by Jack Whyte
“And then I remembered you were Eirish when I met you, that time we ate fish together. Black-haired. Calling yourself Mcuil. And when you were snatched, you were golden-haired and Roman. So that made me wonder where you had been coming from when we met that first day.”
He emptied his cup and look at Varrus with one eye closed, as though measuring him for something. “So I started asking questions, casually, among my brothers in the order, wondering if anyone had heard of anything unusual concerning a young Roman aristocrat who might have disappeared from Londinium a year ago. And I’m sure you can guess what I found.
“By sheer coincidence, the first man I asked had a vague memory of something he had heard around the time I was asking about. He was an old, trusted friend, and he said he had heard some outlandish tale about a rich but unknown young Roman with unusually long, gold-coloured hair who appeared in Londinium one day dressed like an ancient senator, in a full, white toga the like of which hadn’t been seen outside of Rome in two hundred years, and took issue with some fool of a garrison patrolman in a squabble over a woman. Apparently the woman’s brothers tried to interfere, and then this unknown Roman pulled out an imperial letter of authority and used it to quash the patrol leader’s behaviour and to let the woman and her brothers go free. And then the stranger vanished and was never seen again.
“I won’t insult you by asking you if that sounds familiar. But that would have been around the time—within a day or two of the time, even—when I first met you on the road, with your short, dark hair, when you were calling yourself an Eirish smith. Yet by the time you were snatched up, you had been transformed into a golden-haired Roman.
“I remember thinking, after I found you in the cell and you reminded me about that first meeting, that there had to be something outlandishly wrong in what had happened back in Londinium. It didn’t fully sink home to me until much later, once I had time to chew it over, but it became obvious that whatever it was that had resulted in your being snatched up, it must have taken place in the weeks, perhaps even the days, before you changed your appearance, your name, and your racial origin and fled from Londinium. And the sole, memorable thing you had done there was to brandish a document bearing the imperial signature, with the personal power of the emperor attached to it, and then vanish.
“One question remained. What had you done with the document?” He eyed Varrus shrewdly. “The only logical answer was that you must have taken it with you, because if you hadn’t, if you had surrendered it, or if it had been taken or impounded—in fact, if anyone at all, anywhere, had known what happened to it—there would have been no reason to go after you. You would have caused a minor stir, but you would have been unimportant to the men of power.
“As things stood, with both you and the document vanished without a trace, those men of power grew anxious. Each of them, probably all of them, would have paid gladly and grandly to possess that thing, and now it was in the hands of some unknown Roman fugitive, hiding who knew where.” He stopped suddenly, and his expression changed to one of dubious surprise. “You do realize, I hope, why that is so important.”
“Yes. I think so. That document represents the emperor’s power to achieve things.”
“Oh, no. No, Quintus, it does not.” He drank some of his wine, then set the cup down carefully before shifting his backside around to a more comfortable position. “That thing—that labarum—gives godly powers to whoever possesses it. No, don’t shrug off what I’m saying to you, Quintus. You think I’m exaggerating, but I am not. It would be impossible to exaggerate the potency of that thing. It gives unlimited power to whoever holds it. There is nothing—no crime, no sin, no imaginable transgression in the world—that cannot be disavowed by simply waving that document in the air and claiming the authority of the emperor whose signature it bears. It is a licence to do anything. Probably the most powerful document in all of Britain today.” He paused again, then asked, “When did you last look closely at it, can you remember?”
Varrus pouted, thinking. “No, but it was a long time ago. I haven’t looked at it since that afternoon in Londinium.”
“Hmm. Can you remember anything about it?”
“Of course. I remember what it looks like, and what’s written in it.”
“You can remember what is written in it?”
“Do you want me to say no? It was very short. One line. Simply, ‘This man acts in my name.’ And it was signed C. A., for Constantinus Augustus. But it can’t still be all that powerful, Cato. I mean, it’s almost as old as I am. My uncle Marius found it when he was a navarch in the Euxine Sea, and that’s more than eighteen years ago.”
Cato shook his head dismissively. “Those things do not grow old until the emperor whose name they bear dies, and at that moment they all die, worse than worthless. When last I asked, Constantine was alive and well and apparently planning to remove the imperial court to someplace on the edge of nowhere that he intends to name after himself.”
“Byzantium, on the Hellespont. I heard about that. Apparently it will be known henceforth as Constantinople. So the fact that Constantine is still alive means that the writ is still potent?”
“Hah! Beyond your wildest dreams, my friend. That’s what got you snatched. Someone—someone powerful enough to act on his suspicions—kept up a search for you for an entire year. He never stopped looking for you from that day forth.
“So my next question then became, who, in Britain, has that much power and influence, let alone the wealth, to sustain a province-wide manhunt for all that time? And who, among those who have such resources, might be willing to expend so much time and resources to keep up the hunt for the emperor’s licence, keeping teams of people on constant watch for one particular but nameless man who might have fled Britannia a full year earlier?” He shrugged, and made a self-deprecating face. “Mind you, those are the kinds of questions I enjoy. Because daunting though they may seem, they’re usually easy to answer. Very few people are that wealthy or that powerful, and most of those who qualify for either status enjoy both. We are talking about men who move in very exclusive circles.” His look reminded Varrus of a wolf’s snarl as he added, “The kind of circles within which several prominent and senior members of our brotherhood revolve. And so I asked pointed questions and paid heed to what I was told.”
