by Roger Booth
“Ready?”
“As we’ll ever be, Wallia.”
The huge paw wrapped itself around his right hand. “See you in Africa, Theoderic.”
Once more he clambered down from the stone wall into his boat, the largest of the fleet. He looked up a final time at the faces lit by torchlight; by Wallia’s side, unexpectedly, Rohilde, hood thrown back, a lop-sided smile from the tousled blond head just half awake.
“Push off,” he ordered quietly. Ropes loosened, they nosed out into the channel between harbour wall and the other boats moored fast by the quay, sail half unfurled and sweeps guiding their cautious progress. He stood by the prow, hand raised to each of the boats they passed, the salute returned by all. Sixty boats and near three thousand fighting men, they slipped out on dull, muffled waters.
Beneath the glowing brazier of the watchtower they turned out of the harbour, across the bay the land a grey outline. By the point he felt the swell rock the boat, the first spray raining across the bow and into his face. The oars went out and the men pulled, the creak of the oarlocks adding to the wind’s bluster and the slap of the waves. Little by little the town walls dropped away. Then they opened the sail and the men could take in their oars and rest. He made his way back to the stern. From where he looked there stretched an unbroken line of boats, all the way back to the watchtower and the harbour point; a wooden gangplank to bear their people across the Ocean.
To the east, to landward, scraps of dirty cloud scudded through the pale sky, the hills shrouded in the damp mists of dawn. He thought he caught sight of the Goth horsemen Wallia had sent ahead to shadow them. Then he turned to the western skyline, the weather side, anxiously staring through the blusters of the wind and on into the barely relieved darkness.
They were not more than half a mile out to sea, he guessed, following the coast south east down to the straits, a column of sorts two or three boats wide, the nearest boat, Ardrade’s, almost within hailing distance. Except there was no chance of shouting against that wind and being heard more than a few paces away.
The Ocean waves were choppy and he felt the beginnings of a protest in his guts, saw the first of the men cough up over the side. But the wind-filled sails had the vessels fairly flying along through the spray that seemed to be everywhere. The men sat silent, taut as bowstring, for now nothing to do but battle their own selves. Once across, not all the legions in the world would stop them; so much he felt their desire for a killing.
Lips puckered, time and again the helmsman looked back over the stern and sniffed the air. Fingers of cloud, hardly darker than the sky itself; as the pale blue drove back the night, still the knobbly fingers did no more than claw at the horizon. Harmless they appeared to him. The helmsman evidently didn’t agree.
“What do you think?” he asked quietly, so none else could hear.
“You know them?” The black hair and leather-brown face nodded towards his men, sat on the rowing benches or sprawled out, fore and aft, on the empty deck space above the hatches of the hold. The men furthest forward had their backs turned to the clouds of water that doused them with each pitch of the boat’s rounded bow.
“Aye,” he answered, puzzled, though other than his retainers most faces he did not recognise.
“Get them into parties of ten each side, five pairs of two. Spread out the strongest, so they can take spells.”
“We’ll need to row later, then?” and, the words spoken, he realised at once how stupid to the captain he must sound.
“Row later, pray now.”
He went back, whispered in the ears of the retainers. Men were tapped on the arm or leg, slid into new groups. For a moment the boat swayed, full of murmur, the scrape of boots and scabbards. Then, once more, the deck settled. The men had all seen what the helmsman had first noticed; the black line of storm clouds hard to ignore. From the horizon they glided up to the level of the gunwales, held there a while. No-one spoke a word. The water and wind reigned undisturbed but for the battering of their bow against the waves and the sails full as a woman’s round belly. Like a tethered goat, he looked on in helpless fascination, lips tasting of salt each time he licked them, as those black clouds spread ever higher, from gunwale to boom, from boom to mast-tip; and from there, ever quicker, began to flood the vault of winter’s sky.
The wave caught him full in the face.
