The Songs of Slaves

by David Rodgers

  “Done already?” Henric said, pushing out a chair for Connor to sit in.

  “You know how the young are!” Gaiseric offered, to the laughter of all.

  Connor colored slightly at the chiding, groundless as it obviously was. He had not expected a warm welcome from the men, who less than an hour before had seemed almost as ready as Arastan to wash their hands of his trouble.

  Valia stood up and raised a goblet.

  “To Connor, provider of our feast,” he said, and then looking around to see that none of Arastan’s men might be nearby he added “And the champion of our fox hunt today.”

  The men raised their goblets and drank.

  “Where are our manners?” Henric said, filling a goblet with red wine and sliding it to Connor.

  “There is a vast store of wine in this place!” Gaiseric said.

  “Is there?” Connor said, accepting the goblet.

  “Guess all that land under vine should have been a give-away, but still. The others will be very happy when they arrive.”

  “If we leave them any!” one of the men jested.

  “If Arastan leaves them any, drowning his sorrows as he is,” Henric said. “Not gracious in defeat, they aren’t. It’s not like we’re depriving them of everything, just helping ourselves to a share of it. And it’s not like you killed their leader, Connor; you just humiliated him in front of everyone.”

  “Which I thank you for,” Valia said, pointing his dinner knife at Connor. “Not the humiliation part – though I richly enjoyed that. I thank you for not killing him. Even though it was a fair duel in accordance with the law, slaying the youngest son of Sarus would be more trouble than any of us could be ready for. You had the chance to kill him, maybe even twice, but you showed great restraint. You took him down tonight and still kept us all out of the rip current.”

  He raised his goblet again, and the others followed his lead.

  “Now mind you, this truce attached to your victory will hold for tonight,” Valia continued after he had wiped some of the wine from his short beard. “But even though Arastan should realize that he is in your debt because of your mercy, your clementia, he will not see it that way. The humiliation you dealt him – hell, even your refusal to just let him run his sword through you – has made him your enemy for life. And he is a conniving and tireless enemy, Connor. Stick close to us and you should be alright, but never let your guard down around him and his. Never let your guard down. I hope you were not on your way anywhere important when you ran into us yesterday, because unless you want to face Arastan’s hunting party alone you are probably stuck with us for a while.”

  The men laughed. Connor pretended to laugh too.

  “Now, enough grimness for one day! Have some of this mutton. It’s cold, but it’s good. You need some bread, too. We’re out of bread. Woman!”

  The door to the kitchen opened and Mella emerged. She spotted Connor at the table and her face went white. Connor’s heart sank to the pit of his stomach. He should have told Valia sooner. Now he was caught.

  Recovering, Mella’s face took on a hard look; but then she looked away from Connor to Valia.

  “Yes, Dominus?”

  “More bread. And some more of those raisin cakes, and some apples. And have one of your friends go back to the cellar for some more wine. And no tricks, please, as she will be drinking the first taste in front of us.”

  “Yes, Dominus,” Mella said with a bow. She shot Connor one more icy glance before retreating to the kitchen. Connor shuddered. Like Lucia, she must think that he had brought the Goths here. The word would spread amongst the slaves in no time – they would all believe that he was a traitor.

  “The girls here are very friendly,” Henric said. “I would say that you should go down to them later like some of us already have, but you already have the one you wanted bad enough to fight a warlord for.”

  So the slaves who were not in hiding were cooperating? The body of Lucius Montevarius was not even cold yet, and already his household was making the marauders welcome. But what else were they to do? It was the best way to preserve themselves, the only way they knew anymore. Connor shook his head – not him, he would never return to that. But he had to say something – he would rather have talked to Valia in private, but there seemed to be no time for that. He had to come clean before word of his origins reached Valia through the wrong channels. Connor opened his mouth to speak, but did not get the chance.

