Caesar's Sword (I): The Red Death

by David Pilling

  The sight of so much gold made my eyes bulge. Each coin or solidus was stamped with a stylised portrait of the Emperor and worth twenty-four Greco-Roman carats, or about four and a half grams of pure gold per coin. The solidus was the standard currency of the Empire, which gives some idea of the almost unimaginable wealth that flowed through the imperial coffers.

  Thus a bargain was struck, and we became the chattels of a Roman military officer. His name, as his clerk curtly informed my mother in Greek, was Domitius, though we were to refer to him as Kurios (master).

  As I had feared, Domitius kept Caledfwlch for himself. I did not see the sword again for many years.

  Chapter 5

  Domitius had his house at the upper end of the Mese, near the Milion and the vast, looming complex of the Great Palace, where the Emperor Anastasius and his court resided. As a high-ranking officer or doryphoroi in the Imperial Army, Domitius was wealthy enough to afford a fine villa inside a walled enclosure with grounds and gardens, and to employ a considerable household of clerks, servants and slaves.

  Slaves, of course, were the lowest of the low in Roman society, and supported the weight of that society on their backs. They could be worked to death, abused and flogged as their masters liked, with none to protect them. This was the degraded state my mother and I were reduced to.

  Domitius had us taken to his house immediately after purchasing us from Clothaire. I am happy to note that we never saw or heard from the one-legged Frank again. May God excuse my lack of Christian forgiveness, but I sincerely hope he died alone and in great pain.

  We saw little of our new master. I suspect Domitius had bought us as an afterthought, since his household was a large one and could always find a place for extra staff. His real interest lay in Caledfwlch. His one and only interview with my mother, whom he summoned to his presence shortly after our arrival, concerned the sword.

  “I told him almost nothing,” Eliffer told me later that evening, “but pretended to be ignorant of Caledfwlch’s history and previous ownership. Domitius reeks of ambition. The less he knows the better.”

  “I want it back,” I complained, with all the snivelling selfishness of a child. “He has robbed me.”

  “Let us work our way into his good graces,” she said soothingly, “and make him think that the sword is nothing but a common gladius. In time, once he realises that it can do him no good, he will give you back your property.”

  She was wrong, for a slave has no property, and Domitius was intelligent enough to guess something of the sword’s provenance. I was desperate to retrieve it, and could not sleep properly or perform my duties adequately. Cleaning latrines and mopping floors are tedious enough duties at the best of times, and I earned a number of stripes on my back for my perceived sloth and insolence.

  When I did manage to sleep, my dreams were haunted by vague images of slaughter on shadowy battlefields, accompanied by the echoes of war-shouts, clashing steel, blasting trumpets and all the panoply and splendour of war. The only solid presence in these dreams was Caledfwlch, glittering in the midst of a bloody haze.

  A host of faceless men wielded the sword. One by one they were cut down, though not before reaping their enemies like ripe corn. The last of them was a gigantic figure, faceless like the rest, but his outline shone like the last rays of the setting sun. A kind of glory surrounded him. When Caledfwlch fell from his hand the glory faded, leaving a dim afterglow that quickly faded into darkness.

  My mother despaired of me, and lived in terror that I might commit some supreme folly, such as attempting to steal Caledfwlch from our master’s bedchamber while he slept. Fortunately, God or fate intervened, and some weeks after he purchased us Domitius was summoned away by the Emperor.

  He was ordered to accompany his patron, a high-ranking Roman general, on a diplomatic mission to Carthage in North Africa, which was then ruled by the Vandals under their king, Hilderic. Hilderic was careful to maintain good relations with the Eastern Empire. North Africa had once been part of a Roman province, and the Romans occasionally cast jealous eyes at their lost territory.

  The sea-voyage to North Africa was long and dangerous, and it would be months before Domitius returned. He was unmarried – I suspect his interests lay in his own sex, though thankfully he never pressed them on me – and inspired little affection among his servants, so his departure was greeted with sorrow by no-one except me.

