by Ian Ross
A bolt rattled, hinges squealed and the door edged open slightly. A flat-faced man peered through the gap.
‘We want to talk to your master,’ Castus said.
The man peered at him, his jaw working. Castus could see the calculation in his features, the spark of fear in his eyes. Then the door swung closed again.
Before the slave could slip the bolt into place Castus hurled himself against the door, flinging it open. He felt the heavy wood crash against the man’s body, then he was over the threshold and striding in through the vestibule, with Felix and the two troopers crowding behind him.
There were two more slaves at the far end of the vestibule, bodyguards in sky-blue tunics, but they carried only staves. One glance at the armed men advancing on them and they threw down their weapons and backed away. Castus pushed past them.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded, seeing a man in a patterned robe emerging from a side chamber of the courtyard. Lepidus’s procurator, or one of his clerks, he guessed.
‘The master is dining!’ the man exclaimed. ‘If you would care to wait a moment...?’
‘We would not.’
The dining chamber was easy to find. Castus could smell the aroma of spiced food even from the courtyard. His stomach roiled. He still could not admit to himself what he was about to do.
‘Give me your dagger,’ he said quietly to Felix. The small man slipped the weapon from the sheath on his belt and passed it, underhand, to Castus. The two troopers had taken up positions flanking the doorway. ‘Wait here,’ Castus told them.
Throwing open the doors, he marched into the chamber. A quick glance took in the panelled wall paintings, the mosaic floor, and a young slave boy in a very short tunic attending his master. Lepidus was dining alone, reclining on a single couch. There was a stack of tablets and rolled documents on the low table beside him; the man was working while he ate. Lepidus wiped his mouth with a napkin as Castus approached, and dropped the tablet he had been reading, but did not rise.
‘If you’ve come looking for your wife,’ he said, ‘she’s not here. I got tired of her moods and left her at Ariminum.’
Castus stood in the centre of the room, one hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘You,’ he told the boy. ‘Get out. Close the door behind you.’
The boy obeyed promptly.
‘Stand up,’ Castus told the man on the couch. Lepidus was screwing the napkin between his fingers, a nervous smile twitching across his mouth. Castus noticed that his left forearm was bandaged, a thick wad of dressing tied against it.
‘You know there was never a chance that Sabina would be faithful to you,’ Lepidus said. ‘Why should she? A dumb brute, she called you. You know that? She laughed at you, she—’
‘Stand up,’ Castus repeated. His hand itched on the hilt of his sword, but he knew the man was goading him.
‘Now you want to take me before the emperor,’ Lepidus said, the nervous smile still on his face. ‘They’ll torture me, I suppose. But the things I could tell them… Your own dear wife would be next. And the emperor’s wife too. Fausta – I know you’re fond of her. Sabina told me all about it. Maybe you too, then, eh?’
Exactly, Castus thought. He had known at once why the emperor’s men had sent him after Lepidus. They could have chosen anyone, any of the Protectores or the other tribunes, somebody unconcerned. They had chosen Castus because they knew that for him it was personal. And if Lepidus died, the plot died with him.
‘I have plenty of money here in the house,’ Lepidus was saying. He touched his face, and his hand was shaking. ‘It’s yours – all you have to do is call your men off and look in the other direction…’
Castus drew the dagger from his belt and tossed it to the floor, the iron ringing as it struck the tiles.
‘You sent slaves to kill me and the rest of my party,’ he said. ‘They failed. Instead they killed a sailor called Fish-hook and a Christian priest called Stephanus. Now I’m giving you the chance to do the job yourself.’
Lepidus stared at the dagger on the floor. He tried to speak, but his jaw was trembling too much. He wiped his fingers through his hair, then rubbed at his bandaged arm.
Castus raised his hands, keeping them clear of his own weapon. ‘Pick it up,’ he said. ‘Either that or you’re coming with me.’
