Count Belisarius (61 page)

The next day, the sixth of December, was the feast of Bishop Nicholas, the patron saint of children. St Nicholas was much cultivated by Justinian, who built a church in his honour at Constantinople. About him more absurd miracles are related, I verily believe, than about any other saint in the Calendar: no sooner was he born than he stood up and lisped thanks to Almighty God for the gift of existence, and as an infant he rigidly observed the canonical fasts of Wednesdays and Fridays, by abstaining on those days from sucking the breasts of his mother Joanna – to her great discomfort but greater wonder. For some unexplained reason, St Nicholas has become the heir of the Sea-God Poseidon, whose temples have nearly all been rededicated to
him; as the heiress to the Goddess Venus is the Virgin Mary, and the heir to the Dog Cerberus is the Apostle Peter (Jesus Himself being heir to Orpheus, who tamed savage things with his charming melodies). Every saint acknowledged by the Church has his peculiar character and virtue, Nicholas has come to be an emblem of child-like simplicity. On this occasion the Thracian soldiers, being of the Orthodox faith, regarded the day as of particularly good omen, since it was recorded of Nicholas that at the famous Council of Nicaea he was carried away by his hot religious feelings and dealt his fellow-cleric Arius, the founder of the Arian heresy (which the Goths profess), a tremendous box on the ear.

Early in the morning of St Nicholas's Day, then, Belisarius was ready to begin his voyage up the river with oars and sails. Two thousand of his Household Troops, those for whom he had no horses, kept pace on either side of the stream, and his remaining squadron of cavalry acted as a screen. My mistress embraced him and wished him godspeed and victory, and he departed. We who remained waited anxiously on the battlements.

About noon a mounted messenger came back with glorious news. Belisarius's fleet had first encountered a chain net fixed across the river a little distance below the boom – the very same chain that he had himself used for protecting the water-mills during his defence of the city – but the infantry, with a volley of arrows and a charge, had scattered the guards posted at either end; they unhooked the obstruction and proceeded. The tall, floating tower, with the long-boat suspended from the top of it, had been pulled up the tow-path by a number of pack animals. Then, while the archers in the galleys and the infantry on the banks hotly engaged the Goths in the twin land-towers, this floating tower was warped up into position against the land-tower on the tow-path. Now Belisarius's intentions were disclosed. The longboat was lowered from the davits with a rush: as it fell among the crowded Goths in the tower, a dozen flaming torches were thrown into it. The boat had been filled with pitch and oil and resin and other combustible materials, so that in less than a minute the whole Gothic tower was ablaze. A squadron of Goths came charging down the towpath, but hesitated at the sight of the burning tower and at the sound of men screaming from the fiery mass. Our infantry drove them back in disorder. Belisarius began destroying the boom, and was ready to continue his advance as soon as Bessas should make his sortie. Two
hundred Goths had been burned alive in the tower. The garrison of the other tower had fled.

When Isaac the Armenian heard this news he shouted for joy, as we all did at the Port. He decided to win his share of glory by an attack on a stockaded Gothic camp which lay at half a mile's distance, guarding Ostia. Gathering a hundred horsemen together, he spurred out from the fortress into the delta of the river and cried to my mistress Antonina as he went: ‘The fortress is safe under your guardianship, gracious lady; soon I shall return with gifts.'

Isaac never returned. He carried the camp at his first charge, scattered the garrison, and mortally wounded their commander. But the Goths realized that this was not the vanguard of a large army, it was merely a madman with a hundred adventurers behind him. They came rushing back to find Isaac's men busily engaged in plundering the huts. Isaac was struck down, and not ten of his hundred men won safely back to the fortifications. One man, finding his return barred, escaped by galloping away up to the head of the delta. He shouted across the stream to an outpost which Belisarius had left there: ‘O comrades, Isaac is killed, and I alone of his men am left; and I am wounded in the side. Fetch me across the river, I beg.' With that he fainted.

While they ferried him and his horse across the river on a raft, one of them galloped up the tow-path to take the bad news to Belisarius at the boom. What he said was: ‘Alas, General, all is lost at the Port of Rome. Isaac and the entire garrison have been killed by the Goths – all but one man, your guardsman Sisifried, who has escaped and been fetched wounded across the river at the delta head.'

