He gave the command of the Port of Rome to an Armenian named Isaac; my mistress would also be there to advise and assist. A half-squadron of cavalry was stationed on cither side of the river, with supporting infantry, and ordered to hold out to the last man if the Port should be attacked. Belisarius took personal command of the fleet of boarded-in galleys. He sent a message to Bessas: 'Expect my arrival by way of the river in the early afternoon of tomorrow. I have means to break the boom. I count upon you to make a sudden raid against the Gothic camp shortly after noon, as a diversion. I have plentiful provisions for you in my boats.'
The next day, the sixth of December, was the feast of Bishop Nicholas, the patron saint of children. St Nicholas was much cultivated by Justinian, who built a church in his honour at Constantinople. About him more absurd miracles are related, I verily believe, than about any other saint in the Calendar: no sooner was he born than he stood up and lisped thanks to Almighty God for the gift of existence, and as an infant he rigidly observed the canonical fasts of Wednesdays and Fridays, by abstaining on those days from sucking the breasts of his mother Joanna — to her great discomfort but greater wonder. For some unexplained reason, St Nicholas has become the heir of the Sea-God Poseidon, whose temples have nearly all been rededicated to him; as the heiress to the Goddess Venus is the Virgin Mary, and the heir to the Dog Cerberus is the Apostle Peter (Jesus Himself being heir to Orpheus, who timed savage things with his charming melodies). Every saint acknowledged by the Church has his peculiar character and virtue, Nicholas has conic to be an emblem of child-like simplicity. On this occasion the Thracian soldiers, being of the Orthodox faith, regarded the day as of particularly good omen, since it was recorded of Nicholas that at the famous Council of Nicaca he was carried away by his hot religious feelings and dealt his fellow-cleric Arius, the founder of the Arian heresy (which the Goths profess), a tremendous box on the ear.
Early in the morning of St Nicholas's Day, then, Belisarius was ready to begin his voyage up the river with oars and sails. Two thousand of his Household Troops, those for whom he had no horses, kept pace on cither side of the stream, and his remaining squadron of cavalry acted as a screen. My mistress embraced him and wished him godspeed and victory, and he departed. We who remained waited anxiously on the battlements.
About noon a mounted messenger came back with glorious news. Belisarius's fleet had first encountered a chain net fixed across the river a little distance below the boom — the very same chain that he had himself used for protecting the water-mills during his defence of the city — but the infantry, with a volley of arrows and a charge, had scattered the guards posted at cither end; they unhooked the obstruction and proceeded. The tall, floating tower, with the long-boat suspended from the top of it, had been pulled up the tow-path by a number of pack animals. Then, while the archers in the galleys and the infantry on the banks hotly engaged the Goths in the twin land-towers, this floating tower was warped up into position against the land-tower on the tow-path. Now Belisarius's intentions were disclosed. The longboat was lowered from the davits with a rush: as it fell among the crowded Goths in the tower, a dozen flaming torches were thrown into it. The boat had been filled with pitch and oil and resin and other combustible materials, so that in less than a minute the whole Gothic tower was ablaze. A squadron of Goths came charging down the tow-path, but hesitated at the sight of the burning tower and at the sound of men screaming from the fiery mass. Our infantry drove them back in disorder. Belisarius began destroying the boom, and was ready to continue his advance as soon as Bessas should make his sortie. Two hundred Goths had been burned alive in the tower. The garrison of the other tower had fled.
When Isaac the Armenian heard this news he shouted for joy, as we all did at the Port. He decided to win his share of glory by an attack on a stockaded Gothic camp which lay at half a mile's distance, guarding Ostia. Gathering a hundred horsemen together, he spurred out from the fortress into the delta of the river and cried to my mistress Antonina as he went: 'The fortress is safe under your guardianship, gracious lady; soon I shall return with gifts.'
