Authors: Paul Bannister
Emiculea’s informants located the fugitive emperor and his house guard for me. After riding away from the butchery at Alesia, he had travelled to Rouen and had established himself there until a large contingent of wandering Huns had learned of his presence. A captive Roman emperor was a prize worth a great deal, so they attacked the city and Maximian had been forced to flee once again. The Huns followed, relentlessly. For a week, the emperor and his depleted troop of guards had fled across Gaul, riding their horses until they foundered, stealing fresh mounts at sword point, hiding in woodlands to sleep, sometimes travelling by night. Always, the Huns found their scent.
“We’ll
make for Nimes, there are many veterans living and farming in that colony. We can get reinforcements to escort us to Massalia and a ship for Rome,” the emperor told his exhausted troopers.
But
the fugitives’ run came to an end at a
mansio
near Avignon, only a day’s ride from Nimes. A band of Huns who had split from the main body got within long bowshot and Maximian realized his tired horses could not outrun them.
“We
make a stand here, maybe we can get away after dark,” he ordered as the group cantered into the courtyard of the staging post.
The
Spinners who determine our fates must have a sense of irony. In the whole of Gaul, I blundered across Maximian’s tracks while I was heading for manpower to go and look for him.
As
the emperor’s men were reinforcing the windows and barricading the doors of the staging post, I was stepping off a trading ship in Avignon, less than a dozen miles away. After a fast journey across Gaul with just eight men, I was headed for Nimes, where I had instructed our troops to gather. I planned to could scour the country for Maximian from there, and with an army at my disposal, we should find him. We had commandeered a Frankish hide merchant’s vessel on the Loire and sailed it upriver to the head of navigation, fast-marched 30 miles across country and snapped up another ship on the vast Rhone river, which sped us downstream to Avignon, within 30 miles of our destination, Nimes.
And
Maximian was even closer to us than that.
Our
armed party attracted attention on the quayside and soon a Gallic customs official arrived. He became obsequious when he realized my rank, and positively helpful after a couple of pieces of silver crossed his palm. “There are maurauders in the region, majesty,” he said. “There is even fighting reported just several miles from here. A man just came in with two horses that had bolted from the skirmish.” Normally, I would have grunted and asked about food and maybe a bed for the night, but that inner voice which sounded suspiciously like Guinevia’s prompted me to do more.
“What
horses?” I said uninterestedly.
“Those,”
he said, pointing. The Fates must have been howling with laughter.
On
the very quayside where we stood was a mount with a bridle decorated with imperial purple. My ears were roaring as they do sometimes in battle. Quirinus caught my stare and we strode to the horse. The man who had brought it in looked decidedly uneasy.
“I
found him, lord, with another one,” he stammered, afraid we’d accuse him of theft.
“Where
is the saddlebag?” I demanded. He looked downcast but made no error.
“Over
there, behind that bale,” he said miserably. Quirinus was there first and hauled out a fine leather bag. It contained little of interest, some dried meat, gold coins, a Phrygian cap of Mithras and two of the same ceramic itinera I had given my officers to navigate the complex of roads in northwest Gaul.
“This
has to be Maximian’s own,” I told Quirinus, tossing the bag and contents back to its finder, who looked as if he could not believe his luck that it had not been confiscated. “Where were these horses when you found them? Where was that skirmish?”
It
took just an hour, before we had bought horses and tack and all nine of us were trotting out of Avignon, seeking another emperor to kill.
We
soon reached the
mansio
, a solid stone building and stables at the side of the high road to Narbonensis, after getting directions from a woman of the Bowenvi tribe who warned us of danger there. We approached with caution to find about 50 Hun horse archers surrounding the place. I sent back a rider to locate the woman and question her, and his report confirmed our hopes.
