I stood by the tall, arched window on the mezzanine of Treverorum’s mint, gazing into space. An acrid tang of furnace smoke hung in the blistering air. Smelters worked the ovens on the floors below, melting down old silver coins, coins sporting Maximian’s image on one side and mine on the other – all merely to produce a new batch of monies of equal value for no gain. Why? Well, the coinage had to change: for one thing, no longer could I lean on Maximian’s noble lineage, now that I had ended my father-in-law’s life. But that wasn’t all. My teeth ground as I recalled the sight in the days after we returned to Treverorum: my soldiers dragging the hidden money chests from the cellars of Maximian’s villa.
It had been the old bastard’s final slight! In his years at my court, it turned out, he had been hoarding a slice of my coffers – intercepting taxes and working with venal administrators to line their private treasuries and his. When those corrupt administrators had been brought before me, many of my courtiers demanded their deaths in forfeit. They might have thought me lenient or soft in letting the curs live, but they hadn’t seen the innards of the British tin mines that I instead sent the felons to: like the guts of a giant, slumbering beast; eternal darkness, toxic air and space enough only to scurry like rats. Those wretches would live for a few years in such squalor there, I reckoned, in chains, scraping endlessly at the seams, losing their sight and then their minds.
My top lip twitched: their fate would have been fitting for Maximian too. But it was too late for that: he was gone – and the old rogue would no doubt have blocked the mine tunnels with his flaccid body anyway. This thought made me laugh, or snort in derision at least. I glanced around the mint: re-minting the coins was my final retort, my way of grinding his memory into the dirt.
One smelter brought a barrow of round silver planchets up the ramp to the mezzanine, where my minters were seated cross-legged before me, taking advantage of the light from the window. They worked in a steady, slow rhythm, each lifting a single blank silver planchet – still hot from the smelting process – from the barrow with tongs, placing the unmarked disc upon the anvil die mounted on a post between their knees, then aligning the opposing trussel die over the disc like a stake, before striking down with their hammers.
Tink, tink, tink…
Three more silver denarii. The trough in front of the artisans now bore a small ridge of the currency, each and every coin bearing my profile and my title… my true and rightful title.
Augustus.
Aye, Augustus. For that was my title, my station, my birthright. No more self-doubt; that had been shed in the odd shrine on the road from Massilia. Augustus I had been proclaimed by my father’s troops when he died. Augustus, a title Galerius had tried to deny me. Augustus, I would remain.
I stepped forward, lifting one still-hot coin from the pile, tossing it over and over in my hand, seeing my effigy there once, twice, thrice… then it landed on the opposite side, embossed with the face I had chosen to replace and besmirch Maximian’s with: that of a long-dead ruler. Claudius Gothicus – conqueror of the barbarian hordes over forty years ago. Ruler of a united empire. One of the last true emperors before the rise of Diocletian and his toxic Tetrarchy.
The idea had sat awkwardly with me at first, when my advisors had put it before me in the planning room at the palace. But they had drawn up a convincing argument: firstly, I needed to repaint my lineage, replace the vacuum left by the dead Maximian; secondly, they plied me with rhetoric, strong oratory insisting that my father had the blood of Claudius Gothicus in him and thus so did I. The case was well argued, citing nieces and marriages who could be traced back to a forgotten brother of Claudius Gothicus. In my heart of hearts I knew it was unlikely – for Father’s mind was twisted and tormented by the very lack of such noble lineage – so much so that he had estranged Mother and me to marry into the Tetrarchic line. Yet I embraced my advisors’ theory. Why? Because the very fact they had tried to piece together my lineage like this demonstrated how devoted, how utterly loyal, they were.
And that all came back to the happenings at the broken shrine. The small knot of men who had witnessed the laurel wreath of light passing over my head had not been slow in spreading the word. The citizens and the legions far and wide had heard the tale: their emperor had been crowned in divine light at the threshold of an ancient shrine. The pontifices and haruspices of Treverorum, of Avaricum and Lutetia Parisiorum took leave of their temples to gather at my court. These oft-self-absorbed priests and diviners wore looks of wonder as they beheld me and asked me to recount the story. Even the Christian bishops, Maternus and Ossius, had journeyed to Treverorum to ask me what I thought it might mean… or, as it played out, to tell me what it meant. The numerals of light that had passed across my chest – XXX – foretold of a thirty-year reign for the one chosen by the Christian God. Now the clerics of the old ways were none too pleased at the bishops’ proclamations, insisting instead that Mars was behind it all. But despite their difference, they were engrossed, intrigued, taking up residence in my palace for the month. They were with me.
