Battle for Rome

by Ian Ross

  A breeze swept the line, churning the dust to a red-brown fog, and for a few heartbeats Castus could see nothing. When it cleared, he saw a horse charging straight at him from the packed mass of enemy cavalry; it had managed to turn in the confined space, and was bolting back for open ground, but the hedge of spears had panicked it. Castus threw himself back against the men behind him, lifting his shield. He saw the rider lurching in the saddle, trying to angle his long lance to strike. Then the horse lunged forward, jaws wide; the animal’s head passed over Castus’s shoulder, and he heard the ghastly crunch of bone as it bit at Antoninus’s face. Blood spattered against his shoulder, but at once a mesh of blades had struck the animal, jarring in through the gaps in its armour. It stumbled and fell, and the rider tumbled from the saddle.

  Castus stepped forward, raising his spear to strike down at the fallen man. Too late he saw the long cavalry lance angled upwards; then pain exploded through his head. He staggered, but the bodies of men all around him held him upright. His mouth filled with blood; he coughed, and it ran down his chest. More blood, filling his throat. He was choking on it. The lance had slipped in behind the cheek guard of his helmet and stabbed him through the side of the jaw – for a moment, he had felt the sharp point of it in his mouth. He spat broken teeth.

  Pain was ringing through him, and his whole face felt split wide open. His leg went from beneath him and he was kneeling, vomiting blood, propped on his shield. Around him the noise of the battle became a vague rushing roar, and all he could feel was the ripped wound in his head and the taste of cold iron.

  ‘Britannica! Britannica!’ somebody was shouting. When he opened his eyes he could see a dying horse only a few paces away, legs thrashing as it blew bloody froth. Antoninus was sprawled beside him, the front of his skull crushed to pulp. Castus felt his strength ebbing, his consciousness beginning to blur. Get up, he thought. But he could not. Don’t fall on your back; you’ll drown in your own blood.

  He tried to speak, but the motion of his jaw sent a bolt of agony through him, and he plunged down into blackness.

  Chapter X

  They rigged the forks at noon, on the old drill field outside the walls of Mediolanum. The troops of four legions were drawn up in parade formation, four sides of a hollow square facing inwards towards the punishment ground.

  The condemned men wore only loose unbelted tunics, the stripes and patches that marked them as soldiers cut away. All three were bruised, unwashed and stumbling. One of them had to be dragged across the parched grass to the forked punishment poles, and then the three of them were bound in place, their arms raised, and their tunics ripped from their backs.

  From his position at the head of his legion, Castus watched with sober disgust. The day was very hot, his head was aching, and one side of his mouth was packed with a poultice of mashed herbs in sour medicinal gum. Twelve days had passed since the battle on the road to Taurinum, and the wound on his jaw was still healing; the jagged hook-shaped scar was coated in sticky brown paste, but itched furiously. Castus felt like tiny flames were flickering up the side of his face. At least the surgeons had removed the thick linen bandage that had swathed his head for so many days, but his tongue kept probing at the mauled left side of his mouth, rubbing at the stitches, and at the jagged gap where he had lost two teeth: the jolts of pain were becomingly maddeningly familiar.

  It could have been much worse – only the tip of the lance had jabbed through his flesh. If it had been driven with any force it would have broken his jaw, or speared him through the back of the head. The wound had been clean, and there was no infection. But Castus could not rid his tongue of the taste of iron, the vile sensation of the lance-head penetrating his mouth.

  Watching three men being flogged and then beheaded was doing nothing to improve his mood. Squinting slightly, he tried to ignore the flickering itch and the throb in his jaw, and the constant desire to spit. Behind him, his men were drawn up in silence, all of them perspiring in the midday sun with their full kit and shields. The only sounds were the regular swish and crack of the rods on the backs of the condemned men, the howls and gasps of pain. The rods were bloody in the hands of the torturers now, spattering gore with every blow.

  Two of the prisoners had been soldiers of Legion I Martia; the third was from the numerus of Batavi. All three had been stripped of their rank and status, dishonourably discharged and sentenced to an ignominious public death. Their crime, supposedly, had been treason: they had been discovered while trying to set light to a storehouse of army grain and oil. Apparently two of them had confessed to being paid by agents of the tyrant to disrupt the emperor’s advance. It was widely implied that they had also been responsible for informing the enemy of the plan for the assault on Segusio.

