Caesar's Sword: The Complete Campaigns

by David Pilling

  “General,” I said, resisting the urge to stand up and salute, “you…you look well.”

  He smiled bleakly at the lie. “I am what God has made me. And the Emperor.”

  Feeling foolish, I gestured at a spare seat. “Please, sit down. Share a cup of wine with me.”

  “No, no,” he said, waving away the courtesy, “I will not presume on your hospitality any longer than necessary. I feared you might turn me away.”

  I groped for words. “The world moves on,” I said weakly, “and we must move with it. I should feel grateful for what passed in Ravenna.”

  “You have certainly prospered since,” he replied, “and breed the finest horses in the city, so they say. I have considered purchasing some of your stock. At inflated prices, of course.”

  “General,” I said, rubbing my head, which was beginning to pound, “am I to understand you have come here to discuss business?”

  “Of a sort.”

  He clasped his hands together and stood quiet for a few seconds, gazing at the floor.

  “Caesar is sending me back to Italy, at last,” he said, “the situation there is intolerable. I daresay you know something about it.”

  I nodded. “Totila has captured Beneventum, and now threatens Naples. The whoreson has to be stopped.”

  “Just so. I am gathering all my veterans about me before sailing. Every man will be needed. Coel, will you take up your grandsire’s sword again?”

  It was rank discourtesy to drink when a guest went dry, but I had a sudden thirst. Half a cupful of rough red wine vanished down my throat before I gave him an answer.

  “Caledfwlch has hung over my fireplace for four years,” I said, wiping my mouth, “and is destined to stay there. I bear you no ill-will, general, but meant what I said at Ravenna. I am retired.”

  I gave silent thanks that Arthur was not present, but down on the harbour, overseeing the unloading of a consignment of foals from Carthage. He would have leaped at the chance to escape my house, and all the gloom and misery that had descended on it.

  “You don’t need an old man like me,” I continued, “God’s bones, I am almost fifty! What use would I be, save to look after remounts?”

  Belisarius was four or five years my junior, though he looked at least a decade older. “The best soldiers mature with age,” he said, “like a fine wine.”

  He glanced meaningfully at the rotgut I was drinking. I could not help but laugh.

  “It’s no good, sir,” I said, “you can’t get round me. I pray you win a crushing victory in Italy, and bring Totila back in chains. Better yet, leave his body in Italy, and present his head in a casket to the Emperor. But the army will have to cope without my presence.”

  “Or my son’s,” I added before he could speak again, “I stay in Constantinople, and Arthur stays with me.”

  A note of desperation entered his voice. “Coel, I will have great need of loyal officers about me in Italy.”

  “I’m sure you can find some,” I replied carelessly, “how many men is the Emperor giving you?”

  He took a deep breath. “None.”

  “What?”

  “After our recent defeats, Caesar claims he has no troops to spare. I am to sail to Italy with as many of veterans as I can collect, and there try to raise an army from native volunteers.”

  It was monstrous. Of all Justinian’s petty acts of treachery towards Belisarius, this was the worst. It was true Rome had suffered severe losses, including the destruction of a fleet carrying reinforcements off the Bay of Naples, but fresh troops could always be raised or hired.

  The sickening truth hit me like a blow. Justinian was deliberately sending his greatest general to die. An honourable death in battle against overwhelming numbers of barbarians. He wanted him out of the way, without risking the scandal of a trial and public execution. Belisarius was still far too popular for that.

  This, mark you, was the man whom Belisarius had refused to betray! Justinian’s ignoble fear and envy of the general was only fuelled by the knowledge Belisarius had been in a position to destroy him, and he schemed and pondered on ways of bringing down the one loyal servant he should have esteemed above all others.

  For a brief moment I was tempted to accept the general’s invitation. If he had offered to lead a rebellion against the Emperor, and storm the Great Palace at the head of his Veterans, I might well have done so.

  I pushed aside the impulse. It was too late. Far too late.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said without meeting his eye, “my prayers shall go with you, but that is all.”

