by Chris Tookey
He himself was preoccupied with transcribing the Empress Honoria’s autobiography. The hard part involved checking her account against the facts that had been recorded by others and organising her musings in chronological order. To help him, Osprey lent him the Life of Theodosius that the wizard had borrowed from the Empress herself.
As Wyrd had suspected, Merlin’s history showed that Theodosius had been a ruthless killer of anyone who stood in his way, and not only pagans. Wyrd studied the pages closely for any information connected with Honoria’s mother, but she cropped up very late in the narrative and was mentioned only in passing.
The part of the book that really caught Wyrd’s attention was Merlin’s description of the Emperor’s last days, and in particular an account of a visit Bishop Ambrose and the Emperor had made to the Oracle at Delphi. Hardly had Merlin started upon the tale than it ended abruptly, with the disappearance of the Oracle and the fruitless search for her. The centre of the story seemed to be missing.
It was only after turning the pages backwards and forwards that Wyrd noticed that several of the leaves had been stuck together. Was this an accident, or had some previous reader of the book glued them shut so that prying eyes would not discover what had happened?
Wyrd thought about cutting the pages apart with his sword but decided against it. He knew that Osprey would never forgive him if he desecrated a book belonging to the Empress Honoria. Wyrd walked down to the kitchen, where Wenda was preparing a meal for the royal family.
“Wenda, have you a small, sharp knife I could borrow?”
“Would this do?” Wenda asked, showing him one that she had just been using for cutting vegetables. “It’s a witchen knife.”
“Kitchen knife?”
“No, witchen knife. It’s amazingly versatile.”
“That looks ideal,” replied Wyrd.
“I’ll clean it for you,” said Wenda, dipping it in a bucket of water, then wiping it on her apron. “There.”
Wyrd looked at the knife. It resembled any other kitchen knife, except that it had curious runes along both sides.
“What do the runes say?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” replied Wenda. “I think they’re harmless. Instructions, probably.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just concentrate on the length and width of knife you want, while you’re holding the handle, and it’ll be whatever you wish it to be.”
“What if I wished it to be a meat cleaver?” asked Wyrd. “Or an axe?”
“Why don’t you try?”
Wyrd did try, and the witchen knife changed in his hand, first into a meat cleaver, then into an axe.
“This could be really useful,” said Wyrd, as he changed it back into a small knife and slipped it into his belt. “You sure Mrs Scraggs won’t mind?”
“Not as long as you return it. What do you want it for?”
“It’s just an old book,” said Wyrd. “Osprey borrowed it from the Empress Honoria. A couple of the pages have got stuck together.”
“That’s promotion for you,” said Wenda, ironically. “One moment you’re a giant-killer, the next you’re a librarian.”
“You know Osprey,” grinned Wyrd. “He doesn’t want me getting above myself.”
“Don’t forget to bring it back,” said Wenda to his departing back. “That’s one of Mrs Scraggs’ best knives. So mind what you say to it.”
It was only later that Wyrd wondered what she had meant. Mind what you say to it? He must remember to ask Wenda about that sometime. Anyway, back in Osprey’s study, Wyrd concentrated on making the witchen knife as short and sharp as possible. He used it to cut away at the pages, taking care not to tear them. Eventually, the leaves of the book separated.
Wyrd began to read the final chapter of Theodosius’s life, and what he saw made his eyes widen.
23
The Last Days of Theodosius
by Merlin
Theodosius the Great was feeling anything but great. There is little advantage, he mused, in being a legend in your own lifetime – the most powerful man in the world, unchallenged Emperor of Rome, Hammer of the Heathens and Defender of the Christian Faith – if your legs have swollen into hairy balloons and your intestines feel as if they are being molested by a bad-tempered squirrel.
Not many weeks before, Theodosius had been a fine figure of a man. He’d been happy to admire his magnificent, oiled physique in the opulent mirror he had had erected over his imperial bed, amusingly decorated with the skulls of kings and warlords he had conquered in battle or enjoyed the fun of executing.