I tossed and caught the coin again and looked from the window, across Treverorum’s frosty rooftops, to the palace, rising high above all else. Up on the balcony there I saw a lone figure, swaddled in black, outlined by the unbroken white clouds. The wintry breeze lifted her hair gently as she stared into eternity, or maybe just into the very recent past. With my crowning at the shrine, I had won the hearts of my people, it seemed, but that of my young wife remained adrift.
I turned from the window and flitted down the ramp, leaving the mint to walk through the bitter winter air, feeling the eyes of the many on me. The two Cornuti – my ever-present shadows – came with me as I made my way back to the palace. I wasn’t even sure why I was returning there: to try to converse with Fausta again? But what use when these days our conversations were so very different from times past. Prosaic, without emotion and skirting around the death of her father. And Crispus was taking after his adoptive mother, the light rarely in his eyes now.
Inside the palace gardens, I stopped by the skeletal orchard, recalling the earlier days when I helped Fausta and Crispus pick pears. The memory of their lilting chat and laughter brought a melancholy upon me.
‘The fruits will bud again,’ a voice said.
I turned to see old Lactantius shuffling towards me. ‘Things will be right, given time,’ he said, making eyes at the balcony and the black shape that was Fausta. Crispus was with her now, and I saw him looking sadly down at me through the balustrade’s green-veined marble pillars.
‘She is lost to me,’ I said flatly. ‘She is no fool. She understands why I did what I did, but knows also we cannot be what we once were.’
‘She does not understand you,’ he corrected me. ‘Few could. In truth, only the handful of men who have ever been burdened with the imperial purple might. Give her time, Constantine. Time will blunt her grief.’
‘Nearly five moons have passed!’ I snapped. But I noticed his attentions had wandered, an eyebrow arching at the new coin I was still toying with in my hand.
‘You disapprove,’ I stated, no hint of a question about it.
‘For once, no,’ he said, taking the silver denarius and holding the side with the face of Claudius Gothicus up. ‘These will travel far and wide and tell the world: Constantine is no black offshoot of the Tetrarchic weed, of the foul persecutors. Your father resisted Tetrarchic policy. You, Constantine, can smash it, consign its dark legacy to the dust.’
A frisson of pride shot through me. ‘You could have been a fine general.’ I smiled.
‘I choose to spar with words, Constantine.’ He grinned. ‘When Diocletian formed the Tetrarchy, he boasted of the concordia ,’ Lactantius said, ‘the unity it would bring.’
I thought of the civil strife that had racked the empire in the time since: outrageously debased coinage, famine, power struggles, men being burned alive and peeled of their skin in the name of faith and empire, riots, cities in flames. ‘And the Tetrarchy failed, utterly.’
Lactantius nodded in contemplation. ‘As have the Tetrarchic gods. Jove, Hercules – their time has passed. The era of the four emperors has shown that. Where was the favour of either divinity during the wretched decades we have both lived through?’
‘I refuse to believe concordia cannot be attained. This empire knew peace and greatness once before and it can be so again,’ I insisted.
‘Of course it can,’ Lactantius laughed gently. ‘Don’t you see? You can be the one to change the world. Virgil, the great bard, once preached about the birth of a child who would bring peace to the earth.’
I tried to interrupt with a dismissive laugh but he held up one taut finger to silence me, then continued: ‘But you must ask yourself: where might concordia be found?’
I smiled dryly. ‘You led me into a maze once more, old tutor, a maze that ends at the feet of the Christ, I suspect.’
Lactantius’ gaze was probing, searching. ‘We all wander in a maze, Constantine. Where each of us will emerge, is down to our actions, our choices.’
I recalled from my boyhood my own words to Mother on the night of the storm. What brings a man to choose his god?
Lactantius, damn him, seemed to hear my thoughts. ‘Your men – the ones who were with you at the shrine. What did they see when you emerged from its door?’
‘A message from a god,’ I said.
‘Which god?’
My mind walked backwards until I remembered: the staring, awestruck eyes, the whispering lips. ‘They each saw different gods. Krocus thought it was a shrine to Sol Invictus. Batius knew it was Apollo’s temple, and he seems certain it was the sun god’s blessing. My legionaries whispered words of worship to Mars, some to your Christ, some to Mithras, even.’
‘And who is Sol Invictus? God of the sun? Is that not Apollo also? And does not Mars Neton wear a radiant crown? Mithras too – is he not the God of the light? And would it surprise you to know that the rays of the sun are thought to be the light of—-’
‘Of Christ himself,’ I finished for him, knowing well the oft-repeated mantra.
‘… falling every night as he did on the cross and rising again the following morning?’ Lactantius concluded with a hint of a smile.
‘The sun holds the hearts of many, it would seem,’ I shrugged in agreement.
‘Unity,’ he whispered, then leaned a little closer, ‘Concordia. ’