She
had been passed on the road by a curly-bearded man in expensive clothes and fine boots who was accompanied by six or seven armed horsemen, she told us. They were being pursued by the Huns, and she had cowered away as the bearded man approached, then scrambled behind a tree before the chasers saw her. It had to be Maximian, all my instincts told me. The Fates wanted me to catch him and had brought me directly to the right place. Or maybe they wanted him to kill me, another part of my mind muttered. I moved on. How did we get him out of there in the face of these Huns? We settled into a copse of trees to wait and watch while two of my riders went back to Avignon to raise a force to drive off the raiders.
Dusk
came without incident, then full dark. No relief had arrived from the town, but the Huns were moving, and I saw fire arrows flicker and strike the wood-shuttered windows. After that, it was inevitable. The
mansio
began to burn, the Huns ran at the door with axes and a melee of clashing swords and spears broke out.
Quirinus
saw him first, one of two shadowy figures who ran crouching away from the house and stables, towards the Hun horse lines.
“That’s
Maximian,” he breathed. The burly figure was unmistakable.
“You
three, stay and watch, it might be a decoy,” I hissed. Four of us should be able to take the emperor and his solitary guard. We grabbed our horses and led them out of the wood.
Yelling
told us that the fugitives had been detected, but they had done something right, for the two men burst from the Hun horse lines lying low along their stolen mounts’ backs and I saw they must have released many of the horse herd, because those animals were scattering from fright of the noise and flames.
We
thundered after them, momentarily silhouetted against the burning buildings and I heard the twang of bowstrings. Two of my troopers fell from their horses. The Hun archers were deadly with their reflex bows that could kill at 300 paces, and my skin crawled as I anticipated the thump and sear of a four-sided arrowpoint, but although I heard two hiss past, none struck me. And then, miraculously alive, the decurion Celvinius and I were clattering on the shining moonlit stones of the high road, pursuing two riders we could hear just a few hundred yards ahead.
The
race was even. Our just-purchased hacks were no thoroughbreds and the Hunnic ponies would easily have out-run them but those ponies had already been ridden hard and were tired. We began a slow chase, just two chasing two, and the few Huns who had caught mounts in the flame-lit dark did not find our trail.
The
ride seemed to go on for ever. I was in some pain, with my broken left arm and cracked ribs, but they were tightly strapped and I managed. We found we were gaining very slightly on the two Romans, but Celvinius, canny in the ways of horses, told me the Hun ponies seemed close to foundering.
“Just
keep driving them on,” he gasped. “When their horses collapse, we’ll have them.” Our own mounts, though slow, were at least fairly fresh and kept up a steady canter through the night. As the wolf light broke, we found ourselves approaching a water temple, a structure evidently built over a spring, for a large aqueduct came into it and then led away from it to the south. Later, I found that the place was sacred to the Celtic water god Nemausus, and the clear waters that bubbled out of the ground were enough to supply the nearby city of Nimes, but at that moment Celvinius and I were only concerned with the two horsemen ahead of us.
They
turned aside to the slab-topped conduit of the aqueduct, which ran above ground and formed a narrow bridge, jumped their horses up onto and trotted the surefooted little animals one behind the other along its length. We followed, though our nags were reluctant to mount the slippery, narrow limestone pathway.
After
a half mile or so, the dead-level conduit vanished underground into a hillside and Maximian and his soldier kicked their tired ponies forward, forcing them upwards through the hillside scrub.
“They
seem to know where they’re going,” said Celvinius. As he spoke, one of the ponies ahead of us sank to the ground, the white foam at its muzzle plain even at a distance.
“That
horse is cooked,” said Celvinius. “and the other one will fail soon.” I was too busy urging my hack upwards, not easy with only one arm, so did not see the view until well after we had crested the hill.
“Ah,
that’s what the emperor knew,” said my companion, who was having an easier time handling his mount.
Before
us was a fast, flood-swollen river in a narrow valley. Spanning its steep limestone cleft was a magnificent structure, an aqueduct fully 400 paces long and about 150 paces high. It was composed of three sets of arches on top of each other.
