Essay Doctor 16+

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"Iron rows beyond bronze as the choice of speech"; so declares my hero in 'Exile' my two sample chapters which I enclose. Read it and learn more...

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Dear readers and all friends

I wish to enclose the first two chapters of an historical novel called 'Exile'', the title of a 100,000 word novel set in Italy at the end of the Sixth Century C.E. Experienced through the eyes of Flavius Valerius Heraclius, a Byzantine soldier of noble birth and future Emperor (610-641), Italy lies in ruins and is menaced by the savage Lombards, an invading tribe which has pushed as far as the gates of Rome, once the capital of an empire embracing east and west.

Sent to defend the city, the young warrior will fall in love with a captured barbarian princess, desert his colours and flee with her into an uncertain night as an 'Exile' which will alter the very course of history itself.

At the present time I am a support worker and exam invigilator at Manchester University, where I have worked with students across a variety of subjects for the last 15 years.

Do not hesitate to give your feedback, good or bad (!); but in all cases, please enjoy!


Exile

A novel of Rome, Byzantium and Italy in the Dark Ages

Chapter 1-Italy, 590 AD

To his Majesty and Eternity, Flavius Valerius Mauricius, Emperor of the Romans, Colleague of Christ and Guardian of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, as well as all of the rest, etc. etc., addressed by Constantius, bishop of Milan, the Imperial ambassador to the court of Ariuf, the self-styled Lombard king of Northern Italy;

The Lombard tribes, as ever squat before the moss thicken walls of Rome, Your Eternity, once the eye and the lamp of the world, for all that their attempts to carry the city by storm have failed at the brink once again. The treaty with Ariuf, a barbarian chieftain who presumes to wrap himself in the robes of royalty during the waxing times, thanks to the gallantry of your defending soldiers still holds despite the new crimes which his followers daily commit.
Though I bow in obedience to your wish to obtain a peace with the monarch on the tombs of senators and generals that have long been broken in and stripped of their signet rings and robes now that his hordes have drawn back to lick their new wounds, I cannot help gripping my crucifix ever more tightly against my beating breast whenever I am bidden to stand in the tree topping presence of a man who has proven himself to be more formidable to the Romans than a new Hannibal and more savage than a second Attila.
We loath the things which may never be born when such of the fears which we fasten to the cords of our hearts scatter our murmurs to the wind, but I am mindful of the fate which may befall the cradle of the Caesars should Rome eventually submit to the pagan totems of a new despoiler. The king has an eye of red which burns all that it sees, and soft words of reassurance which I hold as lightly as the mist hanging above the woods from where the smoke of his camps rise like spiralling ropes.
Whence can I leave off from making mention of an earlier Lombard invasion of Italy for the education of your eldest son Theodosius, the heir to the Roman Empire today? The barbarians, led by Alboin, the grandfather of Ariuf, had collected every villain on whom man and nature had turned their backs like a new Judas on a single place to task a country which had long been exhausted by a war of reclamation which had been fought by the legions of the Roman world to reunite it with the empire.
Despite every effort to oppose him, the king had routed our hastily gathered levies near Mantua, the birthplace of the poet Virgil, and ruin for the people of Italy had quickly followed; today, the Lombard yoke embraces all of Northern Italy as far as Spoleto and Benevento, lands which we must consider to be permanently lost. Ariuf, I fear will be the most energetic of all of the murderers yet to belong to the House of Alboin should the last obstacle to his burgeoning ambition fall to his bands.
Today I begin my ride for the King's seat at the foot of the Cottian Mountains near Piedmont where he is giving thanks to his pagan gods for his victories to begin my arduous work, for all that he has a catholic wife, the daughter of the King of the Franks no less, who strives with every power of persuasion endowed within her s*x to bring the Word of God to his untamed subjects even while the rank odour of our freshly murdered subjects summon the crows…

