The Fate of an Emperor (Overlord Book 2)

by JD Smith

  I have written to Odenathus with a detailed account of the Tanukh’s movement on the Euphrates. They grow stronger, but we are holding them. Their new leader, Jadhima, has taken the title of king; a little ironic considering his tribe is a faction of the Persian Empire. I wonder if Shapur knows of his rival. Both attempt to plunder our wealth, after all.

  I have worried about you much, Zabdas. I hope that you are well, that you continue to learn and to grow and that your proximity to Zenobia will keep you safe.

  I hear that sweet Hebony has a baby girl and my dearest Zenobia is carrying Odenathus’ child! I sacrifice to the gods daily in the hope that she remains in good health and the child is born safely into our world. I hope to travel again, to Palmyra, once Zenobia’s child is born, if only for a few days. I hope we will see one another then. If you would like, I shall ensure Odenathus makes it so.

  With great affection,

  Julius ~

  I lay down on my bed and read it again. Then I reread it over and again until the words were committed to my memory and the note was merely an object, a smell, a reminder of the man. I wondered if Odenathus had written to Julius to tell him of his grandson, or whether he would leave that for Zenobia to do.

  I stood up and walked across to the table where papyrus waited.

  Zenobia became stronger with every hour. She asked how many had died of plague, how many troops were still fit to fight, what words had passed between Odenathus and the emperor. I had spent so much time at her bedside I could not answer her questions, but Zabbai informed where he could.

  When Odenathus failed to come, Zenobia insisted she go to him.

  ‘There is much to be done if we wish to survive the Persian threat.’

  ‘You cannot. You were close to death, and you are still weak.’

  ‘Oh, Zabdas. I have spent an age resting, I am eager to be out of this room. I am a woman, but I am a strong one.’ She patronized me, but she must have known the words would scorn me into letting her leave. At my frown she sighed.

  ‘You know I will go anyway, so help me up.’

  I did as she said, and before long we were walking through the gardens, Zabbai on one side of her and I on the other. I noticed her scent, her skin and hair without oils reminded me of the sea.

  We walked out into the street, the stench of death and disease humid and heavy in the air. I recoiled, clapped a hand to my mouth. An oxen-pulled cart crossed our path and we paused, seeing as it passed corpses draping from the back, scarred and mutilated with disease, flies buzzing.

  ‘A few?’ I muttered to Zabbai.

  ‘I told you, the death toll increases every day. They burn the bodies outside the city to stop the spread, but it becomes stronger. They are mostly Roman,’ he added, as if to provide consolation.

  Anxiety stabbed as I thought of Aurelia and her Roman origin. Of whether they were more susceptible to this plague than our own countrymen.

  ‘Let us move on,’ I said.

  Zabbai led us to the highest point in the city, to a house with a tall façade and bronze statues. I helped Zenobia up the slope to the house, but she pulled away from me, walking alone. The Roman guards let us pass with a curt nod to Zabbai and quizzical looks at Zenobia. Her paleness and concentration on the simplest of steps betrayed her physical weakness. Inside the house were more bronze statues and sprawling mosaics. I heard voices, and we followed them.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ I asked Zabbai.

  ‘It belongs to a merchant, but Valerian has taken residence here. Odenathus was heading to see the emperor when I left him earlier.’

  We entered another room in which Valerian sat, Odenathus standing before him. They were deep in conversation, and I noted the generals of Rome and the Stratego of the east were also present.

  The group turned as we entered, and I started when I saw Bamdad. Relief surged within me. Gods, he was alive, and yet he was dishevelled, bruised, slumping with tiredness. I longed to know what news he had, but it would have to wait as Odenathus turned to his wife, his face relaxing.

  ‘Zenobia, you have woken.’ His voice seemed heavy with disappointment.

  She looked back at him, her expression indifferent. She might have been weak in body, but her mind had woken stronger than before.

  ‘I am well,’ she replied.

  Odenathus appeared to want to say more, but instead he turned back to the emperor and generals. Zenobia sat quietly to one side, I stood beside her. Zabbai joined Odenathus. Valerian had looked on Zenobia’s appearance with irritation, but now he resumed his conversation with a jerk of his head, as if brushing away a fly.

