‘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 walclass="underline" 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.
Standing back from the wall and squaring his shoulders, he turned to continue on up the street towards the stepped path and the palace. Before he could move, he heard the sound of a shout echoing from the streets behind him, the clatter of hooves on cobbles. A rider was crossing the forum, heading for the theatre and the longer curving road up to the palace, and as he rode he was crying out to the citizens in the forum colonnades.
Castus ran the few paces back down the street towards the forum. By the time he reached the colonnade the rider had already gone, galloping hard towards the palace. But his words seemed to hang in the air; Castus had heard them clearly enough, and knew what they meant.
Constantine was here. His scouts had been sighted outside the walls.
The siege was about to begin.
22
The sun had not yet broken the eastern horizon when Castus threw open the shutters of his sleeping chamber on the upper floor of Maximian’s palace. Leaning from the window, breathing in the cool air of the departing night, he looked down the slope over the pale curving wall of the theatre and saw the massed roofs of the city coming into definition, grey against deeper grey as the light grew. The slopes of the surrounding hills were still covered by sea mist, and the harbour was a vague expanse of white, with the masts and rigging of the anchored ships standing up from it like the stumps of a dead forest.
In the chamber behind him a slave was moving silently, setting out the basin of cold water and the platter of bread, cheese and onion. Stepping back from the window, Castus waved the slave away. He dipped his head over the basin, dashing water up into his face, then straightened again, gasping. Standing in the centre of the room, dressed only in his loincloth, he stretched his back and knitted his fingers at the nape of his neck, flexing the muscles of heavy shoulders. He breathed in deeply. The next few hours would be terrible; the next few days could be worse.