I left of reading the rest of a letter that had been passed onto us by Romanus, the Emperor's appointed governor, or Exarch over the remains of Italy which had survived the Lombard flood which was still left to us, and yawned. The moon hung above my head like an opal bathing the bitterly cold winter evening, and I turned on my side, smoothed down the scarf which I had wound around my neck to keep warm and tried to sleep. I had studied Constantius's message carefully, word for word, during the freezing evening as a means of distracting myself from my shivers and my hunger, and had at last pronounced the document to be as clumsily composed (though, to be fair I have to admit that I am no literary critic), as watching a man trying to swallow a candle.
The opinions of the rest of the soldiers which were huddled in their scooped out holes around me were no different. Every man who lay under a cloudless sky were the stars twinkled like broken shards of glass with their own copy held in their frozen fingers had judged the effort whose duplication the Exarch had thoughtfully assigned to his personal scribes out of the bishop's original dispatch to be no less a waste of labour.
Meat and drink would have been far more welcome, perhaps even a candle as a means of feeding fresh life into our chilled bones as I swept my eyes once again over the wood in which we had concealed ourselves against danger, praying all the while that it would not snow for a second day as I tucked the letter in a pocket of my frayed cloak. Morale was low. The men had to find food, rest and warmth soon, or perish. Only at the beginning of the expedition had our spirits been higher.
After the fall of Gaul and Spain to the barbarians, Italy had blown on its own myth for a hundred years. The arrival of the Lombards put an end to the comedy; the Dark Ages, the name by which men were beginning to call the sinking times, were beginning. Every slow horse is granted a second chance however, and when the Lombard king's warriors were rebuffed by the walls of Rome with no inconsiderable loss to themselves, so Constantius's letter said faithfully enough, the new General sent by the Emperor to retrieve our defeat saw an opportunity to thread an army of relief over a wooded height and break an investment were hope still shone as brightly as a beacon.
Devils' lungs, so the comes militaris had declared, punctured and let out air like anyone else. The Lombard siege lines were strong only through hate, not discipline as we had laughed at his joke, their warriors clumsy spear men with eyebrows that met like mating caterpillars in the middle. We had clashed our shields, chanted our agreement and cheerfully fallen in behind his
white horse when the order had been given to unfurl a pennant displaying the face of Christ the Redeemer on our standard in place of a bronze eagle now that the Romans had embraced the light of the Gospels.
The grass had been thick with the day's new snow, the wind blowing hard across the land as we had begun our climb from ledge to ledge to bind heaven's injury. Eventually a forest of oaks and pines an axe could not split had gathered our column into its arms. Thin beams of sunlight had bathed our helms, chain mail and swords as every man's shield had been gripped tightly ahead of any sudden ambush striking our carefully muffled lines. We had encountered no one; our luck, so it had seemed, was holding.
Our first night on the frowning heights, however, had been enough to unravel the courage of many. We had eaten out the provenage carried on the backs of our pack mules on the trek across Latium once we had touched the shores of Italy, and then the mules themselves, and were now down in the dawn to soft leather and dried raisins. No fire had been kindled and no food cooked if our presence was not to be revealed to a band of furies which impaled or disembowelled every captive without ransom who fell into their hands.
The mutiny began at dawn. The men unslung their bows and hefted their spears in defiance of the General's order to pin birds and rabbits for their pots or hunt down boar seen darting between a set of cork trees. Turning his horse in a smooth line of motion to confront the dissenters, he pushed his cream cloak aside to reveal a red sleeved mail shirt, together with a pair of gold fringed boots marking his high rank. Around his waist was a leather cross belt inlaid with gems, off which hung a looped sword flashing silver.
“Let us match our tune to the beating of our hearts, gentlemen!” the General called out across the cold air as he set about repairing our broken fold, “and trust your victories to God's orders rather than sensible ones. I have brought you this far. Shown you a country besieged. This is an exploit unwitnessed thus far by man, a feat which is without precedent. Sew up your bellies and revel in your success!”
The words, as they had done so many times before, we could not tell why, worked their usual magic. A ripple of nods and chuckles went through the grins and the fleas of the undecided. One man at the back of a group however, less impressed than his mates pushed his way to the front, his nose pricking the air with arrogance, and turned his drawn dagger to his open mouth. He had left a wife, now pregnant, with his second child at home.
“Good! Then weave a hunk of bread out of the clouds, boss! I, m Hungry! And some wine to drink with it.”
“Soon, man, soon,” the General replied confidently. He had rehearsed the stock answer carefully, over and again against such a moment and such a man. Telling the truth merely meant telling believable lies. His own life hung on those which came next.
“Give me time. A day. Perhaps two days. The greater the science, the less need of art. The door is open if you could only see it. Do not follow your desire over an unfenced cliff. Wear your squalor with a sash. Comfort beckons.”
Wrapping the reins of his horse tightly in his hands, the General winked at the rest of us. “And remember,” He added with a grin,” that surprise, like lightening”, tapping the jewelled belt holding his sword, “has no parent.”
“Huh!” the grumbler gave back. But no one chose to join a soldier at the end of his tether who owned no skill other than killing in Mars' gaming house when he had agreed to sign his enlistment papers for the new war. A dissenter is indistinguishable from a whiner when touched by self-hate, and we knew it. The General, resting his arm on the carved pommel of the sword was cautious however, and did not move until he was certain that the malcontent had returned the knife to his hilt and fallen back into his file, after which he raked back his spurs into the side of his horse and began to sing. We knew the song well and took it up. We did not care who knew we were here now.

I know my blade like my lover
My enemy is the last man to know my life
I can never love a woman as I love my sword
A marbled club and heavy mace
Blood spurts from its blows
If he lives he tell the tale

Make no mistake. Courage touched the ink of every order issued by a man who had enjoyed a military career lasting for thirty years as the Emperor's fireman in every quarter of the empire were he had been sent. The General could persuade apes to recite the alphabet, vultures to gather their waste and bishops to wash lepers' feet. In return we could pick holes in his strategy and ask for a quiet word, within reason with him when danger was asleep in his campaign tent. He would, however neither forgive nor forget those like the belted rebel who had almost forced him to draw his blade too soon.
The rest of the army meanwhile was allowed to task me, the youngest man in the expedition with their teasing and their japes without further fear of punishment or retribution. Though a nobleman's son and entitled to a horse of my own, I was underweight, anxious to fit in and determined not to complain or seek advantage. I was also deemed to be a talisman, the coin in which the General stamped his steel on a journey which had yet to experience any true misfortune. Soldiers and barbarians alike are superstitious this way, and because they respected how much confidence he had placed in them by having a boy scarcely out of his shorts march under his flag, the soldiers did no more than pull my leg and offer to carry a part or even all of my kit if I grew tired. I wisely declined. Mascot’s burn. I had been tested in glory's crucible since the age of 11, and the proving was far from ending now. The fate of a province, and behind it that of an entire empire itself all relied on how deeply I yawned or how casually I voided my waters on flowers turning like spinneys in the breeze. I dared not falter now under their watchful eyes if the trees were not to be shaken by what fell out.

There were others attending the Emperor's side, the General's enemies, meanwhile who prayed every bit as hard for me to stumble in the snow and harm his bright star in that direction. Some even whispered in his ear that his favourite soldier had manoeuvred the Italian command with the eventual hope of the throne itself held before his eyes. The Lombard’s were no less fractious in their quarrels now that the siege of the great city had bogged them down, and would have been glad to have known that they were not the only ones to be riven by such divisions.
So the advance went across a heavy earth filling up with irises and lilacs as the day grew warmer, our thoughts and our heads down. A small village stood in our path, trees chipped, arrows embedded in plaster, corpses reposed in mild indifference or nailed in surprise to barn doors were the Lombard’s had caught them before they had been able to flee. Strong in the sight of horror by now, we ignored a crime knowing only that a nature so base as those which had committed the deed could not possibly have long to last.
Soon after we had left with turnips and carrots crammed into our mealy bags, we emerged unopposed between outcrops of red rock nestled to the north of the city. From here we could see a still intact Roman road, the Via Cassia passing over the River Tiber at the Mulvian Bridge before it vanished through a gate, one of fourteen which were fixed along the 19 mile long walls of Aurelian and Honorius.
The barbarians, milling like beetles were out of breath and stretched thin at this point, for they had never successfully covered the entire circumference with their trenches and their towers. Even the most brutish and unlettered soldiers among our ranks stood and paused to stare, memorized up by the spreading wonder under a golden sun whose name was still strong enough to break open mountains and make kings cross themselves. Breathing that 'the long wait of the shaded bank has ended' from his copy of Virgil's Aeneid, the General patted my shoulder. Others sank to their knees in prayer and gave thanks. We had done it. Rome.

The place where I met her.

