‘Smell of woodsmoke carries too.’
‘I know that,’ Flavius retorted, in a less than truly civil manner.
‘Well, you will forgive me for my instructing, Master Flavius, given I have no notion of what you do know and what you don’t. All that sword and spear play you and your companions got up to might be one part of soldiering, but it is only that, and all your wrestling is nothing but sport. Most youngsters I have met and fought with needed a lot of telling about what was right and what was stupid, an’ if they failed to listen then they died.’
A hand was rubbed across a face still bearing much of the mud with which it had been previously coated. ‘Forgive me, it is weariness that makes me talk so.’
‘Then it’s time you got your head down.’ The look that got was a protest, but not a fulsome one; Flavius was near to exhaustion, as much from the strain on his emotions as his body. ‘You need sleep if you’re to think clear, though God only knows what you can do. You rest and I will stand watch.’
‘We must take turns.’
‘And we shall.’
‘Somehow I must get word to Justinus of the death of my father,’ Flavius said, through a stifled yawn, ‘as well as how he met his end. We cannot leave that to the likes of Blastos.’
‘Well, right now he will be doing what you should be – sleeping.’
Flavius Justinus had been a soldier for exactly the same number of years as Decimus Belisarius – they had enlisted together – and he was inured to the habits of his profession, high rank and regard for his abilities making no difference; he woke with the dawn and rolled immediately off his cot. If his limbs, sixty-five summers in age, now creaked it was an act still carried out in one swift movement, to be followed by a morning piss and a wash in the bowl of water left by his side overnight.
The room he occupied was barren, again as befitted the old campaigner he was. Justinus had declined a bed of comfort in one of the many beautifully furnished chambers in the imperial palace, electing instead to occupy something more akin to a hermit’s cell; to the courtiers he now mixed with it was a space both barren and ridiculous and he suspected the men he led, the excubitors, successors to the praetorians who had guarded previous emperors of Rome, thought him either foolish or a man inclined to braggadocio. In truth he liked simple things and straightforward people.
For Justinus his room had two advantages; the first was a single entrance, a stout oak door that once bolted would take a real effort to break down. The second was a window, the bars of which could be removed, which overlooked one of the canals that fed water to the imperial palace. With these attributes he felt he could sleep in peace: anyone seeking to harm him, and he was sure such creatures existed in a court full of competing factions, would have difficulty in doing so. The killing of the comes excubitorum was a prerequisite to the assassination of the emperor.
Making his way to the door he undid the bolts and upon opening he was met by the rigid back of one of the men who had been set to guard it. There were four per night, each chosen from amongst his troops at random, given a token only after all the other sentinels, several dozen in number, had been set at various key points under junior officers to protect the imperial apartments, they chosen by the same method as a protection against plots.
He had known before he ever took up his present duty what were the responsibilities: to keep his master alive, the best way to achieve that being to ensure anyone seeking to harm him would struggle themselves to survive. If others thought him overcautious then he would reply that the history of the palace in which he was employed had seen enough purple blood expended as to make his precautions worthwhile.
Never a man to take anything for granted, Justinus walked the halls of the palace as the sentinels were being changed, to observe that the first act of the day was carried out with proper discipline and secondly to ensure that the officers who took up their stations were from the cadre he commanded and he knew them all; if he could not identify every ranker by face – the imperial guard was a thousand strong – he always gave the impression of doing so, in some cases, where the faces were memorable, able to greet them by name.
That done he headed for the garrison barracks to eat breakfast in the company of the rest of the corps, electing to sit at a different board and with a different hundred-man tagma each morning to thus break bread with an unfamiliar group he led, conversing with and hearing, if they were so minded, their concerns and complaints. Word soon spread that caution was unnecessary; a man could speak his mind to the Count of the Excubitor as long as he spoke with honesty.
Justinus would also watch in silence as, fed and equipped and under their unit commanders, who tended to be the sons of the well-born and thus prone to dissipation, his men went about the duties that had been allotted to them on that day’s orders. If much of what he did was seen as outward show it served a serious purpose; he wanted all to know he was vigilant, to have them think he could see into their souls and sniff out any threat to his primary duty, as well as being a man who, appraised of a genuine grievance, would see it addressed.
He would also, on occasions, turn up and partake in their training in swordplay and spear work, as well as the drills they practised for ceremonial occasions, and given no quarter was asked for, none was given; he was as likely to depart bruised and weary as any other.
Justinus knew as well as anyone that in an empire depending on mercenary rank-and-file soldiers for its security, quite a number of whom came from well without the imperial borders, loyalty was personal, not to the state. He would, as he had sworn, be faithful to Anastasius, and the emperor would be secure as long as his men were loyal to him.
Any breakfasting and organising was completed before the palace, as a centre of governance, came fully to life. Then it became a hive of bodies, hundreds of people from high officials to common scribes needed to run the realm, with messengers coming and going endlessly from all corners of the empire. Every province had its committed representatives just as the satraps who ran them sought support to bolster their personal positions, which were not always in concert with either imperial policy or those they were set to rule over.
The wealth of the Eastern Roman Empire was stupendous. No goods could enter or leave any one of two hundred plus ports or cross a thousand-league border without paying custom dues, nor could land change hands without a duty being paid, while tax farmers ensured that where the imperial bureaucracy ended, the reach of the government did not.
Given the gathering of huge sums of gold over such a large area and through so many different harbours and markets, corruption along with intrigue was endemic, ranging from the petty squabbles of the palace, with servants numbered in the thousands, to the near blood feuds of those who held higher office and sought to sway imperial policy, differing on what that should be either from genuine principle or in search of individual gain, and that included blood relatives – three competing nephews of a man with no children of his own.
At the head of the whole stood the elderly emperor himself. Anastasius had once himself been a high palace official and had come to the diadem from, as it was termed, without the bed sheets. When his predecessor Zeno died, his empress Ariadne had engineered handsome Anastasius’s elevation over the heads of the more obvious candidate, Zeno’s brother, and had then married him. Having worn the diadem for many years now he was well encased in the ceremony and grandeur of his elevated rank.
Only those with whom Anastasius was intimate, and they of necessity had to be few, were able to discern that he suffered all the frailties common to the merely human; he fretted and was often indecisive, swayed by powerful voices, as well as being so mean he was a byword for parsimony. Of necessity close enough to observe his master, as many others could not, his comes excubitorum knew of his many weaknesses as well as his few strengths, though it would have taken hot tongs to get him to reveal them.