The time had almost come, at Sirmium the year before, when the battle against the Black Horde had so nearly seen both boy and guardian die. Yet it had not come to be. For a bastard in Eastern steel had gotten in the way of his designs.
He thought of the dozen men he had despatched eastwards earlier in the year. Vitalianus was the shrewdest of his agents and bore the role of Optio Speculatorum well. Crucially, he was a man who understood the ways of the assassin and of the soldier – having been trained in both arts to the highest level. There was not a crumb of humanity left in his heart, and he would do the job the others could not – the others, like that cur, Scapula, who had broken the code of the Speculatores at the very moment when he could instead have sunk steel into Tribunus Pavo’s throat.
Pavo. The name resonated like a blinding headache. Find him. Seize him. Bring him to me... he had insisted of Vitalianus. It had to be that way. Since moving his capital to Mediolanum, his engineers had crafted a new, stronger, deeper dungeon under that ancient city. Walls of stone bedrock that no man could tunnel through, gates and doors of solid steel that could not be unpicked or broken down, and guards as sharp as knives watching every one of the gates leading from the surface down into the subterranean vaults where the torturers worked. Tribunus Gallus had somehow escaped his old dungeons in Treverorum. Tribunus Pavo would not find a way out of these ones, he thought with total confidence. To test the place, he had hired an escape-artist – a man who performed in Mediolanum’s forum, breaking free of impossible boxes and chains. The fellow had gladly accepted the challenge, agreeing to be locked in those deepest vaults in complete blackness and silence, with water and dried meat that would last him many months. The proud fool had claimed he would need only a week’s-worth of it. The locks had been turned in January. Some sentries behind the nearest steel door reported hearing him singing and whistling gaily to himself for the first few weeks, sounds of scraping and tapping rising here and there as he tested the cell’s walls. In the second month, the sounds of exploratory testing had tapered off, and there was only silence. Fearing he might have broken out of their emperor’s prize chambers, the guards opened the door. They found the man shaking in the corner, gaunt and wretched, sodden in his own mess. The fellow had lunged for the open door, yelling that the vaults were impervious, that the challenge had beaten him. And it had: for the guards did as Gratian had bid them, catching the man before he made it to the open door and tossing him back into the black recesses then locking him in once more. At first, he banged on the other side of the door and wailed, begging to be set free. Over the weeks that followed, the protests faded and now they heard scratching on the other side of the door, and a gentle weeping. Another month passed, when they heard voices. Two, sometimes three. The sentries had thought at first that the cur had managed to sneak another person in, until they realised it was merely the escape artist, chatting with himself in many guises. After the third month, an extended silence ensued. When the guards opened the door, they saw him at the centre of the chamber, dangling from a length of rope, eyes and tongue bulging, his swollen face as black as soot.
Pavo would be found, and that place would be his home. He would not be alone, however… the torturers would be there to keep him alive… and for far longer than a few months. As for the Claudia legion – that pox of men to whom Gallus and Pavo had both belonged? Well, the push against Fritigern’s Goths would be fierce and frantic, and many Romans would unfortunately perish in the initiative. Whole legions, even, might become detached and devoured in the campaign that would soon engulf Thracia.
Gratian heard a boyish laugh, then realised it had been his own. He lifted his drink again and stared into the surface of the wine, content, assured that his ambitions would be realised within this campaign. Pavo would die, Merobaudes and Valentinian too – during the confusion and the dreadful fighting. He would become both indisputable Emperor of the West – shedding his useless boy-Caesar and loathsome general – and saviour of the East.
Yet as he stared into the dark, blood-red liquid, he saw the image that had stained his dreams. A black shape, something like a man, swaying across a bleak, grey moor towards him. It carried a sword in one hand and death in the other. He thought then of the words of the old crone. The witch who had somehow stolen up beside him in the Fort of Mars, some three years ago, just after he had successfully engineered Emperor Valens’ demise at the Adrianople disaster.
‘I will have many years of glory… yes?’ he had asked her.
