Flame of the West (25 page)

  
I should have been sickened, but I had seen worse. Such things happened in war. With terrible clarity, I saw the last moments of the villagers trapped inside the basilica. Unable to get out, clutching each other in shrieking terror as the Masterless Men hurled flaming torches through the windows.

   Stone doesn’t burn, but flesh does.
They had burned, these people, while their menfolk were slaughtered outside. I glanced at the charred remains of the altar, and imagined the priest, kneeling before it and muttering prayers even as the flames licked at his body.

  I turned away, not wishing to dirty my already tarnished soul by looking too long.

   Gambara was waiting for me at the foot of the steps.
“Too strong for your stomach?” he asked, his little mouth curled into a grin, fists planted on his narrow hips.

   “No,” I replie
d, stepping closer, “how about yours?”

   The ugly lines of his face wrinkled in confusion. He was a dull-witted sort, and failed to react in time as I seized the hilt of his dagger, drew it from the wooden sheath and rammed the blade into his gut.

   His little eyes widened in shock. I left the dagger buried inside him, gripped his scrawny neck in both hands and threw him to the ground.

   The back of his head cracked
against the bottom step. Dark blood splattered the stone. I pulled him up and smashed his head against the step, again and again, with all the violence I could muster. His body jerked and went into spasm, blood and brains spilling from the shattered pulp of his skull.

   Finally, when all the rage had gone out of me, I let the dead thing go and wiped my bloody
hands on the grass.

  
Asbad and the rest of the Masterless Men had watched the killing in silence. Not one of them lifted a hand to help their comrade. Life was cheap among such people, and Gambara was not the sort to inspire affection.

   I looked up, panting with exertion, at
Asbad. He, if anyone, would have avenged the dead man.

   “You can have his horse,” he said, before turning away and calling for supper. 

30
.

I rode with the Masterless Men for months, all through the autumn and the long winter that followed.
Asbad took a liking to me, while at the same time making it perfectly plain what would happen if I ever tried to leave his company.

   “No-one leaves,” he was fond of saying, “
save in a box.”

   This was a favourite jest of his
. A Masterless Man was lucky to be buried. If he fell sick, or was wounded in a skirmish, Asbad left him to rot. He judged men by their usefulness, and cheerfully tossed them aside if they showed signs of faltering. 

   “Scum,” he termed
us, “fit to adorn a gallows. Nothing more. I will lead you to profit or death, but don’t expect mercy.”

   We were scavengers, feeding off the scraps of war.
While Totila laid siege to the few remaining Roman garrisons in Italy, and Narses plodded around the Gulf of the Adriatic, the likes of the Masterless Men burned and pillaged and murdered as they pleased.

  
There was none to stop us. We had little to fear from the law, since neither the Goths or the Romans could spare the men to enforce it.

  
Occasionally the citizens of some particularly lawless province would band together to defend their homes. We might have easily scattered these hapless clods, with their cudgels and farm tools, but Asbad preferred to avoid conflict. He would never fight, unless we were starving or in dire need of shelter.

  
Under his bluff exterior beat the heart of a coward. I despised him, and all his followers, and wished I had the means to bring them all to justice. For months I witnessed them slaughter and rob and rape, bringing horrors I will not describe to isolated villages and farmsteads.

  
They thought me soft, for refusing to join in with the worst of their crimes. God forgive me, but I did nothing to stop them either. My quill falters as I think of the atrocities I witnessed.

  
Courage ebbs with age. If I had been a younger man, I might have chosen to die, sword in hand, defending the honour of some young girl the Masterless Men wished to brutalise. Instead I stood aside and prayed silently for death to come and take us all.

   The wheel turned, and winter
slowly melted into spring. During the worst of the cold months we sheltered in the foothills of the Appenines, inside a ruined tower Asbad claimed to be the palace of some long-dead king, but I reckoned was an old fortified byre for cattle.

   One blustery evening in early April, as we sat huddled around a fire on the rough floor,
Asbad’s scouts returned with fresh tidings of the war.

   “The Romans are on Italian soil,” said one, a one-eyed Lombard ruffian named Agelmund, “we saw them marching down the coast to
Ancona. Thousands of horse and foot. Too many to count.”

   “Thirty thousand,” I muttered, and cursed as the bread I
was toasting on the end of my sword dropped into the fire.

   “I was in
Constantinople when Narses was recruiting,” I explained in response to all the hard looks, “the Emperor gave him all the money and men he desired. This is the largest Roman army to invade Italy for centuries.”

 
“What of Totila?” demanded Asbad.

   “He is at
Rome, mustering all the men he can get,” answered another of the scouts, “besides the people of his own race, he has hired a number of Lombards and Gepids.”

   “There a
re the imperial deserters, as well,” said Asbad, “men Totila lured from their old allegiance with promises of easy plunder. What of you, Coel? Would you sell your sword to the Goths?”

   I would rather fornicate with rabid dogs, was the truthful answer. “
To anyone who can afford it,” I replied carelessly, earning myself a laugh from the others and a comradely slap on the back. They thought I was a fine fellow, if inclined to be soft-hearted and easy on women, and referred to me as their little priest, since I refused to take part in rape and the pillaging of holy places.

  
Asbad had no reason to welcome the arrival of Narses. All was set for the contending armies to clash in an epic pitched battle, thus bringing the long war to a close and finally deciding the ownership of Italy. This was wretched news for the Masterless Men, who lived off the consequences of war, and relied on it continuing for many years yet.    

