Caesar's Sword (I): The Red Death Page 13

  Pharas screamed at his men to re-form, but the Vandals had smashed our formation all to pieces. There was no end to them, wave upon wave of mailed and helmeted horsemen. The pick of our men stood and fought doggedly, chanting their death-songs as Vandal swords and spears bit into their flesh.

  I would have fled with the others, but then I saw King Gelimer. He was an unmistakable figure, tall and spare and mounted on a beautiful chestnut stallion, his helmet surmounted by a golden crown. He was less than twenty feet away, watching the unequal fight at the head of his personal guards.

  His sword was still in its leather sheath. The hilt was made of ivory and stamped with golden eagles.

  There is a fine poem in the British tongue, composed in the north, which praises the valour of my grandfather. The poet describes the exploits of a warrior, Gwawrddur:

  He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress,

  But he was no Arthur…

  Even Gwawrddur, says the poet, cannot match Arthur, who was an incomparable warrior. The same could not be said for his grandson. I am not a particularly brave man, and was never more than an adequate fighter. But the sight of Caledfwlch, so many years after it was taken from me, roused a fury in my breast that I have rarely experienced before or since.

  Nor am I a vain man. A fit of madness, not courage, made me turn my horse and ride straight at the Vandal king.

  A horseman threw himself into my path. I threw my spear at him. It struck the middle of his helmet with sufficient force to snap his neck and knock him from the saddle. My horse screamed as a javelin sliced into her belly, but I spurred her on through the swirling dust and knots of fighting men, grimly determined to reach Gelimer and take what was mine.

  His guards saw me coming. One of them rode at me with his spear. I drew my spatha, took the spear-thrust on my shield and cut at his face as he galloped past. That was one of the finest blows I ever struck. He dropped his spear and reeled away, clutching at the terrible gash I had opened across his left eye, through his nose and down to his jaw.

  I plunged on towards Gelimer, who was pointing in my direction and shouting something I couldn’t hear. More of his guards came at me - too many for one man to fight, even I had been Achilles himself. One of them drove his spear into my wounded horse’s neck. The poor beast shrieked and recoiled onto her haunches.

  Another spear struck against my shield with enough force to knock me down. I tumbled to earth, tried to stand, slipped on a patch of entrails, almost impaled my leg with my sword, and felt the prick of sharp iron against my breast.

  “Be still,” said a Vandal horseman in Greek with a guttural Germanic accent, “or die.”

  The red mist lifted from my eyes. I gazed up at him, fierce and bearded under his helmet of corrugated iron, and slowly became aware that I was soaked in blood and sweat. My pulse was fluttering like that of a frightened bird, and my breath came in deep gasps.

  I was surrounded by dead and wounded men, most of them foederati. The survivors had fled, Pharas among them, back down the road towards Decimum.

  King Gelimer trotted towards me, followed by his guards. He was a tall, thin man, of the sort who does not carry fat, with an anxious, dried-up look about him. He was in his early fifties, his sparse fair hair turning white, but his most notable feature was his eyes. These were large and blue, flecked with gold, and had a dreamy quality that reminded me of the stylites I had seen in Constantinople. It was easy to see why his people took him be to a sort of prophet as well as a king.

  “You,” he said, pointing at me, “are the bravest man in the Roman army. When all your comrades ran away, you alone tried to kill me. I salute you.”

  He raised his arm in a clenched-fist salute. Several of his guards rattled their spears against their shields in approval. My face burned, but with embarrassment instead of rage.

  “You are my prisoner,” added the king, “and shall be taken back to Carthage when this battle is done. You shall be treated with all honour, and the price of your ransom sent to Constantinople. Justinian, I think, will appreciate the safe return of at least one of his soldiers.”

  It dawned on me that Gelimer thought the battle was as good as won. The reason why became apparent when one of his officers came galloping up from the road to the south.

  “The Romans are retreating, lord!” he exulted, “not only their mercenaries, but the guards also. They have cast down their banners and are running like whipped dogs!”