  6.

  Knowing it would inflame his martial instincts, I kept the visit of Belisarius a secret from my son. Arthur’s duty, as I saw it, was to stay in Constantinople and tend to his wife. She, poor, broken-hearted creature, was much more affected by the loss of their child, and I despaired of her recovery.

  My cause was not helped by the constant flow of desperate news from Italy. Belisarius sailed to Ravenna with the tiny handful of soldiers allowed him, and set about raising an army of four thousand volunteers from the natives. With this enthusiastic but ill-trained and ill-armed rabble at his back, he advanced boldly to meet the resurgent Goths.

  The ensuing campaign was a confused series of disasters and victories. Hopelessly outnumbered, betrayed and let down time and again by his generals, Belisarius somehow managed to relieve some beleaguered Roman towns and fortresses, and worsted the Goths in a few minor skirmishes.

  For all that, his efforts to scrape together an army came to nothing. Dismayed by the endless run of defeats, and enraged by the constant slashing of their wages, a good portion of the imperial troops in Italy deserted the eagle and offered their swords to Totila. Unable to meet the Goths in battle, Belisarius sent a desperate message to the Emperor, pleading for aid:

  “Great prince, I am arrived in Italy, unprovided with men or money, with horses or with arms, nor can any spirit bear up against such disadvantages as these….were it sufficient for success that Belisarius should appear in Italy, your aim would be accomplished. I am now in Italy. But if you desire to conquer; far greater preparations must be made; and the title of general dwindles to a shadow, where there is no army to uphold it…”

  True to his nature and inclination, Justinian ignored the plea, and sent no aid. The fortunes of Totila continued to wax, as did the numbers of his army, and city after city fell to him.

  At last, thanks to the treachery of the garrison, he seized Rome, and the Eternal City was once again in the hands of barbarians. Belisarius arrived too late with his fleet to save the city, and was forced to withdraw with the mocking laughter of Gothic warriors ringing in his ears.

  I retired to my study when I heard the news, and wept tears of futile rage. The grotesque shades of all my dead comrades, who had fought alongside me on the walls of Rome and given their lives to defend the city, haunted my dreams: cursing me for a coward and a traitor, who had failed to answer the call to arms when it came.

  If I had one consolation in this grim time, it was the knowledge that the Empress was dying. The details from the palace were unclear, but it seemed Theodora had contracted some kind of suppurating ulcer or tumour, which her physicians were powerless to remedy.

  I was told she died slowly, and in the most exquisite pain. When she finally gave up the ghost, and the doleful lamentation of her priests echoed through the streets, I drank a quiet toast to my childhood friend Felix, whom Theodora had murdered for no other reason than to spite me.

  Justinian was said to be prostrate with grief, and I earnestly hoped he would soon follow his evil consort to the grave.

  “Let him die, lord,” I prayed in the lonely silence of my bedchamber, “and keep Theodora company in the deepest furnace of Hell.”

  Frustratingly, the Emperor did not die, but limped on, an increasingly forlorn and despised figure. Deaf to the frantic entreaties of Belisarius, he allowed himself to become embroiled in arguments with churchmen and theologians,
and regarded the war in Italy as an irritating distraction.

  The sorry campaign drew to a miserable and shameful end for Rome. Belisarius was recalled, again on the pretext of being needed in the East, and after his departure the whole of Italy was lost to Totila. Our remaining garrisons were exterminated, and the native Italians – who had cheered the arrival of our fleet from Sicily, just a few years previously – hailed the all-conquering Gothic king as their new sovereign.

  I might have ended my days in Constantinople, grumbling, as old soldiers do, over the follies of their superiors, but largely content. I was not short of worldly wealth, and I still had my son.

  I was deceived. God, as I have said, allows the blood of Arthur no rest.

  In the deep winter of the year five hundred and fifty, in the twenty-third year of Justinian’s reign, Flavia was brought to bed of another child.

