Legionary: The Scourge of Thracia (Legionary 4) (47 page)

Torches crackled in the corners of the dim throne room, sending dancing shadows across the painted scenes of the old gods and the fresher emblems of the Christian faith. A raised dais in the centre of the room was crowned with the imperial throne. Dexion came to a halt before the dais, genuflected, then beheld the young man on the seat of power. Draped in a purple robe and silk brocade, he looked every inch the youthful emperor. His fair skin was flawless and unblemished, his golden locks were swept across his forehead and his delicate features bore an expression of pure equanimity. There was no trace of a scowl or disgust at this guest’s ragged condition. It was then that Dexion noticed there was nobody else in the room. Not a single guard.

‘You bring word from the East?’ Gratian said, breaking the tense silence.

‘The Goths have overrun Thracia,
Dominus,
’ Dexion replied, licking his dry lips. His words seemed to be swallowed in the echo of the emperor’s question.

Gratian did not flinch. ‘And what of the legions in those lands – the comitatenses and the limitanei?’

Dexion mulled this over, thinking back to the fragmented remains of Thracia’s field army and of the scattered border legions. ‘They remain a force that can at least monitor the Gothic movements, but-’

‘Yes, yes,’ Gratian interrupted, swishing a hand lazily as if swatting a fly. ‘But when my Uncle Valens comes from Persia with his Eastern Praesental Army, will the remnant of the Thracian forces be enough to supplement his ranks and to win this Gothic War?’

Dexion remained silent, his golden eyes darting to the shadows around the dais.

Gratian’s air of serenity evaporated and his face bent into a predacious grin. ‘Come now, we are alone. You can speak freely.’

Dexion beheld this feral creature before him . . . then responded with a cold grin of his own. ‘Without your aid, Dominus, Thracia
will
fall.’

Gratian slunk back in his throne and chuckled with satisfaction. ‘Excellent . . . excellent. Then the fate of the Eastern Empire is in my palm. And who better to rule over both East
and
West, but a saviour? I will muster my armies and yes, I will take them east . . . but only when it suits me to do so.’ He stood and descended from the dais, his cloak trailing behind him. He beckoned Dexion with him to the tall, segmented and stained window at one side of the throne room, looking down the gentle slope to the heart of the city. ‘Your time in the east has been lengthy, and your comrades wondered not when but
if
they might see you return here.’

Dexion nodded, gazing down to the side of the forum, where the boy they had passed played with his dog. Joyous, unburdened with life. A true smile played with his lips, then crumbled as he saw the boy’s mother and father come for him. They took a hand each and walked him, lifting him with every second step, the dog yelping playfully as the boy laughed. He had known no such pleasure. His father had abandoned him and Mother to survive on their own – deserting them in favour of another family. And Father’s abandonment had stoked the cancer in Mother, he was sure. His forehead furrowed into deep, dark ruts as he thought of Pavo. He had first sought out his lost half-brother long, long ago, finding him on that hot summer’s day at Constantinople’s slave market. He watched from the pillars at the rear of the square as the fat and rich had bid for his last blood-relative, all the time weighing the purse of coins he was sure would be enough to buy Pavo for himself. He had watched, one foot ready to stride forth and into the bidding.

He had watched, ready to save his half-brother . . . then he had walked away.

Pavo had been favoured by Father, why? Why should he step in to save the boy who had gained all he had lost? He gazed into the ether, losing himself in this question, a fiery heat spreading across his chest and his top lip twitching, then he considered the emperor’s words.

Your comrades wondered if they might see you return here.

It was as an orphan that he had found his true family. Not the military as he had told Pavo, but the Speculatores. They were his blood and his soul. When one fell or was lost, others would replace them. They would never leave him, never abandon him. Pavo was nothing to him – nothing but a mocking reminder of his loss.

Something pinched at his heart. It was a dull sensation, something he had not felt in many years.
Loss? You deplore it and yet you peddle it!