  “As we were riding up here today, not sure of what we would find,” Valia began, addressing the table, “I said to Connor ‘Friend, if this plan works out tonight, and I am sitting around the fire with you –good wine in our goblets and new gold in our pouches –then I will forgive you for your many oddities’. Well, I am glad I took the chance on you, my friend. We are rewarded for our patience as well as our daring tonight; and tomorrow our families and our fellow warriors will get their share of this prize. May the strength we all glean from it sustain us through some of the hard times ahead. As for you, Connor, I know not where you came from; but I do know that you are a good man to have around.”

  The others laughed, and two or three of the drunker ones banged their goblets on the table.

  “You’re welcome to ride with us as long as you like,” Valia said.

  “Thank you, Lord Valia.”

  “No formalities, please. You are too serious all the time.”

  Mella returned with the bread and the fruit and placed them on the table. As she did so, one of the men put his hand on her round bottom. Mella turned to him and forced a smile.

  Connor took some of the food offered him. He was too nervous to be hungry, but he knew that he had to keep his strength up. He set some aside to take up to Lucia. Reaching for his goblet he took some more wine to steady him. He had determined that he would not drink in order that he might be ready for any action; but it seemed that he would be more likely to save Lucia and himself through drinking than through fighting this night.

  Once the other slave had brought more wine and proven it unpoisoned to everyone’s satisfaction, the men started showing each other some of the items they had found. There were a few gold ornaments, and some silver items; a few hand mirrors and coins; as well as some personal curiosities. Clearly some of Arastan’s men had staked their claim to Lucia’s room first, as none of Valia’s men had any jewelry to speak of. Connor wondered what had become of her precious cask of the accoutrements of her religion. Would anyone be likely to have taken them? Or would they have feared that it would bring bad luck?

  “We are making good time,” Valia was saying. “We should beat the worst of the snows. Though if we did not have so many with us I would say forget the passes and take ship instead. That is the problem with this type of expedition – safety in numbers, but slowness in numbers too.”

  “Just where is it that we are going?” Connor said, trying to make his voice sound light.

  The others just looked at him; then a few of them laughed.

  “To meet up with Alaric, of course!” Valia said. “Had we not told you?”

  “Perhaps you tried to tell me, but were interrupted,” said Connor, his mind racing too fast to feel foolish at their reaction to his seemingly perpetual ignorance. Alaric – the man from the story; the man Paulinus Effacus had mentioned months before; hero of the Battle of Frigidus, King of the Visigoths.

  “You’re right,” Valia said. “I do not think that we ever finished our story. We got enmeshed in the plans that brought us here.”

  “When we got interrupted, you were telling me of the Battle of Frigidus and Alaric’s elevation after that,” Connor offered.

  “Right,” Valia said. He took another drink and settled his elbows on the table.

  “This is no setting to tell such a great story, so I will cut it very short for you. After the battle, Alaric realized that there would never be both prosperity for our people and peace with the Romans until the Romans were forced to respect us. The wanderings of our people under
Fritigern – that Alaric lived through as a child – taught the Romans to fear us. Our service to them in the various wars and ultimately in the great battle to once again unite the Imperium taught them that they could use us. But so far nothing had taught the Romans respect for us. Our people were well within the Imperium now and there was no land to go back to outside of it. We absolutely had to have our place within it – lands in which we could live our lives our way, and a legitimate role to play so that we would never again be used merely as arrow fodder for Rome’s enemies. As Alaric and the others saw it, there was only one way to do that. Treaties had not worked. Our invaluable services had been ignored. We had to take it for ourselves.

  “So once again, the Goths went to war with Rome, not to destroy the Imperium but to force it to listen, to bring it to the table with us once and for all. I will not go into the account of those wars now, but they raged all over Macedonia, Thrace, and the Peloponnese, and even into the north of Italia itself. Sometimes we had allies, sometimes we were on our own; but the fight continued to get what we believed was our rights by any means that we had.

