He was right. By the time we got there, they had already done so. Soldiers stood with raised shields to fend off our hail of slingshot, while Green volunteers cleared the far less solid barricade Priscus had put there.
‘Charge!’ I called to my students. My mouth had gone very dry and my sword arm trembled as I led them into battle.
We took the soldiers by surprise. They hadn’t expected active resistance and we were on them before they could mount a defence. I struck one of them straight in his bearded face with the pommel of my sword. I drew its edge along his throat and pushed him back against another two. I snapped another’s neck with the edge of my shield. Beside me, my students hacked and shouted their way through the soldiers as they pushed them back to the other side of the barricade. We moved away just in time to avoid the boiling oil that had begun to rain from the upper windows of the Prefecture.
With the soldiers in retreat, we turned on the trapped Greens and butchered them until the ground under our feet turned slippery with blood. I lost my sword in one particularly fat victim. It went in easily enough, but got stuck somewhere on the way out. He squealed and rolled his eyes as I pushed in and out of his body. It must have seemed rather comical to anyone watching.
‘Take this one,’ somebody yelled in my ear, passing over a much heavier military sword. The new weight and length took a bit of getting used to, but this one cut through flesh and bone as if it were a butcher’s cleaver.
With a blast of trumpets, the soldiers were sent back to rescue the Greens. We now went for Greens and soldiers indiscriminately. The ground before us was a natural killing ground; we had the advantage of cover and a slight incline.
I picked up a spear and threw it at the fleeing soldiers. It caught one of them in the leg. As he went down, one of my students – the young man who’d spoken of Saint Sebastian – disregarded my orders and ran forward. He dodged past the pools of steaming oil that covered the ground and killed the man with a sword-thrust into his mouth. Waving a stolen shield above his head, he danced back behind the barricades, his face shining with joy.
I wanted to supervise the rebuilding of the barricade while the soldiers were in retreat but before I could do so another message arrived. We were hard pressed a few hundred yards down the line where someone had fired one of the buildings. I filled my lungs with clean air as we dashed into the cloud of smoke and felt our way towards the new threatened point. Buildings were burning around us. Missiles rained from the tops of burning buildings as we fought and killed and raced from one threatened point to another.
There were still no cavalry attacks, perhaps because the streets were so choked with debris. But the main danger now was arrows. It seemed that hundreds of archers had been brought forward to join the few I’d seen earlier. They stood out of range of anything we could send back at them, firing off volley after volley of arrows. Most of them fell spent around us, but they made getting about the streets inside the barricades increasingly slow and difficult.
The fighting had by now reached the stage when we were hard pressed everywhere. Blues fought back against Greens with murderous passion. When I and my students got to any one barricade, many of the Greens turned and ran, to be replaced by regular soldiers who usually waited for us to run at them sword in hand.
But we were untrained and outnumbered. The proper place for my Blues was on the City walls, fetching and carrying for the regular defenders. A leader of genius like Belisarius might have kept the defence going longer and more effectively. Had I known then what I learned many years later, I could have used fire and the safe lines of communication offered by rooftops to inflict catastrophic losses on the enemy. But that day I had only the skills of a bandit and the dispositions made by Priscus.
And there were now so many threatened points. I knew that we were being pushed steadily back, but we had to hold the line we had. I’d already pulled everyone back to the innermost ring of defences. There was nowhere further to retreat to and regroup.
We fought with frantic energy. My sword twisted in my grip with blood and sweat and weariness as I hacked and stabbed at the soldiers. So far as I could tell, I was unwounded myself, but I tripped several times over the bodies that now littered the rubble-strewn streets – bodies both in uniform and in makeshift armour.
At last, that poor Saint Sebastian boy died in my arms. He’d taken an arrow in his throat. His face still shining, he choked with his last breath over the poem Simonides had written so long ago for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae:
Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
As I looked down into the dead eyes of his still face, my mind began to clear. Simonides had known how to speak for the Spartans. Their heroes had died for a country that was worth any number of lives. What could I ever hope to say to that boy’s mother? That he’d died to buy time for Phocas?
So far as I could tell, he hadn’t even died for the Blue Faction. Perhaps he’d died for me.
I sat down heavily beside him and pushed his eyes closed. An officer in the attack force stood over me. I reached for my sword.
‘Fuck off!’ I said wearily.
The man looked at me and walked smartly off.
I heard yet another blast of the military trumpets and then a loud voice shouting in the distance: ‘Put your weapons down. Stand against the walls. We give you quarter.’
I heard another voice from a different direction: ‘Put your weapons down. Your battle is lost. You have full quarter.’
‘They’re right,’ Martin spoke urgently behind me. ‘It’s all over. You must get away.’
I looked round. It was Martin indeed. I’d thought at first I was hearing things. He was nursing a cut to his arm but was otherwise unharmed.
What the fuck was he doing here? I hadn’t noticed him during the fighting. So far as I’d thought of him at all, it was to assume that he was safe inside the Great Church.
He sawed at the straps of my breastplate with a broken sword until the thing fell away from my body. It was splashed with blood and dented all over.
I helped him pull the helmet off my head. This also was dented nearly out of shape. I let him throw a piece of cloth over my hair.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked, confused at the sudden silence around me. I coughed as the wind blew smoke into my face.
‘Dead or gone home,’ he said.
He pulled me to my feet.
‘We must get out of here,’ he said. ‘There’s no quarter for you. Before the Prefecture building fell, its defenders hailed you as Emperor.’
‘Stupid fucking bastards,’ I croaked. All of a sudden, I was thirsty beyond imagining.
I had by now recovered my senses as much as I needed them. One after the other, I stretched my arms and legs, expecting to feel a stab of white pain at any moment. But I felt nothing. I’d been in the thick of the battle and I hadn’t picked up a scratch. Given time, I’d have started an argument with Martin about the power of his holy relics.
I looked around me. Except that there was no grass, the street looked like one of the tattier parts of Rome – all smashed wood and other things.
‘Which way to the Legation?’ I asked weakly.
60
I don’t know how we got back to the Legation. There were soldiers everywhere. Citizens scurried around, searching for loved ones or loot. A few times, I saw soldiers looking at me. One raised his sword in a strange salute. But no one tried to stop us.
There were a few bodies in the square outside, and one or two piles of discarded loot. Otherwise all looked much as usual. The Legation was just inside the ring of defences but I didn’t recall any fighting here. Smoke drifted
