Count Belisarius (28 page)

There were dismal feelings of foreboding in Constantinople when the details of the expedition were announced. The City Governor is reported to have said to Cappadocian John one evening at the Palace: ‘I fear that this disaster may prove as great as the one that our grandfathers suffered at the hands of Geiserich.'

And Cappadocian John to have replied cheerfully: ‘That cannot be. For in that campaign we lost one hundred thousand men, no less; but now I have persuaded the Emperor to send only fifteen thousand, and most of these are infantry.'

The City Governor again: ‘At what fighting strength do you reckon the Vandal army?'

Cappadocian John's reply: ‘At more than a hundred thousand, counting their Moorish allies.'

The City Governor, astonished: ‘Best of men, what possible hope of success can Belisarius have in that case?'

But Cappadocian John, shrugging: ‘A bishop has a right to his dreams.' The phrase became proverbial.

The infantry were of good quality, mostly Isaurian mountaineers; Belisarius had been training them in marching and digging, as well as in the use of weapons. The cavalry numbered only 5,000, because of the difficulty of transporting horses a distance of some 1,500 miles. But among them were the remnants of the Massagetic Huns who had fought so well at Daras and by the Euphrates, 600 of them (for many of the seriously wounded had recovered); and Pharas's 400 Herulians; and Belisarius's well-trained Household Regiment of 1,500 cuirassiers. The remainder were Thracians who had served under Boutzes; but Boutzes himself had remained on the Persian frontier. Belisarius had entrusted the command of these Thracians to Rufinus
and to a Massagetic Hun called Aigan, the son of Sunicas, whom Sunicas had commended to Belisarius as he lay dying on the battlefield. Belisarius's chief of staff was an Armenian eunuch named Solomon; he was a eunuch not by deliberate castration but by an accident which had happened to him when a baby in swaddling clothes, and had lived with soldiers all his life.

It needed a fleet of 500 transports to convey this army to Carthage. They were as mixed a collection of vessels as were ever brought together, their burden varying from 30 to 500 tons. They were manned by 30,000 sailors, for the most part Egyptians and Greeks from Asia Minor, and commanded by an Alexandrian admiral. Besides these transports there was a flotilla of ninety-two fast single-banked galleys, all decked in as a protection to the oarsmen in case of a sea-battle. There were twenty oarsmen to each galley, men of Constantinople of the sort called ‘marines', who are paid above the usual rate because they can be used as infantry in an emergency. Cappadocian John was made responsible for victualling this fleet, and two officers were sent to the royal pastures in Thrace to round up 3,000 horses and have them ready at Heraclea, on the northern coast of the Sea of Marmora, when the fleet touched there.

We started at last, at the time of the spring equinox. Belisarius and my mistress had an impressive godspeed from Justinian and Theodora, and a blessing from the Patriarch of Constantinople. We embarked at the Imperial harbour, which is close to the Palace, at the point where the Sea of Marmora narrows into the Bosphorus. Here there are broad white marble steps, and gilded state barges, and ornamental trees from the East; and a graceful chapel in which are shown the authentic swaddling clothes of Jesus, and a portrait of him in later life attributed to the Evangelist Luke. Above the harbour stands a sculptural group of a bull in a death-struggle with a lion. We eyed it with superstitious interest, for the Bull is a symbol of the Roman armies, as the Lion is of North Africa. My mistress Antonina said, grinning, to the City Governor who stood by: ‘I will wager you five thousand to two thousand that the Bull brings it off. The Lion is under-muscled, and the Bull, though small, is of the fighting breed.'

For good luck Justinian put aboard our vessel, the flag-ship of the fleet, a young Thracian who had just been baptized into the Orthodox Church. He was one of a dwindling sect, the Eunomians, whose peculiarity is that they deny that the Son can be God and eternal, on the
grounds that He was once begotten: for eternal generation is, they say, a nonsensical idea. That which is begotten cannot possibly be of one substance with the unbegotten; and contrariwise. The unbegotten remains eternally unbegotten, and the begotten cannot deny the act of begetting. Therefore… But, at all events, this young man was converted from his heresies and became godson to Belisarius and my mistress Antonina, and took the new name of Theodosius.

