Flame of the West (15 page)

   “They are still lodged in the palace,” he explained,
“near my own quarters. Eat and drink your fill, and be comfortable. My men shall soon return.”

   Unable
to eat, I pushed away the platter of salt beef and sat trembling with fear and nervous excitement. I was going to see my son. After all these years, we would clap eyes on each other for the first time.

   Endless questions swirled through my mind. How would he react to me? Would he rush into my arms, or spring at me with a curse on his lips?
He must have something of his mother in him. I prayed he had not inherited her gift for hating.

  
Time crawled past. After an age, the young Gothic officer appeared in the doorway.

   Like me, he trembled, and tears coursed down his beardless cheeks. I half-
rose, and instinctively reached for Caledfwlch.

 
“You won’t need that,” he said, his voice full of misery and despair, “Elene is dead. She took her own life rather than spend it without me. Are you content now, father?”

16.

Elene lay in her bath, the blood from her slit wrists gently expanding to turn the water a cloudy red.

   She looked peaceful in death, almost serene. The years had left little mark on her, save a few grey hairs in her long, glossy black hair, now unbound and dabbled in blood.

   Orphaned as a baby, Elene had been raised in the Hippodrome and trained as a dancer. Her body was as lean and wiry and muscular as ever. I remembered the warmth
of it, coiled around me in bed during the distant days of our shared youth.

   The warmth and life was gone from her forever. Her dancer’s body was naught but a lifeless piece of meat, floating in d
irty water. Her shade had fled, hopefully to some peaceful haven.

  
The moment I heard she was dead, all my hatred for Elene dissipated like morning mist.

  
I tore my eyes away from the terrible, pitiful sight, to face her son. Our son.

   We were alone in his mother’s quarters. Arthur had dismissed the rest of the guard, and brought me here by himself. I thought he meant to kill me.

   “Here,” I said, loosening Caledfwlch in her scabbard and offering him the hilt, “if you’re going to do it, use your great-grandsire’s blade. I won’t try and stop you.”
   His face was still streaked with tears. At just sixteen, he was already a head taller than me, and would grow to be a giant. He had his mother’s wiry frame, of the sort that does not carry fat, and the red hair and fair colouring of his royal British ancestors. My heart swelled with grief and pride to look at him. The grief was for myself; the pride all for him. It was obvious, just by his appearance, that my grandsire’s blood ran far stronger in his veins than mine.

  
He had his mother’s eyes, large and green and fiercely expressive. They fastened on Caledfwlch.

   “Caesar’s sword,” he murmured, wiping his face with the back of his gauntlet, “I have heard
so much about it. The twin Roman eagles, stamped in gold on an ivory hilt.”

   “Your inheritance,” I said, “take it now, if you like.”

   Arthur’s gaze lingered my sword for a moment. Then he drew himself up, towering above me, and patted the hilt of the spatha hanging from his hip. “I have my own sword,” he replied sternly, “and have no interest in old heirlooms.”

   “When you saw m
y mother, lying dead in the water,” he asked, “what did you feel? Shame? Guilt? Or nothing at all?”

   He rapped out the questions like an officer used to command. The harsh, soldierly tone
concealed the undoubted pain ravaging his soul. 

   “
Sadness,” I answered truthfully, “but no shame or guilt. Elene chose to leave me, all those years ago. She chose to betray me, to lie to me, to try and have me killed. She betrayed her employers, and the Empire, and eventually ran out of places to hide.”

   I shook my head, trying not to look at the thing in the bath. “
You knew her better than I, but it seems to me Elene tried to use treachery as a weapon. Unlike others, she lacked the skill to wield it.”

  
Arthur’s index finger tap-tapped on the hilt of his sword. I watched it closely, waiting for him to draw steel. I was testing him, seeing how far he could be pushed, trying to divine his feelings for Elene.

   “She never betrayed me,” he said quietly, “
for years we led a vagabond life, wandering Anatolia and Syria, begging for our keep most of the time. We often had little to eat, but that little always went to me first. My earliest memory is of her weeping with hunger as she pushed bread into my mouth.”

   It was too much. I lifted my hand in a silent plea for mercy.

   “Why?” I burst out when I could trust myself to speak again, “why did she leave me? There was no need for such hardship – no need to expose herself, and you, to such suffering! I would have provided for both of you.”

   To my astonishment, Arthur laughed. It was the bitterest laugh I ever heard, full of contempt and mockery, and the last thing I expected to hear. His mother’s body lay cooling in the bath, just a few feet away, with a bloody knife lying on the flagstones beside the stone tub, and yet he laughed.

   “She didn’t want you!” he cried, “she didn’t want to be any man’s wife, looking after his hearth and home, preparing his meals, submitting to his desires in bed. My mother was a lone wolf, angry and frustrated with the limits placed on her sex. She should have been born a man. What a soldier she would have made!”

   He looked at me pityingly. “S
he didn’t love you. She loved nothing and no-one, save me.”

   Suddenly I was angry. “Very well, she didn’t love me,” I retorted, “but I did nothing to incur her hatred. Why did she
try to have me killed outside Naples?”

  
Arthur hung his head, and ran a hand through his thick mop of red curls.

  
“I don’t know, for certain. I suspect she held a grudge against you for putting a child in her belly. Nature compelled her to love me, so she turned all her anger and resentment on you. No-one could hate like Elene. When I was eight years old, she turned her hand to killing for money. An assassin, hiring out her services to the highest bidder. Turned out she had a rare talent for it. A passion for dealing death. We lived well, until she took service with Antonina, and failed her once too often.”

