Swords Around the Throne (35 page)

The alley was narrow and stank of fish and decaying rubbish. Stepping to either side of the gutter that ran down the middle, Castus turned the corner at the bottom and saw the boy dodging out through one of the low arches in the harbour wall. Three bored soldiers on guard, but they weren't keeping a close watch on anyone leaving, and gave Castus only the slightest scrutiny as he passed them.

Beyond the arch the street led between the crumbling brickwork of a pair of warehouses built against the wall, then out onto the open quayside. For a moment Castus paused to look across the water at the mass of anchored shipping in the harbour, the masts and rigging black and spidery against the evening sky. Then he glanced to his right and saw the boy waving to him from along the quayside. The warehouses here were fronted by wine shops and eating houses, sailors and off-duty soldiers crowding the benches outside. The cobbles were slick and greasy underfoot.

Castus followed the boy up the quay and saw him stop before the open front of one of the taverns towards the end of the row. A man stepped out onto the quay, glanced at Castus and then tossed a coin; the boy caught it and darted away. It was Flaccianus, Castus realised as he approached. And, stepping from the tavern behind him, the hulking bodyguard Glaucus.

For a moment Castus stood still, his palm closing around the hilt of the sword beneath his cloak. Flaccianus gave him a quick nod and a smile, jerked his thumb towards the interior of the tavern, then turned and moved away down the quay with his bodyguard swaggering after him.

Castus took a long deep breath, his senses alert for danger. The tavern looked innocuous: to the side of the entrance was a smoking griddle, strips of fish blackening over the glowing charcoal. The word ‘TRITON' was painted on the cracked plaster above the wide doorway, and a crude black and white mosaic covering the threshold showed a plump sea god cramming his mouth with fish. Castus moved closer, into the spit and smoke of the grill, and stared into the dark throat of the tavern. There were figures hunched over tables in the gloom. A last quick glance up and down the quayside, and Castus stepped inside.

Once his eyes had adjusted he found Nigrinus quickly enough; he was only man sitting by himself, at a small round table in a booth off the main room. On the table was a jug of wine, three clay cups and a wooden platter of food.

‘Grilled squid,' the notary said, gesturing to the platter as Castus sat down. ‘Try some. They cook it with a lot of spice here. Flaccianus did not care for it.'

‘I don't care much for him,' Castus said. ‘Or his friends.'

‘Ah, yes,' Nigrinus said. ‘Your last meeting with them was rather unfortunate. We must aim to avoid any further such misunderstandings.'

Castus tightened his jaw and exhaled slowly through his nose.
No
, he thought,
I won't forgive you that easily. I won't forgive you at all
. He poured himself a cup of wine, concentrating on keeping his hand steady and not letting his anger show.

‘You wanted me for something?' he said.

‘I do,' the notary replied. The casual tone had drained from his voice now. When Castus glanced up he saw that the man's face, usually so bland and inscrutable, was lined and hollowed by fatigue. He felt a pang of satisfaction, although he knew it was not a good sign.

‘You've been surveying the walls, the defences,' Nigrinus said quietly. Castus nodded. No surprise that the notary had been informed of his activities. ‘What do you think?' Nigrinus asked. ‘Would they stand a siege?'

Castus sipped the thin sour wine, then peered around the room behind him. Darkness cloaked them, and the noise of the men talking around the fish-grill covered their conversation. Nobody was close enough to hear what they were saying.

‘Probably,' he said. ‘The walls are sound, the gates too. There are men enough to man the ramparts. There are no engines, no ballistae, but Constantine doesn't have any either.'

Nigrinus nodded. ‘And the troops, do they seem loyal to...
our friend
?'

‘Hard to say. They've been paid, they've got good billets, and they're in a strong position. No reason they shouldn't hold it. I hear Constantine's men are already on half-rations.'

‘Naturally, I hear the same,' Nigrinus said with a creased grimace. ‘I'm not interested in what you've
heard
, soldier. I want to know what you've
seen
. Could the city be taken by assault?'

