Hot sun, a bright sky, and the broad Tyrrhenian stretched blue to the far western horizon. To the east, Italy was a flat shore and a blur of distant mountains. Between sea and sky, the Ligurian coaster Thetis rode southwards across the swells, her upswept prow and stern alternately rising and sinking, her big mainsail sheeted hard against the pressure of the wind.
Leaning out over the rail, Castus squinted into the salt spray and looked back at the wake. Two sails on the far horizon, but they were moving towards the coast, and neither was the one he expected to see.
‘Triangular, you say?’ the shipmaster rasped, moving up to stand beside him at the rail.
Castus nodded. ‘Like this,’ he said, sketching three corners in the air. He had seen a ship with a triangular sail at Genua just before they had sailed the previous morning. He had seen it again in the evening, coming in shortly after the Thetis had anchored in the bay of Luna. And twice more today it had appeared, flickering across the horizon, dogging their wake.
‘Plenty of boats have sails like that,’ the shipmaster said. He was a short stocky Corsican, with no neck and a windblown grin, a man as blunt and weatherly as the vessel he commanded. ‘We could too, if we was running across the wind; you just swing the yard round and bring the leeward arm down, then brail up the sail to the arm and you’ve got your three corners, so it looks. Ain’t triangular really, though, truth be told.’
Castus squinted at him a moment. ‘But we’re running before the wind, not across it. And so are they, if they’re following us.’
‘Fair enough,’ the shipmaster said, showing his yellow teeth. ‘But you’d be better looking the other way, keeping an eye out for any of them cruisers up from Misenum. They’re more to worry about!’
There had been no sign yet of warships patrolling the sea lanes. The only ones Castus had seen were the pair of liburnian galleys in the harbour at Genua, but they were crewed by Constantine’s men; they had seized the port in the emperor’s name only ten days before, but the citizens of Genua did not appear to mind the change of allegiance. The naval base at Ravenna on the Adriatic had also recently declared for Constantine, so Castus had heard, but with the territories of Licinius on the far shore that sea was still too dangerous to travel.
Pushing away from the rail, Castus made his way towards the stern, leaning into the pitch of the deck. He was dressed in a simple tunic of dark blue wool, with plain leather shoes. The gold ring that marked his citizenship, and the golden torque that signalled his rank and prestige, he had left behind in Verona. He felt almost naked without them, and without the military belt and boots he had worn since he had first joined the army nearly two decades before. He carried no weapon either; there was a shortsword concealed in his bedroll, but it did little to reassure him. Castus had the unnerving sensation that he was going into the heart of the enemy camp dangerously underequipped.
The Thetis was a small vessel, not much bigger than a fishing boat; her scarred and greasy timbers creaked and wailed with every shift of the wind, but she was seaworthy enough and would draw little attention. There were six crewmen, all of them slaves, and they went by nicknames: Fish-hook, Donkey, Gizzard… They roamed naked over the deck, joking in gnarled accents, leaping over the rail sometimes to swim beside the ship, or even dive beneath the hull and surface on the other side.
In contrast to the high-spirited crew, the members of Castus’s little party appeared very subdued. Felix sat in the scuppers with his back to the rail, playing knucklebones with one of the young nobleman’s slaves. Of all the party, Felix seemed to inhabit his assumed role with the greatest ease; Castus wondered if there was any truth in the stories about the man once being a slave. But Felix knew Rome, or so he claimed, and Castus had wanted a guide he could trust. The man had saved his life on the night that Pompeianus had broken out of Verona. Twice, in fact: he had warned him of the attackers in the bushes, and then dragged Castus out of the path of the charging horse. The man was tenacious, and quick-thinking, and those were attributes that Castus knew he could use.
Felix, however, hated the sea. Even now, after nearly two days’ sailing, he kept his back to the waves and tried not to look at the water. He had been badly sick for the first few hours after leaving Genua. Castus himself was immune to seasickness; he had often thanked the gods for that.
In the lee of the little kennel-like deckhouse near the stern, Diogenes was still debating with the Christian priest. The former schoolteacher had not been Castus’s first choice for the mission. He would have taken Modestus, perhaps, or Brocchus: a man with military bearing and muscle. But Diogenes had found out what was planned somehow, and petitioned Castus to join the party. It would be dangerous, Castus had explained; maybe they would not return. Diogenes had been unmoved; perhaps, Castus thought, the man would have his uses after all.
