Siege of Rome

by David Pilling

“Please,” I said in a wheedling voice, “remain silent, and you shall be amply rewarded.”

  She raised one hairy eyebrow. “Rewarded, eh? Rewarded by whom, may I ask? You speak with a strange accent. I think you are one of General Belisarius’ foreign mercenaries, come to murder us all while we sleep. I’ll not have it!”

  She started to suck in a deep breath. Before she could scream, I dived at her and struck out with Caledfwlch. The flat of the blade whipped across her face with a noise like a wet cloth slapping against rock. Her little eyes crossed, and with a gentle sigh she folded into a heap.

  God forgive me, I had struck a woman. Cruel necessity demanded it, yet still I made the sign of the cross before sheathing Caledfwlch and hurrying back to the olive tree. My fingers shook with nervous excitement as I took the coil of rope from my belt, looped and made it fast round the narrow trunk, and tossed the other end down the gap.

  We worked with feverish haste, but something like two hours had passed before all our men were lifted to the surface. I retrieved my armour and struggled back into it. As for my matron, she was trussed and gagged and safely deposited in a corner of the yard, where she struggled in vain and none molested her.

  A good portion of the night remained, and the first grey shreds of dawn were yet to pierce the night sky. “To the gates,” said Magnus, “Bessas will be waiting.”

  The broken-down timber gate of the courtyard opened onto a narrow alleyway. We crept down it, two by two, four hundred men attempting to move as silently as mice. Procopius had shown us his old maps of the city, so we had some vague idea of our location, and that we had to make our way to the gatehouse on the northern wall.

  Naples slept soundly. The streets were deserted, and nothing opposed our progress save a couple of stray dogs, who barked indignantly at us until I heaved a rock at them. The curs loped away down a side-street, and we continued on to the gatehouse.

  When the twin towers flanking the gate rose before us, Magnus ordered a dozen men forward to deal with the Gothic sentinels on the rampart.

  I was one of the dozen. We removed our boots, and ran noiselessly on bare feet across the cobbles and up the steps. The guards drowsed at their posts, and didn’t sense our approach until we were on them. I slid my arm around a brawny Gothic neck and drew the edge of my dagger across his throat. He writhed and kicked in my grip, gasping for air as blood pumped from the gash. I threw him off the parapet, and his flailing body hit the cobbles like a sack of meal.

  The rest of our men were quick and silent about their work, and within seconds four Goths lay dead. Our trumpeters raised their instruments to their lips. The shrill blasts echoed across the darkened plain beyond, and were answered by a roar from Bessas’ men. They had crawled as close as they dared to the foot of the walls, and laid flat on their bellies, waiting for the signal to attack. Now the plain seemed to come alive as they sprang to their feet and rushed the gates.

  Somewhere a gong sounded, and lights flared in the street below. Gothic soldiers stumbled from the guardrooms flanking the gates, still half-asleep as they buckled on shields and helmets, shouting blearily at each other in their strange tongue. Magnus and the rest of our men burst out of hiding and quickly overwhelmed them. A brutal street-brawl broke out, figures grappling with each other in darkness.

  War-horns sounded. I looked to my left, and saw a file of Goths storming along the parapet towards us. Big men, as they tend to be, with long fair hair spilling over their mailed shoulders. Their axes were huge, double-handed butcher’s tools, capable of cleaving a man in half.

  I was the officer present, and the Isaurians who had slaughtered the sentinels looked to me for orders. The axe-men were a terrifying prospect, but I didn’t dare show cowardice in front of the men.

  “Stand your ground,” I shouted, drawing Caledfwlch and advancing to meet the leading Goth. The parapet was narrow, barely wide enough for two men abreast, and he filled the space with his enormous bulk.

  I remember him vividly: well over six feet of solid bone and muscle, an officer or nobleman, with a heavy green cloak thrown back over his broad shoulders, fastened with an elaborate golden brooch in the shape of a leaping stag. His mail was of superb quality, shining like a mirror in the pale moonlight, and his yellow moustaches and plaited beard flowed to his breast.

  All these details stuck in my mind, even though I had little time to study the brute before he sprang at me, snarling and whirling his axe.