‘Oh yes,’ the crone had replied at last, tilting her head to one side as if trying to judge a scant portion of food optimistically, ‘you will have… years.’
Three… years… ago, he thought, his hands balmy with sweat now.
‘Is everything well, Domine?’ cooed Bishop Ambrosius.
Gratian jolted, then shot the man a dagger-look. ‘Leave me,’ he snapped. ‘All of you!’
Within moment he was alone.
My fate is my own, he raged inwardly. Glory awaits me in the East. Glory and… vengeance.
Chapter 5
Shrouded in night’s moonless veil, Constantinople was a strange, black mass. There were only pin-pricks of light from the torches of sentries along the land and sea walls, and at strategic points around the rooftops of the wards. Every so often, like the momentarily waking eyes of slumbering monsters, tavern doors swung open to reveal orange hearth fires within, and to release rumbles of laughter or drunken babble that echoed through the lanes and alleys then sailed up into the dark infinity. The Hippodrome resembled a great warship that had run aground at the foot of the first hill, awaiting the repairing hand of some artisanal titan.
The interior of the empty arena was a pool of blackness and silence... until a light pad-pad of feet sounded. Vitalianus trod across the arena’s sandy floor until he came to the spina – the raised dais that ran the length of the racing track, sporting triumphant and tall monuments brought from all across the empire: the suckling she-wolf of Rome, satyrs, griffins, a gold-faced obelisk from Egypt with a bulbous golden sphere fixed to the tip, a marble-encrusted colossus, a bronze pole topped with the twisting heads of three snakes and a marble statue of Hercules. In daylight they were gleaming and marvellous. In the dead of night, cast in shadow, they looked more like talons, as if some underground demon was trying to claw its way free of the earth.
He stopped before the golden obelisk, at eye-level with the soldier dangling there, upside down. His face was purple and his eyes wide with fright. His ankles had shed much blood from his struggles with the ropes holding him there.
‘Help! Help!’ the man whispered, his voice stolen by the brutal hand-chop to the throat that had left a torque of bruises there.
‘Your name is Herenus, yes? You are a slinger centurion?’
The man said nothing.
‘Come, now, Herenus. There is nothing to be gained by your silence. It is over for you. Thank your parents for your chance at life, and accept that these are your last few moments.’
Herenus’ chest rose and fell rapidly.
‘Now,’ continued Vitalianus, ‘you and your comrades in the Claudia have made these last few months rather tricky for me. I lost two men up on the aqueduct, and three more since – near and around the walls of that damned harbour barracks. Indeed, you put a piece of slingshot right through one of my men’s heads. Right here, between the eyes.’ He raised a finger and playfully tapped Herenus’ forehead to demonstrate. ‘Now that was cruel. But kind too – it would have been a blink-of-an-eye death. So… tell me where, and I will grant you the same.’
Herenus shivered and shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said in a dry whisper.
‘Tell me.’
‘The dawn is close. You can torture me for an hour and no more. It is a fair price to pay, for I will die knowing I stayed loyal to the last.’
‘Do you know what an hour feels like, when a white-hot brand pops both of your eyes then sears your genitals and every other patch of your skin? The pain w
ill rob you of your mind. You will forget even your own name.’
‘Then how will I tell you what you want to know?’ Herenus rasped.
Vitalianus swept a hand back and gestured towards the arena’s marble-stepped seating. ‘Point. Point and it will all be over.’
Herenus’ right arm shook as he raised it. Vitalianus’ eyes bulged, his lips peeling apart in a shark’s grin. Yes… yes!
And then Herenus clamped his hand across his heart. ‘For the Claudia,’ he whispered.
Vitalianus’ smile receded, and his eyes tapered to slits. ‘Once a Cretan, always a Cretan,’ he muttered. ‘Very well. Let us begin,’ he said, taking a step back.
Padding feet sounded behind Vitalianus. A bald man with an expressionless, skull-like face and soulless eyes stared at Herenus as he thumped a glowing brazier down, his face uplit in the intense spray of sparks that arose. Several pokers resting within it glowed white.