  He spoke only part of the truth. Our routed foederati had indeed met with a forward detachment of Belisarius’s guards, some eight hundred men. Instead of rallying the beaten fugitives, these cravens joined them in flight, and the whole lot went stampeding back down the road. Had Gelimer pressed his advantage at that moment, I doubt even Belisarius would have been able to withstand him.

  While I was being disarmed and my wrists bound, Gelimer walked his horse down the hill to inspect the slain. The men around me jumped as their king uttered a sudden howl and tumbled from his saddle.

  He knelt on all fours, grovelling and weeping like a babe, beside the body of one of the dead Vandals. This man wore ornate scale armour and a golden helm, and had clearly been a noble of some sort. The helm was split in two by some powerful stroke, and his brains leaked out from his cloven skull.

  “God save us,” whispered one of my guards, making the sign of the cross, “Prince Ammatas is dead.”

  Ammatus was one of Gelimer’s brothers. He had been in command of the detachment of Vandals ambushed and routed by our vanguard under John the Armenian.

  Gelimer was inconsolable. His men looked on in dismay as he clasped his brother’s body to his own, rocking back and forth and weeping bitter tears.

  One of his officers dared to approach the distraught monarch. “Majesty,” he said nervously, “you must put aside your grief. The Romans are not yet driven from the field.”

  “Must!” Gellimer screamed, ripping off his helmet and hurling it at the officer. “You little man of no consequence, dare you tell a king what he must do? Here lies my noble brother, whom I have loved and cherished all my days, lying dead at my feet. Damn the Romans. Someone must ride back to Carthage and fetch a priest, so that Ammatus can be given the proper rites.”

  I could scarcely believe my ears. Gelimer’s grief had overpowered his wits, and he cared for nothing save that his brother should be buried with dignity. His officers begged and pleaded with him – one actually went down on his knees in the dust – but he took no notice.

  Eventually a rider was despatched to fetch a priest. The Vandals stood idle, resting their horses and waiting for further orders. I was hoisted onto a spare horse, but otherwise nothing happened.

  A strange calm fell over the field. Dismounted Vandal soldiers wandered about, stripping corpses of valuables and finishing off the Roman wounded. Others settled down to eat their rations.

  Then a sound like distant thunder reached my ears. I had been waiting for it, and craned my neck to gaze south. Some of the Vandals heard it too. They looked up from their suppers, cocking their heads to listen and exchanging worried glances.

  The thunder grew louder, accompanied by a wall of dust billowing up from Decimum and a cacophony of trumpets and war-horns, echoing and re-echoing through the hills.

  “Belisarius!” someone wailed.

  Roman banners came in sight. Thousands of horsemen were streaming up the road, formed into a single phalanx led by the general on his distinctive white-faced bay. His bucelarii rode behind him, with the Huns and the foederati on the wings.

  I surmised that our fleeing cavalry had encountered the main body of the army advancing across the plain below, where Belisarius managed to rally them. He then formed all his men into a single body and led them on at the gallop, staking the fortune of the battle on an all-or-nothing charge.

  The Vandals were caught unawares, and Gelimer was still too embroiled in his grief to take command. His officers panicked and ran around in disarray, shouting a host of conf
licting orders. Their voices were drowned by the thunderous din of galloping hoofs and screaming trumpets and the war-shouts of Belisarius’s riders.

  The Romans were outnumbered, but Gelimer’s men were stationery, taken by surprise and demoralised by the behaviour of their king. I saw two Vandal officers seize Gelimer, tear him away from his brother’s body, and throw him over the back of a horse. Then the dust kicked up by the charging Roman cavalry rolled over the field and hid them from view.

  My wrists were bound, so I used my knees to goad my horse towards them. One of the bucelarii charged into view. The massive armoured horseman galloped over two dismounted Vandals foolish enough to oppose him and drove his lance through the body of another.

  Trumpets bawled, signalling the retreat. Fleeing Vandals rushed past me, some on foot, others dragging their terrified horses in circles as they tried to mount before the Romans struck.

