Now they were close enough for me to see the evil grins on their faces, the flash of steel as swords were raised. I heard the bubbling screams of the stricken. I saw blood spurt from a man dressed in the formal robes of a senator. His hands went up to the red gash where his face had been, then he went down. I saw a child skewered like game on one of the barbarian lances. Screaming and twisting, it was raised aloft, then shaken loose into the crowd.
Like an arsonist’s fire among ripe corn, the raiders cut their way into the crowd. If they were looking for prisoners, they hadn’t yet taken any. For the moment, they were giving way to the sheer joy of killing the defenceless citizens of the great City.
‘Cover yourself with this,’ I shouted to Theophanes, throwing him a cloth I’d ripped from the table. Dishes of food crashed heavily to the ground. ‘Get this on and come with us.
‘Martin – get the fuck from under that table! There’s no safety here.’
To the blacks, who’d taken to jabbering and clutching at each other: ‘Get hold of your master. Pull him along behind us.’
Even if we managed to reach the City, the gates might well be shut on us and we’d huddle under the outer wall, hoping the artillery was sufficiently in order to cover us. By now there must have been a thousand bodies between us and those mounted savages but that dense buffer of flesh might be enough to protect us. Sooner or later, the raiders would slow their approach and start taking prisoners and booty. In the meantime, we might find somewhere to hide in one of the ruined buildings.
Once he was over the initial shock, Theophanes moved with surprising speed over that broken ground. The main difficulty, I found, was to keep Martin with us. Once or twice, I thought of knocking him down and then carrying him.
We dodged out of main view into a side street. There was no shortage of hiding places. It all depended on how long the barbarians wanted to hang about the city. Even Phocas might send out a brigade to chase them off. At the least, it would soon be dark. That meant we needed to look for a reasonable bolt hole.
The problem was that others had had the same idea. When you’re trying to vanish, there’s no safety in numbers. Squeezing into an already crowded cellar is just an invitation to trouble. It can be worse than hanging about in the open. You might get paving slabs thrown down on you. Or you might have the building set alight over your head.
We had to put some distance between us and the others.
‘Out of my way, shitbags,’ I snarled, shoving a couple of monks back from the breach in a ruined wall we needed to climb over.
We darted round the corner into what had once been a narrow shopping street. From here, those mingled wails and shouts came from a comforting distance. I could hear the birds singing and the wind rustling through the dry grass of late summer. It was a matter of finding the right hole to disappear into.
Then: ‘Oh, Sweet and Merciful Jesus!’ Martin cried in a high falsetto.
At the far end of the street, a barbarian sat on a tall horse. He was of a different race from the others. Lank, blond hair fell over his shoulders. A yellow moustache covered his lower face. He gave us a predatory smile as he raised his drawn sword.
23
When attacked, there is a time to fight and a time to give quietly in. There’s no shame in the latter when you have no means of the former. I did think of picking up a fallen roof spar and using it as a lance. But there was more than one of those Germanics, and Theophanes was urging me to let him do the talking.
The introduction he made in basic Latin didn’t get us as far as he might have wished. The three of us were tightly bound and roped together for dragging along behind one of the horses. So far, we were unharmed, but, for all they wailed so piteously, the blacks were butchered on the spot – throats cut, hands hacked off to get at their gold bangles.
We were dumped with about seventy other prisoners inside the walls of a ruined guardhouse. The gate had fallen off and the roof had long since rotted. This was on the extreme edge of the old suburbs and, except for patches of scrub about a yard high, was surrounded by open ground.
We were a select bunch. The raiders had killed or released everyone who didn’t look fit for a ransom. We were untied, stripped of our cash and jewellery, and then given to feed from bowls of miscellaneous refreshments gathered from the festival preparations.
I looked around. Everyone just sat quietly eating. I turned to Theophanes, who had taken off his silk slippers to nurse his bruised feet.
‘What chance of a rescue?’
‘Not much,’ he said flatly, pulling a slipper back on. ‘There are few enough of these creatures, but overcoming them would require a force I don’t think Phocas will want to spare from keeping the City quiet.’
‘Very well,’ I said, moving on to the next obvious point, ‘we must outnumber these animals five to one. A concerted rush, and-’
Theophanes stopped me. ‘Please, Alaric,’ he said, ‘this is not Rome. Here in the Imperial capital, there is an order to these things. Even in more settled times than now, I cannot say how often I have seen fires burning outside the City walls. The appropriate response is to chase the raiders away, or to bribe them to go away. If there are too many of them for that, some other nomadic race can be persuaded to attack them in the rear.
‘A counterattack being out of the question, the gates will open in due course and the priests will come out to begin ransom discussions. The Yellow Barbarians are from a race we seldom encounter. They drift in now and again from the lands far beyond even Scythia. But the Germanics are reasonably close to the Lombards.’
‘And have you seen what the Lombards can do?’ I asked, breaking into the lecture.
Theophanes waved me to silence. ‘They are doubtless here for the money,’ he said reassuringly. ‘They can be trusted to know the rules. They are probably Christians of a sort. You will notice there has been no more killing without good reason, and no rapes of the better looking. We each have a financial value that will be set by the appearance of our clothing and then by detailed negotiation with our friends and loved ones inside the city.’
I snorted in disgust. ‘So this is your civilisation,’ I said. ‘You disarm the people. Then, when it proves impossible to defend them, they can be shoved around like farm animals.
‘Back in Rome, I can tell you, the priests alone would have been able to fight off this pissy little raid. Given that everyone, ordained or lay, carries arms, we’d have them back inside the walls before dark. Then it would be a matter of exchanging them for anyone who’d fallen into their hands. Failing that, we’d hand them over to the surgeons for live dissection outside the Prefect’s Basilica.
‘Get there early enough for a seat at the front,’ I said with strong approval, ‘and you can learn a lot about anatomy as well as the workings of justice.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Theophanes said with slight amusement, ‘we do things differently here.’ He patted my arm with his fat and now unjewelled fingers. ‘Your best chance of getting out of here alive is to wait for the ransom negotiations. I imagine they’ll start tomorrow afternoon.’
Martin looked suddenly up from his inspection of the robe of blue linen I’d made him put on for the occasion.
‘Shut up,’ I rasped at him before he could ask his question. ‘I’m thinking about other matters. It goes without saying I’ll pay any ransom. You came here with me. You’ll get out with me.’
Handing over an ounce of clipped silver to these swine would stick in my gullet for a year of Sundays. But if it came to that, I’d send the necessary instructions to Baruch.
Theophanes went placidly back to rubbing the weal on one of his arms where a bracelet had been ripped off with exceptional force.
But no priest or Imperial official came to us the following day, or the day after that. We sat in huddled groups, stiff from the night cold and the hard ground where we slept, and sore from the hot sun of the days. Though unbound, we weren’t allowed to go outside the place where we were held captive. The dozen or so guards set over us kept order by the liberal use of beatings. This meant that we shat and pissed where we lived and slept. I did suggest some basic sanitary arrangements but no one listened to me and I soon shut up. I was surprised how many
