The Songs of Slaves (55 page)

Connor regarded Attalus, still jeweled, armed, and armored, but now pale-faced. Lost, the man had not moved. Then summoning his courage he turned to join the senators, and retreated with them back into the camp. The battle lines softened as the warriors began to walk back to their tents and wagons. It looked like a massive mosaic suddenly loosened all of its pieces and blew away as the men moved back to their camp.

“Come on,” Valia said.
“Looks like today’s stand-off is over.”
  

***

“I still do not understand what happened,”
Lucia
said. “Did we come all the way out here just to watch that? And if the king of these people was going to just depose his own puppet
Augustulus
in favor of ours, then why did he show off like that?”

She was kneeling on the bare grass under the low tent, washing her face. Connor looked at her in her linen summer dress, openly admiring her. He rested back on the saddlebags that served as their furniture and pillows, his hands folded behind his head.
Archangel
lay scabbarded across his lab – as always, kept obsessively within his reach – but he had taken off his mail coat and his tunic. The air had cooled somewhat as evening approached, and their old familiar tent gave ample shade. They had thought that the lack of privacy and the noise had been bad when they had travelled with Valia’s two hundred followers; now they were amongst tens of thousands
–
one small tent on a plain of tents, a canvas metropolis.

“So what I’m hearing is that you miss our home?” Connor teased.

“I miss our bath,”
Lucia
smiled.

Connor tore his eyes away and looked out the low opening to the people who idled by. It was a learned art to have a one on one conversation in these surroundings. With so many people, seemingly constantly in motion, the unaccustomed would feel as if they might at any moment be trampled. 

“I think it’s coming together in my mind,” Connor said. “Think about it. This year has been nothing but a series of disasters – not just for the Visigoths, but for everybody involved. So in November Alaric has the Senate appoint Priscus Attalus. This gives Alaric legitimacy, and seems like a great way to get Honorius out of the picture. Maybe if everything had gone to plan it would have. But what happens?”

“Attalus shows that he has a mind of his own,”
Lucia
said. “He starts acting as if he truly is in charge of the government with the Senate, as the
Augustulus
ou
gh
t to be, and as if Alaric is just the head of the army.”

“Right.
That might be fine if he made good decisions – or at least if his poor decisions had been somewhat shielded by luck. But they weren’t. Honorius is weak – he temporarily recognized Constantine as a legitimate co-emperor earlier; and he might have done the same for Attalus. But Attalus brought that to ruin, by insisting that Honorius abdicate, and by choosing to put trust in the wrong people. So then it had to be a struggle between the two. By raising an
Augustulus
against Honorius, the city of Rome backed a usurper by
any outside Roman’s
view. So that makes the C
ity of Rome an enemy of the
Imperium
of Rome. So, of course, the
Imperium
embargoes the C
ity, so no food or other essentials are getting in.”

“And Rome has depended on the outside world for food for hundreds of years,”
Lucia
added. “They have to have it shipped in, or everyone starves.”

“So now they are more under siege then they were when the Goths were their enemies. Instead of Alaric
leading tens of thousands of Visigoths
to North Africa to secure the grain supply immediately, Attalus insists on sending diplomats. Heraclian of Africa declare himself for Honorius, kills the diplomats, and secures the harbors. Instead of listening to Alaric then, Attalus and the Senate send what Roman troops they can scrape together and send them straight into Heraclian’s death trap – all so that he will not have to be beholden to Alaric.”

“Which, of course, he already was and always had been,”
Lucia
said.
“Now Rome starves again.
The women I talked to today said that the tales coming from the city are worse than ever. There is nothing – and what there may be is sold at fully exploitive prices.
Plague has broken out. People are dying. And all the Senate can find to do is reinstitute gladiatorial games. Even in one of those, I heard, there was a riot – as the starving spectators wanted to buy the corpses of the slain gladiators for food!”

Connor nodded. He had heard similar tales.

“So Alaric realized that raising a usurper only made things more complicated for him,” Connor said. “I think perhaps he also though
t that maybe people in Attalus’
government were deliberately trying to undo his work – deliberately trying to make it fail, out of prejudice or resentment. So he brought us all here as a sign of strength, rushed the walls in a sign of bravery and control both to those in Ravenna but more so to his own people, and then publicly and bloodlessly deposed the unwitting Attalus as a sign of cooperation. Now that he has everyone’s complete attention peace talks can resume. Now a treaty may be signed and a solution be reached.” 

“But the truth is that there is only one solution,”
Lucia
said, tossing the bowl of wash water out on the more downhill side of the tent. “There is no food, nor any money, nor
anything left
. Why? Because there is no
one who can work the fields who has not been killed, or pressed into service, or fled out of fear, or been taxed into destitution by one government or another. Who can work when they are afraid their homes will be plundered and their children taken? Who can plant fields when they know that they may just be burned? You have seen more of the countryside of Liguria than I have, and the whole journey down here we saw more of the same. You know better than I do that this land – the heart of our great
Imperium
– is in ruin. How much longer can this continue? Honorius, Attalus, Constantine,
Alaric
– they all must stop. They are like men who are fighting over a cloak but who rip it to pieces in their greed. There will be nothing left for any of them – nothing left for any of us.”

“But how can they stop now?” Connor said. “Can this great multitude just walk away? Where would they go? Can Honorius just forgive the rebel Senate and let everything return to what it had been? Too much blood has already been spilled.”

