‘And you’ll soon enough have a lovely scar to show off in the baths.’ Lucius grinned as he helped me back onto my horse.
I could have managed a longer rest. But Lucius was right. How the dispensator had got an interception party ahead of us was beyond our imagining. But if he could get one, there might easily be others. We needed to get out of the papal zone as quickly as we could.
46
I felt a decided chill as the evening came on. At first, I thought it was the change of temperature. Then I began to sweat. A concern on his face that worried me, Lucius kept looking at me in the failing light. I felt nothing in my side. But, as he’d promised, the wound on my arm had begun to throb, sending spasms of pain up into my neck.
We came to another post inn. Lucius dithered a while over the keeper’s offer of a bed for the night. In the end, he showed the exarch’s letter to get us fresh horses, and bought some food and some drugs.
I don’t know if it was the drugs or the rising fever, but I rode on through the night feeling increasingly detached from my body. I began to sing snatches of ballads in English, alternating these with long passages of the Lucretius I’d read in the library of Anicius. They made an incongruous match – the unreflecting joys of battle and the hunt, and that sombre meditation on the futility of life.
Lucius tried to quieten me several times. But I was hardly aware of his company. I raved on in a feeble croak until my throat was dry as dust and I called for wine. Lucius gave me sips of water. Several times, I thought he was Maximin, and questioned him about the finer points of the Monophysite controversy. I shouted impatiently at him as he failed to answer my queries about the perfect union of God and Man in a single substance.
I then thought Lucius was one of my fellows in that raiding party I’d briefly joined on the Wessex border. I jabbered on and on in English about nothing in particular.
Then everything seemed to clear, and I was sitting on horseback beside that broken sewer in Rome. It was night again, and I could see without any moon above. Lucius sat beside me on the left. Again, there was the heavy crunch of footsteps on the steps. It was coming closer, and I could hear the rough, laboured breathing of something unaccustomed to movement, but still immensely powerful.
This time, we didn’t turn and run. We continued to sit, looking down from horseback at the awful blackness of the sewer.
‘There’s nothing to fear, do be assured,’ Lucius said. His voice shook, giving the lie to his words.
‘We must see what it is,’ I agreed. My teeth began to chatter.
Suddenly, Maximin – or was it the diplomat? – stood beside me to my right. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once. I looked at the shouting face and felt the gentle breeze fanned up by the frantic gestures. But I heard nothing.
I turned back to the sewer opening. Something was coming out. It was big. It was dark. It was And now I was back on the road with Lucius. The moon was bright overhead, and I could hear the sound of eight hooves on the road. My teeth were chattering in reality, I was very cold, and Lucius was leaning over to support me.
I know that, after a while, I couldn’t sit up on the horse. I felt as tired and as weak as a kitten. Lucius stopped and laid me across the horse. We rode on through the night at a very slow pace. We compensated as best we could by not stopping.
By the morning, I felt some return to coherence. Still very weak, I wasn’t up to any galloping. But I could at least now sit on the horse and ride slowly beside Lucius.
At a watering place for the horses, we came upon an armed carriage. Its main passenger was a Greek official on his way to Rimini to hand in some cadastral reports his subordinates had made up for him. Lucius showed his magic letter from the exarch, and I was soon wrapped up in the back seat of the carriage. A slave woman dabbed at my fevered brow, and poured some poppy juice down my throat.
This was one of those carriages that you still saw in those days – partly closed, partly open. The main bumping of the road was kept away with leather straps that secured the seating to the main body. I was soon deliciously comfortable.
The Greek travelled on my horse to reduce the load and allow us to keep up a decent speed.
Lucius rode beside the carriage. As I drifted off into a drug-induced sleep, I asked him where he’d got his knowledge of the Lombard language. I thought he knew only Latin. He explained that he’d been taught to ride and fight by a Lombard captive when he was about my age. He didn’t know enough to hold a proper conversation. Besides, everyone in the Lombard nobility had now learnt Latin rather well. And even the humbler Lombards could speak it after a fashion. But he’d picked up most of the riper expressions from his teacher, and these came out as if naturally in moments of great danger.
‘Did you never think of a military career?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘The days when people like me got given armies to command were over long ago. The Christian emperors made sure to downgrade our place in the world to serving in the civil administration, or to whatever scholarly or other leisure we could organise for ourselves. We were too unreliable for the new order that Diocletian created and Constantine perfected.
‘The armies are for Greek professionals or barbarian mercenaries. My father was prefect once, and had regular meetings with Narses, the first exarch. He was a fine general, but he started out as a eunuch in the Imperial Household. Until Phocas popped up, it made for stability – even if, the occasional Narses aside, it didn’t bring inspired leadership.’
I felt the longing and regret that Lucius hid behind his increasingly smooth flow of explanation. I know he’d have made a brilliant general of the old style. He’d have kept the Lombard out of Italy. Even now, he could have cleared them out. Was this why he’d been so visibly upset by the settlement proposed by the Church?
I slept. I was distantly aware of when we were passing over the compacted gravel that gave us a smoother but slower ride, and then over the great paving slabs that had us swinging and jerking about on our leather suspension.