“What now?” he shouted into the ear of the helmsman. The words he thought might be lost on the wind and he shouted again. The helmsman had heard well enough: “Keep rowing,” the short reply. The sails they had lowered, the full blast of the wind threatening otherwise to tear them away. They already were, rowing for dear life, as the western gale blew them ever closer to the shore. The men bent their backs and hauled at the long sweeps. Thankfully, the shore was hardly visible to the rowers through the clouds of spray and the waves that dwarfed the boats. But it was there, right enough. And he didn’t need a sailor’s eye to know that they were slowly losing the battle.
“And keep bailing,” the helmsman added as an afterthought.
He cursed under his breath though he could have shouted and nobody any the wiser. He half slid, half crawled back to the mast, the boom wrapped in canvas, furled and lashed tight. Grabbing one of the leather buckets to hand he scooped water over the side. Others followed his lead. But the buckets were not large and the waters huge. It seemed so much wasted effort.
Suddenly they were carried high on a wave; behind them the other boats rolling, dipping and diving. With a sickening lurch they dropped into a bottomless valley of water. Then, from the Ocean side, the next wave crashed across the deck.
The helmsman was pointing to landward and shouting. Hanging on to ropes and the shoulders of the men, he hauled himself back aft. “We’re rowing and we’re bailing. But the shore is getting closer by the minute,” he bawled.
The helmsman nodded. Then a wave came out of nowhere. It roared like a bear, swept him off his feet and he felt the jar of the gunwales against his shoulder. He held on to the ropes, the muscles burning.
The boat was losing way, the helmsman only now hauling himself back to his feet. He threw himself back across the heaving deck; together they yanked on the rudder. Almost broadside onto the waves and the boat could be over in an instant. But the first luck of the day. Even the Ocean seemed in need of respite. A lull in the steepest waves and they were back under some sort of control.
The helmsman’s chest was heaving, studying the dunes through the spray. “Put in at Baelo,” he shouted, “only hope.”
It meant nothing to him. “Baelo?”
“Not much of a harbour, town never…” The next giant wave slammed home. They needed all their strength to hold the rudder steady. “Never got over an earthquake. But the bay… shelter. Stay out here,” and again the waves interrupted the helmsman’s words. “Out here we’re all dead.”
Theoderic needed no convincing. The men could not keep this up much longer. If anything the wind was still gaining strength. “How long?” he shouted back.
The helmsman looked to the shoreline creeping closer all the time. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “Twenty minutes and I reckon we’ll be aground – or in the bay.”
He slid through a soup of water and vomit; hardly a man on board who hadn’t lost the innards of his belly to the crazed motions. Even in the wind the boat stank of that vomit and sweat; sweat from the rowing, also another kind of sweat that made each avoid the other’s eyes.
“Twenty minutes,” he shouted in each rower’s ear, the arms and legs straining at every stroke. “Keep rowing, keep bailing out,” he went round the boat, thrown from side to side, falling into bent shoulders, bent backs. “Twenty more minutes now, row and bail, row and bail. Twenty more minutes, men, and by God’s Grace we’re in harbour.”
He tried to catch the attention of the nearest boats. Ardrade he thought he still saw to seaward, clinging like him
to the canvas wrapped mast; impossible to be sure. Like a madman he waved, pointed ahead towards the shore. Like a madman.
The boat inched ever closer to the shallows, the waves short and sharp. Perhaps he imagined it, but he could have sworn. Above wind and waves boomed the drum beat of the surf. He pulled his way back to the stern. The helmsman didn’t offer any comment and he didn’t see the sense in asking. Instead, he silently followed the helmsman’s gaze, from prow to headland and then anxiously over to the shoreline; where, like enemy cavalry, the land was racing to cut them off from safety. Then, half-blinded by the flying spray, he followed the line of the prow as they ducked again into another wild mountain of foaming, living sea.
