Cast Not The Day Page 31

  Our eyes locked. I could feel his breath on my face. In a silken voice more menacing than any knife-blade he said, ‘You fool! You should have let me do it.’

  I understood, and for a brief moment we regarded one another in dreadful silence. The emperor’s notaries worked in the shadows, performing what was shameful to be seen or known. And now this man had been exposed in all his crimes, and the emperor with him. Constantius would make him pay; and the notary knew it best of all. ‘Take him down to the cells,’ I said.

  During the night the city was retaken, though it would be truer to say that resistance gave way without contest, as the rotten fruit collapses at the first touch. Only the barbarian German guards put up a fight. The urban mob, who had been so brave against ageing unarmed citizens, vanished from the streets.

  Next day, we brought the notary from the cells and put him on a ship to Gaul.

  Before he stepped on board he turned to me, fixing my eye. Even now, as a manacled prisoner, there was something terrifying about him, a reaching into one’s soul. I forced myself not to look away.

  Seeing this, and knowing his power, his gaunt face moved in a brief, cold smile. In a quiet voice he said, ‘You had better hope we never meet again.’

  I said, ‘The emperor will see to that.’

  For an instant he paused. My words had sounded brave and hollow, like a child’s. I could tell it amused him; but I did not care. He had dwelt too long with the dark things. I did not want such knowledge as he possessed.

  I thought he was going to speak again; but with a final chilling look he turned away, and the guard led him up the gangboard, and took him below.

  The squat, iron-studded door of the bishop’s residence stood open. Within, strewn about the courtyard, lay signs of destruction and hurried flight – a shattered wine-jar, its contents splashed across the old flagstones like blood; a single doeskin slipper with a silver clasp; the crumpled homespun of a monk’s habit.

  We walked on, through the deserted entry, into the bishop’s grandiose audience-chamber.

  The vast embroidered tapestry still filled the far wall. The heavy stag-footed gilded divan, where once I had sat, was still in its place before his marble-topped desk, and from the alcoves the heavy statues still stared impassively. But everything that was portable was gone – the gilded cups, the jewel-studded caskets, the filigree silverwork.

  We stepped cautiously ahead. On one side of the divan a half-filled wooden chest stood. A goblet protruded from the straw packing, embossed with grapes and vine-leaves. I took it up and turned it in the grey winter light, and recalled the last time I had seen it, clutched in the bishop’s hand.

  Marcellus, who had not been here before, regarded the opulence and said dryly, ‘I thought Christians chose to live in poverty.’

  ‘Not this one,’ I replied. I let the cup fall back onto its straw bed.

  ‘It looks,’ he said, ‘as though the fat pigeon has flown.’

  I frowned about the room. Even with his life in danger, the bishop had not been able to leave without his riches. The city gates had all been closed: he must have taken one of the small river-boats during the night, under cover of darkness.

  At the great desk – sculpted white marble streaked with cherry-red – I frowned and paused, then glanced up at Marcellus.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Do you smell it?’ The scent was fading; but still, in that great cold ornate chamber, the fragrance of sweet perfume hung in the air.

  Marcellus sniffed and twisted up his face. ‘Did he keep women here too?’

  ‘No, not women. It’s him. He’s still here.’

  We found him in his private chapel – a small room with a domed, painted ceiling and a carved altar like a sarcophagus. He was on his knees, bent forward, with his small thick fingers clutching the stone altar-top. A single silver lamp burned there, its flickering light glinting on the emerald and jasper and amethyst of his rings.

  The door had been ajar; he had not noticed us. But then, as I stepped forward into the dim chamber, my boot sounded on the polished stone and he swung round.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘This is a holy place! Have you not taken enough?’

