already on half-rations.’

  ‘Really?’ Maximian said with renewed enthusiasm. ‘No engines? Four thousand men?’ He began to laugh, smacking his fist into his palm. ‘Then the gods truly are on my side, at last! Once my son sends his four legions and two thousand clibanarii across the Alps, we’ll smash Constantine easily! We’ll smear his little army all over the plains of the Rhodanus!’

  ‘It also seems, dominus,’ Macrobius went on, with the faint smile of a man who knows his news is good, ‘that Ulpius Caesianus, the governor of Raetia Prima, has now declared for Maxentius. Thus cutting all land communication between Constantine’s territories and those of his erstwhile ally Licinius on the Danube.’

  ‘Even better!’ Maximian declared. He jumped up from his seat, letting his gold-embroidered purple robe slide heavily from his shoulders. ‘Once he finishes off the rebellion in Africa, Maxentius can use Raetia as a bridgehead across the Alps to strike at Licinius’s western flank, while I deal with Constantine here in Gaul. By winter we’ll be masters of half the world!’

  Castus was still kneeling on the floor, trying not to glance up at the emperor. Maximian was pacing fiercely again, fists clasped behind his back. Scorpianus made a quick gesture, then pointed sharply at the door. Rising, the two Protectores gave another salute, but the emperor ignored them as they backed silently out of the room.

  Night had fallen by the time Castus made his way back towards his quarters. A southern night: the air felt warm and soft, and every lamp along the portico was hazed with a nimbus of tiny wings. The steady chirrup of insects came from the gardens. He was still turning over Macrobius’s news, still trying to determine how much of it might be true, and what it might mean. As he stepped through the passage from the garden portico and entered the darker enclosed courtyard beyond, he was too distracted at first to notice the figure waiting between the pillars of the colonnade.

  ‘Domina,’ he said quietly as she approached him. There were others with her, a pair of slaves, a maid, a eunuch bodyguard, but they hung back at a discreet distance.

  ‘What happened today?’ Sabina asked him, drawing very close. Castus felt himself enfolded in her scent, her presence; but she was scared too, and he could sense it. The imperial household was a place of spies, and it was dangerous to be seen talking with anyone.

  ‘You heard him, the emperor?’

  ‘I think half of Arelate heard him. What was he so angry about?’

  Briefly he filled in the details of the afternoon’s and evening’s news: the rapid approach of Constantine, the size of his army, Maximian’s swoops from rage to triumphant hubris. Sabina took his arm.

  ‘Then he’ll fight?’ They were walking together, around the turning of the pillared portico into the deeper shadow.

  ‘He says so.’

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Castus frowned, only now beginning to consider some of the things he had heard. ‘Constantine has no siege engines,’ he said. ‘I think after a while Maximian might remember that.’

  ‘But that makes no difference! The walls of Arelate are falling down – an army could just walk straight in through the breaches!’

  ‘Maybe they could here. But there are cities in Gaul with stronger walls.’

  He felt Sabina shudder. She drew the shawl tighter at her neck. ‘Is there any news of the fighting in Africa?’ she asked.

  ‘None,’ Castus told her. He remembered that her husband was there, supporting the rebel Domitius Alexander.

  For a few more paces they walked in silence. Her attendants had dropped out of sight and hearing now. Then Sabina drew him to a halt, and took his hand.

  ‘Is it true that they tortured you?’

  Castus shrugged. ‘They thought about it.’

  She appeared confused. ‘So... you genuinely have gone over to Maximian?’

  Uncertainty crawled up Castus’s spine; was this a ruse to gauge his loyalty? Were they being observed even now? He had grown used to being watched, guarded, distrusted.

  ‘Have you?’ he asked in return, and caught her smile in the darkness.

  ‘This is not the best time for such questions, I suppose,’ she said quietly.

  She pressed herself quickly against him, rising to kiss his lips, then stepped away. For a few heartbeats he gripped her hand, not letting her retreat.

  ‘We all do what we must,’ he said, ‘to survive.’

  Then he released her, and she walked away into the shadows without another word.

  Five days later, Castus stood on the deck of the liburnian galley Aurata as it rowed slowly downriver towards the sea. On the raised stern platform, Maximian Augustus sat blearily beneath a purple and gold canopy, staring with dull and reddened eyes at the flat marshy land beyond the riverbanks. He was not retreating; this was not flight. Instead it was a strategic relocation.

  Behind him the citizens of Arelate waited nervously within their crumbled walls for the arrival of Constantine. Their city, the first to acclaim the new emperor, was stripped of troops now. Their civic leaders had either deserted their posts or gone south down the river with Maximian. The soldiers that had been camped around the city were gone too, marching across the flat stony wastelands to the south-east, heading for the city of Massilia on the coast.

