EMPIRE OF SHADES

by Gordon Doherty

  He rounded the mount to a halt before Pavo and Sura. ‘The announcement is done? Where is Julius? Where is the emperor?’ he panted, wide-eyed. ‘We have to act, fast – the outriding scouts reported a vast dust plume rising from the western hills: Fritigern’s horde is on the move from Scupi – and coming this way at great haste.’

  Julius returned to his villa, his spirits high. He imagined every single one of the deported Goths like a coin dripping into full vaults. And the ones who had been cut down in the fracas? They were more like gold chalices – every Gothic death a treasure to be savoured. And the word echoing around the streets now – that Fritigern was on the march – was like a prize from the gods. Already, the drum of boots and martial shouts were ringing out as the legions hastily prepared to move out to meet this threat. But before he set off with them to harvest many more Gothic lives, he had some unfinished business to settle.

  He threw down his black helm onto a couch and hastily unbuckled his cuirass, letting it crash to the floor. With a groan, he hoisted the cellar trapdoor up and flitted down the steps, then beheld the pulp-faced Goth tied to a chair at the other end of the cellar. The man’s swollen eyes were like weeping fruits, his nose flat, the nostrils encrusted with dried blood trails that ran to his chin. Fritigern’s emissary had been directed to him during the emperor’s period of illness. The cur had bleated of Fritigern’s willingness to enter talks. Nobody needed to hear such distractions now.

  The unseeing fellow’s head jerked as he heard Julius approach. ‘Please, hear me at least. Thousands of lives might depend on-’

  Crack! Julius’ fist hammered against the man’s jaw, breaking it. He stuffed a filthy rag in the man’s mouth to stifle his whimpers of pain.

  ‘Enough games,’ Julius growled, drawing his spatha and positioning it vertically, the tip above the emissary’s collar bone. ‘Your kin will die in their thousands in the days to come, and I will have my share of their blood.’

  With a sharp thrust, Julius plunged the blade down to the hilt. The Gothic emissary’s head shot back, the filthy rag falling free, his mouth agape in a final spasm of pain.

  Chapter 16

  Only days after Emperor Theodosius’ return to health, the great turf camp of Thessalonica shed its army entire. To the clarion call of several hundred buccinae and the backdrop of a dawn sun that dripped fire, the reborn legions of the east poured into the spring-green meadows of Macedonia.

  A squadron of exploratores riders sped ahead to comb the route of the march. The rest moved in a thick marching line, boasting seventeen thousand foot and more than a thousand horse. The Flavia Felix and the four other pristine Pannonian comitatenses legions led the way, iron scales blinding, spear-hafts painted in red and white bands as they crunched westwards along the Via Egnatia, their fang-mouthed bronze draco standards bobbing menacingly. The Emperor Theodosius, now full of health and vigour once more rode just behind this group, shielded by his Lancearii Auxilium Palatinum legion who carried golden Chi-Rho topped labarum standards, and a knot of chanting priests. The emperor wore a silver helm, a purple cape and white armour over a purple tunic. Theodosius’ sacrum consistorium, Bacurius, Julius, Saturninus and Modares, rode near their emperor. The three other palace legions that had been rejuvenated in this last year came next: the Hiberi with their fierce golden lion shields, the Nervii with their black helms and red-star shields and the Fortenses under their sapphire sun banner. The five sparkling comitatenses legions of the Egyptian Field Army formed the rear, faces hugged with riveted, ridged helms sporting thick nose guards, their bodies scaled in bronze that flickered like molten gold in the sunlight. Bacurius’ rejuvenated Scholae Palatinae cavalrymen screened the left and the right of the infantry front. So far only these two five-hundred strong wings of horsemen in beetle-black armour had been raised and trained under the old Scutarii banner, but their presence was most welcome.

  Midway down the column and to the right of the infantry elite the limitanei marched, like tarnished coins. The Claudia and the Gemina were somewhat duller in their older mail and less ornate helms. More, the Claudia had the unenviable task of shielding the wagon and mule train. Regardless, Opis and the Gemina aquilifer held their standards high and proud, the polished silver eagle standards catching the fiery sunlight.

