They had gone to Marcianopolis, but had taken a long time to get there. First they had insisted on building some wagons to carry their children and what goods they had left, and then they had marched very slowly to the city, pausing to beg, borrow, and steal food along the way. When they finally did reach the capital, Lupicinus invited the Gothic leaders to a banquet. Fritigern and a noble called Alavivus went, and their usual guard of armed attendants went with them and waited outside the headquarters while the chieftains feasted. The rest of the Theruingi were left outside the city walls. They were still hungry, and a large group of them went up to the city, wanting to trade for some food. The soldiers on guard laughed at them and tried to send them off; the Goths grew angry and hurled insults. Then the townspeople joined in and threw stones. The Goths began to throw stones back, and some threw spears — whatever they could find. The guards ran to tell Lupicinus that there was fighting at the gate. Lupicinus’ first fear was for his own safety and the security of the city. He looked outside his own doors and saw Fritigern’s companions sitting there waiting for their leader. He had them all killed and the chieftains seized.
The news of this reached the Goths outside the walls very quickly, and the rest of the Theruingi came swarming up to besiege the city. Though weakened by disease and hunger, they were very numerous, and many had kept their weapons when they had crossed. They beat their swords on their shields and demanded that the Romans release their king, as they called Fritigern. Fritigern at once spoke to Lupicinus, saying that all this was a misunderstanding, and that bloodshed would be avoided if he and his companion, Alavivus, were allowed to go and calm their people. Lupicinus sent them out past the bodies of their slaughtered companions, and of course as soon as they were out of the city they were off and away. They began to devastate the country regions around Marcianopolis, seizing food, horses, cattle, and whatever else they could get their hands on.
The next news was worse, and arrived a few days later. Lupicinus and Duke Maximus had managed to gather their troops and had led them against the Goths — and been routed. Most of the legions were simply wiped out, as were nearly all the staff officers who had talked so tediously of fortifications at Festinus’ banquet. The standards of Roman legions were in barbarian hands. Moreover, the Goths had armed themselves with the dead Romans’ weapons and were stronger than ever, and it now seemed certain that the Greuthungi had crossed the Danube as well, and that Fritigern had already formed an alliance with them. (Lupicinus was still alive: he’d fled his army when he saw it was going to lose, and had barricaded himself in Marcianopolis and sent for help.) The Goths were now free of all the restraints that fear of the Romans had imposed on them. They were desperate and, once they had tasted blood, hungry for revenge. They attacked towns and country houses throughout the southern provinces of Thrace, burning, looting, and raping. They killed all the men old enough to bear arms, and drove the women and older children off as slaves; babies and toddlers too young to walk far they snatched from their mothers and slaughtered. Officials, even innocent town magistrates, they killed by torture. One of Lupicinus’ staff officers was caught: they flogged, burned, and blinded him, and ended by tearing him to pieces.
But Roman arrogance, the cause of the war, still hadn’t finished making trouble for the Roman state. A letter from the emperor himself was sent to Hadrianopolis, commanding the Gothic troops there to leave Thrace and go at once into Hellespontus, in Asia. These troops were Athanaric’s father’s men, and they were in their winter quarters. They’d already put aside their weapons for the winter, and the town council had had these locked up when the trouble started. The Gothic commanders were not eager to involve themselves in a war, and simply asked for two days to prepare for the journey, for supplies of food, and for journey money. The chief magistrate of the city didn’t have journey money, and the emperor hadn’t sent any. The magistrate’s country villa had been sacked by Fritigern’s people, and he was furious with the Goths. He armed the citizens, and told the Goths that if they didn’t leave immediately, he would have them all killed. The commanders tried to reason with him. The populace shouted and threw things. At last the Goths broke into open rebellion, killed great numbers of the citizens, seized arms — there’s a munitions factory in Hadrianopolis — and left the city. They joined up with Fritigern’s forces, and now Hadrianopolis was under siege by a vast and well-armed Gothic army.
