The King's Coin: Ambition is the only faith (Visigoths of Spain Book 2)

by Paula Constant

  Sisebut drew himself up stiffly, but he could not hide the note of anxiety in his voice, nor the fear lurking in his eyes when he spoke. “I fear I miss your meaning, Severianus. Neither my loyalty nor my… piety… would ever fail to be the highest exemplar.” He stepped a little away from Athanagild. “I ensure all those in my care know their duty.” Laurentius looked at him with hard eyes, and Sisebut shrank slightly from the coldness he saw there.

  “I have no doubt,” said Laurentius softly, “that you take great delight in showing my nephew his… duty.” He could see Athanagild’s stricken face from the corner of his eye, but he did not trust himself to meet the betrayal and hurt he knew he would find there. Instead he gave Sisebut a curt, contemptuous nod, turned, and strode from the grounds.

  The final expression of doubt and serious discomfort he had seen in the archbishop’s face did not, for a moment, eclipse the terrible pain he had seen in Athanagild’s.

  “I had no choice.” Laurentius paced the floor of his father’s Toletum study. “If that bastard Sisebut realised what I am, or thought for one moment he could use me as a pawn in his game, Athanagild would not only have been exposed but his very life put in danger. As it is, I have not entirely convinced Sisebut, only put doubt into his mind. Enough, I hope, to make him tread cautiously.” He stopped pacing and turned to stare at Shukra. The little Persian leaned against the corner of the bookshelf, his arms folded in a deceptively nonchalant posture, dark eyes inscrutable as he watched Laurentius. “Well?” Laurentius demanded. “Spit it out! It is unlike you to remain silent when you have such a spread of sins with which to tax me.”

  “With which to tax you?” Shukra spoke quietly. He lowered his head and shook it once, slowly. “I have been knowing for many long months what this animal is doing to that young man. Months, Laurentius. And I am staying silent, aziz-am. Azura Mazda has watched my silence.”

  “Months?” Laurentius stared at him. “You knew this – and did nothing?”

  “I knew this and did nothing.” Shukra raised his eyes to Laurentius and opened his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I am being yours to kill, aziz-am. There is nothing you can say to me that I am not already saying to myself.”

  “But… he confided in you? Athanagild?” Laurentius felt the colour drain from his face.

  “He did not need to.”

  “How could you have let it continue? Allowed that sick bastard –” Laurentius broke off, the unspoken words mixed in his mind with the stricken pain on Athanagild’s face. He gripped the back of the chair so hard the wood forced its design onto his palm. “I made what he is a sin,” he whispered, the words rasping painfully in his throat. “I thought that if Sisebut believed me disinterested in Athanagild in that way, believed I didn’t share his proclivities, that he might lose interest in the boy and better guard himself. I let my disgust show.” His head felt heavy and thick. Laurentius lowered it into his hands. They were cold, the shape of the chair forced into the bloodless flesh. “God help me,” he whispered. “I all but told Athanagild he disgusts me. What have I done?”

  “Nothing that cannot be undone!” Shukra came to his side, concern on every line of his face. “You must be telling him, aziz-am. What you are – what he is. That this is not the sin your foul Church must insist upon it being. That you are understanding, my friend.”

  “Why?” Laurentius spoke as if he had not heard Shukra speak. “Why would he tell you and not me? Am I so dreadful a man – is what I am so very plain? Was he afraid?”

  “Oh, aziz-am.”

  Laurentius spun from the sympathy in Shukra’s face, and his own expression hardened. “And do not think,” he said harshly, “that my own sins expiate yours. That you knew this all the time, Shukra, and did not stop it, that you allowed that twisted, sick bastard to defile that beautiful young man. Yes, I hope your Azura Mazda is a benign, forgiving God. Because I must tell you, Shukra, I am not.”

  A tense silence was broken by a servant at the door. “Fráuja,” he said, looking between the two men curiously. “Bishop Felix is here to see you.”

