Casca 9: The Sentinel (10 page)

Casca looked forward to meeting the man. From all that he had heard of him, he was the best that the Eastern or Western empires had to offer against the barbarians of the north and west and the Persians of the Sassanian Empire. When he took the field, it was with pathetically small forces, considering the population of Byzantium. From a population of over thirty million, he was seldom given more than thirty thousand regular soldiers. He had to flesh out his forces by hiring local auxiliaries and some mercenary units, such as those of Sicarus. But the heart of his army was the regular soldiers and his heavy cavalry, for which a new breed of horse had been bred that could carry the heavily armored knights with relative ease.

He had his own special force, known as the commander's bodyguard, consisting of fifteen hundred highly trained and motivated light cavalrymen. For sieges, he relied on the sophisticated weapons of the royal arsenal, the ballistae and catapults, which could toss pots of the famous Greek fire over the highest of walls to set the inside of a city on fire. His forces may have been small, but they were all motivated by his personal example of leadership and courage. Hearing this, Casca thought that he was much like the Roman commanders of old, including the great Julius, who never hesitated to share the hardships of common foot soldiers or the danger. And by this, their men came to love them to such a degree that they could never conceive of letting their leaders down by failing to complete their missions, even if it meant death.

Twice on the sail through the Cyclades Casca saw what he thought were the black lateen sails of island pirates, but they kept their distance from the heavy galley and its escort. They would go on to find more vulnerable prey.

The weather stayed good, with only a few swells of fifteen or twenty feet at times when the winds rose. This was enough, however, to send several hundred otherwise courageous mercenaries to the railings, where they emptied their stomachs into the deep, along with their bravery, as most of them begged for mercy from the sea gods, forgetting for a moment their new Christian ethics. Hrolvath never seemed to be affected by anything. He grew golden-skinned from the warm sun of the Mediterranean and relished each new day that brought them closer to the shores of Africa, where he would at last face his first real battle. He had participated in several smaller actions in the service of Sicarus, but that was mostly chasing Armenian bandits back into their mountainous strongholds until winter sealed them in for another season. This was to be a battle against the Vandals who had ravaged most of Europe and defeated a dozen Roman armies in open battle.

There was a short stop at Crete for resupplying and to let the men stretch their legs for a day on solid ground. The horses were kept on board. It would have been too much of a delay to offload them for such a short time. Three of the horses had died from unknown causes, and their carcasses were tossed over the side, wherein seconds schools of dorsal fins gathered about them to feed, turning the waters into small whirlpools of red froth. The sharks' feeding made several of the tough warriors a bit ill. There was something terribly frightening, almost indecent, about the idea of being
eaten by those saber-toothed fish whose jaws ripped the large war-horses into bloody shreds in minutes.

From Crete, they had a clear run to Cyrene, six hundred miles west of Alexandria and nearly the same distance from Carthage.

Facing to the wind, Casca thought he could smell the dry winds of the desert riding over the waters of the sea. Soon they would be at Cyrene, and then he would have a chance to see for himself what Belisarius was like. Sicarus had promised him they would meet.

They were on the last leg of the trip to Cyrene. Fair winds made the use of oars minimal for a few days, but Casca knew that it was hell below the decks, where little or no breeze came through to ease the stifling heat. There, in the semi
-darkness, he could feel the men sweating, unable to move more than a few inches at a time, the chains cutting into their flesh, leaving ulcers on the ankles that would never heal. The flesh of the buttocks did one of two things. Either it grew hard as boiled leather and calloused or it developed sores that ate away the tissue till the suppurating holes reached the bone. Usually death followed not long after that, either from disease entering through the sores or because the slaves were no longer able to pull strongly enough at the sweeps and therefore became expendable.

Sometimes the coughing sickness would sweep through the entire lower decks, killing men by twos and threes till there was no one left to man the oars, and the regular crewmen and marines had to sit on the benches and get a taste of having to manhandle the thirty-foot sweeps in unison for hours at a time, till the flesh peeled from their hands and their blood joined that of the hundreds of condemned men who had sat on the benches before them. It gave them a small taste of hell, and few who ever sat on those benches ever treated oar slaves with quite the same contempt again; they had tasted their pain, if only for a short time.

Casca moved down the steps leading to the slave benches. He had tried to stay away but was drawn to them for some reason he didn't want to examine too closely.

The smell of packed humanity swept over him. The myriad odors of hundreds of unwashed bodies mingled with the stale acrid stench of urine from the pots beneath the benches. There the men
ate, slept, pissed, shit, and died, never leaving those benches till the day they were freed or thrown over the side.

On the slave benches, there were no prejudices shown. Arabs, Jews, Syrians, Persian, Armenians, Goths, Vandals, Greeks, Romans, thieves, pimps, murderers, tax evaders, and those convicted of heresy all shared the same destiny.