The
topmost set of arches emerged from piercing the hillside we had just climbed over, and continued across the gorge. The aqueduct’s square-section water channel, about five feet high, was roofed in heavy stone slabs to form a closed conduit for the river of water that flowed inside its smoothed interior.
The
limestone slabs made a flat, unguarded roadbed about three paces wide and Maximian had already dismounted and was leading his tiring pony onto this bridge. The soldier who had lost his mount had halted and taken up station about 100 paces along the narrow bridge to deny passage to us while his emperor escaped. One glance was enough to tell me there was no way around this obstacle to bypass the soldier and catch the Roman. It was a cliff descent to the river, a spring-melt torrent to cross, and another cliff back up the other side. Maximian would be gone and into the streets of Nimes that were just a few miles away, long before I could overhaul him.
“Sorry,
Cel,” I smiled. “You did it in Londinium and held one bridge, now here’s your chance to take another.” He slid from his horse and drew his gladius, the stabbing weapon of the legions that had conquered the known world. I clumsily dismounted, and fumbled Exalter free. Working one-handed was a nuisance. We advanced on the legionary, who levelled his own sword, swinging it back and forth between us. Celvinius made a fake lunge, the man took a pace back and immediately slipped over the unguarded edge of the aqueduct.
We
gaped as he fell the height of a house, then bounced once and lay still.
Maximian
had turned to watch and I saw his mouth move in a curse. He turned away and began to drag the pony’s reins but the beast stood stock-still, head down, exhausted. I began to trot towards them, cursing again for the thousandth time the Saxon who had maimed my foot.
Celvinius
brushed dangerously close past me as he ran ahead and I lurched towards the edge, staring down at the rocky gorge far below. Then I was jogging on, calling on him to hold, to wait for me. Maximian had turned, a wolf at bay. He was an experienced soldier and knew he had a better chance if he faced us on the narrows of the high bridge where we could not outflank him.
Celvinius
was there easily first and did not wait. It was all very swift. My cavalry commander lunged but his wasp-waisted gladius, just 15 inches long, was no match for Maximian’s yard-long infantry spatha with its razor point. The emperor parried the cavalryman’s stab, flicked his blade down and lanced hard into his chest. Celvinius went down backwards and as Maximian put a foot on him to drag his point clear of the suction of his flesh, I was at the spot.
I
ignored the agony of grinding bones in my broken left arm because I needed to use both hands on my sword. My right had Exalter gripped firmly, my left grabbed at the ricasso, the unsharpened part of the blade just below the hilt. Years before, when Exalter was made for me, I had asked the swordsmith to make him longer than usual and to include a ricasso I could grip to swing him two-handed.
Maximian
jerked the blade free from Celvinius, and began to turn. My comrade, lying flat, swept his arm at the emperor’s ankle. Maximian staggered as his foot slipped from the prone man and threw up his left arm for balance. Exalter, whistling from right to left across my body, cut into the emperor’s unguarded armpit with all the force of my two-handed swing. The huge blade shattered his rib cage and cut deep into his torso, sending him down in a welter of gore. He lay panting, passive, head resting at the edge of the aqueduct slabs, eyes flickering to the long drop below as his slashed lungs heaved bloody foam through his side.
Even
at the end, even knowing he was dying, the brutal Serb was no coward. He looked up at me with hatred and spat defiantly at my feet.
“You’re
finished. Your shield Diocles is dead,” I told him, using his countryman Diocletian’s true name. “Your loving father in law Constantine is in the purple now, he’s become a Christian and he wants your head. You’re too dangerous to live. He wants no threats from a barracks emperor with an army at his back and a poisoner in his kitchen, and he knows you’d steal his title if you could. I should take you to him for reward. You would be paraded through Rome like the ape you are, chained and caged, for the mob to throw shit upon before you are separated from your ugly head.”