“Would you have more blood spilled? Would that wash away the blood already on the ground?”

“You are your father’s daughter,” Connor smiled. “What I would have is you and me far away from all this madness.”

Lucia
moved over to him. Connor put his arm around her shoulders, smelling the sun on her hair. She rested her head on his chest as she traced his muscles with her fingertips.

“Come to Asisium with me,”
Lucia
said. Connor listened to her tone carefully – it was suggestive, but not pleading.

“Are you ready for me to take you?” he asked.

“I am not ready to be without you,”
Lucia
said.

“I cannot stay in Asisium,” Connor said. “Not yet. My
geis
would be unfulfilled, my
mandata
incomplete.”

“You always speak cryptically when you are cornered,”
Lucia
said, kissing his chest.

“And what would I do in Asisium?” Connor said. “I’m sure I would be ever so well-received by your family there. I wonder if Asisium is at all far
enough away from this for us, if even behind the walls of that hill town you will be safe.”

“Is anywhere in the
Imperium
safe anymore?
Anywhere in the world?”

Connor held her closer and kissed the top of her head. Outside the first of the campfires lighted as dusk faded to night.

XXVI

             
Connor sat cross-legged at the entrance of his tent, shaded from the worst of the sun.
Meridiatio
was over, but there was no reason to get up. There was nothing to do. He sipped at his cup of tepid white wine, watered in the Roman style as much to maintain the stores as to make it more thirst-quenching. His left hand lay idly on
Archangel’s
scabbard, but as usual for this time of day his mail and tunic lay folded by his saddlebags. Connor smirked as he remembered all the times he had read in Homer or in the scriptures of eastern men sitting at the entrance of their tents in their far-off arid lands. Now here he was, doing just that. But even his smile seemed to take effort in this heat. It was never like this back home in Eire. He looked up past the masses sweltering in the camp and out towards the rolling Italian countryside – somehow bright green and spotted with flowers despite their lack of rain. The nearby Adriatic was not visible from his vantage point, but he could smell a hint of the harbor on the air.

             
Days like this seemed to drag interminably. Connor realized that he had lost track of how long it had been since they had come here, since Attalus had
been stripped of the Purple. Peace talks had commenced the very next day, held in a pavilion erected on the plain between the Gothic camp and the kill zone before the city. The Goths knew well from the example of Stilicho and so many others not to trust the Romans enough to send their leaders within the walls. Ataulf came back on the night of the first day, but talked of almost nothing but the radiant beauty, charm, and wit of Galla Placidia – the young sister of Honorius and former ward of Stilicho’s wife, now the diplomatic hostage Alaric had taken from the Rome. By this Connor and the others had construed that peace talks were progressing extremely slowly, if at all. In the days that followed the pace of Ataulf’s news increased, so that every night around his campfire he told the officers enough of the talks to make them feel as if they were being kept informed, but not too much. Ataulf, and presumably
Alaric’s
other officers, knew that information is vital to men, but not information that would erode their confidence or incite their discontent. And so Ataulf chose his words carefully, but delivered them with such talent that his men could get excited about it and feel as if they were a part of the process.

             
That they were not, however, a part of the process – other than adding the strength of numbers to the Visigoth position – was evident to all, as day and night drudged on and one week turned to two before most stopped counting. Every day the men assembled in battle formations before the walls, but now there was usually no cheering or other bombast. Alaric wanted the people of Ravenna to see his strength, but acting as if they were truly about to attack would obviously be counterproducti
ve. Every day, while the infantry
lay idle or perhaps engaged in some light practice, Valia and the other cavalry leaders would exercise their men and horses on the fields west of the camp. Connor looked forward to this always – it was good to use up some of his energy; but beyond this, he felt like he was getting quite good. During the wint
er, he had traded in Merridius’
horse for a gray gelding
he had named Fingal. The horse was not as fine in terms of confirmation or speed; but the sturdy beast had been trained as a cavalry mount and was as fearless as a horse could be. With him, Connor was mastering both the individual and the tandem maneuvers and the skills needed for mounted warfare, and loving every hour of it. He wished that they could all use this time for larger
group training evolutions – using all the cavalry together along with the infantry – but this was forbidden. Small units of “Scythians” racing over the plains could impress the Roman onlookers of the formidability of their foes; but a large group operation may just expose their weaknesses.

             
But after these exercises were completed, the men were dismissed. After hiding from the heat during
meridiatio
there was nothing to do but whittle the rest of the day away. Before too
long Connor
felt as if he had talked to every man and woman in camp, heard every tale of Gothic glory thirty times, drank enough wine and ale to fill the Tiber, spent innumerable hours exploring Venusian wonders with
Lucia
, and trod down every convoluted footpath of his mind.

             
But it was not his own boredom with the camp that concerned him. The Visigoths knew they were closer than they had ever been to achieving their goal, and so moods had started out exceptionally high
– almost as if this whole mustering
was a grand festival. But as the waiting settled in, that impression started to slowly slip. No one was going hungry, but it was common knowledge that the food and drink that could
be brought in must be limited. So far sanitation measures had held, but everyone had to know that they were sitting ducks for an outbreak of plague. The small chores of camp life started to seem unduly tedious, and people were inventing things to complain about. The only thing battling all this was Alaric’s and Ataulf’s nightly propaganda and the Visigoth’s native idealism. How long would that be enough? How long before the grumbling turned to fights and the few men who slipped away some nights turned into abandonment in droves?