“What use would Trever’s garrison be in this war, anyway?” I ask. “I’ve read about the Empire’s civil wars — thousands of soldiers on either side.”
“It’s true,” says Arbogast with a nod. “I have less than a thousand men here — still less after a month’s siege… Wouldn’t make much of a dent in Agrippinus’s force. But there are other garrisons in this part of Gaul — in Mettis, in Remi, in Tricas… And they all know, if Trever falls, they will be next. So they’re sitting, waiting, not risking marching out while the barbarian horde is still out in force.”
“How do you know they would join Maiorianus instead of this usurper?”
“We don’t,” replies Aegidius with a wry smile. “Not all of them. The Comes of Mettis probably would — he’s my friend. But the others are waiting not just for the end of the siege, but for the Dux of Trever to make up his mind. They will follow Arbogast’s lead in this conflict,” he adds, pointing at the Dux with his thumb. “Whatever he decides.”
“And you haven’t decided yet?” I ask. I reach for the cloth to wipe my hands before picking an old, wrinkled apple up from a bowl of other old, wrinkled fruit.
“I have had a few more important matters on my mind recently,” says Arbogast. He stands up and raises a goblet as the red chariot passes the finish line, waits for the applause to subdue, then turns back to us. I note Aegidius roll his eyes — he must know the speech the Dux is about to make. Rav Asher, in the corner, focuses on the dish of salted fish before him. He gives me a polite smile.
“How well versed are you in the history of your island, prince of the Iutes?” Arbogast asks. “Do you remember Magnus Maximus?”
“Of course,” I reply. “The Briton Usurper. Every educated child in Britannia knows about him.”
In truth, I know more about the Briton Usurper than most educated children. Seventy years ago, Magnus Maximus was proclaimed the Imperator by the Legions in Britannia and Gaul — not unlike Agrippinus now. When he left the island to fight for Rome, he left a child behind, a baby daughter; that daughter was Sevira: Wortigern’s wife, and mother of Wortimer. It was Maximus’s cursed offspring who waged war on the Iutes and destroyed my home village.
“It’s an old family history,” says Arbogast. For a moment, I’m startled, thinking he has somehow read my mind. “My grandfather, after whom I am named, stood faithfully by the side of the rightful Imperator, defending against Maximus. He was the magister militum in Gaul and in Iberia. He was sent to kill Maximus’s son — after the war ended — here in Trever, in this very palace. After the war ended, he grew to be the most powerful man in the Empire, second only to the Imperator himself… But he could never wield this power in his own name.”
“Because he was a barbarian,” says Aegidius. “He knew the law.”
“He was a citizen of the Empire!” says Arbogast. His fists clench on the sculpted ledge surrounding the balcony from three sides. “He sent thousands of his men to death in the Imperator’s name. But because he was born a barbarian, he would never have a rank himself. He had to use the pretence of acting on behalf of the Imperator’s son.”
“What happened?” I ask, though I can guess where this old story is going. I’ve heard it so many times already in my travel through Gaul. A barbarian’s allegiance to the Empire, rewarded with some kind of betrayal of trust… If there was one trait all the Roman Imperators shared it was their pragmatism. When it came to the Empire’s interests, they held no loyalties to anyone, especially to barbarians. And now, it seemed, all the old grudges were coming to bite Rome back…
“There was a disagreement. The Imperator’s son died. Some claimed he was murdered; my grandfather said the boy killed himself, not wishing to be a barbarian’s puppet any longer. The Imperator marched on Gaul, like Maiorianus marches now, and defeated my grandfather in battle…” He shrugs and turns back. “This is what life is like in Rome. When you aim high, you’d better be prepared to fall hard,” he continues. “I hold no grudge. The Imperator let my father live, and then his grandson made me a Dux here, where my grandfather did such great service to his family. But, knowing what I just told you, would you blame me for hesitating in choosing one Imperator over another?”
My head is spinning. There are too many names and places for me to grasp all at once, even with the help of the map. I’m beginning to wonder why the Dux needed my presence at the race at all — he seems to be providing all the necessary entertainment himself.
