Swords Around the Throne (33 page)

For a few more paces they walked in silence. Her attendants had dropped out of sight and hearing now. Then Sabina drew him to a halt, and took his hand.

‘Is it true that they tortured you?'

Castus shrugged. ‘They thought about it.'

She appeared confused. ‘So... you genuinely have gone over to Maximian?'

Uncertainty crawled up Castus's spine; was this a ruse to gauge his loyalty? Were they being observed even now? He had grown used to being watched, guarded, distrusted.

‘Have you?' he asked in return, and caught her smile in the darkness.

‘This is not the best time for such questions, I suppose,' she said quietly.

She pressed herself quickly against him, rising to kiss his lips, then stepped away. For a few heartbeats he gripped her hand, not letting her retreat.

‘We all do what we must,' he said, ‘to survive.'

Then he released her, and she walked away into the shadows without another word.

Five days later, Castus stood on the deck of the liburnian galley
Aurata
as it rowed slowly downriver towards the sea. On the raised stern platform, Maximian Augustus sat blearily beneath a purple and gold canopy, staring with dull and reddened eyes at the flat marshy land beyond the riverbanks. He was not retreating; this was not flight. Instead it was a strategic relocation.

Behind him the citizens of Arelate waited nervously within their crumbled walls for the arrival of Constantine. Their city, the first to acclaim the new emperor, was stripped of troops now. Their civic leaders had either deserted their posts or gone south down the river with Maximian. The soldiers that had been camped around the city were gone too, marching across the flat stony wastelands to the south-east, heading for the city of Massilia on the coast.

Massilia, with its strong walls and seaport, was to be Maximian's new imperial capital. Arelate would be left to make the best of things. There had been no cheering, no shouts of loyalty and acclaim, as the emperor had made his departure in the grey of dawn. Those citizens who had stirred from their homes had lined the riverbank and watched with blank expressions as the imperial retinue swept from the palace into the waiting boats, the big
Aurata
and the troopships and smaller galleys that followed in her wake.

Now the sun was high over the flatlands of the Rhodanus delta. Flights of waterbirds skimmed the lagoons, and flamingos stood balancing on one leg in the shallows. The double-banked oars of the
Aurata
beat slow and steady, pulling with the current, and around noon the flotilla passed from the river into the straight channel of the Canal of Marius, which would carry them free of the silted branches of the treacherous delta and out to the open sea.

Brinno was sitting perched above the oar box, watching the rowers with open curiosity. ‘I never see one like this before,' he said to Castus. ‘The oars...
so
.' He raised two flat hands, one above the other. ‘In my country, all the rowers sit together, pull together.'

‘It's a bireme,' Castus told him. ‘Out in the east you see triremes – three banks of oars.'

Brinno raised his eyebrows, clearly perplexed as to how this might work. But then his eyes clouded and he leaned closer.

‘
We could kill him now
,' he said in an undertone. Castus felt his shoulders tighten, but waited a few breaths before turning slowly to look back towards the platform at the stern. ‘It is our duty,' Brinno added.

How easy it would be. Only a few attendants stood or sat around Maximian: the eunuch Gorgonius, Scorpianus, Macrobius and half a dozen secretaries and slaves. Besides Scorpianus, only the four Praetorians standing along the break of the platform were armed. A rush towards the stern and the job would be done. And, along with the emperor, both he and Brinno would be dead.

So many times over the last month, since his false pledge of allegiance, Castus had tormented himself with plots and plans. He could escape and flee to join Constantine; he could make some wild attack on the usurper. Each time he had held himself back, thinking that the time was not right – it would be a mistake. Each time he had cursed himself for a coward.

At least nobody now believed the fable about Constantine's death. All knew that the emperor was marching south against Maximian at great speed. Already he was at Lugdunum; in four days he would reach Arelate. He was falling like a thunderbolt out of the north, with the hardest veterans of the Rhine legions behind him, an army that grew larger with every successive report.

‘We need to wait,' Castus told Brinno, whispering between his teeth. ‘Wait for Massilia – things will be decided then.'