The man on the couch swallowed thickly. He let out a brief laugh. Then he threw himself at the dagger. His reaching fingers missed the hilt and knocked it away from him, and Castus stepped back. Scrabbling, Lepidus managed to grab the dagger and straighten up. A look of wild ferocity lit his face, and he lunged with the blade.
Castus took another step back, dodging the man’s clumsy stroke, then with one swift motion he seized the grip of his sword and slid it from the scabbard. He drew his arm back, then stabbed Lepidus through the body.
Lepidus lurched against him, clawing at his neck and shoulders.
‘I guessed you’d be no good at this,’ Castus said, and gave the sword a wrenching twist. Then he shoved the man away from him, dragging the blade free as he fell.
He was wiping his sword on the dead man’s tunic as Felix and the two troopers pushed in through the doors.
‘His excellency attempted to attack me,’ Castus said, and shrugged as he kicked the dagger away across the floor. He gestured to the pile of documents on the table. ‘Burn all these,’ he said, and pretended not to notice the quick glance the soldiers exchanged. ‘Burn any other letters or lists you can find as well.’
Lepidus’s treason, his negotiations with the commander at Ravenna and the others, with Sabina and with Fausta: all of it would go up in the flames. If the emperor’s men wanted him to do their dirty work, he would do it properly, in his own way. Let them accept the consequences. The guilty would be tortured only by their own consciences.
A brief swell of nausea as he stared down at the body, a fluttering sense of shame in his chest. What we call duty is often only pride.
A pool of blood was spreading across the mosaic floor, rich crimson against the bright tiles.
Chapter XXVI
They smelled the river before they could see it. The scent of wet sedge, mud and water carried on the misty night air, and the six riders moved slowly, each man wrapped in a dark cloak. For the last mile the Tiber had been on their left, but it had swung away in a wide bend and now it was ahead of them. Castus felt his senses growing steadily sharper in the darkness.
‘He crossed over there somewhere, dominus,’ the exarch said quietly, pointing into the murk. ‘One of my men found him, more or less where we are now.’
Castus peered towards the river, then nudged the flanks of his horse and the big grey mare moved forward again, slow and steady over the uneven ground. He was glad to have his familiar mount back again; compared with the unfortunate pony he had ridden north from Rome, Dapple’s calm strength and solidity were doubly welcome.
‘And you’re sure there are no enemy troops on this side of the river?’ he asked. The exarch and his men, with several other units of exploratores, had been scouting the area north of the Tiber since midday.
‘Not as far as we know, dominus,’ the exarch said. ‘In this darkness, they could have small patrols out, perhaps. But their main force is far south from here, inside in the city.’
Or so you believe, Castus thought.
Constantine’s army was camped at Saxa Rubra, two miles back up the river, at the ninth milestone on the Flaminian Way. It had taken them six days to march down from Spoletium over the last passes of the Apennines, in a column nearly twelve miles long, moving at the pace of the wagons and the siege train and the few remaining camels. The only enemy resistance had been at Ocriculum, where an advance party of the Divitenses had fought a running battle with a squadron of Numidian cavalry. Now less than half a day’s march would take them to the gates of Rome. The scouts had reported that the stone bridge over the Tiber had been broken, two of its three arches demolished, and the enemy had withdrawn towards the city. Clearly, Maxentius had
opted to keep his army inside the walls and stand a siege. Back at Saxa Rubra the troops were relaxing after their long march; the next day, the engineers would have to repair the bridge for the army to cross, and there would be no fighting any time soon.
But something was not right; Castus could feel it. He remembered this open ground he was crossing now, the escarpment that rose somewhere to his right in the darkness, the bottleneck between hills and looping river at either edge of the plain. He had passed this way on the day he left Rome, and he remembered the strange intuition, something close to a certainty, that the battle would be fought here. Almost, he thought, like a message from the gods.
Intuition alone he could have discounted, gods-sent or not. It was not intuition that had brought him down here two miles from the camp in the midnight mist.
Earlier that evening, a pair of exploratores had found him in his tent in the legion lines. Castus had just finished eating, and was cleaning his kit. The scouts had taken a captive, they explained, who claimed to be a soldier of the Second Legion.
