Swords Around the Throne (27 page)

‘Plenty more in Italy too, with Maxentius. If the mountain passes were held for him, he could cross without difficulty.'

Brinno rubbed his palms across his face. He looked jittery, as if he wanted to attack something. ‘So... who do we trust? I don't know, brother...'

‘I feel likewise,' Castus said. He had never liked subterfuge and politics. Even considering these things seemed to leave a stain upon his honour. He took a last glance across the river at the assembling troops, then turned back to follow the slaves in the direction of the city.

The path climbed the slope to the road. Ranks of tall dark cypresses threw their long shadows across the gravel, and to either side, beyond the trees, were scattered huts and sheds between cultivated plots and tiny orchards. All this land had once been a northern suburb of Arelate, but as the city had shrunk back inside its old walls so the ruined buildings had become overgrown, populated only by squatters and the poor.

Castus and Brinno walked in silence, with the slaves going on ahead of them. A cool evening breeze came from the river. As the battered arch that marked the northern boundary of the city came into view, Castus heard the rattle of wheels on gravel behind him, and moved off the road. A two-wheeled mule cart was approaching, with a heavy ox wagon and several riders following behind. The cart had a wicker roof over it, and the two men inside were lost in its shade. Travellers from the north were not uncommon, and Castus paid them no attention until Brinno nudged his arm.

‘I know that man,' he said, his voice tight.

Standing on the verge in the shade of the cypresses, they waited until the cart had drawn level with them. The driver dragged on the reins and the mules came to a halt. Both the vehicle and its passengers were covered in grey dust, and it took Castus a moment to recognise the man who sat beside the driver.

‘A good evening to you both,' Nigrinus said. He was blinking, his eyes reddened from the dust. He shook at the mantle that covered him like a blanket, and grey plumes rose around him. ‘I had hoped to meet you in Arelate, but it seems some helpful god has directed that our paths cross even sooner...'

Behind the cart the ox wagon had also heaved to a stop. Castus saw that one of the riders following behind it was the imperial agent, Flaccianus. Brinno was staring at the man in the cart in hostile silence.

‘What do you want here?' Castus said. ‘You're supposed to be in Treveris, with the emperor.'

‘Ah, yes, but matters have called me south.' Nigrinus gave a thin smile, and his face under its mask of dust appeared ghoulish. ‘Perhaps,' he said, ‘at some point soon, we might speak together? I'm sure you must have learned a great deal during your time with the former Augustus?'

‘Nothing that need concern you,' Castus said. He had hoped to have no more dealings with the notary, or his repulsive assistant.

Nigrinus's smile did not slip. ‘Well,' he said, with a few last dabs at his dusty mantle. ‘I'm sure there will be plenty of time for you to think about that!'

He made a curt stabbing gesture, and the driver flicked the reins. The mules heaved forward again, and Castus and Brinno stood aside as the cart, the wagon and the riders moved past them towards the outlying buildings of the city. Flaccianus, the last rider, glanced back as he passed with an expression of knowing disdain.

Brinno spat in the dust after them.

It was past midnight when Castus was woken suddenly by the sound of a cry from the courtyard, a slamming door and voices from the room downstairs. He lay on his bed for a moment, disorientated; he felt he had not been properly sleeping, but the memory of a dream was still vivid in his mind: Sabina, an underground room, terror in the darkness and a man with the face of a white dog...

He heard another shout, and his mind returned to clear focus. With one roll he was up off the bed, dragging on his tunic and snatching up his swordbelt as he moved for the door. Stepping out onto the wooden balcony, he leaned over the railing and looked down into the large chamber below.

The scene was lit by two flickering oil lamps. Sallustius had come in from the night dragging a thin man behind him. Victor was there too, both of them with drawn swords. Castus took the stairs in four leaps and went to join them.

As Castus reached them, Sallustius flung his prisoner against the central table, then wrestled him down onto a bench. The man was ragged and unshaven, dressed in a tunic almost black with mud and old stains. His face was swollen and bruised on one side, and his lips were flecked with blood. Sallustius held his sword at the man's throat.

