Flame of the West (21 page)

- Narses.

  
I scrunched the parchment into a ball, dropped it on the ground and crushed it underfoot.

   “There is my reply,” I said, grinning up at the Egyptian.
He returned the grin with interest.

   “My master warned me you might not be polite,” he said, “
especially when I repeat the verbal part of my message. When we reach Salona, you and your son are to join our fleet stationed there.”

   “What fleet?” I demanded, “my understanding was that the army would march north and invade
Italy by land.”

   “And so it shall. But it will take many months to reach the Gulf, and the Goths are already blockading our last ports on the Italian mainland.
They must not be allowed to fall.”

   “Croton and
Ancona,” I said. He gracefully nodded his sleek, perfumed head before continuing.

   “
Just so. Totila is most impertinent. Even now, fifty of his warships blockade Ancona, while some three hundred other vessels are raiding the coast of Epirus and the Ionian Islands.”

   “And I’m supposed to stop him, am I?”

   The envoy gave a mannered little chuckle. “No, no, though your contribution is appreciated. My master has ordered forty Roman ships to muster at Salona. They will sail to engage the Gothic fleet at Ancona, and on the way be reinforced by ships from Ravenna.”

   In spite of all our losses in
Italy, we had at least managed to hold onto Ravenna, the capital.

  
“I still fail to see why my presence is required,” I said, “or my son’s. He is a captain of horse, and we are both quite useless at sea. Who commands the fleet from Ravenna?”

   “
Valerian.”

  
I vaguely knew of him, a tough and capable veteran, and one of the few to serve Belisarius faithfully in Italy.

   “And at Salona?”

   The envoy’s smoothly handsome face split into an infuriating smirk.

   “John the San
guinary.”

26
.

I tried to comfort myself. After ten years it seemed unlikely that John still held a grudge against me, especially since he had risen high in the Emperor’s favour, whereas I had sank into obscurity.

   Besides, Arthur was
right. I was fat, and fifty, and badly out of condition from my shameful habit of gorging at table. The long, weary march from Salona to the Gulf, through the disease-ridden Dalmatian marshes, was not a happy prospect.

   Nor could I disobey orders
. If not a soldier, I was still in the service of Rome, and Narses was the commander-in-chief. He might have had me killed at any time, if he so wished, but instead preferred to torment me from afar. Such was the price I paid for refusing to desert Belisarius for his service, all those years ago.

  
“I am in for a sea-voyage,” I informed Arthur, “with a battle at the end of it.”

   He paled. Like me, he loathed and dreaded the sea. “
To what end?” he demanded, “my Heruls are no use at sea. They will be needed to fight the Goths in Perugia.”

   I smiled bleakly. Narses had thought of everything, and his slave had furnished me with all the details before leaving my house.

   “You are to stay with the army,” I explained, “but I am needed to help relieve Ancona. The garrison has been under siege for months. They are running low on food, and taken to eating their horses. I am to sail with the fleet with my stock, to replace the animals lost to famine.”

   Arthur seemed lost
. We had barely spent a day apart for over ten years, ever since I brought him to Constantinople. All that time I struggled to understand him, and we never grew as close as I would have liked, but he had come to rely on me.

  
“You wanted to go,” I said, clasping his hand, “to prove yourself. Now is your opportunity. We shall meet again, when the army reaches Ravenna.”

   I tried to sound optimistic, but the chances of us meeting again were slender. The march from Salona, all the way around the Adriatic coast, would take
many months, while our army would have to fight its way through hordes of Goths.

   In addition, t
here was no guarantee our fleet would defeat Totila’s. Both sides had an equal number of ships, and the Gothic admirals were said to be able men. 

   Our army marched from
Constantinople, the first landward departure from the city I had experienced. The people gathered to cheer as our troops marched down the Mese with all the grand panoply of war, trumpets playing, cymbals clashing and banners waving.

  
My son took his place among the mounted Herulians in the vanguard, while I stayed far to the rear, riding in the back of a baggage wagon. From there I could keep a careful eye on my horses, over forty pureblood young stallions from Hispania, just recently broken.

   The eyes of the people lining the streets were all for our soldiers. None paid any heed to me, the fat greybeard taking his ease on a straw bale in the back of
a cart, but I carefully scanned the sea of faces. I was looking for Belisarius, wondering if he had ventured from his house in disguise, and come to watch the army march away.

   “The army he should be leading,” I muttered.
There was no sign of his lean, bearded face among the crowds. Eventually I gave up and settled back to contemplate the heavens.

  
The army passed through the city’s elaborate western defences, the old Constantinian Wall and then the double line of walls built by the Emperor Theodosius, and emerged from the Golden Gate. This was the main ceremonial entrance to the city, made from blocks of sparkling white marble in the form of a triumphal arch.

  
It was also the gate via which I had first entered Constantinople with my mother, almost forty-five years gone. As always, the thought of her filled me with sorrow. I closed my eyes until the wagon had rumbled well past the gate.

   I would never see it, or the city, again.

   The army marched on to Salona, through the bleak plains of Thrace, baked dry and hard by the summer sun. I was reminded me of the wastelands of Perugia, strangled by the heat while its people died of thirst and starvation. Fortunately our troops were well-supplied, and suffered none of the privations of previous campaigns.

   After a two-week march, our army
crossed into Dalmatia at a leisurely pace and reached Salona unscathed, without glimpsing any sign of the enemy. Dalmatia was once occupied by the Goths, but had abandoned much of the country and their troops to Italy, leaving just a few scattered garrisons.