He tried to ignore the black voice, but it threw up memories of his actions in these last months. His jaw stiffened as he tried to fend off the images. There were certain people who could not resist digging, prying. That the thug he had paid to deal with the bothersome Felicia could only clumsily wound her meant he had been forced to strangle the thug then silence the bitch himself during the chaos of the Great Northern Camp’s fall. He felt that pinch at his heart again, then he remembered how this had stoked such sorrow in Pavo. A flicker of a movement came to his lips – a tortured, tight smile.

‘It has been a busy time,
Dominus,
’ he replied. ‘Busy, but fruitful.’

Gratian sighed, eyeing the populace passing on the streets below with disdain. ‘And what of the other matter. Did you find some trace of the other one?’

Dexion brightened at this. ‘Tribunus Gallus? Why, yes, Dominus. Indeed, I have brought him to you as a prize.’

Gratian’s lips broke back into that avid grin. ‘He is
here?
’

Dexion nodded. ‘He is outside this very room, Dominus
.
It was an arduous undertaking, leading him here, but I know you have been waiting a long time to have him in your presence. Though it would have been easier had you allowed me to open his throat back in Thracia.’

Gratian cocked an eyebrow as if at once both impressed and concerned for his agent. ‘As you once so deftly dealt with his wife and boy?’

Dexion nodded, his mind flashing back to that shadowy night near Mediolanum when he had slain the mother and child. After so many years of training, it had been his first true assignment in his time with the Speculatores and one he remembered with pride. It had sealed that interminable bond.

‘That cur outside was a bane of my father’s reign,’ Gratian said with a wavering voice through gritted teeth. ‘He supported the senatorial dogs who stood against Emperor Valentinian and then evaded every blade sent to end his miserable life.’

‘So what is to be done with him, Dominus?’

Gratian’s eyes ignited with a rapacious fire. ‘Bring him to the lower chambers. I will enjoy this . . . ’

 
The End

Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

One of the most rewarding outcomes of writing historical fiction is when a reader like you gets in touch to let me know I have sparked their interest in the period, setting them off on a research odyssey of their own to find out more. I hope this latest volume of the series has just that effect. As always though, I’ll try to summarise the key historical points – where I have stuck to recorded history or used artistic licence – here.

In late 377 AD, Emperor Valens and his Eastern Praesental army were pinned down on the Persian frontier while Emperor Gratian and his Western forces were engaged in troubles on the Rhine and upper Danube. This left the Diocese of Thracia in turmoil, still reeling from the indecisive Battle of Ad Salices (covered in volume 2 of the series – Legionary: Viper of the North) against Fritigern’s Gothic Alliance, where much of the Thracian legions had been crushed or severely weakened. Thus, the remaining legions of that region had no real hope of engaging and defeating the ever-swelling Gothic horde, and so they had to look to the Thracian terrain as a means of maintaining control. The Haemus/Balkan Mountains present an almost unbroken ridge that runs east to west across modern-day Bulgaria. As Emperor Valens tried to extract his forces from the Persian border, he sent word back to Thracia, tasking Magister Equitum Saturninus with fortifying the five main passes across the Haemus range to contain the Goths in the lands north of the mountains (the fallen province of Moesia – once the home of the XI Claudia), in the hope of starving them into submission. Saturninus did this and did it well for some six to nine months, repelling numerous Gothic attacks on the mountain blockades as the Roman soldier and historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, attests:

Since everything that could serve as food throughout the lands of . . . Moesia had been used up, the barbarians, driven alike by ferocity and hunger, strove with all their might to break out . . . after many attempts, they were overwhelmed by the vigour of our men, who strongly opposed them amid the rugged heights.

Had this defensive system held out until the two emperors arrived with their armies, then the fate of the Eastern Empire (and, consequently, the Western Empire too) might have been significantly altered. But something happened in late 377 AD: the Huns – those strident riders from the Eurasian steppe who had driven the Goths into Roman lands just a year earlier – agreed some form of alliance with their erstwhile foes. It was almost certainly just a subdivision of the Huns who came over to swell the Gothic ranks, but they brought with them a different style of warfare, diversifying the threat posed to the Romans. They also brought with them Alani riders and, at some point, the Germanic Taifali also joined the ethnically diverse alliance. Fritigern, The Arian Christian Iudex of this horde, had a monumental task on his hands. Organising over one hundred thousand homeless people would have been a gargantuan undertaking in itself. Added to this, power struggles with the likes of Alatheus and Saphrax – leaders of the pagan Greuthingi Goths – and cultural clashes with the northern horsemen were surely rife and frequent. Regardless, the overwhelming manpower he now controlled spelled the end for the stubborn Roman blockades.