Chapter 2-Childhood

I kill for a living. As an Emperor in old age I no longer remember the number of men whom I have sent to the shades, for my only accounting now is with God. Like a toothache which will not go away I close my eyes each evening on a bed of soft silk and hear their voices crying out for vengeance. I am unafraid. In battle the wise soldier faces down his demons without giving way like the wings of a charging army.
The poets and writers which have written down my victories over a hundred nations since I took my part in the relief of Rome all those years ago should read this other history as I prepare to take a new ship for an island which none can tell is barren or fertile. All that remains is to watch over the safety of my son and heir. The Empress, a woman who has preserved her sable hair and sensuous mouth picks at the lock holding both our lives. Death is a four legged beast which scuttles beneath the legs of an empire pulled between two orders, and evil enters every house and fractures the peace which I have fought to build over a lifetime.
Perhaps I shall take my Brother Theodore's advice, a flood in answer to all questions, and arrest a woman while time remains with whose family I had allied myself after I had been risen to supreme power on the shields of my soldiers. I remain proud only of the ploughmen and wheelwrights filling the battered legions from lands wasted by the bad times which have begun to believe in themselves rather than the dark things of the woods after they have won their first battles under my command.
I belong, in the end to no one’s mirror other than the one I hold up to myself. Homesickness and childhood. My pen turns, in a shift of beginning's to both. I hear the voice of my long dead teacher, as clear as a pool of water rippling across half a century, calling out softly to me.

