Conspiracies of Rome Read online

  There was a public library. But Lucius flatly refused to let me enter. He’d never seen me at work in Rome. But he probably guessed how time could stand still for me whenever I found myself in a room with books.

  There was also a tiny church built by the mother of Constantine shortly after his conversion. This had been changed and extended over the years, and now had a bell tower that stood incongruously beside it.

  ‘Are you up to climbing this?’ Lucius asked. ‘I can show you something that will raise your spirits.’

  I nodded. He helped me up the narrow steps to the top. I clutched with my good arm at the wooden rail, wondering at how little strength I could put into the grip. Even so, I could feel the gradual return of strength. Young bodies have the most wondrous resilience. The fever had not been great, and now it was passing.

  At the top, Lucius leant over the northern parapet. ‘Do you see that blur in the distance?’ he asked.

  I looked. Before me lay an immense flat waste, an embanked road leading through it until lost in the heat haze. Far beyond, almost on the horizon, I saw what Lucius was pointing at. It was a blur at first. But I focused and concentrated. Through the low, shimmering air, I could see a high and wide expanse of domes and towers.

  There were miles and miles yet to go. But I’d had my first sight of Ravenna – that great, untakeable fastness perched between a marsh and the sea. From here, the last Western emperors had ruled Italy as best they could, safe from the general havoc that lapped or overpoured the walls of every other city. From here, the exarch now ruled, in continual touch by sea with Constantinople and the world that stretched far beyond the narrow confines of the West.

  Within those walls lay the last undamaged fragments of the old Roman life – the palaces and libraries and bathhouses and trading marts, and the large remains of an urban culture to which all Italy had once been home.

  ‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ Lucius said. ‘Once I’ve got you bathed and rested, we’ll take ourselves to the exarch. I would have sent a slave ahead to alert him to our coming. In the present circumstances, it may be best for us simply to arrive unannounced at his door.’

  Back down in the square before the church, I felt decidedly better. We’d outrun the dispensator’s men. Another day, and I’d be in the fabled Ravenna of the exarch. And I could hope for the answers to which I’d been laying impatient and not always advisable siege since that awful dawn by the Column of Phocas.

  Whatever it meant for me, I swore, I’d have those answers.

  After a brief and merciful rest, we set out again on the road. Before nightfall, we’d be travelling through that great marsh within which Ravenna was protected from all enemies. Some time the following day, we could expect to pass through the immense fortifications.

  Yes, I’d have those answers.

  47

  We were deep into the marshes that protected Ravenna on its landward side. Still straight, the road passed across on a high causeway. Every mile or so, we were stopped and questioned at one of the military checkpoints that blocked the only approach to the city. Each time, Lucius showed his letter of safe conduct, and we passed through.

  The marshes went on for miles. We’d made our gradual descent onto them in the morning. Now I was grown almost used to their hot, stinking air.

  I asked how the city could possibly survive in a climate so pestilential.

  ‘The city itself has the most wonderful air,’ Lucius explained.

  Just before Ravenna, he continued, the marshes gave way to more solid ground. Part of the city was built on this, part on moles sunk deep into the coastal mud. The continual breeze from the Adriatic gave it an unexpectedly fine climate. The gentle movement of the tide washed sea water in and out twice a day through the canals that intersected much of the city. This carried away all the filth and other refuse that would otherwise have remained to fester into an epidemic. Such infections as did take hold in the city were carried in along the shipping lanes from the world outside. Even these were less terrible than when they reached Rome or any of the inland cities.

  It was less fortunate for those armies anyone was mad enough to send against the city. Every one of these had sickened and shrivelled away. The only need for an armed garrison was to keep order inside the walls and to guard the causeway that led across the marshes.

  ‘If it’s churches you like, you’ll love Ravenna,’ said Lucius. ‘The place has been filling up with them for centuries. Even I can appreciate some of the craftsmanship that went into their creation. One of these days, they will all be turned over to the worship of the Old Gods. Even then, however, I hope we can keep some of the mosaics in them. Some might have to be painted over. The rest, though, can be put to a more fitting use than they were designed for.’

  Lucius explained his plan for rolling back Christianity. It required another Julian. But this one wouldn’t throw his life away on trying to imitate Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia. This emperor would take up the failed project of complete religious toleration. All forms of worship would be protected. But the Old Religion would be again the established faith. Only its adherents would be allowed to serve in the army and administration. Only they would be allowed to teach in any institute of higher learning.

  ‘And this is only fair,’ said Lucius. ‘How can someone who believes the Old Gods are demons possibly teach an ancient literature that was created to glorify them? How can he celebrate and encourage emulation of the lives of heroes who his Church insists are burning in Hell?

  ‘It’s really as if I were given the job of preaching the Gospels. With my best effort, I’d make a mess of it. So I’m hardly insisting on the unreasonable. Let them preach the word of their Jewish carpenter. I’d never dream of stopping them. In return, let them stick to that. Everything else must be for my people. Each to his own. What could be fairer than that?’

  I thought of Saint Jerome in his desert, accused by those invisible demons of giving more time to Cicero than to the Gospels. I thought of Pope Gregory and his prayers for the souls of the pagan writers and heroes. There was a contradiction between the two cultures.

