Caesar's Sword: The Complete Campaigns

by David Pilling

  “Why not?” I shrugged, “or a quartermaster, maybe. Even a cook. An army marches on its stomach, my boy.”

  “Not for long, if exposed to your culinary skills,” he retorted, but there was nothing he could say or do to stop me. We had reached an impasse, and had to make the best of it.

  Since Arthur was set on joining the army, I tried to secure a good berth for him. I still had some influence with certain high-ranking officers, old comrades from the wars, and exerted it to get him into the cavalry.

  This presented little difficulty. Arthur was the very image of a promising young officer, and rode as well as anyone. He was appointed a centenar, in command of a hundred Herulian horsemen. This was my choice. I knew the Heruls well, their customs and fighting style, from my time in their camp.

  “A rough lot, with some strange beliefs you must never try to change or interfere with,” I told my son, “above all, they respect courage and horsemanship. Lead from the front, try not to fall off your horse, and you should deal very well with them.”

  The preparations for the campaign were encouraging, and revealed the extent of Justinian’s perfidy towards Belisarius. Narses, having witnessed the general’s fate in Italy, refused to accept the command unless given adequate supplies of men and money.

  Justinian refused his favourite nothing. He emptied the imperial coffers to please him, raising levies from Thrace and Illyria, six thousand Lombard mercenaries hired from their King, Alboin, and three thousand Herulian cavalry. To these were added further auxiliaries, hired at Narses’ personal expense, and even a detachment of Sassanids, refugees who had deserted Nurshivan and fled into imperial territory to escape his wrath.

  In all, the army amounted to no less than thirty thousand men, twice the size of anything Belisarius was ever entrusted with. With such a host at his command, he might have achieved his dream of re-conquering the entire Western Empire, and raised the name of his Emperor to deathless heights of glory. But Justinian was not the man to realise such ambitions. The brief moment passed, and I believe the empire will never recover its old power and prestige.

  Narses surprised me. Twelve years had passed since he briefly led a small Roman army in Italy. Since then he had done no soldiering (unless playing chess counts) and showed no obvious interest in reviving his military career.

  Now, handed a fresh opportunity by Justinian, he threw himself into the task with a skill and energy I would have thought beyond him. Perhaps he had spent his time devouring the histories of old wars, but his conduct of the early stages of the campaign could not be faulted.

  The Goths controlled the seas off the east coast of Italy, so there was no chance of launching another seaborne invasion. Instead Narses ordered the army to march to Salona, an ancient city on the Dalmatian coast, and from there to the head of the Adriatic Gulf. It was a long march, but meant the army could invade Gothic territory from the north, avoiding their fleet.

  During all the bustle and preparations for war, Narses found time to send me a brief note. It arrived at my house, carried by an insouciant Egyptian slave, as I was making my final arrangements for departure:

  I knew you would serve me at the last (it read). Congratulations on the appointment of your son. I will observe his progress with great interest.

  - Narses.

  I scrunched the parchment into a ball, dropped it on the ground and crushed it underfoot.

  “There is my reply,” I said, grinning up at the Egyptian. He returned the grin with interest.

  “My master warned me you might not be polite,” he said, “especially when I repeat the verbal part of my message. When we reach Salona, you and your son are to join our fleet stationed there.”

  “What fleet?” I demanded, “my understanding was that the army would march north and invade Italy by land.”

  “And so it shall. But it will take many months to reach the Gulf, and the Goths are already blockading our last ports on the Italian mainland. They must not be allowed to fall.”

  “Croton and Ancona,” I said. He gracefully nodded his sleek, perfumed head before continuing.

  “Just so. Totila is most impertinent. Even now, fifty of his warships blockade Ancona, while some three hundred other vessels are raiding the coast of Epirus and the Ionian Islands.”

  “And I’m supposed to stop him, am I?”

  The envoy gave a mannered little chuckle. “No, no, though your contribution is appreciated. My master has ordered forty Roman ships to muster at Salona. They will sail to engage the Gothic fleet at Ancona, and on the way be reinforced by ships from Ravenna.”

