Vengeance

CHAPTER TWO

‘You must stay here,’ Ohannes insisted in a hushed whisper as he picked up the sword from the murdered guard.

The reply was just as hushed, but terse. ‘This is my house.’

‘Then go fetch help.’

‘From where?’ Flavius said, making for the open doorway until a strong flat hand hit his chest, stopping him dead, but doing nothing to dent his determination. ‘There’s no one about and my father is half a league away.’

‘Then stay behind me,’ Ohannes hissed as another set of curses and thuds came through the open doorway.

So great was the noise that the pair, swords at the ready, eased unseen through the doorway, until Flavius, possibly through nerves, certainly through a lack of experience, allowed his weapon point to touch the stone of the wall and send out a metallic warning. The men intent on robbery spun round, one holding the axe with which he had placed several deep woodcuts around a lock set in stout oak. The other villain had a short spear and somewhere on their person both must have had knives.

Killers already, they knew they were confronting death and it was inevitable that faced with an old man with greying hair, bony and scarred from many a battle, set against a young and fresh-faced youth, they should make Flavius their prime target. The spear point was aimed at his breastplate within a blink, the hand holding it drawing back to thrust, the youngster too rooted to the spot to react properly. Ohannes saved him by rushing forward and closing with the spearman before he could cast his weapon, a thrust-out and fully extended sword taking the surprised thief in the upper part of his chest.

That exposed Ohannes to a blow from a now raised axe and he was badly placed to avoid the swing of it, while Flavius was not close enough to counter what was bound to be fatal, so when he threw his sword it was in panic rather than any real hope. Mere luck had it spin point forward to take the axeman in the face, cutting his nose and cheek deeply and imposing enough of a check on his swing to allow Ohannes the time to extract his blade from the spear carrier. That did not entirely save him, for the axe had been raised again, ready to come down at a speed that would split the old man’s skull.

Flavius had followed up his weapon and, charging past Ohannes, he hit the axeman’s legs just below the hips with every ounce of his weight. This was enough to drive his body back onto the chest, over which he collapsed, the swinging blade missing the old man by a whisker. Sword now freed, Ohannes was swift to employ it once more on his opponent, a man wounded but still dangerous. The blade sliced down on his neck as the spearman thrust out awkwardly with the fore part of his weapon to parry the blow.

Not that Flavius saw much more than movement in the corner of his eye; the axe that had threatened the Scythian was now about to be employed on him and all the youngster could do was thrust up his own arm to try and ward it off. He soon found out that while he was able to impede the speed of the blow, an adult had the kind of strength he could not match. His head was down and he was sure he was going to die when the sword swished past his crown with such energy that he felt the wind of it on his flesh; he also heard the arm bone break.

‘Your sword,’ Ohannes yelled. ‘Get the damn sword and finish him off.’

That command had to be executed by a very rapid scrabbling on hands and knees. Once the hilt was in his hand Flavius made to stand up, only to find he lacked the time to do so. Added to that he was, once more, fighting one to one, Ohannes being involved in a to-and-fro wrestling match with his wounded opponent. The axeman might be twice injured, but he was still able to threaten Flavius, having transferred the axe to his good hand. The inability of his adversary to swing with real potency saved his young victim, the arc of the left arm being wide enough to avoid by Flavius throwing his body sideways.

From that moment instinct driven by terror took over. Those same pupils with whom he studied in the classroom, the sons of his father’s officers and senior rankers, as well as the offspring of some of the moneyed citizenry of the city, all undertook military training, albeit with wooden swords and blunted spears. For all the lack of threat in the weapons used, the intent by their instructors was that they would be taught as if they were real, so each one carried a leather crop that was used to painfully chastise any youngster who made a false move or employed their arms so badly as to leave themselves uncovered.