  “Bring him in,” said Laurentius tersely, not taking his eyes from Shukra’s.

  The servant cast them another curious glance and backed away, leaving the door partly ajar.

  When Laurentius spoke again, his face was bleak, his tone flat. “I forbid you to approach Athanagild again, Shukra. I do not know what games or whispers have brought you to his door, but you will desist. I can do little, but I will ensure he feels no burden to endear himself to Sisebut on your behalf. And for the time, at least, remove yourself from my house and from my sight. I cannot look at you any more than I can look at myself.” He turned, putting his back to his friend.

  Shukra, seeing the rigid tension in the hard shoulders, swallowed the pain in his chest. “As you wish, aziz-am,” he said softly.

  Turning, his heart heavy, Shukra met Felix’s quiet figure in the corridor. The bishop stared at him with the austere distaste with which he always regarded a man he considered little better than a pagan heretic, and Shukra’s mouth twisted in a hard smile. “Indeed, my good father,” he murmured as he passed, “for once, I fear your judgement is well deserved.” He walked away, feeling Felix’s eyes bore condemnation through his skin as he went.

  16

  Theo

  January, AD 691

  Sebastopolis, Anatolia

  Elauissa Sebaste, Cilicia, Turkey

  Sebastopolis, Theo soon came to realise, was a hotbed of multicultural tension – and warring ambition.

  They had been billeted in a series of low buildings near the agora, the once-great marketplace. It was bound by a thick defensive wall with a grand entrance, guarded by two great lion fountains, long dry and beginning now to crumble. The wall itself was in a state of disrepair not helped by the townsfolk plundering it to build yet more dwellings to house the ever-increasing flood of humanity. But the agora still served as the central commercial district. It was surrounded by taverns catering to the thousands of soldiers who now found the port their temporary home. Theo and Silas were drinking wine in one of them, waiting for Leofric. With them was Boric, who had once been enslaved beside them and whom Theo had seen freed, long ago in the market at Carthage. They had fought side by side ever since. Boric was a good man.

  Night had fallen, and the town had grown raucous. After his victory in Thrace, Emperor Justinian II had inherited a force of Leofric’s countrymen, over thirty thousand Slavs. They were hard fighters, bitter at the loss of their lands and sovereignty. Their mood had not been improved by being forced to fight for Leontios, the same strategos who had led the force that conquered them. Leofric had once fought alongside many of the Slavs housed in barracks they had built themselves, beyond the immediate port of Sebastopolis. Despite taking coin and grain from their Greek overlords, the Slavs maintained a lofty distance. They were hard men, and rough – recruits who followed old gods, and who had lived their lives fighting against an emperor they now found themselves reluctantly allied to. When Leofric entered the tavern fresh from an evening in their company, he looked rather the worse for the experience.

  “The emperor made a deal with the Arabs,” he reported.

  “What kind of deal?” Theo asked.

  “It seems that the Christian refugees,” said Leofric, nodding at where a small group of lean, hard-faced men squatted against the wall of the agora, talking in low voices, “did not flee their homes as we thought. They are here because Emperor Justinian II gave their territory to the Arabs – in return for a share of the taxes from their lands.”

  Theo and Silas looked at him in surprise. “You are certain about this?” Theo said, frowning.

  “Ja.” Leofric nodded sagely. “Come, I tell you more, away from this noise.” He glanced uneasily at Boric, and even Silas frowned. Despite the months they had fought together, Theo knew that their conversation veered into territory too dangerous to risk to any but the most trusted.

  “Boric stays,” said The
o briefly. “He has put his sword between death and me more than once.”

  “Pah.” Leofric gave a contemptuous sniff. “Death is having bad day if Boric’s swordplay is winner.” But there was no hostility in his tone, and he passed the wineskin to Boric as he spoke.