“Flavius; Flavius- Are you still with us?”
My eyes opened in a blaze of light as Arbogast sighed, his school master's chin tapering to a point like a spear being carried by one of my new soldiers to leave me in no doubt, as always that I had earned his displeasure once more. I sat up hurriedly, a child less than 11 years of age adding a new link to an ever lengthening chain of sins binding his petty mischiefs together.
My inattention towards my studies was becoming inseparable from insolence and a worn sock. My brother Theodore, older and heftier than myself with the first flush of down already spreading around his strong jawline, was eating a pear by my side with the mild ease of a bully's reserve which held no such fear of the old teacher's authority, and the sound of his noisy banquet served to drown out the droning of the flies above our heads.
Arbogast however, neither princely nor plain, brave or cowardly, was nothing if not shrewd. Not noted for pruning more than one grove at a time, the angular pedagogue smiled and waited calmly with his thin hands clasped behind his back while I returned my feet and hands to a posture deemed more respectful to his dignity; time enough would be left to clip the rich locks of my brother's conceit before he was finished with the pair of us.
Warmed by the thought spreading through his breast, Arbogast, a gifted teacher worn down by responsibility and disappointment turned and resumed the interrupted lesson. We were two slender limbed children tied to our studies at a school on an open terrace with our brains squeezed dry by his lectures; we did not like school.
I still remembered the evening which had kept the sleep from my eyes. The nightmares which have haunted my life had already begun. Waking up in a bang of disordered hair, I had quietly slid out of the covers of my bed while Theodore had snored on with a wooden horse clutched against my breast which an indulgent sentry had carved for me after describing the sack of Troy. Night had come to day, made flat by hunger, hunger everywhere, so I had prayed in the bends before the soft flame of a candle propped by the family crucifix while a picture filled with blood had run on the cold earth of a city roused to its own doom by the braying of Greek trumpets.
“We are proud citizens, most excellent princes, of the Christian Roman Empire of the East,” Arbogast was now saying as I rubbed the last gleam of the evening from my eyes, tapping a map drawn on unrolled goat skin nailed to a cork board, “a block of lands which unite the towns and provinces of Africa, our farthermost province in the west, with those of Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and Egypt in the east. All cheerfully acknowledge the Lordship of our Emperor, Flavius Valerius Mauricus, the most successful warrior prince to have ascended the proud seat in two hundred years. And not only here, my friends! Whosoever has seen the Emperor's flag,” he began to wax, his voice soaring with genuine heart like one of the plovers which had made their homes in the bored holes of a chalk cliff running like a glacis along the beach beneath the villa, “which are fixed to the prows of his trading ships, received with such respect as in faraway India? What other vessels than those that hold the honour of the Roman name on their very lips have reached the Spice island of Java in the Far East, obtained the homage of the Luzon islands in the Pacific, and have excited the envy of the silk robed Emperors of China? Why even Chosroes, the Shah of Iran, offers haoma, the immortal honey prized by an ancient line of Persian kings which reach back as far back as the Assyrian monarchs themselves, to Caesar's own honoured envoy. Today, the Romans are once more in combat with his armies in Syria, noble warriors which have put the long sleeved hordes of Asia to flight yet again…”
My fears gradually ebbed away as the school master's enthusiasm filled a history with a cast drawn from every quarter of the world, a sure sign that my courage was beginning to revive in the strengthening light.
We were the sons of one Maurice's finest warriors, proud to be his offspring and groomed by Arbogast to follow in his footsteps once we were considered to be of proper age to accept the discipline and rigours of the camp. A fortune in jewels clad our backs. Crimson tunics reaching to the knees covered with golden roundels marked our rank as the favoured children of God and the Emperor's inner circle, while our waists were buckled by golden belts studded with precious stones. Our pageant was completed by a set of purple buskins covered by a fretwork of golden lace coming down to the toes.
We sat on a set of ivory seats bearing carved lions over their arms on an upper storey of a fortified retreat holding generously appointed rooms, kitchens, reception and dining areas, as well as a small barracks with room to house a guard squad, the silentarii. The world was a rumour outside of its walls, the empire a fantasy and Arbogast's tales a fable poking through an idyll.
Facing the white capped tides of the sea, our books and ink pots and scrolls were heaped high on a broad study of costly cedar which had been cut and shaped out of the forests of the Holy Land itself. Arbogast preferred standing to sitting when he was delivering his lectures, and was never happier than pacing back and forth over the flooring of the study
The teacher was a eu**ch, a Roman citizen who had secured a place in Father's baggage train after the General had been raised by the Emperor to the rank of proconsularis in a newly regained territory which hugged a strip of coast between Tunisia and Morocco. As a youth it was said Arbogast had been enslaved as a youth by a barbarian tride raiding his village. Left the sole survivor of a slaughtered family, he had been put to work as a goatherd for his cruel captors. Only after they had been routed by an army led by the Emperor himself to punish their depredations had he been freed. According to the steward of the villa from whom Thoedore and I got the story however, this wasn't the interest part of the story.
Rumours circulating the villa assured us in perfect confidence that the tribesmen had also taken their pleasure with him during his years of captivity as the seasons had run together during his chained life among the cold hills. Arbogast, it was asserted, assumed the raiment of a eu**ch after his return to the empire rather than endure a life longer even by a single day of a pansy. Many of the Father's officers despised a race of gelded creatures such as the teacher which had subsequently made themselves indispensable to his retinue as officials and administrators, but the govenor, so the yarn went, had nobly ignored the grumbles and the rumours and recognised only Arbogast's high intelligence and unswerving loyalty to our family.
