Roma Eterna (21 page)

“But the message to the Sardinian commander was intercepted before it got to him,” Justina pointed out. “He doesn't know that he's supposed to bring his ships north.”

“Do you think they sent only one such message?”

“What if they did, and it was never intended to reach the Sardinian commander in the first place? I mean, what if it was a hoax?”

He stared. “A
hoax,
did you say?”

“Suppose that in fact there's no Greek fleet at all anchored west of Sardinia. But Andronicus wants us to think that there is, and therefore he had this fake message sent out for us to intercept, so that we'd get flustered and move troops toward Liguria to meet the nonexistent invasion force there. Which would open up a hole on one of the other fronts that his forces could stroll right through.”

What a bizarre notion! For a moment Antipater was taken aback by the thought that Justina could come up with anything so far-fetched. Far-fetched ideas were supposed to be
his
specialty, not hers. But then he felt a surge of delight and admiration at the fertility of her imagination.

He grinned at her in an access of overflowing love. “Oh, Justina! You really
are
a Greek, aren't you?”

A quick flash of surprise and puzzlement sparkled in the shining black depths of her eyes.

“What?”

“Subtle, I mean. Inscrutable. Dark and devious of thought. The mind that could hatch an idea like that—”

She did not seem flattered. Annoyed, rather: she responded with a quirk of the full lips, a toss of her head. The carefully appointed row of jet-black curls across her forehead was thrown into disarray. She swept them back into place with a crisp peremptory gesture. “If I could hatch it, so could the Basileus Andronicus. So could you, Lucius. It's perfectly obvious. Cook up a false message and deliberately let it be captured, precisely so that Caesar will go into a panic, and start pulling his forces away from places they ought to be and into places where they aren't needed.”

“Yes. Of course. But I think the message is genuine, myself.”

“Does Caesar? How did he react when you read it to him?”

“He pretended to be calm and cool and completely unruffled.”

“Pretended?”

“Pretended, yes. But his hand was shaking when he gave me the scroll. He already knew roughly what it said, and it frightened him.”

“He's an old man, Lucius.”

“Not really. Not in terms of years, anyway.” Antipater rose and went to the window, and stood there staring out into the gathering gray of dusk. The lights of the capital were beginning to gleam on the dark hills all around. A beautiful sight; he never tired of it. His place, well down the hill from the royal palace itself, was far from majestic, but it had a choice location in the quarter of the Palatine reserved for top-level civil servants. From his portico he could see the great grim bulk of the ancient Coliseum where it rose against the horizon, and the lower end of the Forum below it, and the nearby sector of the splendiferous jumbled arc of marbled buildings of all eras that stretched off to the east, awesome structures going back hundreds and hundreds of years: back, some of them, to the time of Augustus and Nero and the first Trajan.

He had been fifteen, a greenhorn from the not very significant city of Salona in the not very significant province of Dalmatia, when he first saw the city of Roma. He had never outgrown the wonder that the capital inspired in him, not even now, when he moved daily among the great men of the realm and had come to understand only too clearly how far from great in truth they were. Yes, of course, they were mere grasping mortals like everyone else. But the
city
was great, the greatest, indeed, that had ever existed in the world, or ever would.

Was all this to be looted and torched now by the triumphant Byzantines, as it had been by the Gauls, so it was said, sixteen hundred years before? Or—what was more
likely—would the Greeks just walk in and effortlessly take possession, destroying nothing, simply making themselves the masters of the city out of which their own empire had sprung once upon a time?

Justina came up behind him and pressed herself close. He felt her breasts flattening against his back. Their tips seemed to him to be hard.

Softly she said, “Lucius, what are we going to do now?”

“In the next five minutes, or the next three months?”

“You know what I mean.”

“If the Greeks take Roma, you mean?”

“Not if.
When
.”

He answered without turning toward her. “I don't actually think that will happen, Justina.”

“You just said that there's no way we can defend ourselves against attacks coming from three directions at once.”