“Maiorianus was crowned in Rome,” says Aegidius. “And accepted by the Imperator in Constantinople.”
“Constantinople is far away from here. Agrippinus is my…” Arbogast hesitates. “…not friend, exactly, but I’ve known him for years, and I respect him as a politician. I know little of this Maiorianus, except that I’ve heard he’s a skilled commander.”
“He would’ve taken Aetius’s place if not for the palace intrigues,” says Aegidius. “He defeated the Vandals and the Alemanns, and he will defeat the Goths and the Burgundians, of that you may be certain.”
“Then he may not need my help after all,” replies Arbogast, with a smile that tells me the two of them have been through this argument several times before. “And there have been plenty talented commanders before him. Now, maybe if Ricimer was an Imperator…”
“You know very well why he isn’t,” says Aegidius grumpily. “The laws haven’t changed much since your grandfather’s days. Ricimer is as likely to be an Imperator as Odowakr — or young aetheling.” He nods to me.
“Perhaps there is the solution to your dilemma,” Rav Asher speaks from his corner, chuckling. “A third Imperator.” He’s making an obvious joke, but the others are not laughing. It seems Rav Asher touched a nerve. The matter is too serious for everyone involved to turn it into a simple jest.
Arbogast sits back down and runs fingers through his hair. He looks to me. “We are boring our guest with these old tales,” he says. “I would rather listen to a new story — for example, how did a prince of the Iutes find himself in my palace, hundreds of miles away from home, during a Saxon siege…”
So this is why he invited me here — to use me as a distraction if the discussion didn’t go his way… It’s fine, I don’t mind. I’m in a good mood. Thanks to Arbogast’s generosity, I have slept in a comfortable bed and eaten food someone else made for me, for the first time in weeks. I can indulge him and his guests with a story of my adventure.
The fanfare rings out again; another couple of battered old chariots lines up at the start. The servants bring in freshly baked sweet buns and honey cakes. I salivate at the smell. I pick one up from a tray and start my tale with how I met Legate Aegidius in Londin…
CHAPTER XV
THE LAY OF HUDA
The feast ended, I return, sated and lethargic, to my room. In the corridor, I meet Rav Asher, heading back home — or, rather, to the house he’s renting somewhere in the city.
“Come meet me, boy,” he says. “As soon as Arbogast lets you move around.”
“Of course.”
“I mean it,” he adds, with some insistence. “Find me in the insula south of the city baths.”
“What is so urgent?” I ask when I meet him the next day in front of the insula. The baths behind me, though half burnt-down and plundered of anything valuable by the Huns, remain an imposing, extraordinary structure. The size of a small fortress surrounded by a portico on all four sides, their rear rises in great arches like a mountain in the far end of the eastern part of the city. The aqueduct linking the baths with the distant hills runs dry now, either cut off by the besieging army or simply fallen into disrepair. The city planners who devised the compound must have intended for it to be a centrepiece of some new development, for the street grid continues further east and disappears into the wheat fields, a mere vision of what could have been.
“I wanted you to see them before they were sent out on another patrol,” Rav Asher tells me.
“See whom?”
He takes me
to the apartment upstairs; it’s a tiny place compared to his library in Coln, made even tinier by all the books stacked in precarious cliffs everywhere along the walls. His wife greets me with a brief, warm embrace, and then they show me to the next room, which is even more crowded, this time with four people, waiting for my arrival.
“Octa!”
Ursula leaps at me and gives me a tight hug. I hug her back and look over her shoulder to see Audulf and Praefect Paulus. Audulf bears a fresh scar, running from ear to chin. Paulus’s face is covered in bruises; their wide grins have some new gaps in them.
The fourth man is Aegidius. He’s wearing drab clothes of a commoner and a hooded cloak; I instantly sense a conspiracy brewing: here’s a man who didn’t want to be seen on the streets. This isn’t just a meeting of friends. Inadvertently, my muscles tighten as if expecting a fight.
Rav Asher squeezes past us and pushes away enough books to reach a small window. He opens it wide, but it doesn’t do much to rid the room of the stale, musty air. He sneezes and coughs, raising a cloud of dust from the books. The dust makes my eyes water.
