‘And what about the madness of that, how much trouble has the old goat caused there?’
Those words dragged Flavius back to the events of three years previously, a time when his life had looked settled and his future a vision easy and untroubling. A single event had changed that as his father, in command of an understrength force guarding the Danube border, had been tempted into a battle he could not win, one in which the odds had been set against him by a treacherous local magnate who should have been his support. Those thoughts were swept away as Petrus grabbed his arm again to spin him round, his eyes boring in, his look deadly serious.
‘You must trust me in this, Flavius, you must believe me when I say I do it for the safety of all of us. I am not playing a game, I am playing with our lives. Will you go tonight and carry out what I have arranged?’
‘Give me one good reason why I should.’
‘I saved your life, Flavius, and got you revenge for your family, is that not reason enough?’
‘When?’
The explanation, the way revenge had been facilitated on the man who had betrayed his father, was swift and had Flavius dropping his head, brought on partly by amazement, but just as much by his own blindness at not seeing what Petrus had set out to do and what a cunning weave he had made. If it was a conspiracy it had been clever, and more tellingly, it had been successful or he would not be talking now.
‘If you owe me your life, it is not a favour I would ever call in. But I do need your help and there is no one else I can turn to. That is why you were recalled.’
‘I will do that which you ask,’ Flavius replied after a lengthy pause, ‘and no more.’
‘No more is required.’
‘I will need aid from the men of my unit.’
‘As long as they have no idea what will be in the chests that is not a difficulty.’
The cart he borrowed belonged to the Excubitors, the four men he fetched along were under his command and they showed a pleasing lack of curiosity about the task, as soldiers often do, accustomed as they are to the whims of their officers. He left them outside until he had spoken with Amantius, who disappeared before they entered the villa. The first pair took one handle each of a chest, not large, so the sheer weight surprised them and led to an exchanged look of wonder. This had Flavius, who had not anticipated what should have been obvious, reaching for a quick excuse.
‘It’s being taken to the imperial treasury via the apartments of the comes.’
‘Detour would be nice, Your Honour,’ joked one.
‘Don’t tempt me,’ Flavius replied.
This too was taken as a jest, just as the grave manner of delivery was taken as contrived. He meant it, though not in the way these soldiers thought: he was inclined to drop the whole lot in the Propontis and Petrus and his conspiracies be damned. His mood was no better at the other end, even more so when the chests were delivered to the apartments of Justinus, timed to be after he had retired to the single-door cell and hard cot on which he slept.
‘Don’t be gloomy, Flavius,’ Petrus crowed when he discerned his mood. ‘Believe me, when this is over you will heartily thank me.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The heat of the city, in the grip of high and continuing summer temperatures, was enough to permeate the thick walls of the palace; even the marble flooring seemed to be too warm. Was it that which contributed to the increased air of disquiet or was what Flavius observed being given greater definition because of what he had become a party to? If the name of the man Amantius wished to elevate was unknown that did nothing to allay suspicion, quite the reverse. Now he was looking at everyone he passed, seeking by whatever senses he possessed to discern if they were the chosen one.
Matters were not aided by the manner in which Anastasius hung onto mortality, helped by teams of physicians who feared to lose their heads if he died while they were in attendance. Others put it down to tenacity, while the ill-disposed, and they were legion, subscribed to the view that the old goat feared the retribution he might face from an angry redeemer, for if the Emperor had been fired by religious zeal, it had been at the price of much conflict with half of his subjects.
No words were ever more true than that one man’s heresy was another’s route to salvation. In a previous imperial reign, after much dissension, matters on dogma had appeared to have been settled. The Emperor called into being a Great Council in the city of Chalcedon, where the dispute about the divine nature of God and the Holy Trinity had been disputed.
After what seemed like endless argument on arcane points and endless biblical references it had been agreed that Jesus could be both a man and a god, this flying in the face of those who believed that position both impossible and heretical. The seeming acceptance of the conclusion of Chalcedon by those in opposition was just that; soon they were once more pressing for their dogma to be elevated to imperial policy.
Anastasius had backed them, insisting on adherence to the more mystical and Eastern position. The bishops of Asia Minor and Egypt, known as the Monophysites, had captured the imperial soul and in his passion for their cause Anastasius had cracked down on the proponents of the settlement of Chalcedon, removing divines from their diocese and replacing them with men who shared his doctrinal beliefs. The result had been rebellion on a massive scale in the Imperial Themes to the west and north of Constantinople, led by a general called Vitalian who had three times invested a capital city too formidable to actually capture.
It was his first attempt to take the city that had brought Flavius, marching with General Vitalian and fleeing certain death at home further north, to Constantinople and the apartments of Justinus, his late father’s old comrade, where if he had not found peace he had felt something akin to a home.
The religious dispute mirrored in many ways the fissure between the two great groups of the empire, those who clung, and they were often of barbarian stock, to the notion of Imperial Rome as it had been for centuries, set against the greater number of Greeks and Levantines who made up the majority of the population. These were people who seemed to take more inspiration from Persia than Rome, not least in the way the Emperor was seen as divinely chosen and a certain conduit to God.
To a committed Christian this harked back to and mirrored too closely the pagan ethos of the pre-Constantine polity. The Roman-inspired also deplored and fought the way Greek modes of behaviour continually wore down on what they called the Ancient Virtues, notions of behaviour more breeched than observed but held to be a better mode of living.
Their enemies scoffed at these pretensions, seeing them for what they too often were, a hypocritical method of asserting cultural superiority when in truth the reverse was the case; if the Romans had ever had any virtues they were those of Italian peasants and farmers. Learning and sophistication came from Attica, not Italy.
Justinus, Thracian by birth, as had been the family of Flavius, sought to act as he thought a Roman should: honestly and selflessly. When it came to religion, if he kept his own counsel in public, his view in private was unequivocal. He thought his master misguided and making difficulties where none should exist; let each man worship in his own fashion and if the bishops wished to dispute on dogma let them do so without troubling the public peace.
Flavius Belisarius felt himself to be solidly Roman, an attitude inherited from his late father. The events of his death, and that of the three elder brothers who perished with him, were now long past in the life of a boy turned to manhood. Yet they were, to the person who had witnessed the act of treachery, as fresh as if they had happened the day before. This was even truer at night, when dreams turned the man who betrayed them into a Nemesis, an ogre of antiquity, some pagan fiend sent by the Fates to ruin his peace of mind.