Saturninus got wind of the alliance with the Huns and realized that it was no longer feasible to hold the mountain passes –
lest the multitude of barbarians by some sudden movement (like a river which had burst its barriers by the violence of a flood) should easily overthrow his whole force.
Pre-empting a decisive Gothic assault, he hastily withdrew his armies to the south, directing them towards the imperial cities where the precious few legions could take shelter behind strong walls. In this respect, I have used a dose of fictional licence in my illustration of the Shipka Pass falling to a direct assault. Likewise, the Great Northern Camp is my imagining, but there almost certainly would have been a command camp – housing reserves, supplies and marshalling communications – somewhere near the five passes, and the location just south of the central Shipka Pass seems feasible.

With the blockades gone, the Romans had effectively ceded the countryside of all central and southern Thracia – all the way to the Hellespont and Constantinople’s walls – to the Goths. Fritigern’s armies and people flooded south and there was a spell of reckless plunder. As Marcellinus describes it:

Some wealthy nobleman was dragged along like a wild beast, complaining of Fortune as merciless and blind, who in a brief moment had stripped him of his riches, of his beloved relations, and his home; had made him see his house reduced to ashes, and had reduced him to expect either to be torn limb from limb himself, or else to be exposed to scourging and torture, as the slave of a ferocious conqueror.

But Fritigern was shrewd, realizing that the Roman legions would be headed for the safety of their cities and a true victory might be had if he could rout the fleeing Roman armies. Thus, the Iudex despatched his forces to the main population centres in an attempt to intercept and eliminate the fleeing legions. One such clash was that where Comes Barzimeres and his force of Cornutii infantry and Scutarii riders were waylaid on their approach to Deultum (modern-day Debelt). I have almost certainly done Barzimeres a disservice in my (wry but enjoyable to write) portrayal of him as a loathsome, craven and bombastic individual – indeed, it is attested that he was a hero at Deultum, charging the enemy line to allow the rest of his soldiers to retreat into the town.

Despite Fritigern’s attempts to defeat the fleeing Thracian legions, the bulk of them managed to escape behind their city gates. This ushered in another stalemate: Fritigern had no intention of trying to besiege the cities – indeed, he had a policy of 'keeping peace with Roman walls' as he knew he did not possess the technology or expertise to build the required war machines. So the initial rapine abated and the Goths set up camp in the heart of Thracia – possibly Fritigern hoped there might still be a chance of negotiating with the Roman Emperors – while the cities remained as islands of imperial order. Yet time would tilt this stalemate in favour of the empire, with rumours of the Western and Eastern Emperors and their armies readying to converge on Thracia and the trespassing Goths. Tension in the Gothic camp at this stage must have been unbearable.

At this point, Farnobius enters the tale. Marcellinus describes this minor Gothic Reiks as ‘a f
ormidable troublemaker’. It seems that the Taifali riders had sworn fealty to him, and he most likely had the support of some of his native Greuthingi Goths. Marcellinus describes how he broke from Fritigern’s Gothic camp with a splinter horde and set out on a rampage across Thracia, plundering and destroying all in his path
:

Farnobius, one of the chieftains of the Goths . . .was roaming about at random with a large predatory band, and a body of the Taifali, with whom he had lately made an alliance, and who, when our soldiers were all dispersed . . . had taken advantage . . . in order to plunder the country thus left without defenders.

My depiction of Farnobius leading the assault on the Abderan gold mines is based on attestations of Gothic raids on such mines all across Thracia, where it is said that freed Romans indeed joined ranks with the enemy. It is not known exactly why Farnobius decided to then lead his horde towards the western edges of Thracia and into the Succi Pass, but it is in that region that he and his forces met their demise.

