by Q V Hunter
For one afternoon, Magnentius had held peace in his burly hands. The opportunity to share an Empire whole and strong with a rightful heir had been within his reach. He had spent a year waiting, angling for recognition, and grasping for just this offer.
But Constantius had made Magnentius wait too long. The weathered barbarian had come this far and now pinned his pride on a conquest. In his blustering greed, the so-called reformer had just tossed peace away, and with it all the people I loved.
Chapter 19, Ambushing the Fates
—Colonia Aelia Mursa, Pannonia, September, 351 AD—
Constantius’ army stands waiting for you here,’ Gaiso reported, ‘in Cibalis.’ He placed a finger on a large military map of Pannonia spread out before the Council.
‘We shouldn’t follow him,’ Gregorius said. ‘It’s exactly where his father defeated old Licinius. His morale will be too high—’
‘I don’t need your history lessons!’ Magnentius raged.
I stood by, coordinating with senior army communications officers as we registered routine orders going out to legions and civilian support bases beyond. As the General signed off on one order after another, even that brutish bull could count heads and horses. What had been a field of evenly divided forces had slid dangerously in favor of his rival. The loss of Claudius Silvanus was like an invisible wound draining him of all reason.
‘Concentrate on strategy then, Domine,’ Gaiso said, giving Gregorius a cautioning glance. ‘Constantius wants to draw us out onto flatter land for an assault that would favor his heavy cavalry. I say we stick with negotiating. Prefect Titianus is making his counter offer any time now. We should wait for an answer.’
Still angered that, Catena or no Catena, I’d thought better than to accompany Titianus again, Gregorius glared across the room at me. For we all knew that Titianus, mistaken in thinking that Magnentius still held the upper hand, was using his most arrogant patrician tones to suggest that Constantius to abandon his claims to any empire and hand it all over to Magnentius.
‘With Silvanus next to him, Constantius will laugh in our face now,’ Marcellinus said. ‘No more negotiations. We fight it out before anybody else turns coat.’
The Magister Officiorum saw no any future for himself in a co-rulership with Constantius and he never had. If he’d argued for negotiation before this, it was because he thought he would prevail. Magnentius’ formidable blessing would have made him, Marcellinus, effective ruler of the Western Empire.
Fortunes had reversed. So had his prospects.
‘So, our only hope with weaker numbers is a strategic use of this terrain here, to draw Constantius into another ambush,’ Gaiso said. He ran his hand across the detailed landscape sketched out by the Illyrians under his command.
Magnentius stared at the map but he wasn’t listening.
‘We burn Siscia to the ground.’
‘Surely—!’ Gregorius started.
‘BURN it!’
Heaving under his armor with impatience, the Franco-Breton’s appetite for fresh Eastern ground was unsated and might have inexplicably grown in the wake of Silvanus’ flight. He laid a thick forefinger on the map at a circled dot lying three days’ march from us.
‘We destroy Siscia. Then we move up the Drava, take every village on the way, and besiege Mursa!’
Within that same day, the walls of Siscia were breached and archers rained arrows down on the town. Within fifteen minutes of the first assault, it had gone up in flames. In the setting sun, lines of refugees—like living streams of weeping and stunned humanity that paralleled the quiet Drava nearby—flowed southeastwards towards sanctuary in Servitum. They straggled around the southern border of our vast encampment on foot or on mules dragging carts and wagons piled with their pathetic belongings.
Over the hours, we watched them being abused and harried by the carriages of one wealthy Siscian family or another shoving their way down of the center of the paved road.
‘Frankish bastards!’ some Siscian boys yelled as they passed our legionaries. Too young to shave, the bravest of them gathered stones to fling at a herd of army pack mules. The animals panicked, kicking and braying in the dust and straining at their staked ropes. I saw a couple of our Dalmatian stable masters trying to settle the youths down with shouts and gestures until one of them took a missile right in the eye. An archer raised his bow and shot the lead rioter in the right shoulder. The boy howled and his gang backed off with their wounded leader in sullen defeat.
