Part 23 (1/2)

The prophecies of Avalon had foretold a child who would change the world, and with every year it became clearer that Constantine was the one foretold. My rebellion had been vindicated. I wondered why I still felt that flicker of unease even as I rejoiced in my son's victory.

The spring that followed was one of the most beautiful I could remember, as if the entire world were celebrating Constantine's victory. A goodly mixture of sun and rainfall brought out the flowers and the winter wheat produced an abundant harvest.

I was in the garden, talking with the man who took care of the roses, when Vitellia came running out of the palace, clutching a scroll, her cheeks streaked with tears.

”What is it?” I cried, but as she drew closer I could see that her eyes were s.h.i.+ning with joy.

”He has made us safe!” she exclaimed. ”Your son, blessed by G.o.d, has preserved us!”

”What are you talking about?” I took the piece of papyrus from her hand.

”This comes from Mediolanum-the Emperors have made a policy regarding religion-”

I pulled open the scroll, scanning the words that referred to the earlier edict of toleration of Galerius and adding to it: ”...to no one whomsoever should we deny liberty to follow either the religion of the Christians or any other cult which of his own free choice he has thought to be best adapted for himself, in order that the supreme Divinity, to whose service we render our free obedience, may bestow upon us in all things his wonted favour and benevolence .”

The paragraphs that followed restored to Christians the property and freedoms that had been taken in the persecutions, stipulating that all cults should have an equally free and unhindered liberty of religion.

No wonder Vitellia was weeping, I thought then. The shadow that had hung over her and her church was lifted, and the Christians might now emerge to stand beside the followers of the traditional religions in the blessed light of a new day.

I had not seen such recognition of a Truth that lay beyond cult or creed in all my years among the Romans, whose G.o.ds seemed to vie for the favour of their wors.h.i.+ppers like magistrates at the elections, or the philosophers, who denounced other schools as errors, or among the Christians, who simply stated that all other religions were wrong.

This recognition of a Power in whose light all faiths might stand as equals reminded me of the teachings I had learned as a child on Avalon, and at the thought, I found my own eyes filling with grateful tears.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AD 316.

To sit on the sh.o.r.e at Baiae was like being in the heart of the sun. Light reflected with blinding intensity from the white sand that bordered a bay whose waters glittered a clear azure only a shade darker than the blue of the sky. To a child of the north, this light was overwhelming, banis.h.i.+ng every darkness not only of the body but of the soul. As I lay upon the couch on the terrace, set between the sea and the freshwater bathing pool, I could feel the heat baking out the agues that a winter in Rome had set in my bones.

It seemed to me that the anxieties of the past few years were dissipating as well. There were still those who challenged my son's authority, but he had proven himself a brilliant general, and I no longer doubted that one day he would rule supreme in the Empire.

For several years the imperial household had been settled in Rome. But the great city, which was plagued by a raw chill in the wintertime, was just as bad in the summer, when a damp, sticky heat blanketed the seven hills. Fausta, who was now in the last moon of her first pregnancy, had complained that the heat was stifling her, and so I had brought the imperial household here, to the palace the Emperor Severus had built beside the Bay of Puteoli in the gulf of Neapolis fifty years before.

Fausta lay on a couch beside me, with two slaves to fan her and a sunshade to protect her fair skin. But I had only a hat to shade my eyes. To me, the heat everywhere in Italia was equally intense, but on the coast the air had a purity that invigorated even as it overpowered, and so I spent most of my time in the sun, listening to the sigh of the glittering wavelets on the sh.o.r.e.

An occasional shout of laughter came to me from the bathing pool, where Crispus was playing with the sons of n.o.ble Roman families who had come along to bear him company. If I turned I could see the flash of their smooth young bodies, gilded by the sun. Crispus was fourteen now, big-boned as his father, with a voice that was, most of the time, that of a man. By the time my son turned fifteen he had already been at the court of Diocletian for two years. Every year that Crispus remained with me was a blessing, as if the years during which Constantine had been lost to me were being restored.

Of Constantine himself I saw little. The defeat of Maxentius had made him undisputed master of the West. Licinius was now his brother-in-law, but the pact the two emperors had made did not last long.

Within two years they began a series of conflicts that was to continue for a decade. Still, my son now felt secure enough to take Fausta to his bed, and at the age of twenty-three she had become pregnant at last.

She swore it would make no difference to her affection for Crispus, and indeed, she had adopted him as her own child as well as Constantine's. Still, I could not help but wonder if her att.i.tude might change when she had a child of her own.

The noise from the pool crescendoed as the children began to climb out, glistening in the strong sun.

Boreas and Favonia, who lay sleeping in the shade of my couch, lifted their heads to watch, feathered tails beating gently against the flagstones. Slaves hurried forwards with towels to dry the boys, while others brought out trays of fruit and little pastries and pitchers of mint-water chilled with ice brought all the way from the Alpes and stored in a deep cellar, wrapped in straw. Brasilia would have snorted at such extravagance, but she had died the year after Constantine's great victory. I missed her plain cooking, surrounded as I was by all this luxury.

Still laughing, Crispus led the others to the terrace and I sat up, smiling as the dogs fawned at his feet. As he grew, he was coming to resemble his grandfather Constantius more and more, save that where my beloved had been so fair of skin he burned at the slightest touch of the sun, Crispus had inherited his mother's complexion, and the suns.h.i.+ne that bleached his hair only turned his skin a deeper gold. Save for the towel slung over one shoulder, he was as naked as a Greek statue, trained muscles rippling, as beautiful as a young G.o.d.But he is only a boy -I told myself, surrept.i.tiously flexing my fingers in a sign against ill-luck, irrationally afraid that one of those deities might hear my thought and resent it.