  So the official story went, anyway. Castus found that he did not believe it. Most likely the men had been drunk when they were caught, and trying to steal supplies rather than destroy them. Their confessions meant nothing; a weak man under torture would tell his masters whatever they wanted to hear. Whether the rest of the army believed it or not seemed unimportant. The executions would be an example, and a deterrent. Castus had wondered whether Nigrinus might have been behind the arrests. But, no, this was too crude to be the notary’s work.

  At the far side of the hollow square, beyond the ranks of the Divitenses, Castus made out the figure of Aurelius Evander, commander of the field army, watching the proceedings from horseback. Had he ordered this? Did he believe the men were guilty? No doubt, Castus thought, their deaths answered some important official requirement. Perhaps they were intended to silence the rumours about treachery… Gods, his head hurt… Let this be over soon.

  The prisoners were limp as the guards cut them down from the forks. Two of them looked dead already. Castus glanced away as the speculatores moved in with their drawn swords. In his current state, the sight of beheadings was too much to endure. He heard it, though: the chop of the blade quite distinct, three times. From his left he heard a man choke and vomit. Strange, he thought, that soldiers can watch men die in battle or in the arena and be completely unmoved, but to see their own former comrades beaten and executed was painful, sickening. He felt the pain of it himself. Perhaps these three had been traitors. Perhaps they had betrayed their oath, given aid to the enemy. Still, they could have been killed cleanly.

  Finally it was done. The three corpses were dragged away by the heels, their severed heads gathered up by the torturers, and the horns wailed. A collective sigh rose from the assembled troops, a ripple of release, as if they were shaking off the weight of what they had just witnessed. One by one, the legion detachments turned and marched back towards the city, every man eager for the delights of the baths, the wine shops and the races. Out on the plain, only the forked poles remained, and the puddles of blood drying slowly into the dust.

  *

  ‘I’ve got to say,’ Vitalis said, peering at the side of his face, ‘I think it’s an improvement…’

  Castus lowered his brow.

  ‘I mean it!’ Vitalis declared, eyes wide. ‘The scar, I think, distracts the eye from your oft-broken nose, your bull-like neck, your perpetual frown…’

  ‘Get to Hades,’ Castus muttered from the side of his mouth, then leaned and spat between the seats.

  ‘Did he say something...? Ah, but I’m joking. You look fearsome! You look like a gladiator!’

  Castus smiled, and felt his face aching. The ugly welt of scar tissue on his left jaw seemed to have frozen the muscles on that side; the surgeons had told him he would have a crooked smile for the rest of his life. It was still hard to speak, almost as hard to eat and drink.

  It was the penultimate day of the Games of Apollo, and the great circus of Mediolanum was packed. Down on the sand, chariots and horses careered around the track in the hot sunlight. A sudden roar went up from the crowd, and from his position high on the southern curve of seats, beneath the awnings, Castus glanced down to see what had happened. For a moment the light dazz
led him.

  ‘Red team’s crashed onto the barrier,’ Vitalis said, jumping to his feet. He smacked his hands together. ‘Nasty!’

  Castus had never understood the fanatical obsession of so many men for chariot racing. It seemed immaterial to him who won or lost the race, and he suspected most people just watched it for the accidents. He had never known any women who got at all excited about it, not even Sabina, with all her passion for the delights of city life. Then again, he thought, rising in his seat to gaze over the heads of the crowd as two of the Blue and Green teams came racing round the bend in a smooth neck-to-neck arc, it was quite dramatic…

  ‘Beat him!’ Vitalis was shouting. ‘Whip him! Fuck him! Come on, you chicken-hearted bastard!’

  All around him the crowd were yelling, cheering their favourites and screaming abuse at their opponents. Volleys of noise went up from the stands, as gangs of rival supporters raised chants or rhythmic handclaps. The racing teams of Mediolanum had recently suffered a reversal in popularities: Maxentius was known to favour the Blues, and Constantine was widely rumoured to be a supporter of the Greens. Now the Blue teams were getting little support, and a lot of heckling.