Moving deeper into this, hostile territory was madness. Was Magnentius driving ahead into Lower Pannonia out of desperation, ambition or blind defiance of those barbarian fates he feared? Did he fancy himself a Pompey or Caesar of old, laying waste to primitive kingdoms and petty despots? This was the Roman Empire, more modern and richer than any civilization before it, not a wasteland.
Yet no one could dissuade him. To the braying of a thousand mules and shouts of a hundred centurions, the Western Army drove on the very next morning. An endless column of mounted soldiers followed the infantry tramping between the rushing Drava on one side and on the other, a flow of angry refugees who cursed and begged us for bread or coins in the same breath.
I rode alongside the army logistics officers, our mail tunics polished and rolled up in wicker baskets behind our saddles for safekeeping. For the first time in this campaign, I was unfamiliar with the road, the towns, or the foddering. This region, so far east on the Cursus Publicus, had never been part of my route as a junior rider.
When we reached the outskirts of Hadrian’s colony, Aelia Mursa, we met Titianus’ delegation returning from Constantius’ lines. They returned in as much shame of failure as that ass could bring himself to admit. I was called forward to collect the dispatches recording Constantius’ rebuff for posting to the bureaucrats in the West. In Treverorum, Mediolanum, and Roma, clerks and secretaries could cluck over the news from the safety of their desks.
My secret reports to Apodemius would spare no detail. But it seemed that I might have little more to report. I was summoned to the General’s tent amid frantic relays of officers and aides.
‘Agens Marcus, this will be your last commission,’ Magnentius said. ‘You’re already beyond the purview of your assignment to my court. You have no part in the fighting to come. Thank you for the satisfactory implementation of your duties. You may return to Mediolanum or Roma, as you see fit.’
‘Yes, Imperator. Thank you.’
I’d been expecting dismissal for some time. The battlefield was not place for agentes. I marveled only that Magnentius had thought of so trivial an item of command protocol in the middle of preparations to destroy the ironbound gates of Mursa.
His specialists were even now leaning over his conference table conferring on the means of melting down more of the fortifying bands around the ladders to speed up scaling of the walls once Mursa’s garrison extinguished the first flames. Rumors flew around the camp that Constantius had abandoned Cibalis and was even now marching to rescue Mursa.
But the Emperor took the time to rise to his feet and walk me to the tent entrance. I figured he must not have forgotten my small hints to think for himself instead of always following Marcellinus’ bidding.
I tried to understand that his humble beginnings might feed an overweening hunger for revenge on the old enslavements and discarded notions of civilized nobility. His rough, embattled soul hadn’t been lucky enough to grow up at the knees of the old Senator Manlius listening to tales of Greek democracy or Republican values upheld by a Cato or Brutus. Magnentius knew no other education than the poverty of refugee villages filled with superstitious old women for sages and then the melting pot of provincial army camps for a family.
Gregorius followed me out of the meeting tent.
‘You heard your orders. Marcus. This isn’t your battle. Go back to Roma and your new masters.’
He turned the blind side of his face to me and tapped the ground with the tip of one boot as if marking off the se
conds left between us. This curt dismissal was his final comment on the long difficult breach that my manumissions had cleaved between us. If I wasn’t to be his devoted bodyguard in the coming struggle—the same young slave who’d carried his bleeding body to safety across the bloodied waters of the Rhône—then I was of no use to him.
I could bring no further honor to the House of Manlius.
‘I’m sure you’ll need me,’ I protested, ‘It will be dangerous, even if Magnentius can’t expect you to fight on the frontlines with only one good hand and eye.’
‘I’ll command from wherever I can be heard,’ he said. ‘I can strap myself to the saddle and fix my shield to my bad hand. I’ve done it before.’
‘That was fine for parading and inspecting troops. Magnentius won’t expect actual combat from you, will he?’