  He was fearsomely strong, but slow. I dodged aside and that terrible axe, which must have carried twenty pounds of steel in the head, swept past and dashed against the stonework with a terrific clang.

  My back was against the wall. I thrust at his face, missed, and Caledfwlch scraped harmlessly against his armoured shoulder. The axe rose again, his blue eyes glinted in triumph, and then a throwing knife sprouted from his neck like some obscene plant.

  He dropped his axe and clawed at the blade, buried almost to the hilt in his flesh, gasping for breath as blood flowed down his fingers. I placed my foot against his chest and heeled him off the walkway. He vanished over the edge, but another Goth rushed at me before I could thank the knife-thrower.

  I closed with the Goth before he could strike, seizing the haft of his axe and stabbing wildly at his face and eyes. Somehow his helm worked loose in the struggle, and I accidentally butted him on the nose. My eyes watered in pain, he threw his arms around me, and for a second or two we teetered on the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop or more to the cobbles below.

  Desperation lent me an edge in strength. I managed to push him away and rammed my knee into his crotch. He grunted and doubled over, and my heart nearly stopped as an Isaurian leaped out of nowhere, screaming like a devil, and buried his hatchet in the back of the Goth’s skull.

  “Good work,” I panted, helping the Isaurian to shove the dying Goth back against his comrades. They retreated a few steps, and had to push him off the parapet before advancing again.

  I stood ready to meet them, but then the gates burst open below us and our infantry stormed into the city. Magnus’s men had unbarred the gates from within. At the same time Bessas and his chosen men scaled the walls – I learned later that their attack was delayed by the ladders being too short, and they had to bind two together to make the ascent – and flooded onto the rampart, bawling war-cries.

  Now the city would suffer for her arrogance. The remainder of that night was a massacre. Our soldiers ran wild in the streets, slaughtering and burning and pillaging as they pleased. All their pent-up rage and frustration was unleashed, and there was nothing Belisarius or his captains could do to bring the men back under control. The Goths abandoned the walls and tried to stage a fighting retreat to the governor’s palace, but our men hunted them like dogs.

  The Hunnish mercenaries in particular excelled in savagery. They tore the Goths apart, dipped their hands into still-warm bodies and daubed their faces with hot blood. Unlike the rest of our soldiers, they had no respect or veneration for God, and stripped the altars of churches, murdering those priests who bravely tried to resist them.

  Of the citizens, only the Jews put up any form of resistance. They had been foremost in resisting our previous failed assaults, and despaired of receiving any mercy from Belisarius. He would have forgiven them, as he forgave almost everyone who asked it of him. Alas, they assumed he was a monster, and fought to the last.

  More than one Roman officer also indulged in looting, and made his fortune from the plundered wealth of Naples. I might have joined them, but my mind was enflamed with desire for revenge on Photius. I prowled the streets, ignoring the murder and riot and rape going on all around me, my mind as sharp and focused as any predator’s.

  I knew Photius had been among the main body of our men waiting outside the gates. After the Gothic resistance was crushed, they had dispersed, and so he might be anywhere in the city. I silently begged God to lead me to him, but my pleas went unheard. For hours I hunted in vain, until the screams of the dying and
the crackle of burning buildings ebbed a little, and the arrival of morning cast pale, sickly light on a scene of total destruction.

  Belisarius rode into the city at the head of a hundred Guards, and did his best to restore a semblance of order and discipline. Our men were scattered all over the city, drunk on slaughter and stolen wine. A number of captives had been taken by the Huns, mostly women and children. Belisarius had to negotiate with the Hunnish officers, as though they were equals rather than subordinates, to persuade them to release the captives unharmed.

  I had long since given up my hopeless quest, and slumped to rest under the awning of a pillaged wine-shop. Procopius found me here, picking his way delicately over the pieces of smashed vases and amphoras that littered the street, and the slumbering bodies of Isaurian bowmen.

  “Coel,” he yelled, shaking me awake, “get up, man. Are you sober? If so, Belisarius should have you stuffed and mounted as a rare exhibit.”

  He peeled one of my eyelids open, but I pushed him away. “Yes, I’m sober,” I said irritably, “let me alone. I need to sleep. Photius escaped me.”