“Did anyone else make it into the city?” I ask when we all stop coughing. “Was Nodhbert with you?”
“He was, but he succumbed to his wounds after a short time,” says Audulf. “A small handful of Hildrik’s men made it through — and most of Pinnosa’s. We’ve been riding with them on patrols ever since Arbogast agreed to let us out.”
“How are you doing this? Aren’t Odowakr’s warriors guarding all the gates?”
“This city is well prepared for a siege,” says Ursula. She, too, bears some fresh marks of some recent skirmish. “There are hidden sally gates and tunnels all over the perimeter of the walls, and in the fields outside. Whenever the Saxons find one, we jump out of another. They don’t have enough men to guard them all.”
“The one place we can’t get to is the other side of the river,” says Paulus. “You’re the first visitor from there we’ve had since the siege started.”
“And how have you been doing?” asks Ursula. “Rav Asher told us only a little bit of what you recounted yesterday. What happened to Hildrik?”
“Hildrik returned home,” I reply, and tell them about the letter from Meroweg. The news is met with dismay, but no surprise. “I’ve built a small force from the survivors of the battle of the bridge, and we’ve been taking the fight to Odowakr these past few weeks,” I continue. “We took out one of his engineers and disrupted the building of the siege machines, but I don’t know how much we’ve delayed him, really.”
We talk a bit more for a while, exchanging stories of fighting Odowakr’s warriors; I discover the circumstances of Pinnosa’s tragic death — he was shot through with a bolt from a manuballista, a small siege weapon Odowakr’s engineers have built to test their designs, brought over to the eastern side of the river; I learn that Audulf’s and Ursula’s injuries came from a raid on that weapon; and that the command of Coln soldiers and their allies fell to Praetor Paulus, now a senior officer in the city’s guard. But I soon grow weary of talking. My injuries still hurt, my fever is still lingering; I’m grateful to see my friends again, but I’m growing increasingly conscious of the shadowy presence of Legate Aegidius, sitting silently in a corner that has been made out of copies of Tacitus and some tattered volumes written in Greek.
“You’re not here to listen to our tales of battle,” I tell him. “You heard it all yesterday. Why are you here?”
Aegidius smiles. He glances to Rav Asher, standing in the door with his arms crossed on his chest.
“We are all newcomers to Trever,” he says. “As such, we are not bound by the ties of loyalty as is everyone else in the city.”
“I knew it.” I lower my voice. “You’re conspiring against Arbogast.”
He raises his hand to indicate I should talk even quieter.
“But why?” I ask. “Is he not commanding the siege well?”
“No, he is a skilled commander. Perhaps too skilled. Therein lies our problem.”
“A few days ago, when out on patrol, we intercepted a messenger,” says Paulus. “It was most fortunate that it was our soldier who found him, and not one of Arbogast’s.”
“A messenger — from Odowakr?”
“From Arbogast,” says Ursula. “To Odowakr.”
I look at her in surprise. We’ve all changed so much since leaving Britannia; poor Gille died; I found myself commanding a unit of Roman soldiers… but in perhaps the most bewildering change, Ursula and Audulf, my childhood friends, a son of a Frankish guard and a daughter of a minor magistrate from a backwater town, got themselves somehow embroiled in a conspiracy at the highest levels of Imperial power. And all it took was for us to step outside the borders of our small, remote home country — to enter the Empire.
I’m struck by a vision of Rome, not as a wounded animal devouring its victims, like my father described it, but as an enormous machine, of pulleys and gears, swallowing people great and small, individuals and entire nations, and churning them out the other way. Some are diminished, others made greater, but none emerge unchanged.
“It was a response,” says Aegidius. “We don’t know what that earlier letter, or letters, said exactly, but we could guess from the reply. Odowakr was proposing to support Arbogast’s bid for independence.”
“Independence — from the Empire?”
Aegidius nods. “It’s not as preposterous as it sounds. In times of chaos, Gaul was always bursting with usurpers and petty kings. With Trever as his seat, with the garrisons of Belgica at his command, and with Odowakr at his side, Arbogast could feasibly reach for the crown.”
“Then there would be three Imperators in Gaul,” says Paulus.
