by Q V Hunter
I tried to lift Gregorius up out of the mess, but saw he had a deep gash below his cuirass leaving his innards, white and glistening, exposed to the rising night winds. His one good eye rolled back in its socket as he felt my arms encircle him. His right hand dropped his sword as he flailed blindly for my help.
‘It’s me, Marcus. Hang on. Hang on. We’ve done this before. We’ll do it again.’
Chapter 20, A Wounded Dream
—Before Dawn, Mursa, September 29, 351 AD—
I wasn’t sure the Commander had heard me or even knew it was me holding him clear of the filth. I watched his drained face closely as I inched him forward, fearful of pulling his wounds open wider. He couldn’t speak and seemed to be passing back and forth between this world and the next. I might lose him any second.
The sliver of moon now hung low over the plains but the flickering forest of torches that lit up the medical tents only mocked our slow progress. At this rate, we’d never reach help. The whole rescue area had tripled in size with ordinary tents seconded for the wounded into a freshly sprouted city of the half-dead. Bodies were being discarded in piles as fast as the luckier of the wounded were carried in. After only a few dozen yards, I looked up to realized we’d found ourselves on the wrong side of an Alpine mound of corpses, rising higher by the minute as medical slave-runners tossed legatus on top of cavalryman on top of ballistics specialist without regard for rank.
We were being cut off from help by a palisade of the newly dead.
I collapsed with the Commander on the ground and fought for breath. I could hear the medical staff on the other side of the barrier shouting for able men to make way or help bring forward the cases that had any hope of surviving. I waved for their attention and shouted at stretcher-bearers trotting past us but no one paid us any heed in the dark.
They would abandon the hopeless cases where they lay, kicking away the desperate fingers that reached for their ankles and ignoring the savage curses of men left to bleed as they passed.
I’d heard it all before outside Aquiliea and along the Rhodanus but this was no mere battle. We were helpless in the midst of the end of the world. This time even an alert and healthy man could hardly make out the medics’ instructions over the screams and groans of thousands of wounded stumbling and staggering forward through the dark or just left behind, thirsty, dismembered and friendless, in the muck.
The entire breadth of Pannonia had turned to blood and shit. The Roman Army had let loose one bloodcurdling howl to the gods.
By feeling through the gore with my feet, I moved us two yards or so to a patch of raised ground not clutched at by dead fingers or churned up by the death throes of a horse.
I held the commander in my arms.
‘Wait for the dawn, Commander. Someone will find us. Rest for a minute.’ I had no water to rouse him from his faint but he still breathed. His wound might get worse or it might hold—I couldn’t see in the dark but surely light would eventually rise, even on what would be a hellish day?
The last distant clangs of steel hitting steel fell silent at last. The air was filled with the shouts of frantic men with no officers left to command them. We waited and waited. Suddenly half a dozen tribunes rode past, their horses’ hooves dodging men underfoot. They were hunting for lost standards and fallen officers.
I screamed for assistance. They didn’t hear me.
No one was coming to us. Lying in a sea of lost souls, I realized there was almost no one left to come.
The Commander stirred. There was a little daylight now. A cold blue whisper of dawn revealed his scarred gray face. He opened his eye and recognized me.
‘Just wait, Commander. Someone will come. Someone will come.’
He tried to lift his good hand, but I took it in mine to save him the effort. ‘Yes, it’s Marcus. Hold on. It’s almost over. Someone will come.’
But if I’d tried to shout for help again, I would only have joined the chorus of thousands upon thousands who wailed around us. I saw the first bright crescent of orange rising above the eastern flatland where Constantius had stretched out his lethal wing of clibanarii. There was no shining river of faultless riders over there now, but just more of the carnage. I scanned in all directions for a healthy man, a man on two good legs, within hailing for help. But there was no one within earshot of my call, even if I’d had the strength.
Suddenly the Commander’s bad hand scrabbled at my tunic collar. Like a wraith rising from Hades, he pulled on my bulla with all the weight of his armored body. If he meant to lever himself up by the neck cord, it was futile.
The cord snapped and his hand fell back with the Senator’s gift flipping into the gutted earth. His tight fight pounded on the ground as if to bury my bulla or with his last ounce of force, to smash it to pieces. Was this his last gesture? To tear away my last link to the Manlius clan? To deny me even that? Did his life cling to this world by the pathetic cord of so much bitterness?
‘No, don’t take that from me now!’ I stopped his pounding fist.
He tried to answer. I laid my head low to his lips twisted by the old injury and listened. His words didn’t come and his eye rolled back on its socket again. I sobbed, ‘I’m here. It’s me, Marcus. Someone will come. Someone must come.’
His chest heaved with effort. His lips worked until they found the breath.
‘Filius meus.’ My son.
‘Yes,’ I answered, bursting into helpless sobs, ‘Pater meus, semper servio tibi.’ My father, I serve you always.
Then the mangled hand fell back into the mud. I untangled the cord from his remaining fingers and tied it back around my neck. His breath was growing fainter. His eye stared up at me.
His pulse was gone.