“And did you find out who it was?”
“First I had to find out how they discovered where you were.”
“How did you do that?”
“I already knew. Do you remember telling me about meeting Legate Britannicus in the street on your wedding day, when you were wearing your white robe that looked like a toga? You said there were three of his uniformed staff there, and that you talked about your wedding and your life.”
“Of course I remember. That was the only time I have ever spoken with the man. What about it?”
“Well, someone there was paying very close attention to everything you said, because a report went straight from there to Londinium detailing every word.”
“What?” Varrus sat straighter and set his cup down with exaggerated slowness. “Are you telling me that the new legate reported me to someone?”
“No. Absolutely not. He’s one of us, one of the brotherhood. But one of his three attendants that day reported you. The word went from here to Londinium and straight out to Endor, with instructions to pick you up and relieve you of the labarum by whatever means necessary.”
“Which man was it?”
“The only one who went back to Londinium that week. I could tell you his name but it would mean nothing to you. Suffice to say he has since been arrested and is facing accusations of divulging military secrets to enemies of the state.” He shrugged. “Again, nothing miraculous involved. Questions, and then answers, and the wit to put them together. So what exactly happened to you that day you were snatched?”
Varrus shook his head. “I have no idea. One minute I was walking along the street, watching where I was stepping because some farme
r had gone through ahead of me with a herd of cows and the cobblestones were ankle-deep in shit, and the next thing I knew, I was tied to a chair in that cell where you found me.”
“So where is the labarum now?”
“At home. It’s hanging in a closet with my foul-weather gear.”
“At home. In a closet…I see. Safe among all your other precious documents, you mean. Am I correct in thinking you have no planned use for it?”
Varrus was smiling. “Why would you even ask me that?”
Cato shrugged a little. “Because I was hoping that, if you weren’t planning to use it, you might give it to me.”
“And why would I do that, now that I know how powerful and dangerous it is?”
“Because I have a use for it. An appropriate one, worthy of its solemnity.”
“And what could that possibly be, to induce me to part with—what did you call it? The most powerful document in all of Britain today. Why would I part with that? What would you do with it, were I to give it to you?”
Cato sat staring into space for a while, then shook his head. “Same thing I would have done with it before,” he said quietly. “I’d use it to get me close to a man I need to kill.”
He stood up abruptly and began to pace the floor, his wine forgotten now. “I know the ringleader, Quintus, the man whose money and monumental greed made all this happen. The man responsible for the deaths of Strabo and my sister and their son, and so many hundreds of others. The man who has been the head of the snake from the very beginnings of the Ring, when Endor realized he would need willing and hungry help to turn his plans into reality. I know now who the bastard is and what he is—the leech who took over the Ring in the first place, and Endor with it. He’s been the puppet master from the very start, and now I have him. And I know what has driven him, all along. It all came together in Londinium, when I asked one question and got an answer I had not expected.
“I had been moving forward, like everyone else involved since these investigations started, on the presumption that everything—all our investigations—revolved around the central fact that someone had devised a means of outwitting the imperial system of military logistics. Someone had discovered how to steal the empire’s munitions and supplies with complete impunity. But then one evening, unexpectedly, when I was doing no more than making small talk with an influential member of the highest circle of our brotherhood, he made a couple of comments that struck me like blows from an armoured fist, for though I had heard both of them before, I had never thought of them in tandem.
“In the first place, he spoke of the earliest beginnings of the Ring, and how it had been Endor, inspired by his cousin Carausius’s depraved, piratical audacity, who had dreamed up the concept of stealing from Diocletian’s new system. But then he also said that, had it not been for a sudden and enormous injection of financial resources from some nameless sources, the Ring’s existence would have been snuffed out years earlier by its own weaknesses and excesses. It was a massive, sustained injection of capital, over a period of several years, he said, that had enabled the organization to diversify its interests to the point where constant thievery on the roads and trade routes had become almost an incidental source of income.
“That ‘incidental’ imputation seemed outrageous to me and I couldn’t let it go by, so I questioned him on it, and without blinking an eye, he quoted me facts and figures to demonstrate that the raids, albeit more successful than ever before, have been diminishing steadily in number and scope for several years.
“Why, and how could that be, were my next questions, and he shrugged his shoulders in a way that made me think I ought to know such things. With the profits made from those original investments of years ago bolstering the Ring’s activities, he said, the organization’s largest investors no longer needed the income from the thievery. They were still raking it in, of course. But they didn’t need it. They already had so much, my friend said, that the Ring had outlived its usefulness.
