Siege of Rome

by David Pilling

  I turned on my side and peered over the channel. Two people were almost directly under me. The light was dim, but I could see one was a slender woman with glossy black hair flowing to her shoulders, and her companion a heavily-built man in the scale mail and crested helmet of the Guards.

  I silently leaped over the edge and dropped down onto the guardsman. He folded under me, and together we went down in a tangle of limbs and curses.

  He dropped his sword, but was sharp enough to seize my wrist instead of trying to retrieve it. His helmet had also come loose. I smashed my knee into his face, felt bone crunch against bone, and clawed at his eyes with my free hand. The guardsman’s companion might have helped him, but instead she took to her heels.

  I was the stronger, and managed to get on top of him, my left forearm pressed down on his windpipe.

  Now I could see his face. He was indeed a Guard, though I didn’t know his name. I had seen him in drills and on the march, though he always kept his distance. We had never spoken.

  I eased the pressure on his windpipe a little. “Why do you hunt me?” I demanded. His fingers on my wrist had slackened, and I threatened him with Caledfwlch, holding the tip a mere half-inch from his right eye.

  His eyes were full of fear, but he made no answer. “Come,” I said, “I cannot believe Antonina inspires such loyalty. You are in her pay, are you not? Would you truly die for her?”

  Still no answer. I recalled that Antonina inspired terror in her followers. A man in her service would rather die a quick death at the point of a blade, rather than suffer the penalties she inflicted for failure.

  The running footsteps of his companion were dying away. If I tarried much longer, she would have made good her escape.

  “Well,” I said regretfully, “it seems a pity.”

  He tried to jerk his head away, but I seized him by the throat and stabbed Caledfwlch into his eye. The blade slid easily into his brain, killing him almost instantly. His body stiffened under me and went still.

  Leaving him, I got up and ran down the passage, plunging into darkness and emerging at the bottom of the sloping floor that led up to the entrance. The shadow of my quarry flitted ahead of me, and was briefly silhouetted in the narrow opening as her slender form darted through into daylight.

  I pounded up the slope, breath rasping in my throat, and squeezed through the gap. Flinging up a hand to shield my eyes against the glare of the sun, I stumbled outside, looking around for my quarry.

  There she was, tearing feverishly at the bridle of her horse, a fine grey cavalry mount, tethered to a crumbling pillar of rock. My heart stopped as I recognized her.

  “Elene,” I cried out, “you cannot run from me. Not forever.”

  She threw a terrified glance over her shoulder. Yes, Elene, the first woman I had loved and lain with. Still the same lithe, sinuous creature I knew at the Hippodrome, though she must have been nearing forty by now, with the occasional streak of grey in her long, unbound black hair.

  She wore a grey tunic of grey silk, tucked in at the waist, and loose breeches. A dagger hung from a brown leather sheath at her hip. A second horse, another cavalry beast, was tethered next to hers. This one had clearly belonged to her dead companion.

  I started towards her, but she had already swung gracefully into the saddle. Elene had learned to sit astride a horse, like a man, at the arena.

  She turned her pony’s head away, but hesitated for a moment, looking directly at me. Her long face had lost its youthful bloom, and was now gaunt and tired, the face of one who had wandered too far down dark roads.

  I groped for something to say. I was almost certain that she and her accomplice had stalked me in the tunnel with the intention of murdering me, but I didn’t want her to flee and vanish from my life again, not yet.

  “Your son,” I said, “does he live?”

  I had last seen Elene in the cells under the Praetorium in Constantinople, where she had tried to persuade me to confess to conspiring with the Nika rioters. She did so, she claimed, on the orders of the Empress Theodora, who had threatened to kill her husband and little son if she refused.

  Elene had also claimed that the boy was named Arthur in honour of me, even though he was another man’s get. I doubted the tale, thinking it a cruel joke to hurt me, but had pondered it much in the years since. Perhaps there was a son after all. Perhaps she had lied to her husband about the paternity. Elene would have become a practiced liar in the service of Theodora.