A close thing but to his mind they had a chance. Back he slid: “One last push, men.” He looked the oarsmen in the eye. Not their aching shoulders and burning lungs, not even the fear and the shame; none of this would kill them. But that headland would, if they lost their way much more against the shore.
Then he was back to the mast for a final signal to the nearest boats before he picked up a bucket and bailed for all he was worth. The minutes passed like hours. The headland took shape, a mountain of sand dunes, the tip of an invisible triangle where the course of boat and shore line converged.
The helmsman was shouting. He couldn’t hear but he could guess. He leant forward into each bank of oarsmen, looked into each pair of eyes, those eyes bulging above tight jaws and mouths gaping wide, gasping out their last desperate ounce of strength. “Row,” he bellowed from the depths of his heart. “Row and we’re there.”
That drum beat again and no mistake; it was the surf. They could see, almost touch, the headland; so close, so close. The waves sent the stern of the boat high like a kicking stallion, trying all they could to claim their victim. The boat swirled and shook but somehow the helmsman and the rowers kept it on course. Then he felt them turn, ever so slightly, to landward and the wind drop. They still rocked alarmingly but the waves had lost their killing edge. “Keep to it. Easy now.” They had rounded the headland. They would live.
Long minutes still before they moored by the crumbling remnants of a harbour wall. While the men dragged themselves ashore or simply sat, ashen-faced and silent, he dashed past little cottages back towards the headland. Above loomed the wreckage of the old town, collapsed walls and broken pillars, clouds so low they were almost snared on the jagged stone.
Every step forward, he slipped back in the deep, treacherous sand. Breathless, he fought his way up the slopes until, heart hammering, he reached the summit of the headland, faced again the storm’s full blast. In the bay a handful of boats he saw headed for the tumbledown breakwater; beyond, a surging curtain of waves, rain and spray. Even as that rain tore into his skin, a thousand small, freezing arrow points, those murderous waves – and a collection of spars, loose planks and crazy, bobbing barrels – they were all there was to see. The invasion fleet of the Visigoths that had set out with such grim determination from Gades just a few short hours before; it had been swept clean away.
*
Sigesar stepped up into the cart, shook the purple cloak back across his arms. Before him stretched the field of grief, where they stood in their thousands, the King and Galla Placidia in the front rank with the maistans of the nation. At the field’s edge sat men and women from the farthest camps astride horses and mules, their wagons and carts the walls of his open-air church.
Time for one last deep breath: “A man takes his own life; it is a mortal sin.” His voice boomed out and necks craned up; the necks of those who had lost men in the great storm, many others. “The Lord takes away; at the time of his own choosing not of ours. For we are the dust in the air. Each of us; we know this to be true.”
He must give them hope. But first he must make sense of the deaths, the sudden massacre at the hands of the Ocean. The soft air sat bittersweet across the field. Had they only gone today, he knew well, the thought unspoken by all who listened. This was a service to the Lord and Sigesar was a bishop. But he was also a Goth. These were his people.
“We make our decisions and we live by them. The Lord’s judgements, we must live by these also. Twice we have ventured onto the treacherous waters of sea and Ocean. Twice our men have been washed ashore. The Gutthiuda those like me can still remember; it was a wide country, a country of grasses and trees that sometimes shook in the wind. But these winds were dry winds, not the wet blasts of the Ocean we neither know nor comprehend. We must accept the Lord’s judgement; that we are a people of the land. It is here – in Hispania, in Gallia and perhaps even Italia – that He will have us Visigoths act out our days. Foolish it would be, if not a sin, for us not to hear or heed His words.”
He saw the people straining to hear as best they could; knew that before the huge crowd his gestures would say as much that day as any words he could find. His right hand pointed to the ground.
“There are times when the judgements of the Lord are not as we hoped. Such a time we have had in past days. We must ask ourselves why this is so. We are a people of the land and the Lord has spoken to remind us of this. But the Lord is telling us more than that. He tells us that we will not be a people deserving of Him by fleeing from the burdens He has placed upon us.”