The Succi Pass was a vital corridor that had long been used for armies marching from east to west (hence the naming of the Via Militaris which runs through it), and the ancient choke-point in this pass known as Trajan’s Gate was identified by the beleaguered Thracian Roman command as a vital possession that simply had to be retained if Emperor Gratian was to march east to their aid. The Stipon Fortress that stands at Trajan’s Gate was built in the early 2
^nd
century AD (by the eponymous Emperor Trajan), and was positioned to overlook the Via Militaris and control the movement of any significant forces along its path. Going by the ruins that remain, it seems that the original design remained largely unaltered until its abandonment many centuries later. For example, the foundations show no sign of having been expanded to match the style common in the later empire – namely larger, rounded and more protruding towers, allowing greater defensibility.

The task of holding Farnobius’ Goths back at the Succi Pass fell to a certain aged general called Frigeridus. Firstly, I have to clarify why I have instead used the name ‘Geridus’ for this character. I was acutely aware of the presence of ‘Fritigern’ and ‘Farnobius’ in this tale, and reckoned the alliterative similarity of these names and ‘Frigeridus’ might well be confusing for a proportion of readers. I swayed one way and the other on this matter, posing the question to my readership as to how to handle it: should I alter the names or should I stay historically accurate? In the end, opinion was almost perfectly split. So, by slightly altering ‘Frigeridus’ to ‘Geridus’ and taking the alliterative aspect from his name, I aimed to keep the prose cogent while not straying too far from fact.

Frigeridus (as I will refer to him from here on), an officer of the Western Empire, is thought to have been a Comes or a Dux at the time of the story. As I have depicted, he was an elderly man, due to be replaced by Maurus in early 378 AD. His failure to attend the Battle of Ad Salices is well attested, and seems to have stained his previously strong reputation – many thought his complaints of gout were a convenient excuse to avoid that bloody and evenly-balanced clash. Yet roughly a year after Ad Salices his reputation was fully restored when he engaged and defeated Farnobius’ Goths somewhere near the Succi Pass – possibly in forested land rather than at Trajan’s Gate itself – killing Farnobius and capturing many of his Taifali riders. Marcellinus describes the decisiveness of Frigeridus’ victory as follows:

He [Frigeridus] would have slain them all, not leaving a single one of them to convey news of their disaster, if, after Farnobius had been slain with a great number of his men, he had not voluntarily spared the rest on their own earnest supplication.

Interestingly, the captured Taifali riders were then sent to work on Italian farmland and went on to become a Western Roman regiment known as the Equites Taifali. Perhaps if the rest of the Goths in Thracia had been settled and integrated so (i.e. on Roman terms), they might have strengthened the empire rather than bringing about the catastrophe that followed in 378 AD, though such thinking is simplistic and hugely reliant on hindsight.

Regarding the extent of Quadi incursion in the Dioceses of Dacia and Pannonia: I have exaggerated the level of dominance these Germanic tribesmen enjoyed on Roman territory at this time, but they most certainly were roving and raiding these parts regularly. Indeed, Emperor Valentinian is rumoured to have died in 375 AD in a fit of apoplexy when the Quadi Kings claimed they had every right to ride through Roman territory while legions assumed the right to build forts north of the Danube (in Quadi lands). On a side note, the anecdote about Valentinian’s murder of Gabinus the Quadi King at a banquet walked straight from the annals of history and into my tale (another delightful aspect of writing historical fiction).

Lastly, my take on Emperor Gratian’s regard – or apparent lack of it – for the fate of Thracia is speculative, but not without premise. There was at the very least a superficial uncle-nephew relationship between Valens and Gratian, but there is also evidence of an underlying, simmering jealously and desire from each to be considered the senior of the two Roman emperors. I believe Gratian did want to save Thracia, but more importantly,
he
wanted to be seen as its saviour.

So, with the fractious air of two emperors vying for supremacy, a crisis to be resolved and a war to be won, a wicked storm is brewing . . .

Pavo, Gallus and the rest of the XI Claudia are right in the eye of that storm, and I truly hope you will join me for the next volume of the series.
Until then, please feel free to visit my website where you can find out more about me and my work.

Yours faithfully,

Gordon Doherty

www.gordondoherty.co.uk