Part 22 (2/2)
She nodded. Constantine liked to have everyone happy around him. I wondered sometimes if the uncertainties of his childhood had given him this desire for a perfect family, or whether he simply believed it necessary if he was properly to fulfil his role as Emperor.
When Constantine was at home, it was his custom to sit with me for an hour at the end of the evening.
We would speak sometimes of the family, and sometimes of the Empire. I suppose that I was the only advisor whom he could trust absolutely, but even to me he rarely opened his mind completely. I regretted sometimes the loss of the open-hearted boy he had been before he went to Diocletian's court, but I knew that innocence would never have survived the dangers and intrigues that surrounded an emperor.
I had a small sitting room between my bedchamber and the gardens, with doors that could be opened in the heat of summer, and a hearth in the British fas.h.i.+on for the days of winter and autumnal chill. Now, at the end of summer, I sat by the fire with my spinning. The work was no longer the necessity it had been at Avalon, but I found it focused and calmed the mind.
”How do you make the thread so fine and even, Mother? No matter how long I watch you, when I try the wool always breaks in my clumsy hands!” Constantine sat with his long legs stretched out to the fire, his deep-set eyes half-closed as he watched the spindle turn.
”It is a good thing, then, that you were not born a girl,” I answered, catching the spindle with my foot as I paid out more wool from the distaff and adjusted the tension. Then a deft twist set it spinning again.
”Oh yes,” he laughed. ”But the fates, who have laid out my course from the cradle, would not have erred in so fundamental a matter. I was born to be Emperor.”
I raised one eyebrow. There was something a little disturbing about such certainty, but I could not dispute what I also believed to be true.
”And to father a dynasty? Crispus is growing to be a fine lad, but one son is not much of a family. Fausta is nineteen now, and ripe to be bedded. She will get into mischief if you do not give her children.”
”Has she been complaining?” He laughed. ”You are right, of course, but I will sire no more offspring until I can be sure of being at home often enough to supervise their upbringing. The death of Galerius has upset the balance of power. I have reason to believe that Maximin Daia has made an alliance with Maxentius. I myself have been in communication with Licinius, who also claims the East, and offered him the hand of my sister Constantia.”
He gave me a quick glance, as if wondering how I would take this mention of his half-sister, but I had long ago accepted the fact that Constantius had asked Constantine to watch over the children of Theodora. Her birth might have been better than mine, but it was my son who was Emperor.
”So, the lines have been drawn...”
”Maxentius has defaced my statues. He says it is in response to my treatment of the images of his father Maximian, but Maximian died a rebel, whereas I am supposed to be Maxentius's brother-emperor. I will have to go against him, and soon, before snow closes the Alpine pa.s.ses. It is as good an excuse as any.”
”If the rumours thatI have heard are true, the Senate will applaud you. He has made free with too many patrician wives and daughters, and imposed too many taxes. But do you have the forces to match the men he has added to the Praetorian Guard, and the troops brought over from Africa?”
”In quality-” he grinned whitely. ”In quant.i.ty? No, but I am the better general. Superior numbers will not matter if they are not led well.”
”May the blessing of all the G.o.ds be with you,” I said, frowning.
The last of the laughter left his face. ”If I knew which G.o.d could guarantee me victory I would promise him a temple-I would make his cult first in the Empire. I must fight Maxentius, and it must be done now, but you are right in thinking that the result will hang upon the favour of heaven. Pray for me, Mother-you have the ear of the G.o.ds!”
”You are always in my thoughts and in my prayers,” I answered when the silence threatened to go on for too long. I loved Constantine. He was the centre of my life. But there were times when he seemed to need more than I understood how to give to him.
The next day he was gone, to gather his faithful troops from the Rhenus, I a.s.sumed, though no announcement had been made that might warn his enemy. Later I was to learn that Maxentius, antic.i.p.ating some move from Constantine, had entrusted the defence of the north to Ruricius Pompeia.n.u.s, staying in Rome himself in case Lieinius should finish dealing with the Persians in time to attack him. But at the time I was unable to appreciate even what news we had, for Crispus had taken some illness from the gardener's children, and though he recovered quickly, I, who had been nursing him, contracted it myself.
First came the red rash, and then the fever, that seemed to burn in my very bones. If this was a disease we had in Britannia, my upbringing on Avalon had sheltered me from it. And as often happens when an adult catches a childhood disease, I became far more ill than Crispus had been.
I lay in alternating stupor and delirium as the month of October drew to its end. In my moments of clarity I heard the names of cities: Segusio, Taurinorum, Mediolanum, and later, Verona, Brixia, Aquileia, Mutina. Afterward, I was to learn that they were the towns Constantine had taken. By refusing to allow his soldiers to plunder the first of them, he had won the swift surrender of those that followed. But I was fighting my own battle, and as the days pa.s.sed, I sensed that I was losing.
Events around me pa.s.sed like a troubled dream, but in that in-between state in which I hovered, neither the world of humankind or the spirit world, I sensed the tides of the seasons swinging onwards towards Samhain, when the Britons hold that the old year ends and the gestation of the new begins. There comes a moment, then, when a doorway opens between the worlds and the dead return.
A good time, I thought dimly, for my own pa.s.sing. I regretted only that I had no chance to say farewell to Constantine. Yet it was not my life, but an era, that was ending, though it was to be many years before I clearly understood the signficance of that Samhain-tide.