Now on his knees Flavius realised that to seek to rise would be to leave himself utterly exposed: time would not permit it so, gaining as much balance as a split second permitted, he thrust out hard, sending the point of his sword right into the gonads of his attacker, propelling with all his might to seek to get to the stomach. The scream that his assault produced was horrible but that had to be ignored; he was required to use his other hand, fully extended, to catch hold of the arm holding the axe, this while he sought to withdraw his weapon from what was bone-free flesh.

The knee that took him in the face might have been the act of a desperate man but it was effective; Flavius recoiled, immediately aware of the taste of blood in his mouth. Thrown onto his back he might have died at the hands of a fellow who was himself fatally wounded had he not kicked out frantically to put him off balance. One hurriedly placed boot caught the man below the knee and checked him, and this gave the youngster the time he needed to swing his sword low and hard at a bare ankle. He did so with such force that the blade went right through the back to the bone.

One leg gone and already off balance his assailant collapsed, which allowed Flavius to spring up from his static position and deliver the killer blow insisted upon by those who had trained him, albeit he had never employed it for real: a cut to the soft join of the head and neck, a swipe that produced a fount of misty blood as his sword edge severed the main artery. Ohannes, up against a much younger man, had survived because of the first wound he had inflicted, which had sapped the strength of the fellow he was fighting, but he must have had to go at it hard to still be engaged.

That contest ceased when his adversary finally lost the grip on his spear, leaving it in the hand of a fellow who knew how to use it. Ohannes spun it round so the point was aimed at the man’s face, to then draw it back and plunge it into the exposed gorge below a head thrown back as the victim sought to avoid what was coming. The gurgling that followed from both ruptured throats was the only sound that could now be heard: no words came from either Flavius or Ohannes, both sucking in much-needed air.

After a lengthy pause, in which silence took over, Ohannes kicked at the now comatose bodies to ensure they were dead. That established, the two unlikely victors looked at each other with wonder for several seconds before the old man grinned and spoke, his breath heavy and panting.

‘God in heaven, I had forgotten the joy of a damn good fight.’

‘It would be better to thank God for the good fortune we have just enjoyed. We were lucky!’

Flavius croaked that response as he wiped the blood from under what was an obviously broken nose, aware that he was shaking badly in reaction to what he knew now to be a fear suppressed by the need to act. Then he sunk to his knees and his shoulders began to heave as he felt tears well up in his eyes while at the same time he wondered why his mouth was entirely devoid of saliva. There was soon a hand on his back, patting as softly as the spoken words.

‘Wait till your papa hears of this, eh? He will not be minded to leave you behind from his battles in future, I’ll wager. Now come, it is time to wash that blood from your face and those tears from your eyes.’ The tone was firmer, intended to lift his spirits as Ohannes added, ‘You are, Flavius Belisarius, no pretend soldier now.’

It was common knowledge that Flavius was stubborn; it was the way of late children to be so for he was overindulged. With three sons already, the youngest five years his senior, the oldest seven, his parents had seen him as a gift from heaven, a late indicator of their continued regard for each other, and when conceived, a genuine surprise. He had come into the world from the loins of a man well past his prime and through the womb of a matron held to be too old to survive such a conception. If the arrival had been noisy from both mother and child, it had been achieved with surprising ease.

Named after an old companion of his father, he seemed to combine within himself all the best traits of both sides of his family: bonny as an infant and attractive as a growing boy, scamp enough to get into all the usual scrapes but with the charm to avoid too serious chastisement for his frequent transgressions.

Flavius was good at his schoolwork, which he took from his mother, and showed natural grace as he grew both in physique and his combative manner, traits shared by his brothers and inherited from their soldier father. Only recently had puberty begun to put some of his features out of balance, giving him a head a mite too big for his body as well as a small eruption of spots that went with the passage to full maturity.

He was, quite simply, the apple of his parents’ eye and it was not just his father and mother who were given to indulgence; two of his brothers, Cassius and Ennius, the eldest and nearest in age, were equally ready to forgive an increasing precocity. This manifested itself in a ready tongue that was, at times, too clever by half, overly sharp and critical for his years.