The slatted door of the deckhouse swung open, and Nigrinus clambered out into the daylight, blinking as he raised his head.
‘How is he?’ Castus asked.
‘Still asleep,’ the notary replied, with a sour grimace. ‘Probably dreaming he’s back in Genua, lying in a pile of prostitutes.’
The young senator’s son, Publius Pomponius Bassus Pudentianus, was supposedly the leader of their party. Castus and Nigrinus were his freedmen; the others were his slaves. He was a necessary liability, but since the party had left Verona he had caused nothing but aggravation and delay, and his habit of treating them as if they were genuinely his slaves and dependants endeared him to nobody. Most recently, he had vanished for forty-eight hours in Genua, just as Nigrinus had finally managed to arrange passage on a ship for Sardinia. Castus and Felix had tracked the young man down to one of the city’s most expensive brothels, and he had been so drunk by then that they’d had to carry him aboard the Thetis wrapped in a cloak.
Since leaving harbour, Pudentianus had done little but sleep and vomit. His two slaves tended to him most of the time, but Nigrinus made it his business to check on the young man as well: it was vital for the success of the mission that he remain alive and in reasonable health. It was almost worth enduring the irritations of Pudentianus’s presence, Castus thought, to see the notary so obviously ill at ease.
Clambering past the helmsman and the tiller bars that connected the two big steering oars, Castus pulled himself up onto the little platform beneath the sweep of the stern. Gulls wheeled and darted in the wake of the ship; beyond them, the horizon was clear. No sign of a triangular sail, or any other vessels at all now. Castus wondered if he was becoming delusional. Perhaps, he thought, he simply could not believe how easily the journey was going so far? And it was a relief, he had to admit, to be moving again, covering distance with a firm destination in mind, with hundreds of miles separating him from Constantine and his army, from Ganna and from Sabina, from Lepidus. Out here on the open sea his spirits felt liberated, the sea air singing through him. No, he thought: he should enjoy it while he could, and not look for shadows where there were none.
The plan itself, as Nigrinus had explained it back at the villa on Lake Benacus, was simple in its essence. They would take ship from Genua down the western coast of Italy and across the narrows of the Tyrrhenian to Corsica, and then to the port of Olbia on Sardinia. From there they would hope to pick up one of the big cargo ships from Carthage that often called at Olbia before crossing to Portus, the harbour of Rome. With any luck, they could blend in with the other passengers travelling from Sardinia or Africa, and by the time they reached Rome there would be nothing to say that they had come from the north.
To aid the deception, each member of the party carried coins taken from the prisoners at Verona: copper and silver pieces, minted in Rome and stamped with the head of Maxentius. On the other side was the figure of the goddess Roma and the legend PRESERVER OF HIS CITY. Castus had peered at the portrait of the enemy emperor, surprised to notice that it looked so much like Constantine. But coin portraits were seldom accurate: the tyrant’s father Maximian had appeared much the same.
The real danger during the journey lay in the sea crossing between the Italian coast and Sardinia; Maxentius’s galleys from the naval base at Misenum were reported to be cruising in the straits around the island of Ilva. And then, Castus thought, they had Rome itself to tackle. The eternal city, the mistress of nations: the camp of their enemy. As the plan went, once they had done all they could in the city, they would slip out by different routes and make their way north to Spoletium on the Flaminian Way by the ides of October, hoping to meet the vanguard of Constantine’s army there as it advanced across the Apennines.
It was vague – too vague – and Castus still had little notion of what challenges the city itself might hold. His only concern at the moment was getting the party to Rome without being discovered by the enemy. After that, he would take things as they came.
Dropping back down off the stern platform, he picked his way forward to the lee of the deckhouse once more. As he approached, he heard Diogenes still locked in passionate debate with the Christian priest Stephanus, their voices raised against the whine of the wind.
‘But your cosmogony is opposed to all reason! As Aristotle said, nothing can come from nothing… so how can you claim that your god existed before everything else and somehow created the cosmos from a void?’
‘What is impossible with men is possible with God!’ the Christian declared. ‘God is uncontainable and immutable, therefore nothing can exist outside God – a common craftsman can fashion inert and pre-existing matter; only God can create matter from nothing!’
‘Nonsense! Is your god immune from the laws of nature, then? Or are you suggesting that he somehow shat the universe into existence?’