  But then, seeing our military clothing, his eyes narrowed and he drew in his breath, and clutching his mantle around him he climbed to his feet.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said, and there was a wavering in his voice. ‘Are you here to arrest me?’ And when I did not answer he went on, ‘I am the victim here, do you not see? I have been used, put upon by evil men, and now, in my hour of need, they have abandoned me . . . My friends’ – he spat the word out, his round pink face suddenly twisting in bitter fury – ‘my friends have deceived and robbed me. I am a good man – how not? I am a man of God – and I have been moved only by love. Damnation on all of them! They have deserted me.’

  He turned back to the altar and began intoning a prayer, his voice sounding in hurried high-pitched gasps, like a keening woman. But in the midst of it he suddenly broke off and rounded on us.

  ‘You cannot arrest me!’ he cried, throwing up his glittering fingers. ‘I am protected by the emperor. I am a bishop. Do you hear me? A bishop, and you have no authority.’ And he went on to recount in tiny detail the complex legal exemptions to which his position entitled him, which the Christian emperors had enacted to privilege the Church and set it above the law, repeating them like some sort of charm against me. When at length he had finished he returned to the litany of the wrongs he had suffered – how his house had been looted; how those to whom he had devoted his life had turned against him; how he had lost everything and was destitute. And as he spoke he kept stretching his arms in supplication to the holy images on the walls, as if they would take pity on him.

  Eventually, after some little while of this spectacle, Marcellus cut him off, raising his voice and saying, ‘Not once, in all this, have you spoken of anyone but yourself. Where is your shame for all the men you have falsely accused, or for Heliodora, whom your monks dragged off and killed?’

  ‘I am innocent, and what can you prove?’ he retorted, eyeing us with a shrewd, calculating look. ‘Leave me alone to pray. Do you not see how I suffer?’

  Marcellus touched my arm and beckoned me back into the corridor.

  ‘Has he lost his wits?’ he whispered, when I had followed him out, ‘or what is all this about?’

  I shrugged and shook my head, and in the silence, from the little chapel behind us, the bishop resumed his mumbling chant.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was feeling the same deepseated nausea of my last encounter with him. ‘He was lucid enough when he was telling us the rights granted to him by the emperor.’

  I said it seemed to me his vanity and self-conceit had fully mastered him; and that, in itself, was an insanity of sorts. Perhaps, after all, the true implications of his crimes, which up to now had not touched him, were too much for his mind to bear, and he had retreated to his fantasies, so that he inhabited a twilight world with himself at the centre, and all else shadows and dreams.

  Marcellus listened to my words with a stony frown, and as he listened he stared at the half-open door to the chapel, with the pale flickering lamplight showing through the opening, and the bishop’s hurried breathless voice within.

  ‘Then what shall we do with him?’ he asked. ‘Shall we arrest him?’

  I folded my arms across my chest, and let out my breath, and looked away down the narrow unlit passageway. From somewhere far within, a distant voice was singing, a rough drunken male voice, tunelessly rising and falling. It must have been a stray looter, left in the wine-store, drinking himself to oblivion.

  Indeed, I thought, they had turned on their bishop in the end, the city poor and the disaffected feral youths who were his chief victims. They had descended upon him angry and afraid, and had wrought the only revenge they knew, returning a little of the chaos and destruction he had brought down upon their heads. It seemed unjust that they should su
ffer and he should not.

  I found, as these thoughts passed through my mind, that my hand had moved to the dagger on my belt. As my palm touched the cold pommel, I felt my rage like a sudden fire within me. It would be the easiest thing of all to return to the chapel now and despatch the preening fool, and leave him as a sacrifice on his own altar. Easy for me: but, I reflected, easy for him too – a brief moment of surprise and terror, and all would be over; unless, as he claimed, there was some other underworld place where men such as he lived on, recollecting their misdeeds and paying for them. But I could not suppose it. Better, far better, to let him live, and face the consequences of what he had done.

  Slowly I released my hand from my dagger and turned to Marcellus.