  Pavo marched at the Claudia’s head. It had been a long winter in Thessalonica, and the reassuring weight of his mail vest, iron helm and leather boots, the smell of oil on his freshly cleaned armour and the bite of shield and pack into his shoulders comforted him in some small way. By his side, he sensed not only his brothers, but the army of shades once more. Had it not been the road to Adrianople when last the Claudia had marched as part of a true campaign army like this?

  Pavo smiled for a moment as he thought of old comrades. He looked to his left, through the regular legionary squares to the auxiliaries mirroring the Claudia’s position on the other side of the column: there was a turma of twelve mounted Lancearii, some foot scouts, a few centuries of funditores and Eriulf’s pitiful handful of Gothic soldiers, now downgraded to mere auxiliaries – even lower in status than the limitanei.

  He saw, through the forest of vertical spears and the swirl of marching dust, the Gothic reiks’ face. Stony, sober, eyes hard on the road ahead. Humiliated, deceived, robbed of his people, the man had been a shell since the day the Egyptian boats had come. Pavo had spent a long evening with him two nights ago. They had drunk barley beer brewed in the shore camp. Eriulf was quiet, almost mute, and so Pavo took it upon himself to find words that might help. He had told him of his time as a slave, of how he understood the sense of hopelessness that came in such a situation where a master could take what he wished from you and you could do nothing in response. Stay strong, he had told the reiks, as I did. Things can come good. Modares came into the service of the empire just a short time ago, and now there are few who can tell him what to do. Show the emperor your guile and courage in this campaign and you too can rise like Modares. And then, perhaps, you can be the one to order the return of your people from Egypt. And Julius? His reign as the emperor’s voice is over.

  ‘People show their grief in different ways,’ Sura said quietly, marching by Pavo’s side.

  ‘Aye, they do,’ Pavo replied, looking a little further back to the small clutch of wagons that trailed the auxiliary units – archers, lightly armour javelin troops and spearmen wearing old and hotchpotch armour. There, on the driver’s berth of one vehicle, sat Runa, swaddled in a linen shawl. Unlike Eriulf, she had wept openly, allowing her grief to pour from her. She and Pavo had been together almost every night since the Egyptian boats had departed. He cradled her, whispered words of comfort to her and then, when that need came into her eyes, they would topple onto the fleece-lined floor of her tent, locked together. When we make love, it is like a sweet breath of oblivion, she had panted in the moments before they had climaxed last night.

  They marched on for four days along the long-neglected highway, the spring heat sapping the energy from their legs and the mild breeze causing the bronze draco standards to drone and their flame-coloured cloth tails to dance, the sense of isolation growing as they passed deserted farmsteads, burnt-out grain warehouses and fortlets spotted with grass tufts sprouting from their long-abandoned parapets. The second day was the most tense – Modares’ estimate that they would meet the Goths head on around this time had every soldier moving a little more slowly, eyes a little more watchful, every breath of wind and animal call causing hearts to hammer. But they found nothing. Saw nobody.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ Libo grumbled, breaking up the crunch-crunch of boots and the trilling cicada song. ‘We should have sighted them by now.’

  ‘Maybe they’re behind us,’ Centurion Trupo muttered.

  The thought crept over Pavo’s skin like ants. ‘No, they can’t circumvent this route. There’s no other way a horde could move towards Thessalonica, not with the mountains. ‘And look,’ he pointed to the roadsides, ‘the grass would be tra
mpled flat, the earth gouged with boot and hoof prints, had they sped through this way even faster than Modares’ predicted.’

  At low light on the fourth day, they came to a brown ridge that ran across their path like a natural rampart – bare apart from green studs of shrub. The ridge stretched and tapered all the way to the southern horizon. But to the north it rose, sharply, to become a chain of tall mountains, the slopes thickly wooded and the highest tips sparkling white. The Via Egnatia ran on up the ridge just shy of the mountainous section, and disappeared over it.

  ‘That’s it, the Scupi Ridge,’ Rectus muttered. ‘Plains and croplands lie on the other side, in a long valley running north all the way to the city of Scupi itself. The Goths have to be over there.’