‘We thought he was an enemy spy, dominus.’
‘Not the first time you made that mistake,’ Castus muttered to himself.
But when they brought the ragged figure into the tent he could see why they refused to believe he was a soldier. The thin man before him was soaking wet and smelled terrible, his hollow cheeks were covered by a patchy beard, and for a few long moments Castus did not recognise him.
‘Apologies, dominus. I had to swim the river.’
‘Diogenes!’ Castus cried, leaping up from his stool and clasping the man by the shoulders, shaking him with fierce joy. Runnels of brown water dripped onto the tent’s matting floor. Then he was calling for Eumolpius to bring towels, warm wine and clean dry clothing, pushing Diogenes down onto a stool while the man gulped out his story.
He had spent nearly twenty days hiding out in Rome, he told Castus. Pudentianus’s old door porter had concealed him in a neighbour’s kitchen for most of the time, but Diogenes had heard enough of the outside world to know that the atmosphere in the city had changed. News of the approach of Constantine’s army had thrown the people of Rome into a state of barely suppressed panic, everyone convinced that they were about to be sacked by ferocious barbarians from Germania and Britain.
‘Only today I heard,’ Diogenes said, sitting with a blanket wrapped around his skinny shoulders and cup of warm wine in his hand, ‘that the crowd in the circus were chanting the name of Constantine! Some faction or other was leading them, it seems. The Praetorians stormed the stands to try and shut them up, but everyone heard it. “Constantine shall never be defeated,” they were chanting…’
Nigrinus, Castus thought as Diogenes filled in the last few details of his story: he had been smuggled out of the city earlier that evening, but had had to cover the last distance on foot and swim across the river, then had got lost in the mist on the far side.
‘But before I crossed over,’ Diogenes said, with more urgency, ‘I saw something happening on the southern bank. It was about half a mile downstream, I think, close to the broken bridge, and hard to make out in the mist, but it seemed like a large number of men were building something down there.’
‘Building what?’
‘I couldn’t tell, dominus. But I saw boats in the river, moored along the near bank. They looked like barges to me.’
‘Barges,’ Castus said. He pondered a moment, then nodded and stood up quickly, calling for Eumolpius to saddle his horse. He had an idea, but he would need to see things for himself before he could be sure.
*
The mist parted and the river was before them, the black water flowing smooth and fast. Half a mile downstream, Diogenes had said, but in these conditions it was impossible to see anything like that far. They would need to move closer.
‘Fan your men out to the right,’ Castus told the exarch. ‘We don’t want to get trapped against the river if there’s anybody out there.’
He tugged at the reins, and the grey mare turned and moved along the bank, skirting the stands of willow and thickets of brush that loomed from the swirling darkness ahead. For a long time, Castus saw nothing, heard nothing but the slow thud of the horse’s hooves on the damp turf and the steady whisper of the river. The air was cold, and the wetness was soaking through his cloak.
Then he heard it: the voices of men from the far bank, the muffled clatter of wooden boards. He gave a low whistle, summoning the exarch to him, then slid down from the saddle. Passing the reins to the scout, he picked his way forward on foot, scrambling down the crumbling earth of the bank into the mud at the water’s edge. Sound travelled much more clearly here, and as he probed his way forward Castus began to make out the shapes on the opposite bank.
A waterbird burst from cover, startling him, and he threw up his hands but managed to silence his cry. He held his breath, waiting, but there was no response from the darkness across the water. A few more steps, then a few more; the mist swirled aside and Castus saw what he was looking for. He drew a long breath. Then he scrambled up the bank and ran back to the horses.
The return to camp seemed to take an age, but less than half an hour had passed before Castus rode in past the sentries at a gallop, calling out the watchword, and cantered between the tent lines to the imperial enclosure. He dropped from the saddle, Dapple still blowing and stamping, and threw the reins to a sentry. Then he was striding fast, ordering men out of his way, a note of urgent command in his voice. He could see the sentry braziers burning outside the great pavilion that housed the emperor’s own quarters, and the lamplight from within.
