A fresh breeze furrowed my hair as I flitted up the winding broad stone steps – still pristine and bearing remnant dust from the stonemasons’ chisels – and onto the wide eastern battlements atop Divitia’s colossal walls. I acknowledged the stiff and prideful salutes of the Second Italica sentries up there. I gazed east as I walked along the parapet; outside, green forests and grey mountains stretched to the horizon – but not one peak or tree rivalled Divitia, my five-storey limestone giant on the Rhenus’ eastern banks. Bulging, rounded towers adorned the corners and punctuated the curtain walls of the square bastion, and the eastern and western walls were embellished with monumental gatehouses.
The fortress had been declared complete eight days ago, just prior to the ceremony of Tubilustrium , the celebration that marked the army’s awakening after a cold, hard winter. In truth my legions had been busy throughout those frozen months, not in military matters but in quarrying, shaping and hauling stone, mixing mortar, hewing scaffolds and laying flagstones.
I passed through the cool, stony shade of the eastern gatehouse’s nearest tower room, stocked with spears, bows, quivers and swords, then out onto the parapet again across the backbone of the fortified gateway. I paused for a moment up there to gaze at the forest again. I saw no movement but the odd rustle of branches where a flight of tree swallows were swooping and darting in and out of view. Apart from their chattering and gurgling, and the spring song of the other birds and animals in that great, dense woodland, I heard nothing.
A dry smile played with one side of my lips. No raids for months, not a single tribesman had dared to approach. A warmth swaddled me – security such as this the Rhenus frontier had never before known.
I turned to look across the fortress, over the serried ranks of red-tiled barrack houses, to the western entrance – a reflection of this eastern one. Beyond those towering, iron-strapped gates, the mighty bridge stretched across the Rhenus, back to Colonia Agrippina on the western banks. That city, once a majestic stone and marble pearl in this green wilderness, was now the envious sibling of my creation. Divitia was no mere bridgehead on the Germanian side of the river; it was a great stele of my overlordship.
While legions were the mainstay of my army and the muscle behind my building works, it was the ranks of engineers who had designed the fortress and the bridge and overseen their construction. And as this thought crossed my mind, the central section of the bridge shuddered and moved – orchestrated by a chorus of cries and hoisted ropes and pulleys – opening ever so slowly like a set of gates to allow a patrol flotilla of biremes from the Classis Germanica to row upriver. I watched, transfixed, until the bridge gate was hauled shut once more nearly a half hour later.
What a wonder my people had constructed here, a wonder fitting of an emperor. And to think the bastard Galerius sneered at my claims to the Western throne. My teeth ground as my eyes lifted beyond the bridge and beyond Agrippina, to the south-western horizon… to think Maxentius, the cur lodged in Rome like a tick on a man’s neck, had dared to send a hired blade to cut me down. Ideas struck through my mind like tongues of fire: I had established my own school of agents – winter-cold assassins who could travel to Rome and do what Maxentius’ agent could not. I could order them to make it slow and painful. I could…
The swallows sped overhead, singing, their melody incongruous with my thoughts.
I stopped, sighed and partially doused the fiery notions by dropping my head and pinching thumb and forefinger together, that old trick that used to scatter my troubled thoughts – not so now.
It cannot have been Maxentius who sent that cut-throat. Unless… unless he has changed beyond all recognition?
The anger swelled again. I swung to face the north and stomped on through the second tower house, leaving the gate complex and going on along the eastern battlements towards the mid-tower and then the giant, bulging north-eastern corner tower. I thought my anger could not be topped, but then I heard a cry that dispelled that notion.
‘Bastard! ’
My brow tightened and I hopped up the few steps to come onto the circular, flagstoned roof of the corner tower. Three ballistae were mounted there, peeking over the sturdy parapet like hawks’ beaks, and the bull-like form of Batius was huddled over the central bolt thrower. The big man’s body jolted.
Whoosh! Thud!
‘Wodin’s balls! You massive bastard!’ a jagged shout came again from somewhere down on the ground outside the fort.
I strode up to the wall’s edge and peered down over the crenellations.
Krocus stood down there on the patch of ground cleared of trees. He wore a ruddy streak across his nose and cheeks like warpaint. Around him, three thick and lengthy ballistae bolts jutted proudly from the earth, the latest one still quivering where it had plunged into the soil, just a stride to Krocus’ left.