  She swallowed hard, and pushed back a strand of black hair from her eyes. These were as I remembered them, grey and tinged with a strange melancholy.

  “My son is none of your affair,” she replied huskily, “you will not speak of him. Where is Lucius?”

  Lucius, the man I had killed. I noted his name and stored it away for future enquiry. “Dead,” I replied brutally, “I left him to rot in the shadows, as he deserves.”

  A terrible thought occurred to me. “Was he your lover – your husband?”

  For the first time in many years I heard Elene laugh. “No. Merely a man I was obliged to work with. Farewell, Coel. I will see you again, before you die.”

  She turned her pony’s head and heeled the beast into a gallop. I ran for my own horse, tethered in the wood outside the ruins, but stopped. There was no point in pursuing Elene. Her pony was fast, and would have outdistanced mine even in a fair race.

  I swore, and thumped the wall. Elene had escaped me again.

  11.

  Procopius made a great show of shock and outrage when I told him of the attempt on my life. I carefully searched his face as he paced about his tent, cursing and shaking his fist, and concluded his anger was genuine.

  “Belisarius must not know of it,” I said when he had calmed down, “Elene and Lucius were almost certainly in the service of Antonina.”

  “I know, I know,” he replied, suddenly weary, and sat down beside his writing desk, “this is my fault. They must have been watching you. I should have sent you out with an armed guard, but that might have drawn attention.”

  “There are two Huns, lying dead somewhere near Membresa, who had cause to regret guarding me,” I replied.

  “God or the Devil must be watching over you,” he said, shaking his head, “that is twice now your enemies have tried and failed. There will be a third attempt, I am sure of it.”

  I shrugged, trying to give the impression that I cared nothing for assassins, though in truth I was badly scared. “I am alive, and unharmed, and one of their hired killers lies dead. Let them try.”

  Procopius closed his eyes for a few seconds and pinched the bridge of his hooked nose. Then he was all business again.

  “This aperture you found,” he said, turning to the scrolls laid out flat on his desk, “at the end of the old channel that leads into Naples. Show me exactly where it is.”

  His maps of the aqueduct were very old, stained with damp and moth-eaten in many places, but I managed to trace my route through the tunnels. Procopius stared at the parchment, nodding slightly and tapping his chin.

  “Come,” he said suddenly, rolling up the parchment, “Belisarius must be told.”

  We made our way to the general’s pavilion, where we found Belisarius sitting outside under a tree and staring at the walls of Naples. Other than two of his guards, he was alone. Antonina was absent with her ladies-in-waiting, no doubt amusing herself somewhere.

  He greeted us with his usual courtesy, but was in a pensive mood, and clearly in no mood for conversation. His mood swiftly lightened as I told him of my adventure – excluding the murder attempt, of course – and discovery of a secret way into the city.

  “Can it be true?” he exclaimed, staring at me with desperate hope in his eyes. Procopius showed him the fragment of map charting out the route of the underground aqueduct west of Naples.

  Belisarius, for so long a frustrated and disappointed figure, instantly recovered his old self. “Summon Bessas, Troglita and Photius to my pavilion,” he ordered
one of his guards, “they are to come as soon as possible.”

  I exchanged glances with Procopius. “Photius is here, sir?” I asked, striving to keep the emotion out of my voice.

  Belisarius was striding about, rubbing his hands together, his brows knitted in thought. “What?” he said distractedly, “Photius? Yes, he is here. Sicily is quiet, so I summoned him to join us with as many men as he could spare. He came with a hundred or so. Not enough, but a hundred is better than none.”

  I racked my brain for an excuse to withdraw. I could not face Photius, not here in the open, not now. The blood pounded in my veins as I contemplated setting eyes on the treacherous pig. How could I, in all honour, restrain myself from plunging Caledfwlch into his heart? Murder committed in the broad light of day, in front of so many witnesses, could not go unpunished, and the old line of British princes would end in hemp.

  Procopius appreciated the difficulty. His mind was quicker than mine, and came up with a solution.

