by Jack Ludlow
The coin was examined once more. ‘Might be able to let him just gather and carry if this comes regular.’
‘How regular?’
‘Each Sabbath day?’ Flavius had only one thing in mind so he nodded in agreement. ‘Where’d a youngster like you get this kind of money?’
‘That’s none of your concern, the only thing you have to worry about is anyone asking where you got it.’
‘Something tells me you’re no soft touch even if you’re short on years?’
‘Never was and never will be. I will bring my friend to you and if you look after him right, I will do the same for you.’
Did he take that as a threat? He might have, for his reply was a growl. ‘I can take care of myself, young ’un.’
Flavius nodded and left, his route taking him past the line of the officer’s tents and being a warm night the flaps were open so he could see in. One belonged to Vigilius and within he saw what was carried in that covered wagon from which he had been given a cup of wine: fine furniture and hangings to make the interior luxurious, as well as carpets to line the floor. There was a low campaign cot made from well-fashioned and polished wood, with hangings on the sides to keep out prying eyes.
The tribune was at a table, his back to the flap, so Flavius was afforded time to stand and envy the tribune’s comfort, which included an obsequious fellow who appeared to pour him wine, only it was no stone cup this time but glass, established when Vigilius lifted it to drink and it reflected the light from numerous lanterns. If anything established that he was rich, it was that. Not only that he could afford such an object but that he must be unconcerned about the loss or damage to it on campaign.
‘What you hanging about for?’
Flavius spun round to face one of the barbarian mercenaries, who at least spoke comprehensible Latin. Like his compatriots his face was framed in pigtails that might be blond, but could also in the light of the torches be grey, for the face was deeply lined. The man had a spear and shield so was obviously part of the men guarding this part of the camp; only the foederati were trusted to bear arms so close to the senior officers, wary as they were of assassination by agents of Anastasius.
‘I was thinking I might have such a tent one day.’
That got a derisive grunt, not that the person in receipt really noticed. The conversation made Vigilius look round, Flavius wondering if he could see and identify him. There was no sign that he had; the tribune merely turned once more and went back to whatever it was he was engaged in, so the dreaming youngster moved off as he was commanded to, egged on by the barbarian’s jabbing spear. Back at the tent he found the old man alone, asleep and needing to be shaken into wakefulness.
‘Pack up your belongings, Ohannes, you look destined to be a Gideon.’
That did not register at first; Ohannes needed to be reminded that the saint was the feller of trees. ‘He was a mighty warrior, as well, so that fits you like a well-cut smock.’
He moaned of course; it was not fitting, and someone who owed him much was taking him down a proper peg. The youngster made it plain, yet again, there was no choice.
‘I’m sure they are friendly,’ Flavius said as they made their way through the camp. ‘Or at least better than what you have shared with so far.’
‘Master Flavius …’ The youngster sucked in his teeth to hear that word from Ohannes within earshot of anyone they might be passing, which got him another quick apology. ‘I have found myself with strange companions many times in my years and if it is stiff at first it ever settles, it just takes a bit of time. The sods you now command are no different and had they seen me fight, well happen they would have changed their refrain.’
‘When we get to Constantinople, maybe they’ll get the chance.’
‘And you might get sight of the folk you are so keen to talk with?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘What about your mother?’
That got Ohannes a sharp glance, but he was looking away. ‘She will be expecting me any day, I should think, given the time that has passed.’
‘You should send her word.’
The response was so terse it was wounding. ‘If you can find a way for me to do that, then tell me. If not, do not mention it!’
‘Seems to me you have taken to your new rank very well,’ Ohannes growled, putting Flavius on the back foot, something he was well able to do.
‘I had hoped at one time to be destined for higher things, remember.’
Was it the tone of that Ohannes picked up, or was it that he felt the need to take the sting out of his previous remark? Certainly his tone was emollient. ‘Got to start somewhere, unless you’re a patrician, but you will make your way, which I have said before.’
‘Why are we in dispute?’
That got a humourless laugh. ‘Nature makes us so.’
‘Before I hand you on, Ohannes, know I will come by tomorrow to see how you are faring.’
‘For which I thank you.’
The introductions to the curator passed off without trouble and Ohannes was shown to their shared accommodation and he and Flavius said their farewells. Stood outside the tent, wondering if he was doing his friend right, he heard Ohannes introducing himself to those he would work with and he seemed easy with it, bringing home again that he had lived, since probably he was Flavius’s own age, a transient life. Was that now his lot?
His next port of call was to seek out Apollonia, sure he caught a sight of Timon disappearing at his approach. If she was glad to see him it did not show, which he put down to shyness, and when he asked if she could walk with him it seemed that she was reluctant to oblige. While he could think of many reasons why that might be, the one that did not occur was that she did not like him and with much effort he slowly broke down her resolve and she finally spoke a little.
Flavius feared he was interrogating her, but without him posing questions there was only silence. She came from a village he had never heard of, and asked about the province it was in she had no idea. Prior to this campaign, in which Timon hoped to make money from the army by washing and mending clothes – not that he toiled himself – she had never been more than five hundred paces from their hut.