“And that was when I knew what we had been missing all along. We had been underestimating what was happening, even as we allowed ourselves to believe we were overestimating it in the interests of defeating it. In an instant, I could see all of it—including the reasons why we hadn’t been able to make headway before. We thought we had uncovered something huge, and we had, but the Ring itself was incomprehensibly bigger than we had imagined. We thought we had smashed it, but we were too small to realize how wrong we were. The Ring’s still there, Quintus. It still exists, and the master puppeteer is merely waiting to restart it and take it in a different direction.”
He stopped, and frowned, then raised a hand as though to point something out. “I thought I had saved your life, and Lydia’s, but I was wrong there, too. You are both in great danger. He knows you are still alive and that you live in Camulodunum. He knows who you are and who your wife is, and he knows you have the labarum. And that labarum has become the thing he most desires in all the world. There are no restrictions on the power it controls. With that thing in his hands, he will be literally untouchable. As things stand today, he believes he is still safe in being who and what he is because we can’t even accuse him of anything, not even with the full resources of the brotherhood of Mithras at our backs. We can’t bring him down, without proof. We can’t arrest him or stop him or even interfere with him because he’s too damned powerful. He owns everyone who can be bought in Britain, and probably throughout the rest of the empire as well, and if he doesn’t own them personally, he will be able to coerce someone who does. He’s proved himself stronger than all of us, almost as secure as Constantine himself, and if he ever gains possession of that labarum of yours he will become completely monstrous and literally unassailable.”
Varrus was beginning to believe his friend was falling apart, and it frightened him. “Then use your sources inside your brotherhood to denounce him directly to the Emperor himself.”
Cato threw him a look that was almost pitying. “Do you think I haven’t considered that? It can’t be done, Quintus. That’s what I’ve been saying. I don’t know who to trust. Though I hate to say the words, I’m beginning to wonder how secure the brotherhood itself is these days. No, there are too many ways to die along the road to Rome. It appears that this man is inviolable. From where I stand, the only possible way to stop him is for me to kill him, and to be able to do that, I need to be able to reach him. And to do that, I need the labarum.”
“Who is this man? Would I know him?”
“He’s a relative of yours, you told Ajax, a cousin of some kind through your father’s mother. He’s one of the Seneca clan—the senior Seneca in Britain and Gaul since his father died a few months ago. His name is Vassos Seneca and he is the most repulsive, disgusting excuse for a human being that I’ve ever seen, known, or heard of. There is no shortage of depravity in the world, but Vassos Seneca takes even depravity to new depths. But somehow, through his immense wealth and the corruption his family and their connections have fostered throughout the empire, he seems to have achieved a distinction that cannot be challenged. He lives apart from common men, in indescribable luxury and isolation. And he is unapproachable to all but a small number of his peers—and that, again, is no exaggeration. Few people even know he exists. He has no public life, no public persona. Apart from those few peers I spoke of, everyone else—and I mean, quite literally, everyone else—must deal with him through intermediaries.”
“But you would kill him.”
“Within a heartbeat. Without a thought.”
“How would you get close to him?”
“I said he’s unapproachable, not immortal. I’d find a way. There’s little that can stop a single, determined man, providing he cares nothing for the risk he takes. And I intend to kill this slug, to end this my way and give a purpose to my useless, wasted life, if only in death. But I thought that if I had that labarum of yours, it might provide me with some extra leverage in view of the size of the difficulty facing me.”
&
nbsp; He paused, his head cocked as thought recalling something once well known, then grinned, hard-eyed. “I remember what that old Greek Pythagoras is supposed to have said. Give me a place to stand, and with a lever I shall move the world.”
“It was Archimedes who said that, Cato, not Pythagoras.”
“Ah! And where was he from?”
“From Greece.”
“There, you see? One Greek is much like another. So you’ll give me the labarum?”
“On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“You told me, that day I killed Appius Endor, that he had killed my family. That was what made me angry enough to throw that hammer.” He paused, and now it was his turn to stand with unfocused eyes, making mental connections, before he cocked his head to one side and asked, “So are you now telling me it was Vassos Seneca who was responsible, as head of the Ring?”
“Mmm.” Cato moved his head from side to side, neither confirming nor denying the allegation. “That’s complicated,” he said. “The answer is both yes and no.”
“Uncomplicate it for me, and give me one or the other.”
“Ach, I can’t exactly…” Cato’s budding protest died unspoken as he looked into Varrus’s eyes and recognized the expression there. “It really is complicated,” he repeated. “But I’ll try.”
FORTY
Quintus Varrus sat silent as he waited for Cato to decide on whatever he was debating with himself about. He forced himself to be patient, knowing that there were certain things connected to his former work about which Cato could not and would not speak, because men’s lives depended upon his silence. Varrus had once scoffed at that idea, but Ajax and his companions had not been amused by his attitude, and he had fallen silent as they described, using graphic examples, some of what they themselves had done from time to time and the risks to which they were often exposed. He had never since doubted either their need for secrecy or the dangers they faced every day, dangers that were routine and unexceptional to them but undreamed of by the ordinary grunt soldiers who worked beside them.