  Domitius took Caledfwlch with him. The prospect of being parted from the sword for so long, perhaps forever, almost made me run mad. I suffered more bad dreams, and neglected my duties to the extent that the freedman who watched over Domitius’s slaves threatened to have me turned out of doors.

  “I have thrashed him until my arm aches,” he warned my mother, “and still he refuses to work. It is not good enough. Discipline him, or out he goes. And you with him.”

  Eliffer tried her best to bring me to my senses. A mixture of threats and entreaties, salted with her tears, succeeded in extracting from me a reluctant promise of obedience.

  “We must play our parts here,” she said, holding me close and stroking my hair, “at least for a little while. Would you have us beg and starve on the streets?”

  I kept my word, and gave the freedman no further cause to wear out his vine rods on my back. In the weeks after Domitius’s departure I performed all the dull, menial tasks allotted to me with sullen diligence, fuelled by the intensity of my hatred for them.

  The other slaves of the household were a crude, base-born set of Thracians and Bulgars and I know not what else. None were fit to clean my royal mother’s sandals. They mocked us constantly, calling us contemptible little Britons, the progeny of pigs and devils, and shunned our company.

  Life in that villa seemed to stretch into eternity. My mother was worked mercilessly hard, and as the weeks turned into months her proud spirit started to crack. All her hopes had been vested in finding a new life in the city of the Romans, one that befitted the rank and status she had enjoyed in Britain. Instead she found herself treated like an animal, and her only son condemned to the same fate.

  The stresses and strains on Eliffer’s mind gradually worked their way into her body. Her health started to fail, and made worse by the brutish indifference of the freedman, who had little compassion for slaves that fell ill. One day she fainted in the kitchens, overturning a pan of boiling soup and scalding her legs. The other slaves present could hardly ignore her plight, and carried her to the infirmary.

  She lay there for several days in that squalid, ill-lit chamber, neglected save for one ancient female slave whose age rendered her unfit for any task save spooning gruel into the mouths of the sick. There was no medicine on hand, or at least none that the freedman was willing to expend on Eliffer. He was already stretched to the limits of his mercy by allowing her to die indoors. In any case, I think there was no medicine on earth that could cure the wasting sickness in her mind.

  I visited her as often as I was permitted in those last days, and sat by her side while she drifted in and out of delirium. At times she thought herself back in Britain, in the halls of Caerleon or Caerwent, and recited conversations she had enjoyed with men long dead.

  Much of my long life has been hard and violent, and I am rendered immune to most feeling save the love of Christ that has ever sustained and nourished down the long years. It is hard for me now, in the barren and dried-up prison of old age, to describe the visceral anguish of a child about to lose that which he loves most in the world. Or perhaps simply too painful: there is a locked vault in my heart where I store all the worst that has befallen me in life. To open it would risk self-destruction.

  The loss of Caledfwlch, my cherished birthright, felt to me like the loss of a limb. The death of my mother, the moment in which her hand went limp in mine and I realised she had ceased to breathe, temporarily stole away my reason. I sat, numb and lifeless, and cared nothing for what happened to me.

  Many years later, when I went back to Domitius’s villa
as a man of consequence and made the aged freedman grovel at my feet, I discovered Eliffer’s humble grave and had her exhumed and re-interred with the honour befitting her true station. Until then I had no knowledge of what had been done with her body, for barely an hour after her death the freedman threw me out.

  “Now his mother is dead, the boy has no restraining influence,” he said, “I have no time or patience to school the little beast. Let him take his chances on the streets.”

  In the absence of Domitius his word was law, and so I was cast out to fend for myself.

  For the next three or four years I was little better than an animal, one of the hundreds of homeless street urchins that plagued the city like vermin. They lived off scraps or what they could beg or steal, slept in gutters and doorways and formed groups that I can only compare to dog-packs.