Flavius made no secret of the fact that he was the clever one in the family and that severely irritated Atticus, the middle of the senior trio. Being much slower of wit than his siblings, he lacked the patience of his close brothers: he would fetch Flavius a quick clip for being cheeky when he was sure no one was looking.

When small, this had ended in tears that inevitably saw Atticus punished. That had long since ceased and in an odd way it was Atticus that set the example, for he took his chastisements without complaint and with utter indifference to any pain inflicted; the youngster had learnt like him not to cry, steeled himself to avoid any sound if he and his brother came to what were blows or a wrestling match between a pair totally unmatched in size and weight, contests in which Flavius was a constant loser even when he got close to his elder’s height.

In part his silence was for the sake of his pride, the reluctance to admit being bested. Yet added to that was the influence of one of the emperors of Rome he truly admired, a fighter as well as a philosopher, held in high regard by his father, a paragon he had studied assiduously both within the schoolroom and without, the stoic Marcus Aurelius. That was not the only reading in which he indulged; anything regarding Rome or Ancient Greece he studied with a passion, for instance Diodorus Siculus, who had written of the campaigns of Alexander.

Another favourite was the Commentaries of Julius Caesar and his conquest of Gaul. If the library of Dorostorum was far from comprehensive it did contain volumes of imperial history and given the nature of the empire much of that was a story of conquest: Scipio Africanus fighting Hannibal and the final conquest of Carthage. The same story of the very province in which Flavius now lived, taken from Macedonia by the Roman legions and held against constant barbarian attempts to repel them.

There was the narrative of Mark Antony versus Octavian, of campaigns all along the Rhine and the Danube as well as the conquest of Britain by the lame Emperor Claudius. All the Belisarius sons were imbued with their father’s love of things Roman, though the last of the litter was the most affected. Steeped in his reading he held it as unmanly to show either hurt or to let his parents know that anything untoward had occurred when he and Atticus fought. Being active at robust games as well as regularly taking part in military training and wrestling bouts against his peers, there was little need to explain the appearance of sudden bruises.

That streak of stubbornness came to the fore now: Ohannes’s attempt to imply they had done enough, that the duty was now to stay and protect the house ran into a wall. Flavius, once the flow of blood from his nose had been stemmed, was even more adamant that his place was alongside his relatives on the field of battle, which left the domesticus in a quandary for he lacked the standing to order this youngster around.

Thus he was torn between the requirement to protect his master’s goods, set against the need to ensure that this much-favoured son, having just survived a dangerous encounter, did not now get himself into any scrape that might prove fatal. In the balance of value there was no other conclusion.

‘Then I must accompany you.’

‘I would not impose that upon you, Ohannes.’

‘You’re not laying it on me and if you knew me better, had you seen the marks on my back, you would also know that few folk have ever got me doing anything I don’t want.’

‘I could not be unhappy, after what has just taken place, to have you by my side.’

Flavius blushed then; that statement sounded and was sententious. The knowledge that such a view was shared seemed obvious by the jaundiced look the words received, added to a derisive snort.

Ohannes insisted on one last act before departing, which was to drag the bodies of the now dead thieves, as well as that of the murdered soldier left on guard, to be left at each entrance to the house; one outside the kitchen entrance, another by the gate to the stables, both relocked from the inside, the third outside the main atrium doorway, it being hoped this would give pause to anyone else thinking of robbing the place. That complete, it was an unenthusiastic old soldier, now with sword, spear and an axe in his belt, who got himself astride a less gentle mare, a mount made unsettled by the smell of so much blood.

Flavius needed to breathe deep to contain his mirth as he watched the equine struggles: having been taught to ride almost as soon as he could walk, he sat easily in his saddle, even on an energetic beast a mite oversized for a lad his age and build. His horse was a stallion to grow into, an animal that pawed at the ground and loved nothing more than to run, requiring a firm hand to keep it in check, never more than when, out on a ride, Flavius turned for home and the lure of food took hold.