  “Well, let me back up a bit. As this was happening, the Imperium was suffering changes too. For all of his scheming and dreams of greatness, Theodosius did not live more than a few years after the great battle. Again there would be two rulers – his son Arcadius ruled in the east, and his son Honorius ruled in the west. Both were young, inexperienced, and devoid of the wisdom of their father. And so before he died, recognizing the troubles of the empire his sons were inheriting, he appointed men of heroic military standing to act as consuls to guide the young men. The consul he appointed to take charge in the name of Honorius, and to help bring him up to be a great emperor was none other than Flavius Stilicho.

  “Tireless and dedicated, as I have already described, Stilicho wasted no time in dealing with the threats to the Imperium head-on. That of course meant taking his armies after us. And so he did. For years we fought – maybe close to ten years. Through those years I and my friends assembled here passed into manhood. We met our first test of iron and taste of blood in the battles for Mediolanum and Sparta; we covered the ground of Thrace battling Stilicho to our left and Radagasius to our right. So many great deeds and great days we witnessed and took part in; so many great losses and great sufferings we were dealt, as well. Again, I will have to save those tales for another time. But through it all, I must say that Stilicho with his resources, his bravery, and his military ability often took the upper hand. So many times we escaped only by the speed of our horses.

  “And yet there were many times when Stilicho would not press his advantage. Many times the fools back in Constantinople or Ravenna would say ‘why did you not finish them?’ – as if it were that easy! Cowards. We will cut their tongues out some day. But Stilicho knew what he was doing – knew better than they ever would. He understood us. He knew that we were men of honor, as he was a man of honor. But it was not only an insistence on fighting a noble fight in a noble manner that constrained him – no! He understood our purpose, understood what we were trying to achieve, and he believed in it. For look – there was the Imperium divided between two foolish boys of no real ability, Honorius and Arcadius – equally inept, selfish, and full of vice and guile. The East was being savaged by the Huns, and had to utilize its armies on its frontiers to fight them. Meanwhile, Stilicho knew that a great menace was brewing to the north; and in the bitter cold winter, just a few years ago, when the wind and frost were so great that the mighty river Rhine actually froze over, that menace marched forward undeterred. Franks, Alamanni, Burgundians, and many of the tribes of northern Germania were coming south into the already distressed and fractured Imperium. Stilicho knew that instead of fighting us he should be leading us against these enemies. It was a fight we Goths were born for! But we had had enough of serving Roman needs for Roman’s sake. We needed acknowledgement on our own terms and more than empty words. Only then would we unite with the Romans and crush their enemies with them.

  “But alas, it was not to be. Over that decade of fighting us and working vigorously to secure the Imperium’s endless borders, Stilicho had risen in power until he seemed to outshine all others. Though, as a man who was half-Vandal he knew that he would never take the throne of an Augustulus, he had risen to the level where Honorius was even to marry his daughter; and where most of the acts of that emperor – the effective ones, at any rate – where of Stilicho’s design. You know enough of how the world works, Connor. You know that this would be enough to make him many powerful enemies.”

  “Many indeed,” Connor offered. The other men were nodding their heads, wrapped up in the story that had been their reality all this time.

  “Well, a brave man – a man such as yourself – can stand against any man in battle and live or die. But who stands a chance against the viper in the grass, the low-minded coward? Who can stand against the knife in the dark? And so it was with Stilicho. One day he was our noble enemy, the most powerful man in the Imperium, the ablest man to face the Germani threat and the Hunnic threat, and our one hope of a diplomatic solution. The next day his own people were selling him out. His enemies that schemed against him enacted their plan. They even found the one man who owed him nearly everything and who should have been most loyal to him – the Augustulus Honorius, himself – to be all too easily swayed by their lies. United, his enemies struck when he least expected it, in double betrayal murdering Stilicho on the steps of a church – though he had given himself up peacefully.”

