by Jack Whyte
“Benigne, Quintus, for giving me time to think things through.” Cato poured himself more wine from the jug on the window ledge.
When he sat down again, still having said nothing, Varrus, whose patience was at last wearing thin, decided to prompt him. “I didn’t expect to hear what you said about Vassos Seneca,” he said. “You told me originally that Endor killed my family, and I was prepared to believe that. But I had also been told earlier that no one knew who had killed them because there had been no evidence to indicate what had happened that night, and no trace of a connection to anyone identifiable.”
Cato frowned quickly. “Who told you that nonsense?”
“Your own friends—Ajax and the others. They said the brotherhood of Mithras investigated the deaths and could find no evidence.”
Cato looked bewildered. “Ajax told you that? And the others backed him up?”
“Yes.”
“When did they tell you this?”
“Several weeks ago, before you first showed up here, and I believed every word they told me.”
“Shit!” Cato threw both his hands in the air, spilling his drink. “That makes no sense at all, man.” He pulled out a kerchief and began dabbing at the hem of his tunic. “And how would they have known, anyway? They were all here in Britain when the murders took place, but I was in Italy, chasing Endor. I did establish that he was there, and I did it officially, with records of witnessed testimony confirming that he had assembled a crew of killers for the raid on the Varrus villa on the night the massacre took place. We could always capture idiots and underlings, but most of those barely knew their own names and they had nothing worthwhile to tell us, even when we broke them. But on that occasion we actually found some participants who could talk. And with a little persuasion, they talked loudly and believably.
“So, Endor bears a great deal of responsibility, unquestionably, for that raid. While it was happening, though, he was far away, as usual. I began to think he must be able to smell me, for it seemed as though every time I came within spitting distance of him he would vanish again, reappearing a hundred miles away within mere days. But the truth, though we could never have suspected it at the time, was that he was being fed a constant stream of information on everything we were doing. And that was years ago. Years ago! I only found out the truth by sheerest accident, a few days ago, as I told you, when I understood what my senior brother had enabled me to see!”
He shook his head in disgust, apparently at his own stupidity, and drained the last drops from his cup. “I’m surprised the lads would tell you that, though. That it didn’t happen as it did.” He hesitated. “What, exactly, did Ajax say?”
“He said the entire resources of the brotherhood had been brought to bear upon solving the murders. They went through all the records of everyone my grandfather ever crossed and condemned or offended in the line of duty and examined each of them minutely—most particularly those who were still alive. They were looking for grudges and resentments powerful enough to create a motive for vengeance. But after a year and a half they had been unable to expose the slightest hint of a plot or a…” He stopped, because a deep frown had been growing on Cato’s face and he had finally thrown up a hand to interrupt what Varrus was saying.
“Wait,” he said. “They couldn’t find the slightest hint of a plot against whom?”
“My grandfather. Titanius.”
“Titanius? What in Hades has Titanius to do with any of this? He was inactive by then. He never even entered into this mess, unless it was as an advisor. Of course they couldn’t find a plot against him, because there was none! Your grandfather had nothing to do with what happened at the villa that night. For the first time in his entire life, he must have been an innocent bystander, caught up in events he couldn’t influence.”
“What—?”
Varrus slumped in his seat, gaping at Cato, who stared back at him, bristling with indignation, and too disgusted with his friends to be articulate and logical. Neither of them spoke for some time after that.
Varrus was the first to speak again, holding up a hand, palm outwards, in a tacit request for time and consideration. “So…” he began. “My family was not murdered out of revenge for something my grandfather did years earlier. That is what you’re saying, is it not?”
Cato nodded. “Yes. That’s what I’m saying. What happened that night had nothing to do with your grandfather. Nothing at all.”
Quintus Varrus seemed to crumple visibly, withdrawing into himself, and even his voice diminished to a whisper. “So it was random? It was all meaningless?”
Cato nodded again. “That’s how it was supposed to look, yes.”
Varrus’s head came up immediately. “What d’you mean, it was supposed to look?”
Cato looked slightly confused. “What I said. It was supposed to look like a random, savage raid in order to deflect suspicion.”
“Deflect suspicion from whom? You said there was no plot.”
“No, I didn’t.” The indignation was back in Cato’s voice, too. “What I said was that it had nothing to do with Titanius Varrus.”
“Well then, who else was there?”
“Your father. He was the one they wanted dead!”
“That’s ridiculous! My father was a—”
Varrus cut himself short, on the point of disparaging his father.
“Your father was a highly regarded personal advisor to the Emperor Constantine,” Cato said quietly. “He was a diplomat of the highest imperial standing, entrusted with highly secretive negotiations on the Emperor’s personal behalf. Extremely important, influential, far-advanced but essentially incomplete negotiations. I learned that later. He, Marcus Varrus, was the one the killers came looking for that night. Their task was to make sure those negotiations remained unresolved.” He shrugged his shoulders regretfully. “They succeeded, but in order to complete the required illusion of brutal mindlessness, everyone there, every potential witness, had to die.”
