The army passed through the city’s elaborate western defences, the old Constantinian Wall and then the double line of walls built by the Emperor Theodosius, and emerged from the Golden Gate. This was the main ceremonial entrance to the city, made from blocks of sparkling white marble in the form of a triumphal arch.
It was also the gate via which I had first entered Constantinople with my mother, almost forty-five years gone. As always, the thought of her filled me with sorrow. I closed my eyes until the wagon had rumbled well past the gate.
I would never see it, or the city, again.
The army marched on to Salona, through the bleak plains of Thrace, baked dry and hard by the summer sun. I was reminded me of the wastelands of Perugia, strangled by the heat while its people died of thirst and starvation. Fortunately our troops were well-supplied, and suffered none of the privations of previous campaigns.
After a two-week march, our army crossed into Dalmatia at a leisurely pace and reached Salona unscathed, without glimpsing any sign of the enemy. Dalmatia was once occupied by the Goths, but had abandoned much of the country and their troops to Italy, leaving just a few scattered garrisons.
Occasionally we marched past one of their outposts, but the men inside wisely stayed behind their high walls and strong gates.
“Two hundred miles from Constantinople,” grumbled Arthur after the army pitched camp a day’s march from the coast, “and all I have to show for it is saddle sores. Caledfwlch is quiet in her scabbard.”
“And will remain so for a while yet,” I said cheerfully, “it is a long way to Italy. A very long way. At the speed Narses likes to march, the Goths may have died of old age before you reach Ravenna.”
Steel hissed on oiled leather as Arthur slowly drew Caledfwlch. “You will see action before me,” he said, offering me the sword, hilt-first, “perhaps you should take her back. She has never failed you in battle.”
The blade of Caesar’s sword gleamed in the half-darkness of early evening. For a second or two I was tempted. It would have been good to feel the worn ivory grip in my hand again, and the familiar weight and balance of the ancient gladius.
“No,” I said, with a great effort of will, “I gave Caledfwlch away, and no longer have any right to it. A plain sword will serve me well enough. Assuming I can find the strength to fight, with a deck heaving under my feet.”
The mere thought of fighting aboard ship was enough to make my stomach clench. I suspected Narses was aware of my sea-sickness, and wanted me to suffer vomiting and loose bowels while the battle raged around me.
Salona was a rich port, the capital of Dalmatia, and had remained loyal to Rome when the Goths overran the rest of the province. The landward gates stood open to welcome our troops, and imperial banners flew from the walls.
My guts gave a twinge when I spotted the masts of our ships clustered in the harbour. I counted thirty-six vessels in all, mostly war galleys, with a few smaller dromons and four fat-bottomed transport ships.
I made my way to the harbour, ignoring the puzzled and occasionally amused looks the citizens gave me. As old soldiers went, I was a fairly unimpressive specimen, puffing and sweating as I fought my way through the busy streets. I had struggled into my old armour – not the fine gear Belisarius gave me, which I had sold off, but a plain knee-length mail coat and a cavalry helmet with dangling cheek-pieces – and was feeling the strain of it, especially around the waist.
John the Sanguinary’s flagship was docked nearest to the harbour, and the largest vessel in the fleet, a sleek war galley gleaming with fresh black and gold paint.
I smelled John before I saw him. He still doused himself in perfume, like a cheap dockside whore, and was standing among a little group of his cronies. Like their chief, all were resplendent in finely-wrought armour and costly silks, and carried expensive swords with gold hilts.
They were also notably young and tall and comely, as though chosen for their physical grace and ability to look grand in military uniform. Next to this pack of brightly coloured starlings, I was an old crow, drab and unsightly.
“Good to see you again, sir,” I said in a loud voice, interrupting their banal chatter. John swung around, a look of annoyance on his darkly handsome features. He hadn’t aged a day since I last met him, outside the gates of Rimini.
“Ah, the tame Briton,” he said in that cold, sneering tone I remembered so well, “Narses told me to expect you. You have a few more grey hairs since we last met, and a bit of extra padding around the middle. Are you pregnant, man, or have you stuffed a cushion down there?”