Several guards stood at either end of the walkway separating the two banks of oarsmen that ran the length of the galley. The heat made them sluggish, semi-drugged from the heaviness of the air inside. Even with the ports open, little breeze could find its way into the floating dungeon. To guard the slaves was a dehumanizing experience. The only way to keep one's sanity was to not think of them as men; they were, instead, machines of bone and flesh that existed only to serve the ship by pulling the oars.

Casca found a seat on the stairs near the stern end of the walkway, near the drum of the hortator, which was now idle. He could feel in his bones the beat that set the mark and tempo of the slaves' efforts. When the beat was set to half stroke, it wasn't too bad. You could get lost in the rhythm of movement. Even full stroke could be endured for a time before arms and backs began to break under the strain, but there was nothing like the hellish drive of ramming speed to break a man. It was nearly impossible for anyone to keep up the measure for more than twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes, men would die on the benches, their open mouths spouting bright red blood from ruptured hearts. Others would collapse over their oars in uncontrollable muscle spasms, with
tendons and ligaments torn free from their anchors. Even the whips couldn't penetrate through the red glaze that consumed one's mind in those horrible minutes.

He had seen men who had to be killed to stop them from rowing. When they would no longer respond to command, they had become lost in the mad rhythm of the drum beat. Their souls had become one with the oars and the cycles of pulling the handle of the sweeps to the chest, right foot set on the block under the benches in front of them to give the rowers more strength.

Pull to the chest, leaning back as far as you could, then a half circle down on the handles to raise the blades from the water, a shove forward to prepare them to be set again, then a precious moment's rest as the weight of the oars was released for the space of a heartbeat to fall back into the waters before the cycle was repeated. The pattern never changed, and they became trapped in that pattern and couldn't stop of their own accord. They would row until their hearts burst or a thrust from a guard's lance ended their labors.

Then the useless husk would be tossed to the sharks and one of the spare rowers would be brought up from the holds to take the empty seat. Every good ship always carried a supply of spare rowers.

A scream pierced through the fog of Casca's recollections, jerking him back to the present, hand on sword. A slave had broken free from his chains, as sometimes happened when the wood became rotten or the bolts rusted through beneath the surface of the wood, where it couldn't be detected by the oar master. Reflex made Casca draw his sword as the hysterical slave raced at him, chains dragging at his feet, eyes wild, mouth flecked with the foam of madness. He screamed and screamed again, blindly running the length of the walkway. One of the guards tried a cast with his javelin and missed his target, pinning another slave to the deck.

The screaming man ran straight into Casca, stopping only when Casca held him to his chest with his left arm around the wretch's ulcerous shoulders. The man looked at him, tears running from his eyes as he cried through a mouth from which the teeth had long ago fallen out.

Sobbing, the man cried out, "Don't let them take me back. Don't let them take me back. I would rather die!"

Casca tensed his left arm, holding the man firmly to his chest. Placing the point of his sword onto the space in the upper chest where the heart lay, he shoved the point in quickly, giving the man peace. As he let the body slide down to the planks, he spoke so softly that no one else could have heard:

"I understand. There are things in life many times more terrible than death. I give you your escape."

As the guards approached him, they congratulated him on his quick actions. They would have been in a lot of trouble if the slave had reached the upper decks and disturbed the captain. Casca was tempted for a moment to strike out at them.
But to what purpose? They were only doing their job, and it would not have helped the other slaves. He had responsibilities now; he had to think of Ireina and Demos. He would do nothing that would have him put in chains, unable to return to them.

Feeling depressed, he returned to the upper decks, found a leather bucket, and threw it over the side, hauling up some clean water to wash away the slave's blood. Hrolvath came running to him,
asking if he was all right, saying that he'd heard that Casca had been attacked by a slave who'd run amok and had tried to kill him.

Casca shook his head a bit angrily. "He wasn't trying to attack me. I merely helped him find that which he was seeking."

Hrolvath didn't understand what Casca meant by that, but he could hear the sadness in the tones of the Roman's words and knew that what had happened had brought a great sadness to his friend.

It was the next morning when Sicarus called the two to him on the bow. He pointed to a dark line on the horizon. "Cyrene lies there. We will make port in a few hours. This will be our last stop before Tripoli. Here we should have our next orders waiting for us from Belisarius. Then, if things have not changed, we'll sail in two days to our rendezvous point."

With the wind behind them, they were able to sail into the harbor entrance nearly to the piers before the sails were dropped and the oars set out to guide them the last few yards to where lines were tossed out for slaves to haul them into the side of the stone wharf and gently come to rest.