  Procopius sat back on his meatless haunches. “I know. I saw him at the general’s pavilion this morning, sharing breakfast with his mother. They seemed in high spirits.”

  I got up, wincing at the aches and pains in my body, reminding me that I was no longer young. “No doubt they are hatching some new plot,” I said, yawning and stretching until the joints in my shoulders clicked, “some fresh way of putting me in the earth.”

  “You flatter yourself, Coel. Antonina and her son have a great many enemies. You are merely an irritant, an insect to be stamped on when the occasion presents itself.”

  “An insect? My thanks. It is good to know one’s true worth.”

  I was starving, but Procopius had thought to bring a loaf of bread, and I gnawed at it as we made our way through the reeking streets towards the palace.

  Corpses lay everywhere, bloating like dead cattle in the wan morning sun. Flies buzzed about them, and the stench of blood and death and smoke hung over the city like a vile cloud.

  The gates of the palace were shut, and the remainder of the Gothic garrison had barricaded themselves inside.

  “Eight hundred remain in arms,” said Procopius, “Belisarius has surrounded the palace with as many troops as he could find that were reasonably sober and could stand upright, but so far the Goths have refused his entreaties.”

  I paused, squinting up at the palace, a large rectangular complex built in the typical Roman style, comprising four wings with colonnaded fronts, arranged in a square. A double line of Huns and Isaurians were drawn up in front of the main gates. Many were still suffering from the previous night’s excesses, and stood slackly to attention, leaning heavily on their spears.

  Bessas was in command, but there was no sign of Belisarius. “The general was called away,” he said, “some of the citizens have gone mad, and are demanding the deaths of Pastor and Asclepiodotus.”

  These two were the rhetoricians who had inspired the citizens to stay loyal to the Goths. Now the fickle mass of the people, who had listened to their advice and hailed them as wise men and patriots, were turning on them.

  “They will be torn to pieces,” I said carelessly, stifling another yawn, “unless Belisarius reaches them in time. What about Stephen and the others we bribed?”

  “In hiding,” replied Bessas, “or fled, I know not which, nor do I care. The fate of traitors is of no interest to me.”

  Belisarius returned wearing his most severe expression, jaw clenched, eyes glittering with rage.

  “Murdered in the street,” he said in answer to our unspoken queries, “they caught Asclepiodotus as he tried to flee the city in disguise, and ripped him limb from limb. By the time I arrived, they were parading his head on a spear.”

  He paused to spit. “Savages. I should have the lot of them hanged.”

  That was impossible. Our invasion of Italy was supposed to be a war of liberation rather than conquest, a grand attempt to snatch back the Roman homeland from the dominion of barbarians. These same Roman citizens, who had refused to open their gates to us, thrown in their lot with the Goths and murdered a defenceless old man, were the people we had come to rescue.

  The evidence of our failure was all around us, in the smoking rubble of Naples and the hundreds of citizens abused, robbed and slaughtered at the hands of our soldiers. Belisarius could not resort to hanging people, even if they were murderers, without further exposing the hypocrisy of our cause.

  “What of Pastor?” asked Procopius.

  “Also dead,” replied the general, “by his own hand. He locked himself inside his house and opened his veins in the bath. I have set a guard on the house, and will have him decently buried once all is calm again.”

  Pastor and Asclepiodotus were the last casualties of the siege. The eight hundred Goths holed up inside the palace had little food and water to sustain them, and soon came to terms. Incredibly, Belisarius persuaded them to turn their coats and enlist under our standards. No further proof is needed of the mercenary nature of the Roman army at this time, and I found myself marching alongside the same Gothic axe-men that would gladly have chopped me in two during the struggle on the walls.

  Belisarius set the surviving citizens to clean up the debris. He blamed them, not the Goths, for the ruin of Naples. They had failed to heed his warnings, mocked his offers of clemency, and thus brought misery and destruction on themselves.

  I felt some degree of guilt for the sack, but it soon passed. This was war, and I had seen and suffered too much to fall prey to sentiment.

  “Now our mission begins in earnest,” said Procopius on the eve of our departure.