  ‘Leave him,’ I said. ‘People will say we lock him up because we fear him, that we do to him what he has done to Heliodora. Let them hear him and see for themselves that he counts for nothing. He cannot continue; he must know that. His followers have deserted him. He has had his chance to rule, and he has brought nothing but ruin to the city. Everyone has seen it; the evidence is all around us. No one will follow him now.’

  And so at last we left him, mumbling his prayers alone in his gilded chapel beside his empty, unfinished cathedral, built from the looted ruins of what had stood before. We walked out through the open door, across the ravaged square, and away down the hill towards the river.

  On the slope, beside an old smashed shrine, we paused and gazed out at the water, and the distant fields to the south and west, where finally the winter sun had broken through the clouds, casting diffused shafts of fading evening light.

  I found I was thinking of Aquinus. My heart had been full of anger and revenge. But now I felt an emptiness, a stillness, a calm. He had been right, and I understood now his reluctance to meet violence with violence, when all about him there had been so much injustice. Nothing would be the same. The city remained – the fine buildings and open precincts, the gardens and baths and neglected temples. But its soul was retreating, ebbing away, dispersing like smoke into air.

  Men had made the city because they believed in it, and in themselves, and what together they could achieve. They had filled it with their gods, and adorned it with objects of beauty. And now those men were gone, and the beautiful objects were looted and broken; and from the temples the gods had retreated back to the remote places of the countryside from whence they came – the secret streams, and dark forests, and mountaintops, and sacred groves.

  All this Aquinus had seen, and resisted. What men had built, men had also undone, through their own folly, and ease, and complacency.

  And, somewhere beyond the horizon of my vision, unseen enemies, who cared nothing for such precious things, were observing our self-inflicted weakness, and smiling as they waited, biding their time, and sharpening their swords against us.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE EVENTS OF THE STORY take place in the mid-fourth century AD (about AD 350), in the generation prior to the fall of the western Roman Empire. It was a time when people had grown used to a unified world of material plenty, where one could travel from York to Jerusalem speaking a common language, spending the same money, and dwelling in the same culture. People found it inconceivable that such a complex and powerful world could come to an end; they were simply unable to foresee the complete collapse that was the Dark Ages. My novel explores some of the reasons for that collapse.

  The modern reader is likely to be familiar with the Roman world of Julius Caesar, but less familiar with late antiquity. For that reader, and for those who enjoy the details and feel like delving further, I provide a few pointers.

  Since the reign of the emperor Constantine I (died AD 337), the empire had been officially Christian. The Church, growing in confidence, and bolstered by the power of the state, was attempting to bring about by force what it had been unable to achieve by persuasion. This was a period of growing religious absolutism and intolerance, alien to the accommodating polytheism of the classical world.

  The later Church liked to present the advance of Christianity as inexorable; but in the mid-fourth century its victory was not assured, and there is evidence during this time of resistance and a general pagan revival, both in Britain and elsewhere.

  It is worth mentioning the terms ‘Caesar’ and ‘Augustus’. Originally Caesar referred to Julius Caesar, and Augustus was the honorific name assumed by Caesar’s nephew and adopted son Octavian when he became the first emperor. By the late empire these terms had become titles of office. An Augustus was an emperor; a Caesar was an emperor’s deputy and designated successor – who was often, but not always, a family relation. Also, at various times, it was thought expedient to divide the vast empire between two or more emperors, each of whom would rule a part (typically the West and the East). So, during the late empire, there were often two or more emperors, each ruling a different region.

  For the purposes of the story I have simplified the more complicated aspects of late Roman provincial administration. Provinces during this period were grouped together into larger units called dioceses (a term later taken up by the Church). Each diocese was administered by an official known in Latin as a vicarius. These details, though interesting, do not add to the drama of the tale I have told, and so I have left them out.

  As far as place names are concerned, I have chosen the modern name where this is likely to be familiar to the reader. So, for example, I have preferred Britain to Britannia; London to Londinium; York to Eboracum; Autun to Augustodunum.