Secrets of the Dead

XVI

Constantinople – April 337

THE SOLDIERS AREN’T palace guards. The badges on their cloaks show twin men wrestling each other. The fourteenth, the Gemini. By rights, they should be a thousand miles away on the Rhine frontier, watching for barbarians trying to creep across the river.

The centurion salutes. ‘General Valerius. Please come with us.’

It’s a long time since anyone called me General. ‘Who wants to see me?’

‘An old friend.’

It must be a lie. All my friends are long gone, one way or another. But there’s no point resisting. I pull on a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat and let them take me. We avoid the obvious destinations – the palace, the Schola barracks, the Blacherna Prison – and instead plunge down the steep-stepped hill towards the Golden Horn. Early afternoon on a Sunday, the city dozes like a dog: the market halls are empty, the shops shuttered, the ovens cold. Even the picks and hammers have gone quiet. The whole world’s stopped, because Constantine commanded it. Who’d reject a god who gives you a day off once a week?

A skiff’s waiting for us, bobbing among the litter and debris that clog the harbour. Twelve strong slaves bend over their oars. I’m expecting them to take us across the Horn; instead, they turn out into the open water of the Bosphorus. I glance down into the bilge. A length of chain makes an iron nest near the bow, and the anchor fastened to it looks heavy enough to sink an old man. With the wind up, blowing spray off the whitecaps, you wouldn’t even see the splash.

I pull the cloak closer to keep off the wind, and fix my attention on the city on the Asian shore – Chrysopolis, the city of gold. It’s lost some lustre in recent years – the magnificence of Constantinople casts a long shadow across the strait – but a certain class of person still values its amenities. The houses are spacious, the air’s clear, and the jealous eyes that watch every inch of Constantinople can’t reach quite this far.

The boat steers clear of the town harbour, and pulls along the coast to a private stone landing. Long gardens stretch away from the water towards a handsome villa at the top of the slope. Almond trees are in bloom; bees buzz among the cyclamen and roses. Halfway to the house, two men wait on a terrace. One hurries down the steps to greet me.

‘General Valerius. After all these years.’

It takes me a moment to place him – not because I don’t recognise him, but because to see him here is almost the last thing I expect. It’s Flavius Ursus, Marshal of the Army, the most powerful soldier in the empire after Constantine. I knew him when he was Tribune of the Eighth. Flavius the Bear, we called him. In the field he wore a bearskin cape and a necklace of claws and teeth. He’s short, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a full beard that hides most of the scars on his face. His father was a barbarian who crossed the Danube in the chaos before Diocletian’s reign, and then joined the Roman army to stop his countrymen from following him. The son, I think, is similarly flexible.

He shows me up to the terrace.

‘My men coming to get you – I hope you didn’t mind. I’m sure you understand.’ We climb the final step and come out on a broad terrace. ‘And here’s another face from the old days.’

The man waiting there is younger than both of us, probably half my age, with short dark hair cut straight across the forehead, and a smug patrician face. He looks pleased to see me, though I can’t think why.

‘Sir.’

He clasps my hand, but doesn’t introduce himself. He’s waiting, hoping I remember him.

‘Marcus Severus?’ It’s half-guesswork, but his smile says I’ve got it right. ‘I haven’t seen you since …’

‘The Chrysopolis campaign.’ Now I’ve recognised him, he’s happy to remind me. ‘I was on your staff.’

‘And now the Gemini?’ I guess. ‘You must be a tribune by now, at least.’

His face flushes. ‘I’m Chief of Staff to the Caesar Claudius Constantinus.’

‘Of course.’ It’s been fully twelve years since our last campaign, when he was a hot-headed young officer buzzing around my staff, angling for any command that might give a whiff of glory. I flap my hand, an apology for my age. ‘An old man’s memory … I knew and I forgot. Congratulations, richly deserved.’

An awkward silence descends between the three of us. Why is Severus here? He should be a thousand miles away in Trier. And why is Ursus harbouring him?

A slave brings us cups of spiced wine on a silver tray. I sip mine, and stare across the water. A brown haze of dust and smoke smears the sky over the city.

‘Is this your house?’ I ask Ursus.

‘It belongs to a merchant, a contractor for the army. He lets me use it from time to time, when I need somewhere private.’

Obviously, the merchant’s done well out of supplying the army. ‘And did you row an old man across the water just to reminisce about the old days?’

‘In the old days, General, you always had your finger on the pulse,’ says Severus.

‘I retired. I have a villa in the mountains of Moesia, and in a month I’ll be there for good. As soon as the Emperor lets me go.’

Ursus gives a short, barking laugh. ‘Nothing changes. Every campaign I fought with you, you said it would be your last. And I hear the Emperor has you doing yet another last job for him. Still his trusted right hand.’

