by Jack Ludlow
‘Huns!’ was an alarmed cry that issued from several throats, though it had less effect on Senuthius, who replied with what was almost a scoff in the piping voice. ‘Then it is a pity the emperor does not see fit to provide us with more men.’
‘But—’
That changed the tone; Senuthius snapped at him. ‘If they are indeed Huns then I and my fellow landowners will advance when we consider it prudent, for there will be no recompense from Constantinople if we lay down our lives for a few peasants of little worth.’
It had taken Ohannes a great deal longer to get to the same point, but it was just as well he arrived. Flavius had drawn his sword and was loudly threatening Senuthius with the removal of his head if he did not go forward with his men. Some of his retainers moved to protect their master, just as the mare Ohannes was riding waddled in between the boy and those who might harm him.
The youngster had no eyes for them or the threat they represented; he was glaring at Senuthius and beside him again the bishop, who was as ever eying the youngster, flowering yellowing bruises and distended nose notwithstanding, as if he were a tasty meal waiting to be consumed, his lips wet from the salivating.
‘Put up that sword, boy, or I will order my men to kill you.’
‘Do as he says, young sir,’ Ohannes said in a low growl. ‘You cannot overcome such numbers.’
The turmoil on the face of Flavius was a mirror of his tumbling thoughts; was this an accident, an act of caution for fear of the consequences, or was Senuthius deliberately leaving his family exposed? If he was doing so he was being aided and abetted by every man who had brought a sword to this fight, as well as the cleric who brought no more than his crucifix.
Why that should be he was struggling to comprehend, for if he knew there was no love lost between his father and these two men, and a residual dislike of authority in the rest, he could not fathom the depths of the politics involved.
The sounds of fighting, which had filled the air, much louder now he was close to the action, had begun to seriously diminish; the battle was moving away from this position and that could only mean one thing. He spurred his horse once more and aimed it straight at Senuthius, ignoring those who stood in his path, his dark-brown eyes boring into the pale green of the older man, orbs set in a fat, round face topped by thin strands of hair.
The men Senuthius employed tended to be ex-soldiers and so they knew how to deal with such an assault. As a terrified Blastos jumped away for a second time, one grabbed the bridle and hauled hard while a second shoved his spear shaft between the horse’s forelegs, to set Flavius shooting forward as the mount stumbled.
Having fallen off ponies and horses many times the youngster was quick to clear his feet out of his stirrups. He also knew that to fall under the horse would lead to him being crushed, so rather than fight the motion he enhanced it, throwing his weight outwards and launching his body into the air.
If he could save himself from harm in that fashion there was no way to avoid the pain that came from landing on rock-hard ground and he felt the shock as his left shoulder made contact, as well as the immediate pain of a joint that had possibly been dislocated. His mount was over on its side, legs kicking in the air as several men sought by holding its head to keep it still. He did not see Ohannes slip off his mare to come to his aid but he did hear Senuthius order his men to leave Flavius be, his voice ringing out as he said to all assembled:
‘Never let it be said that a man of my standing makes war on children.’
The hands that began to lift him were gentle and Ohannes’s solicitous voice was in his ear asking him how badly he was injured.
‘Not hurt, not hurt,’ came the reply, which had about it a snuffling sob that gave a lie to the words, made more so by the fact that his nose was once more bleeding copiously.
‘You,’ Senuthius called. ‘I take it you are a servant of the family Belisarius?’
‘I am, sir.’
‘Then take this young miscreant away from here before I find I cannot restrain men he has so insolently insulted from slicing his gizzard.’
Helped to his feet, one hand holding a right arm now feeling numb and useless, Flavius lifted his head and glared at Senuthius. If the fleshy senator saw the look of pure hate it did nothing to affect his demeanour and his voice was steady as he spoke to those who now surrounded him.
‘Time for us to sound the advance, I think.’
It was a much-chastened Flavius Belisarius, needing one good arm to support the other and with the taste of blood still in his mouth, who eventually followed in the wake of the advancing militia, men who did so without the need to raise or employ a weapon. The raiders had made it to their boats and were now out on the river, there to jeer and bare their arses as the first of their enemies came to the bank or to hold up as trophies the shields and armour they had taken from their soldier victims.
In moving forward the militia had passed the mutilated bodies of the men of the imperial cohort, few of whom had survived. If they had they were now on the water, destined to be thrown out midstream to drown or to be taken north as slaves. Flavius and Ohannes found the bodies of the centurion and his three sons in a tight cluster not far from the riverbank and it was only later, in a visualisation that would come back to haunt him throughout his life, that Flavius realised how his siblings had sought to protect their father, putting their persons before him in a bid to keep him alive and in control of his cohort and the battle.
It was a dream that would recur often at night, but also a vision that would come to him unbidden during many a day as he recreated time and again the scene, without ever being sure he had the right of it. He would remember with clarity that all four were covered in blood and had multiple wounds, deep cuts to arms and body, so that it was impossible to know which blow was the one to prove fatal, while around them, in ground made soggy by so much gore, lay a dozen corpses of the men they had slain, evidence that they had not been cheaply overcome; the barbarians who had escaped would be jubilant but on this spot they had paid a heavy price to kill the men of the Belisarius family.