‘Once the fighting starts, Magnentius won’t have much to say about it.’ His scarred lips twisted into an ironic grimace.
‘Then I can still be of service, if not to you as body-guard, then to you as fellow soldier.’
‘But you aren’t a soldier now, you’re a—’ Even he bit off the insult curiosus, so as not to sully our last meeting.
But it was more than that.
If Magnentius carried the day, his personal victory would be to owe nothing more to me from now on.
If he was on the losing side, he couldn’t bear the thought of my witnessing his ignominy under the hooves of the coming clibanarii. However much he tried, Gregorius couldn’t suffer me to see the final failure of his misjudgment in backing Magnentius. By siding with a barbarian usurper against the febrile but legitimate Constans, he’d risked his father, his clan and even the future of his beloved Leo.
My very person, standing there with my agens insignia emblazoned on my tunic, was a reproach to his maverick decision, no matter how honorable.
If he wouldn’t let me share the odds, I saw my hope of proving my loyalty to him was dashed on the packed ground under our boots. It hardly mattered now with the army machine rumbling past us, but my heart finally gave up.
Gregorius would never see me as his son—even in spirit—no matter how I was sired. He could only see in me the little bastard child he’d doddled on his knees and tolerated when grown. He’d been relieved when he was able to lift up in full view of everyone a nine-day-old Manlius boy in the ancient gesture of official recognition and legitimacy. He would never lift me to public view, even in spirit.
Once back in Numidia, at the moment of my demanding from him my promised freedom, I’d seen him weep over losing me. There were no tears today. He had his Leo now, a scion to carry on the name, burn incense to his memory, and carry on the line.
For a moment in Mursa, during the disciplined scurrying and fearful preparation for battle all around, I was tempted to take my revenge and tell him the truth. Then the memory of the Senator’s kindness to me silenced my tongue. To tell the Commander that Leo was my child, his grandchild, at this moment would have either killed his courage or ended in my exile from his life forever.
‘May the Fates be kind to you in your endeavor, Commander’ I said. ‘I’ll wait for you in Roma.’
‘You see,’ he suddenly joked. ‘There will be no need to execute me as a traitor to any cause. I’m traitor enough to my own.’ With that enigmatic farewell, he walked back towards the council tent at the center of the parade ground.
I touched my sword in a salute to his back but he didn’t turn around.
***
I had nothing much to pack. By the time dawn had fully blossomed across the plains, any man in his right mind would have seized the honorable flight I’d just been offered and have departed hours ago.
Instead, I lingered, unable to tear myself away from the astonishing sight spread across the broad horizon all the way to the orb of the rising sun itself.
The deep blue Drava flowed along the left of Magnentius’ forces. The slanting sun suddenly hit the shine of a sea of armed men and their horses. But as terrifying as if the sun had come to join the enemy, spread out facing us with the river sliding along their right flank, stood thousands of Constantius’ men encased in blinding bright Noricum steel. As one body, they stood still as statues, dark below the waist, illuminated above. As the dawn caught the reflection of helmets and plated shoulders, the enemy looked more and more like one huge fat, satisfied, scaly reptile sunning itself on a rock.
Their stealth and power in moving forward into our range overnight stole my breath. We’d heard no trumpets through the night. We hadn’t seen them massing. Now the line of their formidable clibanarii extended up to the Drava, and for more than a quarter of mile on the other side of his infantry formation, in a second wing reaching much farther south than Magnentius’ opposing ranks of horsemen. In their fantastic masked getups, the heavy cavalry looked faceless, fleshless and almost inhuman—at the very least Persian—but more like something from the Underworld.
Patient and deadly, the Eastern army held its position as the great gold sun rose directly behind them like the gods’ own standard. What might these two armies have done as one if Magnentius had only accepted Gallia from one hand and peace from the other! Yes, Apodemius had been right to struggle for a balance that might sink roots, but it was too late now for regrets.
I spotted Magnentius’ standard moving along his front lines, even before the winds brought his booming voice in my direction.