“I know. But I want to believe that I'm wrong. The Emperor has called a meeting of the Great Council first thing tomorrow, and maybe someone's got a battle plan that I don't know about.”

“Or maybe not.”

“Even so,” Antipater said. “Let's say that the worst happens: that they march against the city and we surrender, and the Greeks take control of the Western Empire. Nothing much should change, if they do. They're civilized people, after all. They might even want to keep the Emperor around as a puppet ruler, if he's willing. In any event they'll still need civil servants who are fluent in both languages. My position should be safe.”

“And mine?”

“Yours?”

“You're a Roman citizen, Lucius. You look like a Greek, yes, and why not, considering that your people came originally from Syria—from Antioch, isn't that so? But your family's been living in the Western Empire for centuries and centuries and you were born in a Roman province. Whereas I—”

“You're Roman too.”

“Yes, if you believe that Byzantines are Romans just because they say that their country is the Roman Empire and their emperor calls himself King of the Romans. But Greek is what they speak and Greek is what they are. And I'm a Greek, Lucius.”

“A naturalized citizen of Roma, though.”

“Am I?”

Startled, he swung around to face her. “You are, aren't you?”

“What I am is an Asian Greek. That isn't any secret. My family's from Ephesus, originally. When my father's shipping business went bad we moved to Athens and he started over. When he lost three ships in the same storm he went bankrupt and we left for the Western Empire to escape his creditors. I was three years old then. We lived in Syracusae in Sicilia at first, and then in Neapolis, and after my father died I moved to Roma. But nowhere along the way did I become a Roman citizen.”

“I never knew that,” Antipater said.

“Well, you do now.”

“All the same, what does it matter?”

“It doesn't, maybe, so long as Maximilianus is Emperor. But what happens after the Byzantines take over? Can't you figure that out, Lucius? A Botaniates who sleeps with Romans? They'll punish me as a traitor!”

“Nonsense. Roma's full of Greeks. Always has been. Syrian Greeks, Armenian Greeks, Aegyptian Greeks, Cappadocian Greeks, even Greek Greeks. Once Andronicus's crowd is in charge, they won't care a rat's ass who was sleeping with whom.”

But she clung to him, terrified. He had never seen her like this. “How do you know? I'm afraid of what might happen. Let's run away, Lucius. Before they get here.”

“And go where?”

“Does it matter? Somewhere. Anywhere. Just so long as it's far from here.”

He wondered how he could calm her. She seemed to be in the grip of inordinate unthinking fear. Her face was pale, her eyes had a glassy sheen, her breath was coming in little sobbing gusts.

“Please, Justina.
Please
.”

He took her hands in his for a moment, then slid his fingers up her arms until they rested along her collarbones. Tenderly he kneaded the muscles of her neck, trying to soothe her. “Nothing will happen to us,” he said gently. “The Empire hasn't fallen yet, for one thing. It isn't necessarily going to, despite the way everything looks right now. It's survived some pretty bad things in the past and it may well survive this. The Basileus Andronicus might drop dead tomorrow. The sea might swallow his fleet the way it did your father's ships. Or Jupiter and Mars might suddenly appear in front of the Capitol and lead us to a glorious victory. Anything might happen. I don't know. But even if the Empire does fall, it won't be the end of the world, Justina. You and I will be all right.” He stared intensely into her eyes. Could he make her believe something that he didn't fully believe himself? “You—and—I—will—be—all—right—”

“Oh, Lucius—”

“We'll be all right. Yes.” Antipater folded her small body up against his and held her close until her breathing sounded normal again and he could feel her taut frame beginning to relinquish its tension. And then—a transition so swift that it almost made him want to chuckle—her entire body softened and her hips began to move slowly from side to side. She pressed herself close, wriggling in unmistakable invitation. Her eyes were closed, her nostrils were distended, her tongue flickered like a serpent's between her lips. Yes. Yes. Everything
would
be all right, somehow. They would close the walls in around themselves and ignore all that was going on outside. “Come,” he said. He drew her toward the waiting bedchamber.

