Legionary, page 4
‘An eternal echo from the lungs of Decebalus, the last King of Dacia,’ Betto said, enunciating every syllable perfectly.
Sura eyed the place, annoyed by the crawling mist that obscured full view of it. This new tribe of Goths that had been spotted roaming on the northern banks of the Danubius had always behaved in the same manner: coming to the northern berm of the river, hunkering down and noting the Roman positions on the southern banks, then peeling back in this direction. On the evening previous, they had done the same again. Yet this time, none of them had been aware that the Claudians had rowed across the river earlier that day, and were bellied down in the brush nearby. So this time when the Goths peeled north, Sura and his men had shadowed them. All throughout the day they had followed the trail. In the early evening, Sura had spotted torchlight, leading this way. It was as he had suspected – these mysterious new Goths were using Argedava as their base. A base for what? Invasion?
And there were things far more deadly than Goths out here, he knew. The Huns had been suspiciously quiet in these parts over the last few summers. The thought of those roving, merciless hordes caused him to shiver, the swamp water suddenly feeling like ice. Huns dominating the north, these new mysterious Goths, and the restless, so-called ‘settled’ Goths in the Haims of Roman Thracia. What a dangerous balance. The legions – few as they were – were the thin grout holding the mottled mosaic of the East together.
‘That’s our way in,’ Libo whispered, planting a hand on Sura’s shoulder and pointing towards a stone culvert at the base of the mound, the iron grating within long-ago rusted away.
Sura shot a look towards where the fort battlements should have been, but there was only a ceiling of fog. ‘Perfect. That fog will cover us all the way. Pulcher, Libo – with me. Darik, you stay here with the rest of the legion. Wait here until you see us signal from within the fort.’
‘Signal? What kind of signal, sir?’
Sura eyed the fort sourly. ‘It’ll be a flash of light from the battlements… or my severed head splashing down into this swamp.’
Inside the culvert, the freezing waters were nearly at the ceiling, and so Sura, Libo and Pulcher had to take their fin-topped intercisa helmets off and wade, necks bent awkwardly just to breathe. Every so often the ripples on the surface would wash into their mouths, triggering bouts of gagging and coughing.
‘Smells shittier than shit in here,’ Pulcher moaned, his focale scarf floating up around his face.
‘Shh,’ Sura hissed, straightening up as the culvert ceiling vanished. ‘we’re in.’
Pulcher and Libo stood tall too, climbing a small set of steps, out of the water channel and into a darkened chamber of sorts.
‘Can’t see a thing,’ said Libo.
Sparks flew as Pulcher struck his flint hooks together, lighting a candle from his pack. The subtle light revealed that they were in…
‘A latrine,’ said Sura. ‘An ancient Dacian latrine.’
Pulcher picked some morsel of waste from his teeth and sighed. ‘We’ve just waded through – and drank at least a congius of – centuries-old toilet water? Outstanding.’
‘Here’s the door,’ said Libo, feeling his way around its frame to find the old copper handle, then planting an ear against the surface. ‘No sound from beyond.’ He dropped to one knee to peer through the keyhole. ‘I… I can’t see a thing,’ he said. ‘Nothing but blackness.’
‘Try the other eye?’ Sura sighed.
‘Ah,’ Libo said, blushing as he shifted to look through the keyhole with his real eye instead of the wooden one. ‘Sometimes I forget.’ A moment passed. ‘I can see the fort interior. Nobody in there. Nothing moving.’
‘Hands on sword, just in case it’s a trap,’ said Sura, then nodded to Libo. ‘Open the door.’
Libo nodded back, rising and twisting sharply on the handle. All three padded swiftly and silently out into the fort’s interior. It was a dank, gloomy place – open to the skies. The only other rooms here were the turret houses. The wooden stumps of what must have been a Dacian warlord’s quarters stood in the centre of the space.
‘No Goths,’ Pulcher surmised, steam rising from his slowly drying clothes.
‘Very perceptive,’ Libo snorted.
They checked inside the turrets, all empty.
Sura sighed. ‘Those Gothic scouts were headed this way. I saw it, you saw it.’ He sighed again, then tossed his helmet to the ground with a hollow, metallic clatter. ‘Bring the men in. We camp here tonight.’