His cronies laughed at the feeble jest and gave each other knowing looks. Their high-pitched braying grated on my nerves, but I did my best to ignore it.
“My horses are stationed outside the city, sir,” I said patiently, “and are ready to embark whenever you choose.”
“And? What is that to me? I am the admiral of the fleet, not a God-cursed beastmaster, and cannot attend to every minor detail. Have the animals loaded aboard the transports without delay.”
I saluted and wandered away, feeling the heat of his gaze on my back. If he wanted to plunge a dagger into it, here was his opportunity.
As ever, I overrated my importance. John the Sanguinary cared little whether I lived or died, and the faint animosity between us was long-buried in the past. He was an anxious man, entrusted by Narses with the task of relieving the last two major Roman ports in Italy and destroying the Gothic fleet.
Narses’ judgment could not usually be faulted, but I thought he had blundered in choosing John for his admiral, allowing friendship to blind him to the man’s limitations. John was a cavalry officer, and a good one, but had no experience of naval warfare.
That evening I had the Devil’s own job loading my horses aboard the transports, or rather my handlers did. I confined myself to standing on the jetty and cursing their incompetence while they laboured to get the terrified beasts into the barges.
Horses loathe the sea, almost as much as I do, and they had to be lifted aboard with a crane. Frantic with rage and terror, they kicked and bit and lashed out at the handlers, breaking one man’s arm and shattering another’s ribcage. Darkness had fallen before the thing was done, and I was obliged to pay for the injured men to be taken to a sanatorium.
Weary and footsore, I went in search of Arthur and found him eating supper with his men, on the outskirts of the city of white tents that had sprung up outside Salona.
I shared a cup of wine with him, complimented the good discipline and order of his men, and tried to put off the inevitable farewell.
Arthur did it for me. “Until Ravenna, then,” he said suddenly, offering his hand.
I clasped it. “Until Ravenna,” I replied, silently cursing the catch in my voice.
The rest of my night was spent in virtually sleepless dread, haunted by images of burning ships and myself drowning, clawing helplessly at the black waters as they closed over my head; or else visions of Arthur, lost on some misted battlefield, calling feebly for his parents even as his life-blood spilled from a mortal wound.
These merry thoughts occupied me until morning, when the brazen call of trumpets announced the imminent departure of the fleet. Valerian had arrived from Ravenna with his twelve ships, and we were now ready to sail.
“Glory and death,” I muttered as I made my reluctant way down to the harbour, “God spare me from either.”
27.
The familiar twinges of sickness descended on me before my transport had even crawled out of the harbour. She was an ugly, slow-moving vessel, and wallowed low in the water, thanks to the weight of supplies and animals packed into her hull. The terrified shrieking of my horses, cooped up in tiny pens below deck, did nothing to improve my condition.
“This ship is too full,” I complained to the captain, a hard-faced Greek with a jagged scar where his nose used to be, “look how low she rides in the water. She may sink of her own accord without any aid from the Goths.”
“Do your bit to light
en the load, then, you old bugger,” he snarled, “and go and puke over the side. You look green enough. But you won’t do it on my quarterdeck, you hear? Not if you want to keep the skin on your back.”
I struggled down the ladder onto the maindeck and heaved my breakfast over the rail. A group of Cilician sailors stampeded past me, trailing onto the end of a rope and yelling at me to stand aside. I crouched against the side, hand clapped over my mouth, and waited for the boiling chaos in my guts to subside a little.
When I had recovered sufficiently, I stood on shaking legs and looked out to sea. The other transports were keeping pace with us, strung out in a line from north to south. They were also over-full, and laboured through the water with all the grace and speed of a pack of dying turtles.
The rest of the fleet were spread out to the north-west, and divided into squadrons, with the smaller dromons acting as escorts to the galleys. John’s flagship was just visible, a lean black shape knifing easily through the sea at the head of the first squadron.