He heard Brinno smack his lips in frustration. There were seagulls whirling and crying above them now, and the air smelled of brine.

‘Decided how?' the young barbarian hissed. ‘And if not by us – then
who
?'

‘I don't know, brother,' Castus told him, unable to meet his eye. ‘I don't know.'

The
Aurata
and her flotilla of smaller vessels left the mouth of the canal that afternoon, and a fine westerly breeze carried them across the bay before sundown, to anchor in the lee of the small barren islands off Massilia. The night was calm and clear, the stars very bright, and as the sun rose the oarsmen backed water and turned the head of the ship towards the narrow inlet of the harbour mouth.

Standing beneath the high gilded prow, Castus watched the city appear out of the sun-haze of dawn. To either side was a rocky coastline, grey crags dusted with the grey-green of olive groves and wild trees. With the sun glaring off the water, Castus could see little of the city at first. Then he made out the wall that circled it on the seaward side, a massive fortification rising from the naked rock, with squat square towers every few hundred paces. As the
Aurata
pulled closer, it appeared that the wall entirely closed the city, cutting it off from the sea; then, as the ship turned, Castus made out the narrow neck of the harbour, clinched between the fortified headland and the rough slopes on the far side.

The galley pulled in through the neck, and the harbour opened before her. An expanse of enclosed water, glimmering pale blue in the early sun, half of it filled with moored vessels. Beyond the forest of masts and yards, the city rose in a broad arc around the northward side of the harbour, clustered houses climbing the hills in terraces. At the summit of each of the hills was a temple, the pillars and pediments gleaming white and gold in the morning sun.

It was a magnificent sight, the air so clear and clean that Castus felt he could see every detail of the city in perfect focus. For a few moments he forgot the grim mission that had brought him here, and gloried in the view of the city before him across the water.

But then, as the
Aurata
crawled the last distance between the moored ships in the harbour, Castus made out the squalor of the docks, the stone quays slippery with fish guts, the jetties of rotting black timber, the wrack of rubbish and half-decayed wreckage in the mud at the water's edge, and the mass of people spilling down through the gates in the harbour wall and between the chaotic assemblage of warehouses and taverns along the dockside. Horns were blaring from the temples on the hills, and the gathering crowd was already cheering, waving palm branches, crying out its acclamations. The people of Massilia, like those of Arelate before them, had been instructed on how to greet their new master.

Maximian stood up on the stern platform of the galley, beneath a flapping purple pennant. Castus stared at him, bemused for a moment. The emperor appeared different. His face had been whitened with some kind of paste, his cheeks rouged, his beard and hair dyed jet-black. Standing stiffly in his heavy embroidered robe and his jewelled imperial tiara, Maximian resembled a painted statue. Jupiter, maybe, or Hercules himself.

The oars backed water, bringing the
Aurata
smoothly round to the wide stone quay at the western end of the docks. Slaves wearing flowered wreaths lowered a gangway down to the galley's deck, and on the quay twenty young maidens of the city were drawn up in lines carrying baskets of flowers. As Maximian made his way with slow and stately tread up the gangway and along the jetty, the girls cried out praises and scattered the flowers before him. Music of pipes and tambourines eddied through the noise of the cheering.

At the head of the quay, across an open paved area, the grandees of Massilia were assembled to greet the emperor: the curator of the city, with decurions of the city council, the
flamines
and augurs of the temples and the imperial cults. All of them dressed in their heavy white wool togas, their rich silk and linen tunics, their plushly embroidered cloaks. As Maximian approached, all of them knelt on the greasy cobbles and performed their adoration.

Castus came up the gangway after the imperial party, with Brinno at his side. He tried to keep his expression blank, tried not to stare too critically at all the outpourings of loyal devotion. What was wrong with these people? How much had they been paid? How much had they been threatened?

He saw Fausta and her retinue disembarking from one of the smaller galleys at the next jetty. Constantine's wife had given up her pretence of mourning, and wore the full splendour of her wealth once more. Castus watched her as she moved to join her father; what were her loyalties now?