  Lucius had a point, to some extent. The Church was at war with the past. At the same time, though, the Church had taken over the whole of ancient learning to a degree that he couldn’t realise. The more educated clerics were able, in ways that I myself had trouble comprehending, to hold in their minds two contradictory views of the world without letting one contaminate the other. They could read Cicero in the morning, and preach from the Gospels in the afternoon. In the evening, if they felt inclined, they could write about the Gospels in a style sometimes admirably close to Cicero. I thought to explain the plan behind the English mission. But Lucius was continuing with his own explanation.

  Christianity would be tolerated, he said. But every man of ability and ambition would avoid the Church once membership was no longer the path to worldly advancement. From the moment Constantine had established it, the Church had been filled with hypocrites. They mouthed one nonsensical doctrine after another, never believing a word of any of them. They didn’t believe, but they supplied an essential weight of numbers without which the Church couldn’t have triumphed. Take away that establishment, and the hypocrites would give their same essential weight to the restored Old Religion.

  One generation of rigid discrimination would force Christianity back into becoming the lower-class religion from which it had started. The temples would reopen. The greater churches would have their uses changed. Once again, the smoke of sacrifice would rise from ten thousand altars, and the nightmare of the past three centuries would pass away.

  But the new paganism wouldn’t be the decentralised bundle of worships that Christianity had displaced. The Old Religion was true, but its organisation had failed it. The Church was based on the fraudulent raising up of a minor Jewish deity far beyond his proper station. But the organisation of the Church from Saint Paul onwards had been a work of genius. Long before Constantine, it had mi
rrored in its own structures the administrative machinery of the Empire. Before ever they had been given equal status with the civil authorities, its bishops had been trained in a school of government.

  A revived paganism would learn from that. No longer a bundle of self-contained worships, it would be unified at every level. Each cult would be formally assimilated with the others corresponding to it. The worship of Syrian Astarte would be combined with that of the Ephesian Artemis. And above the worship of the people, a class of philosophical priests would teach that the honour paid to every lesser deity was also honour paid to the single unmoved Mover of the Universe.

  There would be a formal hierarchy, with regular councils to settle points of disputed doctrine. But, unlike with the Western Church, the civil power would predominate. The emperor would be pontifex maximus. There would be no room for patriarchs, let alone a universal bishop able to arrogate the imperial power.

  Lucius spoke on, ostensibly to me, but mainly for himself, building his castles in the air as we trotted along that interminably long causeway. For a while, I thought he had caught some of my old fever. At last, though, he turned to the more immediate matter of our accommodation in Ravenna.

  We’d turn up unannounced at the house of a friend close by the naval base. We’d rest. From here, we’d move on to the palace of the exarch. Even if he were up to his eyes in work, Smaragdus would receive us directly. Once those letters had been produced and read, there would be an immediate dispatch of enough soldiers to arrest every senior official in the Lateran and secure its archives. These would all be brought to Ravenna for the formal investigation of treason.

  ‘And what then?’ I asked.

  ‘That depends on events that I can neither predict nor control,’ said Lucius. ‘But one thing I can promise is that we shall both have something at least of what we most want. And we can plan our future together.’

  Our future together?

  I hadn’t thought of that. I owed an immense amount to Lucius. He had taken me up that day on the Tiber embankment and helped me on a journey to the truth I could never have mapped out for myself. He had saved my life. He was good in bed. But the rest of my life with him? How much had we really in common?

  I wanted to read every book in the world that hadn’t yet fallen to pieces. I wanted to see much of the world. I wanted to endow the mission to my own land with riches of knowledge and its supporting gold that would multiply across the centuries. In this last respect – and perhaps in the others too – I was part of a Church that he only wanted to see destroyed.

  And what did Lucius want? He wanted, I had no doubt, enough money to get his palace back into its ancient glory, and to give him the undoubted first place in noble society in Rome. That was the only reason I could see why he had made that long journey to wonderful Constantinople. I knew he’d been in the Imperial Palace. I knew he’d watched some execution in the Circus that had sickened even his firmness of mind. Had he once stepped into those vast libraries? I knew he had barely a word of Greek, and had no desire to learn more.

  Women are one thing. They look after the household and have children. They can even have a sort of equality in your life once you accept their lower nature. But where would be the glue in a long relationship with Lucius?

  And what about the Church? In Rome, it had all appeared obvious once Lucius explained it. Maximin hadn’t destroyed those letters because he wanted to use them to bring the pope and dispensator to justice before the exarch.

  But had he? Did Maximin really want the Western Church to be despoiled and then made into a department of the imperial state, as it was in the East? Where would that leave the English mission? Was Ethelbert to become a vassal of the emperor? Was the race of educated Englishmen I was to help raise up to become pieces in a game played from Constantinople?

  It had seemed obvious enough in Rome. I hadn’t given any thought at all to the wider implications of what I was doing in the first and most exciting part of our journey to Ravenna. But I had, in my conscious moments while jolting along the road in that carriage, been able to give long thought to these matters.

  I fell into a guilty silence.