  “Go and fetch the rest of the scrolls from my tent, Coel,” he ordered me, “I think there are some duplicate maps of the aqueduct among them.”

  The implication was clear: make yourself scarce, and don’t come back until the council is over. I gratefully withdrew, and waited nervously in Procopius’ tent until he returned some hours later.

  “Belisarius was annoyed at your failure to return,” he said, yawning, “but I persuaded him that the duplicates weren’t necessary, thank God. There are none anyway.”

  “So what was decided?” I asked.

  “He is going to send a detachment of Isaurians into the tunnel. They will widen the aperture, until it is large enough to admit men in full armour, and then offer the Neapolitans a final opportunity to surrender. If they refuse…Naples will suffer the horrors of the sack.”

  “Was my name mentioned during the council?”

  “It was. Belisarius spoke highly of you, and I had the pleasure of seeing young Photius’ face drain of blood. His mother must have informed him that you are still alive, but still he was shocked to hear your name on the general’s lips. And frightened, if I am any judge.”

  That was something. Photius now knew that I stood even higher in the favour of Belisarius, which might dissuade him from trying another clumsy attempt on my life. I decided that his mother was responsible for sending Lucius and Elene to hunt me in the tunnels below the aqueduct. Unless Procopius had indeed betrayed me - which I doubted, considering the efforts he had made on my behalf – she must have had spies watching my movements.

  I groaned. More traitors in the Guards, perhaps, or among Belisarius’ staff. It was impossible to be certain. All I could do was live from day to day, guard my back, and pray my luck held.

  The next day Belisarius sent heralds to the gates of Naples, summoning Stephen and the elders of the city to his presence once more. They shuffled outside and, as before, met Belisarius at his pavilion.

  Stephen looked drawn and ill with terror, as well he might, since his efforts to raise the citizens of Naples against their Gothic overlords had proved futile. Belisarius had paid a lot of gold for his useless services, and he must have feared that the general meant to take his head as recompense.

  Belisarius calmed his fears by embracing him as a brother. “I have a message,” he said, holding the quaking old man at arm’s length, “that I wish you to remember and repeat to your fellow citizens. It is this.”

  He stepped back and flung up his right arm in a grand flourish, aping the rhetorician’s pompous, old-fashioned style in a way that drew a chuckle from his officers.

  “I have often seen cities taken by storm,” he boomed, “and know too well, from experience, the sad results which commonly ensue. In the memory of these I view, as in a mirror, the future fate of Naples, and my compassion is strongly moved at its impending ruin. I frankly tell you that I have prepared an expedient for entering your walls, of which the success is certain. It would fill me with grief if so ancient and noble a city, peopled by brother Christians and Romans, suffered the havoc of war, and especially by an army under my command. My authority would be insufficient to restrain the victorious troops from bloodshed and pillage; they partly consist of barbarians, who claim no kinship with Rome, and would regard your downfall without pain. During the short respite I have granted you, while it is still in your power to deliberate and choose, prefer, I beseech you, your own safety, and avoid the destruction hovering over you. Should you reject my offers, you may blame the sufferings that follow, not on my desire for vengeance or the harshness of fortune, but to your own stubborn folly.”

  It was a powerful speech, in a style calculated to appeal to the scholars and rhetoricians inside Naples, as well as strike terror into the citizens.

  Stephen bowed. “I shall tell them, General Belisarius,” he murmured, his face ashen, “I shall tell them to prefer life over death.”

  The deputation returned to Naples and recited Belisarius’ threats to the populace, to no avail. The Neapolitans and the Goths still held us in contempt, and were convinced that Theodatus would soon send an army to chase us away.

  Belisarius’ patience was at an end. Even as he spoke with Stephen, his Isaurians were at work under the aqueduct, widening the aperture I had found at the end of the channel.

  It was dusk by the time the Isaurians returned. Belisarius now ordered four hundred men, led by myself and an officer named Magnus, to make our way to the tunnel and prepare to attack. We were provided with dark cloaks, covered lanterns to light our way, and two trumpeters to sound the signal when we broke into the city.