  In spite of all our losses in Italy, we had at least managed to hold onto Ravenna, the capital. “I still fail to see why my presence is required,” I said, “or my son’s. He is a captain of horse, and we are both quite useless at sea. Who commands the fleet from Ravenna?”

  “Valerian.”

  I vaguely knew of him, a tough and capable veteran, and one of the few to serve Belisarius faithfully in Italy.

  “And at Salona?”

  The envoy’s smoothly handsome face split into an infuriating smirk.

  “John the Sanguinary,” he replied.

  9.

  I tried to comfort myself. After ten years it seemed unlikely that John still held a grudge against me, especially since he had risen high in the Emperor’s favour, whereas I had sank into obscurity.

  Besides, Arthur was right: I was fat, and fifty, and badly out of condition from my shameful habit of gorging at table. The long, weary march from Salona to the Gulf, through the disease-ridden Dalmatian marshes, was not a happy prospect.

  Nor could I disobey orders. If not a soldier, I was still in the service of Rome, and Narses was the commander-in-chief. He might have had me killed at any time, if he so wished, but instead preferred to torture me from afar. Such was the price I paid for refusing to desert Belisarius for his service, all those years ago.

  “I am in for a sea-voyage,” I informed Arthur, “with a battle at the end of it.”

  He paled. Like me, he loathed and dreaded the sea. “To what end?” he demanded, “my Heruls are no use at sea. They will be needed to fight the Goths in Perugia.”

  I smiled bleakly. Narses had thought of everything, and his slave had furnished me with all the details before leaving my house.

  “You are to stay with the army,” I explained, “but I am needed to help relieve Ancona. The garrison has been under siege for months. By land, and now by sea. They are running low on food, and taken to eating their horses. I am to sail with the fleet with my stock, to replace the animals lost to famine.”

  Arthur seemed lost. We had barely spent a day apart for over ten years, ever since I brought him to Constantinople. All that time I struggled to understand him, and we never grew as close as I would have liked, but he had come to rely on me.

  “You wanted to go,” I said, clasping his hand, “to prove yourself. Now is your opportunity. We shall meet again, when the army reaches Ravenna.”

  I tried to sound optimistic, but the chances of us meeting again were slender. The march from Salona, all the way around the Adriatic coast, would take many months, while our army would have to fight their way through storm-clouds of Goths. Meantime there was no guarantee our fleet would defeat Totila’s. Both sides had an equal number of ships, and the Gothic admirals were said to be able men.

  Our army marched from Constantinople, the first landward departure from the city I had experienced: all the previous expeditions I were part of were seaborne. The people gathered to cheer our troops as they marched down the Mese with all the grand panoply of war, trumpets playing, cymbals clashing and drums hammering out a deafening rhythm.

  My son took his place among the mounted Herulians in the vanguard, while I stayed far to the rear, riding in the back of a baggage wagon. From there I could keep a careful eye on my horses, over forty pureblood young stallions from Hispania, just recently broken and ripe for employ as cavalry mounts.

  The eyes of t
he people lining the streets were all for our soldiers. None paid any heed to me, the fat greybeard taking his ease on a straw bale in the back of a cart, but I carefully scanned the sea of faces. I was looking for Belisarius, wondering if he had ventured from his house in disguise, and had come to watch the army march away.

  “The army he should be leading,” I muttered. There was no sign of his lean, bearded face among the crowds. Eventually I gave and settled back in my rough seat, lazily contemplating the heavens.

  The army passed through the city’s elaborate western defences, the old Constantinian Wall and then the double line of walls built by the Emperor Theodosius, and emerged from the Golden Gate. This was the main ceremonial entrance to the city, and made from blocks of sparkling white marble in the form of a triumphal arch.

  It was also the gate via which I had first entered Constantinople with my mother, almost forty-five years gone. As always, thoughts of her brought tears to my eyes, and I forced them shut until my wagon had rumbled well past the gate.

  I would never see it, or the city, again.