I have been among the Romans too long, I told myself then, for the G.o.ds of my own people were not so p.r.o.ne either to l.u.s.t for mortals or to jealousy. Nonetheless, Crispus was approaching that age which in these southern lands was held to be the apogee of splendour. Fausta was watching him with an appreciation as great as my own, and I found myself suppressing a s.h.i.+ver.

”Avia, Avia! Gaius says that the lake on the other side of the hill is the place where Aeneas descended into the Underworld. Let's get up a party to go look for it. We can take a lunch, and picnic on the sh.o.r.e, and read pa.s.sages from theAeneid . It will be educational.”

”Who will read them?” Fausta laughed. ”Not Lactantius!” She tried to sit up, but the great round of her belly prevented her, and she held out a hand so that her maid could help her.

I smiled. The eminent rhetorician had in later life become an ardent Christian and had recently been sent by Constantine to become his son's tutor. The Emperor had made it clear that the Christos was now his patron deity, and those who wished to rise at his court had found it in their interest to become Christian too. So far he had not insisted on a formal commitment from his family, though we were expected to attend those parts of the services open to the uninitiated. I missed Vitellia, who had gone back to Londinium to rebuild the church there in honour of her nephew.

”Do not be so sure!” retorted Crispus. ”Lactantius is a great admirer of Virgil, and says that he is one of the virtuous pagans who predicted the coming of our Lord.”

”Then I suppose he will not forbid the expedition,” I put in. ”Very well. Let us plan to set out early tomorrow, so as to arrive before the heat of the day.”

Somewhat to my surprise, Lactantius not only made no objection, but decided to come along, a scroll of theAeneid firmly in his hand. Fausta remained at the palace, resting, but the old man and I travelled in litters, while the boys rode little surefooted donkeys from the nearby village up the winding path. A waggon full of picnic gear brought up the rear.

Even in the north of Italia I could find scenes that reminded me of home, but here I knew I was in another land, where the heated air was fragrant with the scent of artemisia and the perfume of the flowers that grew in such profusion in the rich volcanic soil. As we reached the top of the hill above Baiae I called for a halt to rest the bearers and the donkeys and turned to gaze out over the brilliant blue waters of the bay to Neapolis and the perfect cone of Vesuvius beyond. Today no smoke curled from its summit, though the slopes of Vulcan's forum, a half-day's journey away, steamed with a variety of foul smells.

They called this place the 'Fields of Fire', and I could sense the earth-fires below the surface, a constant reminder that nothing was eternal, even the solid ground beneath our feet.

Then we were jolting our way down towards the round blue mirror below. The white columns of the healing baths built on the sh.o.r.e by the first emperors gleamed in the summer sunlight, but we halted in a shady grove in the lee of a hill, and the slaves began to lay out our meal. The boys were already running about, das.h.i.+ng down to test the water, daring each other to dive in.

”Are you sure this is really Lake Avernus?” asked Crispus as Lactantius and I settled ourselves in wicker chairs. ”Look, birds are flying across it without harm, and though the water smells a little stagnant, it did us no harm.”

”Virgil must have known it was all right,” said one of the other boys. ”They say that Julius Ceasar himself visited those baths.”

”Well, perhaps things were different when Rome was founded,” I said, smiling. ”After all, it was over eight hundred years ago. And this is bright summer, remember. In the winter, with a storm coming on, this place might look much more menacing.”

”But where is the 'wide-mouthed cavern' of which Virgil tells us?” asked Crispus.

”Perhaps there was once a chasm which has now closed,” answered Lactantius, ”for they say that this is a land of changes.” He stretched out one arm in the pose of an orator. Even in this heat he wore a I long robe, and with his white beard flowing over his chest, looked the part of an ancient sage as he unrolled the scroll and began to intone: ”There was a wide-mouthed cavern, deep and vast and rugged, sheltered by a shadowed lake and darkened groves; such vapour poured from these black jaws to heaven's vault; no bird could fly above unharmed ...”

”And when the ground begins to shake, it was an earthquake and not Hecate coming at all?” asked Crispus.

Lactantius nodded, smiling. ”Such evil spirits are no more than dreams and delusions, made demonic by men's fears. When the earth shakes, it is by the will of the Lord G.o.d who made it, but it was necessary that Aeneas, who lived long before the light of the Christos came into the world, should be led to found Rome.”

”Yet Virgil himself was a pagan,” I observed.

”He was,” answered Lactantius, ”but so n.o.ble in soul that the light of G.o.d was able to reach him, as it did so many of our greatest poets, men of the highest genius. Seneca and Maro and Cicero, of our own Roman writers, and Plato and Aristotle and Thales and many another among the Greeks, all touch upon the truth at times, and only the custom of their times, which insisted that G.o.d was not One, but many, caused them to continue to honour false G.o.ds.”

”If there was a chasm here, perhaps it closed when Christ was born,” said young Gaius, whose father was one of the few senators who had converted wholeheartedly to the new religion.

”Indeed, it might be so,” said Lactantius approvingly.

By this time, the food was ready and the boys, who were at that age when a meal was always welcome, were attacking it with their usual gusto. In addition to the hard breads and olives and cheeses, the cooks had included a crock of the seafood stew that was a specialty of Baiae, featuring various sh.e.l.lfish cooked with sea nettles and spices. I eyed it dubiously, but the cooks had packed it with snow from the cellars, and it seemed to be good.

”What is the temple whose dome I see s.h.i.+ning above those trees?” I pointed towards the top of the hill behind us.

”It is the Temple of Apollo that crowns the hill of c.u.mae,” answered one of the slaves.