  Panic, the death of all armies, infected the Vandal host. Only a few of Gelimer’s guards held their nerve and closed up around the protesting figure of their king. One of their officers, curse him, had sufficient presence of mind to seize my bridle.

  “Let me go!” I yelled, “I am no use to you – release me, damn you! Help me, comrades! A rescue, a rescue!”

  No-one heard me, and he would not relinquish his grip. I could have taken a risk and deliberately tumbled out of the saddle, but lacked the courage.

  There was a good chance of being trampled in the rout.

  Still bleating, I was led away from the battlefield as a captive.

  Chapter 18

  I expected the Vandals to flee north, to take shelter inside Carthage, but instead they turned west into the deep deserts of Numidia. The reason for this, as I was curtly informed by the man who had dragged me from the field, was that the walls of Carthage were in a state of disrepair.

  “The city is no sanctuary,” he said, “we neglected to rebuild the old Roman defences. God has punished us for our complacency.”

  God was never far from his thoughts, or from those of his comrades. After the first mad dash from the battlefield it became clear that the Romans were not in pursuit, and so they halted to rest the horses. Every one of the guardsman knelt in the sand and folded their hands in prayers, while their captain exhorted the Almighty to deliver them from evil.

  Gelimer did not join in their devotions. He sat drooping in the saddle, looking every inch a defeated man. Tears plodded down his cheeks and formed runnels in the coating of dust from the rout. His extraordinary eyes were red-rimmed and contained a world of misery.

  “Do you wonder why I do not pray with them?” he said to me, “it is because I cannot. Like so many of my subjects, they follow the Arian heresy, while I am of Rome.”

  He referred to the bitter divide between Arianism and Roman Catholicism. The followers of the teachings of Arius, a heretical Egyptian priest, believed that the Son of God was essentially inferior to God the Father, and denied the sanctity of the Trinity. Most of the Vandals were devout Arians, but Gelimer had converted to Catholicism. Thus with one stroke he had alienated a large portion of his subjects, and could only regain their love by being successful in war.

  His defeat at Decimum would, I thought, surely finish Gelimer and force him to abdicate and flee into exile. The king he had deposed, Hilderic, would be restored to the throne and the war ended, for Hilderic had always been a friend of Rome.

  In the meantime I pondered some way of recovering Caledfwlch from the defeated king. My mind was fixed on this object as we rode deeper into the trackless desert. The great copper orb of the sun slowly sank into the west, and its dying rays cast a spectral red glow over the endless sand dunes. We might have been in another world.

  Gelimer’s army was scattered to the winds. Only sixteen loyal guardsmen remained with him in the desert, and even these did not seem to bear much love for him. They resented his Catholicism, and blamed him, with some justice, for the defeat at Decimum. But he was not finished yet.

  When we made camp that night, huddled in our cloaks around a spluttering fire, he ordered me to sit with him, out of earshot of his guards. My wrists were still bound, and while we talked he fed me bits of bread and dried meat from his own rations.

  “The desert is cold at night, eh?” he began, crossing his long legs and staring up at the vast purple arch of the evening sky, already dotted with stars.

  “Yes, lord,” I said cautiously. My attention was all on Caledfwlch. I prayed silently for the strength to burst the tight leather cords that secured my wrists.

  For a man who had just suffered a catastrophic defeat, Gelimer was in good spirits. His sorrow for his late brother Ammatus, which had seemed so all-consuming, had vanished.

  “My men are talking about me,” he said with a little laugh, “some of them were Hilderic’s guards before they were mine.”

  I moistened my lips, wondering if I dared try and sow a little discord. “Perhaps they want Hilderic back as their king,” I murmured, “old loyalties tend to die hard.”

  “They can’t have him. As soon as I heard that your army had landed on African soil, I had my dear cousin and his chief supporters killed. I should have done it months ago, but was reluctant to anger Justinian. He sent Belisarius against me anyway.”

  This rocked me a little. With Hilderic gone, so too was any hope of peace between the Vandals and Rome. I marvelled at Gelimer’s folly, and his blithely callous tone.

  “Tell me your name, Roman,” he asked, “and something about yourself. What was the reason for your extraordinary behaviour today?”