  Massilia, with its strong walls and seaport, was to be Maximian’s new imperial capital. Arelate would be left to make the best of things. There had been no cheering, no shouts of loyalty and acclaim, as the emperor had made his departure in the grey of dawn. Those citizens who had stirred from their homes had lined the riverbank and watched with blank expressions as the imperial retinue swept from the palace into the waiting boats, the big Aurata and the troopships and smaller galleys that followed in her wake.

  Now the sun was high over the flatlands of the Rhodanus delta. Flights of waterbirds skimmed the lagoons, and flamingos stood balancing on one leg in the shallows. The double-banked oars of the Aurata beat slow and steady, pulling with the current, and around noon the flotilla passed from the river into the straight channel of the Canal of Marius, which would carry them free of the silted branches of the treacherous delta and out to the open sea.

  Brinno was sitting perched above the oar box, watching the rowers with open curiosity. ‘I never see one like this before,’ he said to Castus. ‘The oars... so.’ He raised two flat hands, one above the other. ‘In my country, all the
rowers sit together, pull together.’

  ‘It’s a bireme,’ Castus told him. ‘Out in the east you see triremes – three banks of oars.’

  Brinno raised his eyebrows, clearly perplexed as to how this might work. But then his eyes clouded and he leaned closer.

  ‘We could kill him now,’ he said in an undertone. Castus felt his shoulders tighten, but waited a few breaths before turning slowly to look back towards the platform at the stern. ‘It is our duty,’ Brinno added.

  How easy it would be. Only a few attendants stood or sat around Maximian: the eunuch Gorgonius, Scorpianus, Macrobius and half a dozen secretaries and slaves. Besides Scorpianus, only the four Praetorians standing along the break of the platform were armed. A rush towards the stern and the job would be done. And, along with the emperor, both he and Brinno would be dead.

  So many times over the last month, since his false pledge of allegiance, Castus had tormented himself with plots and plans. He could escape and flee to join Constantine; he could make some wild attack on the usurper. Each time he had held himself back, thinking that the time was not right – it would be a mistake. Each time he had cursed himself for a coward.

  At least nobody now believed the fable about Constantine’s death. All knew that the emperor was marching south against Maximian at great speed. Already he was at Lugdunum; in four days he would reach Arelate. He was falling like a thunderbolt out of the north, with the hardest veterans of the Rhine legions behind him, an army that grew larger with every successive report.

  ‘We need to wait,’ Castus told Brinno, whispering between his teeth. ‘Wait for Massilia – things will be decided then.’

  He heard Brinno smack his lips in frustration. There were seagulls whirling and crying above them now, and the air smelled of brine.

  ‘Decided how?’ the young barbarian hissed. ‘And if not by us – then who?’

  ‘I don’t know, brother,’ Castus told him, unable to meet his eye. ‘I don’t know.’

  The Aurata and her flotilla of smaller vessels left the mouth of the canal that afternoon, and a fine westerly breeze carried them across the bay before sundown, to anchor in the lee of the small barren islands off Massilia. The night was calm and clear, the stars very bright, and as the sun rose the oarsmen backed water and turned the head of the ship towards the narrow inlet of the harbour mouth.

  Standing beneath the high gilded prow, Castus watched the city appear out of the sun-haze of dawn. To either side was a rocky coastline, grey crags dusted with the grey-green of olive groves and wild trees. With the sun glaring off the water, Castus could see little of the city at first. Then he made out the wall that circled it on the seaward side, a massive fortification rising from the naked rock, with squat square towers every few hundred paces. As the Aurata pulled closer, it appeared that the wall entirely closed the city, cutting it off from the sea; then, as the ship turned, Castus made out the narrow neck of the harbour, clinched between the fortified headland and the rough slopes on the far side.

  The galley pulled in through the neck, and the harbour opened before her. An expanse of enclosed water, glimmering pale blue in the early sun, half of it filled with moored vessels. Beyond the forest of masts and yards, the city rose in a broad arc around the northward side of the harbour, clustered houses climbing the hills in terraces. At the summit of each of the hills was a temple, the pillars and pediments gleaming white and gold in the morning sun.

  It was a magnificent sight, the air so clear and clean that Castus felt he could see every detail of the city in perfect focus. For a few moments he forgot the grim mission that had brought him here, and gloried in the view of the city before him across the water.

  But then, as the Aurata crawled the last distance between the moored ships in the harbour, Castus made out the squalor of the docks, the stone quays slippery with fish guts, the jetties of rotting black timber, the wrack of rubbish and half-decayed wreckage in the mud at the water’s edge, and the mass of people spilling down through the gates in the harbour wall and between the chaotic assemblage of warehouses and taverns along the dockside. Horns were blaring from the temples on the hills, and the gathering crowd was already cheering, waving palm branches, crying out its acclamations. The people of Massilia, like those of Arelate before them, had been instructed on how to greet their new master.