Castus grinned ruefully, then climbed around the far side of the deckhouse and forward to the mast. In the bows, one of the sailors stood poised with a three-pronged harpoon, catching fish for the evening meal. Off to the west, the sun was slipping down towards the horizon, and the waves were fired with gold. A stirring sight, Castus thought. So why did he still feel so wary? Again he glanced back to windward, and just for a moment the low sunlight seemed to flash off the white peak of a following sail.
*
The mission to Rome was a closely guarded secret, or so Castus had been told. But he already knew that the information had leaked to the imperial court; he’d had proof of that before he’d left the villa on Lake Benacus. A eunuch dressed in court robes of deep wine red had been waiting for him outside his room when he’d returned from dinner; he had provided no information but only requested that Castus follow him. Already Castus could guess the identity of the eunuch’s mistress.
Years had passed since he had last spoken to Fausta, nobilissima femina, the wife of the emperor Constantine. He had seen her often enough, both at official functions and around the palace in Treveris, and with Sabina so often in her retinue he had heard a lot about Fausta as well. If she’d paid any special attention to him, she had been careful never to show it, and he’d acted likewise.
He found her in her private chambers, seated on a couch with several other ladies and eunuchs around her; she dismissed them all with a gesture, and in a flurry of silks and scents they were gone. Castus heard the eunuch who had brought him softly closing the door behind him.
‘Be seated, please,’ Fausta said, offering him a place on the facing couch. Castus crossed the room and sat down. He was very conscious that he was alone with the emperor’s wife, although he knew that he would be observed, and anything he said overheard.
Fausta had been only seventeen when they had last met. She was around twenty now, a grown woman; the change in her appearance and manner were remarkable. Castus had noticed before that she had shed the plumpness of adolescence, the soft roundness of face that had given her a childish look at times. Now he saw how poised she had become, how regal. He noticed the hard clarity in her deeply lidded eyes. The ‘gilded piglet’, the crueller courtiers had called her once, in Treveris. She was far from that now.
‘You are being sent to Rome, I hear,’ she said.
Castus did not attempt to deny it.
‘Have they ordered you to murder my brother?’
‘In a manner of speaking, domina,’ he told her. ‘I said no.’
‘I’m glad.’ Her expression barely altered, but Castus sensed her warming towards him. ‘I did not think you were the sort of man for that.’
What sort of man, he wondered, do you think I am? Being in her presence again brought back charged memories. He had last spoken to her before the siege of Massilia, during her father’s attempt to seize power from Constantine. Maximian had died by his own hand soon afterwards, and Castus had been the last man to see him alive.
‘My brother,’ she said, ‘is not the monster that so many here like to believe. All this talk of sorcery – complete nonsense! He’s entirely devoted to the traditional superstitions. Quite the champion of piety, in fact.’ She paused, moving her lips slightly, as if deciding how much she ought to say. ‘I was never very close to him,’ she went on. ‘He’s more than a decade older than me, and by the time I was able to think of him as my brother he was sent off to join Galerius as a staff officer. But every man I’ve known has been ambitious for power, excepting slaves. I can’t blame him for wanting what my father had, or what my husband also desires.’
Castus nodded slowly, still uncomfortable under the frankness of her gaze. She had put her trust in him once, back at Massilia; Sabina had been her gift to him, a reward for service. But there had been more between them than that. Both of them, in that warm, scented, dimly lit chamber, were aware of the deeper connection they had once shared.
‘You know he must die,’ Castus said. ‘If we win.’
Fausta just shrugged slightly, and her brief pout made her appear once more the child she had once been. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve had to accept these things. I’d just rather it was decided… fairly.’
Back at Massilia, Castus had realised that Fausta had made a decision to support her husband over her father. That was where she saw her best interest. But now, he realised, she was undecided. What would she do if her brother was victorious, and her husband was defeated? What future would there be for her then? She still had no child by the emperor; rumour was that Constantine continued to prefer the company of his concubine Minervina to his wife. He could set Fausta aside at any time. If she had chosen to leave matters to the will of the gods, Castus could not blame her.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to speak with you since my father died,’ Fausta said. Castus felt a brief flicker of surprise at her cool candour. He reminded himself that this young woman had never known love, or been loved herself. ‘I understand you played an important part in what happened at Massilia. I should have thanked you for that.’
Castus inclined his head. ‘There’s no need, domina.’
She gave a quick laugh, and her smile had a capricious look. She was lounging on the couch now, no longer so regal. ‘No doubt my husband will be grateful once more if you succeed in your mission to Rome.’
