His next move was an attack on the Franks who were Carausius’s allies at the mouth of the Rhenus. Trade was already suffering, and now, for the first time, people began to murmur against their upstart Emperor. It was said that his wife Teleri, the one who had been trained on Avalon, had gone back to her father, the prince of Durnovaria. Had she loved her Roman husband, I wondered, or was the marriage a political arrangement from which she was happy to be freed? And if so, had the alliance been made by the Prince of Durnovaria, or the High Priestess of Avalon? Teleri might be the only woman in Britannia who could understand me. I would have liked to talk with her.
And then, just before the feast that begins the harvest, men came crying through the streets with the news that Carausius was dead, and his minister of finance, Allectus, had claimed his throne, rewarding his old master’s Frankish auxiliaries richly to support his claim. When it was announced that he would marry Teleri I shook my head. Allectus might call himself an emperor, but clearly he meant to be High King in the old way, by wedding the queen, and with her, the land.
I stood among the crowds who watched them on their way to their wedding feast. Allectus waved with a feverish gaiety, though there was tension in the way he gripped his reins. When the carriage in which Teleri was riding with her father passed by, I caught a glimpse of a white face beneath a cloud of dark hair, and thought she looked like a woman going to her execution, not her marriage bed.
Surely, I thought, Constantius would put an end to the pretensions of Allectus soon. But one year passed, and then another, with no challenge from Rome. Allectus pressed out an issue of hastily-minted coins and then lowered taxes. I could have told him that short-term popularity might prove a poor trade for repairs to fortifications when the Picts attacked or Rome decided to reclaim its errant province.
But I had taken care that no one should learn my identity. Constantine wrote regularly, letters filled with robust good cheer but few personal opinions, as if he suspected someone in the Emperor’s household was reading his correspondence. I doubted that anyone was reading mine. It was not unusual to have a son in service abroad, after all. It was not my connection with Constantine that was the danger.
I had not heard from Constantius since he left me, but sometimes I saw him in my dreams and I did not think he had forgotten me. I would have made a valuable hostage, if Allectus had known who was living in his capital.
In the third year since I had come to Britannia, at the beginning of autumn, I had a series of dreams. In the first of them, I saw a dragon that emerged from the waves and coiled itself along the white cliffs of Dubris, guarding the shore. A fox came, and fawned upon it until the dragon ceased to pay attention to it, and then the fox leapt and bit the dragon’s throat, and so the great beast died. And now the fox grew great, and decked himself in a purple mantle and a wreath of gold, and rode in a golden chariot about the land.
That dream was not hard to interpret, though I wondered why the gods had sent me a vision of something that had already come to pass. Still, I thought that perhaps some change was coming, and sent Philip more often to the forum to hear the news.
The next dream came with more urgency. Across the sea I saw coming two flights of eagles. The first group was driven back by the wind, but the second used mist and cloud to hide its approach and soared to the land. A flock of ravens rose up to combat it, and I saw they were protecting the fox, but the eagles overcame them and killed the fox, and the ravens retreated, shrieking, towards Londinium. Then the first group of eagles reappeared, descending just in time to defeat the ravens once and for all. And when they had done so, a lion appeared among them, and the people came out of the city to greet it, rejoicing.