  ‘Are you feeling well, my love?’ Lucius asked, giving me a look of tender concern. ‘Does the air trouble you? We’ll be in Ravenna before evening. But we can stop at an inn built over the marshes. We can rest there awhile.’

  ‘I do feel rather tired,’ I lied. ‘If we can stop before very long, I’d appreciate the chance of a rest and a cup of wine.’

  We stopped at the inn. This was a lighter structure than the other inns I’d seen. It rested on wooden supports sunk deep into the mud. Lucius and I bathed again and took a late, slow lunch.

  ‘We can slow down as much as we like,’ said Lucius. ‘I suggest we don’t put any further strain on your health in this climate. Whether we arrive in Ravenna this evening or tomorrow morning doesn’t now matter. Smaragdus will thank us for those letters, but would never appreciate being got out of bed to look at them. He’s getting old, you know. And he is just a little mad, I think I’ve already told you.

  ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ said Lucius, now decided.

  We ordered a room. We got into bed. I slept. Stronger than for several days past, I now had no dreams.

  I didn’t mean to sleep so long. I’d expected Lucius to wake me. But I eventually woke by myself as the first light of morning was stealing across the marshes outside. I could hear the big, wooden gate creaking open for the day, and the cheerful sound of men on horseback. From down in the slave quarters, I could smell the heated wine and hear the clatter of pots as breakfast was made ready.

  Lucius was already up. For the first time, I saw him reading a book. He read aloud, but was keeping his voice down so as not to disturb me. I heard the slow, halting mutter of something in one of the more complex lyric metres.

  ‘I never guessed you liked poetry,’ I said, looking over to the window where Lucius had his book.

  ‘Nor did I,’ came the reply. ‘I had a wretched education, and I’m beginning to feel I should do some catching up if I’m to be a fit companion for you. I borrowed the book from some deacon I was drinking with last night. It’s all rather difficult stuff, though, don’t you think? I’ve been up half the night, and I’m only on the fifth page of this thick, heavy book.’

  I got stiffly out of bed and stretched. Lucius gave me an appreciative look.

  ‘I think I could do with a brief walk to get some movement back into me,’ I said. My arm was still aching. But I’d removed the bandage, as the wound was nicely scabbed over. I reached for some clothes.

  ‘If you’re going down, could you sort out another change of horses?’ Lucius asked. ‘Get something fine. I’ve had our good clothes aired and pressed. We shan’t be exactly splendid. But there’s much to be said for making the best entry possible into Ravenna.’

  I reached for my purse. So far as I could tell, Lucius had paid the whole cost of our journey so far. With all my riches – and if the dispensator had frozen these, they’d soon enough be unfrozen – I had a plain duty to pay some share of all this travelling.

  ‘No, no, my golden Alaric,’ Lucius protested. ‘Take my purse with you. I absolutely insist.’

  He got up and forced his purse into my hands.

  Down in the stable, I chose a couple of black horses. They were a matched pair, and of good quality. But I thought they were rather expensive.

  ‘This is Ravenna, mate,’ the groom explained when I tried to haggle on the price. ‘You aren’t in some shithole pile of ruins now. This is an imperial city. You pay standard prices here.’

  I wished I had brought my own purse. I was being forced to hand over almost as much as the previous six days had cost us. I sighed and opened the smaller compartment of the purse Lucius had grabbed up as we left his house.

  I pulled out a couple of solidi. I looked at them. My heart froze. The coins all bore the head of the Emperor Maurice. On the reverse, the letters ‘CONOB�
� were clearly stamped. The letter B was raised just a little above the other four letters.

  I emptied the whole compartment into my hand, and spread out the smooth, regular coins.

  ‘It’s not that much, mate,’ the groom laughed. ‘Here, I can see you aren’t up with real coin. Let me sort out the price—’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ I snapped. ‘Keep those horses to one side. I’ll be back for them.’

  48

  Back in our room, I undressed and lay on the bed. I stretched out my arms to Lucius. He came to me. We fornicated for a long time.

  Afterwards, I began in a slow, dreamy voice I’d been practising in my head.

  ‘Lucius,’ I asked, ‘We’ll be meeting the exarch later today, shan’t we?’

  ‘Yes. Probably in the late afternoon.’

  ‘You say he’s a bit mad. Does that make him dangerous?’

  Lucius thought. ‘Not really dangerous,’ he said. ‘The man is getting old, and the tendency to shortness of temper that he’s always had is growing worse with age. I promise you’ll get on with him – no problem.’

  ‘But I’ll need to be careful what I say to him – after all, he’s the most powerful man in Italy.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lucius. ‘But you don’t have to worry about that. Your speech and general manners are not in question.’

  ‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘but I’ll need to know the appropriate responses to what he says. In particular, I’ll need to know the truth about those letters. The truth for the whole world is one thing. The real truth is another. And I must have the real truth.’

  Lucius sat up. I continued lying, my eyes half closed, my good arm across my brow.

  ‘Lucius,’ I said, ‘I know that you had those letters written. You got Martin and someone else to write them. You got them to those English mercenaries outside Populonium, and you set them up with the prefect’s men.