The two Protectores on duty halted him at the door of the pavilion. Castus knew one of them, but the other was a stranger.
‘Sorry, brother,’ the Protector said in a hushed voice. ‘Nobody goes in there. The Augustus is conferring with his Christian priest and can’t be disturbed.’
‘The priest? Why?’
The man shrugged, and Castus caught the swift apprehensive glance that passed between him and his fellow guard.
‘Then where’s Aurelius Evander?’ he said.
‘Here,’ a voice said. The flap at the door of the pavilion lifted aside and Evander emerged, a pair of eunuchs trailing behind him. The Commander of the Field Army of Gaul looked unusually harried, his face drawn and unshaven in the glow of the braziers. Castus noticed that he was wearing his sleeping tunic beneath his cloak.
‘Dominus!’ he cried, saluting quickly. Then, more quietly, he asked what was happening in the pavilion.
‘The Augustus has had a dream,’ one of the eunuchs announced. It was Festus, the Superintendent of the Sacred Bedchamber. ‘A dream of great portent, it seems. He believes that the Bishop of Corduba to be the only man who can explain to him its meaning!’ The irritation in the eunuch’s voice was obvious.
Castus frowned heavily. In his experience, dreams seldom meant anything good. They were best forgotten as soon as possible.
‘You arrived with some velocity, tribune,’ Evander said, stifling a yawn. ‘What brings you here at this hour?’
‘Dominus, I believe the enemy are about to cross the river in force.’
Evander’s expression changed instantly, tightening to a look of stern attention. He gripped Castus by the shoulder, steering him a few steps away from the pavilion. ‘How can you know this?’ he demanded. ‘The Milvian Bridge is broken, the scouts said…’
Quickly Castus outlined his reconnaissance along the riverbank. ‘The enemy have constructed a bridge of boats,’ he told the commander. ‘They must have built it in sections and moved it up under cover of darkness. There’s a mass of men on the far bank, and as soon as the bridge is in place they’ll cross over and take up a position on the plain before dawn, with their cavalry occupying the high ground on the right of the road.’
Evander was blinking, struggling to take it in. ‘You’re certain of this?’ he said. ‘I mean, you couldn’t have been mistaken, a trick of the mist perhaps, cattle o
n the far bank – such things can be deceptive…’
Castus felt the scar on his jaw beginning to itch. He knew, as Evander surely knew, that certainty was impossible in these situations. But his intuition had surely been proved right: either Maxentius had changed his mind about remaining in the city, or his withdrawal to the shelter of the walls had been a ruse all along.
‘Dominus,’ he said. ‘If we prepare to march now we can take up an opposing position before they’ve had time to properly deploy and prepare the ground. Perhaps we can even seize the heights before their cavalry get there…’
Evander shook his head promptly. ‘Don’t presume too far, tribune,’ he said. ‘It would take hours to assemble the men and break camp, and we’d need a strong cavalry force if we wanted to hold ground.’
Castus clenched his back teeth in frustration. But he could see that Evander was thinking, his mind running through options. ‘I must speak to the Augustus,’ the commander said. ‘Only he can order an immediate advance. Remain here.’
He turned back towards the pavilion, and only then did Castus notice the large number of other men that had gathered around them, tribunes and other officers, Protectores and civilian officials, drawn by the currents of rumour. Castus imagined those same currents running through the whole camp around him, all thirty thousand fighting men and the great mass of slaves and civilians that had marched with them. But it would take more than rumours to stir such an army into motion.
As Evander approached the pavilion, the two Protectores stepping smartly aside, the doors flapped open again and another figure emerged into the braziers’ glow. Castus recognised the dark features and white hair of the Christian priest, Hosius, the Bishop of Corduba. The man was dressed in a plain unbelted tunic, and his feet were bare.
‘Bishop,’ Evander said, drawing himself up stiffly. ‘Is the Augustus still awake?’