Isaac never returned. He carried the camp at his first charge, scattered the garrison, and mortally wounded their commander. But the Goths realized that this was not the vanguard of a large army, it was merely a madman with a hundred adventurers behind him. They came rushing back to find Isaac's men busily engaged in plundering the huts. Isaac was struck down, and not ten of his hundred men won safely back to the fortifications. One man, finding his return barred, escaped by galloping away up to the head of the delta. He shouted across the stream to an outpost which Belisarius had left there: 'O comrades, Isaac is killed, and I alone of his men am left; and I am wounded in the side. Fetch mc across the river, I beg.' With that he fainted.
While they ferried him and his horse across the river on a raft, one of them galloped up the tow-path to take the bad news to Belisarius at the boom. What he said was: 'Alas, General, all is lost at the Port of Rome. Isaac and the entire garrison have been killed by the Goths — all but one man, your guardsman Sisifried, who has escaped and been fetched wounded across the river at the delta head.'
Belisarius knew Sisifried as a bold, loyal, resourceful soldier, and the messenger also as a very trusty man, so he could not but believe the news. The first question he asked, with a sort of gasp, was: 'And my wife, the Lady Antonina?'
The messenger answered: 'I do not know. Sisifried's words were: 'I alone am left of Isaac's men.' '
At this Belisarius swayed upon his feet. Tears burst from his eyes, and for a while he stood speechless. He crossed himself, muttering a broken prayer. But in a little while he regained control of his feelings: perhaps he recalled how Geilimer, the Vandal King, had lost a battle by untimely grief for a dear one. It was now three o'clock, and Bessas had not made the expected sortie, though aware of the burning of the tower and the destruction of the boom. Must he engage the whole Gothic Army by himself? That would be foolhardy to the point of madness. Nevertheless, he would have done so, in the hope of aid from Bessas as soon as the galleys drew near to the city; but that, with the Port taken, he was cut off from the sea — for Ostia was also held by the enemy, and defeat now would be disaster. His only hope lay in immediate return and the recapture of the Port. He ordered the helms of his galleys to be turned hard about, and, taking the infantry aboard, recalled his cavalry by trumpet-blast and hurried downstream. Perhaps it was still not too late to wrest the fortress from the enemy and avenge his dead.
When we at the Port saw his boats returning we were filled with amazement, but not so great an amazement as he himself felt on observing our sentries still at the gates of the fortress. Then relief and disgust struggled for mastery in his mind — relief that the report was an error, disgust at having, from foolish credulity, abandoned an attempt so well begun. He said bitterly: 'This is the day of St Nicholas, when children find sweetmeats hidden in their shoes, and when old soldiers turn simpletons.'
That night his malarial fever came back upon him. The restless and unhappy condition of his mind aggravated the attack; he grew very sick indeed, and was soon raving in delirium. He kept calling for my mistress, not recognizing her at his bedside. Her heart was pierced when in the wanderings of his mind he relived the anguish that he had suffered in the belief that she was killed. 'What remains for mc now?' he continually cried. 'Antonina is dead.'
At the height of his fever, we who attended him were obliged to call the assistance of eight of his strongest guardsmen to restrain him from doing some wild deed. Now he imagined that he was fighting the Goths outside the walls of Rome, and now that it was the Persians at Daras. Once he uttered his war-cry in a terrible voice and caught two men in his arms, nearly crushing them to death; but suddenly fell gasping.
CHAPTER 22
Belisarius was confined to his chamber for ten days. On the eleventh day King Teudel took Rome, being admitted one night with all his army by four treacherous Isaurian soldiers at the Asinarian Gate. Bessas had not constantly changed the duty roster for his guards, as Belisarius had done, or changed the locks on the gates; thus the soldiers had been able to agree with Teudel for an exact hour some days in advance. The cause of their treachery was a grievance against the captain of their company for holding back part of their com ration in order to sell it to patricians.
King Teudel's Goths immediately set about plundering the great houses of the patricians, allowing Bessas and his garrison to escape without hindrance. Teudel contented himself with what he found in the Pincian Palace — Bessas's evilly won store, which had the appearance of a royal treasury or the hoard of a successful admiral of pirates. In all Rome, a city that had recently housed half a million souls, the Goths found no more than 500 commoners and 400 persons of patrician blood — nearly all women and children, these, since most of the patricians
