The Fortress of Desolation by Francis Hagan

Author:Francis Hagan [Hagan, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

'. . . And what she told us then I write now and leave no detail out, father. I hear her words still - even as I dip this stylus in ink and make these crude marks across the parchment. It was a dark, squalid, place, that underground cave, rank with moisture and slime. The stream was fetid and covered with green scum. The light which fell down in that dusk no more than a faint glow, sickly and pale. And we squatted, little Sadr and I, down by this woman whose face was ravaged and whose hands were worn and yet whose eyes shone with a nobility I have only seen in those high Roman and Persian ladies under escort from generals and lords. And what she told us made me shiver deep in my bones as if I suffered an ague.

Her name is Olympias, father, a Roman noblewoman born into the Senatorial ranks at Constantinople. Her father had been Flavius Ablabius, Praetorian Praefect of the Oriens, and she had been promised in wedlock to the son of Constantine himself, Constans. With all the blood and murder which had followed the death of that great emperor, Constans had drifted from her and instead eventually she had been allowed to marry not for political intrigue but instead for love - a most rare event in those dark times, she told me. The man who won her heart was Gerontius, a Comes in the armies in the west and she had spent many years in ignorant happiness. However, when the tyrant Magnentius later rose to power and challenged the Constantinian House, her husband, this Gerontius, pledged his support to him and rose up the ranks. In the great war which followed, as Constantius marched westwards and the fortunes of this Magnentius wavered and then evaporated, Gerontius stayed loyal even to the end when the tyrant fell on his sword. Her husband was banished to an island off the Dalmatian coast and ordered to divorce. Do that and be allowed to live, he had been advised, and out of love she had acquiesced - not knowing that in fact the Augustus Constantius had darker plans for her and had been using the threat of exile as leverage.

The Oriens, she told me, had been in turmoil thanks to the wars staged by Shapur during Constantius' absence in the west, and so this Augustus had decided to offer Olympias as a bride to the newly-elected Armenian King, both to win favour and also pledge public support to that land and its peoples. And so she, a Roman noblewoman, once consort to the son of Constantine, had been escorted eastwards into this dark and barbarous land to marry Arsaces while all the Naxarars under him plotted and schemed to keep their own power and remain independent from both Rome and Persia . . .

And I remember her whispering to us in that dank place, all shrouded in darkness, as we leaned in to listen, her words slithering up the unseen walls and echoing the waters near us.

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