ruined. Outside the walls, it was almost a shock to breathe clean air again, and to have an unbroken view all around me.
As before, the road was raised above the surrounding countryside, running straight and white into the distance. On our left was the Tiber, sliding further away from us as we travelled north; on our right the ruins of a civil order that had once reached far outside Rome.
Unlike on the Aurelian Way, we weren’t alone. There was a thin but continuous stream of traffic: wagons laden with food and other goods for the Roman market, pilgrims coming in for the consecration or just to worship in the existing churches, the carriages and litters of the great. We passed a convoy of imperial couriers, bringing letters from the exarch. Covered in dust from the long journey, they now rode slowly, laughing and chatting. They called out a greeting as we passed them.
I looked back after a few miles. I shaded my eyes and squinted to see past the sun, which had risen high on my front left. My heart skipped a beat. There was a little cloud of dust in the south. The dispensator had at last got wind of our intentions, and had sent out a whole mounted brigade to ride us down. Another chase on a road. How would this one end?
Lucius looked back and laughed. ‘They’re too heavy and too far behind,’ he cried, waving his cap joyfully. ‘Unless they can grow wings on their horses, they’ll never catch us.
‘Come on! We’ll be out of their reach by nightfall.’
This time, I was with a skilled horseman. Lucius rode beside me, explaining the proper use of the reins and spurs, and showing me the correct posture. We didn’t seem to ride as fast as I had from those English mercenaries. The horse never once panted, let alone foamed. I didn’t feel any jarring of my back or straining of muscles. But we kept a smooth, steady pace along the road. Every time I looked back, the cloud in the south was a little more distant.
‘Even light armour is a drag on horses,’ Lucius said. ‘And they’re keeping in formation.’
He pointed at a few tiny clouds of dust closer towards us. ‘Those are the riders we need to watch,’ he said. ‘They aren’t meant to stop us. Instead, they’re to ride straight past and get an intercept at the next military station. If we try to stop them, the others will have a chance to get closer. We must keep well ahead of them.’
We rode on. There was a light breeze behind us to keep us cool in the hot sunshine. Lucius had a good look at everyone who rode past us in the opposite direction. He told me the advance couriers would co-opt every fast horseman they encountered. We’d soon have a small army on our backs. But we met no one who seemed to give him cause to quicken our speed.
After another few miles, we came to the first military station. This was based around a little fort built of reused materials. It stood on an earth mound, dominating the road and country. Some imperial foot soldiers lounged by a bar at about waist height that closed the road.
‘Important business with the exarch,’ Lucius called as we approached. ‘Get that bar raised.’
The officer in charge darted a glance at the letter Lucius held under his nose. With a barked order, the bar was up and we were through.
‘No horsemen back there or fresh mounts,’ he said quickly. ‘The Gods are with us today.’
We rode on through the afternoon. We stopped briefly a few times to water the horses and to stretch ourselves. As we got further away from Rome, and as the light of the late afternoon began to fade, the traffic grew thinner. There were fewer ruins along the road, and the countryside became wilder, with larger and larger clumps of bushes and small trees to give cover should it be needed.
As the light faded entirely, I looked back along the road from a high ridge. Could I see a small cloud in the distance? Or was it a trick of the dying light?
We came to a fortified post inn. In those days, Italy was still covered with these. They had been built in ancient times every so far apart along the main roads. There were fewer of them on the roads with every return journey I made there. I believe they are all ruined now. On my first visit, they were still in something like their old operation. This was the road that connected Rome with Ravenna.
All around – often very close – were the domains of the Lombards. The road had at all times to be kept open for communications. Every strategic point was fortified and controlled. The post inns were important links in that chain of control. They were also places where ordinary travellers could get a meal and a safe bed for the night. For those on official business, there was the added benefit of being able to change horses. Every inn had its stables and its many horses in continual readiness to speed those travellers with the relevant influence. The prohibitions of using the posts for private business had long since broken down. The whole operation now ran on a cash basis. But Lucius showed his letter from the exarch, and this got us the pick of the horses available.
Inside the gate, I could see that the inn had been built on a generous scale. On two storeys around the main courtyard, it offered individual rooms for travellers of quality, with descending levels of comfort for the humbler, and a good kitchen and eating area on the ground floor.
It was crowded when we arrived. The Lombards were still on the prowl after that cold winter, and everyone who could scrape together the minimal price of entry had squeezed himself in for the night. No stopping for us, however. A satchel of bread and wine and a change of horses, and we were off again. With the dispensator’s men in hot pursuit, we’d take our chance with the Lombards. We were two powerful men. We had fast horses. We were armed. It would be a desperate raiding party that tried to interfere with us on the road.
‘We’ll ride as long as we can through the night,’ Lucius told me. I suggested hamstringing the other horses in the stable. But there were too many, and we might be caught. We paid and rode off.
We rode until the moon was high overhead and until little puffs of steam came from the horses in the chilly night air. We stopped in a small grove high beside the road. This allowed a fine view back along the road. We didn’t bother with a fire, but sat down on a fallen tree and ate what we’d bought.
Lucius questioned me again about my life in England. I told him of the broken-down house in Richborough, and Auxilius, who with his loving pedantry had given me a key to the world beyond. I told him of the humiliations that had attended our fall from nobility and the increasingly desperate shifts by which I’d supplemented Ethelbert’s dwindling charity. I spoke of my dead mother.
‘Not that much difference between us, then,’ said Lucius when I’d finished. ‘We both come from families pushed below their proper station in life. The Gods willing, though, we’ll rise together all the way back to what we were born to, and – who knows? – we’ll die higher yet.’
He told me nothing in continuous narrative about himself. From the disjointed anecdotes he gave me instead, I gathered his parents had died in one of the plagues when he was very young. He’d then been handed around various grandparents and uncles, getting scraps here and there of an education, while his family had wondered what to do with him.
At last, the plagues had done him a favour. ‘It was like an invisible beast,’ he said, ‘the sort that comes again and again, but always takes others and never yourself.’ While he grew up without a day’s illness, all his relatives had sickened and died. His grandfather made sure to give the bulk of it away to the Church in his will, but Lucius had finally come into the full remaining wealth of the family. And he would have had more, but for those charges of treason laid in Constantinople against his one genuinely rich relative.
‘The man is trash,’ I agreed, hoping to deflect him from another of his denunciations of Phocas. ‘But when you came back to Rome, was it to be forever?’
‘Don’t forget, Alaric,’ the reply came, ‘I am a Roman. The city is my world – this city and all that is natural to it.’
He’d come back to Rome, he then admitted, with no apparent alternative to settling into the life of a decayed noble. Except for his deep – if inconveniently placed – religious feelings, he was no different from any other member of the Roman nobility. He repeated himself: ‘I am a Roman, and the city is my world.’
He’d thought at first to refuse the invite to that dinner party. It was too painful, he said, to look at what he was sure he was now fated to become. All that had got him along there in the end was the chance to see the learned yet deadly barbarian from far-distant Britain. And he had met me.
‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘we are both fugitives from Rome on our way to what I hope will be a hero’s reception in Ravenna. The Old Gods have a sense of humour – and, I think, of justice.’
When the moon had risen high above, we took turns at sleeping, the other keeping watch. A few night birds aside, and the rustling of nocturnal animals in the undergrowth, I heard nothing. As I lay down to sleep, it was for all the world as if Rome had been a bad dream, and I was still travelling there with Maximin. Except the weather