Herenus’ face widened as the skull-faced one lifted the poker like an accusing finger, bringing the tip towards his bulging, staring eyeball. A dull pop sounded, and a dry, rasping and voiceless hiss spilled from Herenus’ lips as his entire body convulsed in agony. After a time, he settled, pink gloop seeping from the destroyed eye socket, his body shaking with shock. Skull-face rummaged at his brazier, selecting the next poker.
‘It hurts, yes?’ Vitalianus purred. ‘Well, it can end. All you have to do is point…’
Pavo stood, caged in iron armour, the silver eagle standard in one hand. Ahead, the blood-wet tombstone road stretched out towards the blazing sunset, the lone olive tree and the strange woman sitting under the boughs, singing her sweet song. But his legs were still frozen, his eyes fixed on the soil by the roadsides: it continued to pucker and break, and now the strange shapes rising from below were taking form.
‘What is this?’ Pavo croaked, sensing the crone’s terror.
‘It is all I feared it might be,’ she whispered by his side.
The shapes shuddered and stretched, shaking off the soil and standing tall. Not crops nor roots… but men. An army of men clad in strange armour, lining both sides of the road. No, not men, he realised, seeing the white bones under the armour, the grinning skulls or rotting faces inside the spiked helms. A corpse army. They wore terrible capes of human skin, some using peeled, dried faces like masks. They spun slings, whirled and cracked whips, patted spiked clubs against their hands and worked twin swords or twirled spears, each of them craning in to stare down the road at him, eager for his arrival. Their leader was a golden-vested, rotting corpse mounted on a skeleton horse. The mount reared up as the cadaver king pointed a bony finger at Pavo and unleashed a murderous shriek.
Pavo shot bolt upright. The terrible sound of the cadaver king’s cry warped into the triumphal wail of cornua. The sound of the heraldic trumpets and the bright fingers of dawn light searched through the Neorion barracks. The threads of the nightmare faded, and he slid from his bed. Then he realised what the trumpet calls were for, and what day it was.
The nightmare had just begun.
The purple and golden belon banner fluttered up on the Hippodrome’s southern lip. A trio of musicians stood up on those heights, continuing to empty their lungs into G-shaped cornua horns which dazzled in the mid-morning sunlight.
‘Arise and come together, citizens of the empire,’ boomed a herald, strutting to and fro along the heights in front of the trumpeters, gesturing to the fluttering belon flag. ‘Emperor Theodosius calls upon you.’
It was dog-hot, and the city streets writhed with bodies, pushing and jostling down the main way, converging from the hilly wards, spilling from alleys and finally congregating in a sweating, babbling swarm around the flagged concourse of the Hippodrome. Hawkers and hagglers cried to all and sundry, offering tiny, stale loaves baked with last week’s grain, pots of thin stew and vases of cheap wine. A sultry sea breeze wafted uphill from the Julian Harbour, and a squadron of gulls wheeled overhead in search of spoils. One bird swept low in a daring attempt to snatch a meagre piece of bread from one of the refugees in the crowd, only for another such malnourished man to leap up and snatch the bird from the air. Many more gathered around and the bird’s pained, final screech sounded along with a puff of white and silver feathers as the hungry ones pulled the bird apart.
The emperor’s Lancearii legionaries shepherded and steered the masses towards the gateways leading inside the great arena. More sentries stood in the arched galleries of the stadium’s upper tier, like war-god statues set in votive niches as they peered down at the approaching crowds. Up on the arena’s high lip, where the herald and the cornua players had been earlier, a dozen more soldiers paced back and forth like eagles, outlined against the cornflower-blue sky. They glowered down at the masses too, watching for trouble. Suddenly, their heads snapped round towards the travertine plinth of a statue. There was one exasperated blind fellow standing up there – like a man stuck on a rock amidst a rushing river, calling for help. He was reed-thin, almost skeletal, the sun beaming from his bald head and his ring of white hair hanging in thin tresses to his bare shoulders.
