Conspiracies of Rome (45 page)

    Lucius looked back and laughed. ‘They’re too heavy and too far behind,’ he cried, waving his cap joyfully. ‘Unless they can grow wings on their horses, they’ll never catch us.

    ‘Come on! We’ll be out of their reach by nightfall.’

    This time, I was with a skilled horseman. Lucius rode beside me, explaining the proper use of the reins and spurs, and showing me the correct posture. We didn’t seem to ride as fast as I had from those English mercenaries. The horse never once panted, let alone foamed. I didn’t feel any jarring of my back or straining of muscles. But we kept a smooth, steady pace along the road. Every time I looked back, the cloud in the south was a little more distant.

    ‘Even light armour is a drag on horses,’ Lucius said. ‘And they’re keeping in formation.’

    He pointed at a few tiny clouds of dust closer towards us. ‘Those are the riders we need to watch,’ he said. ‘They aren’t meant to stop us. Instead, they’re to ride straight past and get an intercept at the next military station. If we try to stop them, the others will have a chance to get closer. We must keep well ahead of them.’

    We rode on. There was a light breeze behind us to keep us cool in the hot sunshine. Lucius had a good look at everyone who rode past us in the opposite direction. He told me the advance couriers would co-opt every fast horseman they encountered. We’d soon have a small army on our backs. But we met no one who seemed to give him cause to quicken our speed.

    After another few miles, we came to the first military station. This was based around a little fort built of reused materials. It stood on an earth mound, dominating the road and country. Some imperial foot soldiers lounged by a bar at about waist height that closed the road.

    ‘Important business with the exarch,’ Lucius called as we approached. ‘Get that bar raised.’

    The officer in charge darted a glance at the letter Lucius held under his nose. With a barked order, the bar was up and we were through.

    ‘No horsemen back there or fresh mounts,’ he said quickly. ‘The Gods are with us today.’

    We rode on through the afternoon. We stopped briefly a few times to water the horses and to stretch ourselves. As we got further away from Rome, and as the light of the late afternoon began to fade, the traffic grew thinner. There were fewer ruins along the road, and the countryside became wilder, with larger and larger clumps of bushes and small trees to give cover should it be needed.

    As the light faded entirely, I looked back along the road from a high ridge. Could I see a small cloud in the distance? Or was it a trick of the dying light?

    We came to a fortified post inn. In those days, Italy was still covered with these. They had been built in ancient times every so far apart along the main roads. There were fewer of them on the roads with every return journey I made there. I believe they are all ruined now. On my first visit, they were still in something like their old operation. This was the road that connected Rome with Ravenna.

    All around – often very close – were the domains of the Lombards. The road had at all times to be kept open for communications. Every strategic point was fortified and controlled. The post inns were important links in that chain of control. They were also places where ordinary travellers could get a meal and a safe bed for the night. For those on official business, there was the added benefit of being able to change horses. Every inn had its stables and its many horses in continual readiness to speed those travellers with the relevant influence. The prohibitions of using the posts for private business had long since broken down. The whole operation now ran on a cash basis. But Lucius showed his letter from the exarch, and this got us the pick of the horses available.

    Inside the gate, I could see that the inn had been built on a generous scale. On two storeys around the main courtyard, it offered individual rooms for travellers of quality, with descending levels of comfort for the humbler, and a good kitchen and eating area on the ground floor.

    It was crowded when we arrived. The Lombards were still on the prowl after that cold winter, and everyone who could scrape together the minimal price of entry had squeezed himself in for the night. No stopping for us, however. A satchel of bread and wine and a change of horses, and we were off again. With the dispensator’s men in hot pursuit, we’d take our chance with the Lombards. We were two powerful men. We had fast horses. We were armed. It would be a desperate raiding party that tried to interfere with us on the road.

    ‘We’ll ride as long as we can through the night,’ Lucius told me. I suggested hamstringing the other horses in the stable. But there were too many, and we might be caught. We paid and rode off.

We rode until the moon was high overhead and until little puffs of steam came from the horses in the chilly night air. We stopped in a small grove high beside the road. This allowed a fine view back along the road. We didn’t bother with a fire, but sat down on a fallen tree and ate what we’d bought.

    Lucius questioned me again about my life in England. I told him of the broken-down house in Richborough, and Auxilius, who with his loving pedantry had given me a key to the world beyond. I told him of the humiliations that had attended our fall from nobility and the increasingly desperate shifts by which I’d supplemented Ethelbert’s dwindling charity. I spoke of my dead mother.

    ‘Not that much difference between us, then,’ said Lucius when I’d finished. ‘We both come from families pushed below their proper station in life. The Gods willing, though, we’ll rise together all the way back to what we were born to, and – who knows? – we’ll die higher yet.’

    He told me nothing in continuous narrative about himself. From the disjointed anecdotes he gave me instead, I gathered his parents had died in one of the plagues when he was very young. He’d then been handed around various grandparents and uncles, getting scraps here and there of an education, while his family had wondered what to do with him.

    At last, the plagues had done him a favour. ‘It was like an invisible beast,’ he said, ‘the sort that comes again and again, but always takes others and never yourself.’ While he grew up without a day’s illness, all his relatives had sickened and died. His grandfather made sure to give the bulk of it away to the Church in his will, but Lucius had finally come into the full remaining wealth of the family. And he would have had more, but for those charges of treason laid in Constantinople against his one genuinely rich relative.

    ‘The man is trash,’ I agreed, hoping to deflect him from another of his denunciations of Phocas. ‘But when you came back to Rome, was it to be forever?’