Perhaps Theodore and I had chosen to believe the scurrilouss yarn because Arbogast, with a sensibility worthy of the old Romans themselves like Cato and Cicero had disapproved of our open display of luxury on his first day as our appointed tutor. Duty, he had pointed out, unshaped by good works would not prosper so long as we did not advance beyond the spangled sin in which our balled silks slouched by the shore of the Mediterranean. It was time, he declared, for us to heave against the doors of glory and chart our own epic. Luckily for us, the old roué had been resourceful; he even had a plan.
Arbogast surmised that only curricula filled with a proper study of the rhetoric of the great men of history would tighten our falling lines ahead of a life in Father's own honour squad.
“The lightest feed of a spider,” his favourite proverb often went, “weaves the strongest of webs when given over to studying the examples which are furnished by the past. To be an orator, I confidently tell you boys, is to take the first step to being a better copy of the old Romans when you eventually exchange your fine clothes for a buckler and a breast plate.”
Why, Arbogast boasted, he had once heard the Emperor Maurice himself harangue his army on the eve of a clash when he had been a humble scribe in one of the divisions that Caesar had manoeuvred so deftly before Shah Chosroes' glittering host, and it would be no bad thing for us to learn from the example. What had the Emperor looked like, I had promptly demanded to know; had Maurice been fat? Bald? Short or thin?
“I cannot tell,” had come the careful reply to a question whose bluntness would not have been forgiven by the magister officiarum, the Emperor's own master of spies if his agents had been nearby to overhear it;
“Caesar had been much too far away for me to see him properly. Maurice was, all that you need to know boys, a warrior. His army, more to the point had thought him to be so too. He was a man who knew how to persuade a group of strangers, like all great men, to go to a place and there stand and die for him. As you will eventually ask those who will come under your own command, in the fullness of time to do so too.”
Thus had begun the chivvying and the harrying. “Work hard, my fine students, work hard, just as golden Alexander, the Conqueror of Darius had done so by the foot of Aristotle,” Arbogast would utter helpfully, day on day as we sweated manfully at our lines, “and do not allow the laws of honest labour to be trampled down when the lazy student says-'I will do it tomorrow', least the fruits of his industry vanish down a million gullets of forgetfulness. Good grammar, like a hanging light, I tell you alone separate the hero from the barbarian.”
Theodore had not expressed his contempt for the opinion openly when he had raised his head to utter a voiceless insult to the teacher's back. Fine spelling, has far as my brother was concerned, only divided a Christian warrior from a painted lunatic who was lording it over us, not a lard smeared Persian irregular poking his spear at the fences of the imperial frontiers.
There was, however one other, much more powerful reason for my brother's reticence. For Arbogast had drowned his aspirations (and in consequence, by those mysterious workings of cause and effect of which Aristotle expounded so much in his Physics to such great length, in doing so throwing open the door to my own life path) with an error of his own making at the end of the week when the teacher allowed wine to be admitted to the school. Spring was smiling on us that sunny morning, and Arbogast was confident of reinforcing the talents which virtue's muse had surly seeded in our breasts by unbolting the contents of the family cellar. The well intentioned gesture merely opened the door to a herd which spoke all languages and none. I was not allowed a drop unmixed in a bowl in view of my tender years, but Theodore, a goggle eyed prince balancing half dead over his chair was already rolling like a barrel rather than a disciple of the long dead philosopher towards a future as a sot rather than a soldier of ours or any other army.
“More,” he dully commanded me, his eyelids fluttering as he held out his goblet for a refill. I rose without a word to carry out the summons and was careful not to spill a drop from the bottle, and allowed my gaze to drop once more on the object tied around his belt. As Theodore was almost a man and had already begun to exercise with the guards, his garb had been reinforced by a ceremonial knife bearing an ivory handle with a carved eagle on its pommel tucked snugly into a gold fringed hilt. A finger of death gleaming brightly in the sun, I coveted a gift which Father himself had made over to him before he had left us on the Emperor's business to pacify the tribes of the deeper desert of the south to preserve the peace if not the sobriety of the land.
The leaves of a cypress tree rustled like tinkling bells as a soft wind filling the white sails of the merchantmen connecting Novo Carthago, our provincial capital with the trading arteries of the empire blew through its branches. The tangy smell of sea air posed a sore temptation to my nostrils as the plovers swooped to pick off the flies settling around the opened mouths of the wine jugs, and I was gripped in such moments, as always with the desire to take flight of my own for a beach where the directing music of freedom was offered by an altogether different sound. The waves, I surmised which were crashing against the shore would revive me, wash away the bad dreams and even direct, unlike Theodore my proper concentration on my studies as Arbogast intended.
I bite back a small stab of pain as I shifted my knees in readiness to carry out a plan to escape from the study, going over and again in my mind a carefully worked out path which would weave and dodge past the teacher's chopping hands for the door. I still bore the memory of a beating over my backside which Father had administered on his behalf with a scutia, a wrap of slim vines tied together with cord as a punishment for my repeated transgressions, but I had borne no great resentment toward either of them because of it and would have gladly have embraced a dozen more strokes for his overdue return. Theodore, whose own love for Father alone equalled his wine driven self-regard, had drunk down the best of his company during his short stays at home. Though the Emperor's man had returned twice more since then to see us, the fresh absence of a warrior who had dusted off his sand covered gauntlets only long enough to count off his young had stretched for far longer than the rest put together. My daily duty as Theodore's water boy alone arrested my twisting impatience to be away, there and then as the heat of the morning and the shrieks of the birds blended together.
The governor had been gone now for almost a year by my reckoning, and I was beginning to drift back into my old, bad ways in the face of a world baring its harsh teeth to me without his company. A source of adventure was needed, I believe to balance my young and lonely life. I wanted to run unchecked without an end across a thin strip of sand smothered by the curling waves, run on until I heard his laughter and saw his horse mounting the high spume. I turned to see if Theodore had caught my small hiss of pain, but he was already calling out for a third refill while old Arbogast was prattling on as ever.