  The army marched on to Salona, through the bleak plains of Thrace, baked dry and hard by the summer sun. I was reminded me of the wastelands of Perugia, strangled by the heat while its people died of thirst and starvation. Fortunately our troops were well-supplied – Narses had seen to that – and suffered none of the privations of previous campaigns.

  After a two-week march, our army crossed into Dalmatia at a leisurely pace and reached Salona unscathed, without glimpsing any sign of the enemy. Dalmatia was once occupied by the Goths, but had abandoned much of the country and their troops to Italy, leaving just a few scattered garrisons.

  Occasionally we marched past one of their outposts, but the men inside wisely stayed behind high walls and strong gates.

  “Two hundred miles from Constantinople,” grumbled Arthur after the army pitched camp a day’s march from the coast, “and all I have to show for it is saddle sores. Caledfwlch is quiet in her scabbard.”

  “And will remain so, for a long while yet,” I said cheerfully, “it is a long way to Italy. A very long way. At the speed Narses likes to march, the Goths may have died of old age before you reach Ravenna.”

  Steel hissed on oiled leather as Arthur slowly drew Caledfwlch. “You will see action before me,” he said, offering me the sword, hilt-first, “perhaps you should take her. She has never failed you in battle.”

  The blade of Caesar’s sword gleamed in the half-darkness of early evening. For a second or two I was tempted. It would have been good to feel the worn ivory grip in my hand again, and the familiar weight and balance of the ancient gladius.

  “No,” I said, with a great effort of will, “I gave Caledfwlch away, and no longer have any right to it. A plain sword will serve me well enough. Assuming I can find the strength to fight, with a deck heaving under my feet.”

  The mere thought of fighting aboard ship was enough to make my stomach clench. I suspected Narses was aware of my sea-sickness, and wanted me to suffer vomiting and loose bowels while the battle raged around me.

  Salona was a rich port, the capital of Dalmatia, and had remained loyal to Rome when the Goths overran the rest of the province. The landward gates stood open to welcome our troops, and imperial banners flew from the walls.

  My guts gave a twinge when I spotted the masts of our ships clustered in the harbour. I counted thirty-six vessels in all, mostly war galleys, with a few smaller dromons and four fat-bottomed transport ships.

  I made my way to the harbour, ignoring the puzzled and occasionally amused looks the citizens gave me. As old soldiers went, I was a fairly unimpressive specimen, puffing and sweating as I fought my way through the busy streets. I had struggled into my old armour – not the fine gear Belisarius gave me, which I had sold off, but a plain knee-length mail coat and a cavalry helmet with dangling cheek-pieces – and was feeling the strain of it, especially around the waist.

  John the Sanguinary’s flagship was docked nearest to the harbour, and the largest vessel in the fleet, a sleek war galley gleaming with fresh black and gold paint.

  I smelled John before I saw him. He still doused himself in perfume, like a cheap dockside whore, and was standing among a little group of his cronies. Like their chief, all were resplendent in finely-wrought armour and costly silks, and carried swords studded with precious stones.

  They were also notably young and tall and comely, as though chosen for their physical grace and ability to look grand in military uniform.

  Next to this pack of brightly coloured starlings, I was an old crow, drab and unsightly.

  “Good to see you again, sir,” I said in a loud voice, interrupting their banal chatter. John swung around, a look of annoyance on his darkly handsome features – he hadn’t aged a day since I last beheld him, outside the gates of Rimini – and curled his lip at me.

  “Ah, the tame Briton,” he said in that cold, sneering tone I remembered so well, “Narses told me to expect you. You have a few more grey hairs since we last met, and a bit of extra padding around the middle. Are you pregnant, man, or have you stuffed a cushion down there?”

  His cronies laughed at the feeble jest and gave each other knowing looks. Their high-pitched braying grated on my nerves, but I did my best to ignore it.

  “My horses are stationed outside the city, sir,” I said patiently, “and are ready to embark whenever you choose.”