Occasionally we marched past one of their outposts,
but the men inside wisely stayed behind their high walls and strong gates.

   “
Two hundred miles from Constantinople,” grumbled Arthur after the army pitched camp a day’s march from the coast, “and all I have to show for it is saddle sores. Caledfwlch is quiet in her scabbard.”

  
“And will remain so for a while yet,” I said cheerfully, “it is a long way to Italy. A very long way. At the speed Narses likes to march, the Goths may have died of old age before you reach Ravenna.”

  
Steel hissed on oiled leather as Arthur slowly drew Caledfwlch. “You will see action before me,” he said, offering me the sword, hilt-first, “perhaps you should take her back. She has never failed you in battle.”

   The blade of Caesar’s sword gleamed in the half-darkness of early evening. For a s
econd or two I was tempted. It would have been good to feel the worn ivory grip in my hand again, and the familiar weight and balance of the ancient gladius.

   “No,” I said, with a great effort of will, “
I gave Caledfwlch away, and no longer have any right to it. A plain sword will serve me well enough. Assuming I can find the strength to fight, with a deck heaving under my feet.”

   The mere thought of fighting aboard ship was enough to make my stomach clench.
I suspected Narses was aware of my sea-sickness, and wanted me to suffer vomiting and loose bowels while the battle raged around me.

  
Salona was a rich port, the capital of Dalmatia, and had remained loyal to Rome when the Goths overran the rest of the province. The landward gates stood open to welcome our troops, and imperial banners flew from the walls.

  
My guts gave a twinge when I spotted the masts of our ships clustered in the harbour. I counted thirty-six vessels in all, mostly war galleys, with a few smaller dromons and four fat-bottomed transport ships.

   I made my way to the harbour, ignoring the puzzled and occasionally amused looks the citizens gave me. As old soldiers went, I was a fairly unimpressive specimen, puffing and sweating as I fought my way through the busy streets.
I had struggled into my old armour – not the fine gear Belisarius gave me, which I had sold off, but a plain knee-length mail coat and a cavalry helmet with dangling cheek-pieces – and was feeling the strain of it, especially around the waist.

  
John the Sanguinary’s flagship was docked nearest to the harbour, and the largest vessel in the fleet, a sleek war galley gleaming with fresh black and gold paint.

   I smelled John before I saw him. He still doused himself in perfume, like a cheap dockside whore, and was standing among a little group of his cronies.
Like their chief, all were resplendent in finely-wrought armour and costly silks, and carried expensive swords with gold hilts.

   They were also
notably young and tall and comely, as though chosen for their physical grace and ability to look grand in military uniform. Next to this pack of brightly coloured starlings, I was an old crow, drab and unsightly.

   “Good to see you again, sir,” I said in a loud voice, interrupting their banal chatte
r. John swung around, a look of annoyance on his darkly handsome features. He hadn’t aged a day since I last met him, outside the gates of Rimini.

   “
Ah, the tame Briton,” he said in that cold, sneering tone I remembered so well, “Narses told me to expect you. You have a few more grey hairs since we last met, and a bit of extra padding around the middle. Are you pregnant, man, or have you stuffed a cushion down there?”

   His cronies laughed at the feeble jest and gave each other knowing looks. Their high-pitched braying grated on my nerves, but I did my best to ignore it.

   “My horses are stationed outside the city, sir,” I said patiently, “and are ready to embark whenever you choose.”

   “And? What is that to me? I am the admiral of the fleet, not a God-cursed beastmaster, and cannot attend to every minor detail. Have th
e animals loaded aboard the transports without delay.”

   I saluted and wandered away, feeling the heat of his gaze on my back.
If he wanted to plunge a dagger into it, here was his opportunity.

   As ever, I overrated my importance. John the Sanguinary cared little whether I lived or died, and the faint animosity between us was long-buried in the past.
He was an anxious man, entrusted by Narses with the task of relieving the last two major Roman ports in Italy and destroying the Gothic fleet.

  
Narses’ judgment could not usually be faulted, but I thought he had blundered in choosing John for his admiral, allowing friendship to blind him to the man’s limitations. John was a cavalry officer, and a good one, but had no experience of naval warfare.

   That evening I had the Devil’s own
job loading my horses aboard the transports, or rather my handlers did. I confined myself to standing on the jetty and cursing their incompetence while they laboured to get the terrified beasts into the barges.

   Horses loathe the sea, a
lmost as much as I do, and they had to be lifted aboard with a crane. Frantic with rage and terror, they kicked and bit and lashed out at the handlers, breaking one man’s arm and shattering another’s ribcage. Darkness had fallen before the thing was done, and I was obliged to pay for the injured men to be taken to a sanatorium.

   Weary and foots
ore, I went in search of Arthur and found him eating supper with his men, on the outskirts of the city of white tents that had sprung up outside Salona.

   I shared a cup of wine with him, complimented the good discipline and order of his men, and tried to put off the inevitable farewell.

   Arthur did it for me. “Until Ravenna, then,” he said suddenly, offering his hand.

   I c
lasped it. “Until Ravenna,” I replied, silently cursing the catch in my voice.

   The rest of my night was spent in virtually sleepless dread, haunted by images of burning ships and myself drowning, clawing helplessly at the black wate
rs as they closed over my head; or else visions of Arthur, lost on some misted battlefield, calling feebly for his parents even as his life-blood spilled from a mortal wound.

  
These merry thoughts occupied me until morning, when the brazen call of trumpets announced the imminent departure of the fleet. Valerian had arrived from Ravenna with his twelve ships, and we were now ready to sail.