Age? She had no idea and if he put her near his own, then Flavius could not be sure so unrevealing was her clothing. When she began to seek to count on her fingers, Flavius noticed how raw were her hands, reddened from the work Timon had her along to do, washing for small payments. In normal circumstances he might have told her all about himself, but the residual reserve he had formed around his identity he kept to, for it made no difference to her who he was.
In the end they just sat for a while, he feeling as tongue-tied as she, which had never been the case with girls at home, where he and his friends had moved on from taunting them to seeking to impress them; it had not, in his case, gone as far as any kind of intimate physical contact, though others had boasted of matters he could only imagine.
‘Timon has left you be?’ he asked and she nodded. ‘Your mama too?’
That suddenly animated Apollonia; she looked right at him, clear fear in her open-wide blue eyes. ‘She is terrified of what he will do.’
‘But I have let it be known what he will face if he harms you.’
‘And how long will you be present to protect us?’
‘As long as is needed,’ he lied.
Flavius realised, with a sinking feeling, that armies form and armies disband, with the elements dispersing, and that would apply as much to camp followers as soldiers. Unless he was present permanently, Timon would have his way.
‘You must not worry,’ he added, lifting her unresisting hand and kissing it, aware that the touch of her skin was affecting more than his fingertips, which had him shift uncomfortably. ‘I will take care of you.’
That was a statement he later lived to deeply regret.
The man from the disbanded contubernium joined at dawn and the words used about new comrades being stiff was borne out by his col
d reception. Named Baccuda he was a fellow with no real jaw and protruding upper teeth who proved, on further acquaintance, to be a real dimwit. Any question posed to him took an age to elicit an answer so Flavius gave up seeking to establish from where he had come and what was his fighting background, given there was no time for lengthy interrogation.
They were on the move again, now marching through a string of hamlets edged by tilled fields, or those given over to pasture and full of sheep and oxen, produce that fed the great beast of Constantinople. Halfway through the day the blue of the Sea of Marmara became visible to their right, sparkling in the sunshine with many a sail, some red, most a dull brown, dotting the ocean, either beating up to the port city or sailing away on a firm breeze.
The barbarian foederati were, as usual, to the fore of the host, ready to do battle, even if those scouting ahead could espy no enemies waiting to contest the ground before them, news that rippled through the marching columns. The emperor was, it seemed, content to rely on his walls, for if he had any soldiers they had been withdrawn into the city, which sent a plain sign that God was on their side.
There was, it was assumed, one more temporary camp to make, the last, everyone hoped, before they could settle into something more permanent, which would see those with an eye for a bit of coin setting up shops and taverns at which the troops could take their ease and also their pleasures, be they alimentary or carnal – another fact of campaigning never mentioned in the histories and one Flavius only knew because it was being discussed and anticipated.
As promised, he went to visit Ohannes, to find him aching as much from felling timber as he would have done from marching, only in different places, a fact he made plain to Flavius in no uncertain terms. When the youngster led him away from his part of the camp he followed, producing a litany of moans to let it be laid down, and no dispute about it, that he was a fighter not a saw man.
Flavius spotted a little copse of trees, an area outside the lines of campfires, seemingly deserted, and indicated that was where they should go to talk.
‘I have seen enough wood for a lifetime this very day.’
‘Oblige me, Ohannes.’
Which he reluctantly did. They stopped on the edge, where there was enough starlight with which to see each other, and when Flavius issued an apology, that engendered another litany of complaint, which he had to stop quite brusquely.
‘My friend, it was done for a purpose, so please be quiet and let me explain.’ That got a grunt and a far from happy one. ‘What chance do you think you would have of getting away from here as a member of our contubernium?’
‘Get away from here?’
‘You have a sharp mind, old friend, so I ask you to think on what might have been my motives for arranging your present posting − one, I might add, I had to pay a bribe to secure.’
The wait for an answer was long, evidence that Ohannes was thinking it through. ‘Do I sense it was not just to get me out from under your feet?’
‘You are halfway to the truth.’
‘Not much good when only you know the other half.’
‘I have a task I would like you to perform, though I cannot command it and would not even if I had the right.’ Ohannes did not respond, leading to an extended silence that forced Flavius to continue. ‘I want you to leave Vitalian’s army.’
‘To which there would be a purpose?’
‘I must go on to Constantinople and I have no idea, even if I can succeed in what I need to do, how long that will take and, while I am engaged in that, how my mother will act if I do not go to her and there is no message to say why.’
‘Which you could have asked for before you had me shifted.’
‘But …’
Ohannes came out with a definite chortle, as he hit on the conclusion. ‘Had I left prior it would have been desertion, for which I could have been strung up if caught and you would have felt the hurt of a proper lash. This way I can go and you are not at risk.’
‘Forgive me if I misled you.’
Not the truth, really; Flavius had worried that a man who could not stop referring to him as ‘master’ might, if included in his thinking, say something to render it impossible; better Ohannes only find out now why he had chosen to act so.
‘You’re a sly one and no mistake, Master Flavius.’