Quintus Varrus looked aimlessly around the tiny room as he wrestled with this new knowledge, and then turned to face the centurion, narrow-eyed and accusatory. “And you think Vassos Seneca was, at the highest level, responsible.”
Cato shrugged. “Again, that’s a yes-and-no response. I know approximately where the orders originated, but I don’t know who actually issued them. There’s a number of possibilities, and I can’t entirely rule out the others.”
“But? I can hear a ‘but’ in there, Cato.”
“I know you can, because it’s there. But the orders were issued authoritatively, and the word went out to find a special man to handle a special, highly delicate assignment. The price involved was enormous, because the task itself was huge and the need for secrecy even greater.”
“And it went to Appius Endor.”
“Yes. Conveniently, he was in Italy at the time, a fugitive, running from me. Not from me personally, of course, but I was the man charged with finding him and bringing him down.”
“And why him? Was he that well known outside Britain?”
“No, but the forces using him weren’t confined to Britain. They were empire-wide, connected at all levels. Endor had proved trustworthy, and he was ruthless and cruelly efficient, ergo when the need arose for a reliable specialist, his name was put forward. The broker’s fee for that would have been substantial.”
“And…you are saying Vassos Seneca was the broker.”
“Seneca was the broker. He supplied the killer and he claimed the broker’s fee. Endor was his prized possession, loyal and completely trustworthy.”
“And the person who did the hiring? Tell me.”
“It wasn’t a person. It was a group. An entity. Remember what your father’s work entailed.”
“Negotiations.” Varrus had barely had to think. “Dealing with one party on behalf of another. Who had he been negotiating with?”
“With the leaders of the Christian Church, on behalf of the Emperor Constantine.”
&nb
sp; Varrus’s eyes slowly went wide with disbelief. “Are you saying the Christians were responsible?”
“No, not at all, though if the stakes were different I might not discount the possibility. Someone was responsible, though, and whoever they were, they made sure that no hint of any connection to them could be found afterwards, no matter how thoroughly we searched. It wasn’t the Christians, and it certainly wasn’t the Emperor. But those were the two stakeholders at the table—the principals in the negotiations—so if it wasn’t them, who else could it have been?”
Varrus sat glowering, his brows knitted as he considered the question. “Someone who stood to lose heavily if the negotiations were successful, obviously. But I don’t know who that could have been. Who do you think it was?”
“I don’t need to think. I know who it was. What I need now is for you to see it, too, without help from me, so think a little harder. Constantine and the Christians are the principals in the negotiation, both focused tightly on their common interests. Who would stand to lose from their negotiations? It’s not difficult.”
Varrus thought for a moment longer, then shrugged. “It is, if you don’t know what they were negotiating.”
“You can’t mean that!” Cato looked as though he had been slapped.
“Can’t mean what? That I don’t know what they were negotiating? How could I? I didn’t even know they were talking to each other.”
“But this is your father we’re talking about! You must have heard something, formed some idea of what was happening.”
“In my father’s affairs? I doubt the man spoke ten words to me in fifteen years. He spent my entire life avoiding me. We might have slept under the same roof from time to time, but he barely acknowledged me and we were never friends. So no, I heard nothing and I cared even less.”
“Oh…” Cato looked slightly deflated. “I didn’t know that.” He sat stock-still for a moment, eyeing the younger man, then nodded abruptly. “So be it. They were negotiating the terms under which Christianity would become respectable.”
“Christianity is respectable. Has been for years. Constantine gave it official status long ago, when he became Emperor.”
“Nah.” Cato shook his head. “That made it official, but nowhere near respectable…” He paused, then sighed. “How much do you know about Christianity, really? Are you a Christian?”
“No, but my mother was, and my wife is.”
“Was your mother devout?”
“Perhaps. I think so, but I don’t really know.”
“What about your wife?”
“She’s Christian, but not really devout—at least I don’t think she is. Her mother was Christian, too. Killed during the early anti-Christian riots in Diocletian’s day.”
“Galerius was the one behind that killing spree. Diocletian gets the blame, because he set things in motion, but it was Galerius who launched the real persecutions.”
“Why would he do that?”
Cato quirked an eyebrow. “You really don’t know, do you.”
“About what? What don’t I know, apart from almost everything? I grew up in Italy, but because I was a cripple who offended my father’s sight, I spent most of my boyhood in Dalmatia. We didn’t hear much about Christianity there, or about anything else, come to think of it. I was wild, as a boy. I never learned anything about religion.”
Cato blew out air noisily, shaking his head and grimacing. “Well, then, you had better listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you. You’re a clever fellow, I know that, but you have some gaping holes in your knowledge of the world you live in.”
He narrowed his eyes, squinting into some place only he could see, then started talking. “Galerius was afraid of the Christians. Everyone in Rome was, and with good reason. They came out of Judea, after all, and that has always been the most dangerous wasp’s nest in the whole damn empire, full of strife and rebellion and hate-spitting defiance. And once out, into the rest of the world, they spread like a contagion.”