  How I survived the first few months of this hellish existence is a mystery to me. My memories of that time are vague and mingled with the deadening pain of the loss of Caledfwlch and my mother. A large portion of my humanity had been stolen away with them, which may have been crucial to my survival. A child reduced to a beast, who is a stranger to fear and despair and most other human weaknesses, concerned only with finding enough food to live through another day, soon learns how to cling to life.

  I was not completely lost to human feeling, and made a friend of a fellow savage. I first encountered him in one of the poorest quarters of the city, running for his life from a tribe of slightly older youths whom he had stolen half a loaf of mouldy bread from.

  He had a rare turn of speed, which kept him out of their clutches long enough to reach the alley that I was squatting in.

  “Out of my way!” he gasped, almost falling over me in his frantic haste. I hugged my knees to let him pass, and picked up the slingshot I had made from a couple of strips of leather. It had saved my skin in one more than one street-fight, and would now do so again.

  There was a low wall at the end of the alley, and the brickwork was crumbling and covered with slimy lichen. I could hear the boy sobbing with fear as he tried to climb up it, with no success, while I busied myself loading a jagged stone into my sling.

  His pursuers rounded the corner of the alley, a pack of gangly, dirty-faced youths, of the sort I knew well. Their courage was mostly invested in their leader. I picked him out as I whirled the sling. He was the biggest and oldest of them, with a shock of greasy black curls and a terribly hard-faced look for one so young.

  What kind of man he might have become was destined to remain a mystery. My stone hit him square in his right eye, pulping the eyeball and penetrating into his brain. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut, and lay jerking in his death-throes on the filthy cobbles. His followers stopped dead, aghast, which gave me time to load another stone.

  “Which of you is next?” I cried with a bravura I didn’t feel. There were five or six of them, each a head taller than me and several years older. They could have easily rushed and overpowered me, but not before I had time to loose off one more shot.

  Their fragile courage evaporated, and they turned tail and ran. “That’s right, boys, run home to your mothers!” I shouted after them.

  I turned to look at the boy they had been chasing. He was crouched at the end of the alley, looking rather shame-faced and trembling like a dog that had just suffered a beating.

  “You saved me,” he said, “I behaved like a coward. I am sorry.”

  He was short and stocky, and would grow to be a powerfully-built man, assuming he survived that long. I noticed that his fists were swollen and callused with the marks of many fights, and his eyes had the wild, hunted look about them I had come to know well.

  “No harm done,” I said, rolling up my sling, “they were only a pack of sheep. Perhaps they will know better than to hunt wolves in future.”

  I offered him my hand, the first time I had offered my hand in friendship to anyone, and he warily took it.

  “I am Felix,” he said. “You have a strange accent. Are you a foreigner?”

  “Yes. I am from Britain. My name is Coel ap Amhar ap Arthur.”

  His eyes widened. “More a chant than a name,” he replied with a quick grin. There was a fellow-feeling between us, and from time on we were firm friends.

  In the following days Felix told me something of himself. His Roman parents had died in a recent plague, and he had no other family save some distant relatives in Nicomedia who had no interest in his welfare. Thus he had taken to the streets.

  Felix and I took care of each other, avoiding the juvenile factions that ruled the underworld of Constantinople, much as the Greens and Blues ruled respectable society. Our backgrounds could not have been more different, but poverty and starvation are great levellers. In many ways he was the brother I never had.

  God knows what we might have become in the end – gallows-bait, probably – but we were rescued by the lure of the Hippodrome.

  Chapter 6

  As the Coliseum was to Rome, so the Hippodrome was to Rome’s heir. I pity those who have never set eyes on that marvellous U-shaped structure next to the Great Palace, big enough to contain over a hundred thousand people in the stands. Here the Romans indulged their undying love for horse and chariot racing, regardless of the disapproval of the Church, which ever desires to curb ‘indecent’ entertainment.

  To understand the importance of the Hippodrome, and the influence it exerted over the people of Constantinople, you must first understand something of the factions that ruled the city. I was a member of one of those factions for a time, so they have a double bearing on my story.