‘Do we have to?’ Libo moaned.
‘It’s that or float in the swamp till dawn,’ Sura replied, then took the candle from Pulcher. ‘I’ll signal them in.’
He climbed up the stone steps to the wall parapet and leaned out over its edge. The mist had thinned and he could just make out Centurion Darik and the rest down in the swamp, the leaping bulls and golden Mithraic stars on their red and gold shields just visible through their coating of mud. But… they were moving. Coming towards the culvert.
‘I told them to wait for my fucking signal!’ Sura raged. He noticed that they were slipping and falling, agitated in their haste.
‘Sir,’ Pulcher croaked, arriving beside him. ‘I don’t think they had the luxury of waiting…’
Sura opened his mouth to question the big centurion, when his eye caught sight of the horror emerging from the northern mists at the same time.
They were like faded spirits at first, their torches shining damply in the murk. Only as they drew closer did they take shape. Goths, rumbling on horseback, glittering with armour – tribal leathers and bronze cuirasses buffed to a sheen. An endless screen of them, descending from the woods in the north, their torchlight stretching from horizon to horizon. They splashed into the swamp, their powerful war horses wading across confidently. Behind them bobbed countless more torches carried by Gothic footsoldiers, their spears, bows, quivers, tribal knots of hair all jostling. And banners, ghostly white standards bearing the image of a proud stag. Somewhere in the mist, riding high on the back of a huge battle horse swayed a man, broad and crowned in a helm of antlers. Sura’s skin crawled. How could it be? He had heard Gothic elders regaling their young with tales of the Silver Stag, but had dismissed them as nothing more than fables.
‘We were told the Gothic scouts might be part of a lost tribe,’ Libo said, choked with disbelief. ‘This is no tribe, not even a confederation of tribes…’
Sura’s heart thundered, as he was whisked back to the memories of those dark days when the many Gothic tribes of Fritigern had arrived at the river, demanding entry into the Roman Empire. The numbers here were comparable.
‘…this is a disaster,’ Pulcher finished for Libo.
For a moment, Sura felt as if he was on a wildly swaying ship, his head swimming, heart pounding, the potential consequences of what he was seeing making him punch-drunk. And right here, now, the rest of his Claudians down in the swamp might be the first to fall to this new force. ‘Get inside, faster,’ he hissed down at the last few of Darik’s men who were still funnelling into the culvert. This fort was their only hope, he realised. Maybe the Goths would ignore and forge on past the half-ruined place.
‘Sir,’ Libo said, his voice a croak, ‘they’re veering this way.’
The blood crashed in Sura’s ears as he saw a group of Gothic foreriders cantering up out of the swamp and round to the fort’s main gates, while the rest converged on the place from all sides.
They were trapped, Sura realised. Nowhere to run. No way could his few hundred men resist this movement. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to have his old comrade, Pavo, here by his side.
Chapter 3
February 386 AD
Northern Thracia
A summer gale whined around Augusta Treverorum, the capital of the Western Empire. The winds threw darkening waves of grey across the afternoon sky. The faintest rumble of faraway thunder sounded. In the upper floors of the imperial palace, Maximus stood at a stone window arch, his eyes – like inky pools – drinking in the sight of the storm.
‘In these moments before the sky bursts, I adore how the air changes,’ he said quietly, directing his words to the shadowy corner of the private study behind him. ‘It suddenly feels heavy, pregnant.’ His flat-boned face and thin lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile.
Yet no reply came from the shadowy corner.
A thorn of lightning struck down from the canopy of clouds into the green hinterland. Shortly after, the rising drum of heavy rain swept across the countryside and hit the city, sending civilians running for cover, turning the alleys to mud, and coating the grey defences in a dark patina. Maximus inhaled the scent of the damp stone and mortar.
The wind puffed inside momentarily, lifting proud the black quills of his feather cloak and unsettling his immaculately combed-forward short black hair, spots of rain landing on his prominent nose and chin.
‘Domine,’ a voice barked, someone entering the room behind him with a clatter and the martial stamp of one foot. ‘The party from Hispania has arrived.’