   “And you?” I asked, “
did she teach you to hate?”

  
“I was always a disappointment to her in that regard. She tried to turn me into a killer, to teach me the ways of the assassin. No-one suspects a child, do they? I could slip poison into a man’s drink, or a subtle knife into his back, and escape before anyone noticed I had gone. I refused to do it. Why should I? I had no cause to hate anyone.”

  
“Still, she kept me by her side through the years. As I grew, I became her protector, her shield against the buffets of the world.”

   He eyed me with a cynical smile on his lips, far too cynical for one so young. “
I suspected who you were, as soon as you told me you were British. Your continued survival drove her mad. In the end, she decided you were not quite mortal, and that she was fated to die by your hand.”

  
“But she died by her own,” I said heavily.

   “Yes.
She preferred death by the knife, in the warm and comfort of her bath, than the humiliation of being defeated by you. Disgraced Roman senators used to open their veins in the bath. I believe she was following their example, and tried to make a noble end.”

   “
I was ready to kill you in the throne room,” he added, “even though I knew you were my father. If you had asked Vitiges to put Elene to death, I was going to draw my sword and run you through the heart. Vitiges would have executed me, of course, but I cared little for my own life. I could not see my mother end on the gallows, or by the headsman’s blade.”

  
In the end, I left him to grieve. It was unbearable, being in the presence of such a miserable death, and I could feel the weight of all Elene’s wasted years pressing down on me.

  
Somehow, though I claimed to feel no guilt, the blame was mine. For whatever reason, I had not been good enough for her, and the result of my inadequacy lay bleeding in a lukewarm bath.

  
For the present, I had exhausted all I had to say to Arthur. He had shocked me, and frightened me a little, and finally left me baffled. His love and sorrow for Elene was evident, but there was something unknowable about him. In time, when his grief had passed and Elene was safely in the ground, I hoped to become his friend.

   I was obliged to leave
Ravenna the same evening, to inform Belisarius of the success of my mission. He was elated, the happiest I had seen him in many a year, and warmly congratulated me on finding my son.

   “God has not seen fit to bless me in that regard, alas,” he said, shaking my hand (he had just one child, a daughter from a previous marriage), “but I wish you joy of him. Arthur, is his name? Ha, your grandsire lives again
!”

   I had come to a similar conclusion. Later, in the peace and solitude of my tent, I permitted myself the luxury of grand dreams.

   Thanks to the discovery of Arthur, my chaotic, rootless existence now made sense. All had become clear. Belisarius would assume control of the restored Roman Empire and despatch me, at the head of an army, to make Britain a Roman province once again.

   The stories of my grandsire insisted that he had not died at Camlann, but had been spirited away to Avallon, the legendary Isle of Apples, to recover from his wounds in a deathless sleep. When the time came, and
Britain was in deadly peril, he would awake and return at the head of his warriors to save the country.

   My mind raced
with possibilities. The prophecy of my grandsire’s return would be fulfilled in the person of my son, another Arthur. He would return to Britain, with me at his side, and drive out the barbarians who had plagued the land for generations.

   It was not I who would sit in royal state, with the
glittering crown of the High King of Britain on my brow, and Caledfwlch at my hip. That glorious destiny was reserved for my son. My task was to bring it about.

   My dreams that night were full of kings and crowns, dim battles fought beside a misted shore, the cries of dying men, the dying blast of war-horns, and the harsh croak of ravens as they feasted on the slain.

   My youth had been haunted by such dreams, but I had not experienced any for years, ever since I slew the traitor Leo in the Hippodrome. I welcomed their return, and gloried in the vivid, bloodstained imagery of war. They were glimpses, I assured myself, of the glorious victories Arthur would win over the pagans in Britain.

  
Not once, in my fevered imaginings, did I consider the wishes of my son. He, like me, was inextricably bound up in the coils of fate. There was no escaping his destiny. Why should he wish to?

  
The night passed, dreams faded, and the sound of trumpets pierced the morning air, announcing the surrender of Ravenna.

17.

On a cold, bright dawn in mid-December, the gates of the Gothic capital were thrown open, and Belisarius led his army in triumph through the streets. His fleet, laden with provisions to sweeten the mood of the starving populace, was permitted to sail into the harbour at Classe.

   T
he sailors immediately started distributing bread and wine to the citizens. Belisarius well understood how to win the affection of the mob, and that the fame and terror of his name were sometimes not enough to guarantee it.

  
I rode in the vanguard, among his Veterans, wearing the fine armour he had given me at Fermo. The imperial banner flew in triumph above my head, and thousands of people lined the streets to look upon their deliverer – or conqueror, depending on how you look at it – General Flavius Belisarius, the most famous soldier of the age.

   “Shame!” I overheard some of the Gothic women cry, “shame!”

   I thought their shouts were directed at me, but then I saw them spitting in the faces of their menfolk and pointing in derision at our troops.

   They were heaping shame on their husbands and brothers and sons, the men of the Gothic nation, for being conquered by the Romans, whom they regarded as degenerate and effeminate. Certainly, most of our soldiers lacked the physical size and strength of the Goths. To the women, who knew little of war, it must
have seemed impossible that a vastly outnumbered army of pygmy hirelings could have overcome their warriors in so many battles.

  
Belisarius was careful to restrain his men from looting the city, not wishing to spoil the glory of this, his final and decisive victory. Having surrendered peacefully, Ravenna was spared the horrors of the sack, and Belisarius’s accession to the throne of Italy untainted by the blood of innocents.