He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and I have seen many. He was not so tall and magnificently muscled as Belisarius, but he was strongly and gracefully built and had an extremely mobile face. (The only defect that I could find in him was that the nape of his neck was a trifle narrow and had a deep cleft in it.) But besides all this he was the only man that my mistress had ever met who could talk her own particular sort of happy nonsense with her. Belisarius was witty and eloquent and affectionate and had all the qualities which are admirable in a man, and there was never a woman who was so lucky in her husband as my mistress. He was like the Sun that runs around the heavens – warming creatures and buildings; but, like the Sun, his circle was not complete – he could not shine from the North. It was an incapacity connected with his loyalties: faith and ignorance occupied that quarter of his orbit. But Theodosius shone from the North, as it were, with a laughing light, the quality of which is very difficult for me to express. I can only say that, whatever Belisarius lacked, with this Theodosius seemed to supply my mistress. It was little enough by comparison with what Belisarius had, yet extremely precious to her, even for its littleness.

It is almost impossible, I believe, for one man to love two women at the same time, without a secret reservation in his mind, ‘this one I prize the most'. But a woman may very well be in such a situation, as my mistress soon discovered – at once the most happy and the most miserable one possible. She can reconcile the two in her heart, but in their relations with her each ignores her love of the other. The better man (and my mistress would never at any moment have failed to acknowledge Belisarius to be such) is tempted to behave rather unkindly towards her – from an inability to understand the phenomenon of radiance from the North, and from a desire to make a complete orbit of love around her. The other one is so free of jealous or intense feelings that he regards her loving someone else with as little seriousness as her loving himself. His equable humour makes any strong emotions seem absurd.

It was Theodosius's serene airiness in contrast with Belisarius's deep moral gravity that first made my mistress Antonina pair them together in her mind. There was the occasion of the drunken Massagetic Huns at Abydos; and then that matter of the water-bottles, as we neared Sicily. Both must be told about in detail.

After taking the Thracian horses aboard at Perinthus we continued down the Sea of Marmora until we came to the Hellespont, and anchored off Abydos one evening, intending to set sail early the next morning. The currents are very difficult here, and one needs a good north-easterly breeze to assist one in navigating them; but the next morning there was no breeze at all, so we were obliged to wait four days until one sprang up. The men, having been given shore-leave, found themselves at a loose end: there is not much to be done or seen in this part unless one has a taste for antiquities – then one may ride along the coast to the site of Troy and, dismounting, run around the Tomb of Achilles for good luck.

The Massagetic Huns carried with them what is called a ‘bee', a sort of yeast that they put into mare's milk to make it ferment after they have beaten it in a bladder with a hollow club to thin it of its fatty parts. At Perinthus they had bought a quantity of mare's milk and treated it in this way, so that by now it was a very potent drink – they call it
kavasse
or
kumys.
In politeness to Aigan I tasted it once and found it far too pungent for my liking, though the after-taste was not unlike the taste of almond-milk; and there seemed something disgusting in its being drawn from a mare. But, as we say when the habits of others are not ours, ‘Every fish to his own tipple', and ‘Thistles are lettuce to the ass's lips'.

Belisarius did not know about the bee, and had taken what he thought were sufficient precautions against the soldiers supplying themselves with any intoxicating drink beyond the day's ration of sour wine, which they mix with their water to purify it. The Huns, then, had a drunken party ashore, in the course of which one of their number ridiculed two other Huns for losing their way in a ballad – and was immediately killed by them. Belisarius ordered a courtmartial on the murderers, who seemed to take a very light view of the crime and pleaded drunkenness as an excuse: they were prepared, they said, to pay the customary blood-money to the dead man's kinsmen. But Belisarius held that to kill a fellow-soldier on the way to the war was a most infamous act. He asked Aigan what was the most
infamous death that could be inflicted on a Hun, and Aigan replied ‘death by impaling'.