Over the last few weeks, though, his legs had swollen with the dropsy while the rest of his body had mysteriously shrunk. Surplus skin hung off him now, as dry and mottled as old parchment. If he’d had the energy, he would have ordered someone to break that damned mirror. And now, overnight, his bowels had turned to bilgewater.
He shifted painfully on his mattress. It felt lumpy, even though he had ordered it to be stuffed with feathers from the finest Thracian flamingoes and body grease from the plumpest eunuchs of Cappadocia. His bed, which was gold of the highest quality – mined by delinquent dwarves in the Dolaucothi mines of Western Britannia but carved by the educated elves of Transylvania – stood on a marble platform (he had chosen the marble himself from a quarry recently opened in some godforsaken hill village called Carrara). As for the rest of the bedroom, he had imported it – erotic columns and all – from his previous palace in Constantinople.
But luxury was of little consequence if there was no impressionable young woman with whom to share it. Not that he was in the ideal condition to do anything to her. As he lay dying at the age of forty-nine, he felt as amorous as a rotting peach.
Old memories itched like mosquito bites. Scratch them and most led to bloodshed.
He allowed his concentration to wander back over both his unhappy marriages. His first had been to the society beauty Aelia Flaccilla. She had looked all right in her pictures but had turned out to have an expensive shopping habit, a whinny for a voice and an annoying tendency to scream obscenities at him in public whenever she thought he had slighted her, which was all the time.
At least she had managed to bear him two sons before dying in childbirth. For that last mercy, he was grateful to his daughter Pulcheria, who had outlived her mother by only a few hours, saving him a small fortune in clothing, cosmetics and earplugs.
Then there had been the plain but immaculately well-born Gallia. She had failed to provide a son and then had had the effrontery to present him with an ugly daughter, Aelia Placida, who had unfortunately lived.
After that birth, Gallia informed Theodosius that his breath smelt and demanded they sleep in separate bedrooms. He was only too happy to accommodate her, since by now his taste in the fair sex lay in those much younger and less querulous.
The one enduring compensation of marrying Gallia was that she had – as the daughter of the old, respected but remarkably boring Emperor Valentinian I – helped secure him the loyalty of the legions. As long as the soldiers were paid, they didn’t care if Theodosius had halitosis or not.
Throughout both marriages, there had been mistresses, willing and unwilling. Among the most pleasantly pliant had been a recent concubine, a lissome twenty-year-old called Patricia Flavius Junius. She had told him she was tired of being used as breeding stock by her husband, King Salamon of Armorica, a small and insignificant kingdom sometimes known as Lesser Britannia, in the distant, north-western part of Gallia.
She had spent a tiring but adventurous week with the Emperor, before returning to her husband. Theodosius had never fully recovered from those exertions. He wondered if she was pregnant again and if so with whose child.
Not all his female conquests had been as willing. The one who had fought hardest had been Helen, daughter of Eudaf, a British ‘King’, as the b
arbarians of Britannia dared to call their minor chieftains. Theodosius had taken her to bed seven years ago, mainly to teach her a lesson. Oh, how she had screamed!
She had been a pretty little thing, with a tiny waist and a pert, upturned nose. She was half the age of her husband, Magnus Clemens Maximus, to whom she was unaccountably devoted. Maximus was Theodosius’s uncle and liked within his family, though to the Emperor he seemed about as trustworthy as a greased senator.
Maximus had used his inexplicable popularity within Britannia to launch a rebellion against the empire. Theodosius sighed as he remembered how he had had to sort out that mess, putting together an army out of barbarians claiming loyalty to Rome, though in fact their only interest was in being paid. Maximus ran away after being defeated, like the coward he was, but some drunken Visigoths in the pay of Theodosius captured him as he tried to raise a new army in Aquileia.