Batius’ face split into a haggard smile as he adjusted the angle of the huge ballista and winked to ensure the Regii leader was now firmly in his sights. ‘Heheh, you hairy, stinking, tree-shagging arsehole,’ Batius muttered under his breath.
I noticed that Krocus carried a handful of short sticks, each with a knotted coloured rag tied to it, in his hand. ‘Sighting and distance marking?’ I guessed. Batius turned, only now aware of my presence, and nodded. I cocked my head to one side. ‘Usually the practice involves letting the poor sod on the ground plant the sticks before you shoot.’
‘Usually,’ Batius grunted. ‘Thought this might save time, though. Look, we’re nearly done. But we can test it once more?’ he said, turning to me with the look of an excited – if grossly overgrown – boy.
‘One more bolt,’ I sighed as if speaking to little Crispus.
Batius poked his tongue between his teeth gleefully, his hand hovering over the holding peg. For a moment, Krocus’ eyes bulged and he flapped his hands before him like a shield. ‘What are you doing, you dog-ugly maniac?’ he squealed.
Batius chuckled again, then shifted the device on its rollers just a finger-width to the right. His hand dropped, knocking the holding peg free.
Whoosh! Thud!
What came from Krocus’ mouth next nearly peeled the paint from the shields of the legionaries lining Divitia’s curtain wall.
‘…and I’ll come up there, rip your bloody balls off and cook them in front of you…’
On it went.
Those watching and unfamiliar with this pair might well have expected blows to be traded – or worse. Their rivalry had certainly become ingrained – insults used by way of standard greeting, each slandering the other’s gods as if passing comment on the weather. Mars had become a curse-word to Krocus and Wodin likewise to Batius. I, being so close to both men – each of whom was a most trusted general – had seen more than the average passer-by. I saw their snatched glances at one another after battle or at the end of a hard day’s march. Admiration, respect… albeit loathingly offered. They were almost an illustration of my burgeoning army: heterogonous, embryonic… volatile.
Hooves clopping on timber yanked me from my musings. I turned to see two green-cloaked messenger-riders cantering across the bridge from Agrippina.
‘I’ll deal with this one, Domine,’ he said in a low drawl.
I blinked, seeing the riders enter the fort via the western gates. Dismounting, one of the fellows remained with the horses, hooded, while the other was led by two of my legionaries across to the foot of this tower before he disappeared into the stairwell.
Batius patted his scabbard and the dagger tucked into his boot. All messengers were put under extreme scrutiny now. My heart hardened at the thought that this might be another blade from Maxentius. You wouldn’t dare, cur.
The weak-chinned messenger rose from the darkness of the stairwell and stepped onto the rooftop, his face ruddy with the exertion of the five-storey climb. As well as the two legionaries flanking him, Krocus had come up too, his ire at Batius forgotten, his eyes hard upon the messenger.
‘Domine,’ the messenger gasped, stepping proud of his two-man escort and falling to one knee then flinching as Batius and Krocus stepped towards him and clasped their hands to their sword hilts. Looking up at the pair with wide eyes and a bulging Adam’s apple, he held out a scroll. ‘A message…’ he began.
My eyes tapered. From Rome?
‘From the East,’ he finished.
My eyes met with Batius’ and Krocus’. I had received not a word of communication from the East since my defiance of the proclamation of Carnuntum, since I rejected Galerius’ carefully worked calls for me to abdicate. Silence… apart from the slow, steady crunch, crunch of hobnailed boots as his puppet, Licinius, moved into position along my south-eastern borders. Where the Germanic threat ended, the Herdsman’s armies now swelled like wolves, some even spilling deep into Italia.
I could not stop one side of my top lip from flinching in hatred for all that bloated whoreson had done. I snorted mockingly, snatched the scroll from the messenger’s hand and unfurled it without ceremony, primed to be angered, certain it would be some demand for my throne and a threat of imminent invasion was I not to comply. It had been coming, after all, ever since Carnuntum.
But my eyes dragged across the script, the letters not matching my expectations. Not at all.
My flesh is weak and my time is short. I fear I may not see another summer after this one. I call upon you before the darkness claims me. Come, Constantine, Warden of the West, and speak with me. I wish to bring peace upon the empire. Let there be one last, amicable meeting…
‘You mean to trick me? You think me so gullible?’ I spat. But the wording was striking, more for the phrases that were absent: no self-proclamations as Parthicus Maximus, Gothicus Maximus, sired by Mars.