  Silas gave Boric his slow smile. “Do not stand between Theo and death, wenkai. The boy has a knack for finding it.” Jostling Boric good-naturedly between them, they moved out of the tavern.

  Theo glanced at the men by the wall as they passed. The refugees were followers of a regional priest, Ioannes Maronus, and were known locally as Maronites. Fiercely independent, when the Arabs had come to their Armenian mountain villages, they had banded together in their traditional clan groups, caught in a geographical pincer between the political machinations of Constantinople and Damascus, suspicious of both. Now some ten thousand of them lived in and around the port, alongside the same forces that frequently attacked their brethren.

  They left the raucous noise of the market behind them and moved into the ruins of the theatre. It was a small place, popular for soldiers seeking privacy with local women. On the tiered benches, couples whispered together; behind large blocks near the old stage, relations of a more intimate nature frequently took place.

  They climbed to the very back of the theatre and sat up high. Behind them the small port stuck out into the sea like a stubborn growth, connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land along which men bustled at all hours, ferrying supplies, arms, and news from the boats that docked there. With the recent addition of both naval and land forces drawn from across the Empire, Sebastopolis was a seething pot of money, politics, arms, and people with competing concerns and hidden alliances. It smelled of danger and transience.

  “The Arabs fight our armies to a standstill in the mountains,” Leofric said. “My friends tell me there is no point to fight further east – the Arabs hold all, and they will not cede. But the same is true on this side of the mountains for the Greeks.” He passed a wineskin to Theo, who drank and passed it to Silas, who in turn gave it to Boric. “It is the emperor who collects taxes from the mountains,” Leofric went on. “My friends tell me they escort half of those payments to the Arabs on the other side of the passes – either by sea or by land. We are also here to subdue the rebels who would take the coin themselves – or who would bargain with Arabs to cede territory.”

  “And these rebels are many?” Silas asked.

  Leofric nodded. “There is no loyalty in those mountains,” he said, nodding sourly at the dark shadow on the horizon. “Brarrhans minus – my brudders – say the Christians who still hold fast are wicked fighters, fearless against both sides. Our time, they say, will be spent subduing the locals – and carrying money for emperor.”

  Boric spat on the ground in contempt. “This is not war,” he said moodily. His eyes roamed the seething mass of humanity. “This is trouble,” he muttered.

  Theo tapped his leg with a restless hand, his eyes narrowed in thought. And where there is trouble, men like Oppa find opportunity.

  “For this reason, my countrymen are stationed here.” Leofric took a long pull on his wine flask. “We must hold the passes and ports on this side, or the Arabs have a clear route to Constantinople. It would not be first time they try to take those walls.”

  “But they have never succeeded,” said Theo, remembering Laurentius speaking of the long years of the Arabic siege of Constantinople.

  Leofric shrugged. “Does not mean they will not,” he said simply. “We Slavs held our lands for years beyond count. Now we do not. Such is war.”

  They drank to this immutable fact. The sky was clouded with the scent from a hundred cooking fires, and people bustled through the streets whilst lanterns bobbed along the thin spit of land to the port.

  “What of your brethren?” Theo asked Leofric. “How do they feel about doing the emperor’s bidding?”

  Leofric tilted his head. “Neboulos controls them. Neboulos is good man, and strong soldier, good leader. I like.” He nodded.

  “But?” Theo prodded him.

  Leofric’s face closed over, and he looked away as he pulled on the wineskin. “They will do as Neboulos instructs,” he muttered. Theo, catching the undertone of defensiveness, suspected that Neboulos’s instructions to his men would rely a great deal on his own conscience.

  He sighed. The Slavs, he knew, were not happy. Neboulos, their leader, was no flag-waving puppet to be controlled by commanders he did not respect. And Theo was realising that nobody respected Leontios.

  The commander seemed shadowed everywhere he went by Oppa’s lean, dark figure, perpetually whispering in his ear. Theo had sent word to Apsimar, through Athanais, of their close alliance, but he had little to report beyond the fact that Oppa had brought horses to Leontios – and that could hardly be construed as anything other than a gift, in their current circumstances.