‘This city is full of engineers, soldiers, craftsmen, mothers, fathers, children and slaves,’ he cried to everyone and no one. ‘All of us on the brink of starvation. Yet most choose to squabble not about their empty bellies, but the form of God. If you desire a man to spare you a cupful of flour, he informs you that the Son differs from the Father; if you beg for a loaf, you are told that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire, whether there might be a scrap of meat to be had, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing. Should we not instead be asking our God in what form he will bring us back our bread?’
‘Watch your mouth, old goat,’ a passing man croaked. He was a refugee like the old-fellow – his face sunken and his eyes dark-rimmed with hunger. ‘God hears all! He sees all. He has eyes everywhere… everywhere.’
Pavo, amidst the crowd, heard the shrill words, and they chilled him to his marrow. Shuffling through the sweating, heaving masses, he stared straight ahead, but sensed the many pairs of glinting eyes around him. His finned helm gleamed like a beacon, his full parade armour shushed like a dancer’s bells, his ruby cloak seemed brighter than the day it was woven and the white, purple-cuffed tunic beamed like a rich senator’s teeth. Worst of all, he carried no weapon or shield – none could enter the Hippodrome armed. For just a trice, he saw amongst the sea of bobbing heads one with neatly swept-back black hair, lightning flashes of white at the temples. His mind’s-eye saw the handsome Optio Speculatorum, Vitalianus. His heart – on edge all morning thanks to that damned dream – broke into a rapid charge… and then the black-haired man turned around – ugly as sin, with brown teeth. His heart settled back into a canter. Two months of lying low in the Neorion Barracks had nearly robbed him of his mind. Today might rob him of his life.
We’ll be with you, all the way. Sura’s words that morning when the herald’s call had sailed across the city had fortified him. I’ll have your flank. Opis and Pulcher will watch your back.
‘Seen anything, Sura?’ he muttered to his left. No response. He glanced round, seeing Sura trapped some way back, behind a sudden surge of sailors streaming across his path to bring sails to the arena – the great white linen sheets would be erected as canopies to shade the wealthier sections of the crowd in the higher tier from the sun.
Sorry, Sura mouthed, ducking and dodging to try to find a way past the neverending white ribbon. Likewise, Opis and Pulcher were trapped.
Pavo knew that to cause a scene or work backwards against the crowd would draw too much attention, and so he carried on, alone, alert to every malodorous body bumping into him as he went. With his peripheral vision, he watched for steel or for men veering towards him, while he outwardly looked at the preaching fellow on the travertine plinth. ‘We quarrel amongst ourselves, calling ourselves Arian Christians, Nicene Christians, people of each sect spitting, swearing and bludgeoning one another… all the w
hile we, as Romans starve and wither, our once-glorious capital now but a crowded hovel in which so many take sanctuary from the Goths. Where in this madness lies the old faith? The wisdom of the past and of the gods who raised us to our exalted place? Where for Mars, Jupiter… for the Soldier-God, Mithras? I have lost my sight, but by all of those wondrous beings, I have not lost my mind. You too must see that it is a bleak path we wander, the path of a man more blind than I. The path of the Christ-God.’ He jabbed a finger towards the Hippodrome. ‘The false god… the god our emperor claims to represent…’
Pavo felt a degree of awe at the man’s bravery. The previous year in Thessalonica, Emperor Theodosius had denounced the Arians and all those who followed the old gods as heretics. Rumour had it that his bishop, Ancholius, had pressed him for stronger measures every day since.
At that moment, he realised he had let his guard drop. Two men in armour were cutting through the crowd towards him like sharks, using their sword hilts like bludgeons. Legionary watchmen? Or agents in legionary steel? His heart thundered as he saw their brutish, malicious faces bending in grimaces as they closed in on him.
Whoosh! a breath of air tinged with soldier-sweat wafted by him as the nearest of the two pushed past and clambered up onto the travertine plinth. The soldier mock-jabbed his sword at the old preaching fellow, who fell backwards into the arms of the other soldier. The old man’s screams became a muffled whimper and then he was gone, carried off to no doubt be dumped outside the city walls or somewhere down in the slums.
The Blood Road (Legionary 7): Legionary, no. 7 Page 9