equally.’
‘The army wants an orderly succession,’ Ursus confirms.
I know what he means. The army wants Constantine’s three sons to divide the empire. Three emperors means three armies, three times as many generals, three times the profits for the contractors in their palatial villas on the Bosphorus shore.
‘One heir would be more orderly.’
‘Only if he was undisputed.’
‘That time has passed,’ says Severus. ‘This is a new age.’
‘Every age thinks so.’
‘And old men think nothing changes.’
I study him more closely. He’s wearing a leather thong around his neck: it dips under his tunic, but when he tips his head back I glimpse a curved, scaly fish-back rendered in bronze.
‘I remember when you were the crow, and I was the scorpion,’ I say. Severus looks at me as if I’m spouting gibberish, as if the phrase genuinely means nothing and he never heard it while squashed together with his comrades in a damp basement with frontier earth oozing through the stones. As if he never knelt in front of me so I could sign the blood of Mithra on his forehead and induct him into the mysteries he was so desperate to know.
‘There is only one God, Jesus Christ,’ he says blandly. Ursus, who stood beside us in those caves, says nothing.
There’s no point arguing. I could accuse Severus of treachery, of abandoning the old gods, but he wouldn’t care. He’s not interested in the past, not even his own.
‘Why is he here?’ I ask Ursus. ‘Does Constantine know?’
Their faces tell me he doesn’t.
‘The Caesar Claudius is worried for his father’s health,’ says Severus.
Translation:
An aide sidles up and presents a scroll to Ursus. He withdraws a little distance to study it, leaving me and Severus alone.
‘I saw the Augustus two days ago,’ I tell him. ‘You can go back to Trier and report that he was in rude health.’
Severus nods, as if my news is helpful. We both know he’s not going anywhere. ‘I need to know about the will, Valerius.’ He’s dropped the ‘General’. ‘There are factions at court, and who knows what they might do to deny Claudius his inheritance.’
‘Constantine knows his own mind – more than any man who ever lived.’
‘He can still be swayed by gossip. As you know.’
Again, that twist of the knife in my heart. I want to hurl him into the water, hold him under the waves until the fish nibble the privilege off his face for good.
‘You’re still the crow, Severus, even if you don’t remember those days. Sitting in your tree, waiting for the wind to bring you the smell of death.’
It’s my last attack, and it doesn’t touch him. I never had a family of my own; I’ve been spared the experience of seeing my offspring start treating their parents like their own children. Now I know how it feels.
Ursus, who’s been waiting at a safe remove, interposes himself again.
‘My boat will take you back.’
He doesn’t escort me. But as I step on to the landing stage, a final question follows me down to the shore.
‘Have you wondered why Constantine asked someone who knows nothing about the Christians to investigate the death of a bishop?’
XVII
UNTIL THE VERY last minute, she didn’t guess what they’d do to her. Blindfolded, she was dragged back downstairs to the car, then driven for what seemed an eternity. The hand on her back never relaxed. She lay curled in a ball, face down in her stale vomit, reliving her nightmares. The villa on the coast and the black museum and all the evil places on earth she’d been. Different voices spoke inside her, overlapping ghosts. Hector:
The car stopped. A door opened. She felt a shove against her back, and then a shuddering blow as she fell and landed on her shoulder. Above her head, the door slammed shut. She heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of tyres; she choked as a blast of exhaust fumes blew in her face. Then there was silence.
She pulled the blindfold off her face, and emerged, gasping, into the sodium glow of the city at night. Far in the distance, a pair of brake lights veered around a corner and vanished.