Of all the things I expected when the soldiers arrived at my door, this must be the least likely. What did this bishop have that makes everyone from an old pagan to Constantine’s field marshal so sensitive to his fate?

‘It’s trivial,’ I assure him. ‘I don’t know why the Augustus bothered himself with it.’

A fringe benefit of my reputation is that people always assume I know something when I plead ignorance. Severus gives me a conniving smile. ‘There are rumours, General. You must have heard them.’

‘Imagine I haven’t.’

‘They say that when your dead bishop was found, a document case was missing.’

When did he become my dead bishop? ‘Bishop Alexander was writing a book for Constantine – a compendium of the events of his reign. Whatever papers he had were just for that.’

Severus leans in closer. ‘We’re not interested in the past.’

I believe him. Constantine’s raised a new generation in his image, and the past is simply embarrassing. The ancestral gods get lodged in the attic, and old books make good kindling.

I glance at Ursus, looking for a hint.

‘You know there are factions at court.’

‘That’s why they call it a court. People choose sides and play games.’

Neither of them smiles. ‘They say that Constantine’s sister, Constantiana, has a secret will he’s written,’ says Severus.

‘Benefitting whom?’

‘No one knows.’

‘Then who’s spreading the rumours?’

Ursus grunts. ‘You know how it goes. Whispers and glances and shadows in the smoke.’

I know how it goes. ‘There is no secret will,’ I say flatly. ‘Even if there were, why would Alexander have it? When was the succession ever decided by a priest? The army’s loyal.’ I fix on Ursus’s brown eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘To Constantine.’

‘But after Constantine …’ The red wine has stained Severus’s lips purple. ‘It’s important that all the sons inherit equally.’

‘The army wants an orderly succession,’ Ursus confirms.

I know what he means. The army wants Constantine’s three sons to divide the empire. Three emperors means three armies, three times as many generals, three times the profits for the contractors in their palatial villas on the Bosphorus shore.

‘One heir would be more orderly.’

‘Only if he was undisputed.’

‘That time has passed,’ says Severus. ‘This is a new age.’

‘Every age thinks so.’

‘And old men think nothing changes.’

I study him more closely. He’s wearing a leather thong around his neck: it dips under his tunic, but when he tips his head back I glimpse a curved, scaly fish-back rendered in bronze.

‘I remember when you were the crow, and I was the scorpion,’ I say. Severus looks at me as if I’m spouting gibberish, as if the phrase genuinely means nothing and he never heard it while squashed together with his comrades in a damp basement with frontier earth oozing through the stones. As if he never knelt in front of me so I could sign the blood of Mithra on his forehead and induct him into the mysteries he was so desperate to know.

‘There is only one God, Jesus Christ,’ he says blandly. Ursus, who stood beside us in those caves, says nothing.

There’s no point arguing. I could accuse Severus of treachery, of abandoning the old gods, but he wouldn’t care. He’s not interested in the past, not even his own.

‘Why is he here?’ I ask Ursus. ‘Does Constantine know?’

Their faces tell me he doesn’t.

‘The Caesar Claudius is worried for his father’s health,’ says Severus.

Translation: Constantine’s an old man. If anything happens, Claudius wants his man in place to guard his inheritance. No wonder Severus is holed up here, watching the palace from across the water. If Constantine found out, he’d have Severus counting gulls on some rock in the Aegean for the rest of his life.

An aide sidles up and presents a scroll to Ursus. He withdraws a little distance to study it, leaving me and Severus alone.

‘I saw the Augustus two days ago,’ I tell him. ‘You can go back to Trier and report that he was in rude health.’

Severus nods, as if my news is helpful. We both know he’s not going anywhere. ‘I need to know about the will, Valerius.’ He’s dropped the ‘General’. ‘There are factions at court, and who knows what they might do to deny Claudius his inheritance.’

‘Constantine knows his own mind – more than any man who ever lived.’

‘He can still be swayed by gossip. As you know.’

Again, that twist of the knife in my heart. I want to hurl him into the water, hold him under the waves until the fish nibble the privilege off his face for good.

‘You’re still the crow, Severus, even if you don’t remember those days. Sitting in your tree, waiting for the wind to bring you the smell of death.’

It’s my last attack, and it doesn’t touch him. I never had a family of my own; I’ve been spared the experience of seeing my offspring start treating their parents like their own children. Now I know how it feels.

Ursus, who’s been waiting at a safe remove, interposes himself again.

‘My boat will take you back.’

He doesn’t escort me. But as I step on to the landing stage, a final question follows me down to the shore.

‘Have you wondered why Constantine asked someone who knows nothing about the Christians to investigate the death of a bishop?’