  I had advised them not to try again. Flavia was weakened by the previous tragedy, and I feared her insides were damaged.

  Arthur would not listen to me, and Flavia meekly obeyed her husband’s wishes. He was determined to have a son, to carry on the unbroken blood-line of British princes.

  “Before God, I regret I ever told you of your ancestry,” I said bitterly, “I would rather see your wife alive, and happy, than risk her for the sake of our family. The line of kings was broken long ago, Arthur. Even your great-grandsire never laid claim to a crown.”

  He proved stubborn, and I wondered if Elene’s shade was working through him, exacting her long-delayed vengeance on me.

  If so, she got her wish. Flavia endured another excruciating labour, and produced another stillborn child. To twist the knife in Arthur’s wound, the child was another daughter.

  This time, there was nothing the Greek physician and midwives we had hired could do to save Flavia. She would not stop bleeding, and died in the small hours of the morning, without seeing the pathetic fragment of dead flesh she had brought into the world.

  7.

  My son was a changed man after the death of his wife. For three days and nights after the funeral he kept to his room, refusing to eat or drink or speak to anyone. When he emerged, drawn and haggard and with a world of pain in his eyes, the bright youth I had known was quite gone.

  I was surprised by the depth of his grief, since he never seemed to care overmuch for Flavia in life. Like his mother, Arthur possessed depths and twists to his character I was incapable of divining.

  With nothing left to keep him in Constantinople, he revived his ambition to join the army. “You cannot persuade me otherwise, this time,” he said as he broke his three-day fast, “I need to get away from this city and all its ghosts.”

  There was iron resolution in his voice, and I lacked the will to fight him. Flavia’s death, and the loss of my second grandchild, had opened fresh wounds in my battered soul.

  “You must do whatever you think is right,” I replied, “whatever your decision, you have my blessing.”

  After he had forced down a morsel of bread, he went to the fireplace and took down Caledfwlch. The sword had hung there for four years. I had not touched it since, and nor had anyone save the servant tasked with polishing the blade and keeping it sharp.

  “It has a weight to it,” he said, running his hand gently along the blade.

  “The weight of souls,” I replied, “of blood and death. Caledfwlch has ushered hundreds of men into the next world.”

  I looked at the thing with distaste, and a twinge of fear. Once precious to me, my grandsire’s sword was now a reminder of past terrors and disappointments. I was still plagued with dreams of slaughter, half-buried memories of the battles I had witnessed in Africa and Italy.

  “All those dead men,” I said, “and for what? Belisarius may as well have stayed at home and grown cabbages. All his victories and conquests have crumbled away like a hollow pile of sand.”

  “That is the military life, my son. Men march away, and not all of them come back. They leave nothing but shallow graves, mourning widows and fatherless children.”

  Arthur held Caledfwlch up to the light streaming in through a latticed window. “A grave for Constantine; a grave for Aurelius; a grave for Uther. All the world’s wonder, no grave for Arthur!”

  He was reciting one of the snatches of verse I had taught him relating to his great-grandsire. I had heard it from some of the Germanic mercenaries in the Roman army, who in turn heard it from their kin in Britain. Arthur, the enemy of their race, who had piled up heaps of their slain at Mount Badon, was now one of their heroes. All the world, it seemed, was embracing the tales of my famous ancestor.

  “I care not where they bury me,” my son said, with more than a trace of bitterness, “let me rot on some distant battlefield. The ravens can pick at my bones. As for wife and child, they have gone before me.”

  “But I have not,” I said quietly, my eyes misting with tears.

  For the first and perhaps only time, I managed to inspire a little pity in him. He returned Caledfwlch to its hook, and then caught me in a fierce embrace.

  “I will make you proud, father,” he whispered. I wanted to reply that he already had, but the breath was crushed from my lungs.

  Arthur took to training with the citizen levies, which drilled regularly on the plains outside the city walls. I was unsurprised to hear he excelled at every form of weapons exercise, as well as horsemanship, and drew praise from the tough veterans who oversaw the drill.