  “My name is Coel ap Amhar ap Arthur,” I replied, “I am a Briton, not a Roman citizen, though I have spent much of my life in Constantinople. I tried to kill you because I want that sword you carry. It is mine by right of inheritance.”

  Gelimer looked at me with an expression that reminded me of my brief conversation with Antonina. It said: you are an animal barely deserving of my notice, but you just performed a trick. Can you do another?

  “This,” he said, tapping Caledfwlch’s hilt, “is Crocea Mors, the Yellow Death, once owned by Julius Caesar. How can you possibly have any claim to it?”

  I told him, of my grandfather and my mother’s flight to Gaul from Britain after the disaster of Camlann, and how we had journeyed to Constantinople. He listened with interest. When I mentioned Domitius his mouth dropped open.

  “I thought you were just a clever liar,” he said, fingering his scrubby little beard as he studied me, “but your story rings true. The Roman officer named Domitius did come to Carthage, many years ago, as part of a diplomatic mission sent by the Emperor Anastasius. Hilderic recognised the sword he carried for what it was, and offered Domitius a casket full of gold coins for it. Domitius refused, so Hilderic poisoned his food - a clever, subtle poison that induces symptoms akin to malaria. As he lay dying, thieves in the employ of my cousin stole Crocea Mors and hid it until Domitius was safely buried and his colleagues had sailed back to Constantinople.”

  He drew Caledfwlch and held the blade up to the fading light. I was reminded of Owain doing the same thing, in the cavern by the shores of Less Britain, a lifetime ago. The sight of that silvery blade made the breath catch in my throat, and filled me with a deep longing that overrode my fear of Gelimer.

  “Great king,” I said hoarsely, “I am a poor man, alone in the world, and am like to always be. No-one cares whether I live or die. Very little is mine, but that little I would have. To me that sword is more than just a tool for killing. It is the missing link in the chain of my life. I beg you, if you have any sense of justice and mercy, let me have it, and let me go.”

  This was the most impassioned plea I could muster, but Gelimer wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on Caledfwlch. As I spoke his lips moved silently.

  “I read the future in the depths of the blade,” he breathed, “God speaks to me through hand-forged steel. This is a holy weapon. A gift from on high.”

  He abruptly stood up and rammed
Caledfwlch back into its sheath. “At dawn we shall make for the plain of Builla,” he barked at his guards, “there we shall send out riders to rally our scattered forces. We have enough yet living to oppose the Romans, and my brother Zano still has an army in Sardinia. Belisarius may have won a victory, but soon he shall have to face the entire Vandal nation in battle!”

  After a freezing and virtually sleepless night we set off west at the break of dawn, further into the desert. The plain of Builla lay on the road leading to Numidia, some four days’ march from Carthage. It was as bare and desolate a spot as any in Africa, but often used by the Vandals as a rallying point.

  A few of Gelimer’s soldiers were already encamped there, and cheered him as he rode out of the wilderness.

  “The war has but started,” he cried as they gathered around him. “I still have Caesar’s sword, and God marches with us!”

  He ordered a tent to be erected for him, and sat under the canvas scribbling a torrent of letters. These he gave to the most loyal and willing of his men, who sped away on horseback to summon Gelimer’s surviving allies to Builla.

  Gelimer also dispatched spies to assess what was happening at Carthage. They brought back news that Belisarius’s army had occupied the city, which drove him into a passionate rage.

  “Did they not bar the gates against him?” he fumed, “we left enough soldiers inside the city to defend it, at least for a few days.”

  “The native Africans opened the gates to admit him,” said the spy, who trembled as he spoke, “and removed the chains across the entrance to the port to allow the Roman fleet to enter the harbour. Those of our people who were still inside abandoned the city or took refuge in churches. The Africans lit fires to mark the joy of their deliverance.”

  The pathetic surrender of Carthage only sharpened Gelimer’s temper, though he should not have been surprised. Africa had been a Roman province once, and the people still had fond memories of living under the benevolent rule of the Caesars.