The two Huns were duly impaled on the hill by Abydos, to the great indignation of their comrades, who declared that they were allies of Rome, not Romans, and that their own laws did not make death the penalty for manslaughter committed under the influence of drink. Belisarius paraded them for a personal address, and, so far from making an apology, told them that it was high time that their barbarous code was revised: drunkenness was, in his view, an aggravation of crime, not a mitigation, and while they served under him they must obey his laws. He warned them that he would not overlook any acts of private violence whatsoever committed against fellow-soldiers or prisoners or civilians, unless great provocation could be proved. ‘This army must go to battle with clean hands.' Then he took possession of the bee, until such time as the Huns should be safely garrisoned in captured Carthage.

At supper that evening his table-companions sat silent. Belisarius, knowing what was on their minds, nodded in the direction of the hill and asked: ‘And what is your frank opinion? And yours?' Armenian John replied: ‘It was well deserved.' Rufinus said the same, and Uliaris grunted out: ‘A man should not handle a weapon when he is drunk.' Finally, Theodosius, called upon for a comment, remarked carelessly: ‘There should have been a third, surely?'

My mistress was the only person present who understood the mocking reference. Belisarius replied seriously: ‘No, the other men at the camp-fire were not implicated, according to the evidence.' But my mistress looked at Theodosius and said: ‘And if there had been a third, your godfather would not have rewarded him with a drink of wine.' At which Theodosius smiled gratefully to her, and no more was said; but it is a great bond between two strangers when they can carry on a private joke together without anyone, even their intimates, suspecting that their words hold more than they seem to do. For Theodosius meant something of this sort: that the hill suggested Golgotha, the place of the Crucifixion, but that there was missing from this impressive execution a third victim more glaringly innocent even than the other two. My mistress's remark about the sour wine was a reference to the merciful Roman soldier who gave Jesus to drink from the hyssop-sponge raised at the point of a spear.

Theodosius was not a religious-minded person. His baptism into the
Orthodox faith had been a matter of convenience, as my mistress's had been, and he never lost the practical, faintly mocking way of looking at things that I have always found characteristic of the Thracians. He could detect inconsistency and pretentiousness even in the most admirable characters, though not setting himself up as a moral paragon. His emotions and thoughts were at least his own, not borrowed; he conformed outwardly to current conventions, yet in private he acknowledged no authority but his own sense of what was fitting.

As for the incident of the water-bottles: that occurred some weeks later on our way to Sicily. The voyage had been a much longer one than anyone had expected: because, though from Abydos we had a strong following wind which carried us out into the Aegean Sea as far as Lesbos, it dropped to almost nothing at this point, and we were three weeks in rounding the southern coast of Greece. Moreover, the speed of the whole fleet was that of the slowest ship, since Belisarius was anxious that no unit should become detached and arrive at Carthage before the rest of the fleet, thus preventing a surprise. He painted the mainsails of the three leading vessels, ours and two others, with broad vermilion stripes as a guide by day; at night he used sternlanterns. No ship was allowed to steer more than a cable's length away from its neighbour. At times there was a good deal of bumping and cursing and use of boat-hooks, but no ship lost touch or was stove in.

Then the wind failed completely, and Belisarius ordered a general disembarkation at Methone, a town on the south-western promontory of Greece. This was done as a drill practised in full armour, and the inhabitants were most alarmed. The men were in a listless enough condition by now, and the horses too, so marches and sham-fights were the order until the wind rose again. It was extremely hot at Methone. The soldiers' biscuit-bread which had been brought in sacks from Constantinople began to turn mouldy and stink. Belisarius immediately used his Imperial warrant to requisition fresh bread from the neighbourhood, but did not obtain it before 500 men had died from colic.

He investigated the matter of the biscuits and reported to Justinian. His findings were that the biscuits had been supplied by Cappadocian John in his capacity as Quartermaster-General to the Forces; that, on account of the loss that fresh bread suffers in weight on being hardened
to biscuit, the Quartermaster-General had been paid the customary one-fourth more for his contract than for an equal weight of fresh bread, in addition to a fuel allowance for the baking; that he had only slightly baked the bread, and thus not reduced its weight by the necessary one-quarter, while accepting payment as if for proper biscuit; and that he had also pocketed the fuel allowance, though his partial baking had been done for nothing at the furnaces that warm the Public Baths. Justinian later complimented Belisarius on his report, while exonerating Cappadocian John (who had found a scapegoat among his subordinates) from the suspicion of deliberate fraud.