When first brought into the empire, Sasan had been provided with a household and ordered to live in Aquileia. For four years he had enjoyed growing up in the elegant northern Italian town with its views of the Alps and the gulf of Tergeste. He had been glad to be alive, and content to be schooled as if he were a scion of some obscure but wealthy Roman family. Above all he had hoped to be forgotten.

That hope had been disabused when the army of the newly proclaimed Emperor Aurelian had marched through Aquileia. Aurelian had taken him to Rome, given Sasan citizenship, awarded him the toga of manhood, then declared him a senator. Imperial generosity had provided a house on the Esquiline, and a wife from a senatorial family. Whatever calculation had provoked Sasan’s brief return to the public gaze had died with the assassination of Aurelian.

As Emperor succeeded Emperor, Sasan devoted himself to books and the arts. History was his passion, but he had no desire to make it himself. A dutiful husband, he had fathered four children: three sons and a daughter. He had seen them grow, marry, produce eight grandchildren. Apart from an annual trip to the Bay of Naples, he had hardly left Rome until he decided to take advantage of the largess of Constantine, and come to live by the Bosporus. Two sons had predeceased him, but their deaths apart, it had been a long and thankfully uneventful life.

As the litter made its stately way through the streets, Sasan thought of that wilder journey long ago down from the Elburz Mountains and across the Steppe. The wound of Valens, the young officer who had saved his life, had healed. After Aquileia he had never seen any of them again. Not Valens or the odd Manichaean Iudex, not his fellow Persian Narses or Hairan the handsome young man from a desolate city. Ten men had ridden out of Zeugma to rescue him. Six had died in the attempt, including the traitor. They would all be long dead now.

When he still publicly worshipped the traditional gods of Rome, he had made libations to their shades. Even now, in the privacy of his home, occasionally he tipped a little wine on the ground.

But the one who most often haunted his dreams had not been a man at all. He would wake in the dead of night, thinking of an old eunuch and a young boy in a tall tower on a remote mountain crag. Sometimes he woke sweating as the old eunuch was hunted through the marshes by the Caspian Sea.

Tell us about the Castle of Silence, his children had often asked, as had his grandchildren in their turn.

His reticence had only encouraged them.

Tell us about the Castle of Silence.

AD337

Historical Afterword

HISTORICAL AFTERWORD

The Castle of Silence