  The Romans were fiercely partisan in their support for racing teams. The teams were traditionally identified by colour – Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues – and had been imported to Constantinople from Rome. By the time I write of, only the Greens and Blues were still significant. They had become hugely powerful in their own right, and were responsible for staging all forms of public entertainment: not only racing, but athletics, boxing, wrestling, theatre, wild animal displays and gymnastics.

  Inevitably, the Greens and the Blues had acquired a political dimension. There was hardly a Roman citizen inside Constantinople that did not belong to one faction or the other, and wore their colours to advertise the fact. The factions were often used as a mouthpiece for public opinion, and would eventually come close to pulling down an Emperor and destroying the city.

  That was all in my future, one I could not have imagined during my lost years of running wild in the streets. It was Felix who first suggested that we find work at the Hippodrome. We had barely survived a bad winter and a particularly vicious beating from a butcher we had tried to steal a leg of mutton from, and were nursing our bruises in an alleyway when he raised the idea.

  “I have consulted the fates, syntrophos,” he said (this means ‘companion’ in Greek, and was our name for each other). “They tell me our stars are due to rise.”

  The ‘fates’ were a group of coloured pebbles that Felix carried in a little drawstring bag. He claimed to be able to read our conjoined futures in them, and to derive meanings from the pattern they formed when he cast them on the ground.

  “It does not feel that way,” I replied, grimacing as I massaged my neck. The butcher had thrashed me with a heavy stick, and there was barely a patch of flesh on my meagre body that was not tender.

  “The fates direct us there,” said Felix, pointing at the Hippodrome, about a quarter of a mile away. Along with the walls and towers of the Great Palace, the stadium dominated the skyline.

  “If we wish to thrive, syntrophos,” he went on, “then we must join a faction, or leave the city. Do you want to leave?”

  I shook my head. Since arriving in Constantinople I had not once ventured outside the walls. It was my home now, and life beyond the maze of streets, alleyways and plazas that I had come to know so well seemed unimaginable.

  “Join a faction, and learn a skill,” said Felix, “or several skills. We are young enou
gh to learn. Horse-riding, chariot racing, anything we like. What do you say?”

  “They may not take us,” I pointed out.

  “Nonsense,” he replied airily, “the Greens and the Blues are always looking for new recruits, especially young ones. Many of their apprentices find the training too rigorous and drop out.”

  Or were seriously injured, sometimes even killed, he might have added. I let myself be persuaded, and that same day we made our way to the Hippodrome and presented ourselves at the Black Gate.

  The guard lounging by the gate was a bored veteran with a missing eye and little to do. He responded to our entreaties with a growl, and threatened to whip our hides if we didn’t make ourselves scarce.

  “Our hides have been whipped once today already,” said Felix, who was fearless, “see for yourself.”

  He tore off his filthy jerkin to display the livid welts on his back, some of which were still bleeding. The guard, evidently not so cruel a man as he appeared, blanched at the sight.

  “For God’s sake, put your jerkin back on,” he begged, “so you want to join the circus, do you? Wait here a moment.”

  We sat on the steps and waited. I toyed with a loose stone and watched the people passing the Palace of Antiochos, a large hexagon-shaped building opposite the Hippodrome. There was a group of orthodox Greek priests among them, tall black-robed figures with long grey beards, marching along like so many angry crows as they furiously debated theology with a pale little monk whom I assumed to be a visitor from Rome. The churches of Constantinople and Rome were forever at each other’s throats, wrangling about the true nature of Christ and the Divinity.

  The guard came back with a tall, darkly handsome young man, of noble bearing and stature, but dressed in a torn and shabby tunic.

  “Well, here they are,” said the guard, stopping at the top of the steps and gesturing at us, “what do you think? Skinny little brutes. Not good for much except fetching and carrying.”

  “I will be the judge of that, soldier,” replied the youth. The guard, who was at least twenty years his senior, stiffened at the sarcasm in his tone.