We rode on. The road stretched on, seemingly forever. We came to a tunnel cut through the rock. We stopped awhile in its shade, and Lucius supervised a change of dressings to my wounds. There was no visible suppuration, I was conscious enough to notice, and the wound in my side was beginning to heal. But, even through the weak opium I’d been given, I could feel my arm stiff and burning. Lucius washed it himself with cold water and rubbed some ointment he’d bought at another of the inns from a travelling apothecary. He accompanied this with some muttered incantations. Either the little Greek on my horse didn’t notice, or he didn’t care.
In the evening, the fever returned with similar force, and we had to go very slowly. The Greek was in a hurry, and didn’t like the delay. But the only person to my knowledge with whom Lucius never managed to pull rank was the emperor himself. Everyone else just fitted around him.
In between short waking spells, I dreamt fitfully through the night. I dreamt that Maximin was looking down at me from heaven. He sat beside a severe, iconic Christ; on his face the same troubled look I’d seen him wearing the last time I’d seen him alive. He spoke to me, but I was again unable to hear what he said.
I dreamt, or think I did, that a wolf came close by the carriage. Lucius and the guards chased it away with their drawn swords.
Then I was back in Rome, though not this time by the broken sewer. I was now with the dispensator. He sat in his office, looking at me with his usual slight distaste. He spoke to me, but no sound came from his lips. He spoke to me again. Still I couldn’t hear or understand. Now impatient, he took me to the door of his office. The entrance hall and labyrinth of tunnels at the front of the Lateran had been abolished. The door of his office opened straight onto the square outside.
Again, I saw that slow, silent triumphal procession. The emperor was shrouded in purple. His carriage stopped close by me. He pointed and pointed at me, until I realised he wanted me to join the procession in my a
llotted place at the back with the other barbarian prisoners. The flutists and drummers never once stopped their silent, convoluted playing.
I woke bathed in sweat, with the first light of dawn stealing over the rocky landscape from our right. My arm still hurt, but I felt that I was recovering from the fever.
By now, Lucius was increasingly sure we were safe. Closer to Ravenna than to Rome, we were deep into the exarch’s zone of rule. We were passing rapidly down towards sea level, and the air was became appreciably warmer and more oppressive.
We thanked the Greek, and I got unsteadily but with returning strength into my saddle. My last sight of them was far back along the road, where they’d stopped for breakfast.
At Fano, on the Adriatic coast, we turned northwest, following the coastal road towards Rimini.
That evening, there was no return of the fever, and we were able to take turns again at sleeping and watching. But we did this, Lucius said, from simple caution. Even if the dispensator had worked some other miracle, he could have us murdered, or perhaps kidnapped. He was no longer able to have us arrested.
We spoke awhile about nothing in particular. But Lucius was concerned that I should sleep as much as possible.
We passed the sixth day of our journey on the long road between Pesaro and Rimini. On our left, approached by long spurs from the main road, stood walled towns. I could hear the church bells ringing for the Sunday service. Needless to say, we didn’t stop to go in and pray anywhere.
On our right was the Adriatic. Looking out over the flat, gentle expanse of water, I could see the stream of warships and trading ships that connected this outpost of the Empire with the gorgeous East. I could hear the dull, rhythmical thump of the drums that kept the naval oarsman in time together. The trading ships were decked with sails of frequently gorgeous colour.
The East itself was preparing for some struggle of life or death from which it might not emerge. Here, on the edge of the directly ruled Empire, trade and the process of such government as was possible continued as normal. This, I reflected, was how our myrrh must have arrived.
The road was filled with merchants and wheeled traffic and the litters of the wealthy. The occasional band of soldiers passed by us. They gave me an interested look, but returned the greetings Lucius called to them.
That evening, we stopped at another of those inns. Lucius spent a long time after dinner questioning the keeper and the other guests about the news from Ravenna and the East. The wars were going uniformly ill for Phocas. There were rumours of a joint attack by the Persians and barbarians on Constantinople itself. The city couldn’t be taken with those huge double walls that surrounded it and its unbroken command of the seas. But how long could the Empire last with just the capital intact? The provinces, I was told, were either occupied by various enemies or falling away of their own accord.
The main topic of discussion was how long it would be before our exarch in Ravenna declared for one of the African exarch’s sons or some other candidate. There was no fresh news from Carthage or Constantinople. We had a drink with some merchants from Antioch. They told us the city was dissolving into endemic violence between the Greek and Jewish communities. Meanwhile, the Syriac majority was growing more open in its heresy and preparing to receive the Persian king, whenever he should make his expected full descent on Syria.
This was news, I thought with a sudden rush of greed, that would convert easily to gold on the Roman markets.
We had no fresh news from Rome – not that anyone now could possibly have overtaken us. No one had even yet heard that the pope was back from Naples. Circuitously but at length, Lucius questioned everyone about any groups of armed men who weren’t obviously connected with the exarch. There had been no one.
For the first time since leaving Rome, we bathed and passed the night in a bed. I cuddled up close to Lucius in the warm night air, feeling a vague obligation to have sex with him. But he was asleep even before I drifted off. I’d slept badly on the road, he hardly at all with the work of looking after me. I dreamt in disjointed flashes of Rome and the many comforts of Marcella’s house. There was nothing frightening in my dreams.