Flavius fell weeping to his knees and if he had suffered mental turmoil before this moment it was as nothing to what he was going through now, that jumbled up with the seeking of a reason why this should have happened. Being alive for fourteen summers did not prepare anyone for this, the sudden realisation that all the pillars that supported his life, barring his absent mother, were gone.
‘We must get a cart, young sir, and take their bodies home to be laid out for burial.’
Ohannes’s soft injunction took time to penetrate the troubled mind of the kneeling youth and when it did that brought forth an image of the slimy, pederast bishop Gregory Blastos overseeing the funeral rites, a thought at which Flavius rebelled.
If Senuthius had betrayed his family then he had done so with the blessing of a man who did not deserve the ecclesiastical title he wore. Added to that, Blastos would say Mass according to the Monophysite creed, an interpretation of gospel and the nature of God to which his father had never subscribed.
Decimus Belisarius had worn his Christian faith as a badge of honour and that permeated his family. That said, he had been sure that if salvation existed there were more routes to grace than the one solely provided by a church that was so often corrupt, with prelates and priests who seemed to care more for their own comfort than that of God’s flock. It had also become more Eastern and mystical, less the pure faith into which he had happily been subsumed as a young man.
Proud to call himself a Roman he had allowed himself no truck with the way the empire leant towards the Greek in both language and behaviour, refusing to allow anyone to address him as kentarchos instead of centurion, quick to remind any person unwise enough to use that military title of the nature of the domain of which they were part. It was not a Greek polity even if a high proportion of the population were of that race; it was Roman and had been, whether pagan or Christian, before the dawning of the Augustan age
!
Descended from barbarian stock himself and raised outside the Christian faith – he had first taken the Eucharist as a soldier – Decimus had embraced the empire and its doctrines with a full heart and mind, to become more Roman than the citizens of the ancient city itself. It had become a creed, if not an obsession, to be seen so, to show those over whom he held sway that there was a better way to act, a true Roman way.
It was that which coloured the bereaved youngster’s thinking as he finally replied to Ohannes, his voice a hiss. ‘I wish them to be left here.’
‘What!’ Ohannes replied, clearly shocked that the boy could consider such a thing for his loved ones. ‘So the crows can peck their eyes out?’
With some effort and still on his knees Flavius scrabbled forward to ensure their eyes were closed and to kiss each blood-coated cheek in turn, his father the last and longest, mouthing as he did so a quiet prayer, before whispering a wish based on many intimate moments he had shared with the object of his supplications.
Decimus Belisarius had never ceased to remind his offspring of their birthright as full Roman citizens, a gift, to his thinking, beyond price and that included the rituals of what had been a pagan society, one he had refused to condemn as worse than its Christian successor. Added to that was an oft-expressed wish to die like one.
‘I want them to have a proper Roman funeral, it is for that my father would have wished, something of which he spoke many times.’ Ohannes was confused as Flavius continued, a fact made obvious by his silence. ‘I will remain with them and pray for their souls. You I would ask to return to the villa – the servants will come back as soon as they know the threat has receded. Fetch the males to this place and bring with them saws and axes.’
‘In God’s name, why?’
The reply was firm for the first time since the boy had fallen to his knees, forced through his troubled larynx. ‘So they can be given the funeral rites of Romans. Fetch pitch too, and oil as well as terebinthus. I intend that a pyre should be built and that they should be laid upon it and cremated.’
‘Am I allowed to say, young sir, that such a thing is blasphemous and is forbidden?’
‘Say nothing to anyone!’ Flavius rasped. ‘Bring what I ask here for this is where I want their ashes to remain. As for blasphemy, is not the bishop who resides in his basilica the very living expression of that sin? I would not have that swine say a single word over their bodies, for any prayer from him is a profanity.’
‘Sir, I—’
The youngster cut across Ohannes and he did so looking him hard in the eye, though his voice lacked any note of censure, being gentle.
‘You must do as I ask, for I am master of the house now and though you are a freeman, you’re still a family retainer. I cannot command you as I would a slave to obey but I can ask you, as one who was loyal to my father and his sons, to do for him what I insist he would have wished.’
‘You could be consigning them to hell.’
‘God, I am sure, will forgive me, and how can he place against their salvation an act of which they have no part? Better he be entreated over by those who esteemed him than a man he thought an apostate.’
All around them the militiamen were moving enemy bodies, having first searched them for booty, before carrying them to the riverbank and throwing them into the flowing waters, which would take them downriver to rest on some sandbank as carrion, perhaps even to be carried all the way into the Euxine Sea as food for the fish. The soldiers Decimus had led were being piled up like slaughtered cattle. One group approached Flavius to remove those killed by members of his family and, that completed, hinted they would help with the four bodies over which he was mourning, only to recoil at his glare, as well as his grating command to get out of his sight.
