Flame of the West (17 page)

   Arthur smiled. He was a handsome boy, my superior in every respect.

   “Mother wanted me to kill you,” he said, “she never uttered your name without cursing it. And now here you are, offering me a chance of a new life. What would we do, go into business together?”

   I nodded. “That is exactly what I have in mind. I am getting too old for the army, and have no wish to see you waste your life following the eagle, as I have. Come home with me, and let us spend my money wisely.”

   So we did. A fair wind blew us across the calm seas of the Adriatic, and barely two weeks later our ship was gliding up the Straits of Magellan. It was the easiest voyage I ever knew, even though Arthur, like me, was a martyr to sea-sickness. Between bouts of vomiting and praying for death, we came to know each other a little better.

   I had never really confided in anyone before, save Procopius, and I had always been careful to feed him carefully selected bits of information. Procopius was a friend, but also a clever and self-interested man, and his first instinct was to use people to his advantage.

   Arthur knew nothing of his family on my side. I had told Elene a fair deal, in the days when we were lovers, but she chose to keep her son in ignorance of his distinguished British ancestry.

  
He devoured the tales of his namesake, my grandsire, and of the glorious line of ancient British princes we were descended from.

  
“This sword,” I said, running my hand along the gleaming blade of Caledfwlch, “has dropped in and out of our family’s history. Nennius took it from Caesar, and then the enchanter Merlin gave it to Arthur. My mother gave Caledfwlch to me, and so, when the time comes, it shall pass to you.”

   I weighed the sword carefully in my hands.
“It has always been the most precious thing in my life. I went to the far ends of the earth to retrieve it from the King of the Vandals. I believe the soul of Arthur resides inside the steel.”

   On impulse, I
held it out to him. “Take it.”

   Arthur gaped at me, and at Caledfwlch. His face was pale and wa
shed-out from sickness. “No,” he said weakly, “I can’t take it now. When you are gone, maybe…”

   “Now,” I said firmly, “
I was never fit to wield Caledfwlch. You are Arthur’s true heir.”

   He required some persuasion, but eventually consented to take the sword. I could sense he wanted it for himself, and was anxious to avoid causing any jealousy or resen
tment by making him wait for his birthright.

   In truth, I was weary of the responsibility. Caesar’s sword was a heavy burden, and I had always felt like a mere
guardian rather than its owner. A stopgap, until a better man came along. Now he had, in the person of my son.

  
Arthur reverently took Caledfwlch. The pale morning sun caught the polished steel. For the second time in my life I saw Caesar’s sword burst into silvery flame, a nimbus of light that rippled up the length of the blade and surrounded it in a kind of unearthly glow.

   “The Flame of the West,” I muttered. Caesar’s sword bore many names, and now it had another.

   The moment was spoiled somewhat when another spasm gripped Arthur’s belly, and he was obliged to turn away to dry-heave over the side. I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen, and patted him on the back until he had finished retching.

   You may think me a fool for returning to
Constantinople, where I had made so many powerful enemies. Perhaps I was foolish, but I was also sick of running, and living in fear of the glut of degenerates who governed the Empire.

   There is a deep core of stubbornness to my character, and I had rejected my old notion of fleeing, beyond the borders of
Rome. I gambled on being no threat to the likes of Antonina and Narses now, and of no interest either. Merely an ageing ex-soldier, looking to live out his declining years in peace. Besides, Constantinople had been my home since childhood, and I wanted to see it again, the jewel of the civilised world.

   A plan was forming in my mind. By the time the walls and towers of Constantinople came in sight, and our little ship
was rowing carefully around the edge of the great fleet nestling in the harbour of the Golden Horn, it was complete.

   I would use my money to set up as a horse-dealer, one of the most profitable trades I knew, and supply beasts to the army and the merchant caravans that frequently passed through
Constantinople. Not the most honourable trade for the descendent of princes, perhaps, but I was done with honour. It was a foolish conceit invented by those who knew nothing of the world, and the true character of mankind.

   Done with
honour, and war, and politics. The whole messy, bloody business.

   For a time, God granted me the peace I craved. But nothing in life is permanent, and
no man can elude his destiny.

20.

I remained in Constantinople for ten years, with Arthur at my side. My money from the Italian campaign purchased a fine set of stables on the Asiatic side of the city suburbs, including training grounds and a paddock.

  
As an ex-cavalry officer, I knew something of horses, and bought decent stock from stud farms in Hispania and North Africa. I bred and raised foals for the chariot races in the Hippodrome, for merchant caravans, and for the army, which had an inexhaustible need for cavalry mounts.

  
These were good years, perhaps the best of my life. As I hoped, my enemies no longer had any interest in me, and were too embroiled in their own affairs to waste time persecuting nonentities. I heard of the various court scandals and intrigues from afar, and thanked God I was no longer dragged into them.

   I forged a successful working partnership with my son. At first he was wary of me, which was only natural, considering the lies Elene had fed him about his father.
I took various measures to win his trust, including giving him a share in the business, a degree of responsibility, and a stipend to live on.

   Perhaps I was too generous, and left mysel
f open to being exploited, but Arthur never looked to take advantage. He was an easy-natured youth, quiet and hard-working, and never complained or demanded more than I gave him. 

  
I never really got to know him. Even when we were alone together, sharing a last cup of wine after dinner before retiring, I was conscious of a certain reserve. Maybe it was due to his strange upbringing, wandering from place to place, always among strangers, always wondering where the next meal would come from, but he never revealed his inner soul. The gates to his true self were firmly locked and barred. I could only hope, as the years passed and he ran out of reasons to distrust his father, that one day I would be permitted to enter.