  “So,” Silas said, his deep voice somehow falling beneath the surface noise so it was both clear and yet unheard by others, “we are here to hold this port indefinitely?” His eyes narrowed as they scanned the terrain. “It is a bad place to stand,” he said, nodding at the crumbling defences and wide-open plains beyond the city. All three contemplated the horizon for a moment, but there was little to say. Silas was right: it was poor country in which to make a stand.

  “Come,” said Theo, standing up. “Enough skulking in the corners, ne? We have armour to ready. We are to report to Leontios tomorrow – and I for one do not intend to do so with a sore head.”

  “Leontios!” Leofric spat in contempt. “He is a fool,” he said. “I am missing that mad bastard, Apsimar.”

  “But it is Leontios’s army,” said Theo. “And Leontios it is we fight for now. Apsimar is gone to Constantinople. Even he must jump when the strategos commands. Leontios answers only to the emperor. Your brethren may consider him a fool, but do not forget, it was Leontios who conquered them, Leofric. No man likes to fight for the one who enslaved him.”

  “The man is a fool,” said Leofric stubbornly. He looked at Theo and shrugged, a reluctant smile breaking out on his rough face. “But we have fought for fools before, ne?” He clapped Theo on the shoulder. “And no doubt, schnecke, we will do so again.”

  The mountains were harsh, and they reminded Theo of the steep peaks near Lælia’s villa. Must everything come back to her? he wondered, frowning as one of his men kicked a stone. They were scouting ahead of the main force, which rode into one of the mountain villages to collect their taxes, and should travel in stealth. Theo ran forward, spear in hand, staying low, eyes scanning the terrain with detached scrutiny, whilst his mind returned to Illiberis.

  “Idiot!” hissed Silas fiercely as the man kicked another stone that went clattering down the path. He cast Theo a fearful look. Theo forced his face into something more approachable. He was aware that his temper was not kind, of late, and despite the man’s clear remorse, he felt a sudden, unaccustomed rage within him at the small error. His fingers closed about the spear, almost willing an enemy to appear. He found himself longing for the fight, as he often had since they came to Sebastopolis.

  He had not long to wait.

  The Maronite rebels launched from the hillside in a sudden phalanx, taking the handful of Slavic horsemen who rode beside them in a rush of knife and spear, men rising seemingly from nowhere to take the horses first. The main body of fighters rushed the scouts with swords raised, shrieking their battle cries.

  Theo felt the familiar dread rush through his body, followed by the immediate adaption of his physical senses. Time slowed, his body operating on instinct so that he must trust where it led. Now it called him to swivel; he did, and his spatha took the man behind him through the throat, just as he hurled his spear to take the one behind that.

  He turned again to find Silas beside him and a line of men attacking them from the higher ground in front. Leofric was at his right, Boric beside him. In a small line, they hacked their way forward through the wall of s
words coming at them. Silas whirled in front and to the left, both arms cutting his curved swords in fierce slices, taking a life with every movement. In lined battle, Silas must equip himself with spatha and spear as every other soldier did, but here, scouting in the mountains, such discipline was neither useful nor expected, and their small band of scouts had won something of a reputation for action that allowed them certain liberties. Theo was grateful for those now as he fought his way beside Silas and they cut down the men who appeared before them in a steady stream. There was something grimly satisfying in the carnage, in the fierce immediacy of battle.

  “Retreat!” came the panicked cry from behind them, but none of their small band slowed or obeyed it.

  “If we retreat,” grunted Silas, slicing a man’s throat so his blood sprayed the ground, “we are all dead.”

  “And,” said Leofric, grinning manically as he fought close to them, “we lose money! Never forget the coin, African!”

  “You,” gasped Silas as he slammed two bodies together, “have your priorities very confused, Slav.”