“The same way emperors have been destroyed before, by death,” she said calmly. “After all, the people called for you at Diocletian’s abdication. They would have supported you if you’d gotten rid of Galerius and named yourself in his place.”
“What about Diocletian’s plan to keep the Empire stable?” “The forces that will tear it apart are already building up,” Fausta said with a shrug. “Maxentius plots against Severus while my father plots against Galerius and Maximin Daia. If he thinks the East is in danger of being lost, Diocletian might come back to the throne; then Father could proclaim himself Emperor of the West again.”
“You forget that my father is Augustus now.”
Africa and Pannonia
“There’s room for three: your father in Gaul, Britain and Spain, with you as Caesar; my father in Italy, Africa and Pannonia; and Maxentius in Egypt and Syria. It’s a much more sensible division than the one we had under Diocletian. Surely you can see that.” She came into his arms again with the words and he was so excited to discover that she had become considerably more womanly than when they’d said goodbye that day in his quarters at Rome, he quite forgot everything else. When she kissed him, the softness of her mouth against his set up a flame of desire that threatened to overcome him. But even as she nestled against him fully conscious, he suspected, of the effect she was having upon him he could not help wondering how much of her partial yielding was based on real emotion and how much on furthering her own schemes.
“Now that you have left Nicomedia, your only course is to make such a name for yourself in Gaul and Britain that the legions will follow you anywhere.” She pushed him away just when he was becoming really ardent. “After all, Carausius once made himself Augustus of Britain.”
“He was a rebel!”
“Before he was a rebel he was a hero when he cleared the pirates from the channel. My father and Diocletian even acknowledged him as Augustus of Britain.”
“Only because Gaul was in a ferment from the revolt of the bagaudae and the Germans were threatening from the north.”
“Gaul is always in a ferment,” she said airily. “And the Germans are only waiting for another chance to cross the Rhine. The Piets are in revolt again in Britain and I heard Father say only yesterday that Constantius is going to have to cross the Fretum Gallicum again to put them down.”
“He did it before,” Constantine reminded her, with some pride.
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