“We have all thought of crossing to Africa as an escape.” With this, his eyes swept the front ranks of the crowd; the King and maistans, so they would mark his call. “And what is escape,” he asked them, “but flight from the world as it is? From the world as the Lord has made it for us. And, my friends,” he cried out to the farthest row at the farthest end of the field. “This is not the first time of late we have sought to flee. What should we learn from the bloodshed amongst ourselves in Barcino? For what was that but flight as well; flight from our duty to our King and to each other?”
He was no longer an old man with bent back and patchy hair. He was their faith, the latest in the line of bishops that had started with Ulfilas, the first man to take them out of barbarism and into God’s truth.
“My friends, and what is flight? Surely flight is nothing but despair. And despair, we each know, is the act of the coward, the act of man or woman who would end it all but lacks the courage for even this, their final conviction.”
His hand hammered the air.
“It is the act of mortal sin that dares not speak its own name. But make no mistake and hear me well. Despair, my friends, puts us but one heartbeat from the eternal flames of the damned.”
While rushed words were passed back to the men who saw but could not hear, he gathered his strength for the final moment of truth.
“Today we mourn the dead and we learn from the Lord’s judgement. Today we weep, if we will. And accept what the Lord has told us, as we must. Today is the Sabbath. Today we can rest.”
Both arms out wide, he offered himself to the people as a living cross; in atonement for their many sins and their grievous losses.
“But tomorrow, my friends, we all know what we must do. Tomorrow, we will harness the carts and wagons. And as King Wallia and his Council direct, we will worship the Lord. By living and, yes, if we must, by fighting and dying; in the world that is the world of God’s love.”
Hard comfort to be sure, but it was the only comfort he could offer them. It wasn’t as if they had much choice; unless they were to sell their birth right and join the Vandals, as other strays had once joined them. Many had come to seek his blessing for themselves and their dead, while Wallia and the other maistans mixed with the people who lingered. He heard no reproaches but saw the tear-streaked faces, grim and drawn.
As the last of the people left the field, Wallia walked over to join him. Not so dissimilar in age, they had lived much of their lives in the same camps, had many of the same youthful memories; of when the people had owned lands and homes, however simple, rather than the Empire’s great highways that were home to them now.
“Fine words you spoke, Siges
ar. By God’s will, the people will hold together.”
Sigesar raised an eyebrow. To his knowledge, Wallia had never shown any interest in the will of the Lord; unless spoken by a sharp blade.
“But you think we should not have sailed,” said the great head of hair.
“Wallia, you did not know,” he nodded not unkindly to the man who against all expectations, his own assuredly not least, carried now the burden of being their King. “Listen,” he said. “They’ve learned from Barcino. There will be no uprising now, of that I’m sure. But, Wallia, in losing their rage they’re not far from losing their hope.”
“I know, Sigesar. I feel it myself.”
“I’ve bought you time,” he said. “But such a sermon I cannot hold again. So think what you do with the time I’ve bought you, Wallia. Think long and hard.”
*
“Far worse than a battle, Rohilde. So little anyone could do, except row and bail, aye, and pray; that the helmsman knew his business.”
Together Theoderic and Rohilde rode back towards Gades, in the lead the Queen in her carriage, Herfrig and her escort trotting immediately behind her; salutes from the picket at the landward end of the spit.
“We were lucky and, the helmsman, he was brave as a Goth in his own way. To all the captains who survived, Wallia has made a gift from the treasury.” A sad smile: “It won’t cost a lot.”
“No, and Ardrade, he’s really dead?” she asked.
“He was there to seaward almost at the end; then… Men from his boat were found washed up, yards short of the headland. They did all they could. Another hundred yards and we’d have run aground ourselves.”
“Who will be your lead retainer? Or is it too soon?”
“I’ve been thinking, Rohilde. My men are all so young, the promising ones. I thought, Brodagast, he might be a good choice.”