I held him until the morning unveiled its full horror across the plains of Mursa and I could stand the carpet of stench, bones and brains around me no more. There was no more need to worry about his wound. Straining under the weight of the Commander’s armor, I stumbled with his lifeless body around the vast palisade of corpses and found help at last.
I added his body to a camp of thousands of dead. I had to walk up and down a maze of lifeless bodies, threading my way between the macabre corridors of the unclaimed and sightless dead, hoping to find an exit and a cup of water.
A head and pair of shoulders sticking halfway up a mound of slain stopped me short. Here lay the peerless Gaiso between two signalers from the Herculiani corps. His eyes stared up at the skies. His right hand clutched at the shaft of a Syrian’s arrow piercing his cuirass over the heart. His death had been swift.
I felt emptied of emotion or grief. I stumbled on, my ears ringing with the screams of casualties in the medical tents and frantic commands all around me. Impatient army slaves jostled and bossed me out of their way. Only when I found the body of a legion commander I recalled in conference with Silvanus did I stop my ghoulish tour long enough to notice that deep gashes scored my own thighs and calves.
‘Get those looked to, man, or the infection will take you next,’ said a little Dacian slave. But the medical tents were so swamped with critical cases, I shook my head.
The sun had cleared the horizon. I laid down in despair and slept among the dead and wounded, no different from a thousand other men, or two? or three? who did the same, waiting for one world to breathe its last and another to take its place . . .
***
‘You’re wanted in the command tent.’ A tribune kicked me awake. He had found me bandaged and passed out with exhaustion on a tarpaulin stretched out on the grass.
Of course it would be the Prefect Fabius Titianus who had survived. He lost no time as the sun rose in the sky to try to impose order in the command tent. I found him flanked by legion commanders from all over the battlefield reporting on losses as they came to light.
Working my way through dozens of weary fighters, I reported for duty.
‘I heard you dismissed back to Roma, Agens,’ the prefect said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Fighting, Prefect.’
‘That’s not your job. Does your schola know where you are?’
‘I’m not sure, Prefect.’
‘What’s your rank, Numidianus?’
‘Circitor, upper class, promoted a year ago.’
‘Clean yourself up, if possible and stand by. We may have use of you.’
‘Where is the Emperor Magnentius, Prefect?’
‘Unaccounted for.’
I waited some hours for Titianus to finish his awful task of tallying the losses with the assistance of army secretaries. Titianus was no champion as a fighter or diplomat, but I credited him with the stamina of a god as the numbers mounted up, passing ten thousand, then fifteen. By noon, the estimate had reached twenty thousand.
The secretaries halted once, so that Titianus could leave the tent. We heard him retching outside. One of the tribunes went off in a futile search for a bucket of fresh water.
There was no food or drink. I saw no friend. I sat alone, like hundreds around me. I thought of Kahina and wondered where the court of Magnentius had fled. Magnentius . . . where had the Usurper himself gone? And the Caesar Decentius?
The Prefect returned to the tent, brushing past us, just as a decurion from one of the Frankish legions arrived on foot, carrying a bundle of leather in his arms.
‘For the command staff, urgent,’ he said, pushing past those of us ordered to stay out of the way.
Titianus watched as the gruff German auxiliary unpacked his burden. He unrolled Magnentius’ huge purple and gold battle cloak on the ground. ‘He was last seen by some of our men fighting late into the night,’ he reported in the rough Latin of the Rhenus refugee camps. ‘We found his horse grazing across the Drava to the west. We took it to the stable tents.’
‘Any sign yet of the Caesar Decentius?’
‘None so far.’
‘We can’t wait any longer. Get that Agens Numidianus for me.’
‘Yes, Prefect. I’m right here.’
‘You remember Sardica? You remember what Constantius looks like?’
‘Of course, Prefect.’
‘The hours are passing. I have no choice. As an agens, your schola is distinct from the army. That makes you neutral, although at this moment, you hardly look credible.’
‘No, Prefect.’
‘The men who fought for Magnentius are at the mercy of the victor. We face execution. But Roman law protects the agentes from recrimination. You are to cross the battlefield, locate Constantius, and deliver this to his hand and none other.’
He handed me a piece of vellum bound by a leather cord scavenged from someone’s saddlebag.
I stared at the document in my hand.
‘It’s the written surrender,’ Titianus said, ‘as if one were needed.’
‘Casualties at 22,000,’ a tribune interrupted, ‘but we’re counting the fallen enemy standards as well, estimating losses upwards of 33,000 for them.’
‘Is this possible?’ Titianus burst out, pounding his fist on an upturned weapons crate. ‘Is this possible? Where is everyone?’
I stood there, stunned. Titianus had just ordered me to return to the court of Constantius, whatever hellhole that court occupied now across the fields of slaughter. I stood commanded to march straight back and face both Paulus Catena and Eusebius, not to mention risking Emperor Constantius’ paranoid and vengeful fury over the death of his brother—at my hand.
I stood frozen, unable to speak.
‘What’s the matter with you? You have your orders. Go now.’