We would work for the rest of the morning against the hours marked by the sliding shadow of a bronze sun dial set on a quartz pedestal until noon hove into view, after which the full blaze of the sun would drive us into the cool shelter of the travertine and limestone villa which Father had built for us as his first act on arriving on African shores at the head of an army heavy with fire and steel. Thanks to the mitigating influence of the soft bora however, that was not for a long while yet, and Arbogast was not given to telling a story quickly. His theme this morning was an account of the fall of the empire in Italy and the west. We groaned. Not again.
“Here,” he began, “by contrast to the glorious victories gained by the Emperor in the Persian War, the darkness has intruded on his light. The hordes of Germany, as you well know boys, some two hundred years ago pushed over the frozen Rhine River to overwhelm the Roman garrisons of Gaul, Spain and Italy, and advance unimpeded right up to the exploding shores of the Ocean itself, where the bones of the kingdom of Atlantis, so Hesiod and Pindar's writings tells us, still rest. There had, shamefully not been much fight in our legions, I would have to admit, for the eagles which had once held the world in their thrall for five centuries had grown soft and mutinous. The cords of a glorious past were hacked apart as they recoiled from the barbarian blades, and an empire which had pressed it's fascines on the necks of a hundred nations in the name of The Senate and the People of Rome between the glens of Scotland and the banks of the River Nile was reduced to a heap of bars and grates.”
The eu**ch took out a silk cloth and delicately brushed a loose tear off his painted cheek.
“With those same clumsy implements,” he continued as I watched a winding sail being hauled down by a merchantman putting into the harbour of Novo Carthago with an equally heavy heart hanging in my breast the longer my departure from the study was delayed, “the Germans have quartered the conquered lands into independent kingdoms, over which they have made themselves petty kings with crowns of thin gold that the Emperor sends to them as tokens of his esteem. Formidable in battle, yet their kings are corrupt and easily divided by such trifles. Thanks to their bickering, the portion allotted to our part of the world in the east which had stood outside of the fall is protected by a network of forts and armies guarding the new imperial capital of Constantinople. Founded by the Emperor Constantine, a man who gifted what had once been a simple port perched on a set of straits dividing Europe from Asia with his own name, the city soon grew fat on the tolls levied on every ship that landed their wares in its fortified inlet. The solidi nummus, issued by the imperial mint every year, is now the most stable currency in the world. Constantine had been compelled quit the city of Rome in Italy, the capital of the west, as indefensible in the face of the barbarian tribes which had come closer and closer to its walls every year. Rome, at length was put to the sack like all the rest, occupied and turned into a dung heap...”
I drummed my fingernails, accepting that my hope for escape, for the moment was closed off until he was finished. Rome; that was also the first mention of the city that I heard from his mouth entering my fraying ears, the city founded by the Trojan hero Aeneas and his band which had survived the ashes of his own, doomed city, and it was certainly not to be the last. Laid low, much like the towers of Ilium whose shadows still lay undisturbed across the straits separating it from Constantinople by famine and war, the cradle of the Caesars was a shapeless mass spinning like a lost disc into a nameless night were only the calling of mournful owls broke its silence.
“In the years following Constantine's death,” the pedagogue continued as a fly scrambling across the map was crushed with a smart flick of his palm, “an invading army of Goths deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor to sit among the Seven Hills, and established a line of chieftains in his place. Outraged, Constantine's successors dispatched one military expedition after the other to reclaim the old city and as much of Italy and the west as they could by force of arms. When he heard of the terrible calamity which had befallen Rome, the blessed Saint Jerome was said to have forgotten his own name, while Saint Augustine, author of The City of God, the doorway to heaven's truth....”
I had finally heard enough. Resuming my scheme with fresh resolution, I clutched the handles of my seat and prepared to take my first cautious step towards liberty without arousing the notice of my fellow occupants or thinking overmuch on the fall of empires. A reviving Theodore, sticky with the running juice of grapes blew his nose through his fingers, rinsed them clean in a bowl of rose water and smiled like a newly washed Lazarus.
“The Italian War was a hard one,” an unperturbed Arbogast continued, “and the city suffered most harshly. Garrisons were knitted at every point considered useful by both sides, stormed, recovered and levelled. While the citizens perished by their thousands from famine and battle, a host of barbarous tribes, lured south of the Alps by the prospect of plunder and lands, wasted their numbers in battle on the wheat fields of Campania and Umbria. By its end our attempts to reunify the shorn halves of the Western Empire, though successful, was limited; only the coast of Italy, our present home of Africa and a portion of Southern Spain were reconquered and retained. Stories would occasionally reach our ears of a one Artorius, or Arthur as he was generally known, from the gossip of sailors which had penetrated the seas as far as Britain, that as a warlord he sent letters to Caesar claiming to hold much of that misty island as a duke in the name of the Romans. Ridiculous, of course; Britain, a most blustery place which even the divine Julius Caesar himself declared to be destitute of all riches except in slaves or pearls, is now a Saxon possession.”
The teacher allowed himself a quiet chuckle as the old joke, weathered by six hundred years in the telling was repeated for our benefit. I would, in the fullness of time hear more of that rocky outpost too, and forge a lifelong friendship with a warrior belonging to the Saxon races who had been expelled by his land hungry rivals with nothing remaining but the blouse on his back to show that he had ever been a man of rank. But I push too far; space enough will be allowed for this particular part of my story to be described. At last Arbogast sank with an 'aaah' into a seat by our side in a rustle of falling folds and left my way to decampment from the study clear at last.
The teacher eased the back of his neck. “The Goths which had deposed Romulus Augustulus tried to retake Rome from our army with crude siege methods, but to no avail. Repulsed by the gallantry of our soldiers, the barbarians gave way with heavy losses, but not before much of the city had been reduced to a quarry. I knew the desolation of Rome well, for I visited the city as a youth soon after the war was ended and before the pair of you were born. Peace, after a fashion had come at last to the country, and the Emperor dispatched soldiers of proven worth and ability to administer what has been regained after expending so much blood and gold.”
Arbogast sneezed, and our hearts quickened. “Romanus, the first governor of Italy fixed his seat at Ravenna. Rome, still a wasteland was left by his indifference to moulder. No matter. The other, Flavius Valerius Heraclius the Elder, was raised over Tunisia; your honoured father, boys. He made Novo Carthago, built on the ashes of the older city of the same name which had produced the terrible Hannibal his capital and beautified it, unlike the hulk that is Rome with a new circus, a meeting square and an administrative palace. Today you enjoy the peace, and I must say, far too much of the indolence that he has secured for you.”
Theodore's arm rose unexpectedly into the air. Arbogast paused, the smallest of frowns playing on his brow as if he had been stung by those of the remaining flies which had decided to seek vengeance for their smeared companion. I could think and see in my indifference as I measured the distance between my shadow and the door behind him only of the waves crashing far beyond the villa, their sound a rumble of thunder blowing over, in truth what was destined to be the savage sunset of an empire enjoying its last flush of greatness before the barbarians whom we foolishly thought to be defeated in east and west resumed their march oozing mud and blood. My destiny beckoned.