Belisarius knew Sisifried as a bold, loyal, resourceful soldier, and the messenger also as a very trusty man, so he could not but believe the news. The first question he asked, with a sort of gasp, was: ‘And my wife, the Lady Antonina?'

The messenger answered: ‘I do not know. Sisifried's words were: “I alone am left of Isaac's men.”'

At this Belisarius swayed upon his feet. Tears burst from his eyes, and for a while he stood speechless. He crossed himself, muttering a broken prayer. But in a little while he regained control of his feelings: perhaps he recalled how Geilimer, the Vandal King, had lost a battle by untimely grief for a dear one. It was now three o'clock, and Bessas had not made the expected sortie, though aware of the burning of the
tower and the destruction of the boom. Must he engage the whole Gothic Army by himself? That would be foolhardy to the point of madness. Nevertheless, he would have done so, in the hope of aid from Bessas as soon as the galleys drew near to the city; but that, with the Port taken, he was cut off from the sea – for Ostian was also held by the enemy, and defeat now would be disaster. His only hope lay in immediate return and the recapture of the Port. He ordered the helms of his galleys to be turned hard about, and, taking the infantry aboard, recalled his cavalry by trumpet-blast and hurried downstream. Perhaps it was still not too late to wrest the fortress from the enemy and avenge his dead.

When we at the Port saw his boats returning we were filled with amazement, but not so great an amazement as he himself felt on observing our sentries still at the gates of the fortress. Then relief and disgust struggled for mastery in his mind – relief that the report was an error, disgust at having, from foolish credulity, abandoned an attempt so well begun. He said bitterly: ‘This is the day of St Nicholas, when children find sweetmeats hidden in their shoes, and when old soldiers turn simpletons.'

That night his malarial fever came back upon him. The restless and unhappy condition of his mind aggravated the attack; he grew very sick indeed, and was soon raving in delirium. He kept calling for my mistress, not recognizing her at his bedside. Her heart was pierced when in the wanderings of his mind he relived the anguish that he had suffered in the belief that she was killed. ‘What remains for me now?' he continually cried. ‘Antonina is dead.'

At the height of his fever, we who attended him were obliged to call the assistance of eight of his strongest guardsmen to restrain him from doing some wild deed. Now he imagined that he was fighting the Goths outside the walls of Rome, and now that it was the Persians at Daras. Once he uttered his war-cry in a terrible voice and caught two men in his arms, nearly crushing them to death; but suddenly fell gasping.

B
ELISARIUS
was confined to his chamber for ten days. On the eleventh day King Teudel took Rome, being admitted one night with all his army by four treacherous Isaurian soldiers at the Asinarian Gate. Bessas had not constantly changed the duty roster for his guards, as Belisarius had done, or changed the locks on the gates; thus the soldiers had been able to agree with Teudel for an exact hour some days in advance. The cause of their treachery was a grievance against the captain of their company for holding back part of their corn ration in order to sell it to patricians.

King Teudel's Goths immediately set about plundering the great houses of the patricians, allowing Bessas and his garrison to escape without hindrance. Teudel contented himself with what he found in the Pincian Palace – Bessas's evilly won store, which had the appearance of a royal treasury or the hoard of a successful admiral of pirates. In all Rome, a city that had recently housed half a million souls, the Goths found no more than 500 commoners and 400 persons of patrician blood – nearly all women and children, these, since most of the patricians themselves had escaped with the garrison. Teudel began pulling down the fortifications; and swore that, for its ungrateful hostility to the benignant Gothic rule of Theoderich and his descendants, the city had earned no better fate than to be burned down and reduced to the level of a sheep-walk.

Belisarius learned of this threat and wrote to him from the Port of Rome: ‘King Teudel, if you do as you have threatened with Rome, the birthplace of Empire, will your name not stink in the nostrils of posterity? Be sure that it will be told and written of you: “What fifty generations of Romans toiled to build, bringing together the noblest materials and the finest architects and craftsmen procurable in the entire world, a German princeling, insulting the great dead, burned down one day as an act of spite, and at a time when it stood empty because of plague and famine.”'