  “And? What is that to me? I am the admiral of the fleet, not a God-cursed beastmaster, and cannot attend to every minor detail. Have the animals loaded aboard the transports without delay.”

  I saluted and wandered away, feeling the heat of his gaze on my back. If he wanted to plunge a dagger into it, here was his opportunity.

  As ever, I overrated my importance. John the Sanguinary cared little whether I lived or died, and the faint animosity between us was long-buried in the past. He was an anxious man, entrusted by Narses with the task of relieving the last two major Roman ports in Italy, and destroying the Gothic fleet.

  Narses’ judgment could not usually be faulted, but I thought he had blundered in choosing John for his admiral, allowing friendship to blind him to the man’s limitations. John was a cavalry officer, and a good one, but had no experience of naval warfare. To give him his due, he did not shy from his duty.

  That evening I had the Devil’s own job loading my horses aboard the transports, or rather my handlers did: I confined myself to standing on the jetty and cursing their incompetence, while they laboured to get the terrified beasts into the barges.

  Horses loathe the sea, almost as much as I do, and had to be lifted aboard with a crane. Frantic with rage and terror, they kicked and bit and lashed out at the handlers, breaking one man’s arm and shattering another’s ribcage. Darkness had fallen before the thing was done, and I was obliged to pay for the injured men to be taken to a sanatorium.

  Weary and footsore, I went in search of Arthur, and found him eating supper with his men, on the outskirts of the city of white tents that had sprung up outside Salona.

  I shared a cup of wine with him, complimented the good discipline and order of his men, and tried to put off the inevitable farewell.

  Arthur did it for me. “Until Ravenna, then,” he said suddenly, offering his hand.

  I clasped it, briefly, and stood up. “Until Ravenna,” I replied, silently cursing the catch in my voice.

  The rest of my night was spent in virtually sleepless dread, haunted by images of burning ships and myself drowning, clawing helplessly at the black waters as they closed over my head; or else visions of Arthur, lost on some misted battlefield, calling feebly for his parents even as his life-blood spilled from a mortal wound.

  These merry thoughts occupied me until morning, when the brazen call of trumpets announced the imminent departure of the fleet. Valerian had arrived from Ravenna with his twelve ships, and we were now ready to sail.

  “Glory and death,” I muttered as I made my reluctant way down to t
he harbour, “God spare me from either.”

  10.

  The familiar twinges of sickness descended on me before my transport had even crawled out of the harbour. She was an ugly, slow-moving vessel, and wallowed low in the water, thanks to the weight of supplies and animals packed into her hull. The terrified shrieking of my horses, cooped up in tiny pens below deck, did nothing to improve my condition.

  “This ship is too full,” I complained to the captain, a hard-faced Greek with a jagged scar where his nose used to be, “look how low she rides in the water. She may sink of her own accord, without any aid from the Goths.”

  “Do your bit to lighten the load, then, you old bugger,” he snarled, “and go and puke over the side. You look green enough. But you won’t do it on my quarterdeck, you hear? Not if you want to keep the skin on your back.”

  That was plain enough, so I struggled down the ladder onto the maindeck and heaved my breakfast over the rail.

  A group of Cilician sailors stampeded past me, trailing onto the end of a rope and yelling at me to stand aside. I crouched against the rail, hand clapped over my mouth, and waited for the boiling chaos in my guts to subside a little.

  When I had recovered sufficiently, I stood on shaking legs and looked out to sea. The other transports were keeping pace with us, strung out in a line from north to south. They were also over-full, and laboured through the water with all the grace and speed of a pack of dying turtles.

  The rest of the fleet were spread out to the north-west, and divided into squadrons, with the smaller dromons acting as escorts to the galleys. John’s flagship was just visible, a lean black shape knifing easily through the sea at the head of the first squadron or vanguard.

  By my (fairly poor) reckoning, Ancona lay more or less directly to the west. We were heading north-west, towards the region of Sena Gallica, a small port town on the Adriatic coast. Unsurprisingly, John the Sanguinary had not confided his battle-plan to me, but I guessed the Gothic fleet had been sighted there.