  “When we hear the trumpets outside, I will order a general assault on the walls,” Belisarius informed us at a last hurried council, “Bessas and the pick of my troops will scale the ramparts, while you storm through the streets and open the gates from the inside to admit the rest of our men. Understood?”

  I and the cluster of officers around me murmured in agreement. Photius was among them, and I could feel his eyes scorching into my back. I refused to look at him, fearing that my temper would overflow.

  “Control yourself,” Procopius had advised me before hand, “do not lunge at your enemies, but be content to wait. Your opportunity for revenge will come.”

  That opportunity, I had decided, would arise during the sack of Naples. When the fighting was at its hottest in the streets, amid the chaos and bloodshed, I would stalk Photius like a tiger might stalk its prey in the jungle.

  Our assault very nearly met with disaster. Magnus and his four hundred men followed me to the ruins of the aqueduct, where I managed to find the entrance again after some witless stumbling about. There, to my amazement, at least half of his command refused to enter the tunnels.

  “I will not go through that portal,” declared one of the faint hearts, “it is a doorway to Hell.”

  Magnus raged at them, but they would not be moved, and in the end it was only the arrival of Belisarius in person that restored the situation.

  “What is the reason for this delay?” he demanded, his face pale with fury, “into the tunnels at once, you laggards, or I will have every tenth man among you executed by his fellows!”

  The threat of decimation, an ancient punishment not used in the Roman army for centuries, was enough to restore their courage.

  Once again I descended that sloping floor into pitch darkness, though this time I had the comfort of a lantern and hundreds of men at my back. While I retraced my steps through the subterranean passage, Bessas and his detachment advanced towards the foot of the rampart above ground.

  Soon we reached the end of the channel, and caught a glimpse of starry night sky through the gap in the wall that the Isaurians had mined and widened.

  I paused to study the gap. The path through it led upwards into a courtyard, at a steep incline that would be difficult for a man in armour to ascend.

  “I will go first,” I whispered to Magnus, “give me a rope, and I will drop it down for the next man to follow.”

&nbs
p; He agreed, and I stripped off my helm and coat of mail. I weighed Caledfwlch in my hand before handing it over to Magnus for safe keeping. As ever, I was reluctant to place my precious heirloom in the hands of another, especially a stranger.

  In the end I decided to risk the extra weight, and slung my sword-belt over my shoulder. Magnus and another soldier boosted me up the wall, and I clung to the almost sheer sides like a monkey, groping for handholds.

  Straining with effort, I struggled upwards by inches, Caledfwlch dangling awkwardly down my back. Somehow I scrambled up and over the edge of the hole, and threw myself, panting, onto the cobbles of the courtyard.

  When I had recovered my breath, I got up and approached the large olive tree in the middle of the yard, meaning to tie the rope around the trunk and pay it down the gap for the next man.

  “Who goes there? What are you doing? Intruders! Help! Murder!”

  A woman’s voice, shrill and cracked and elderly, squawked behind me. I let out an involuntary yelp and spun around. Caledfwlch banged against my thigh as I scrabbled for the hilt, though I was faced with nothing more formidable than a fat old peasant woman in a brown smock and an apron dusted with flour.

  Nothing more formidable, did I say? She had a broad, lantern-jawed face, and stuck out her chin as I finally managed to wrestle Caledfwlch free of its sheath.

  “Brave young man,” she sneered, folding her heavy forearms, “to draw sword against a woman. Come near me with that thing, sir, and I will scream for help. I have neighbours who will hear me.”

  She was a problem I failed to foresee. I had assumed the house that adjoined the courtyard, being in such a ruinous state, was deserted.

  What could I do? Bessas would have put his sword through her heart, without hesitation, but I wasn’t made of such stern metal.

  Procopius would have appreciated the absurdity of the situation. The entire fate of our assault on Naples, and on the Italian campaign in general, now depended on me silencing one querulous old matron.