  Today, the rivalries of the racing factions seemed like the only feud in town. All around him Castus could see off-duty soldiers, many of them from his own legion, mingling with the civilians. They had reason enough to celebrate: it was high summer, and their emperor was everywhere victorious. Like Taurinum before it, the city of Mediolanum had thrown open its gates to the conquering new emperor. The greatest city in northern Italy, the Queen of the Plains, one of the capitals of the empire, had fallen without a single blow, and the citizens had lined the streets and clambered onto the rooftops to cheer and throw rose-petals on the imperial retinue as Constantine made his ceremonial entrance. Castus had gained only the vaguest impression of it all; the imperial adventus was a clash of bright colour, noise and thronging crowds, seen though a mist of fevered pain. Now the men of his legion were billeted in the city, and Castus himself had been allocated another smart townhouse as his quarters; it was the former property of a Maxentian supporter who had fled for Rome.

  It was almost as if, Castus thought, the war was already won.

  Despite himself, he felt the mood of the crowd lifting his spirits. His wound had depressed him; close brushes with death often had that effect. Was it only chance that he had lived? In the past he had found it easier to shrug these things off, but life now seemed both fuller and more precarious. He had so much more to lose.

  But for all the enthusiasm of the city’s population, the rapturous panegyrics hailing the godlike conqueror as a bringer of a new golden age, Castus knew there were plenty here who had no love for Constantine. Even less love for his army: to the cultured citizens of Mediolanum, the soldiers billeted among them must have seemed barbarians, uncouth foreigners from the edge of the world. Their streets were packed with legionaries from the far frontiers of Gaul and Britain, with swaggering warriors from the forests of Germania, drunk on their wine, filling the air with guttural barracks Latin and vomiting on the marble steps of their temples and theatres.

  Castus sensed the tensions in the crowd around him, the knots of gathering threat. The city was like dry tinder, waiting for a spark. But this was the festival of Apollo, the sun god, Constantine’s own protecting deity. An aspect of the great god Sol Invictus. It was only right, he told himself, to celebrate. And over in the enclosure of the imperial gallery, Constantine himself sat watching the races, a tiny figure between the white and gold pillars.

  ‘I hear the nobilissima femina and her retinue will be arriving here soon,’ Vitalis said, leaning to speak over the noise of the crowd.

  ‘Fausta?’ Castus mumbled. He had heard nothing of it.

  ‘Fitting that the wife of the Augustus should join her noble husband, no? Besides, she spent many years in the palace here, when her father was alive.’

  Mediolanum’s imperial palace lay only a short distance away, flanking the circus: both had been constructed by Maximian, father of both Fausta and the tyrant, when he was senior Augustus. But every time Castus thought of Maximian, he remembered the old man’s face swollen in death, the body turning slowly as it hung from the rafters of the residency in Arelate. He suppressed a quick shudder. His wound was flaring badly, and he fought the desire to scratch at it.

  If Fausta was coming to Mediolanum, would Sabina be coming with her? Hard to imagine that she would remain behind in Treveris. The prospect of seeing his wife so soon, so unexpectedly, quickened Castus’s heart. But he felt uneasy: why had she not written to tell him? Was she intending her arrival to be a surprise?

  Unlikely. All that he knew of his wife suggested that she did not enjoy surprises. Her life had contained too much chaos, he supposed, too many reversals; now she relished routine, careful planning, order and clarity. He wondered how she would react to his appearance. Would the scar repulse her?

  Leaning forward on the stone seat, he spread his knees and flexed his shoulders. The race was approaching its climax now, the remaining teams galloping up towards the curve once more before swinging round into the closing straight. All around him men were getting to their feet, waving, screaming. Vitalis had climbed up onto his seat and was stropping the air wildly, shouting to one driver or another. Unmoved by the frenzy of the crowd, Castus squeezed the wad of leaves between his back teeth, then dipped his head and spat again.

  The noise crested as the winning team crossed the line, the whole stadium roaring. Then, gradually, the cheering and the shouts of victory died away, the spectators dropping back into their seats. Some looked smug, triumphant, others desolate. The Greens had won, it seemed.

