I don’t understand. ‘Constantine? Has he returned from the war so soon?’
‘He’s at Nicomedia.’
And there’s a finality in those words that tells me he won’t be coming back.
It’s seventy miles to Nicomedia. In my youth, I’d have flogged every post horse on the road to get there in a day. Now, it takes me the best part of two. It isn’t just my age. The road’s busier than I’ve ever seen it; at every waystation, there are long queues for fresh horses. The messengers are tight-lipped, but the grooms know the gossip. From them, I gather that Constantine’s final campaign ended before it really began. He didn’t even get as far as Nicaea before he started complaining of a pain in his stomach. He diverted to the hot baths at Pythia Therma, hoping for a quick cure, but it only made the symptoms worse. His doctors said he was too ill to make the journey back to Constantinople; instead, they decamped to an imperial villa, one of Diocletian’s old estates near Nicomedia: the Villa Achyron.
The villa stands five miles outside Nicomedia, on terraces cut into the slopes above the coast. Fields of corn surround it, though the threshing floor that gave the villa its name is long gone. The corn should be ripening gold in the May sunshine, but there’ll be no harvest this year. The crop’s been trampled back into the earth by the boots and tents of two thousand soldiers camped around it. It’s hard to tell if they’re guarding the villa or besieging it. I trudge up the hill along an avenue of poplars, and announce myself to the clerk, who has set up an administrative headquarters in the vestibule. Not a secretary or a palace functionary, but an officer of the
‘How’s the Augustus? Is he … ?’
An unforgiving stare. ‘His doctors prescribed rest.’
‘He sent a message – he summoned me here from Constantinople.’
‘Your name?’
The question spins me off balance like a slap in the face. Is he making a point? Deliberately putting me in my place? People never ask my name: they
He taps his pen on the desk. He’s a busy man; an ambitious young officer in a thankless job. And he has no idea who I am.
I tell him; the eyes don’t blink. All I am is a name to be compared against a list. And found absent.
‘Is Flavius Ursus here? The chief of staff?’ That earns me a few seconds more of his time. ‘Tell him Gaius Valerius Maximus is here to see the Augustus.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
They leave me to wait in an anteroom near the heart of the villa. Priests, officials and soldiers pass in and out and through the chamber: Schola guards in their white uniforms, but also field commanders in red battledress. This is still a campaign headquarters, after all.
Hours stretch by, and my mind reaches back to a different villa on a different sea.
Pula’s a small port near the head of the Adriatic. It’s a quiet, well-maintained town, full of merchants who’ve made modest fortunes in regional trade. I imagine it’s the sort of place Constantine has in mind when he rhapsodises about the delights of his peaceful empire: neat, prosperous and dull. A backwater. A good place for a man to disappear.
I reach the governor’s villa near sunset. It’s taken me almost a week to complete the three-day journey here: I’ve slept badly, started late, found infinite faults with the horses, the food, the lodgings. I don’t want to be here. I pleaded with Constantine to send someone else. For the first time in our lives, he wouldn’t meet my eye.
‘It has to be a man I can trust,’ he told me. ‘You’re the only one.’ He handed me the leather bag with its knotted string, the glass vial heavy inside. ‘I don’t want …’ He trailed off with something that sounded like a sob. The things he doesn’t want are so terrible he can’t give voice to them.
‘Do it quickly.’
I find Crispus on a pebble beach on a promontory south of the town. Grass grows between the stones; fish flit among the rocks in the clear water. Two guards, armed, watch from the pines that fringe the cove, while their prisoner sits by the water’s edge, barefoot and bareheaded, letting the waves ripple over his toes.
The guards see me coming and call a wary challenge, their hands on their swords. They’re anxious. Even when they recognise me, they don’t relax. They’re worried I’m going to make them do it.
I send them away. ‘Make sure no one disturbs us,’ I tell them. They’re so grateful to be gone, they don’t look back once.
Now Crispus and I are alone. I scramble down the rocky bank and cross the beach towards him. He turns, smiles, and gets up.
‘I hoped it would be you.’
A clumsy embrace. An over-zealous wave races up the beach and breaks over my boots. I take a step back and stare into his face. There are bags under his eyes, a grey cast to his skin. The smile which once came so naturally is now forced, an act of defiance.
I start to say something, but he interrupts, ‘How’s my father?’
‘Lost without you.’
‘I’m sorry I ruined his celebrations.’ He scoops up some pebbles and tosses them one by one into the sea. ‘It’s funny. Three weeks ago, I was watching everything, imagining how it would be for my own
The last pebble drops into the water and barely makes a splash.