    ‘Don’t forget, Alaric,’ the reply came, ‘I am a Roman. The city is my world – this city and all that is natural to it.’

    He’d come back to Rome, he then admitted, with no apparent alternative to settling into the life of a decayed noble. Except for his deep – if inconveniently placed – religious feelings, he was no different from any other member of the Roman nobility. He repeated himself: ‘I am a Roman, and the city is my world.’

    He’d thought at first to refuse the invite to that dinner party. It was too painful, he said, to look at what he was sure he was now fated to become. All that had got him along there in the end was the chance to see the learned yet deadly barbarian from far-distant Britain. And he had met me.

    ‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘we are both fugitives from Rome on our way to what I hope will be a hero’s reception in Ravenna. The Old Gods have a sense of humour – and, I think, of justice.’

    When the moon had risen high above, we took turns at sleeping, the other keeping watch. A few night birds aside, and the rustling of nocturnal animals in the undergrowth, I heard nothing. As I lay down to sleep, it was for all the world as if Rome had been a bad dream, and I was still travelling there with Maximin. Except the weather was far more clement, it was like any other night we’d spent camping out in the open.

‘They’re still following,’ said Lucius, prodding me awake. ‘But they are a long way behind.’

    I heaved myself up in the first light of morning. Whatever dreams I’d been having vanished beyond recall. I was stiff and cold. But the sun was rising in a clear sky. This would be another lovely day, though a little cloud cover would have been better for the horses.

    I looked beyond the arm that Lucius extended back along the road. Far in the distance, I could see the faint glint of armour in the pale sunlight. For some while, we’d been riding uphill. We were passing into the range of hills and mountains that run down the centre of Italy. Far below us, shining like ants after a storm, our pursuers toiled forward in search of a quarry they themselves couldn’t see. But still they came.

    Lucius bent and stretched some life back into his stiff muscles. ‘If we can keep ahead of them till nightfall,’ he said, ‘we’ll be far outside the zone of papal influence. They can keep following, but their ability to command help will be at an end. By tomorrow, I’ll be able to use the exarch’s name to slow them down, or even have them turned back.’

    We still had to look out for the lighter, faster pursuers. And we were making slower progress as we rode continually uphill. But there came a moment when, though we looked back, we saw no one in pursuit. No matter how I squinted back into the sunlight, I saw no pursuit.

    ‘We haven’t outrun them,’ said Lucius during one of our little stops. ‘They’re still back there, and any delay on our side will bring them back into sight. Don’t forget how desperate they are. But they’ll need all the luck in the world to catch us now.’

    Because these high lands had never been much settled even in ancient times, there were fewer signs of recent devastation. I saw a few abandoned villages and a few broken temples. But these were so weathered and overgrown, they might have been out of use for centuries, perhaps even before the making of the law to close them all down. I wondered if the inscriptions that covered the fallen columns were in Latin or in that older language I’d seen in Populonium. But Lucius made sure to keep me moving on the road.

    We spoke about women. As I’d thought, Lucius had no taste for them whatever. He’d once considered marriage. But this had been purely for cash. And her father had broken off the engagement when a more substantial catch arrived suddenly from Carthage.

    He’d found release in his better-looking slaves, and sometimes in the boys who were laid on for anyone in the nobility or higher offices of the Church who wanted their services. Then his friend the priest had persuaded him to a life of semi-continence – he’d been assured it made him a more fitting instrument for the will of their Gods.

    Either the adherents of the Old Religion had cleaned up their act in competition with the Church, or those declamations I’d read against their lustful ways were just lies. Whatever the case, his own priests weren’t unaware of how sex blunts the religious sensibilities. That may be why I’ve had so few of them – not even when I was posing as a bishop. Lucius had learnt to contain himself. Then he’d met me.

    He asked me again about Edwina. Feeling the jealousy behind his playful tone, I spoke lightly of her. I said nothing of the love that had burnt – and still sometimes did burn – in my heart.

    Though the sun shone bright overhead, the air was crisp. We passed streams and waterfalls. These were swollen with the snow from the mountains that rose about us. The tops of the mountains shone white in the sun. Even from a distance, I could see how densely the tops were fringed with the deep greens of the trees.

    The rains and ruin of winter were over. All around us, later than on the plains, I could see the world coming back to life. Not for the first or the last time, I was forcibly impressed by the wondrous beauty of the nature in Italy.

    Once, we passed a group of free peasants, taking their produce to some town along the road before us. We bought some food from them. For a few silver coins, they agreed to climb up to an outcrop above the road and force a rock fall that left a ten-foot-long band of jagged rocks. It took a while to supervise the work, but probably bought us much more time than we spent. It would take days to get that lot clear. Just getting horses over it would take long enough.

    Onwards and upwards, the road extended. It cut through peaks and ran on bridges across the deeper ravines. Hardly once did it deviate from a straight line, and then only to skirt something that even the ancients didn’t think it worth trying to overcome. It must have taken years and whole armies of slaves to build. Lucius had barely any of the historical knowledge of Italy outside Rome that had allowed Maximin to bring the vanished past to life. But I could imagine the settled, populous Italy of earnest officials and competent engineers who had strained every nerve to push these lines of domination to the farthest corners.

    We rode all day. In the evening, we stopped at another post inn. This was smaller, but otherwise just like the one at which we’d stopped the previous evening. We ate a meal of meat and bread. After a change of horses, we were off again. As before, we took turns to sleep and keep watch in the open. As before, we were undisturbed.