  Maximian stood up on the stern platform of the galley, beneath a flapping purple pennant. Castus stared at him, bemused for a moment. The emperor appeared different. His face had been whitened with some kind of paste, his cheeks rouged, his beard and hair dyed jet-black. Standing stiffly in his heavy embroidered robe and his jewelled imperial tiara, Maximian resembled a painted statue. Jupiter, maybe, or Hercules himself.

  The oars backed water, bringing the Aurata smoothly round to the wide stone quay at the western end of the docks. Slaves wearing flowered wreaths lowered a gangway down to the galley’s deck, and on the quay twenty young maidens of the city were drawn up in lines carrying baskets of flowers. As Maximian made his way with slow and stately tread up the gangway and along the jetty, the girls cried out praises and scattered the flowers before him. Music of pipes and tambourines eddied through the noise of the cheering.

  At the head of the quay, across an open paved area, the grandees of Massilia were assembled to greet the emperor: the curator of the city, with decurions of the city council, the flamines and augurs of the temples and the imperial cults. All of them dressed in their heavy white wool togas, their rich silk and linen tunics, their plushly embroidered cloaks. As Maximian approached, all of them knelt on the greasy cobbles and performed their adoration.

  Castus came up the gangway after the imperial party, with Brinno at his side. He tried to keep his expression blank, tried not to stare too critically at all the outpourings of loyal devotion. What was wrong with these people? How much had they been paid? How much had they been threatened?

  He saw Fausta and her retinue disembarking from one of the smaller galleys at the next jetty. Constantine’s wife had given up her pretence of mourning, and wore the full splendour of her wealth once more. Castus watched her as she moved to join her father; what were her loyalties now?

  ‘Maximian Augustus! Eternal Augustus! Greatest of emperors! May the gods grant you eternal life! May the gods grant you eternal rule!’

  On and on it went, until Castus felt the massed voices drumming in his skull. He scanned the crowd, trying to read the faces of individuals, but saw nothing. All looked as blank and bemused as he felt. Maximian stood in the cleared area at the top of the quay, motionless as a statue with his retinue around him.

  Now there was one voice, rising clear above the rest. The cheering and the chanted acclamations died away, and the voice carried onwards. A panegyric of praise, of course. The orator was a plump-faced man dressed all in wine-red, and he sketched florid gestures in the air as he spoke.

  ‘...lover of your country, lover of the true gods, O greatest of emperors, you bring glory to our city by your Sacred Presence! All civil strife is banished, all traitors and impious followers of outlaw sects slink away before the dawn of your arrival! Maximian Augustus, the city cries aloud with one voice in praise and in ardent gratitude that you have chosen this place to commence once more your Divine Rule and given us this opportunity to once again adore your Sacred Features...’

  Just as Castus felt his ears growing numb, he noticed a stir running through the crowd at his back. Turning, he made out another voice, shouting from a short distance away, a harsh angry yell rising above the hushed noise of the crowd. Beside him was the low stone platform of a dockside crane: Castus shoved aside a couple of lounging labourers and clambered up onto it, peering back over the throng towards the line of warehouses that fronted the harbour wall.

  ‘...Brothers and sisters, you see before you the emissary of the devil! A persecutor, despised by God! A man who has shed the blood of innocents, the blood of the faithful!’

  The speaker was an older man, powerfully built
but plainly dressed, with a bald head and flaring grey beard. He was standing on the back of a cart drawn up outside the warehouses, and the crowd was thick around him. As he spoke his words gained in power and volume, drowning out the honeyed phrases of the orator.

  ‘Once more he comes amongst us, brethren, in the guise of an emperor, but he is the devil’s shadow! I call upon you – cast him out! Reject this usurper, this persecutor, this enemy of God!’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Castus said to a slack-mouthed youth sitting on the crane.

  ‘That’s Oresius, the head priest of the Christians,’ the youth said, and spat. ‘Bishop, they call him. He almost managed to get his head lopped off the last time Maximian was in power here. Reckon he wants to be one of their martyrs, eh?’

  Already the crowd was splitting apart, a solid wedge of Praetorians with locked shields driving a path towards the man on the cart. Another man was calling out to the Christian priest: a well-dressed citizen, wearing the insignia of a city magistrate.

  ‘Cease this disturbance!’ the magistrate shouted. ‘For the good of the city, Oresius, I beg you – stop this criminal madness!’

  ‘Madness?’ the grey-bearded man yelled back. Veins were standing out in his neck, and he seized the front of his tunic as if he would tear it from his body. ‘Who are you, Trigetius, to speak of crime and madness? There is no madness for those who know the love of God! For those who have Christ there is no crime!’

  The crowd around the cart was shoving back against the phalanx of Praetorians. Some of them pelted missiles: rotten vegetables and kicked-up cobblestones spattered and rattled off the shields. Castus saw men knocked to the ground, scuffles breaking out. Bodies were swirling around the platform of the crane as the mass of onlookers tried to back away from the confrontation. A scream from just below him, and Castus saw a gang of sailors in greasy smocks shoving a woman between them as she tried to carry her child clear of the riot.