Now he hoped to test him in battle and with Ohannes in his wake, holding the reins tight, he went in the direction taken by the imperial cohort, easy to see by the rising smoke from burning farms now high in the sky. Outside the city they came across one of those farmers and his family, trundling along as fast as they could go, a cart bearing their possessions, having abandoned their home to head for what would now be a very crowded fortress.

Being mounted and wearing Roman armour they asked him for information he did not possess; his assurances that they had little about which to worry when it came to survival failed to gain much traction.

‘Fighting men will have gathered all over the district. Once all available forces are gathered the barbarians will have a choice to flee or be slaughtered.’

‘Rumour is they are in their thousands.’

Tempted to scoff – the Sklaveni could not muster such numbers – Flavius had to rein that in as much as he was needing to do with his skittish horse. ‘At worst we must hold them until aid comes. You should be safe to return to your farm.’

The answer was a glare, before the farmer smacked the rump of his plough horse to move it and his family on, the children taking their cue from their sire to add their own baleful look. There was a moment when he considered telling them who he was and to whom he was related but that died as he recalled his age; that would be against him, even if he did feel his advice to be sound.

Armed men would now be rushing to his father’s aid from all over the district, the limitanei – those able-bodied men who could be quickly mustered to fight alongside him – necessary given he led a unit under-strength for the length of border he was tasked to maintain when serious trouble threatened. If imperial taxation was high, none of the proceeds seemed to be employed in paying for the soldiers needed to secure the borders, which left many of the men who had served in the armies of the empire to seek private employment.

It was from these that support would come; a decent-sized local farm would run to a quartet of fighters, some bigger landowners to as many as ten. If it sounded good in theory it was less so in practice; Decimus Belisarius had to rely heavily, despite his reluctance to do so, on the men mustered by the greatest local magnate, a senator whose landholdings and wealth dwarfed those of anyone else in the borderlands.

If Flavius had not been at his studies he would have heard his father cursing the very name of Senuthius Vicinus as soon as he was informed of the raid; not that the son was unaware of the antagonism between them or the reasons for it, their differences – from religious dogma to conduct – being a frequent parental refrain.

Given his numerical weakness Belisarius senior was adamant that only by peaceful cooperation could he hope to effectively fulfil his duties. He worked assiduously to maintain relations with the tribal chieftains across the Danube and by doing so he hoped not only that they would restrain their more excitable young bloods, but that he would also be forewarned of any incursions into their lands by the tribes to the north.

Senuthius was the exact opposite; too often he acted like a man poking a hornet’s nest with a stick and with no regard for the consequences. He provoked the Sklaveni by sending raiders across the river: livestock his men would merely butcher, crops they would burn; it was slaves Senuthius sought, fit young men, women and children who could be sent on to the markets where such unfortunates were sold, all the way to the rich buyers in Constantinople if the younger ones of either sex were fair of hair and comely enough.

Nor did he respect anything of a religious nature; if the men who carried out his bidding came across a temple or a sacred burial site, pagan or Christian, it would be razed to the ground or desecrated, further antagonising the Sklaveni elders, while at the same time firing the desire for revenge among the younger tribesmen.

Decimus Belisarius was convinced that most of the Sklaveni, certainly the older members, were content to live in peace, and given they had as much to fear from Alans and Huns as did the citizens of the empire, they should be counted as potential allies, not as enemies or a source of ill-gotten profit.

‘Who can blame them if they respond in like manner?’

His father would always splutter this protest when the subject came up, which it too frequently did, usually following on from some rapid vengeful response that, coming in reprisal, he was called upon to contain.

‘Taking good citizens from farms I struggle to protect, using those they kidnap as a means to bargain?’

Not that Senuthius was willing to trade those slaves he had acquired; able, given the number of fighting men he could muster, to protect his own property, it mattered not to him that others suffered from small and revenge-driven raiding parties, citizens taken from their destroyed dwellings to a life of servitude well north of the Danube, for the Sklaveni would not keep them in an area from which they might escape; they passed them on to the Huns or Alans.