No longer smiling and overconfident, Maximus begged his nephew for his life, but Theodosius was not a man given to mawkish sentiment. He had his uncle beheaded, along with his infant son, named – hilariously, under the circumstances – Victor.
Theodosius had meant to kill Maximus’s two older boys as well but had been unable to find them, so he had to make do with exhibiting his uncle’s head on a spike and raping his widow, which he did with considerable enthusiasm.
Theodosius heard later that little Helen had committed suicide but not before giving birth to a girl called Severa. Lying in bed, Theodosius tried to guess what had happened to the child. She must be seven years old by now. Theodosius wondered if she was as pretty as her mother or as soft to the touch.
Drifting in and out of salacious consciousness, Theodosius heard someone intoning a prayer above him. He opened his eyes and could dimly see his longtime spiritual advisor, Bishop Ambrose. There was no mistaking that sallow, bearded face or the yellow pate that tried to disguise its baldness with strands of hair combed across it. To Theodosius, they had always looked like anchovies trailed over a melon, though now any thought of food made his gorge rise.
Theodosius wondered if he was receiving the last rites. Every so often, he could distinguish a telltale phrase.
“Through this holy anointing,” chanted Ambrose in his tone-deaf tenor, “may the Lord pardon you whatever sins you have committed.”
Theodosius allowed himself a smile. That was the refreshing thing about Christianity. Whatever outrages you had perpetrated, you had only to confess them to escape eternal punishment. Even when Theodosius had ordered six thousand Thessalonicans to be put to death in a sports arena for daring to question his authority, Bishop Ambrose had eventually forgiven him.
The Emperor was dimly aware of other shadowy shapes surrounding him, visible through a fog of incense. He suddenly remembered a line from his teenage years: they come at you out of the fog.
Was he about to die? From the number of distant relatives who had come to pay their respects, whether they had the slightest respect for him or not, he supposed he must be. So, that filthy pagan Oracle had been right: he would not live to the age of fifty.
Come to think of it, his health had never been the same since he had visited the Oracle. Perhaps something in the Delphic air had created the canker that had been rotting his guts for two years.
As he lay, gasping at the cramps wracking his stomach, he could smell something other than the unpleasantly sweet odour of his own sweat. He sensed the familiar, metallic smell of blood. That told him that if he had the energy to look down at his upper body, he would see a mass of twitching leeches.
Some were so well fed that they were plopping on to the mattress. They left burgeoning wounds that the medics did their best to staunch.
The doctors had assured him that the leeches would remove toxins from his body and prevent blood clots. They had not bothered to inform Theodosius that they would leave him more helpless than a newborn babe at a papal orgy.
The Emperor noticed that his two sons had come to stand beside the bed. Theodosius had never cared for Arcadius, the older of the two. He was a good-looking young man, with blond curls in the Roman style, but lazy. He hadn’t even shown any emotion when Theodosius had told him he was to be Emperor of the East. It was as if Theodosius was casually passing on one of his old togas. Still, Arcadius was a handsome enough boy. He’d look good on the coins.
The Emperor thought how similar he himself must have appeared at the age of twenty-two, when he had accompanied his father to distant, malodorous Britannia and had had his first taste of battle.
His memory wandered to the time he had nearly perished at the foot of Hadrian’s Wall. Before he saw it, Roman propaganda had led Theodosius to expect a huge defensive fortification made of stone, twenty foot high and ten foot wide, stretching eighty miles across the north of Roman-occupied Britannia, for purposes of defence against land-grabbing Picts from the north.
The reality was less impressive. The wall was over two hundred years old, and looked it. Sections were falling down. Some had never been built to a high enough standard. At a few points the wall was only four foot thick and ten foot tall. Where there was no local stone, turf had been piled on turf – hardly a daunting barrier to marauding Picts, unless they happened to be midgets, and easily impressed midgets at that.
Theodosius’s father had been one of Rome’s foremost generals under the Emperor Valentinian I and was more than a bit miffed at being dispatched to the cold northern wastes of Albion.