Was that admiration or astonishment? Hard to tell.
‘If you go missing from the forestarii it will not rebound on me, and added to that it has to be easier to go missing from a forest than a march on the Via Gemina. I want you to slip away and go to my mother to tell her in what I am engaged.’
‘If the folk you seek are inside Constantinople, which I take leave to suggest they will be—’
‘Then,’ Flavius cut across him, ‘I must find a way to get within the walls and I hope I am with a body of men who might achieve that.’
‘And if they don’t?’
Flavius ignored that and produced a small slip of parchment, on the obverse of which was one of his father’s roughly composed letters to Justinus. ‘I have written down the place where her family villa is located.’
‘Which I cannot read.’
‘But which I will tell so you can recall it – the writing is to show anyone local who can aid you. I have done a drawing of the way from the Via Egnatia to her family farm as well.’ Flavius pressed a purse into the hand of Ohannes, the one Dardanies had returned to him. ‘With this you can rest in the post houses and be fed. I ask only that you do not tax yourself; proceed at a pace that suits your bones, but make your destination.’
‘And what am I to say?’
‘Stay where you are until I come for you.’
‘Will she take such a message from me?’
‘My father trusted you, Ohannes, and I have as much faith in you as I have in God. Go, if you can, to my mother and stay with her, protect her. A snake like Senuthius will not rest if he thinks she has the means to bring him down, any more than he will be content until he is sure that I am dead.’
‘And if I do not succeed?’
‘Lap of God, Ohannes, is it not? How many times have you told me to trust in that?’
‘Seems I will miss a battle.’
Flavius put his arms around Ohannes then, as much to hide his emotions as to demonstrate an affection which had deepened so much that love was not too strong a word to explain it.
‘I will fight for both of us.’
The clutch from the old soldier was just as tight and his voice was as cracked as that of Flavius had ever been these last months. ‘Then I pity those you face.’
‘We cannot be seen together again, Ohannes, it will smack of—’
‘No, I understand.’
‘Choose your moment with care, friend.’
The laugh was hearty, intended to reassure. ‘No need, this lot can’t see the wood for the trees.’
‘Till we meet again, then.’
The clasp then was the same as he had exchanged with his school friends, a grab of each other’s arm in a tight and truly Roman grip.
Flavius could not return to his tent without again visiting the area set aside for the camp followers and, of course, Apollonia. From that first tender touch of fingers he had moved her on to a holding of hands, able to ease her away from whatever duties she was required to perform in order to walk with him.
Yet her reserve made any attempt to take matters further difficult. Only in later life would Flavius come to see how selfish had been his actions, for if he had been asked he would have denied the truth, that he was fixated on only one goal, natural for his age, but utterly lacking in consideration for the consequences.
They ended up in the same woods in which he had talked to Ohannes and that led to a first out-of-sight kiss, followed by hands eager to explore and a diminishing resistance that they should. If what followed was a great deal of inexperienced fumbling there was a moment of which Flavius had dreamt too many times without realising the pleasure to be felt.
&nbs
p; How soft it was, warm and so welcoming; the immediate tingle he felt and the sensation of flesh against his flesh and pubic hair entwined when he thrust forward made what followed seem the most natural and beautiful thing in creation. To add to this was the way Apollonia seemed to take equal enjoyment and employ matching physicality to their encounter, even her gasping and increasingly recurrent cries adding to their mutual pleasure, which had they timed it, would not have seen many grains of sand filter through the neck of glass.
Sated they lay together, letting their breathing subside as Flavius let himself be subsumed by his sense of wonder, until discretion demanded, after more tender kisses, he take Apollonia back from where he had fetched her. Did those who looked at them guess what had taken place? Certainly the harpies had a glint in their eye but no act of either let them have a hint, their parting acted out in such a chaste manner.
It was only when walking back to his tent with a real spring in his step – he had climbed a mountain this night, killed a lion single-handedly with a spear, swam the Inland Sea and conquered the Medusa as well as the Minotaur of legend, in short he had become a man – that Flavius realised that one thing his father had sought to advise him of had not happened.
Decimus had counselled a son sprouting spots and fluff on his chin of what was to come to him in time and of his family’s hopes, the first night with a new bride and the accepted pain he would inflict, which had to be borne and would lead to many a happier repeat. Why had Apollonia not cried out in pain? Why had she been so forthcoming in her responses? Who had penetrated where he had been so thrilled to go before him?
It could have been anyone, Timon, a companion of her years, some other soldier, but if it was enough to raise a question, did he care? With his thinking fixated upon more of what he had just enjoyed, he put aside any consideration of how Apollonia had been deflowered and by whom.
CHAPTER TWENTY
What was heading their way was no mystery to anyone in the imperial palace; the emperor knew from his advisers that the forces of Vitalian were close and would be without the walls of the city in a day, two at the most. The composition of his army and the numbers were likewise acknowledged, including the old-fashioned way it had been structured, not seen as a reason for any concern, quite the reverse; such things as centuries were thought of as not fit for the requirements of up-to-date battle. The only unknown was what Anastasius intended to do to counter it.