  ‘So, the man who betrayed Antioch is dead,’ Valerian mused. He looked haggard and exhausted. His task in Syria had been a failure since he arrived. He had managed to yield more land to the enemy than Odenathus had ever done, and still our king would not stand against him, still Odenathus bowed to Rome. Did our enemies now suffer plague as we did, were their numbers also diminishing? Could we stand equal, or had we been forsaken? Had the gods truly left us to the mercy of Valerian’s ill decision, or indeed the mercy of Shapur?

  ‘True enough,’ Bamdad replied. ‘The man who led the Persians into the city to poison the water supply is dead; more so than the men on the carts in your streets.’ Grief riddled his face and yet he spoke lightly. I longed to know if his family had escaped the city of Antioch. I prayed to all the gods that he had found and them and sent them to safety, away from Antioch and the Persians, away from this place of disease and death.

  ‘You have told us everything you know?’ Odenathus said.

  ‘I have.’ Bamdad gave pause.

  ‘What is it?’ Valerian asked.

  ‘Some suspect the Persians also sent disease into the city to spread sickness. Perhaps the same disease is now killing your men.’

  Valerian paled, his eyes panicked, and his hand twitched to cover his mouth, but he dared not show more fear before King Odenathus and his own generals. He would not wish to appear as weak as we knew him to be.

  He said, ‘You may leave us.’

  A man ran into the room. ‘Caesar …’ he said, voice breathless.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Caesar …’ he began again, ‘the enemy are on the move.’

  Odenathus ordered his stratego to ready our men for battle. Valerian panicked, sending more scouts to confirm that the enemy did indeed approach.

  ‘I have travelled hard for many days to bring you this news,’ the messenger insisted. He was young, a little older than me. He walked stiffly and swayed, as if he would collapse at any moment.

  ‘But are you sure?’ Valerian demanded.

  ‘Caesar, you must ready your legions,’ Odenathus said. ‘If the boy is right, we have little time. A defence must be made if we are to survive.’

  Valerian’s face changed from one of disbelief to shock.

  ‘Come,’ Bamdad said to me, and we left the house amidst chaos.

  Once outside, Bamdad embraced me.

  ‘He is a weak man, the Roman.’

  ‘He fails to see what is under his very nose. What happened?’ I asked, unable to hide my curiosity any longer. ‘What happened in Antioch?’

  Bamdad sighed and the weight of the previous days seemed to bear down on him.

  ‘I was caught in the press of people leaving the city. It was mayhem. Everywhere soldiers moved and people were in panic. When the streets cleared, I managed to reach our home, but when I got there my wife and children were already gone. I do not know what has become of them.’

  Grief and despair showed on his face, and yet I could also see his strength, the soldier inside him.

  ‘They could have left the city before you.’

  ‘I waited for weeks inside the city, hiding where I could, hoping to find them amongst those taken as slaves. Eventually I thought to look for them elsewhere, among the dispossessed, on the roads, heading for another city, but I have not found them.’

  I knew then how lucky I was to have lef
t with Aurelia. For her not to have been taken a slave, and for the time I spent wallowing in Zenobia’s ill-health, now that she was gaining strength.

  ‘You have my sympathy, Bamdad. If there is anything I can do, you only need to ask.’

  ‘Kill Persians.’

  Aurelia placed a cup on the table before Bamdad. The smell of bread hung heavy in the kitchen and my stomach gave a painful rumble.

  Bamdad drained his cup and Aurelia refilled it. She touched my arm and gave a sad smile. I felt embarrassed at my proximity to Aurelia, to Zenobia, when he was still in search of his own wife and children.

  After a moment I ventured, ‘You said that the traitor is dead. Did you mean the person who betrayed Antioch, who told the Persians of the hidden entrance into the city?’

  Bamdad stirred from his thoughts.

  ‘They betrayed the entrance to the Persians,’ he said, his voice thick and gruff. For a strong man, who had joked and whooped so gleefully in the face of the enemy, it was odd to see him now so distant. He took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair.