‘Please, domini... Please forgive me if I've wronged you!' the man cried. ‘I told you what I was doing! This is a mistake, an error. Please, there's no need for violence!' Tears were running down his bruised face, and he was cringing on the bench, clasping his arms around his chest.

Castus went to the table and poured himself a cup of water from the jug. He took two long swallows, then dashed the rest of the water in the man's face.

‘Shut up,' he said.

The man fell silent at once, swaying on the bench with his mouth open in shock.

‘What happened?' Castus asked. Brinno was coming down the stairs now, blinking sleepily.

‘We caught him on the rear portico,' Sallustius said, ‘coming up from the river towards Maximian's apartments. Victor challenged him and he ran – but unfortunately for him I was at the other end of the portico, and he ran right into my fist...'

‘He had this,' Victor said, and threw a short dagger in an ornate scabbard down on the table. ‘That's no weapon for a beggar like you!' he sneered at the prisoner. ‘You were planning to get into the apartments and murder somebody.
Eh?
' he added, smacking the cringing man across the top of his skull.

‘Domini, please, I told you,' the man said. ‘I was paid to deliver it to the eunuch Gorgonius. That's all – I can show you the gold piece they gave me to do it!'

‘Who paid you?' Castus demanded.

‘I don't know, dominus! I'm a poor man – I don't know the imperial officers! A soldier, I think... A fine man, such as yourselves...'

Castus looked at the dagger on the table. The hilt was silver, although a little tarnished, but the scabbard had a gold-plated framework. He picked it up and drew the blade. Clean and sharp.

‘Could be a message hidden in the scabbard?' Sallustius said.

Castus had been thinking the same. If the weapon was for Gorgonius, and came from a soldier, it could be a communication from the troops across the river. He stared down the throat of the scabbard, but there was no folded slip of papyrus hidden inside it. He sheathed the dagger and placed it back on the table again.

‘What do we do with him?' Brinno asked, sitting on a bench with his elbows on his knees. He stretched his mouth in a long yawn.

‘There are notaries and
quaestionarii
with Maximian's staff,' Sallustius said. ‘We can deliver him to them in the morning. And
they
, my friend,' he told the man, ‘will soon use their hooks and irons to drag the truth from you!'

The man had started gasping and shaking again. Castus looked back at the dagger. Something about it was not right. He picked it up again, turning it in his hands, rubbing at the scabbard with his thumb. One side looked fine, but on the other was a line of crude stitching. Inside the flashy framework, the leather of the sheath was just thin rawhide, poorly sewn together.

Drawing the blade again, he slid the tip beneath the brass lug that held the scabbard frame together and twisted hard. Sallustius and Victor were peering at him, perplexed. The rivet broke without much effort, and then it was a simple task to lever open the framework and cut the stitches along the tube of the rawhide sheath.

‘What is it?' Brinno asked, looking more awake now.

Castus unrolled the tube and flattened it on the table as Sallustius gazed over his shoulder. There were letters painted in black ink on what had been the inside of the sheath. Castus leaned closer, his mouth moving as he carefully read them aloud.

‘I don't understand it,' he said, frowning in disappointment. Had he read it wrong? His knowledge of letters was still not too good – the terrible weight of his ignorance pressed on his mind. ‘
Calvikal Sepihn
? What does it mean?'

For a moment he remembered the strange incantations that the sorcerer in the necropolis of Treveris had intoned. A slight flicker of superstitious dread ran through him. Sallustius had snatched up the message and was peering at it in the light of the lamp. His lips moved for a moment, then suddenly his face cleared and he laughed.

‘It's a date and time!' he said. ‘The second part anyway. The first must be either a name or a place. Look...' He took a wax tablet and pen and began tracing the letters, then turned it so Castus could see. For a moment it still did not make sense.

CALV.VI.KAL.SEP.II.HN.

Then Sallustius placed his thumb over the first four letters, and Castus saw the rest jump into recognisable shape.

‘The sixth day before the kalends of September, at the second hour of the night,' he said. ‘That's tomorrow night.'

‘Must be an arranged meeting,' Victor said, leaning closer. Even the man on the bench had ceased trembling and was looking interested. ‘But who, or where, is
Calv
?'