‘The Augustus…’ Castus began, then paused, uncertain how to continue.
Fausta laughed at his discomfort. ‘He’s still very angry with you, yes. He thinks you’re a very insubordinate soldier.’ She widened her eyes a little. ‘If only he knew,’ she said.
Castus felt the heat rush to his face, but Fausta was still smiling. A private, knowing sort of smile. Since entering the room he had been trying not to think about that night in the garden house of the Villa Herculis, the darkened bedchamber where she had played the role of Sabina. But she surely knew he was thinking about it now. For a couple of heartbeats he allowed himself to meet her gaze. The distance between them felt suddenly very slight, but it was an unbridgeable chasm. Memory kindled desire; desire brought shame.
‘Your wife is being foolish,’ Fausta said, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘But perhaps don’t judge her too harshly until you know the truth.’
‘What is the truth?’ Castus said, his voice thick.
‘That’s what you have to discover,’ she told him, with another sly flicker of a smile. ‘Maybe in Rome you’ll find out?’
*
They camped on the beach that evening, in the shelter of a low headland that broke the straight ribbon of the shoreline. The sailors brought the Thetis in under oars, then ran her up onto the beach; as soon as the keel grated onto the sand Castus jumped over the side and waded through the surf. Clumsy on dry land after two days at sea, he stamped up the beach and through the fringe of coarse grass to the pines that covered the flat land inshore. No sign of habitation: this entire coast seemed deserted. No sign of a sail out on the horizon either: war had emptied the sea lanes. Content that their landing had been unobserved, and no concealed enemies lay in wait for them, Castus swung his arm, and the rest of the party came ashore.
The sailors secured the ship with anchors high on the beach, then gathered driftwood and cut branches from the myrtle bushes for a fire. The sun was low over the sea to the west, and evening was gathering beneath the pines. Insects flickered in the warm light as the sailors lashed oars together and covered them with sail canvas to make tents in a clearing between the trees. Pudentianus, the young nobleman, sat on a folding stool on the sand, drinking wine and admiring the last glow of the sun over the sea while his two slaves waited on him.
In the woods above the beach Castus cut two short straight sticks. He handed one to Felix, and they stripped off their tunics and went down onto the sand to practise their armatura drill. It was different fighting without a shield, and without the reach of a spatha, but Castus knew that any fighting they did over the coming month would be like this. When they closed to spar together, both men instinctively shifted into wrestling stances, sword-sticks drawn back to stab, their left hands stretched out to grab and grapple. Felix was much smaller than Castus, but fast and agile, and his unnaturally long arms gave him a killer’s reach. Circling, kicking up sand, they fought until both were breathing hard.
‘A good show!’ Pudentianus cried, as Castus pulled Felix to his feet for the last time. He and his slaves had gathered in a circle with the sailors, as if they were watching a gladiators’ bout. Castus spat in the sand and wiped a forearm across his brow. He had not intended to create a spectacle, but on an open beach there were few places to exercise discreetly. Besides, he thought, perhaps it was better to let the civilians know there were real fighters defending them.
Diogenes passed him a flask of watered vinegar wine, and Castus drank deeply. After so long aboard ship it was good to stretch his muscles and feel his blood flowing. Even the sting of sweat in his cuts was invigorating. Further down the beach the sailors were grilling fresh fish over the charcoal, and the smells of the smoke and the sea mingled with the scent of the pines. Castus breathed it all in, and felt his spirits rise. Just for a moment he allowed himself to imagine Ganna on that beach, with his son in her arms, both of them gazing out over the waves.
‘They tell me you’re a tribune,’ Pudentianus said, appearing beside him. Castus blinked away the brief reverie. He nodded curtly.
‘I’ve never really met any soldiers before,’ the young man said, with the faintest note of apology, ‘so I wasn’t entirely sure.’
He was about eighteen or nineteen, Castus guessed, and his face still had an adolescent look, rather thick-lipped and pimply. Nigrinus had told him that the youth came from one of the most highly placed families in Rome, but Pudentianus had never spoken directly to him before, and seemed to find conversation with his social inferiors difficult. He was looking sideways at Castus now, as if dubious about his status.
‘It’s good to know that a warrior of your experience is accompanying us to Rome,’ he said, with an awkward smile. ‘Although I hope there won’t be any occasion for fighting…!’
‘I hope so too,’ Castus said. If the youth was going to drop the formal address, so would he.