Teudel reflected, and refrained. Belisarius had been right in supposing that, with a Gothic King, the hypothetical verdict of posterity
would weigh more than his own natural inclinations or the most practical advice of his wisest counsellors. Nevertheless, Teudel dismantled three miles of the fortifications, and removed all the gates, making an open city of it. Then, leaving strong forces behind him in the neighbourhood to pin down our forces at the Port of Rome, he set out against Bloody John, who was now at Taranto.

Bloody John did not dare to face Teudel, and so retreated hurriedly to Otranto; by which action Southern Italy, that had seemed securely his, was handed back to its Gothic rulers. Teudel, considering that the capture of Otranto was a matter of little importance, so long as Bloody John could be immobilized there, decided to march up the Adriatic coast to Ravenna, the inhabitants of which were clearly disaffected to the Imperial cause and likely to open the gates to him. With Ravenna in his hands he would be the undoubted master of Italy.

King Teudel had already begun his march up the coast when he was recalled by news which filled him with astonishment and indignation. Belisarius, true to his reputation for attempting the seemingly impossible, was once more holding Rome and ready to dispute its possession against all the Goths in Italy!

‘But how,' you may well ask, ‘could even Belisarius dare with his miserably inadequate forces to hold an open city against an army which could now muster 80,000 men?'

Belisarius's own answer to this question would have been: ‘We must dare to make amends for our former failures.'

As soon as he was sufficiently well to sit his horse, Belisarius had reconnoitred the city with a thousand horsemen, riding out by night from the Port. He had found it wholly deserted (for the first time in its history, I suppose) and even encountered a small pack of wolves roaming in the Field of Mars – which the soldiers refrained from shooting. These wolves were regarded as a good omen, because they were animals once held sacred by the ancient Romans, Romulus the founder of Rome having been suckled by a she-wolf. Belisarius made a careful tour of the walls and finally pronounced: ‘All is well, friends.'

They thought that his wits were still deranged by the fever, but he explained: ‘King Teudel, being a barbarian, has scamped his task of destruction, as I expected. He has been content merely to dislodge the upper courses of stone from the rampart and push the rubble forward into the fosse. Working with vigour, we can repair the damage in a short time.'

The Gothic retaining army, informed that Belisarius was returning to the Port from his reconnaissance, ambushed him at four several points. In each case he divided his forces into three parts: one half-squadron held its ground while the other two pressed forward on either flank and enveloped the enemy, distressing them with arrows until they abandoned their position. On this homeward ride Belisarius killed or captured more than the number of his own forces, losing some thirty men, because the Gothic squadrons consisted of lancers only and were given no opportunity to come to close quarters, but overwhelmed by arrows. Though numbering fully 15,000, this Gothic army did not again venture from its camp; and Belisarius, leaving only 500 men to guard the Port, could throw all his forces into Rome. He had with him his own 4,000 Thracians, diminished by 300, and 2,000 of Bessas's men who had fled to him when Rome was taken, and 500 regular troops, former deserters to Teudel at Spoleto, who had been persuaded to return to their allegiance. There were also a few hundred sturdy labourers gathered from the villages in the neighbourhood, mostly refugees from the city, who gladly offered to work for him if they were paid with corn and meat and a little wine.

Count Belisarius entered Rome on the Feast of the Three Kings; King Teudel did not return until the first day of February (of this new year of our Lord 547). In those twenty-five days a miracle had been accomplished. The whole fosse had been cleared of earth and rubble and planted with pointed stakes cut from the rafters of ruined houses; and the dressed stones of the rampart had been collected and laid back in place, though without mortar. The walls presented a bold face again to the enemy, and only fell short by a few feet, in the rebuilt places, of their original height. Only there were no gates, and for lack of skilled smiths and carpenters none could be improvised in that short time. Belisarius was therefore obliged to resort to the tactics of the ancient Spartans: he closed the gateways with human gates, which were his best spearmen drawn up in phalanx. We had all worked in the eight-hour shifts: soldiers, domestics, civilians, including women and children – not one of us was allowed to avoid the
corvée
. I, a pampered eunuch, broke my well-trimmed nails on the rough stones and wearied my plump shoulders carrying baskets of earth. Belisarius was everywhere at once, like lightning in a storm.