‘
Maximian Augustus! Eternal Augustus! Greatest of emperors! May the gods grant you eternal life! May the gods grant you eternal rule!
'

On and on it went, until Castus felt the massed voices drumming in his skull. He scanned the crowd, trying to read the faces of individuals, but saw nothing. All looked as blank and bemused as he felt. Maximian stood in the cleared area at the top of the quay, motionless as a statue with his retinue around him.

Now there was one voice, rising clear above the rest. The cheering and the chanted acclamations died away, and the voice carried onwards. A panegyric of praise, of course. The orator was a plump-faced man dressed all in wine-red, and he sketched florid gestures in the air as he spoke.

‘
...lover of your country, lover of the true gods, O greatest of emperors, you bring glory to our city by your Sacred Presence! All civil strife is banished, all traitors and impious followers of outlaw sects slink away before the dawn of your arrival! Maximian Augustus, the city cries aloud with one voice in praise and in ardent gratitude that you have chosen this place to commence once more your Divine Rule and given us this opportunity to once again adore your Sacred Features...
'

Just as Castus felt his ears growing numb, he noticed a stir running through the crowd at his back. Turning, he made out another voice, shouting from a short distance away, a harsh angry yell rising above the hushed noise of the crowd. Beside him was the low stone platform of a dockside crane: Castus shoved aside a couple of lounging labourers and clambered up onto it, peering back over the throng towards the line of warehouses that fronted the harbour wall.

‘...Brothers and sisters, you see before you the emissary of the devil! A persecutor, despised by God! A man who has shed the blood of innocents, the blood of the faithful!'

The speaker was an older man, powerfully built but plainly dressed, with a bald head and flaring grey beard. He was standing on the back of a cart drawn up outside the warehouses, and the crowd was thick around him. As he spoke his words gained in power and volume, drowning out the honeyed phrases of the orator.

‘Once more he comes amongst us, brethren, in the guise of an emperor, but he is the devil's shadow! I call upon you – cast him out! Reject this usurper, this persecutor, this enemy of God!'

‘Who's he?' Castus said to a slack-mouthed youth sitting on the crane.

‘That's Oresius, the head priest of the Christians,' the youth said, and spat. ‘
Bishop
, they call him. He almost managed to get his head lopped off the last time Maximian was in power here. Reckon he wants to be one of their
martyrs
, eh?'

Already the crowd was splitting apart, a solid wedge of Praetorians with locked shields driving a path towards the man on the cart. Another man was calling out to the Christian priest: a well-dressed citizen, wearing the insignia of a city magistrate.

‘Cease this disturbance!' the magistrate shouted. ‘For the good of the city, Oresius, I beg you – stop this criminal madness!'

‘Madness?' the grey-bearded man yelled back. Veins were standing out in his neck, and he seized the front of his tunic as if he would tear it from his body. ‘Who are you, Trigetius, to speak of crime and madness? There is no madness for those who know the love of God! For those who have Christ
there is no crime
!'

The crowd around the cart was shoving back against the phalanx of Praetorians. Some of them pelted missiles: rotten vegetables and kicked-up cobblestones spattered and rattled off the shields. Castus saw men knocked to the ground, scuffles breaking out. Bodies were swirling around the platform of the crane as the mass of onlookers tried to back away from the confrontation. A scream from just below him, and Castus saw a gang of sailors in greasy smocks shoving a woman between them as she tried to carry her child clear of the riot.

Jumping down from the platform, he threw his arms out straight before him and forced the bodies aside. The first sailor he caught by the neck, then kicked his legs from under him. The second went down with a fist in the face; the third saw the way of things and made his escape. Castus took a moment to catch his breath, then scooped up the woman and her child and lifted them up onto the crane platform.

By the time he clambered up after them, it was over. The Christian priest had raised his arms and stepped off the cart, surrendering himself to the centurion of the Praetorian detachment. The shields closed around him, and he was led away.