Sebastianus had returned to Scythia before the rebellion started. The troops were put on alert, preparations were made to join up with other imperial forces — and then nothing happened. Sebastianus did not have enough men to face this huge Gothic army on his own. He sent letters to the emperor, sending them by sea so that they’d be safe, asking what he should do.
Thorion sent letters too, some to the emperor and some to me. “Come back to Tomis at once,” he wrote. “I’m sending you and Melissa and the baby back to Constantinople. A province at war is no place for women.”
“There are plenty of women in every province in every war,” I wrote back. “And I am responsible for this hospital: I can’t just abandon my patients. Don’t worry. I’m as safe here in Novidunum as you are in Tomis.”
I sent the letter with the official courier. I climbed the walls of the fortress and watched the man ride off across the flat fields, white now with the first snow. The sky over the delta was gray and swollen; only on the horizon did it brighten, with the peculiar lightness that the air has over the sea. The courier moved across the white snow under the heavy clouds, a small black ant crawling along a stretch of dust. Nothing else stirred. I looked down the delta, then walked slowly along the circuit of the walls. Smoke from a few houses eastward; cows in a field; a woman gathering wood. Then the vast brown tide of the river, dark and steaming in the cold air, running into the brightness of the distant, invisible sea. Beyond it the walls of the abandoned Gothic settlement on the other side were just visible, and more fields and trees: no motion, no life. There were no Goths there. But there might soon be other barbarians — Halani, Huns. I closed my eyes and thought of the empire, a ring of cities around the Middle Sea, spreading up the Euxine, up the Nile, up into the inland wildernesses, from remote Britain to the Persian frontier, from the Rhine and the Danube as far south as the deserts of Africa and the lands of the Ethiopians. Alexandria with its beacon tower, Caesarea, Tyre, imperial Antioch, Rhodes, Ephesus, my home, with its splendid temple to the goddess Artemis. Radiant Constantinople. Athens, mother of us all and still a city of learning, even in its long decline. And the cities of the West, which I knew only by report: Rome, Carthage, Massilia, and remote inland capitals like Treviri and Mediolanum. People of Britain, Gaul, Africa, Egypt, Syria, Asia: a babble of different languages, different histories, religions, races. One empire, two common tongues, and nearly a thousand years of civilization. For the first time in my life, standing there on the walls of Novidunum, I tried to imagine life without the Roman Empire, and for the first time I understood why Athanaric loved it.
I climbed down from the walls and went to my work at the hospital. I should have realized before that I was entirely a creature of the empire, formed by it through my education, fed by its learning, nourished by its peace. But Ephesus is an old city, and one takes things for granted, assuming that something is a natural state when really it is a hard-won privilege. It had never seemed odd to me that only soldiers bore weapons, that the laws were the same everywhere, that people could live by their professions, independently of any local lord, that one could buy goods from places thousands of miles away. But all of that was dependent on the empire, which supports the structure of the world as Atlas is said to support the sky. All of it was alien to the Goths. I had hated the imperial authorities at times, for their corruption, their brutality, their greedy claim on all power in the world. But now that there was a challenge to the imperial government of Thrace, I found myself completely a Roman. What I could do to serve the state now, I would. Others might abandon their posts; I was resolved that I
wouldn’t abandon mine.
Sebastianus came through Novidunum in the next week, checking on the troops on his way upriver. I gave him my report on the state of the legions’ health (it was fairly good) and reported Edico's defection. Since this left me shorthanded, I asked Sebastianus to do two things: first, to promote the cleverest of the hospital attendants to the rank of doctor, and second, to legally manumit Arbetio and give him a salaried position. I’d asked this last several times before, but on this occasion I stressed the demand. I didn’t want my other assistant disappearing as well, and I was fairly certain that Edico had promised him his freedom if he joined the Goths. Sebastianus saw my point, and didn’t put the matter off as he’d done before; he had his scribe draw up the documents at once, called Arbetio in, and told him he was a free man. Arbetio gaped at him, and Sebastianus handed him the contract of an army doctor for him to sign. Arbetio looked at it, stunned. He signed it, his hand trembling. Sebastianus took the hand and shook it. Arbetio stared at the contract, his eyes very wide. I went over and offered him my hand as well; he took it, then looked at my face and embraced me. “Thank you,” he said.
