Huns, the Vandals, the sea…
Even Rufus, a good sailor, looked sea-green, hanging on the taffrail like a rag. From back in the mist there came a muffled crack. The boy stared in that direction, rolling on the balls of his feet with the ship, drool still hanging from his lips. Theodoric and Torismond were collapsed on their pallets below, filling buckets.
‘What is it, lad?’ said Aetius. He could see nothing.
The boy stared a while longer. ‘I thought I saw white horses,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t mean breaking waves, I mean… real white horses, swimming. Drowning.’
Aetius looked grim. Had they lost the horse-transporter? It was possible.
He sent an order to the master to kill the oars. The Cygnus slowed, then wallowed terribly in the heavy sea, groans arising from below. Aetius himself held onto a rail-post. The deck was rolling through ninety degrees, water sluicing back and forth across the boards. He strained to see or hear: nothing. They had to go back. Not for the horses – they could not save the horses even if they found them – but for the men.
They ploughed back a weary league against the sea, but found nothing. No sighting of the broad transporter, not a horse, not a single waving man.
They pulled round and went on. Rufus returned to hanging sickly from the taffrail.
‘Don’t tell the princes,’ Aetius instructed.
He himself returned to his station in the bucking prow, right arm tight round the jibmast. Standing face into the rain, praying to his god, gaunt on the poop deck: sleepless, grimfaced, hatless, windblown, Rome’s last believer.
At last the storm died away and visibility returned. No sign of the horse-transporter.
The princes came shakily up on deck and understood it was lost.
‘We’ll get more horses,’ Aetius promised, ‘fine Cappadocian horses.’
‘I hate the sea,’ murmured Torismond.
‘You might as well hate the Power that made it,’ said Aetius. ‘It is ignoble to hate a thing as great and implacable as nature.’
Torismond looked away.
They anchored at Syracuse, took on fresh water, sluiced out the lower decks, sold a couple of slaves who were as good as done for and bought a couple more. The princes tottered unsteadily down the gangplank for a walk round the harbour. Aetius forbade them to drink, saying they were under his command now. They didn’t look like they wanted a drink anyway.
The master brought him a squat, bearded fellow who was asking for passage east.
Aetius eyed him. ‘What for?’
‘I make for Alexandria, but I need to visit Constantinople first. I have two chests of… materials which I need to bring with me. With them, I will protect you against attacks by pirates.’
Aetius grinned broadly. ‘I have a retinue of fifty Gothic spearmen. I think we can look after ourselves.’
‘You do not know the Vandals.’
‘On the contrary, I know them well.’ He looked him up and down. ‘Name?’
‘Nicias.’
‘Greek?’
‘Cretan.’
‘Even worse. All Cretans are liars, beasts and gluttons, as Saint Paul himself has told us.’
Nicias snorted. ‘We Cretans have been living with that calumny for four centuries now.’
‘You’ll be living with it for centuries to come, too. Is it not the word of God?’
Nicias kept a stubborn silence. This general was too clever by half.
‘Very well. And what is in your magical chests?’
‘Materials – alchemical materials.’
‘God help us.’ Aetius saw the two princes returning.
‘You may take passage with us, but we neither want nor need your protection against pirates. Understood?’
The princes joined them, looking a little improved.
‘You will not get through, I tell you,’ said Nicias. ‘Vandal pirates infest the eastern seas.’
Prince Theodoric interrupted. ‘We Visigoths are no enemies of the Vandals. Our father is to marry our sister Amalasuntha to Genseric’s son himself.’
Nicias looked sardonic. ‘Pirates are no great respecters of treaties, son.’
‘We’re finished talking,’ Aetius snapped. ‘Now, bugger off.’
Nicias stumped away.
Aetius looked at Theodoric sharply. ‘Your sister? That pretty slip of a girl? To marry Genseric’s son?’
Theodoric nodded.
‘Then your father is a fool.’
The young man’s eyes blazed. ‘How dare you speak of my father like that!’
Prince Torismond took a step nearer Aetius. The general held his hands up. He had indeed overstepped the bounds of politeness. He apologised profusely. They relaxed.
‘But I will have to beg of your father-’
‘That is his policy. An alliance between the Visigoths and the Vandals, a Germanic empire in the West, neither friend nor enemy to Rome.’
Aetius shook his head. ‘The Vandals are already in alliance with the Huns. I know it in my bones. I will bring your father proof. That embittered, half-lame Genseric is playing him false.’
‘So you want to believe.’
‘So I do believe.’
‘The Vandals are your fellow Christians.’
‘Even the Devil himself believes in God,’ muttered Aetius.
They sailed on the small evening tide again. The storm had blown out, the sea was subsiding. It was peaceful. And too damn slow.
Aetius sent for Nicias. ‘Bring up your chest,’ he said. ‘Entertain us.’
The Cretan needed no second bidding. In a trice he scuttled down to the hold and got one of the sailors to help him up with his chest. He raised the lid and knelt down reverently, like a holy man before an altar.
The princes and the Gothic wolf-lords crowded along the rail to watch the show. The master and bosun craned from the wheelhouse to watch this great wonder-worker about his miracles, and the sun-bronzed sailors sat along the yard above, swinging bare feet, grinning, gold earrings winking in the sunset. Only the slaves below worked on unregarded.
Nicias rummaged, giving a running commentary. ‘My recipe combines essence of nitre, phosphorus, and refined black oil from Mesopotamia.’
‘Must make a right stench,’ grunted the master.
‘The odour is distinctive.’
‘And you better not set fire to my fuckin’ ship.’
The alchemist ignored this uncouth remark.
He drew out of his chest some wooden spars and an iron frame, and quickly assembled them into something like a miniature ballista. He set the machine on the deck beside the chest, and rapidly wound back a little brass winch. His audience was interested now, despite themselves. Even Aetius kept his grey eyes fixed steadily on the proceedings.
Nicias produced a small ball from his chest, holding it between forefinger and thumb, and showed it around like a huckster in the market-place trying to sell off a rare egg. It was a perfect iron sphere, studded all round with sharp spikes, rather like a caltrop thrown out to stop cavalry. Nicias set the sphere down at the end of his little ballista, turned a brass knob at the side one half-turn, and was ready to fire.
‘Hold,’ said Aetius. ‘There are dolphins out there. Look.’
Breaking the surface of the burnished sea, between them and the falling sun, there were dark, glossy shapes arcing and curvetting through the water in the wake of the ship, some fifty yards off.
‘All the better!’ said the little alchemist excitedly, turning his machine aft. The onlookers stepped back warily. ‘I will use them as my targets. I will show you what becomes of mortal flesh when one of my devices…’