‘This is no trick, Domine,’ the messenger pleaded. ‘The Great Augustus has a short time to live. He is in torment, both from the agony of his condition and, and… from the memories that plague him.’
I showed the scroll to Batius and Krocus and strode round the kneeling herald. Batius let out a single, barking laugh. Krocus hitched himself, snorted and spat phlegm by the kneeling man’s side. I bored a fiery look into the rider. ‘Galerius calls me to the East, and he expects me to run to him like a dog?’
The messenger nodded. ‘He does, and he knew you would spurn his invite.’
I scoffed without a hint of mirth: ‘Galerius could send me his own mother as proof of his geniality and I would still not believe him.’
‘He knew it would take much for you to trust him,’ the messenger said, then stood – gingerly to appease Krocus and Batius – and waved down at his fellow rider on the fort floor.
My two generals looked with me, confused.
The man down there saw the signal, and drew down his hood to reveal a pale, gaunt and war-hardened face, ice-bright eyes, lips tight as a drawn bow, and thin, straight hair combed forward ascetically.
‘Glaucus!’ Batius and I half-whispered, half-gasped.
*
The fires in Divitia’s praetorium lit the austere grey room with a troop of dancing shadows. I had barely touched my meal of goose and leek stew. I had drained three cups of unwatered wine, however, and was eager for the slaves to return with more. I looked across the table at Glaucus again, my eyes narrowed as if sure that from a certain aspect I would see through his words. But the notion was absurd.
The centurion had served under me in the East, in the wars against the Goths and in the Persian struggle. A Christian, he had been one of the few to remain in Nicomedia, the epicentre of Galerius’ persecutions, while so many others fled. A man who hated the Herdsman with all of his being.
‘It is as the scroll suggests, Domine,’ Glaucus said in that expressionless way of his. He had shown little of any emotion in the time I had known him, and what little embers lived on in there had surely been quashed the day the persecutions took everything from him. ‘The Herdsman turns to penance at last. He understands his sins… now, at the end.’
‘Then he is dying?’
Glaucus’ mouth almost moved into a sad smile. ‘He has been dying from the moment he turned Diocletian’s mind towards the foul attacks on my kind. But his flesh? Yes, it rots and falls from his bones. He has even commissioned the building of a tomb-palace at Romulia in Moesia. He talks of nothing but what lies… beyond.’
‘How long: days, months?’
Glaucus sighed. ‘He is prone to exaggeration, as we both know. His blight has been with him for a long time already.’
I recalled the distended, ashen-skinned form I had faced last in the Alpine passes, when I had herded him on out of the West after his failed attempt to dislodge Maxentius from Rome. That was two years ago and still he clung to life.
‘But I do not doubt his fear that this summer will be his last.’
With a grunt and a shuffle, another voice interrupted: ‘This one and the other rider are hounds of the Herdsman. We should throw them in the cells,’ Krocus muttered from the edge of the room.
‘I would readily agree,’ I replied, speaking over my shoulder, ‘were this any other being from the East.’
‘You cannot think of travelling into his lair, Domine,’ Batius gasped from the other corner of the room, having remained silent since finishing his meal. ‘Remember the horrors we saw in Nicomedia? Remember all you risked, all you went through to escape it?’
I imagined the world once more, riven in three. Me, Maxentius, Galerius. It seemed that the great board was poised to lose one piece. Were Galerius to die, what chaos might ensue from the Herdsman’s mutts: Licinius and Daia? Despite his loathsome nature, Galerius was still the most senior of emperors. With his dying and repentant words, might he set aside his grievances and bestow order upon the warring world? It was a slim hope, but a stirring one.
Still locked in that gaze with Glaucus, I replied: ‘Only a fool would accept such an invite. Yet… I cannot afford to spurn it.’
‘Then what is it to be, Domine?’ Batius asked.
The fiery anger from before came back to me as I recalled the Herdsman’s threats against Mother, his subtle hints that Minervina and Crispus would fall at the end of his men’s blades, his gleeful overseeing of the brutal Christian executions… that snowy night when he tried to have me killed in the dining hall of Nicomedia’s palace. I imagined him in this new tomb-palace at Romulia… shivering and alone. It shames me to say the image conjured a dark smile onto my lips.
‘Let him rot,’ I said in a low growl, then stood and strode from the room.