Secrets of the Dead

An awkward silence hangs in the speckled air between us. Constantine gestures around the domed hall. ‘Look at this mess. If I died tomorrow, they wouldn’t know what to do with me.’ He laughs. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to die until the Persians are sorted out. A final victory to complete my work.’

A pause. Perhaps it’s occurred to him how many final victories he’s already won.

‘Do you remember Chrysopolis? The day after?’

Chrysopolis – September 324 – Thirteen years earlier …

On a warm Sunday morning, Constantine and his family are taking a walk. The long, hot summer still hasn’t let go: the sky is blue, the sea calm, the ground baked hard. The purple imperial boots kick up puffs of dust as they pick their way among the cypresses and pines on top of the bluffs. Constantine leads the way, with Crispus at his side pointing out details of the great fleet moored below them. I’m just behind. After me come the women and children – the youngest, Constans, only a year old and still in the arms of his wet nurse. They could be any Roman family out gathering berries or looking for eggs. In fact, they’re now undisputed masters of the empire. On the other side of the hill, twenty-five thousand corpses are awaiting burial.

By my count, it’s only the third day since June that I haven’t been in armour. We’ve fought our way through the summer. It’s taken ten years, but the confrontation between Constantine and Licinius has finally come to a head. In June, we marched into Thrace and sent Licinius packing from the Balkans, thirty thousand men lighter. In August, when Licinius hoped to stall us at Byzantium, Constantine literally marched over the city walls by building an earth ramp against them. At the same time, Crispus led our navy from Thessalonica and defeated Licinius’s fleet in the straits at Gallipolis. I was with Constantine at Byzantium, but by all accounts it was a magnificent, daring victory.

Watching them together in front of me now, father and son, it’s easy to believe this is a family touched by the gods. Constantine is just past fifty but as vigorous as ever, a strong man in his late prime. Crispus is a son any man would be proud of. Tall and handsome, with Constantine’s soft-featured good looks and jet-black hair, he’s at an age where fresh experience meets the confidence of youth, and nothing is impossible. He laughs easily and makes others laugh, even his father. When Constantine stumbles – he’s still nursing a thigh wound he sustained in the charge at Hadrianople – Crispus is quick to put out a hand and steady him. Crispus points to the fleet and tells his father stories: this ship grappled Licinius’s flagship; that one, the captain fell overboard because he tripped on a chicken that had escaped its coop.

Without warning, two boys run up behind us and start attacking Crispus with pine branches. Claudius and Constantius, eight and seven years old, Constantine’s elder sons by Fausta. Crispus laughs, finds a stick on the ground and chases his half-brothers shrieking back to their mother.

Constantine turns to me, eyes shining. ‘Was any man ever this happy?’

Yesterday, two hundred thousand men lined up on a dusty plain between Chalcedon and Chrysopolis to contest the fate of the world. It wasn’t Constantine’s greatest battle as a general. No daring ruse, no clever tactics. He put his standard, the labarum, in the centre of his line; he massed his cavalry behind the standard and his infantry behind the cavalry, and launched them in a sledgehammer blow straight at Licinius. Perhaps the magnitude of the occasion made him conservative. Or perhaps, again, he saw what others didn’t: that having been outflanked before and determined not to let it happen again, Licinius had left his centre weak. And that having marched all summer, our army was in a savage mood, ready to end the war quickly.

We’ve reached the end of the point. Gentle waves lap on the rocky shore below; across the sparkling sea, Byzantium rises from its promontory. At the moment it’s a small ferry port: a useful staging post for travellers crossing to Asia or up to the Black Sea, but too far upwind from the Mediterranean to generate any major commerce. At this distance, the only building of any prominence is the baths, with the low line of the hippodrome just visible beyond.

‘Is this what you brought us to see?’ asks Fausta. She’s come up behind us with the infant Constans. Her voice is muffled under the enormous hat and veil she’s wearing to keep the sun off her face. While Constantine’s lived his life at the frontiers, and can walk for miles, she’s a creature of the palace. She can’t comprehend walking anywhere that hasn’t been shaded, pruned and swept. It offends her.

‘This place is the hinge of the world.’ Constantine has a way of speaking sometimes which makes you believe he’s seeing things you can’t. ‘Halfway between east and west. And now, the hinge of history.’

Claudius and Constantius seem to have conquered Crispus. He collapses to the ground, writhing theatrically and clutching an imaginary wound in his side, then goes still.

‘I thought you were old enough to fight real battles now,’ Fausta says.

Crispus gets to his feet and brushes dust and pine needles off his tunic. ‘Not too old to play with my brothers.’

Fausta scowls. Her boys adore Crispus – the best of a brother and a father rolled into one. She can’t stand it. Like Crispus, Constantine was the only son of a first marriage. Like Crispus, Constantine has three half-brothers from his father’s second marriage. He treats them regally, but he’s never allowed them within a hundred miles of real power. Yesterday’s battle is a bitter victory for her. If there’s to be only one emperor, what will her sons inherit?

A shout behind us interrupts the lap of waves and the buzz of flies. When you’re sole ruler of the world, you don’t just go for a stroll in the countryside. The imperial guard have cordoned off the whole promontory. Now, a dozen guards are approaching, walking single file on the narrow track between the grass and bushes. A woman and a boy, both dressed in plain white tunics, walk between them. It’s Constantiana and her son Licinianus.

The moment they appear, Constantine stops being a father, a husband, a friend and becomes the Augustus again. His shoulders spread; he seems to grow six inches taller.

The soldiers salute and form a line. Constantiana drops her bundle on the ground, a wad of purple cloth, and sinks to her knees in the dust. Her son kneels beside her.

‘From my husband Licinius – his imperial vestments. He renounces his titles and any claim to power. All he asks is that you spare his life and his family.’

‘If he’d won yesterday, would he have spared me?’ Constantine makes a gesture at Fausta, Crispus and the boys. ‘Them?’

‘If my husband had won, I’d be kneeling in front of him this minute begging him to spare you.’ Her dress is artfully torn, her hair carefully disarrayed; you might think she’d just come off the battlefield herself. But the desolation in her face is genuine. She had dreams, too.

She stares at Constantine’s feet. The captain of the guard’s hand drifts to the hilt of his sword. Constantine