“It happened before,” says Rav Asher, shrugging. “It didn’t end well. This time, it might well mean the end of the Empire.”
“What was the Dux’s response?” I ask.
“Non-committal,” replies Aegidius. “But it wasn’t an outright refusal, which is the only response a loyal Dux should make in this situation.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to anger Odowakr.”
Aegidius tilts his head. “Maybe. But we can’t risk the fate of the Empire on guesswork.”
“I get it,” I say. “You want us to help you kill the Dux.”
“What?” He guffaws, genuinely surprised. “No, good Lord, no!”
“Then, what?”
“Arbogast is a decent man — and a good Roman, considering what the Empire did to his family,” says Rav Asher. “He often visited Coln, and I would sometimes accompany Pinnosa to Trever, so I got to know him well. His loyalty to the Empire is paramount.”
“But he holds an even greater loyalty to his city,” adds Aegidius. “And the longer this siege takes, the greater the strain on these two loyalties.”
“We need to end it soon,” says Paulus. “Before Arbogast makes up his mind.”
“And I assume you have an idea how to do it…” I pause. Something still doesn’t add up. “One that you don’t want to involve the Dux in. But why? Surely, he too would wish for the siege to end.”
Aegidius clears his throat. “Not like this.”
“As much as it pains me to say,” says Paulus, “we need help from the River Franks.”
“Hildebert?” I exclaim, before remembering we’re supposed to be quiet. “Hildebert?” I repeat in a whisper. “Why would you want him to help you? And why would he even agree?”
“The River Franks were never fond of Saxons,” says Rav Asher, smoothing his beard. “I’m aware this time they had some kind of… agreement… but these arrangements never last long among the barbarians.”
“Nor among the Romans,” I say. “I’ve heard more about the promises broken by the wealas than by our own kin.”
“Yes… And we have been reaping what we have sown for a long time,” admits Aegidius with a weary nod.
“You’ll need more than contrition to convince Hildebert to help you.”
�
��We would recognise his rule over all of Germania Secunda,” says Aegidius. “Grant him the title of a Comes, with everything this entails. He would be free to rule as he pleased and gather the taxes and customs for himself.”
“He already can do all of that,” notes Audulf. “He’s conquered Coln.”
“But only Coln.”
“Ah,” I say. “I see why you’d be avoiding Arbogast. You want to give the River Franks some of his land. And power.”
Their silence suffices for an answer. How much are they willing to trade, I wonder? Does the deal include the city itself?
“What does this have to do with me?” I ask. “With us?”
“We need someone the Franks would trust,” says Aegidius. “You said it yourself, the Romans have a history of broken promises… Besides, you’re the only one who’s managed to cross the river since the siege started.”
“It was just a stroke of fortune.”
“The Lord works through such strokes of fortune,” says Rav Asher, raising his eyes to the sky and folding his hands in prayer. “You have been blessed once already. Maybe you will be again.”
“It’s a long way back to Coln, even if we did get across the river,” I say. “How much time do we have?”
“Judging by those machine plans you recovered,” says Aegidius, handing me the papers I got from the engineers, “they’ll be ready in some three weeks. Maybe more. Plenty of time to get there and back.”
“Let’s do this, Octa,” says Ursula, her cheeks bright red with excitement. “I’ve been suffocating within these walls. I need to get out. There’s just too much stone here, and not enough trees!”
The trap door opens and the first squadron rides out, torches blazing, into the night. We wait for them to vanish out of sight before venturing carefully outside ourselves — only me, Ursula and Audulf.
Once we’re out, Audulf closes the trap door and covers it with the vines. If I didn’t know it was there, it would be impossible to notice the entrance to the tunnel, painted over and disguised as an outcrop of the red rock. The tunnel, big enough to fit a war horse without a rider, took us from the catacombs by the city’s Cathedral and into the thicket of yews a few hundred feet outside the city walls. According to Paulus, this is the last tunnel not yet discovered by Odowakr’s men — and ours might be the last sally the city could afford to send out.
The Blood of the Iutes: The Song of Octa Book 1 (The Song of Britain 4) Page 27