A day came when the fever rose once more, and my spirit, freed from a weakening body, fared forth between the worlds. I seemed to see the land laid out below me, and love carried me eastwards where my son was about to come to grips with his enemy. I saw a great city beside a river which I knew must be Rome. But Maxentius's forces had crossed the Tiber upstream from the city, and were drawn up in formation, facing the smaller number of troops led by Constantine. Winter was coming early, and in the crisp air the sun seemed to shatter, sending a refraction across the horizon that rayed out in a cross of light.
Constantine's forces charged the enemy, his Gallic cavalry evading the more heavily armed Italian horse and overwhelming the lightly-armed Numidians. I could see Constantine in his golden armour, and his bodyguard, all with a Greek Chi Rho painted for luck upon their s.h.i.+elds.
Maxentius's Praetorians died where they stood, and the remainder broke and ran. The bridge cracked beneath the sudden weight, spilling men and horses into the swift grey waters. The attackers swarmed after them, repairing the damage, and by sunset they were entering Rome.
As shadow swept across the land I also fell into darkness. The disease had run its course, but I was dreadfully weakened. I would eat and drink when they roused me, but most of the time I slept.
Sometimes, half-conscious, I would hear conversation around me.
”She grows no better,” came the voice of the Greek physician. ”The Emperor must be told.”
”We dare not distract him. If Constantine is defeated, none of our lives will be worth a denarius.
Maxentius will treat us as Maximian did the wife and daughter of Galerius.” That was Vitellia. She sounded as if she had been weeping. I wanted to tell her that Constantine had triumphed, but I could not make my body do my will.
”Even if we sent a message now, my lord could not come in time,” said Fausta. She was Maxentius's sister, and might expect to be spared if he triumphed, unless he blamed her for the death of their father.
The early emperors had not hesitated to kill their own kin. Why should I fight my way back to life in a world where such things could be?
But by the next morning a messenger had come to confirm my vision, and in the general rejoicing, little Crispus slipped into my chamber, and as he hugged me, laughing for joy at the news and weeping to see me so thin and pale, I felt a pulse of strength leap from his strong young body to mine, and knew that the G.o.ds were not going to take me this Samhain after all.
It was past the feast of Saturnalia when Constantine returned to Treveri. By that time I was recovering my strength, with only an occasional shortness of breath to remind me of my fight to breathe, but my hair, which until now had shown only a few strands of grey, had gone white in the course of my illness. I trusted that it would distract him from noting any other changes, for I had not allowed them to tell him how close to death I had come.
I chose to receive him in my sitting room, where the reflected light from my red-painted walls would give me a healthier colour. Even so, I was glad to be sitting when he came to me, for the aura of power that blazed out around him was like the blast of heat from a roaring fire.
”HailSol Invictus ! You are surely the sun in his splendour now!”
I lifted a hand, in welcome, or perhaps to ward him away, for in that moment he was a giant, dwarfing all else in the room. Later, when I saw the statue that he had commissioned in Rome, whose head alone was the height of a tall man, I realized that the sculptor had sensed the same quality of something beyond the scale of humanity as I.
Constantine grinned, bent to kiss me, and then began to pace around the room, as if the power that filled him would not let him sit still. He did not comment on my appearance; perhaps he was still too transfixed by his visions to really focus on the outer world.
”Oh Mother, I wish you had been there, for surely the G.o.d of Light was with me on that day!” He took another turn around the room and came to my side once more.
”I have heard there were many signs and wonders. What happened, Constantine? What did you see?”
”Oh yes, now they are all saying how my victory was foretold, but at the time the prophets on both sides were predicting their sides would win. The Sibylline Books prophesied that an enemy of Rome would perish on the day of the battle, and of course Maxentius said it must be me, and the astrologers were muttering darkly about a conjunction of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus in Capricorn. But I am the Child of Prophecy, and I knew how to make even my enemies serve me!”
I gazed at him in wonder. Constantine had always been confident, but now he spoke with the fervour of a priest in trance.
”Maxentius had become a tyrant, and Rome was bound to see me as a liberator. He was on the bridge when it collapsed, and the weight of his armour drew him down into the mud and he drowned. As for the stars, the night before the battle I dreamed that a s.h.i.+ning figure showed me a scroll with the Greek letters that the scribes use to signify a pa.s.sage that is good, and told me that was the Sign by which I should conquer. When I woke, I told the fabricators to affix the Chi and Rho to a military standard, and my guard, to draw the Sign on their s.h.i.+elds, and then the sun rose and divided in a cross of light, and I knew I would have the victory. Sopater believes that I saw Apollo, but Bishop Ossius a.s.sures me that my vision was given by the Christos.”
”And what do you believe?” I asked him then.
”The Jewish Jesus, whom we crucified, is a G.o.d for slaves,” said Constantine. ”But the great Father whom the Christians wors.h.i.+p, the King and Creator of all the world, is the same as the G.o.d of the philosophers, and worthy to be patron to an emperor. I do not think it matters what name folk use for Him, so long as they recognize that One G.o.d is supreme in the heavens and on the earth, one Emperor.”
”The Senate may have acclaimed you as senior Augustus,” I observed gently, ”but in the East, Licinius still rules, and is about to become your brother-in-law...'
”That is true,” Constantine frowned. ”I do not know how the G.o.d will arrange matters, but in my heart, I know that what I have said is true. It is my destiny.”
”I believe you,” I said softly, for in that moment, with the last of the winter sunlight bathing him in a golden glow, he did indeed seem touched by a G.o.d. And surely, after the civil disorders of the past years, a single strong hand on the reins of Empire would be welcome.
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