Sicarus, escorted by Casca and Hrolvath, was the first to leave the pier, to be met by a centurion, who was the emissary of Belisarius. The officer led them into the town, which to Casca looked much like all the others of the African and the Mediterranean coastal region. Flat-roofed, whitewashed one and two storied structures made of either stone or sun-baked bricks of mud, except that it had more of the Egyptian touch to many of the public buildings, which were leftovers from the times of the pharaohs. In the center of the city, near the public offices, were several large obelisks, set there to commemorate the passage of some pharaoh's army to do battle with tribes now long forgotten. Only the huge monoliths remained to mark the passing of an empire that had equaled and surpassed many of the accomplishments of Rome in its prime.

There was harshness to the glare of the sun that pierced the eyes, evidence that not far beyond the green fringe of the coast, the trackless wastes of the desert lay as they had for eons. A host only to the few nomads who had learned to live in harmony with the great wastelands that were friends only to the lizard and the sand viper.

Inside the welcome shade of the headquarters for the local garrison, Sicarus was greeted by the praetor, Cornelius Pompeianus, the city commander, a member of the Illustrii. Distaste at having to have any dialogue with one of such disreputable origins was written clearly on his patrician face. He didn't give in to bad manners, though, and forced himself to offer at least the barest minimum of courtesies by indicating for his guests to have a seat.

Sicarus knew the type, and it didn't bother him at all. He knew that these pompous smug asses would put on their airs of superiority because of some accident of birth and then cry for his help when they couldn't handle things themselves. They would say that he was the best of friends, until such time as he had done all the dirty work for them and would once more be relegated to the status of a lesser being.

Pompeianus looked with even greater distaste at the overmuscled, scar-faced scoundrel who was scowling at him over Sicarus's shoulder. He was most definitely a brute of a lower order. But the young man with the gold hair and fine glowing skin seemed to be several cuts above his companions.
He thought he even detected a certain sensitivity in the curve of the lips. Yes, a most interesting young man, one who might not be averse to having his status in life improved through the efforts of a gracious and understanding sponsor.

It was with reluctance that he returned his attention to the business at hand. Putting on the best face he could, he handed over the sealed written orders left in his care by Belisarius, who was now ten days' march somewhere along the coast. Cornelius felt slighted that he was privy to the contents of the letter or even the eventual destination of Belisarius and his forces. Why were these mercenaries in his district? He didn't think they would be going to battle the Vandals. That was too horrible to think of. It had been many years since the army had taken the field against the barbarians, and then it had not gone well.

No! It had something to do with Justinian's constant harping about opening up new trade routes to the distant East. This was most likely just a strong scouting force to determine what resistance might be found among the tribesmen and savages of the deserts. If there had been any thoughts of war, surely he would have been informed, as his jurisdiction lay on the most direct route to the Vandal domain and the same path they would take if they decided to move against Egypt.

Sicarus removed himself to where the light was a bit better to open the sealed letter from Belisarius and also to keep Cornelius from seeing anything.

Inside were his next instructions and a written order for the garrison commander to give the mercenaries whatever they wanted in terms of supplies. This had been anticipated by Sicarus, who had his list of demands ready. These he handed over to Cornelius, along with the order written in Belisarius's own hand, commanding him to put himself and his warehouses at the disposal of Sicarus.

Cornelius wished there had been some way to refuse the demands made on his resources. If he gave the mercenaries all they wanted, his own storehouse would barely be able to handle his requirements till the next harvest. Why did they need so much grain? Were they going to trade it to the desert savages for ivory or gold? That wasn't a bad idea. The nomads were always hungry. Perhaps he would be able to mount a small expedition of his own later, using what he normally skimmed from the harvest.

Turning on the charm, he escorted his guests to the door, promising to see to their requests with all possible dispatch. He managed to separate Hrolvath from the others for a moment and whispered in the boy's ear for him to come to his quarters on the hill near the east wall after sunset. He had something of importance to say to him which could have an effect upon him and his comrades. Conspiratorially, he touched the side of his nose to indicate secrecy in the matter. Hrolvath didn't know what to make of it, but if the man had any information to give him, he would have to go.

They returned to the galley, finding that most of their men had offloaded and were already well established in the waterfront taverns. Sicarus didn't mind too much. They needed something to ease the wobbles from their legs and had to give vent to their emotions.

In each of the taverns there were at least two of his mercenary squad leaders, with a couple of others who didn't take part in the drinking. They were there to make certain that all the men got safely back to the ships on time and to ascertain that they didn't make too much trouble among the locals. The next day they would have their chance to party, and others would watch over them. No man was permitted outside the waterfront on pain of flogging unless he had express permission from Sicarus.

Casca was sent on various errands for Sicarus, as was Hrolvath. Sicarus stayed close to the ship so that he could be located easily if anyone had problems. It wasn't midday before the first of his warriors began to return, most not under their own power. These were hauled aboard with no ceremony and moved down to the holds of whichever ship they belonged to by the squad leaders, who then returned to gather more of their besotted comrades.