Castus took the message back from Sallustius. He had known already what he would have to do, although the thought filled him with angry foreboding.

‘Leave this to me,' he said.

Julius Nigrinus had initially appeared annoyed to be disturbed in his chambers in the dead of night – if not, Castus thought, all that surprised. The lamp had already been burning when he had arrived. Now, with the message before him, the notary seemed his usual devious self.

‘
Calvisiana
,' he said, looking up from the message with a knowing smile. ‘It's a villa, a few miles south-east of Ucetia. A day's ride from here. If you can get out of the city tomorrow without attracting attention you'll easily be there by the appointed time.'

‘Then what?' Castus said. He was standing before the table in the small dimly lit anteroom of the notary's bedchamber.

‘And then,' Nigrinus said, casting the message aside and rubbing at his eyes, ‘you can observe, and if possible apprehend, whoever is attending this meeting – this no-doubt
treasonous
meeting!'

He stood up, pulling a rough homespun blanket around his shoulders. The night was not cold, but the notary was almost shivering as he paced a few steps to the wall and back. ‘Take only men you can trust – your Frankish friend and the two others in your section. Tell nobody else of this – nobody! I'll order four of the agentes in rebus to accompany you, plus a few other armed men in case they're needed. You must act in the name of the emperor, no matter what the rank or station of these conspirators might be...'

‘You're quite sure this is a conspiracy, then?' Castus asked. The notary's nervous excitement was making him wary. Or
was
it excitement? He had the strong sense that there was more going on here than he was being told. But that was a familiar sensation.

‘Why else would a military officer hire a common beggar to carry a concealed message to Maximian's chief eunuch? Don't worry, I've been observing things for a long time. I've known of the Villa Calvisiana for a while too – it's been mentioned in correspondence.'

‘I see,' Castus said. He could well imagine this cold-blooded man sitting up late into the night, reading other people's mail. The odium he felt for Julius Nigrinus had not diminished at all over the years, he found. Being forced into such close company with the man filled him with a clenched rage all the harder to endure the more he tried to suppress it.

‘Best go and prepare yourself,' the notary said. ‘And remember – tell absolutely nobody about this.'

Castus nodded once, then turned to go. At the door he paused.

‘Do you never sleep?' he asked.

‘Night suits me,' Nigrinus replied. ‘Daylight hurts my eyes, you know. In ten years' time I will doubtless be completely blind.' He gave a couple of long slow blinks. ‘And so,' he said, ‘I must ensure that all my work is done before then. But it is a hard, slow business, soldier. Harder than you will ever know.'

For once, Castus did not doubt him.

Clouds covered the moon, and shadow filled the narrow valley. The twelve men picking their way along the track slowed and then paused, disorientated in the total blackness. Castus could sense the river moving to his left, flowing in its deep channel between boulders and shingle banks. He could smell the wild herbs growing between the trees and thick scrub on the upper slopes of the valley. He recalled the last time he had led a party of men through a darkened wilderness, the summer before after the crossing of the Rhine. But that had been different – this was no barbarian frontier, but the heartland of Roman Gaul, and he could fear no sudden onrush of savage enemies from the night. But still he felt the stir of apprehension up his spine.

Then the clouds shifted and moonlight flooded the valley once more, seeming almost unnaturally bright. Castus looked back and saw the massive arches of the great aqueduct that crossed the valley behind them. It looked ghostly, unreal in the midst of this empty forest.

‘We should see the place soon,' Flaccianus whispered. ‘Just around the next bend in the river.'

Castus had not realised that the man was so close behind him. If he despised Nigrinus, he hated the greasy agens in rebus even more. Flaccianus's hired bodyguard was no better, a hulking flat-faced ex-wrestler named Glaucus, who said nothing and followed his master around like a loyal mastiff. Hunching his heavy shoulders, Castus moved off once more down the track. They had left the horses beneath the arch of the aqueduct, in the care of a couple of slaves; the villa was a mile upriver, but they could approach more quietly on foot, and if they got separated in the dark the aqueduct made a good rendezvous. Even so, without the horses their scanty numbers were even more obvious. Not for the first time, Castus had serious misgivings about the planning of the night's mission.