Pleas for mercy were left to Decimus Belisarius, who had only insufficient coin and his own honesty to offer in exchange. His coffers were far from full and not every tribal elder trusted his protestations of non-collusion. Too few of those taken ever came home, while attempts to curtail these activities fell on the stony ground of private support.

Senuthius was a senator, and if that was a moribund body that met rarely, if at all, he was still a leading citizen of the empire with well-placed friends and one high-ranking relative at court. It was doubly a problem that he had an ally in Conatus, the too willing to be bribed magister militum per Thracias, based in Marcianopolis. When Decimus complained to his military and gubernatorial superior, Conatus did not even deign to respond.

His cousin Pentheus was likewise a senator, a sly courtier in the imperial household, so even bypassing Conatus produced no results, the functionary being well placed to dismiss or rubbish any written submissions from Decimus Belisarius detailing the Senuthius misdeeds, while praising him as an upright citizen, a man who paid substantial taxes without complaint into the imperial treasury and was continually rated as honourable by the military governor closest to him.

Nor, unlike many of the citizens of the Thracian diocese – and this counted as much as any other factor – did he question the emperor’s right to set the codes of Christian belief that his subjects should follow. These factors had made it impossible to either chastise the swine or to have him indicted for his blatant transgressions.

The person of Gregory Blastos, the local bishop and a close associate of Senuthius, compounded such difficulties, the cleric being a blatant pederast and corrupt priest who was held in the Belisarius household to be a disgrace to his calling. Blastos was a man who saw his Christian duty, which stood above that of looking after his flock, as lining his purse and slaking his carnal desires. Worse, he was a trimmer, a man willing to bend to any prevailing wind to maintain his position.

The empire had been locked for decades in discussions over two competing dogmas concerning the human and divine nature of Jesus, a matter supposedly resolved at a convocation called the Council of Chalcedon. It was not: the dispute simmered on despite the passing of much time, in excess of sixty years, given the bishops of Armenia, Syria and Egypt fought hard to overturn the conclusion. They held on fiercely to a different set of beliefs to that which had been agreed.

Blastos had come to the Diocese of Dorostorum preaching the doctrine as decided at Chalcedon, only to switch when Emperor Anastasius announced his personal endorsement of the Monophysite interpretation and took forcible steps to see it implemented throughout his domains. It was not hard to fathom his reasons, even if many wondered at his principles. Bishops who stuck to the Chalcedonian interpretation and defied Anastasius were, by imperial decree, being dismissed from their diocese and the thought of that Blastos clearly could not abide.

Such suppleness gave him, too, a sympathetic ear in Constantinople; a patriarch who seemed either blind or indifferent to his faults as reported, as long as the revenues he anticipated were forthcoming and the doctrine the emperor insisted upon and he preached was being spread. Any attempt to blacken the Blastos name tended to rebound on the complainant and had done so more than once; the Church, of whatever persuasion in dogma, did not take kindly to accusations that its priests were anything less than saintly!

The citizenry were not blind; if a man of the rank of Senuthius could do as he pleased and their bishop could flaunt his catamites as well as his peculations with impunity, while trimming his principles to suit himself, then why should they too not behave as they wished? The transgressions this caused led, with the wealthier citizens, to furious confrontations and threats of legal redress rarely taken to a satisfying conclusion. With the poorer folk it manifested itself as many a severe whipping, none of which were imposed with any great pleasure, for crimes, many of which were misdemeanours.

The public peace had to be maintained and Decimus Belisarius, even after six years in post still an outsider to this part of the imperial lands, was the man tasked to maintain order – the result being that he was not loved in the first instance as the agent of a state seen to be tax greedy as well as over-intrusive, and he was also resented for his palpable probity, as well as for being the overseer of any physical chastisement of wrongdoing.