  Meanwhile, the Emperor had been seized by a rare burst of energy and competence. He shook off his mourning for Theodora, put aside his wrangling theologians, and took measures to reverse the catastrophe in Italy.

  Nothing on earth, however, would persuade him to restore Belisarius to rank and favour. The general was detained in Constantinople, a free man but constantly under the shadow of imperial displeasure, spared from destruction only thanks to his wife, who exerted a strange influence over Justinian.

  Having put aside his only great general, Justinian desperately cast about for someone to replace him. First he chose his nephew Germanus, then changed his mind in favour of Liberius, a decrepit civilian with no military experience, then to an Armenian named Artaban, then back to Germanus.

  “Vacillating ninny,” sneered Procopius, who had returned to Constantinople with his master, “he will end up appointing his horse as commander-in-chief. A dumb beast can scarce be a worse choice than Liberius.”

  Eventually Justinian settled on his nephew, and sent him to Sicily with a fleet. Germanus had a mixed reputation, having fought well against the rebels in North Africa, but fled before the fury of the Sassanids when they descended on Antioch. Justinian had succeeded in marrying him off to Matasontha, the ex-Queen of the Goths, so he also enjoyed some popularity among her people.

  “Germanus will fail,” Procopius said confidently, “Totila will give him a good thrashing, and he will run back to uncle with his tail between his legs.”

  “I want to join the army bound for Sicily,” Arthur announced. Procopius, who was fond of my son, stared at him in horror.

  “Don’t be so damned stupid,” he rasped, “you may as well fall on that old sword now and save yourself the trouble. Germanus won’t achieve a thing.”

  In the event, Germanus died, of a fever he picked up in Sicily. Plunged back into the depths of grief by this unexpected loss, Justinian was driven to extremity, and chose for his general an ageing, deceitful, twisted little half-man.

  “Narses!” Procopius informed us, almost choking on his mirth, “he is going to send Narses to rescue Italy! Now may God help Rome, for the Emperor has failed her.”

  8.

  I was appalled by the Emperor’s decision, and tried to forbid Arthur from joining the army. Any campaign led by Narses, I argued, could only end in total disaster.

  “He is a crippled eunuch, a greasy, shamelessly corrupt courtier, a master of wiles and treachery and every foul trick,” I said forcefully, “the little bastard can’t even ride, with his twisted
legs, but has to be carried everywhere in a litter! A fine leader, to take a Roman army into the field! Are we to rely on the Goths laughing themselves to death when they set eyes on him?”

  Arthur was unmoved. He was twenty-five years old now, in the prime of his youth and manhood, and this was his time.

  “You can forbid me nothing, father,” he said calmly, “though I honour you for your love and concern. I will go to Italy, with or without your blessing or permission.”

  I am not a demonstrative man, but his icy stubbornness drove me into a rage. I raged and cursed, and broke furniture, and threatened to have him clapped in irons if he refused to listen to reason.

  Arthur waited patiently for the storm to blow itself out. I may as well have expended my wrath on a statue, for all the effect I had on him.

  For a moment I despaired, but then an idea struck me. “Very well,” I said, when I had control of myself again, “if you go, I go.”

  Arthur was rarely taken aback, but I was gratified to see him blink. “What? You mean to join the army again? Father, you are too old.”

  “And,” he added, poking me in the belly, “too fat. Fine living has been the ruin of you.”

  Insolent whelp. If he wasn’t quite so big, I would have taken my belt to him. “Nothing would induce me to re-enlist,” I said, thinking myself very cunning, “but the army will need horses. Lots of horses. No doubt a good part of our stock will be requisitioned. I mean to take them myself, and see the poor beasts are not ill-used. We paid good money for them, after all.”

  “You mean to offer your services as a glorified ostler?” he said incredulously, “you, who once commanded Roman troops in the field, mean to follow the army as a horse-trader?”