“What d’you mean, a contagion? They’re peaceful people.”
“I know, turning the other cheek and forgiving their enemies.” The look Cato gave Varrus then was one of pure cynicism. “They came out of Judea, Quintus, and within decades the authorities had started to grow afraid of them because they were ungovernable. They refused to conform, and no one in authority could make them behave the way Rome wanted them to. They worshipped an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-forgiving god who they claimed was the sole god in existence, save for his son, who was the same god but with a different persona, and there was a third one, too, in case you weren’t paying attention to the other two in one. Don’t get me started on that. Anyway, the Christians weren’t even afraid to die, because their Jesus god had died—crucified by us Romans, no less—and had come back to life again, so they knew they’d be reborn after death. That meant, in essence, that we—us, Rome—couldn’t control them. Couldn’t discipline them or punish them effectively, because they’d simply turn the other cheek and forgive the soldiers flogging them. And even if we crucified or slaughtered them, they died happily, going to the arms of their Jesus god in his Heaven. They didn’t care about working to grow rich, either. They were happy being poor, so they paid no taxes, contributing nothing to the state except their refusal to be governed.
“Galerius saw that. He couldn’t avoid seeing it, and no one else could, either. But the real trouble began because their creed spread like a fire in hillside grass, with its promises of happiness in a life to come and a better, blissful existence in some imaginary world free of pain and sickness and grief and taxes. Within a few years of first appearing in Rome itself, they were threatening the empire, diverting people away from the state temples and religions and undermining the traditions and ancient customs and colleges and cults that had built Rome into what it is today.
“That’s what prompted Diocletian to try to bring them to heel—he was trying to protect Roman traditions and customs, and he thought he could do it by shutting down Christian houses of worship and forbidding them to worship any but the ancient Roman gods. Well, he couldn’t. It was Galerius, though, who decided to stamp them out of existence. And he couldn’t do that, either. They had to lift the suppression orders eventually, but they hadn’t even come close to solving the problem.
“By the time Constantine came along, the Christians were the biggest headache the empire had, and everyone was more than happy to leave him to deal with it. He had made himself sole Emperor, they said, so they accorded him full responsibility for what happened during his reign.”
“But Constantine was already well disposed towards the Christians, was he not?” Varrus felt vaguely uncomfortable with all he was being told here, and felt a need to defend the Emperor, though from what, he could not have said. “Wasn’t his mother a Christian?”
“Helena?” Cato’s grin was wolfish. “That depends on who you’re talking to. She was a tavern whore, some say, when his father took up with her.”
Varrus winced. “I hadn’t heard that. But what I did hear—along with everyone else—was that the Christian god gave Constantine a sign before the battle at the Milvian Bridge that won him his crown as Augustus—the labarum symbol. He became a Christian right after that.”
Cato grinned again, his expression sardonic. “Aye,” he said softly. “But before your bubbling zeal makes you foam at the mouth, remember that Constantine had been a politician for long years before that. He’s the son of Constantius Chlorus, one of the most successful politicians of our times, Caesar in the west for seven years, then Augustus after that until his death. No one achieves that kind of success without great intellect and great abilities, and his son studied his methods and techniques throughout his life.
“A wise man should never lose sight of the fact that in government of any kind, nothing is more important than politics. Politics and perceptions, my old commander in the brotherhood used to say, are the legs on which a ruler stands or falls. Perceptions, properly manip
ulated, instruct the people how to believe and what to think. Politics, properly executed, convinces them how to behave. And in both instances, direct interventions by the gods on behalf of a chosen one have an astounding amount of potency when it comes to swaying the common herd.
“Did you know, incidentally, that years before his miraculous experience with the Christian god, Constantine had had an equally famous visitation from Apollo, as god of the sun? It’s true—depending, again, who you talk to. Apollo appeared to young Constantine in a dream and awarded him laurel wreaths with promises of great health and a long reign as Emperor, and Constantine wasted no time letting the entire world know of his divine blessings.”
Varrus was looking at him strangely, and now he said, “You’re sounding very cynical about our Emperor, Cato. Should I believe you or not? Or are you simply testing me? All I really know is that Constantine granted the Christians official status as soon as he was crowned. That sounds to me as though he had been predisposed to treat them well, long before he took the crown.”
Cato grunted, then dipped his head in wry acknowledgment. “Aye, well, perhaps he was. Who knows what emperors think about when no one else is around? One thing is certain, though, and you should bear it in mind at all times when you are talking about our beloved Emperor. Constantine is a politician before all else. He never stops scheming, never stops weighing and assessing all the possibilities ahead of him. And he’s good at it. According to the best brains in our brotherhood, there has been no one like him since Marcus Aurelius, and he died nigh on a hundred and a half years ago. So our Constantine is a clever lad. You can rely on that. The Christian problem landed in his lap as soon as he began to think about becoming our Augustus, which was probably around the time of his tenth birthday, and he hasn’t spent a moment since then without thinking deeply on what to do about it.”