‘Tell me something,’ the youth said, pacing across the sand towards the trees, hands clasped behind his back. ‘What do you make of our friend, the notary?’
Castus realised that he was expected to follow. He lingered a moment, pulled on his tunic, then tied his belt as he strode to catch up with Pudentianus. Nigrinus was still sitting on the sand near the fire, well out of hearing.
‘I mean,’ Pudentianus went on, ‘do you trust him?’
‘I wouldn’t trust him beyond the reach of my arm,’ Castus said in a low tone. ‘But I think he’s on our side, if that’s what you mean.’ Even as he spoke, it occurred to Castus that he was only assuming they were all on the same side.
‘I suppose that’s what I was asking, yes.’ Pudentianus paused, scuffing the sand with his foot. He gazed over at Nigrinus and frowned. ‘It’s just… he seems such a crude sort of person. I wonder why the emperor would trust him with a mission of such delicacy?’
Castus snorted a laugh. ‘He’s delicate enough when he want to be.’ Like a surgeon, he thought, and remembered the torture chamber Nigrinus had shown him in the cellars beneath the city of Arelate. No, he did not trust the notary at all: he had seen and experienced enough of his work over the years.
‘When we reach Rome,’ the youth went on, ‘I’m concerned that the meetings with the aristocracy should be left in my hands. I mean, my father was Consul, and I’m personally acquainted with many of the best people. I… I was on the board of the Centumviral Court last year; I can expect entry into the Senate very soon… But I fear that the notary might wish to take control of things, and his… his more abrasive attitudes might cause offence…’
Castus tightened his lips against a sneer. It was all politics, he thought. This puking lad, who’d spent the last ten days either complaining, sleeping or sick, was making a bid for control, and wanted Castus to back him. Perhaps he had a point – no doubt Nigrinus lacked the charm for diplomacy – but the idea that this boy could do any better was almost laughable. Was that really how things worked in Rome?
‘My only business at the moment is getting you both to the city alive,’ Castus said, stepping closer and speaking quietly. He was a head taller than Pudentianus; the young man nodded quickly, swallowing. ‘Once we’re there,’ Castus went on, ‘you can thrash things out between yourselves.’
He did not rate the young man’s chances if he pitted himself against Nigrinus. Then again, the city was Pudentianus’s home territory. Shaking his head, Castus left him and strode back to the fire, where the sailors had finished preparing the evening meal.
The sun had still not set, but the sea to the west was glowing. Castus stood just above the surf, eating grilled fish and chewy flatbread and washing it down with watered wine. From behind him he could hear Diogenes and the Christian priest, still locked in their intractable debate.
‘…but what about the bodies of those who’ve been cremated, or dismembered in battle? Will they be stuck back together, at this resurrection of yours?’
‘After the Day of Judgement the righteous will take on heavenly bodies, yes – they will be resurrected in the incorrupt flesh, as they were in life, and those bodies will be immaculate…’
‘So how was it that when your Jesus came back to life he still had wounds upon him? Didn’t he tell his followers to stick their fingers in his scars? And he had to eat and drink too – doesn’t it say that in your books? How come he needed earthly nourishment, if he had an immaculate heavenly body? No, this is clearly childish nonsense! Plato, on the other hand—’
‘I’m afraid you are an extremely ignorant man…’
Finishing the last of his meal, Castus paced along the beach. Philosophical debates had always confused him; how could people spend so much time arguing about things they could not see or feel? When he looked out towards the horizon, he saw the sun sinking towards the rim of the sea. That was god, surely. The light of the world. Beyond that light there was nothing. Castus kissed his fingers lightly, then raised his hand in salute to the sun. Sol Invictus. Lord of Daybreak.
The headland above the beach was lit by the evening glow, and Castus had a sudden desire to climb up to the heights and survey the surrounding country. He wished he had done it earlier, but if he hurried he knew he could get up and back before nightfall. Doubling back quickly to the camp, he took the shortsword from his bedroll and threw the baldric around his shoulder. Felix glanced up from his meal and then made to stand; Castus gestured for him to stay where he was.
Moving away from the fire and the voices, he crossed the sand and jogged up the rise through the grass. There was a track between the trees, he noticed, but still no other sign of human life. He started climbing, the slope growing steeper and more rocky as he pushed his way through the dry scrub. Then, before he had expected, he was at the summit of the low headland, clambering through a last screen of tangled bushes and out onto the stony ridge above the sea. The air smelled strongly of thyme, and now he was no longer moving Castus could hear the noise of the insects from the darkening land behind him.