  The Goths at the table banged their goblets on the wood and growled their revulsion at this. Connor looked into the fire in the fireplace, trying to understand all that he was hearing, and make sense of these men who were disgusted at the murder of their enemy.

  “But the outrage did not stop there,” Valia said.

  “No it didn’t,” muttered some of the men in response.

  “The bastards assassinated his family and almost all connected with him in the days that followed. But it did not end there.”

  Again, the murmur of agreement.

  “The people – the Romans throughout all of Italia – were whipped up into a frenzy by these enemies of Stilicho and haters of us. They believed the lies blaming him and his fellows for everything from not wiping our people out, to not stopping the irresistible advance of the Germani, to allowing Constantine the Usurper to gain ground here. They blamed Stilicho and they blamed all barbarian kind. They were going to kill barbarians wherever they found them. But they were too cowardly to march out and find the Germani armies to the north, or the Hun army to the east. No. They were far too cowardly for that. They were ready for murder, not ready for war. So they turned towards the only outsiders they could find – the woman and the children, the families of the foederati who were peacefully settled in the Italian countryside as their brave husbands and fathers fought Rome’s wars!”

  There was an eruption of outrage at the table as the Goths reacted to the story that they of course knew well. Connor heard one of the women in the kitchen drop a plate, as if fearing the sounds of anger meant some new assault.

  “Imagine, as their brave men fought as foederati against Rome’s enemies, these Vandal, Sueve, Alan, and Ostrogoth women were raped, their children slain, their babies cast out of windows, their houses fired and burned to ash, and all their possessions stolen by the people they were fighting to protect! Tens of thousands were murdered. Tens of thousands! With such coordination that it had to have been planned. The parade-ground Praetorian soldiers murdered the families of men who had the courage to fight on the frontier. Vile, cowardly civilians plundered and tortured their neighbors whose husbands and sons fought for their protection.”

  “When did this happen?” Connor asked, a wave of nausea coming over him as he envisioned what he was hearing.

  “Only a year ago. A little more than a year. That is what these people are.”

  “That is what these people are,” Connor heard Valia say; but he knew
that he should have just said “that is what people are”. He struggled to suppress the sense of claustrophobia that arose in his chest. He wanted to get away from all of this. He wanted to fly on the wind back home to Eire and hide in the hills forever.

  “Well, it did not work out as they had planned,” Valia continued in a low rumble. Around him the turns of anger turned to sounds of affirmation.

  “They killed the wrong people. They made enemies of their friends. And all at once, the foederati that had been fighting for them turned against them. They wanted revenge on these cowards for shedding the innocent blood of their loved ones, and so they turned to the man who could help them get it. Tens of thousands of them left the Roman lines and hastened to join Alaric. Alaric’s army grew, and continues to grow. We too, now hasten to join him. Alaric has seen the whole truth. He was born into the knowledge of the Roman lie; then he struggled to fix it at Frigidus, then through his own actions against the Imperium; and now he has seen the fruit of Rome ripen and their evil come to its fulfillment, as they have murdered the one general who could save them and forever alienated the men who could strengthen their ranks. The time is now. The time will never come again. It is our time. Change must come, and we must bring it. We are going to purify the Imperium, to remove the dross and make it a place for our people.”

  “How?” Connor whispered. “How are you going to do it?”

  “We are already doing it,” Valia uttered. “Alaric is already there! We are going to join him. We will join him at the gates of Rome.”

  Part III

  The Alps

  409 AD

  XIX

  “Ambush.”

  In the four weeks he had known him it was only the third time Connor had heard Tuldin speak. They had entered the Alpine pass three days ago, and so far it seemed to Connor that they were almost always in a prime position to be attacked. The wagon train they led was slowed by women and children, and forced to snake out as the Goths picked their way along the narrow channels through the gray stone. Even when their way was less choked they were then exposed on steep, rocky terrain so windswept that it was devoid of trees or natural cover. If they were attacked by a competent enemy many would die even before they could turn the group around.