Conspiracies of Rome (35 page)

    He fell silent. He sat looking at me for what seemed a long time. At last, my will snapped, and I asked: ‘You may not know, but what do
you
think was in the letters?’

    ‘If I thought anything clearly, my golden boy from the North,’ he smiled back at me, ‘would I be so eager to learn it from you?’

    ‘This conversation,’ he said at length, ‘is private. If you care for your new friend Basilius, you will keep all this to yourself. As for the letter you had me sign, bear in mind it is a sword with two edges.’

    He called one of his slaves over with more fizzy water. By the time I staggered out of his suite, I was bursting.

34

I fell sweating into my bed. My mind was racing, and I thought for a moment I’d not get to sleep. But I no sooner had the covers pulled up than I was out like an extinguished lamp.

    I had the strangest dream. I was back outside that wine shop on the Caelian Hill. It was night, and there was no moon overhead. I was with Lucius and Martin beside the broken sewer. Martin was holding a torch that burned without any noticeable flame. All around was still and silent.

    The sewer was different. Rather than terminating about six foot down in a thick layer of earth and rotting filth, it was too deep to see the bottom. A cold draught blew steadily up at us, carrying the faint smell of something very old and frightening. A flight of worn steps led down into the mobile blackness. They went down and down, seemingly far beyond the range of the light from our single torch.

    ‘Go on, Martin,’ I urged. ‘Go down there and have a look. We’ll be up here for you, and you can assuredly trust us to come down if you get lost.’

    Martin looked at me with doubt showing plain on his face.

    ‘Go on,’ Lucius joined me in urging. ‘There might be something valuable down there, and we’ll let you share it with us.’ He spoke in the cold, peremptory tone he always adopted with slaves.

    At last, after a brief shove from Lucius, Martin went down into the shadows. Before setting foot on the steps, he handed me the torch, and I saw his pale, scared face as he walked down into the endless blackness of the sewer.

    We could hear his footsteps crunching lightly on the various mortar crumbs and other débris that lay on the steps.

    ‘It’s very dark down here,’ he cried up plaintively. ‘Can I come back up and borrow the torch? I can’t see anything.’

    ‘You’ve started now,’ Lucius replied firmly. ‘You’ve got to see it out.’

    Down and down he went, until we could hear nothing more of him. There followed an interminable wait in which Lucius and I speculated on what might have happened below.

    ‘Are you all right, Martin?’ I called softly down. ‘Have you found anything down there?’

    No answer.

    The darkness within the shadow of the sewer grew more intense, and I noticed that the torch was beginning to fade without burning out.

    Suddenly, at what sounded an incredible distance, we heard footsteps ascending. These were not the light, hesitant steps we had heard going down, but a slow, regular tread crunching heavily on the steps.

    ‘Is that you, Martin?’ I called down nervously.

    No answer – only the same tread coming steadily closer up the steps.

    ‘It is him,’ Lucius said with trembling voice. ‘He’s just trying to frighten us.

    ‘I’ll have him flogged when he comes out.’

    At this point, the torch went out, and we stood in utter darkness.

    The footsteps were now just a few yards below, and I could hear something brushing on the steps as if dragged behind. Without seeing or hearing or smelling anything new, I had the impression of something unspeakably old and unspeakably evil.

    Lucius and I bolted. We ran back down the street, looking for the security of Marcella’s house. There was a wall across the street where there had been nothing before. In the centre of the wall was a small gate. Lucius dragged it open, and we ran through into the clear street beyond.

    The street was now filled with a dense, white mist. We ran forward and lost each other. I called for Lucius, but heard nothing back. I could now hear nothing except my own breathing.

    I ran towards what I believed was the turning for Marcella’s. I came to the gateway in. Gasping for breath, I pushed on the gate and staggered into what should have been the common entrance. Instead, I found myself back beside the sewer. If I’d turned back on myself, the gateway had somehow expanded into something much larger than we’d found the other side.

    Though all was dark again, I could somehow see around me. I recall seeing the torch where I’d dropped it. Though all was quiet, I knew I was not alone. There was something very big and very powerful behind me. I dared not turn round.

    I cannot describe the terror that I felt. It had been growing from the moment Martin had vanished into the darkness, and now it had overwhelmed me, depriving me of the ability or the will to do other than stand looking forward at the dark gash of the broken sewer.

    I heard a rough scraping behind me, as of something heaving itself over the paving stones. I felt a chilled breath on my neck. There was a smell as of something pulled from a very old grave. And there were words as well.

    I didn’t catch these. As soon as I heard them, the mists closed in around me, and I was lifted suddenly away. Before all went black around me, I could see the rooftops of the Caelian glowing white under the moonless sky.

    Unlike with the similar dreams I’d had back in Richborough, I was too old to wake screaming from this one. But it took some while after I did wake to assure myself completely that none of it had really happened. I lay alone in the darkness, freezing and unfreezing from the terror that still lingered.

    I tried to get back to sleep. But my mind was racing. I lay alone, my thoughts turning again and again to that awful dreamscape.

    I got up and put on some clothes. I did think to go out for a walk. But I’d have to wake the old watchman. Then I’d have the streets of Rome to face all by myself. I didn’t want that. I stirred up the charcoals in the brazier, then lit a lamp from them. Some of the books I’d got from Anicius were piled up next door in my office. But, for all they’d enchanted me in the daylight, there was nothing there now that seemed likely to soothe my ragged nerves.

