Nigrinus smiled, despite himself, and had to look away. Diocletian had always been the intelligence behind the partnership of emperors. Maximian was all bluster and rage, good at leading men but impulsive, boorish and often rash. Nigrinus was glad that Diocletian had kept himself out of these current turmoils. He had always regarded the old senior emperor as an admirable figure, a titan in a world of comparative dwarfs. Let him remain with his cabbages. Heroes should know when their day is done.
‘So Maximian is coming back here to us,’ Flaccianus said, ‘to rejoin his household-in-exile.’
‘To rejoin his loving son-in-law and devoted daughter, you mean. Such is the line to take. Meanwhile, we must assume that the breach with his son remains officially irreparable.’
Nigrinus snapped open another of the tablets. More dull stuff, something about villa renovations. He tried to force himself to concentrate, but would far rather do this alone. Any amount of code might be concealed in such mundane material – although anyone genuinely planning treason would be unlikely to communicate it via the imperial post; all he could hope for were the ripples of conspiracy, the shadow of a plot. He was sure that such a conspiracy must exist; if it did not, it was his job to create it.
‘According to this,’ he said, studying the tablet, ‘the wife of Gregorius, comes rei militaris, claims that her husband had a dream in which he fell into a vat of purple dye.’
Flaccianus sucked in breath. ‘That might give a man ideas above his station!’ he said. ‘Very dangerous things, dreams.’
‘Yes, people should really try not to have them,’ Nigrinus said vaguely, his eyes flickering over the text on the tablet. ‘Or, if they must, they should try not to tell their wives about them… What of matters in Rome?’
‘There are food riots,’ Flaccianus said. ‘Maxentius sent in the Praetorians to put them down, which the plebs loved, of course. They’re beginning to regret their choice of usurper.’
‘He had no alternative, as long as Domitius Alexander holds Africa. He can choke off the grain supply whenever he wants.’
Domitius Alexander was another problem. The former governor-in-chief of the African provinces, apparently a feeble old man, had allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor by the provincials and the garrison. Just what the world needs now, Nigrinus thought: another emperor… So Alexander was an enemy of Maxentius, who believed that he should control Africa, and needed the grain. But was he yet an ally of Constantine? Nigrinus reminded himself that he should research links between those at Constantine’s court and the supporters of the African usurper.
‘Apparently Maxentius has also thrown out the high priest of the Christians,’ Flaccianus said. ‘He officially ended the persecution in Italy, declared their religion legitimate, allowed them to appoint a chief priest, but then they immediately fell to fighting among themselves. Seems that now we’re not persecuting them, they’re busily persecuting each other – one half reckons the other half surrendered their faith for a quiet life, or something. So Maxentius banished their man and installed his opponent. He’ll have no peace with them!’
‘Indeed not,’ Nigrinus said. He felt a laugh gathering in his chest and suppressed it. ‘Anything that vexes our enemies is a boon.’ But Constantine also favoured the Christians – would they cause such turmoil in his domains too?
There was nothing of interest in the documents, or nothing that his tired eyes could decipher. A shame: he always thought he would pick out the telling word or phrase, the key to the lock of treason. And with treason there came possibility…
‘If you are the Flycatcher,’ Flaccianus said as he gathered the documents back into his satchel, ‘what does that make me? One of the flies? Or am I a spider, perhaps, who helps you construct your webs?’
He was smiling, unctuous. Nigrinus said nothing – he needed no help constructing his webs. And a man like Flaccianus was strictly expendable anyway, he and all those others like him, weak and venal men, liars to their oath.
‘You do rather well by me,’ he said. ‘As I rise, you too shall rise. One hand, as they say, washes another… And for someone with such tastes as yours, I’d say I have proved remarkably open-handed to you.’
‘Tastes?’ Flaccianus said, and stretched his mouth in a yawn. Nigrinus looked away. ‘Oh, that… Why, that’s no cause for shame. I’m a man; my blood is red. Anyway, the deified emperor Tiberius is said to have enjoyed much the same sort of thing.’
Nigrinus fought down an expression of disgust. Surely, he thought, Flaccianus did not train infants to swim around him as he bathed and suck at his genitals, as that most depraved old emperor was said to have done? That was in the biography by Suetonius, he reflected. Such a quaint old style too, the Latin of two hundred years past. Emperors could never get away with such gross perversions now: the solemn mantle of state weighed too heavily upon them. The awesome burden of power. Or did they merely lack imagination these days? And perhaps such enormous gravitas made them brittle too…
‘There is an anecdote about the emperor Domitian,’ he said in a musing tone, still thinking about the biographies of Suetonius. ‘He enjoyed catching flies too. But apparently the black tyrant claimed that the lot of emperors is never happy. Nobody ever believes in conspiracies against them until the conspirators are successful, which tends to leave the emperor dead.’
‘An interesting conundrum – for the likes of you. After all, treasonable action is seldom called treason by posterity, if it succeeds.’
‘Exactly,’ Nigrinus said with a tight smile. Very occasionally Flaccianus surprised him with his acuity. He leaned back on the end of the couch, steepling his narrow fingers. ‘So, to profitably uncover a conspiracy, one must first wait for the seeds of treason to bear fruit. The more fruit, the better the crop when harvest comes.’
‘But if you wait too long…’
‘Then the treason is out in the open, and you have no secrets left to reveal.’
‘And then you have to decide which way to jump…’
Flaccianus’s smile died as he took in the full implications of what he had just said. He shuddered slightly, and glanced towards the shuttered window as if feeling a draught. But Nigrinus was nodding, slow and cold.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ he said quietly. ‘Just follow my orders, in all things, and matters will be well.’
Flaccianus stood up, gathered his satchel and wrapped the dark cloak around his shoulders. The lamp guttered.
‘Oh, and take those olives with you. I don’t want them any more.’
8
Snow had fallen in the night. Castus could feel it tightening the air as he rode out with the hunting party before dawn; the frozen crust muffled the sounds of the horses’ hooves as they moved through the empty streets, skirting the forum, down to the river gate. Ice groaned and cracked beneath the arches of the stone bridge, and first light revealed a snow-blown landscape of white and grey as the hunters climbed into the hill country to the north-west of Treveris.
By the time it was full daylight the party had reached the boundary of the imperial hunting reserve. A score of riders, with as many men on foot accompanying them, and as they neared the villa lodge at the edge of the reserve they could hear the whine and yowl of the dogs kennelled there. An hour later they were spread out across open country, and the day was bright and cold around them, every sound crisp-edged.
They had given him the largest horse in the stable, and it bore his weight well, but even after five months of training on the practice ground to the east of the palace Castus was still not a comfortable rider. He sat heavily in the saddle, his thighs clasping the horse’s flanks, chilled fingers gripping the reins. His nose was numb, and every time he inhaled he could feel the ice at the back of his throat; he had known worse on the Danube frontier, but being up on a horse seemed to make the cold sting more sharply.