 

The Great Council of State assembled at the second hour of morning in the grand velvet-hung chamber known as the Hall of Marcus Anastasius on the northern side of the Imperial palace. Both Consuls were there, and half a dozen senior figures of the Senate, and Cassius Cestianus, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Cocceius Maridianus, the Secretary for Home Affairs, and seven or eight other government ministers as well, and a formidable battery of retired generals and naval officers. So, too, were the key members of the Imperial household: Aurelius Gellius, the Praetorian Prefect, and Domitius Pompeianus, the Master of Latin Letters, and Quintilius Vinicius, the Keeper of the Imperial Treasury, and more. To Antipater's astonishment, even Germanicus Antoninus Caesar, the Emperor's rascally younger brother, had come. His presence was appropriate, since at least in theory he was the heir to the throne; but never had Antipater seen that wastrel prince at any sort of council meeting before, nor, to Antipater's recollection, had Germanicus ever been visible in public at all at such an early hour of the day. When he came sauntering in now, it caused a palpable stir.

The Emperor began the proceedings by asking Antipater to read the captured Greek scroll aloud.

“Demetrios Chrysoloras, Grand Admiral of the Imperial Fleet, to His Excellency Nicholas Chalcocondyles of Trebizond, Commander of Western Naval Forces, greetings! Be advised by these documents, O Nicholas, of the unanswerable will of His Most Puissant Imperial Majesty and Supreme Master of All Regions, Andronicus Maniakes, who by the grace of God holds the exalted title of King of the Romans and Lord Autocrat of—”

“Will you spare us this Greek foolishness, Antipater, and get to the essence of the matter?” came a drawling voice from the side of the chamber.

Antipater, rattled, looked up. His eyes met those of Germanicus Caesar. It was he who had spoken. The Em
peror's brother, lounging in his chair as though at a banquet, was rouged and pomaded to gaudy effect, and his purple-edged white robe was rumpled and stained with wine. Antipater understood now how Germanicus had managed to be here at this early hour: he had simply come directly to the palace after some all-night party.

The prince, smirking at him across the room, made a little impatient circling gesture with his hand. Obediently Antipater skimmed silently through the rest of the flourish of Byzantine pomp with which the letter opened and began reading again from the middle of the scroll:

“—to hoist anchor forthwith and undertake the northerly road, keeping well clear of Corsica isle, so that you journey straightaway to the Ligurian province of the Western Empire and make yourself the master of the ports of Antipolis and Nicaea—”

There was murmuring in the chamber already. These people had no need of maps in order to visualize the maritime movements that were involved. Or to grasp the nature of the danger to the city of Roma that the presence of a Greek fleet in those waters would pose.

Antipater closed the scroll and put it down.

The Emperor looked toward him and said, “Would you say, Antipater, that this document is authentic?”

“It's written in good upper-class Byzantine Greek, majesty. I don't recognize the handwriting, but it's that of a capable scribe, the sort who'd be attached to an important admiral's staff. And the seal looks like a genuine one.”

“Thank you, Antipater.” Maximilianus sat quietly for a moment, staring into the distance. Then he let his gaze travel slowly along the rows of Roma's great leaders. At last it came to bear on the frail figure of Aurelianus Arcadius Ablabius, who had had command of the Tyrrhenian Sea fleet until his retirement to the capital for reasons of health a year before. “Explain to me, Ablabius, how a Byzantine armada could make its way up from Sicilia to
the Sardinian coast without our so much as noticing the fact. Tell us about the Empire's naval bases along the west coast of Sardinia, if you will, Ablabius.”

Ablabius, a thin, chalk-white man with pale blue eyes, moistened his lips and said, “Majesty, we
have
no significant naval bases on the west coast of Sardinia. Our ports are Calaris in the southeast and Olbia in the northeast. We have small outposts at Bosa and Othoca in the west, nothing more. The island is desolate and unhealthy and we have not seen the need to fortify it greatly.”

“Under the assumption, I suppose, that our enemies of the Eastern Empire were not likely to slip around us and attack us from the west?”

“This is so, majesty,” said Ablabius, visibly squirming.