Maximus turned to see a golden-shielded Victores legionary at the study door, staring into the distance, face set like concrete. The man was ardently trying to look anywhere but at the room’s shadowy corner. Maximus strode past the soldier, on down the corridor and then flitted down the grand marble steps to the palace atrium.
The visitor – Bishop Priscillian of Abulensis – glided towards him like a spirit, the hem of his pale, soaked robes trailing on the atrium’s tiled floor, his hair slick with rainwater too. His personal guards followed with an iron clank.
‘Domine,’ Priscillian spoke first, lifting the simple wooden Chi-Rho symbol hanging from a cord around his neck and kissing it. ‘God made my journey here swift. The discomfort of the way was but his means of reminding me that I am alive. Yet the reason for your summons remains a mystery.’
‘There is no mystery,’ said Maximus, spreading his arms in welcome. ‘This palace was once the seat of Constantine the Great. He brought to us the Word of God. A Word that spread across our empire like wind-blown seed.’ The gale outside rose and the rain hammered against the palace walls. He clapped his hands, and a slave appeared with warmed towels for the bishop and his men.
‘Come, come.’ Maximus beckoned Priscillian and his retinue up the stairwell, leading them on a tour of the first floor, past the busts of the western emperors who had followed the reign of Constantine. ‘It took time for the seed to germinate and to grow. And like all crops, some were strong, some weak. Some healthy, some ridden with blight.’ He cast a hand towards the deliberately chipped-off face of the bust that had once been the likeness of Julian the Apostate.
‘Indeed,’ said Priscillian, confidently, patting his hair dry. ‘More, the wisdom does not reach some men until they are older. How many years is it now since you were baptised, Domine? Only three summers ago, wasn’t it? Just after you overthrew Gratian. A lifetime of crooning to the pagan gods then – suddenly – you saw the light?’ He handed his towel to the following slave. ‘It’s almost as if… as if you wanted to flatter your Eastern counterpart, Emperor Theodosius.’
Maximus smiled tightly, eyeing the bishop sideways. Such confidence – something rife in those who rose to the upper tiers of the Christian Church these days. ‘It matters not how you find your way to Orthodoxy, only that you do,’ he answered gently.
‘The Word sprouts in many different – and equally worthy – ways,’ Priscillian replied with a sour edge. ‘Orthodoxy is not the only way to God.’
‘And there you have it,’ Maximus said as he led them up a further flight of stairs and back to the private study.
‘Hmm?’ Priscillian’s forehead creased in confusion.
‘You wanted to know why you had been summoned here.’ He guided the bishop and his six brutes into the room.
Priscillian glanced around the office, bemused. His gaze drifted past a suit of silver armour by the window, a fine oak bureau, on past the shadowy corner – then snapped back to that gloom. His confidence almost palpably fell from him. He cupped a hand to his mouth. ‘Father in Heaven…’
There, seated in the corner, was the embalmed corpse of Emperor Gratian, the mouth fixed in an unsettlingly placid smirk, the false eyes piercing, the skin black and broken in patches. One arm ended in a stump near the wrist.
‘What horror is this?’ the bishop croaked. Iron rustled as Priscillian’s guards touched their hands to their swords and to the hafts of the axes strapped across their backs, eyes suddenly alert.
‘Orthodoxy, as you say, is not the only way,’ Maximus explained. ‘Indeed, my predecessor here was fanatically Orthodox. Some months after he died, I returned to the spot where he was killed. His body was still hanging there from the bridge where the legionary, Pavo, left him. Torn at by animals, yes, but largely preserved by the frosts.’
‘Why?’ Priscillian said, choking with disgust. ‘For his piety, he at the very least deserves burial.’
‘Piety?’ Maximus strode past the bishop’s highly-agitated guards and to the bureau, lifting the oak panel lid and producing a small glass case. In it was Gratian’s missing hand, desiccated, the fingers half-clenched like claws, the nails yellow and overgrown. On one finger was a ring, with a silver fang jutting from it. Maximus planted the case down on the desk’s surface. ‘He used to present his political enemies with this ring, command them to put it on their finger and to slice open their throat arteries with the fang. No trial, no mercy. Does that sound like piety to you?’