In the morning, we exercised away some of the stiffness of the long ride behind us, and bathed again after a leisurely breakfast. I managed a small quantity of bread soaked in olive oil. Lucius allowed me no wine.
We set out on fresh horses. I could feel the definite return of health and strength, and I delighted in the warm sea breeze and my clean clothing.
We skirted Rimini. I could see from a distant inspection that this was still a substantial town within its walls. But Lucius insisted we shouldn’t spend any time there. Except for our inexplicable brush on the third afternoon of our journey, we’d passed unchallenged.
‘Best not push our luck,’ he said, after pointing out the main sights that could be seen above the distant walls. ‘You can tour to your heart’s content once our business with the exarch is out of the way.’
In the early afternoon, we entered a small town. This had shrivelled to a core within its walls. Most of the buildings outside this core had collapsed, and some of the materials had been used again for the construction of churches or heavier fortifications. But it had a bustling market and a wine shop where we could sit down and eat our first proper meal in days. Lucius fed me some thin gruel sweetened with honey to cover the bitterness of the drugs he’d added. I managed to swallow most of this. He kept the wine heavily watered.
‘Can’t have you drunk as well as half dead,’ he joked.
We went for a walk round the centre of the town. I demanded this much, and I leaned heavily on him as we inspected the surviving buildings. There was a fine basilica there, now used as a monastery. An inscription above the portico recorded that the building had been provided by the munificence of a certain Gordianus in the reign of Claudius the Goth Killer. It was an interesting example from a time when architectural styles were on the turn from the elegant but ancient to the more functional modern.
There was a public library. But Lucius flatly refused to let me enter. He’d never seen me at work in Rome. But he probably guessed how time could stand still for me whenever I found myself in a room with books.
There was also a tiny church built by the mother of Constantine shortly after his conversion. This had been changed and extended over the years, and now had a bell tower that stood incongruously beside it.
‘Are you up to climbing this?’ Lucius asked. ‘I can show you something that will raise your spirits.’
I nodded. He helped me up the narrow steps to the top. I clutched with my good arm at the wooden rail, wondering at how little strength I could put into the grip. Even so, I could feel the gradual return of strength. Young bodies have the most wondrous resilience. The fever had not been great, and now it was passing.
At the top, Lucius leant over the northern parapet. ‘Do you see that blur in the distance?’ he asked.
I looked. Before me lay an immense flat waste, an embanked road leading through it until lost in the heat haze. Far beyond, almost on the horizon, I saw what Lucius was pointing at. It was a blur at first. But I focused and concentrated. Through the low, shimmering air, I could see a high and wide expanse of domes and towers.
There were miles and miles yet to go. But I’d had my first sight of Ravenna – that great, untakeable fastness perched between a marsh and the sea. From here, the last Western emperors had ruled Italy as best they could, safe from the general havoc that lapped or overpoured the walls of every other city. From here, the exarch now ruled, in continual touch by sea with Constantinople and the world that stretched far beyond the narrow confines of the West.
Within those walls lay the last undamaged fragments of the old Roman life – the palaces and libraries and bathhouses and trading marts, and the large remains of an urban culture to which all Italy had once been home.
‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ Lucius said. ‘Once I’ve got you bathed and rested, we’ll take ourselves
to the exarch. I would have sent a slave ahead to alert him to our coming. In the present circumstances, it may be best for us simply to arrive unannounced at his door.’
Back down in the square before the church, I felt decidedly better. We’d outrun the dispensator’s men. Another day, and I’d be in the fabled Ravenna of the exarch. And I could hope for the answers to which I’d been laying impatient and not always advisable siege since that awful dawn by the Column of Phocas.
Whatever it meant for me, I swore, I’d have those answers.
After a brief and merciful rest, we set out again on the road. Before nightfall, we’d be travelling through that great marsh within which Ravenna was protected from all enemies. Some time the following day, we could expect to pass through the immense fortifications.
Yes, I’d have those answers.
47
We were deep into the marshes that protected Ravenna on its landward side. Still straight, the road passed across on a high causeway. Every mile or so, we were stopped and questioned at one of the military checkpoints that blocked the only approach to the city. Each time, Lucius showed his letter of safe conduct, and we passed through.
The marshes went on for miles. We’d made our gradual descent onto them in the morning. Now I was grown almost used to their hot, stinking air.
I asked how the city could possibly survive in a climate so pestilential.
‘The city itself has the most wonderful air,’ Lucius explained.
Just before Ravenna, he continued, the marshes gave way to more solid ground. Part of the city was built on this, part on moles sunk deep into the coastal mud. The continual breeze from the Adriatic gave it an unexpectedly fine climate. The gentle movement of the tide washed sea water in and out twice a day through the canals that intersected much of the city. This carried away all the filth and other refuse that would otherwise have remained to fester into an epidemic. Such infections as did take hold in the city were carried in along the shipping lanes from the world outside. Even these were less terrible than when they reached Rome or any of the inland cities.
Conspiracies of Rome a-1 Page 33