Then leaning forward on my horse, I heard a roar go up from the opposing forces. Constantius was galloping too, back and forth along his front lines, with one hand raised in salute at their bristling forest of lances and javelins. His horse was magnificently decked out in the knee-length mail issued to all his cavalry, but emblazoned on both sides of his imperial saddle in solid gold was his father’s emblem, the Christian letters, ‘Chi-Rho.’
I watched as the centurions rode back and forth between the vast lines of standing forces under the sharp orders of their decurions. The silent, anxious breath of over one hundred thousand men in full armor waiting to cross swords lay across the entire plain. Only the orderly commands of the officers or the whinny of a nervous horse broke the deathly hush.
The morning turned hot for autumn. I was thirsty, but that was no excuse to linger like this. Yet I couldn’t tear myself away from the sight of the Empire poised and divided against itself. Glancing down the Cursus, I saw that my passage was still clogged with refugees.
I dismounted and led my horse to the outskirts of the emptied camp, seeking a medic’s tent. I knew from the old days, that even though the doctor’s surgery always lies on the outskirts of battle, bad news of any kind gets to his team first. I found them rolling their bandages and soaking instruments in acetum with a wordless professionalism. Their tents would fill with men’s screams of pain soon enough.
‘It’s been a couple of hours,’ I said to one of the Greek orderlies. ‘What’s happening? Are they negotiating?’
As long as there was no signal to attack, I held out hope.
‘The fodder team tells us that Constantius met with the Mursa bishop, Valens. The old priest saw a cross hanging in the sky at dawn so he says the Christian god blesses their side. Constantius is off in some church of Arian martyrs saying prayers.’
‘I heard he’s having all of his soldiers baptized before they risk their lives,’ said a supply slave, running in with boiled water.
‘But he’s not baptized himself! He’ll leave it to his deathbed like his father did,’ I said.
‘All I know is that he’s dismissing the soldiers who don’t want to be baptized from the fighting,’ the slave shrugged.
‘He will leave the fighting to his generals,’ the Greek said, rolling his knives and pincers in the sterilizing bath.
‘Yes, well, the imperial family has form when it comes to letting others do their fighting for them,’ I told him. ‘Constans did the same thing. Did Magnentius see this Christian cross in the sky?’
‘Did you? Did I?’ the Greek slave scoffed.
‘Nearly 40,000 men on our side missed the miracle sign? Funny we should hear of it, though, right?’
The supply slave shook his head. ‘They’re just trying to spook us.’
The morning wore on and the heat rose shimmering into the heavy air. On the other side, Constantius’ heavy cavalry must be stifling, even cooking in those body ovens. Yet, from a distance, I could see none of the heavy lances poised for attack waver or falter. After years on the scorched Persian deserts, the Pannonian September might be just a clement spring day to these veterans.
I waited and watched, unable to tear myself away to safety. Perhaps the baptizing of thousands of men would take up the whole day. Or perhaps it was just a ploy to avoid engaging his metallic warriors during the hottest hours of the day. There was no standing down, not through the sun’s highest point in the sky, nor even as the birds began to return from midday naps to peck and twitter in the afternoon shade of a few trees overlooking the plain.
I could not believe it they would actually fight. I prayed that these long hours of unnatural silence promised peace, compromise, safety and sanity for us all. It was coming, I felt sure at last, as I felt the sun sinking on my back now. That last warmth of late afternoon turning the sky rust-red with resignation. The day’s danger would soon be survived. Dusk was less than an hour away.
I left the medics and went back to pack up again, unhitch my horse, and ride away. A horn sounded across the plains and echoed off one hundred thousand shields. The Eastern horns answered the signal. The medics ran outside and together we watched the horizon. Half a mile to the right of our tents, we heard thunder and spotted Constantius’ limitless left wing on the move. His massive wing of thousands of clibanarii, were gathering speed, advancing at a measured gallop in a disciplined oblique line stretching southwestwards away from the river.