  
He brooded for weeks in his lonely mountain stronghold, sending out regular bands of scouts to watch Totila at Rome and Narses at Ancona, and report on any movements. I waited, and bided my time, and prayed for Arthur’s wellbeing.

   “Please God,” I murmured every night, out of earshot of my godless comr
ades, “let him be safe. Bring him through every trial without hurt. If he must fight, let him not be struck down. Spare him, O Lord, and take me instead. I am old, and ready to die.”

  
It was high summer before Narses made his move. From Ancona he marched north to Ravenna, forcing a path through the mountains since the Goths had destroyed the old Roman bridge on the Flaminian road. At Ravenna he rested his army for nine days before setting out again.

   “He’s marching on
Rome,” reported Agelmund, “straight down the Flaminian Way. Totila has moved out of the city to confront him.”

  
I would not have credited Narses with such boldness, but then the eunuch constantly surprised me. His conduct of the war to date had been firm and decisive, as though placing him in overall command had instilled some sense of duty in place of his usual scheming avarice. For once, Justinian had demonstrated shrewd judgment.

   An idea came to
me. “We should be present, when the armies meet,” I said, “remain out of sight while the battle rages, and then descend on the field after all is over. Think of it! All those thousands of dead men. The plunder would be immense.”

   “Too risky,”
Asbad replied quickly, “what if we were spotted by outriders?”

   I could almost smell
his fear, and his followers looked unimpressed. A few had already started to cast sidelong looks at their chief. I was sometimes tempted to encourage their doubts with a carefully placed word here and there, but refrained, not wishing to put myself in danger. It is in the nature of thieves to fall out among themselves, and I predicted Asbad would suffer a fatal accident before the summer was out.

   He sensed the disquiet of his men
. After a bit more whining and protesting, he agreed to my plan by pretending it was his own.

   “We shall track the line of march of the Romans,” he said, “Totila will have to advance to meet them somewhere on the Flaminian road. Until the slaughter is over, we keep our distance.”

   “Then,” he added, baring his brown teeth in a snarl, “the wolves shall descend.”

31.

The Masterless Men rode out in force from their lonely hilltop fortress. There were twenty-seven in all, a disparate collection of Goths, Isaurians, Lombards, Gepids and I know not what else. And, of course, a single Briton.    

   Asbad se
nt two bands of scouts on ahead to discover the precise location of the contending armies. Agramond’s men returned first. They found us picking our way through a ravine, surrounded by the frowning heights of the snow-capped Appenines.

   “
The Romans have taken up position over there,” said Agramond, pointing his spear to the south, “on a plain near Taginae.”

   I could see nothing but mountains in that direction, but Asbad knew the country better. “Onward, then,” he said, “but slowly.”

   He took us south via a difficult route, through a winding defile with sheer walls of rock rising either side of us. The way was so narrow in places we had to ride in single file, and Asbad insisted on absolute silence.

   The ground sloped gradually upward. It was oppressively hot, and clouds of midges buzzed and danced around us, irritating the horses.

   We emerged on a high ridge, overlooking a broad expanse of grassy plain. The plain was entirely ringed by mountains, a hollow crown of jagged white peaks, thrusting like colossal daggers into the peerless blue sky.

It was a glorious sight, and at another time I might have enjoyed the view. Instead my eye was drawn to the north-west, where Narses had drawn up his army.

  
I am a Briton at heart, of the old blood of British princes, but did not serve all those years in the Roman army for nothing. After the long, weary months of captivity, and the degrading company of thieves, the sight of the eagle stirred something dormant in my soul. 

   “He has
arranged them well,” I said, the first and only time I paid a compliment to Narses, “Belisarius could have done no better.”

   Narses had indeed done well. The little chess-master was something of a soldier after all,
and possessed a martial spirit under the soft powdered flesh and opulent trappings of the courtier.

   He had taken up a defensive position, securing what little high ground existed, on the north-west edge of the plain. A mile or so to his east was the little
village of Taginae, which gave the region its name. The village was deserted, for the prudent inhabitants had fled into the mountains until all was quiet again.

  
In the centre of the Roman army, massed in a single dense phalanx of infantry, were the foederati troops, Huns and Heruls and Lombards and the levies from Thrace and Illyria. They numbered some ten to fifteen thousand men, presenting a long, unbreakable wall of shields.

  
My spirits rose at the sight of the forest of banners and streamers, garishly painted with the crude symbols of the various tribes in Roman service: the wolf and the fox, stag’s heads with spreading antlers, swooping hawks and snarling bears.

   On the flanks of the infantry, protected by lines of stakes and hastily-dug ditches, Narses had placed his archers. Isaurians mostly, mixed with a few Sassanids and Thracian slingers. The Roman battle-line resembled a crescent, with the archers on the wings inclining slightly towards the infantry in the centre.

   “It’s a trap,” said Asbad, who had also been studying the Roman formation, “if the Goths attack the Romans in the centre, they will be shot to bits by the archers on the flanks. This Narses is a shrewd devil.”

   I agreed
, and smiled as I imagined the eunuch sitting in his pavilion, thoughtfully planning the deployment of his army with chess pieces representing the various units. 

  
My heart clenched as I saw what lay in wait behind the archers. Narses had also stationed his cavalry on the wings, squadrons of lancers and horse-archers, including the elite bucelarii. Somewhere among them, assuming he had survived the long march from Salona, was my son.

   It was agonising, knowing he was so close, but unable to go to him. “
Stay where you are, old man,” snapped Asbad, noting my anxiety, “dare to give away our position, and I’ll put my sword through your heart.”