If Constantine had been Tarcho he would not have hesitated - Tarcho, the only person in his life save perhaps his dimly remembered mother who had ever been truly kind to him. And yet Constantine was enough like Tarcho that he found he trusted him. People were real, Audax thought. People and their characters and their judgements. That was all that mattered in the world. Words, prophecies, were nothing.

‘Call your doctor,’ he said.

Constantine’s eyes did not move, but his expression softened. ‘Philip. Come here. As slowly as you like, sir ...’

Nobody dared move until the Greek doctor had taken the knife from Audax’s hand, and then slowly extracted it from the Emperor’s chest. Audax, released, fell back, his head ringing, and that strange sense of detachment evaporated, and the room closed up to become just a room once more.

After that there was an explosion of movement, a flashing of blades. Tarcho grabbed Thalius and Audax and pulled them out of the mêlée.

XIV

XIV

In the autumn of the year that Constantine died, Thalius arranged to meet Audax before the steps of the Temple of Claudius in Camulodunum.

He fretted how he would even find Audax. After all, twenty-three years had elapsed since that extraordinary audience with the Emperor. And besides, he dreaded leaving home. It was a market day, this bright autumn morning, and the town would be full of farmers and their wives and brats, their dogs and sheep and cattle, and the traders, prostitutes and petty thieves who preyed on them. Some days Camulodunum was more like a vast cattle pen than a town, he thought grumpily. At the exceptional age of seventy-five years old, Thalius found it increasingly difficult to get around, and on days like this he preferred simply to hole up in his townhouse.

But he had no choice, for this was the only day Audax could meet him. The boy had had to travel all the way from his posting in far Constantinople, using up most of his leave on the complicated journey across the western empire, and even then he was required to spend most of his time in Londinium, at the headquarters of the diocese of the four Britains. Well, if Audax was prepared to come so far, Thalius could pluck up the courage to step out of his own front door to greet him.

And after all, they were both here for old Tarcho.

The mêlée before the Temple was just as difficult as Thalius had feared. Vendors had set up stalls on the steps and even inside the colonnade itself. They filled the air with the stench of broiling meat, and sold clothes, bits of cheap jewellery, second-hand pottery, little miniatures of the divine Helena - endless bits of tat. There was hardly an item here that was new, hardly anything that hadn’t been manufactured within a mile of this very spot.