Chapter 3-Theodore

“Father spoke to me of his first campaign of pacification against the wild tribes of the south not long after he had hauled his colours in Africa,” Theodore announced, so I checked my movement with a flare of sharp interest to hear what he had to say. My carefully constructed design of plucking the governor from a freight of darkness was delayed; the world held its breath, and I dared hope for rescue by the short rather than a long path after all.
“Indeed?” the eu**ch, for whom everything and nothing which an elder brother heavy with his own importance spoke concerning the shield of the land might be true or false, replied without revealing his own surprise; “then Flavius and I will wish to hear.” He gave me a wink of reassurance; “I think that I have spoken long enough of ruins this morning. Throat gargle, I believe is in order.”
Theodore, swelling with the pride of a braggart at every point of his bilious body, failed to notice the veiled rebuke. For the governor’s prolonged absence had dimmed the power of an imperial jewel which was drifting, much like Italy towards the shoals of neglect the longer he was away. Strong in limb and popular with the mob, Theodore had taken the first step needed to bringing Africa Province back into the stream of its obedience by wearing an ornamenta palatii, a red consul's robe and vestment in public similar to Father's in defiance of all custom if not the law, as well as attaching a bright sword attached by a lanyard around his shoulder.
Though he hacked lustily at a set of straw effigies placed in a tilting yard ahead of leaving for The Devil's Gap, a place of the deeper training where a man aspiring to high office shaped his skill and polished his ambition to satisfy an increasingly worried Emperor that all was well with his western possessions, Theodore had also begun to ride through Novo Carthago on a white horse and throw money to lines of cheering crowds bursting at their knees to spend it.
And why not? As the sons of a noble who was separated from our table by a past ebbing towards the lands of forgetfulness, Africa needed a firm hand at the tiller to steer it back through all its gathering troubles towards a safe inlet. Our lives under the tutor's guidance was a long preparation which would eventually, so it was hoped, help to keep the picture as whole as the pin of power which Theodore waved at the pricking clouds above his head.
All, however to no avail. A set of slender talents honed down to a clutch of desperate war shouts picked out by his toadies and camp followers proved to be my brother's sole success. Despite his failures however, Theodore might yet have made a passable ruler had his personal character not been soured less by the wine he quaffed at our table than by the public scandals which he could not quash.
For all of his posturing Father's eldest boy was well on his way to smearing the family name by siring any number of bastards which we could not count through our fingers on the daughters of the ambitious magnates and merchants of Novo Carthago who promised to support his rule according to the value which they set on his carnal industry on their weighing scales once he was placed on the colonial seat.
Theodore had the blood, and for those of his wealthy supporters which would be flattered by being connected through grandsons and granddaughters with a leading family of the empire, this was all that mattered. Borrowing Father's laurels, my brother surmised, would do no harm to his cause when the time came to declare his suit.
“Let me think now...” he mused grandly, curling one of the bristles of his beard through his fleshy fingers, “yes, I have it! Victory, the proconsul said is the best fortification. I have fought the Austuriani, a wandering people of the desert which had threatened the peace of Africa with success; a feat”-he added, “which we haven't achieved against our new foes to our north, the Lombards, a new enemy of the empire which have pushed aside our frontier guards in Italy and are now camped around the walls of Rome!”
My silence drove away my sulks. Hope hung off as branch like heavy fruit as my Father's image came to life. Arbogast folded his hands with dignified discipline, his locked fingers a rampart running like the ageing fortifications protecting the old capital of an imperial territory against the battering rams of Ariuf, a barbarian king who had blockaded the city these last ten years.
“Continue,” the teacher replied dryly.
Theodore, topping to the brim a fresh goblet of wine describing Odysseus's return from exile to his wife and son, began to slur his words. The sunniness of his voice wore itself to the worse with each new draft.
“Father was devoted in his bloody labours tor the Emperor. While our soldiers were holding the walls of Rome, the armies of the most obstinate tribes inhabiting the sandy hills of Numidia, the Gaetuli, or 'robed men', offered battle to him after coming down from their mountains, hoping that the stench of their camels would upset his horses and throw his men. The ranks of the nomads were of a rough cut however, the cudgels they held in their hands fashioned from the meanest of materials, and a single charge by Father's mailed cavalry was sufficient to send them into headlong flight. After laying low the last band which had escaped the rout, the victorious governor set at liberty numerous captives of great dignity. Business has been brisk lad, Father boasted, death itself put out to grass.”
Theodore lent back on his seat and waited for our applause with drink filled happiness.
“Truly-those were his very words-?” I asked with heat while Arbogast chose to preserve infinity of suggestion. My brother grinned.
“The bright days of the old Moorish triumphs, Father announced, have been dimmed now that the eagles of the empire have returned to Africa, their boasts of driving the Emperor's best into the sea curbed as far as the tides of the Atlanticus itself.”
He looked to each of us with his shiny eyes. “And how do I know all this? I will tell you. I visited the freed captives as an honoured guest with Father, and took the best seats in their houses. Afterward I err, blended in more intimate ways with those of the matrons who had been liberated, along with the rest who wished to speak of their experiences in conjoining rooms. I was a governor’s son you see, for whom both doors and thighs opened.” His features sparking with happy force, Theodore threw back his head and laughed uproariously. We could not believe it. He rejoiced in his vice. When we did not nod or wink as eagerly like the rest of his followers however, a dangerous indent at last began to form on his brow.
“And why not!” he said with a hard slam of the goblet on the wood; “Jove himself, whose image the legions still honour on their standards alongside those of Christ, smiled no less on as many girls! I know an old flame that has begun a school of rhetoric. Another wishes to be an abbess-an abbess I tell you, to honour Saint Cyprian, a bishop who was beheaded when superstition still ruled the empire for refusing to offer a pinch of incense at a graven alter in Novo Carthago. When I march against the Lombards after I become the new proconsul, husbands will be in short supply. Who knows?-You, dear teacher, may even find yourself hitched to a widow. A rich one, too boot. How would that be to your liking?”
“Delightful,” replied a patient Arbogast; “Simply delightful.”
Theodore turned and dug his great elbow into my ribs; “And not forgetting you, younger brother. You will be of age on my return, loaded with b***y, to participate in my triumph”
He leaned back, his good humour rebuilt in everything except his humility; “I do not think that the Emperor Maurice will have cause to worry over the safety of this particular part of our world for a long time when I lead a line of Lombards through the city streets, loaded down in chains.”
I allowed what had become a disappointment to play itself to the finish, recalling more than the average in an account given by my rambling brother if only because our fates, in the fullness of time would be entwined with one another. Theodore was like a proud tower, much like the crumbling temples of Rome which were fading daily each day in the face of her new peril except that he lacked, in common with so many of those abandoned places for a decent roof. I could no longer remain silent.
“The Governor of Africa could have accepted prisoners,” I spoke up, “and have even made the desert powers the honorary pensioners of the palace. That is the surer path, I think to the restoration of happiness in Italy. I do not think that you will secure the submission of the Lombards without offering fair laws to their king.”
The sublime becomes the stuff of small talk when subjected to criticism. Poor Theodore; good for correcting the shape of a mistress's nose but little else. When fresh anger began to ripple through his limbs the eu**ch hastily cleared his throat;
“Theodore-excuse the boy,” Arbogast spoke up; “his naiveté instructs him. Nothing more. Have some patience with his years.”
Theodore stared at us for a moment, his expression looking like a set of hastily thrown up earthworks, and then as suddenly recovered his charm when he wanted to impress somebody or knew which look was needed when he saw that he had lost control of himself.
He tapped a finger on my skinny shoulder. “Very well. Your manners have been formed by a hard star, kid. So I will accept the honoured teacher's advice, and overlook your loose mouth this time.”
I should have bowed my head and have accepted the generous offer; it would have been the easier for me. Wisdom has to grow from the cot before it can presume to place one foot in front of the other. I could not, however endure the arrogance with which Theodore claimed his familiarity with the proconsul, and I began to swell with the stupidity of pride which was no better than that of his own. Theodore was big, yes, very big now, a tree who stood as proud and commanding as Ariuf before a trembling leaf over whom he could easily bring down a foot if he wished, yet I was determined not to give way in retreat. I considered his anecdotes to be lies, an epic set to the tune of a poor song, and said so openly before Arbogast could catch my rashness by its legs a second time. Father’s name commanded authority in the land even by its omission, and it would do so, even now.
“I do not mean to speak out of place,” I answered with a tremble as night and day came together without thinking even in a half run of the consequences of my action, “but I don't think-I don't think,” I ran on, “that I believe your story. You wouldn’t have been the only one to have known about his deeds. Others would have been told too, and then word would have reached us all. And Father would not have put the nomads to death out of hand either. Joseph himself,” I added, surprised by my ability to dredge up my half-forgotten scriptural instruction from the deepest recess of my disinterest, “so the Judaic Book tells us, held his authority in the name of Pharaoh, but he was not Pharaoh. You also get drunk every day and sleep with other men’s' wives. I do not like it when you are drunk.”