By my reckoning, Ancona lay more or less directly to the west. We were heading north-west, towards the region of Sena Gallica, a small port town on the Adriatic coast. Unsurprisingly, John the Sanguinary had not confided his battle-plan to me, but I guessed the Gothic fleet had been sighted there.
I remained at my post, rubbing my aching belly and silently begging God to restore my strength: enough, at least, to give a reasonable account of myself in the fight. Terrified of being dragged under if I fell into the sea, I had discarded my mail shirt, and for protection wore only my old cavalry helmet and an iron-rimmed buckler strapped to my left arm.
The Greek captain appeared at my side. “Recovered?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied with a grimace, “the sea has always been my bane. Poseidon must have a grudge against me.”
He gave a mirthless little chuckle. “Got any more questions for me? I noticed you staring at the fleet.”
I looked at him warily, but he seemed friendly enough, and not about to have the skin flayed from my back.
“Well,” I said, pointing to the north, “shouldn’t our galleys be reducing sail? At this rate we’re going to be left behind.”
The bulk of our fleet was indeed speeding away, towards the barely visible line of the Italian coast. It was a bright, blustery Autumn day, and the wind was in their favour.
“Yes,” replied the captain, “won’t we just?”
The hairs bristled on the back of my neck as the import of his words sank in. My reply was cut off as the damned ship gave a sudden lurch, almost bowling me off my feet.
His brawny arm shot out to seize my arm. “Steady,” he said, “can’t have you falling overboard. We’ll have need of every man soon enough, even a sickly land-crawler like you.”
“Bait,” he added before I could ask the obvious question, “our admiral is dangling us before the Goths like a prime bit of meat, in the hope they snap us up.”
I gaped at him, and at the distant blood-red sail of John’s flagship.
“Bastard,” I spat. He was deliberately sacrificing the transports, and me into the bargain.
In hindsight, his strategy was sound. John was directing the fleet according to his soldier’s instincts, deliberately exposing his flank to lure the enemy into a fatal charge.
At the time, with my stomach churning and my blood boiling, I was in no mood to appreciate his clever tactics. The captain, on the other hand, appeared strangely indifferent.
“It was this, or hang,” he said with a crooked grin, “me and my crew are all pirates, and should have gone to the gallows last week. John spared our lives on condition we took service aboard his death-ships.”
“The other transports are the same,” he added, “all crewed by the scum of the sea.”
“If the Goths descend on us, we will all die,” I said.
“Maybe. They might take us prisoner, or we can try and swim for it. We have a small chance. A better chance, at least, than the gallows offers.”
I could do nothing but wait, stranded aboard the lumbering transport with its crew of condemned sea-rats. The remainder of our fleet was almost invisible now, a row of tiny sails bobbing on the far horizon to the north-west.
My hope was that the Goths would refuse John’s bait. Another hour or so passed. I spent the time offering up multitudes of silent prayers, but God is endlessly fickle, and chose to ignore me.
“Enemy sighted!” bawled the look-out from his vantage point at the top of the mainmast, “off the port bow, there!”
I lurched across to the port side of the maindeck, and joined the crewmen staring out to sea, towards the west.
“Look there,” growled a villainous-looking Cilician, all scars and stubble and barely suppressed aggression, “seven orange sails. Galleys, curse them, with a double bank of oars apiece.”
I looked where he pointed, and saw them clear enough. Seven Gothic warships bearing down on us from the west. The wind was against them, but thanks to their oars they were still ploughing through the water at a fair speed.
I made some swift calculations. The enemy ships were of a roughly equal size to our galleys, and probably carried some two score fighting men apiece, besides the crew and oarsmen.
Our transports carried no more than twenty crewmen each. They were a tough-looking set, as pirates tend to be, but hopelessly outnumbered. We couldn’t hope to make much of a fight of it.
The captain had no thoughts of surrender. “Don’t just stand there gawping!” he bawled, “fetch your weapons, you misbegotten sons of pigs, and prepare to repel boarders!”