   For much of this time, the Empire was at war. Shortly after being recalled from
Italy, Belisarius was sent to fight the Sassanids. Under the leadership of their cruel and ambitious ruler, Nurshivan, the Sassanid armies had burst over our eastern frontiers like the pent-up waters of a great dam, flooding Roman territories and threatening to overrun the whole of Syria.

   The Roman general entrusted with the defence of the region, Buzes, collected his forces at
Hierapolis. After making a speech, exhorting the soldiers and citizens to fight to the last, he fled at night with a few attendants, leaving them to face the fury of the Sassanid host. Hierapolis fell, and the great city of Antioch, and many other Roman towns and cities.

   Dire rumours rea
ched Constantinople of the fate of our citizens in the East. Nurshivan was a merciless pagan savage, and committed terrible massacres, regardless of age or sex or degree. After the destruction of Antioch he stripped naked and bathed in the waters of the Orontes, as if to say this was his territory now, and he might do as he wished.

   “Only one man can halt the progress of Nurshivan,” said Procopius over dinner one evening, “Justinian knows that, and will pack Belisarius off to the East without delay. He is taking me with him, so we may not see other again for a while.”

   He was still a friend, and occasionally visited us when he could spare the time. Belisarius owned an estate at Rufinianae, barely a mile from my house. Procopius usually resided there, attending on his master and secretly working on his own history of our times.

  
This was a year after the end of the Italian war. I had not seen Procopius since leaving Italy, and a definite change had been wrought in him. He was always lean, and full of manic energy, but now there was something else: a kind of desperate, feverish intensity that seemed to be eating away at him from inside.

   “You don’t look well, my friend,” I remarked, which was an understatement. He looked half-starved. The tendons on his scrawny neck stood out, and there was not an ounce of spare flesh on him. He picked restlessly at his food, speaking too quickly and eating too little.

   “I am perfectly well,” he snapped, “never better – never better! It is the Empire that sickens. Can you not see it, Coel? Can you not smell it? The stench of decay and corruption. It is all around us. It hangs in the air over this benighted city like a cloud, carrying plague and damnation and hellfire. Hellfire!”

   His knife stabbed at a slice of chicken, missed, and almost overturned his bowl.

   “You still can’t wield a blade, then,” I said drily, and was gratified to hear Arthur laugh. We were alone, just the three of us, seated on couches in the triclinium of my modest house.

  
Procopius sniffed, and crammed the morsel of chicken into his mouth. “You may jest,” he grumbled, still chewing, “but it is the laughter of the damned. So might the Greeks have laughed while Athens burned, or the citizens of Carthage, even as Scipio’s legions battered down their gates.”

   Arthur sat upright on his couch and peered out of the wind
ow, which commanded a good view of the Bosphorus. “I see no enemy fleets sailing up the Horn,” he said lightly, “should we sound the alarm? Is the city threatened with imminent invasion?”

  
Procopius frowned horribly, stretching the too-tight yellow skin of his face. “Ignorant boy,” he snarled, “have you read no history? Every great empire eventually destroys itself from within.”

   He leaned in closer, until I could smell the foul taint on his breath. “The
Eastern Empire will go the same way as the West,” he hissed, “unless God sees fit to strike down Justinian and his whore of a wife. They are an evil couple, sent by the Devil to destroy the last outposts of civilisation with their venality and blatant injustices. Theodora has turned the imperial court into a simmering nest of slaves and vipers and profiteers – a veritable Sodom, the canker in the bosom of the Roman Empire!”

   I held up my hand. “Enough
,” I said patiently, “I won’t have that sort of talk in my house. It is treason.”

  
He sneered at my cowardice. “I seem to recall you were happy enough to commit treason in Italy.”

   “I made a mistake. Belisarius lied to me, and I was fool enough to believe him. Afterwards, I swore to never again put my faith in so-called great men, or dip my toe in politics.
I’m sorry, Procopius. If you speak of such matters again, I will have you ejected from my house.”

   He growled and mumbled for a bit, but made no objection when I steered the conversation into calmer waters: the weather, my recent profits, the lamentable state of a recent shipload of mares from Hippo Regius.

  
Procopius’ illness and foul temper stemmed from his disappointment in Belisarius. Like me, he had trusted the general, and hoped he would restore the former glory of the decaying Roman state. Belisarius’ military victories had blinded us to the weaknesses of the man.

   He continued to adore his wife, even though her affair with Theodosius had become the scandal of the age, and in doing so made himself ridiculous. The conqueror of North Africa and
Italy, reduced to a hapless cuckold.

  
Fortune had deserted him. His reward for his loyalty in Italy was to be despatched to the East with a small and inadequate army. He had won great victories against the odds before, but Nurshivan was no fool, and refused to encounter the Romans in the field.

  
With half a mind on his wife’s infidelity, Belisarius fought a desultory campaign. He eventually managed to push the Sassanids back into their own country, and bring Nurshivan to the negotiating table. A treaty was signed, whereby the Sassanid king promised not to attack Roman territory for five years.

   The wax was hardly cooled before Belisarius hurried back to
Constantinople, to finally confront his faithless wife. I had forbade Procopius from uttering treason in my house, but it was difficult not to be fascinated by the morsels of court gossip and scandal he fed us.

   “
Belisarius is a broken man,” he confided to us during one of his infrequent visits, “would you believe, while in the East he tried to cultivate the friendship of Photius! He imagined Photius would help him bring about the downfall of Theodosius. Oh yes, our golden general finally accepts the truth of his wife’s infidelity. How he wept over her! It was pathetic to witness. Shameful. A great man and a great soldier, reduced to slavery by a woman.”