    I opened the door from my suite into the corridor. All was dark and silent. Walking carefully, so as not to make any noise on the floorboards, I moved down the corridor. With the key I’d got out of Marcella, I let myself into Maximin’s rooms.

    Once the door was closed behind me, I turned up the lamp and looked around. The dispensator’s men had swept it almost clean enough for re-letting. Still uncleaned from when he’d first set them out for me to trip over, Maximin’s boots stood by the bed. A bronze pen I’d seen him use in Canterbury was neatly set beside some waxed tablets. I looked at these. They were new and had never been used. Otherwise, there was nothing to show the room had been occupied by Maximin.

    I sat on a chair and looked at the boots. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about those fucking letters?’ I asked softly. ‘Why did you have to keep them to yourself? At the very worst, we’d have been killed together. Even that would have been better than this. But you know we’d have come up with something. You know we always used to come up with something. We could have burnt the letters. We could have sold them to the highest bidder. We could have  . . .’

    I trailed off. I pulled my indoor clothes closer to me against the night chill and sat now in silence, looking at the streaks of uncleaned mud on the boots.

    My thoughts wandered back to happier times. There was our first day of really good weather in Italy. We’d crept round the Alps, hugging the sea on our way in from southern France. At some point along the road, we’d come to a worn boundary stone, showing that we were now within the ancient provinces of Italy.

    These had, Maximin explained, once been uniquely privileged in terms of citizenship and immunity from tribute. Rome had grown from a city state to the head of an Italian federation. And it might have remained the capital of a united Italy, but for a course of rapid conquest that had stretched its limits from the Tees to the Euphrates. Now, the conquests were long since reversed. Even before then, the unique status of Italy had been abolished in a world of universal citizenship and liability to taxes. But the stone remained.

    ‘It makes no difference to me,’ I’d said, looking at the invisible line Maximin had drawn across the road. ‘The trees on each side are the same. The rain is still coming down like it does in Kent, and from skies the same colour.’

    ‘Just wait,’ Maximin had said.

    I had waited. A few days later, I’d crawled from under the trees where we’d dossed for the night, and looked into a morning that reminded me of the lightest and most sparkling cider. It was like that morning I’ve already described on the road – but I was seeing it for the first time.

    I don’t know how long I’d stood wondering at the glory that Nature had strewn unexpectedly all about me. But Maximin at last had come up beside me. ‘Didn’t I tell you Italy was worth a look?’ he’d asked with the pride of a native.

    ‘Why did you ever set out for England?’ I’d enquired, holding up a hand to shield me from the light of the rising sun.

    ‘We all have our reasons for leaving home,’ he’d answered with a faint smile. ‘It’s for each of us to say whether we go to better or to worse.

    ‘Which will it be for you?’

    I hadn’t answered. But the sudden joy and hope of that morning in early spring was all the answer anyone could wish for.

    We’d set out along the road with renewed energy. Maximin had even sung, and I’d croaked along beside him with the closing uncertainties of my late-breaking voice. It had seemed we were advancing into paradise.

    Now, I sat alone, amid the ruins of this city of cities – and perhaps amid the ruins of all hope. ‘I will avenge you,’ I said to the boots.

    The boots said nothing back.

    ‘I will avenge you,’ I said again, speaking up to try and fill the void of silence all about me.

    The problem was that I was no longer clear that I could avenge him. With every step I’d made on the road to knowledge since I’d sworn to Maximin’s body, my conviction that I could grasp the final truth had ebbed further away. Whatever facts Lucius and I could bring to the growing structure of knowledge, who had killed Maximin and why remained mysteries wrapped in the deepest shadows.

    I knew he’d been killed for those bastard letters. But it was plain whoever had killed him hadn’t managed to lay hands on them. It was plain the letters contained important matters of state. The emperor’s agents were after them with frantic determination. The exarch of Africa’s man was promising untold wealth probably for just a sight of them. I had no doubt the Church was after them – why else strip these rooms so bare? Just as plainly, no one had yet found them.

    What had Maximin done with the things?

    As for what they contained, I couldn’t begin to think of an answer. Even Lucius couldn’t tell me that. I knew he was fussing on about not making hypotheses without evidence. But it struck me he was making a virtue of necessity – refusing to speculate on matters that were as much beyond his understanding as mine.

    What I needed, of course, was some solid fact. The letters would certainly help. If I could know what was in them, I’d be able to work out why they were so important and to whom. In the absence of those, I needed something else that would at least point me clearly in the right direction.

    ‘What did you do with the fucking things?’ I asked out loud of the boots.

    No answer.

    It was now that I heard a scratching at the door. It was very gentle, and I thought at first it was a mouse in the room. But it was on the door. I froze, my thoughts wandering stupidly back to that dream. Then I heard a movement of the latch, and the door was pushed cautiously open.

    ‘Oh, it is you, sir,’ Gretel said with relief in her voice. ‘I heard noises from downstairs. I was frightened thieves might have broken in.’

    Not much of a lie, I thought indulgently. The slave quarters were far distant from the guest areas of the house. I’d have needed to make a great deal more noise than I had for anything to reach her. And what would a lone woman be doing if thieves were a genuine fear?