  ‘Then we should go no further, not today,’ Magister Militum Julius mused, slowing his horse as he overheard Rectus’ comment. ‘Here we have good camping ground, and we control the road. We can station men on the brow of that ridge to watch for any Gothic approach from the flats beyond.’ His head shifted around in search of further rationale. A small brook trickled down from the mountain chain, babbling and sparkling as it became a gentle waterfall near the roadside. ‘And we have water.’

  Pavo instantly wanted to disagree with the man – more a personal issue than a strategic one. He bit his tongue, but there was something odd about the scene. The brown ridge and the looming mountains leered at him like a smug man holding a secret behind pursed lips. Then he saw it: high up on the mountain, an exposed face of naked rock, splashed with the deep orange of sunset, seemed to ripple like a sail. Bands of ghostly, pale light drifted lazily across the bluff, over and over. Reflections. ‘There’s a lake up there,’ he realised, following the winding path of the brook uphill.

  ‘And it’d serve as a good lookout post too,’ Sura said. ‘We should station men up there.’

  ‘Aye,’ Pavo muttered, his eyes falling to the small waterfall by the road again: oddly, the rock down which the water cascaded was jagged and craggy – not worn-smooth and dotted with pale lichen like most age-old falls that dotted the countryside.

  But before the itch in his mind could be scratched, buccinae blared out the order to halt and make camp.

  As the column dissolved and the campworks began, Pavo saw Modares, eyeing the landscape with less trust than Julius. ‘Tell me, Tribunus,’ he asked Pavo without looking at him, ‘Is the watch up there strong enough?’ he ran his index finger along the spine of the Scupi Ridge. Two centuries of the Fortenses had taken up position along that low height, manning it as if it was an outer bastion of the emerging camp.

  ‘A double watch, by the looks of it,’ Pavo mused. ‘A wise move.’ He looked again up to the mountain heights and the eerie bands of light on the high bluff. ‘We should have a strong watch up there too,’ he said, remembering Sura’s earlier thoughts.

  ‘Aye, up there you’d see any movement from miles away,’ Modares agreed. ‘I said the same to Julius.’ He made a low grunting noise, shooting a sideways glance across the camp works towards the black-garbed Magister Militum. ‘But he made some remark about drinking a pig’s piss before he’d take advice from a Goth.’

  Pavo struggled to suppress his frustrations. He gazed at Julius, scowling over the camp works as if in search for complaint, and made a note to himself to petition the general before the light faded: even a century of Claudia men up at the lake would be better than nothing. ‘Grim things happened to Julius, and I have a grain of sympathy. But his actions since have been notorious. His blind hatred will be the death of him one day.’ But Modares was barely listening, Pavo realised.

  ‘Two days,’ the Gothic general mused, still eyeing the ridge moodily. ‘The scouts saw the dust cloud moving south from Scupi. By my reckoning, we should have sighted them within two days.’

  ‘You doubt your own judgement?’ Pavo asked.

  Modares sighed heavily. ‘Before coming to Thessalonica I had never before been near the sea. Oceans and their ways were a mystery to me. I bought a fish from the market a few days after my arrival. Sea Bream. It stank. The fishmonger told me it was normal for fish of such quality to smell strongly. I paid handsomely for it, and took it home because I wanted to believe that I had bought wisely. When I got home, it stank even worse. The local cat who had befriended me didn’t even try to investigate what I had brought home – normally he would have my hand off for anything remotely resembling food. On I went, cooked it in the small stove then settled down to eat it. By the old gods and the new, it was disgusting, and I spent the next day and a half on the latrine.’ He chuckled, ‘that’s why I was in a particularly grim mood the first time we met. But I should have learned to trust my instinct, to see through the veil of blind hope. That fish stank.’ He pointed again at the ridge, tracing a finger back and forth across it. ‘So does this.’ He grumbled and spat into the earth. ‘My men saw their dust cloud on the move, somewhere beyond that ridge – on the flats. A fair way north, granted, but they were lumbering south and I was sure they would have covered that ground by now, crossed this range and, well,’ he glanced back along the Via Egnatia whence the Roman column had come, ‘I don’t know.’