My heart sank as I watched his men scramble to arm. John hadn’t supplied them with much – why bother wasting decent gear on the condemned? – and most could lay their hands on nothing better than a dagger and light throwing javelin. Five had bows and a sheaf of arrows apiece. There was no armour aboard, and only the captain and his first mate were fortunate enough to have helmets and shields.
I saw frantic activity aboard our fellow transports as the men aboard them prepared to die. The dry heaving in my guts was replaced by the familiar swelling of fear, and I badly needed to void my bladder.
Fear and a desire to piss were preferable to all-consuming sickness, and I felt some of my strength return. Not much, but enough to strike a blow or two before the end.
The steady thump-thump-thump of drums sounded across the water, pounding out the rhythm for the oarsmen aboard the Gothic ships. They were slaves, many of them Roman soldiers taken prisoner during the recent wars. Now they were forced to bring about the doom of their countrymen.
My heart thumped in time with the drums. I could seldom recall feeling so nervous before a fight, but I was ill, and old, and had not seen action for over ten years. Nor had I ever fought at sea, trying to keep my footing on the heaving deck of a ship.
“Javelin-men on the port side,” the captain’s harsh voice barked from above, “archers with me on the foredeck. Move, you steaming piles of dung.”
Bare feet drummed across the planking of the deck as his crew rushed to obey. None seemed to care what I did, so I retreated to the mainmast and rested my back against the wood, hoping it would aid my balance.
Guttural yells and insults drifted across the water. The galleys were closing in, so near I could see the rows of fierce, bearded faces under spiked helmets lining their decks.
The leading ship, also the largest, had a kind of raised tower or castle near the stern. A giant banner displaying two crossed red axes against a black field flew from its timber battlements.
I saw a knot of Gothic officers standing under the banner. One of them, a towering figure in gleaming scale mail and a rich blue cloak, was Indulf, a former mercenary in the Roman army who had defected to the Goths. Totila had made him co-admiral of the fleet.
For all his talents, Totila was a poor judge of character. Indulf was a thief and a pirate, as well as a traitor, and his first instinct was to go for easy plunder instead of following orde
rs.
John the Sanguinary’s ploy had worked. Seeing the bait dangled before his eyes, Indulf had lunged at it like a starving dog, with no thought for the consequences, or the rest of the Roman fleet.
This was small comfort for us, who stood in his way.
“’Ware arrows!” bellowed the first mate. The Gothic archers packed onto the foredeck of the leading galley were bending their bows, aiming upwards to send their shafts sailing high across the water, down on our heads.
I crouched beside the mainmast, raising my pathetic little buckler for all the protection it offered. The thumping of the blasted drums was like thunder in my ears. I was consumed by terror, and struggled to retain control of my straining bladder.
The crew scattered under the lethal hail of arrows. One or two were unlucky. Shrieks of pain swept across the deck. My horses, still crammed into the hold below, heard the dreadful cries and responded in kind. The air filled with the noise of dying men and frightened animals, pounding drums, splashing oars, the zip and hiss of arrows, and the triumphant war-songs of the Goths.
“Shoot!” I heard our captain howl, “give the bastards some of their own gruel!” but resisted the urge to look up: every old soldier knows that is the surest way to receive an arrow in the eye.
The singing of the Goths rose to a great shout, and the rain of arrows ceased. Their flagship was slowly turning about to present her starboard flank to us, so her archers and javelin throwers could aim downwards and sweep our deck clean before boarding.
Seen close to, the enemy flagship was huge. Her maindeck loomed over us, packed with cheering warriors, working themselves up into a killing frenzy.
Four of our men lay scattered about the deck, twitching in their death-throes, bodies feathered with arrows. I observed the flights on the Gothic arrows were dyed red, the kind of irrelevant detail that men often notice in the heat of battle, as a distraction from impending death.
Another storm of arrows engulfed our ship, along with javelins and throwing darts. More screams. Three more of our men were ushered into death’s embrace, and our captain’s flow of orders were abruptly cut off.
Flame of the West Page 15