  His lugubrious features glowed with something like holy zeal. “Forget Sicily and Naples. These were mere distractions from our true object. The Eternal City, Coel. Rome! She has been in the hands of barbarians for over a century, but Belisarius will reclaim her for the Empire.”

  I shared his enthusiasm. To me Rome was a mythical city like Troy or Olympus, an ideal rather than a place, spoken of in hushed whispers by the bards and storytellers of my youth. Now I would help to liberate the ancient birthplace of an empire that had conquered most of the known world.

  It was something to boast of to my grandchildren, assuming I ever had any, and the prize seemed well within our grasp. The Roman army, when led by Belisarius, was invincible, and the Goths under Theodatus had proved a weak and indecisive enemy, incapable of bringing their greater numbers to bear.

  Then, even as I sat and swilled wine with Procopius in a tavern that had somehow avoided being plundered, a breathless envoy arrived from the palace.

  “General Belisarius demands to see you at once, sir,” he panted, leaning against the doorframe.

  “What is it?” snapped Procopius, shaking off the wine fumes and rising from his chair.

  “A messenger just arrived by boat from the north. The Goths have deposed Theodatus and elected a new king in his stead. The new man is called Vitiges.”

  This name meant nothing to me then, but my hand still trembles to write it. In place of the weak and timid Theodatus, the Goths had chosen a humble officer of obscure origin but considerable ability and force of will. Like Stozes, Vitiges had a gift for unifying a defeated people, and stirring them to fresh defiance.

  Procopius hurried to the palace to discuss this new threat with Belisarius and his generals. I stayed, finishing off my wine and sadly tracing another name in a puddle of stale liquid on the table.

  Elene.

  12.

  In common with most deposed kings, Theodatus didn’t last long. The Gothic nobles met at Regeta to pass his sentence of deposition and to proclaim the new king. As was their custom, they raised Vitiges on their shields, and his name was chanted by the assembled mass of soldiers.

  Vitiges’ coronation took place even as we marched from Naples and advanced on Rome. Reluctant to weaken his already slender forces, Belisariu
s left three hundred men to garrison Naples, and a similar number at the fortress of Cumae, the only other stronghold of note in Campania. These necessary losses were more than compensated by the eight hundred Goths he had enlisted at Naples, though like many of our foederati troops they were treacherous and fought only for money. It was one of the miracles of Belisarius’ glorious career, that he achieved so much despite being almost always outnumbered, and with men who cared little for his causes.

  Our army marched along the newer road, called the Latin Way, though for the sake of romance we might have used the broad pavement of the Appian Way, which followed the same route just a few miles to the west. Procopius was seized with a kind of ecstasy at being so close to this famous highway, and galloped off to survey it without waiting for Belisarius’ permission.

  “It is a wonder of the world!” he enthused on his return, “even after nine centuries of use, the pavement is unbroken, and the flagstones smooth and polished like glass. Oh, that I should live to tread the same path as the legions of old, as Caesar and Mark Antony and the heroes of the Republic!”

  I was keen to see the Appian Way for myself, but Belisarius allowed his soldiers no time for sightseeing. He had to reach and seize Rome before the Goths rallied under their vigorous new king.

  It was now the beginning of December, and the fair summer was a distant memory. We struggled along the icy roads, buffeted by cold winds and pelting rain that soaked man and beast to the bone. I remember glancing over my shoulder and being struck with fear at how puny and vulnerable our little army appeared, bogged down in winter rain and ice, more like a wandering band of fugitives than a mighty host bent on conquest.

  Belisarius had hopes that the Roman senate, along with the nobles and Catholic clergy, headed by Pope Silverius, would not support the election of Vitiges, and welcome us into Rome without a fight. Vitiges, like his predecessor, held to the Arian heresy, and was no friend to the Catholic faith.

  His other great hope was that the deposed king, Theodatus, would escape and raise an army to reclaim his throne, thus splitting the Gothic nation. While the two factions tore each other apart, Belisarius could quietly take possession of the Eternal City. Then, after the Goths had all but destroyed each other, he would march out and sweep the survivors into the sea. Italy would be free of barbarians, and the heartlands of the Empire restored to her rightful rulers.