There he knelt praying quietly as the sun began a slow, shadow-making descent. He was obliged to take from his relatives anything of value they had carried into battle, rings and personal talismans, most tellingly his father’s keys. Even without any of the twelve books to hand, the oft-memorised reflections of Marcus Aurelius came forth, to remind him of the transience of existence, that death comes to us all and what comes from nature will return to it.
Normally a source of consolation, even such a wise voice failed to ease his feelings now and he wept until no more tears would come.
CHAPTER FOUR
As he made his way back to the villa, Ohannes passed men digging a long trench, which he assumed to be a communal grave, for the raiders had indulged in much casual slaughter of any citizens they had come across. As he strode along he reasoned that with so many farms now without owners or folk to occupy what houses still stood, there must close by each be a pile of already cut timber.
On arrival at the family villa he found that the household slaves had indeed returned and they were first ordered to cast into the road the bodies of the two thieves, as much to see if anyone would claim them as to clear the entrances, this while the poor guard who had been murdered was laid out in the servants’ quarters, there to remain until his relatives, if he had any, came to claim him.
That done he led the male staff, freedmen and slaves alike, back to where their master had met his end, gathering on the way such timber as they came across, carrying it to a spot near to where Flavius still knelt, before sending them to scour for more. The wood, both gathered and cut down, was raised into a decent pyre onto which, once it was soaked in inflammables, the four bodies were laid, Flavius, unable to take part in any lifting, only able to watch.
An ex-soldier never went anywhere without his flints and it was Ohannes who gathered the long, dry grass and kindling that allowed him to ignite some straw then make that into a proper fire. One cloth-covered pole was soaked in oil and resin and this was handed to Flavius who stood in silent prayer before setting it alight.
Devotions complete he walked to the edge of the pyre where he thrust the torch into the heart of the timber. The soaked brushwood at the base showed an immediate flame, then the first of the logs ignited and soon the blaze began to spread and lick upwards, this as the sun dipped out of sight in the west, leaving a clear sky and a gilded edge to the horizon, that disappearing by the time the pyre was fully alight.
The darkness, aided by a palpable wind, made the flames appear furious as with red and orange flicks they began to wrap themselves around the quartet of bodies, sparks emerging from any unseasoned wood to fly into the night air. If the flames appeared angry, that was as nothing to the feelings of Flavius Belisarius, who saw in the shapes created the faces of the men who had betrayed his family, and there and then he swore two things.
He would erect here an obelisk to his father and brothers inscribed with their names and the manner of their demise. The second vow was even more heartfelt and filled his thoughts as he made his way, with a heavy tread, back to the Belisarius villa: the creatures that had caused their deaths would suffer a worse fate.
On his return home, the silence drove home the loss in an even more telling way than either the sight of the mutilated bodies or the act of cremation. From a busy and raucous household-cum-military-headquarters it was now as silent as what it had become, a graveyard if not of actual corpses, certainly of hopes, aspirations and activity. Just the day before the building had resounded with the sound of endless callers: soldiers seeking orders, citizenry in search of advantage or more often justice; now those who came would do so as mourners.
His family had been a noisy presence, their needs catered to by people who no longer bustled about the rooms and corridors but crept around in near-total silence, giving Flavius on any encounter a quick and sad look, before ensuring that apart from that first fleeting glance they avoided his eye. Their bickering, an ever-present part of life, was utterly muted now, while the schoolroom remained empty, so the daily noise of the pupils coming and going was likewise absent. When Flavius wandered from room to room it was as if it was already a place of ghosts, which in a sense it was; lacking an imperial centurion it had lost it
s function.
Exhaustion had got him through the first night; the next, even if he was just as tired, was very different. Sleep seemed impossible and when it finally came he was troubled by wild dreams. The advent of first light and awakening was a moment of confusion, turning to dread and disbelief, slowly maturing into the realisation that what had happened was true; Flavius was on his own and only the need to act as his family would have wished kept him from breaking down completely.
Ohannes tried for a certain level of normality, though there was a forced quality to his actions; he must have the physician look at his shoulder, fortunately not as badly damaged as at first feared, though a sling was advised. Flavius had to eat, to bathe and to be presentable for the callers who came to proffer their condolences, as well as the widows and offspring of his father’s dead soldiers, who were wondering how they would be able to keep body and soul together now that the stipend they were supposed to receive through imperial service – it was often late or absent – was no more.
Nothing was harder than maintaining a decent composure in shared grief, to which was added his ignorance of what reassurances he could with honesty provide. Even with his fellow pupils, especially his closest friends, a mask of acceptance must be maintained. There were duties to perform: word had to be despatched by a trusted messenger, one of the older servants, to Illyria, to his mother, who had gone to the place where he had been born to visit relatives of what, on her side, was a significant and extended family. How would she cope with the news?
The chest over which he had so recently spilt blood, with the bright, fresh cuts of the axe a stark reminder of how close he too had come to death, had to be unlocked and the contents examined. He had quickly found and read his father’s last testament, which made him well up again as he saw the names of his brothers listed above his own, each to be given equal shares of what was a constrained inheritance, but only what remained upon the death of their mother.