‘Of course it could,' Castus told him, refusing to rise to the goad. ‘But it would be hard. Far better to blockade the place and wait for treachery from within.'

Nigrinus narrowed his lips, opened his mouth and closed it again. His thinking face, Castus guessed. He felt a knot of irritation twist in his gut.

‘What are you planning?' he hissed, leaning closer over the table. ‘Tell me now... If you want me to kill him...'

‘No!' the notary exclaimed, raising a finger. ‘Nothing like that! And you must restrain your barbarian friend too... No, if anything of that sort occurred it would seem an act of private revenge, or the deed of a madman. Only the rightful emperor can judge, only he can pass sentence. This must be
seen
to happen, do you understand?'

Oh yes, Castus thought as he sat back from the table. He understood very well what the notary was saying. He had the brief sickening intuition that this too had been planned, this too was part of the game.

‘Then what?' he said. ‘We just wait?'

‘Not for too long. The enemy has agents in Constantine's camp. If they sense it could be accomplished, they will murder him. Then Maximian will be the only man with imperial authority...'

‘Infernal gods,' Castus said under his breath. ‘You
know
this?'

‘I believe it. Retreating this far south was not entirely accidental. Constantine is far from his base, far from the bulk of his army and the provinces most loyal to him. Here we are closer to Italy, and to Maxentius... If the emperor was struck down by somebody close to him...'

‘But it was you who warned him. You sent him the message, and that was how he was able to march south so soon.'

‘Not I,' the notary said. ‘Since I left Treveris I've had no contact with the imperial staff. I confess I have no idea how Constantine managed to act so quickly. Perhaps indeed the gods send him messages in dreams... But he is in danger here all the same.'

Castus nodded. ‘Then whatever we do has to happen soon,' he said.

‘I've been working, these past days,' the notary said. ‘Probing. Trying to determine who among the usurper's people is weakest, who might betray him. So far I have discovered little. But when I do – and be certain I will – then I may need you to act. Are you ready?'

‘Always.' A thought struck Castus. He glanced around the smoky tavern again, then looked back at the notary. ‘What about the emperor's wife, Fausta? Is she loyal to her father?'

He caught Nigrinus's brief flicker of a smile. ‘Perhaps you might know more about that than I?' the notary said. For the first time he appeared genuinely amused.

‘That was you, then, last autumn? Your plan?'

‘Oh, come!' Nigrinus said, feigning an expression of pique. ‘Surely you don't think I could have arranged anything as crude, as... sordid? Why would I?'

‘But you knew about it.'

‘I discovered traces of it, afterwards. I believe Gorgonius was behind it. You may kill him, by all means, if you get a chance. As for the nobilissima femina: she is a woman, and young. Barely more than a child. I doubt she has wits enough to rebel against her father. And if she did, what could she accomplish?'

Maybe so, Castus thought. A sense of hopeless despair rose through him. Truly they were all at the mercy of the gods. He drank more wine.

‘The most important thing, for now, is that you hold yourself in readiness, and resist the urge to make any rash attempts of your own,' the notary said. ‘Things are most delicately balanced. Some clumsy gesture could do more harm than good...'

Castus glanced at him quickly over the rim of his cup. The notary seemed almost to be talking in his sleep, or to himself.

‘Excuse me a moment,' Nigrinus said, rubbing the heel of his palm across his eyes. ‘I will not be long.'

He got up, circling the table, and paced quickly through a door at the back of the room. Castus remained seated, sipping wine, but turned his body so he could watch both doors. Laughter came from the crowd around the griddle, and beyond them Castus could see the deep blue of evening darkening into night. He ate a little of the grilled squid on the platter. Then he got up and followed Nigrinus.

The doorway led to a short narrow passage, then a second door into an open yard. There was a harsh briny stink of rotting rubbish and old fish. Castus stood braced in the doorway, staring around the yard. Two men suddenly lurched through a low opening to the right. Their filthy leather aprons and grey tunics marked them out as municipal slaves, and they were lugging stained wooden buckets.

