‘Goodbye.’
His body tenses. A scream of strangled rage or despair rasps in his throat until he chokes on it. It takes all my strength to prise his fingers off me so I can push him back down on the bed. Even then, he struggles and flails, throwing back the sheets.
I blunder towards the door. It’s already open: guards are rushing in, with a mass of priests and soldiers pressing behind them. I struggle against the tide and find myself face to face with Eusebius.
‘You can have your prize,’ I tell him.
I don’t think he hears me. The crowd carries him forward to Constantine’s bedside, while I slink out of the hall.
The moment I’m alone, remorse overwhelms me. Whatever’s happened between us, who am I to deny an old friend his last comfort. I turn to go back, to tell him I forgive him. That I love him.
But the throng of courtiers blocking the way is so thick I’ll never get through. They make a circle around the bed, where Eusebius is standing next to the bowl of water. A snatch of what he’s saying reaches back to me.
‘Die and rise to new life, so that you may live for ever.’
The doors close in my face, and Constantine is gone.
XXXIX
THERE WEREN’T MANY places in the world where you could inhabit a Roman emperor’s palace. Split might be the only one. When the Emperor Diocletian defied all precedent and expectation by quitting his office at the peak of his powers, he built himself a retirement home on an imperial scale: a seafront palace on a quiet bay overlooking the Dalmatian coast, based on the plan of a military camp the area of eight football pitches, with walls ten storeys high. Inside the walls were gardens, where the peasant emperor could tend his vegetable patch; opulent living quarters and ceremonial halls (even a retired emperor expects a certain grandeur); several temples to the old gods, whom Diocletian had defended with cruel vigour against the depredations of the Christians; a garrison, because even though he’d pacified the empire, his successors were jealous, violent men; and his own mausoleum, so he would never need to leave.
But the Christians had survived his persecution, flourished, and eventually thrown out the old gods and their champion. Five hundred years after his death, Diocletian had suffered the ultimate indignity. His porphyry sarcophagus had been torn out of his mausoleum, his bones thrown into a ditch and replaced with those of a man he’d martyred. The church he’d tried to destroy had appropriated his final monument, turning his mausoleum into a cathedral.
And the palace remained. When barbarians came, the local citizens retreated inside Diocletian’s walls and squatted in the ruins. Over time, houses grew up like weeds, weaving through the remains and making them their own. New walls absorbed columns and arches; old walls sprouted new roofs. Bit by bit, the palace turned into a town. Roman
Abby had been there with Michael a few months ago, another stolen weekend away from Kosovo. She’d instantly decided it was one of her favourite places in the world. They stayed in a boutique hotel with bits of Diocletian’s wall jutting into the bedrooms; wandered down narrow alleys that suddenly opened up on intact Roman temples; ate Dalmatian ham on freshly baked bread, and drank red wine late into the night.
That had been June; this was October. The tourists had gone home, the pavement cafes retreated indoors, the hotels emptied. She’d thought her memories of the summer might bring back some warmth: instead, they only mocked her with echoes of happiness. It reminded her of the dying days of her marriage, when she and Hector had gone back to Venice, scene of their honeymoon, hoping a spark of the old feeling might rekindle something. That was when she’d realised there was no way back.
At least she and Michael had reached Split. After all her worries, getting out of Serbia had been the easiest part of the journey. At the border, the bus driver had collected passports and handed the stack to the guard, who took them in to his hut. Ten heart-stopping minutes later, the guard came back and returned them to the driver, who redistributed them among the sleepy passengers.
The bus rolled on, the border receded. Across the aisle and three rows forward, Michael glanced back and winked.
They checked into the Hotel Marjan, another hulk of Soviet-era luxury squatting on the waterfront half a mile from the old town centre. They registered under their own names – Michael spun the bored clerk a story about how a pickpocket had stolen their passports, until the man surrendered the keys to room 213. Abby went up, washed her face, and got ready to go straight back out. It was already almost one thirty.
Michael flopped down on the bed.
‘Are you sure you’re all right doing this on your own?’
‘We’ve got to assume Mark will have people watching. It won’t work if they see you.’
He leaned over on his side and stared across the room at her. ‘Be careful, OK?’
‘I’ll see you later.’
She walked along a palm-lined esplanade, past the mostly empty marina and the few ferries tied up at the dock. At the far end, the pillars of the palace facade rose above the shops that had been tucked into the wall. Just past a jeweller’s she turned left through an arch into an underground arcade that had once been a water gate, but now housed stalls selling trinkets and art. Ahead, a flight of stairs led up towards daylight.
Unlike most people living in the West, Abby actually knew what it was like to be followed by secret police. She’d experienced it countless times: a blacked-out car trailing her from the airport in Belgrade; a window cleaner in Khartoum who’d spent an hour outside the meeting room making smudges in the dust; a telephone that clicked all through her conversations and cut out unexpectedly in Kinshasa. She’d once asked her boss if she should have some sort of counter-espionage training to deal with it.