  ‘You did well?’ Castus said.

  ‘Not I,’ Vitalis replied, shaking his head. ‘I had money on the Whites. Their lead driver was supposed to be a wild beast. Not today, though…’

  ‘It’s all fixed anyway. Isn’t it?’

  Vitalis shoved at his shoulder, grinning. ‘Let it never be said that you’re too clever for your own good!’

  They got up, joining the columns of people queuing for the exits. The imperial gallery was already deserted: the emperor must barely have stayed to see the finish of the race.

  ‘Of course,’ Vitalis said in an undertone, ‘the real money’s on what happens tomorrow morning. The ceremony.’

  ‘What about it?’ Castus asked. He knew what his friend meant: at dawn the following day, the last day of the games, the emperor with his chief ministers and the priests of the city would make public sacrifice to Apollo. An ox with gilded horns, two goats and a heifer. It was tradition. It was required. The smoke of sacrifice was the divine nourishment of the gods, or so he had always been told.

  ‘There’s a rumour,’ said Vitalis in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘that our Sacred Augustus won’t attend…’

  ‘He has to,’ Castus hissed back. ‘It would be sacrilege otherwise.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe he just wants to avoid any more bad omens… Or maybe those Christian priests have talked him out of it. They’re very opposed to carnal sacrifice, apparently…’

  Castus remembered the scene he had witnessed in the emperor’s pavilion, the night before the battle. The white-haired Christian priest leaning forward to touch the emperor: a sign perhaps, or a blessing? It could not be true: no commander who shunned the gods, who failed to give respect to the deities of Rome, could ever hope to win victory. Divine favour would desert him. More importantly, his troops would desert him.

  The crush in the stalls was very great now, people shuffling along in herds towards the arches of the upper exit gates. The sun was hot, and Castus heard raised voices, tremors of violence. Without the race to focus the attention, the aggression of the crowd was turning inwards. Down in the lower stalls a few brawls had already broken out. Neither Castus nor Vitalis carried swords, just a dagger and a staff each. Both were plainly dressed, with no insignia of rank; they could have been off-duty centurions. Castus still
wore the gold torque around his neck, a decoration for valour, but few seemed to notice. The circus had always bred a democratic spirit. Perhaps that was why there were so many riots at the games?

  Vitalis took his arm, and Castus paused. ‘You remember I said that I’d seen your wife with a man in Treveris?’ Vitalis said in a low and confidential tone. Castus gave a quick nod, feeling his senses sharpening at once.

  ‘He’s here. At least, I’m fairly sure that’s him…’

  Castus gazed down into the milling people filling the lower stalls; at first in the light and confusion he could not make out any single figure. Then a flash of colour caught his eye. The scene leaped into sudden focus. Four slaves in sky-blue tunics flanked another man, clearing a path through the throng for their master.

  ‘That man down there?’ he said, quiet and urgent, and Vitalis nodded.

  The man was moving through the meshes of the crowd with unhurried assurance. He was in his mid-thirties, perhaps, and despite the heat he was wearing a dark cape across one shoulder, richly embroidered in gold. Hawkish profile, a high forehead, receding black hair slicked with oil. Castus watched him for a moment, noting the shape of him, the way he moved. Not a fighter, but his slaves would fight for him. He captured the man’s image in his mind, flicked a glance towards the exit gate, then stepped up onto the back of the curve of seats and began clambering through the crowd.

  He heard Vitalis calling after him. ‘Careful, brother – do nothing rash. Least, not in public!’

  Men turned, shoving at him, some of them snarling abuse as he climbed between them. Dropping down onto the next row, Castus moved steadily towards the archway, glancing down every few steps to track the progress of the man in the dark cape. It would have been impossible to climb all the way down to cut him off before he reached the lower exit; Castus knew he would have to try and intercept him as he left the stadium. He had no real idea what he intended: the man was a stranger to him, and he had no evidence against him. Only the shadow of a suggestion. An intuition. What would he do if he managed to confront him? Castus was not sure. He just wanted to look the man in the eye, watch for a flicker of recognition. Then he would know.