‘Prefect, I’m not even ranked biarchus class. I’m hardly senior enough for this honor.’
‘I know it’s an honor well above you, but from what I recall, you’re a freedman from the House of Manlius. Gregorius thought something of you. Even Constantius, that Illyrian bastard, might have heard the esteemed name of Manlius. We Romans understand these things, right? Barbarians on one side, Arian priests on the other—but we are still Roma, I swear to the gods, and that Constantius has yet to even set foot in the Founding City!’
I may well be arrested. If there is an answer—?’
‘You will take two signalers. Will you do it for the rest of us—for the thousands who’ve fallen today in defense of the Empire?’
He did not realize that he had just laid down my death sentence. With teeth clenched and heart frozen, I marched away to locate a fresh horse. This was the last thing I was destined to do. If Titianus had needed a way of twisting the blade of my loyalty deeper into my guts to bend me to his will, he could not have found a better means. Titianus had just done something that as an ex-slave I could not resist.
In the end, he’d asked, not ordered me.
Yes, I would deliver the surrender—as a Roman freedman proud of his last act.
It took us some twenty minutes of careful riding to reach the imperial tents pitched not far from the church where Constantius had waited out the massacre of the previous day in prayer with Bishop Valens. The imperial banners flew over a slight rise in the terrain marking out a string of tents forested by standards being returned by slaves and infantry medics.
They parted to make way for our trio. The signalers surrendered the muddied banners and standards of the Ioviani and Herculiani legions and remnants of other legions. I reported us to a group of officers gathered around a camp desk, shaking their own blood-smeared faces at casualty lists.
Leaving my escorts outside the main tent, I found Emperor Constantius with what was left of his advisers. He did not stand to receive me, but some members of his comitatus nodded with respect. Eusebius was nowhere to be seen. There was only one hateful face that leered at me with recognition as I advanced my way through the exhausted officers.
I identified myself and extended the roll of vellum, ‘For the Emperor.’ An officer on Constantius’ left took it and with ceremony passed it to the Emperor himself.
Stony-faced, Constantius unrolled it and scanned the lines.
Now he stood up from his sturdy cathedra. I was astonished anew at his height. His rigid expression seemed calculated to give the impression of a statue already carved to his own greatness. Up close all his features were recognizably Constantine but thicker and masculine, unlike his younger brother’s. His expression was unemotional and virile, unlike that of the viperish sister.
‘We have lost more men today than the Tyrant,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Yet we have carried the day.’ He seemed to be addressing me with an unblinking glare.
‘Yes, Imperator.’ I gulped and felt Catena’s black eyes pierce my back with anticipation.
‘We did everything to prevent him,’ the Emperor murmured. ‘We offered him forgiveness, freedom, and all of Gallia. Yet he pressed on.’
I nodded my affirmation and waited at attention.
‘The Roman Empire has just committed suicide,’ he said to the hushed officers. ‘Look around you out there.’ His voice rose, not in panic, but despair. ‘What do you see? The Empire has just fallen on its own sword! What was that Plutarch called it? What did—?’ his voice broke with sudden grief. ‘What did he write about Pyrrhus?’
There was a dismayed silence in the wide space around him, as if only this man saw and understood the catastrophe of two short days. Would no officer answer the anguished sovereign? These lesser men hung back and simply stared.
I was a doomed soul, but not an ignorant one.
I braced my shoulders and touched my sword again to show my respect. ‘With respect, Imperator, “Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him”.’
‘That’s it, Agens! What did Plutarch write after that?’
‘He wrote, “For he’d lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italia backward”.’
‘Go on. This is a message from our betters that we need to hear.’
&
nbsp; ‘ . . . “On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.’
‘Would that it were so. How do you know the wisdom of our forefathers by heart, Messenger?’
‘I had an excellent teacher, Imperator, the Roman Senator Manlius to whom I read those pages many times. I am grieved to add that during the revolt of Nepotianus, the rebel Magister Officiorum Marcellinus murdered this venerable statesman.’
‘We see. What strange events.’ Constantius took a deep breath. ‘Like Pyrrhus, we have no hope of fresh troops, no fountain of men rising up from this carnage to fill up our ranks . . . ’ He stood stock-still. No one dared interrupt. ‘There is no one left.’
Constantius glanced at the comes standing mute next to him. ‘To whom do we award the torc, the armillae, the phalerae, and the Hasta Pura? What use are medals, honors and awards to dead men?’
Finally, Constantius looked again at me. ‘This is the message we want you to carry back—that all division and enmity between our armies is forgiven. We order a complete truce. What’s more, we order the immediate coordination of all our medical resources and staff to tend to the wounded of both sides. We are again one Roman Empire. Is our message clear?’
‘Certainly, Imperator.’ I fell to one knee and kissed the hem of his cloak to indicate gratitude.
‘We ask only one thing of the gods on this sad day and that is revenge on the family of Magnentius and those who were individually responsible for my brother Constans’ murder.’
The officers murmured their approval of the Emperor’s magnanimity. Only one harsh voice broke the sad harmony.