Priscillian scoffed and swiped a palm through the air. ‘I’ll be returning to Abulensis at once,’ he thundered, swooshing his pale robes as he turned on the spot. But the doorway was blocked. In swayed a pair of holy men in robes like his. Old men, their faces bright and eager. ‘Hydatius, Ithacius?’ he said, stunned. ‘You came all the way from Hispania too?’
Ithacius, the Bishop of Merida, smiled triumphantly. Bishop Hydatius of Aquae Flaviae gave him a look that dripped with anticipation.
‘They came to adjudicate in the trial,’ Maximus explained.
Priscillian looked to each man in the room, lost. ‘The trial?’
‘Your trial, Bishop Priscillian. For your crimes against God,’ Maximus explained.
‘Crimes against…’ Priscillian’s lips flapped in outrage. ‘How dare you!’
‘Be grateful that I am just, and offer you this trial,’ Maximus replied. ‘Orthodoxy is not the only way, you said. Indeed, it seems that you have been plotting your own alternative ways to reach God. Asceticism, you call it?’
‘Heresy,’ Ithacius hissed, then began pacing before Priscillian.
Hydatius raised and pointed a shaking finger. ‘Practicing maleficium… sorcery!’
‘Praying naked, studying obscene doctrines,’ Ithacius went on, ‘sleeping with sluts!’
Priscillian shook with indignation. ‘I never once denied that my way to God differed from Orthodoxy. But these accusations are comical.’
‘Can you prove they are false?’ Ithacius cooed.
‘Of course I cannot, do not be so preposterous!’ said Priscillian, reddening with outrage now. ‘No more than I can prove to you that a blackbird flew past my wagon yesterday on the way here.’
‘Then the trial is complete,’ said Ithacius, stepping back.
Priscillian scoffed. ‘Guards. Take me from this place,’ he snapped.
The instant the six armed ones took a step forward, the corridor outside filled with clattering footsteps. In filed a score of golden Victores legionaries. Maximus’ palace guards spilled around the visiting delegation, levelling their spears at chest height.
‘Take the hired muscle out into the countryside and kill them in the woods,’ said Maximus.
The room erupted for a moment, as the brutes put up a struggle, but only a brief one. A dozen Victores bound them and marshalled them away to their deaths. Those legionaries still in the room forced Priscillian to his knees before Maximus.
‘Sorcery is a capital offence, as you know,’ said Maximus, taking the sword from his suit of armour and offering it, hilt first.
Priscillian turned white as ash, shaking with nothing but fear now. ‘Gratian offered his victims no trial and the fang ring. You give a sham hearing and a blade. You are no better than him.’
Maximus sank to his haunches, planting the sword pommel on the floor and wrapping Priscillian’s trembling hands around it. Next, he positioned the tip near Priscillian’s breastbone. ‘There you go. All you have to do is lean forward. The blade is sharp, you won’t feel much.’ He stood, stepping back.
Priscillian was weeping now.
‘Give him until the light fades,’ Maximus said to the two golden legionaries standing over the bishop. ‘If he hasn’t done it by then, give him a helping hand.’
With that, Maximus swept from the room.
‘You are the one who will be judged for this, Maximus,’ Priscillian wailed in his wake. ‘You! Valentinian, the true heir to the Western throne, will bring God’s judgement upon you.’
The rains continued to batter the city, causing the cavernous throne hall to rumble like the insides of a drum. Maximus swept in, seeing that his council was already gathered there. They stood in an arc around the steps to his imperial throne, the fire in the hearth casting them in an orange uplight.
Three amongst them were key: his younger and irritatingly handsome brother and master of the infantry, Marcellinus; the cavalry master Dragathius – known as the Bull of Britannia – towering like a battle standard, his long grey hair a ragged pennant; and Victor, his thirty-year-old son and nominated heir, tidily bearded and prematurely balding.
Maximus eyed his son with pride. People often criticised him for such clear dynastic planning. Hereditary succession was not the Roman way, they said. Yet was that not exactly what Theodosius was doing in the East with his ridiculous toddler consul and boy-Augustus?