Some believe that courage follows its own star in the darkness. So it was that my thoughts, much like a shield being gripped by the fumbling fingers of a blind man, laid bare my true feelings that morning. Perhaps it was the way in which my brother unfolded what I considered to be an unlikely tale, or maybe it was the first public evidence I was exhibiting of my natural distaste for a battlefield paved with blood over the middle way of diplomacy and conciliation that gave to my sibling the notion that we had reached a fork in our roads. As an Emperor I have never allowed a fear of spiders and worms to obstruct the ambassadors which the tribes of the world have dispatched to the foot of my court. An Empire which does not see an idea cannot live for long. Goaded by the spear of a gambolling demon, an elder brother who could not see at all reached over to grab the scruff of my neck. Only the arresting power of the wine allowed me to dodge his lung.
“You are slower than the flies!” I cried with scorn and dashed on my light feet for shelter behind Arbogast's back. “You will do better to convince them of your fitness for high office!”
By way of reply Theodore drew out the ceremonial knife from his belt with the heavy face of an ogre. A youth of powerful and dangerous emotions, he rose to his full height now that his eyes and hands had set themselves the first act of his future government.
“You won't be laughing when I carve an extra scar over your arse, scutia, for that is what I will call you from now on, and finish Father's job!” he snarled.
The eu**ch scrapped back his seat and bravely pushed me farther behind him.
“No one,” Arbogast spoke sternly with the voice of a rake sweeping brushwood aside as he stepped decisively between us, “can turn back from what has been said in heat this morning on either side, but no one will be pointed out or thumb screwed for their freedom to have done so either. You, Theodore,” he called with a voice of cultivated moderation crafted in the most careful of tones, my brother meeting his calm at the brink of madness, “rightly wish to give your fathers honoured name its due. Speak up and speak clearly,” he said as he carefully glided his blade past the fatal point, “like a man without a need to press his suite by force.”
The tutor brought me round to his front, yet never once taking his face away from him. But I was not exempted from his criticism.
“And you, Flavius,” he uttered, “own the unchecked ardour of your tongue by gainsaying your brother so rudely. Both of you may continue the debate, but only as gentlemen. I will not force either of you to give an apology to the other. Polite society does not prosper in a blindfold. Allow the pieces to fall according to their worth.”
The reassurance of the eu**ch revived my boldness. But I was also more careful now.
“We are not kings to the country,” I challenged a sullen Theodore with squared shoulders while he allowed the blade to slide from his palm onto the tiling with a clatter, “to take ownership of our subjects.”
“Huh”-he gave back in a hoop of nervous lines, “a born lawyer!”
And so it went as we talked on and squabbled without end for the rest of the morning, our fencing words scratching the air with the obstinacy of youths who believed themselves to be in the right on everything and anything if only the people would listen to them. Arbogast was anxious for the debate to play itself out without further trouble. Our arguments had grown fiercer, each clash a fresh flare of leaping flame which pushed that bit higher into the sky for which every object save his shrunken balls was tinder if they strayed too close. Hair pulling, kicking and biting had given way to a willingness to shed blood and even take life.
Gradually my brother, by sheer bulk alone began to exhaust me in the argument, and I found myself craving a need to reach out for fresh air. He pressed, like the Father would have done, his advantage when he sensed this, a truer son to the wild skin clad tribes of the wastes he regarded with contempt than a rising general of the empire holding the fences of civilisation together. My unbrushed teeth and smeared shirt were all of the clues that Theodore's eyes needed to ripen his scorn while the clouds above our heads floated from pole to pole.
“You would have been too young to understand him,” he declared decisively, his chin held up proud; “Terror, Father believed, was the only advocate which the barbarians understood. Mercy only instructed the dead. He was stood like a saint, glowing bright in a cylinder of golden armour like the prophet Daniel for all of us to see and to remember, I tell you, on the day before his rode out to give battle to the Moors. We would not be where we are now, defending everything and preserving nothing, certainly the walls of Rome itself from the Lombards, if the soldiers which were meant to have protected our lands had mustered even half as much spleen as the army which he led. I was deep in conference with the governor for a whole day, and learned much. The noble warrior suggested that you joined us, but I shook my head and said that you were on your poo-pot and demanding a bag of sugar.”
Drenched in sweat by now, I was too exhausted to reply to the sneer and bowed to my defeat. Gold can be reckoned as a stone; it may also be an idea or an era. My brother was the last of us to see Father, so I had to acknowledge, alive; I was not. Who could gainsay the weight of the recollected moment, as I rested my eyes in hopelessness on the limestone and marbles of the villa with nothing to do but accept the insult with grace? Perhaps Father had indeed fallen to our enemies in one war too many, gasping out his blood onto the sands of the south under the burning Saharan sun.
Our rivalry would not have been as bitter as it was had our mother's loving light still been with us. It was, all in all easier for Arbogast to subdue the air itself rather than to acknowledge the tread of her ghost in the matter of our quarrel. Their union in the beginning had been a mating of money, a blending of two proud families on the advice and approval of Caesar himself. Love, however had grown once the one had recognised an equal in the other.
The rest of their lives would have been a happy ending if history hadn’t got in the way. Mother had been a gentle and intelligent woman with thick spun, golden hair at the peak of her beauty who used to sit and sing to Theodore on her lap with a voice whose tenderness had been enough to melt the harshness of the rocks themselves. Her decline had begun when a wasting disease pared away her fine locks to leave her a shell as bare as the slopes and scrub of the mountains; the Governor tried were he could to arrest the fate which God had marked out for his mate by spending whole days with her on the beach, whispering words of affection and reassurance in her ear while Theodore capered and splashed among the waves along the very same strip which I later came to know and love as well.
Reduced to little more than a leaf drifting on a thin current of air by the time of my own birth, I had only hours to know my mother before she had glided away, happy but exhausted with a last gift to the family on the ebbing tide.
Devoted in life to the glory of The Redeemer, so my Father intoned during her funeral eulogy were a cluster of bright candles lit up a grief stricken crowd shifting past her open coffin in Novo Carthago to pay their last respects, a heavy load filled with suffering had fallen away now that the angels themselves had become her guides. I knew otherwise; it was I, not mother's sickness, which really took her life; it was I who bore the burden of guilt for the death of a woman who had only found true peace from her endless pain, thanks to my insistent kicks in her womb, within the cool arms of eternity. Theodore had been delivered quietly and without fuss in the year that Father had brought his bride with him to Africa, but I had breached the sky in a mess of blood and s**t with a cry of battle already bellowing from my lungs.
Years on as I slept uneasily in the nights I recollected my crime, over and again, shifting each time that my dream assumed the form of her face, so I convinced myself whispering for vengeance in my ear. Cicero, a jurist whose speeches we had studied under Arbogast's guidance, had borne a healthy fear of ghosts, and so did I each time I stopped my ears against a phantom of expiring moans which daily invaded my rolled up slumber. Only the victories which my brother had described which were won by Father securing the borders of Africa had allowed the Governor, a widower standing so stern and proud in grief's thicket to find new joy when he had hurried, much too late to close her eyes.
Was it all ten years ago now? I did not know if mother would have been kind or cruel, wise or dense. Neither Theodore nor I had laid a wreath on the step of her tomb of late, a necropolis of granite marked with a jewelled cross and a warrior stood in its centre, perhaps Father himself, with his cloak drawn in sorrow over his face. The crypt, a family chapel composed of Corinthian columns was approached by a set of massy steps at the end of a gravel path whose loneliness only instructed the wind. So long as the proconsul remained absent however, the carefully cultivated romance which had marked their lives would fade from sight along with the sad beauty of the rearing memorial itself. Everything was provided for us at the villa except love and a set of pruning scissors.
I tried and failed once more to find rest once evening fell. A strong hand emerged out of the fluttering blackness and clamped itself over my mouth. I choked, my eyes rolling in terror, and vainly tried to pull it away. Theodore looked down on me with his face pressed on mine, the point of his knife held just above my eye.
“Shush! Not so loud! I am not going to hurt you. Not just yet. But one day you will see this, the instrument of your death, plunging through your heart as you deserve for defying me today,” he whispered sweetly, turning the handle of the blade through his free hand. “Look well on it, dear brother, for it will be the last thing that you will feel before you leave this earth. I do not like disagreements. You are nothing, and I will take my revenge on you in my own good time, for I am patient. I will persuade Arbogast tomorrow morning that I am a reformed man, a good man and that I have learned my lesson and that I should not harm you, and he will believe me. I can, you see, talk anybody into seeing my side of an argument, anywhere and any place when I want to. But mark my words-once I have assumed the chair of Novo Carthago, as is my right, you will die. Take care now,” he said, relaxing his grip with a chuckle, “sleep well and count every day that is left to you.”
Theodore rose from my bed, paused to sneeze and then retired to his own cot with a low whistle of contentment blowing between his teeth. I tugged my cover over my head and cried quietly into the pillow. Theodore was mad. His science measured a drop and weighed a tear without an ounce of feeling to either. When would Father return?