‘Mind yourself, citizen,' one of them said, and Castus stepped back as the smell of stewing urine hit him. The opening led to the tavern lavatory, and the slaves were collecting the urine for the city fulleries. They stumbled out though a gate in the far wall of the yard, and Castus saw them tipping the brimming buckets into a tub in the alley beyond. Then they lifted the tub on poles between them and moved away down the lane out of sight.

Stepping to the right, Castus glanced into the lavatory. Flies whirled up from the wooden toilet holes. Back into the yard, he leaned from the rear gate and looked in both directions along the alley. But Nigrinus was gone.

* * *

The night was warm, and the air felt greasy with the breath of the sea as Castus passed back through the gate in the harbour wall and up the narrow alleys to the main street of Massilia. Still plenty of people about, mainly soldiers and dock labourers who had been working on the fortifications all day and were now enjoying their few hours of leisure; raucous laughter came from the bars on the alley corners, and from a distant side street came the noise of an argument breaking into violence. But still no sign of Nigrinus. Castus scanned the passing faces, but the notary seemed to have vanished. Let him go, he thought. The man had delivered his message, and there was nothing more to say.

As he walked, Castus thought over the conversation that had just passed. However much he detested Nigrinus, he had been relying on the notary having some scheme or devious plan to turns events around. Quite clearly he did not, or not yet at least. Perhaps his probing and plotting would get a result in time, but time, from what he had said, was in short supply.

Along the street to the west the crowds thinned, and by the time Castus emerged into the agora the city around him seemed almost deserted. The broad open expanse of paving was empty in the yellow moonlight, only a few figures moving under the colonnades. Massilia had been a Greek city once, and still preserved the Greek names of her civic spaces, but the agora resembled the
fora
of any number of Roman provincial towns. Castus crossed quickly, heading for the stepped path that led up from the back of the curia, the meeting hall of the city council, and around the side of the theatre to the large house that Maximian was using as his palace. As he moved from the darkness of the agora colonnade into the narrow cobbled street at the side of the curia, he paused suddenly and stared into the shadows ahead.

For a moment he wondered what he was looking at, but then the low shape hunched at the side of the street shifted and Castus saw that it was a small group of people, all of them in dark cloaks, sitting or kneeling at the base of the curia wall. They might have been beggars, or homeless refugees from the countryside, but all of them seemed to be facing inwards, towards the wall itself. The streets around him were almost silent, and Castus was sure that he could hear a muffled whispering coming from the group. He would need to pass them to reach the steps up to the palace; they did not appear threatening, but the whispering and the uncanniness of their huddling posture made him wary. He loosened the sword in his scabbard once more, then walked slowly towards them.

At the sound of his steps on the cobbles one of the figures sat up and turned to look at him. He got a brief glimpse of a face beneath the hood of a cloak: a girl, or a young woman. Somebody spoke, low and quick, and at once the strange gathering broke up. Castus stopped and waited, his hand on the hilt of his sword, as the five figures scrambled from their kneeling position against the wall and hurried up the street away from him without glancing back.

When they were out of sight he paced quickly across the street to the point where they had been crouching. Now he could see the low square opening in the stones of the wall: an airshaft, or perhaps a window into a chamber in the basement of the curia building. As he got closer and stooped down he saw the iron bars closing the opening. All around it the stone was scratched with words. Castus squinted, trying to make out the shapes of the letters in the dark and string together their meaning. It did not take him long.

DEATH TO THE HATERS OF THE GODS
said one scrawl.
CHRISTIANS TO THE LIONS
.

As he glanced down at the barred window again, Castus saw a movement from the darkness inside. A face rose from the gloom, thin and hard as a mask, beneath the white curve of a bald head. The face stared back at him from a moment, then sank once more into the black shadow of the prison.

Oresius, Castus remembered. The priest of the Christians. And those huddled figures kneeling at the window, whispering to him: were they his followers? Castus suppressed a superstitious shudder. Why did Christians always seem drawn to dark places and secret rituals? But then he remembered the magical ceremony in the necropolis of Treveris. Christians were not the only people attracted by shadows.