  A distant drumming of hooves turned the pair’s heads: twelve exploratores were speeding off up the road, approaching the low crest of the Scupi Ridge. ‘They’ll tell us soon enough,’ Modares sighed.

  Pavo remembered that evening in the Rhodope quarry, when he had spotted Reiks Ortwin’s camp. ‘If the God of the Light is with us,’ he mused, ‘the campfires will give his position away.’

  Modares frowned. ‘Hmm? Don’t make the mistake of comparing Fritigern with Ortwin. As different as a war horse to a toad.’

  Speratus the explorator lay flat in the saddle, coaxing his chestnut stallion onwards in a gallop with whispered words in the beast’s ear. He clasped a hand to his felt cap to keep it on his head as they went, and kept his eyes on the land. The light was poor now, but an explorator’s eye was sharper than a blade. The Scupi flats were long and narrow – like the hull of a giant galley, edged west and east by hills and mountains. He scanned the dusty Scupi road from near to the northern horizon and back again. Not a sign of tracks of any sort – no prints, no droppings, wheel ruts in the dust. Nothing. The horde had to be further north. Had to be.

  His stallion’s hide was slick with lather now and he eased off, knowing the creature well enough to recognise its limits. He slid from the saddle to ease the mount’s burden for a while, taking out a bar of hard tack and snapping it in two, feeding the stallion one piece and eating the other. The stallion traipsed over to a gentle brook and gulped hungrily at the water there. Speratus crouched by the brook side too, upstream of his mount, to fill his drinking skin. He saw his narrow features in the pale reflection, the sickle moon hanging behind him like a stranger. When his mount stopped drinking, he noticed all of a sudden how deathly quiet the flatlands were, and felt a chill creeping under his woollen cloak. From some way off to his left, he heard the distant echo of a comrade’s hooves, and this comforted him a mite. He laughed, stood and drank the crisp, refreshing brook water, then stroked his stallion’s muzzle. ‘How long have we ridden together? In the early days we were both like cats – jumping at the slightest noise. Now, you have nerves of steel! What is your secret?’

  The horse spluttered and shook its head. Speratus laughed again, but caught the sound in his throat… as a crackle of falling scree sounded. The entire side of his body crept with a shiver again and he swung to the noise. The mountains there, lining the eastern side of the Scupi flats, were still and silent, an arrowshot away. He looked up their sides, a mix of shadow and dark blue now that twilight had descended. The shadows were an explorator’s worst enemy. Darkness that even his owl-sharp eyes could not penetrate. And the more he stared at the ribbons of black higher up on the mountains, the more the shadows taunted him. His stallion pawed at the ground, agitated.

  ‘What’s wrong, boy?’ he whispered, seeing how the beast’s attentions were on the
mountains too. The longer he stared at the shadows up there, the more his eyes played tricks, making the dark bands seem to move and roil. He traced his gaze southwards, to the point where the mountains tapered down to become the Scupi Ridge. The legions waited back there, behind the ridge. Now he looked down again at the print-free road underfoot and up at the heights again, his mind taunting him with half-formed ideas.

  When a pair of hands slammed down on his shoulders, Speratus almost purged his bowels into his loincloth. Barely strangling a scream, he swung to see a fellow rider, face agape with excitement. ‘Look,’ the other exclaimed, pointing northwards.

  Stifling curse words, Speratus gazed north and saw it: ever-so-faint bubbles of orange light coming to life just as darkness claimed the day. ‘The horde,’ he whispered. ‘They’ve made little progress southwards from Scupi. They’re still far to the north!’

  ‘Hmm?’ Julius grunted, tearing at salted meat and not even standing or looking Pavo in the eye.

  ‘Permission to send a century of my men up the slopes of that mountain. We’ll gain an even better view of the Scupi flats beyond the ridge up there,’ Pavo repeated.

  Julius’ shoulders jostled with dark laughter, his craggy face uplit by the campfire. ‘Your lot are trouble,’ he said. ‘Spent too long with the Goths over the river, I’d say. The answer is no.’

  ‘Sir, it’s dark now and my instincts are telling me we should put a few pairs of eyes up there, that is all,’ Pavo protested. ‘If not my men then some from another regiment.’