Down on the beach, the camp fire was a glowing ember. Beyond it stretched the pale ribbon of empty sand and the ranked trees, following the shallow curve of the coastline as far as the distant hills. But when Castus glanced down to the other side of the headland, he caught his breath. On the beach about half a mile to the north, another vessel was pulled up on the sand. It was small, with oars piled across the thwarts and a lowered mast, but Castus felt almost sure that it was the same one he had seen in Genua, and in the bay of Luna. The ship with the triangular sail.
It must have crept in along the coast under oars, he realised, screened by the headland. Peering at the distant shape, he could make out one or two figures sitting on the sand beside the beached craft. There had surely been more, to work the oars, but there was no sign of them now. No fire either, or any encampment.
Castus had already reached for the hilt of his sword. He slid the blade free a short way, then tapped it back into the scabbard. Then, slow and smooth, he eased down into a crouch in the bushes; no watchers on the beach would see him silhouetted against the evening sky. Keeping low, he began to edge back through the scrub bushes. Almost at once he paused; now that he was listening more carefully he could clearly make out the sounds of men moving in the near distance. At least six of them, he estimated, and no more than a couple of hundred paces away. The dry bushes and scrub crackled and hissed as they crossed the ridge and descended into the pine woodlands behind the beach, and all the time Castus stayed still, tensed and hardly breathing.
When the last of the men seemed to have passed his position he eased himself back into motion, stepping carefully over the tangled bushes and picking his way down the steep stony track. The sun had long gone now; only a trace of light remained in the western sky, and the hillside was being consumed by the darkness. Insects rustled and rasped on all sides.
By the time Castus had scrambled down to the beach, he estimated that the group of men ahead of him would have almost circled around through the trees behind the camp. Lifting his sword clear of his waist, he started running along the hard wet sand at the edge of the surf. The camp seemed further away than he had anticipated. He could make out the fire, still burning down to embers on the sand, and the dim shapes of the makeshift tents just below the trees. He was running hard, yet trying to conserve his strength: if he could get to the camp in time he could warn Felix and Diogenes, perhaps counter-attack before the newcomers could spring their ambush…
A shout reached him, then a scream from the camp. Castus doubled his stride, a curse bursting from his lips. Swerving up the beach and across the dry sand, he saw the figures running in the trees, one of them outlined briefly against the light of the embers. Smoke swirled, and Pudentianus’s two slaves dashed from the closest tent. Castus could see a body on the ground, the dim shapes of struggling men.
Stooping as he ran, he snatched up the three-pronged fishing spear from beside the fire. The man on the ground was one of the sailors; the combat between the trees was indistinct, frenzied. Castus yelled out a battle roar; his sword was in one hand, the trident in the other. There were pale faces in the darkness, a haze of kicked-up dust, incoherent shouts. Then suddenly the attackers seemed to melt back into the darkness; Castus saw one man turn and flee, his cloak whipping behind him. He canted back the fishing spear, aimed at the fleeing man’s legs, and threw.
The man screamed as the blow knocked him down. ‘Get him!’ Castus shouted. ‘Get him alive!’ He was closing fast, sword in hand; but one of the sailors was faster. Standing over the fallen attacker he raised a club in his fist.
‘They killed Fish-hook!’ the sailor yelled, then smashed the club down on the head of the wounded man with a meaty chopping sound.
Light rushed between the trees, flinging shadows. Diogenes had a flaming torch in each hand, and passed one of them to Pudentianus.
‘Who were they?’ the young nobleman was saying, clearly shaken as he stared into the reeling shadows between the pines.
The sailor stepped back from the body of the fallen man, flinging down his bloodied club as Castus approached. The attacker was quite obviously dead: the harpoon had struck him in the thigh, but the club had crushed the side of his skull.
‘Bring the torch closer,’ Castus said, still heaving breath after his run along the beach. He considered going after the other attackers; but, no, that would be disastrous.
Diogenes stepped up with his torch, and Castus shoved the dead man over onto his back. What was left of his skull was shaved bald. Castus leaned closer, studying the ruined features in the flickering light of the flames. Then he stepped back.
‘Can you tell who he was?’ Pudentianus said, wincing.
Castus just shook his head. But he had a good idea all the same. He was sure that he had seen this man before, back at Mediolanum, and he had been dressed in a sky-blue tunic.