Sebastianus laughed. “You’re right to thank the author rather than the executor of your freedom.”
“I thank Your Generosity as well,” Arbetio said, turning to him in embarrassment.
Sebastianus waved the thanks aside. “I should have done it the first time Chariton asked me — only we’ve been short of money. It’s pleasant to see somebody happy these days. Will you perhaps join me for dinner this evening? You too, of course, Chariton.”
“I didn’t know you’d been asking him for my freedom,” Arbetio told me as we left the presidium.
“I didn’t want to raise false hopes,” I returned. “I’m glad you’ve got it; it’s long overdue. Congratulations.”
Arbetio stopped and caught my hand again. “You are like a god to me,” he said, his voice shaking. “You have transformed everything. First you taught me the art, and now you’ve given me my freedom. I have no words for it. I would be willing to die, to thank you properly.” He was crushing my hand, and starting to weep. “I could kill myself for happiness! Freedom!”
I felt ashamed. I had done nothing unusual; he had no cause for this passion of gratitude. And I hadn’t realized that his freedom meant quite so much to him. “You should not thank me; you have no more than your due, and what you could have had for asking if you’d gone to the Goths. And don’t kill yourself, my friend, we have too much work to do.”
Arbetio laughed, let go my hand, and gave the long rising whoop that Goths use as a victory shout. Everyone in hearing range turned and stared at him. He flung his arms in the air and shouted, “I’m free!”
“Will you buy a house?” Sebastianus asked him at dinner that evening.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to, anyway. If I can borrow the money.”
“You could have my house,” I offered. “I mean to get rid of it. You can pay me when you have funds.”
“I meant to borrow some money from you for something else,” Arbetio said nervously.
Sebastianus eyed him carefully. “For what? Another slave? Ten to one it’s a woman.”
Arbetio grinned and blushed. “Yes.”
“The best way to spend money,” Sebastianus told him. He snapped his fingers and pointed for his slave to pour some more wine for Arbetio.
“I’ll need someone to keep house for me,” Arbetio said defensively.
“I’ll lend you the money,” I told him, smiling. “And the house as well. Really, I’ll be just as pleased to have it off my hands. Valerius has found a bigger one for me; it just needs rethatching.”
Sebastianus smiled at me. “So speaks the man of wealth. Athanaric says he’s discovered something about you.”
I couldn’t stop the nervous start; I spilled my wine down my tunic. I sat up quickly and tried to mop it off.
“Lord God Eternal!” said Sebastianus, and laughed. “It can’t be that bad!”
I sat still and tried to control myself. Even if Athanaric had guessed the truth, he had plainly not actually told Sebastianus anything; there was nothing in the duke’s manner to indicate that he knew I was a woman. “Athanaric told me that he was digging into some matters that didn’t concern him,” I said at last, savagely. “Some of which touched on me. I regard the matters as strictly private, and if Athanaric has discovered anything, I hope he has the grace to keep his mouth shut.”
Sebastianus stared at me in some surprise. “He simply wrote at the bottom of a letter that he had been thinking about some events in Asia and had discovered something about you, which he meant to tell me when next we met.”
“I would thank Your Honor not to listen to him.”
“Holy Christ, Chariton, it can’t matter. I don’t care if Festinus accused you of treason, or even if you’re really a runaway slave. Whatever it is, I’m sure you’re perfectly innocent, and Athanaric’s sure as well. He gave no indication that whatever it was was discreditable to you, only that it was something I should be aware of. If he means to tell me anything, it will only be because he wants me to sort the trouble out.”