Arriving at Hadrian’s Wall, Theodosius’s father saw at once that his predecessors had allowed standards to slip. Either because he was grumpy about the cold or because he was eager to exert his authority, he had his soldiers dig pits and fill them with brambles and briars, to impede any enemy charge. Then he ordered that ground be cleared for a hundred yards to the north, to prevent barbarians from gathering unseen to launch an attack.
In his mind, Theodosius could still hear the soldiers grumbling in a multiplicity of languages. He could understand a few snatches of conversation:
“We came here to fight, not dig.”
“Who is this general, anyway? What’s he ever done?”
He recalled with particular clarity the comment from one old hand that haunted him ever afterwards:
“What does it matter? You never see them at a distance, anyway. They come at you out of the fog.”
The old hand had been correct. That was exactly how the Picts had behaved. They’d waited for one of those thick, murky, flesh-creeping mists that descended on Hadrian’s Wall in the early morning and shrouded visibility to a few feet. Theodosius heard the Picts long before he saw them. He tried to guess how many there were of them. Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? It was impossible to tell, until they loomed out of the swirling fog.
Theodosius had been warned that Picts were savages. But even so, he was unprepared for their ferocity as they attacked the wall at its most vulnerable point. Also, the way they smelt. Roman baths were an alien concept to them, in more ways than one.
His father had stationed himself there, with his best men, anticipating that this was where the barbarians would strike. But his father had expected only a few score attackers, and there were hundreds of the brutes, all armed to their rotting, malodorous teeth.
Pictish swords were shorter and narrower than Roman ones, but that did not make them less effective at stabbing and maiming. Pictish spears were long – and serrated to cause maximum damage. When the barbarians attacked, they were not the angry, undisciplined warthogs that Theodosius had been led to expect – though, admittedly, their breath stank of warthog, mixed with fat from the old, diseased sheep they bafflingly regarded as a delicacy.
They advanced in three lines. In front were the swordsmen and behind them two lines of spear-warriors, holding the shafts with both hands and turning their left shoulder towards the enemy. On that shoulder was a small shield. They were no disorganised rabble, but a disciplined army be
nt on carnage and, by the look on their unsavoury faces, homosexual rape.
Behind these lines were crudely made wooden chariots drawn by ugly, Pictish horses, but these were used not as the Iceni rebel Boudicca had done – as war-chariots driven to strike the imperial enemy first, run them over and generally show the unacceptable face of anti-Roman road rage – but to bring reinforcements to wherever the attack was succeeding best.
When the attack came, it was a shock, not least because of the sudden din from the Picts’ war trumpets and their equally terrifying appearance. Theodosius had heard that the barbarians tattooed their bodies with woad – it was this practice that had given them the Roman name of Pictii, ‘the painted ones’. No one had warned him about their lewd taste in illustration or the foul stench of their warpaint – a horrifying mixture of sulphur and urine, which made the warriors smell as if they had been disgorged from the cesspits of Hell.
Theodosius had been equally unprepared for the fact that women fought alongside men, as barebreasted as the males, or that their tribal markings covered their bodies. The Picts attacked wearing only breeches or a loincloth, revealing not only their morally reprehensible tattoos but also stomach-turning scars from previous battles.
The first wave of Pictish warriors knocked Theodosius backwards off the wall, along with many others, and for a moment he thought he was finished. A huge, red-bearded Pict with a more than usually disgusting tattoo of a woman copulating with a dragon threw him to the ground and was looming over him with a sword, clearly in a mood to add his head to the skulls hanging from his belt, when the bleeding tip of a spear emerged through his chest. The Pict collapsed forward on to the boy, winding him.
Theodosius was helped to his feet by his father, who had crept up behind the ruffian to administer the mortal thrust. Theodosius still remembered the biblical inscription in Latin carved into the blade of his father’s sword. It read: ‘Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be scattered’.
“Why do they hate us?” Theodosius gasped.
