Ian Ross - The War at the Edge of the World

‘Don’t worry, brother! I’m just concerned. A sense of loyal regard for our domini.’

They fell silent for a few moments as they passed the tall portals of the headquarters building.

‘You saw his son, too? Constantine?’

‘I saw him,’ Castus said. His discomfort had not eased, and he wanted to step away from Valens, as if the mere suggestion of treasonous talk might be contagious.

‘There were a couple of Protectores down at the Blue House the other night. The new one, I mean, in the old Tenth Cohort barrack… They told me that Constantine had only joined them at Bononia on the Gallic coast, just before the crossing to Britain.’

‘What of it?’

‘Well – do you know where he’d been? Apparently the son of the Augustus has been in Nicomedia these last eight years, at the court of the other Augustus, the senior one, Galerius. In a sort of gilded captivity, so they implied. When the news arrived of the uprising here – by express messenger, as you’d imagine – Constantine petitioned Galerius for permission to go and join his father on the expedition. Galerius could hardly refuse, but he’d barely given his nod – while he was drinking over dinner, so they say – before our Constantine was off. He rode all the way from Nicomedia to Bononia by post relays in just over ten days, mutilating the horses as he went so he couldn’t be followed by a countermanding order!’

‘Is that even possible?’ Castus had travelled most of that route himself when he had come to join the Sixth, and it had taken him nearly three months.

‘Seems so. He’s here now, anyway. And you know that quite a few in the army think that Constantine should have been made Caesar after the abdications? Apparently the mint in Alexandria had already started turning out Constantinus Caesar coins when they heard the news – they had to recall them and break the dies. These two Caesars we have now, what are they? Flavius Severus is a drunk and a gambler who can’t control himself, let alone the empire. Maximinus Daza’s a common soldier with no more experience of commanding armies than… well, than you!’

This time Castus really did step back, and gave his friend a hard appraising glare. Valens looked away, as if conscious that he had said too much.

‘Don’t tell me these things,’ Castus said, cold and level.

‘You’d hear the same in any officers’ mess, brother. Here, in Gaul – all across the empire, probably. If you weren’t too thickheaded to listen when you’re off duty you’d have heard much the same.’

‘But I don’t want to hear it!’

Politics, Castus thought, was a stinking mire. Nothing to do with him. The emperors were to be revered, whatever their personal failings. They were beyond mere men; the purple robe elevated them to stand beside the gods. It pained him – quite literally burned in his guts – that the circles of supreme power were just as foul with intrigue and suspicion as the mortal world far below. Because if the emperors could not be trusted, could not be wholeheartedly admired and obeyed, where was loyalty? Where was honour?

In his mind he heard the voice of the notary, Nigrinus, and his subtle threats and insinuations. We make our own gods too, here on earth . Then the panicked stammer of the renegade Decentius, just before Castus had killed him. Both men had been sucked into the intrigue: one prospered by it; one had died of it. The muck of politics was corrosive. It rotted morals; it made men weak and terrified, or turned them into monsters. Castus shuddered, hunched his shoulders, tried to ignore Valens’s disapproving stare.

They were passing beneath the north-west gate now. The sentries gave their salutes, and Castus remembered, with sudden start shy;ling clarity, the early dawn when he had ridden in through those gloomy arches with Marcellina. Barely three months ago, but it seemed like years. Valens was marching on, head down, and Castus took three long paces to catch up with him. They emerged from the dark tunnel beneath the gate into the sunlight, and turned left into the drill field.

‘There he is,’ Valens said, nodding away into the middle distance.

A crowd was gathered around the margins of the field, most of them soldiers and centurions. In the centre of the field straw bales had been set up for cavalry practice, and a troop of the Equites Mauri, light horsemen from North Africa, were wheeling and darting their javelins at the gallop. It was an impressive display, but the crowd was not watching the Mauri. Constantine, the emperor’s son, was riding with them. Mounted on a powerful grey mare, and dressed only in a quilted white linen corselet, he rode hard at the bales, flinging his javelins with great grunts of effort. Each one flew straight to the target, punching into the bale and hanging slack as Constantine spurred his horse away.

‘You brought me here to see this?’ Castus asked.

‘He comes down every afternoon. Sometimes with the Mauri, sometimes the Dalmatae or the Scutarii. Joins in their practice, at all arms. Quite a performer.’

‘Just for show, you think?’

‘Could be. Letting the army see who’s going to be leading them.’

They had dropped their voices again, as if by instinct.

‘The emperor leads the army,’ Castus said quietly. ‘Nobody else. This man’s just a tribune of the Protectores.’

‘The emperor is sick …’ Valens said, almost under his breath. ‘If we’re going to war in the spring we ought to know the facts, do you agree?’

‘I don’t care. All that matters is that we go. We have reason enough.’

‘Well, as to that,’ Valens said in a brisker tone, ‘it’s not exactly certain if we go or not… There are new detachments arriving from the German legions. The Eighth and the Twenty-Second. And two cohorts of the Second Augusta from the southern province are camped just south of the city, did you know that? The Sixth might just be left here in the spring after all, holding the fort.’

Castus frowned. Surely that could not happen? He remem shy;bered the emperor’s words, in the audience hall. We need skilled men like you – was that it? Not, surely not, just to work at training recruits at Eboracum either.

They walked back to barracks in silence.

Saturnalia, and the dark wintry streets of the fortress were loud with the noise of riotous celebration. Released for the period of the festival from the bounds of military disci shy;pline, the soldiers roared and laughed from the taverns and the baths’ porticos, rampaged around the colonnades, climbed onto pedestals naked, oblivious of the freezing drizzle, to yell bawdy songs at the moon.

Leaving the centurions’ messroom, where most of his fellow officers had barricaded themselves in for the night, Castus flung a common soldier’s cloak over his head and paced warily back towards the barracks. He had drunk a few cups of beer, and he was still alert but tired. Parties of men gathered on the street corners, fighting and singing. Now and again one of them recognised him – the cloak did little to hide his bulk – and flung a half-mocking salute. Castus stepped aside as a naked man wearing an ivy wreath came charging down the main street, riding bareback on a terrified cavalry horse, screaming, ‘ Io Saturnalia…! ’

Another few days and the celebrations would be done. Then it would be the Day of Sol Invictus, the birthday of the sun – by then the men would be sobered up, kit cleaned and polished, all of them dressed in their best clothes for the dawn parade to salute the rising sun. After more than two months of training, Castus was beginning to have a little more regard for the men of his century. Countless days on the drill field had battered the inert matter of their civilian selves into shape, at least to some small degree. Perhaps, he thought, by the spring they might be fit to call themselves soldiers.