  Aurelia settled herself opposite, wiped her hands on a cloth.

  ‘The hole in the city wall was swarming with Persians. The gates were eventually opened from within. There were many people still inside the city.’ Bamdad shook his head, as if willing himself to go on. ‘The enemy poured into Antioch, killing and raping. I heard the screams of my people. So many screams …’

  Aurelia shifted beside me. Beneath the table I took her hand in mine.

  ‘I went to my house but my wife and children were not there. And as I left I heard the first cries. Nearby. I heard them again. They pierced the sky, so loud and shrill. I followed the noise to a neighbour’s house; an old man and his daughter. He had been a stonemason in his youth, but for some years he had suffered from the wracking cough caused by the dust of his craft. I would hear him in the night, a sound familiar to those in my part of the city. I entered the house with only my sword. More screams came from the darkness. There were men, Persian bastards …’ Bamdad looked down at his hands as if expecting to see the blood of the enemy dripping from them.

  Aurelia refilled his cup and he snapped from the trance and glanced up at her. He gave me a roguish grin. I smiled back, more because his strange mood disconcerted me than because I shared whatever it was that amused him.

  ‘And the traitor?’ I prompted.

  His expression turned to one of disgust.

  ‘A week or so after the city fell, the Persians began to drift … some of the citizens were left behind and not taken as slaves: the sick and the dying; those who concealed their presence from the enemy. Even a few traders who had thrown in their lot with the Persians. People came back from the sanctuary of the hills, back to a barren city. Livestock had been taken, food, riches, anything of value. What the enemy couldn’t take, they had destroyed.

  ‘One man remained. He was not a Persian, but for all the gods in all the kingdoms, I would name him so. Rumours circulated of a local in league with the enemy; a Syrian who had joined them, and that he had taken residence in the house of the priest king, Haddudan, who is thought to have fled. Those who lost everything sought him out. I was one of those who went to the house, who forced entry to find him with possessions that could only have been bought with blood. He had the only riches left in the city.

  ‘With a sword in my hand and a mind for revenge, I claimed his life. I took his head. Blood still swims before my eyes. I have killed many men, but none with as much hatred as this one. His evil, treacherous blood spurted from his neck and his mouth tried to speak, but nothing came. He could speak no more. He could never again betray Syria.’

  ‘Who betrayed us?’ I asked.

  ‘The man …’ Bamdad began, but checked himself at the sound of the door opening.

  Zenobia came into the room, pale and sickly. Fresh bruising shone on her right cheek and I bristled with rage at the thought that Odenathus had raised his hand to her after her ordeal and her loss. Odenathus was not with her. She clung to the wall, steadying herself, then walked over and took a seat beside me.

  ‘The traitor was Mareades,’ she said.

  It took a heartbeat for me to recall the city official accused of embezzlement earlier that year. The same man we had suspected innocent but were unable to prove so. The one who had been branded with the slave mark upon his cheek, whom I had persuaded Zenobia to purchase, and who she had subsequently set free.

  ‘But you set him free!’ Aurelia said.

  My ears deceived me. It could not have been him, not after what we had done, not after I had begged Zenobia for his life. She was mistaken. Confusion took hold and I put a hand on Bamdad’s shoulder.

  He nodded agreement. ‘It was Mareades. Once gone from the city, he must have headed straight for the Persian army, intent on bringing the city down in revenge.’

  ‘He ought to have been grateful for his life,’ I spat. ‘How could he do this? To his people? With his own family still inside the city!’

  ‘Revenge was reason enough,’ Zenobia said.

  ‘Enough?’ I demanded, thumping both my fists on the table. ‘You gave him back his life and he betrayed us all. He cared not for us, nor for his fellow citizens, those who would support him if they could. He cared for what? Revenge? On one man? On the priest king who saw him made a slave? Gods’ breath, he is a traitor.’

  Zenobia sat motionless, her hands placed in her lap.

