A man rose from the piles of bodies strewn before the gates, blood pouring from his mouth. I stabbed him in the gut and relished his inhuman shrieks as I twisted the blade with all my strength.
“Traitors!” I spat as he died, “traitors!”
I record this killing, and the many others I committed that day, with no sense of joy or shame. God forgive me, but the memory of what happened at the Hippodrome arouses no great emotion inside me. The Nika riots had to be suppressed, and the Empire preserved from a fatally divisive civil war. But for the courage and prompt action of a handful of men — and Theodora, though I shall come to that later — the world might look very different today.
Belisarius allowed the rebels no respite. If any of the ringleaders had seen how scanty his numbers were, they might yet have rallied and overwhelmed his Veterans, but panic quickly spread through their ranks. They were driven like sheep across the track of the arena. Many tried to escape via the gates at the rear, only to find Mundus and two hundred grinning Huns waiting for them.
My arm grew tired of killing as I paid off a good number of old scores. All the slights and insults I had patiently endured over the years boiled over. I went hunting for familiar faces, and chopped them down with no more mercy than a wild beast shows its prey.
To my immense frustration, the scalp I craved most of all eluded me. Leo had escaped.
When he saw that the spirit of the rebellion was broken, Belisarius did his best to limit the massacre of Roman citizens. To no avail — the Huns were in an ungovernable killing rage, and his Veterans in no mood to spare those who had threatened the security of the state. The floor of the arena was piled high with corpses, and the foul reek of blood and excrement and spilled entrails rose to Heaven, so that God Himself might savour the vengeance of Justinian.
The killing lasted all through the night. When dawn broke, grey and timorous, the only living souls inside the Hippodrome were the gore-slathered figures of Belisarius and his troops.
I was leaning on my sword, breathing hard and wincing at the cramp in my muscles, when a heavy hand descended on my shoulder.
“Still alive, then,” grunted a weary but familiar voice. I glanced up to see the rugged, unlovely features of Mundus, in no way improved by a thick coating of other men’s blood.
Belisarius was standing nearby, drawn and pale after the night’s work. Like everyone else he was covered in gore. Narses was at his side. To my surprise the delicate-looking eunuch was garbed like a soldier in helmet and breastplate, and the sword thrust into his belt was stained and notched with use.
“I saw this one at work last night,” Mundus said to the general, slapping me on the shoulder again, “he’s a right bloody killer. A bit old for a recruit, maybe, but he could make a decent auxiliary.”
Belisarius nodded, though his mind was clearly on other matters. “Is the rebellion over, lord?” I asked, doing my best to straighten up.
“All bar the mopping-up,” said Narses before Belisarius could answer, “Hypatius and his brothers are in a dungeon, and their supporters have either fled the city or taken refuge. We shall soon smoke them out of their holes.”
“The Emperor shall use mercy, I hope,” said Belisarius, though judging from his expression he knew it was a false hope. Narses snorted, and waddled away to consult with a group of officers on horseback. I noticed a couple of senators among them. They had presumably crept back into the city now the danger was passed.
Belisarius pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He suddenly looked much older than his years — he was about my age — and utterly drained of energy.
“Coel,” he said, glancing at me, “I also saw you at work. No-one could doubt your strength and enthusiasm, but you wield that sword like an apprentice butcher with a cleaver. How would you like to learn to use it properly? I think we can assume that your contract with the Circus is no longer valid.”
He was offering me the chance to become a soldier. The prospect was not a displeasing one, though it meant my freedom would again be limited.
“I have sworn an oath, lord,” I said, “to find and recover my birthright.”
“I am not in the habit of forcing men to break their oaths,” he replied impatiently, “what is this birthright of yours?”
I felt awkward telling him, but under the gaze of those shrewd eyes it was impossible to lie or dissemble. “A sword that belonged to my grandfather, lord. It is all I had to remind me of my family and homeland. I lost it many years ago. A Roman officer named Domitius stole the sword from me and took it with him to Carthage. He never returned.”
Belisarius stared at me in silence for a moment, and then gave a dry little chuckle. “Join the ranks of my foederati, Coel son of Amhar,” he said, “and you may have a chance to find Arthur’s sword. A better chance, at any rate, than if you journeyed to North Africa on your own.”
I little knew what he meant, but the winds of fate were once again blowing me in a direction I could not resist. There, on the blood-soaked ground of the arena, I knelt before him and was sworn into the Roman army.
Chapter 13
The immediate aftermath of the revolt witnessed one more spate of killing. Left to himself, the Emperor might have spared the lives of the hapless pretender Hypatius and his brothers, but Theodora persuaded him otherwise. Such clemency, she argued, would only encourage further others to conspire against the throne. In this, as in so many other things, Justinian was her obedient slave, and so all three men were strangled in their cells.
I was enlisted into the foederati, mercenary horsemen bound by various treaties to serve in the Roman army. They served under the banners of their own tribal chiefs, but as the sole Briton I was placed among the Heruli, from a tribe in Eastern Germania. Five hundred of these warriors, along with other units, had been recalled from their outposts along the Danubian frontier after the Nika riots, to defend the city in case of another revolt.
The Heruli were cousins to the Saxons, whom my British ancestors had been fighting for generations. I accepted the placement — I had no choice in the matter — and had to smother my disgust at being forced to train and co-exist with coarse, flaxen-haired barbarians whom I regarded as racial enemies.
Life has often forced me to adapt, and I slowly learned to smother my prejudices and respect my new comrades. As soldiers, they were worthy of anyone’s respect. The Romans had started to recruit the Heruli as mercenaries after suffering a number of disastrous defeats against them in battle, and by the time of Justinian’s reign they were an integral part of the imperial army.
That army was very different from the Roman army of antiquity that had conquered much of the known world. The famous infantry legions were a thing of the past, as the diminished Empire no longer had the resources and manpower to maintain them. Instead the army was now divided into squadrons of at most twelve hundred men each.
The total fighting strength of the Empire was roughly three hundred thousand men. About two-thirds of these were lightly-armed garrison troops, the limatanei, whose task was to guard the frontiers. The rest made up the mobile field army or comitanenses, largely drawn from the tribes of Germania and Scythia or the bleak mountain regions of Armenia and Isauria. These regions produced tough, hardy men and ideal soldier material.
With such a denuded military, and surrounded by hostile nations eager to pick away at Roman territory, the Empire was hard-pressed to defend its borders. Still, successive Emperors dreamed of restoring the glory of the Western Empire and recapturing the Eternal City of Rome.