I sat back on the couch, but was too tense and angry to recline properly. Something Sebastianus should be aware of. I couldn’t think of anything but my secret — but if he had worked that out, why hadn’t he just told Sebastianus in his letter? Was it that he feared that the letter might fall into the wrong hands? Or had he jumped to some false conclusion? I might yet escape. But still I was angry and frightened. “Doesn’t Athanaric have enough to do with the present calamities, without chasing up stale old events in another diocese?” I asked bitterly. “Particularly ones that could hurt his friends.”
“If I could help at all . . .” Arbetio said hesitantly, but I shook my head.
Sebastianus sighed. “Well, I’m sorry I spoke. I didn’t think you’d take it this way.” He snapped his fingers and pointed to my glass; the slave filled it. “I was surprised that Athanaric had time to think of anything but his work, now that you mention it. He’s been to Antioch and back, he’s been talking to Fritigern under a truce flag, and in his last letter he said that he was bound for Sirmium.”
“What’s the news?” I asked, recovering myself a little.
“The Goths have lifted the siege of Hadrianopolis. Apparently Fritigern realized that they didn’t have the experience in siege warfare to accomplish anything, and were only losing men. They’ve left a small force guarding the city, but the rest have broken into smaller bands and are roaming about pillaging. We might meet some in Scythia soon after all.”
“What about our troops?” asked Arbetio.
Sebastianus shrugged. “No one will come from the east before the spring. Lupicinus has been relieved of his command and Festinus of his governorship, and they’ve both been sent home in disgrace — but that just means that now nobody’s in charge here. And His Sacred Majesty doesn’t dare move anyone from the Persian frontier without first concluding a peace with the Great King. He’s sent Count Victor to do that now. It’s likely that they’ll partition Armenia. And he’s going to send Profuturus and Trajanus here with some of the Armenian legions. I imagine that Athanaric is taking a message to the West asking Gratianus Augustus for troops, though he didn’t say so. Still, I think we’ll have to manage on our own until the spring, and possibly even the summer.” He raised his cup, eyeing us over the top of it. “Drink up. We won’t have much time for drinking, soon.”
Sebastianus was right in both his guesses: we did not receive any reinforcements until the summer, and we did see more of the Goths. The main body of the Theruingi moved back toward Scythia. On a wide plain near the boundary between Scythia and Moesia, where the Danube swings close to the foothills of the Haemus mountains, they built a permanent camp. They moved their wagons into a great circle to form a kind of city, where the women and children remained; the men went out in raiding parties which traveled widely through Thrace, looting and pillaging. Some of
them passed within a few miles of Novidunum. They made no attempt to attack the camps or to lay siege to any of the fortified cities, but concentrated on getting hold of supplies and booty. In this they were very successful. Many Gothic slaves, particularly those enslaved recently by Lupicinus’ practices, ran off from their masters and back to their own people; they then told their compatriots where to find the richest houses and the fattest cattle. The Goths amassed plunder more quickly than the most corrupt governor amasses bribes. They plundered the gold mines to the south, they plundered the farms, they plundered the towns and villas. They carried off all the Roman goods they had always valued — fine pottery, ironwork, silver, and glass; good imported clothing of linen and silk and wool; inlaid furniture, paintings, and curtains; books which they couldn’t read. And they took Roman slaves. Men who had been slaves themselves a few months before carried off the wives and children of their former masters, and the Roman troops could do little to stop them. Sebastianus set up a few raiding parties of his own, to try to catch small groups of Goths on their expeditions and punish them, but he didn’t have the troops to do much.
Most of the population of Scythia flooded into the fortified cities, into Tomis and Histria and, to a lesser extent, into the army camps such as Novidunum. Thanks to Thorion’s grain hording there was enough in the cities to feed everyone, though Thorion quickly established a system of rationing. Or so we judged: communications were disrupted. It was not always safe to send messages by land, because of the Goths, but the Danube was now frozen, and no ships braved the Euxine in midwinter. Couriers rode with any troops who were going up or down the river, but for weeks at a stretch Novidunum might have been the only city in the world, standing alone on its bluff amid the snows. Occasionally an army party would come down the river and dump a load of wounded in the hospital, but no one came from the sea from December till the spring.
The Beacon at Alexandria Page 38