  ‘He was not free, Zabdas. What he lost tormented him, as it would most men. He lost his home, his family, every possession he owned. Above all, he lost his pride the day he was branded a slave and committed to a life worse than death; to a life of solitude and shame.’

  Bamdad looked curiously at this girl with dark, almond eyes and long tumbling hair. His mouth twitched with amusement, to hear such words leave the lips of someone so young.

  She continued: ‘We could have done no more, but I was foolish to think him shallow enough to accept life at any cost, for him to accept the brand upon his face, and for him live with that. He could have taken his own life, but he did not. I will know better hereafter.’

  ‘Zenobia is right,’ Aurelia said ruefully. ‘He was never going to accept what had happened. He could never move on.’

  In my youth, I was too pig-headed to see what the two women before me understood. Would I have done what he had done? I knew then I would not. But I did not know what I would have done in his position. Find a new life, in the hills? Find contentment as a nomad? Perhaps I was not old enough to know.

  CHAPTER 7

  Zabdas – 260 AD

  The year came to a close, the next ran its course, and then another began. Months of plague saw our armies weaken further still. Riders returned telling of the proximity of the Persian army as messengers from the west told of the Gothic invasion in northern Anatolia, of Pontus and Cappadocia. Valerian sent his army to Antiocheia to intercept them, but with them they carried the plague and they failed.

  Our own soldiers, and those of Rome and every country of the Empire who remained in Edessa, plunged into gruelling training in readiness for the Persian approach, fighting the sickness which very near consumed us. Those who were fit enough trained hard, tried to ease the worries that death itself was now against us. Fear of both a mortal and an immortal enemy seethed, and our numbers shrank to two thirds of what they had been when Valerian Caesar first came to Syria.

  Each morning brought news of more deaths, more illness and dying. I had little experience of armies so large, but those men of Rome knew only too well the outcome for a man whose stomach coated the inside of a bucket and could not hold his bowels. They knew those poor souls faced death, and neither strength nor skill in battle could save them.

  I longed for a chance to escape the disease infested city, but never did I think of desertion as so many had done. I stayed to face the enemy when they came. It was not long before that opportunity came.

  I dressed before the sun rose as I did every
day, splashing cool water on my face to revive myself, and I donned boiled leather that had come to fit my shape, stretched with the muscle I had built. I strapped shin guards to my legs, fastening them tight so they would not slip. We wore them every day to train, so that our bodies grew accustomed to the feel and movement within.

  A shadow moved behind me as I pulled the straps. Zabbai’s tall, hefty frame stood in the doorway, watching me flex to check the tightness of my armour.

  ‘The change of boys into men always astonishes,’ he said, judging with seasoned eyes.

  ‘You were once a boy yourself,’ I replied, half-laughing. I looked at the muscle on his arms and his broad chest and knew that one day I would look like him, know the ripple of strength beneath sun-marked flesh and the scars of my errors.

  ‘It always amazes me, how quickly the young grow into men.’

  ‘And young men into old,’ I chided.

  Zabbai smiled.

  ‘Is Zenobia returning to Palmyra?’ I asked. After the loss of her child and the revelation of Mareades’ betrayal, she and Odenathus had barely spoken. He insisted she return to Palmyra, to the safety of the oasis, to her mother and sister, and, without voicing it, out of his sight and mind.

  ‘She has not left yet. But she will. You are to go with her.’

  ‘I had assumed as much,’ I said, but without bitterness, knowing Julius’ desire to keep me as far from the frontier as he could. I respected that now. Yet here we were, and here Zenobia was, as near as she possibly could be; as near as she wanted to be.

  Part of me hoped she would go soon, because Aurelia would then go too, with her and with me, back to the city I saw as sanctuary, the oasis of my early years as a soldier. Then both would be safe; further from disease and enemies and the Romans.

  I fastened the last strap of my armour and then my sword belt, and turned to Zabbai. His face was creased with age and worry. He had always sided with Odenathus on matters of Rome and the emperor. A loyal friend to the king, as Odenathus was loyal to his overlords. Perhaps, beneath the loyalty he showed, hidden behind his friendship, he agreed with Julius’ belief that Syria should be free.