Blood and Steel. Harry Sidebottom

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ his father, Gordian stepped onto the purple carpet. They walked with slow and measured tread, befitting their combined dignity and the parent’s age. Following the fasces and the sacred fire, they proceeded up the many steps, through the dark interior of the building, up to the imperial box.

      The light was blinding as they came out into the Circus. It surrounded them, its marble dazzling under the African sun. The noise and heat rolled up from the tiers, and buffeted the two men. Forty thousand or more voices were raised in welcome. Hail, the Augusti, our saviours. Hail Gordian the Elder. Hail Gordian the Younger. May the gods preserve father and son. Nicknames were chanted, respectful for the senior – Hail, the new Scipio. Hail, Cato reborn – less so for his progeny – Hail, Priapus; the princeps of pleasure. With no soldiers on hand to keep them within bounds, it was their nature to call out what they pleased. The Carthaginians were second only to the Alexandrians in their irreverence.

      Gordian solicitously took his father’s elbow, and supported him to their thrones. As they settled themselves on the unforgiving ivory, their entourage filed in behind them.

      The crowd quietened. Down on the sand, a city elder stood forth. The white of his toga shimmered in the sun, the narrow purple stripe on his tunic an incision as black as blood.

      ‘With fortunate omens you have come, our Emperors, each as brilliant as a ray of the sun that appears to us on high.’

      The space was vast, but the orator had a strong voice, and the acoustics were good. The words carried up to the Emperors and to those in the seats of honour. The rest would have to be content with reports and saying they had been there.

      ‘When night and darkness covered the world, the gods raised you up to their fellowship, and together your light has dissolved our fears. All men can breathe again, as you dispel all dangers.’

      The enumeration of past miseries would take some time; the iniquities of the deceased Procurator here in Africa, the savageries and stupidities of the tyrant Maximinus Thrax across the breadth of the empire. Amplification was ever the watchword for a rhetor on safe ground.

      Gordian inclined his head slightly, and regarded his father’s profile, the strong chin and aquiline nose. Gordian was glad that at the outset he had thought to have an artist draw them both, and had sent the portraits ahead both to Carthage and to Rome. The coins from the imperial mint would convey a suitable majesty. Here, seated on the throne, Gordian Senior was the very image of an Emperor; serene yet alert. His father had stood up well to the rigours of the hasty journey, but close up Gordian could see the dark smudges under the eyes, the sunken cheeks, and the slight tremor in one hand.

      His father was old, possibly too old to bear the weight of the purple. Gordian had neither expected nor wanted his father to elevate him to the throne as well. Yet his father was eighty, and it would have been wrong not to shoulder some of the burden. Now, together, they would see the race out, fight the contest to the finish.

      On the evening of the acclamation, when they were as near alone as Emperors could be, in just the company of four or five of their immediate familia, they had talked. The conversation remained with Gordian.

      ‘I am sorry, Father. If I had let the Chain kill Mauricius, we would have been next.’

      His father had been calm. ‘I would have done the same, if I was still young.’

      Gordian had been compelled to explain, to try to win his father’s approval. ‘A life of fear, without ease of mind, is not worth living. To live as a coward can not be endured. Once the Chain was dead, there was no choice but open revolt, the proclamation of a new Emperor. When a tyrant threatens your friends and family, your own equanimity, the very Res Publica itself, a man can not continue to live quietly out of the public eye. A wise man will not engage in politics, unless something intervenes.’

      ‘Although I do not share your Epicureanism, you are right.’ A long life had armoured the self-control of his father. ‘We are wealthy. The Domus Rostrata in Rome, the great villa on the Via Praenestina, confiscated by the imperial treasury, they alone would fund a legion for the northern wars. Since your sister’s husband was condemned for treason last year, we are marked down for destruction. You did the right thing. Your mother would have been proud of you, as I am.’

      ‘But I have endangered us all.’

      ‘There is no time now for regrets. You must act swiftly. Seize Rome. Rally the eastern armies to our cause. I am old and tired. All depends on you.’

      ‘It may end in disaster.’

      His father had smiled. ‘At my age death holds no terrors. Perhaps it would be no mean thing to end my days on the throne of the Caesars. Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it.’

      A flamboyant gesture by the orator brought Gordian out of his memories. Slowly, for imperial majesty precluded sudden movements, and out of the corners of his eyes, he studied those who stood behind the thrones. Brennus, his father’s silent bodyguard, as ever was at hand. The persistent rumour that Brennus was an illegitimate child of Gordian the Elder was fuelled by the striking resemblance between his legitimate son and the bodyguard, although the old man laughed the story off.

      Gordian took in the rest of the party. Arrian and Sabinianus, the two legates, stood together, as close as the Cercopes, the mischievous twins of myth. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, some hint of patrician amusement could be detected in their faces. Serenus Sammonicus, his old tutor, was the same age as his father, but appeared older and very far from well. Aemilius Severinus, the commander of the speculatores, was not young. He must be in his sixties. But he looked tough and fit. Phillyrio, as his scouts called Severinus for some long-forgotten reason, had been scoured and tanned like leather by a lifetime patrolling the desert frontier. At the end was Mauricius, the local landowner whose persecution had been the catalyst. Few enough to support a revolution, none of them, apart from the legates, of any great rank, but loyalty ever counted for more than mere numbers.

      ‘On his father’s side he traces his descent from the house of the Gracchi, on his mother’s from the Emperor Trajan.’ The oration had moved to the origins of Gordian Senior, another safe topic for fulsome exploration. ‘His own father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, his wife’s father and grandfather, and likewise another of his wife’s grand-fathers and two of her great-great-grandfathers, were Consuls.’

      The offices, deeds and virtues of every one of these individuals would be recalled, exaggerated, or invented. Gordian seemed to have been listening forever, to have been Emperor for eternity.

      Gordian had been busy beyond measure. That first day, before the citizens of Thysdrus could swear their oaths of allegiance, majestic regalia had had to be created. It had been easy enough to find both a small, portable altar for the sacred fire and rods to bind around axes to make the fasces. As governor his father had curule chairs which could serve as imperial thrones. A purple cloak already had been taken from the sanctuary of Caelestis, from the shoulders of the goddess, and draped around his father. Another, most likely of similar provenance, was produced for himself. An imperial seal had been more problematic. But the town gaol had contained a forger – as long as there were coins, there would be counterfeiters – and, once pardoned and reunited with the tools of his illicit trade, it had taken him no time to create a simulacrum; in metal not precious stone, but the impression it made had seemed adequate.

      From the ceremonial Gordian had turned to the practical. After his father had retired to his chamber, he had worked through the night. Many, many letters had been dictated and signed; to all the leading communities in the Province СКАЧАТЬ