Siege of Rome (13 page)

  
The light was snuffed out as I descended further. For a time I crept along in total darkness. The air was musty and warm. All was silence, save for the steady drip-drip of water somewhere close by. My breathing came hard and fast, and my heart fluttered in my chest like a trapped bird.

  
At any moment I felt certain the walls would close in, forcing me into a steadily shrinking space, until I was crushed inside a stone box. I almost soiled myself at the prospect of being buried alive in this dreadful vault. Only the reassuring weight of Caledfwlch at my hip prevented me from turning back.

  
Blessed light returned, slanting through collapsed sections of the ceiling, far above my head. I found myself following a steadily widening passage. An arched channel, similar to the ones I had seen above ground, ran through the middle of the passage and vanished into the darkness ahead. It was smaller than the surface arches, about eight feet high and four wide. I was no engineer, but even I could see that the water that supplied Naples had once flowed along the conduit.

  
The passage was not straight, but ran in crooked lines for what seemed like several miles. I followed it for as far as my courage would take me. My nerves were stretched to breaking point, when the passage came to a sudden end.

   I was
confronted by a wall of natural rock, pierced by an aperture wide enough for water to flow on into the remainder of the passage beyond and into the city. Heart thumping, I climbed up onto the lip of the channel and peered along the gap. It was too narrow for a man to pass through, but the rock was soft here, and could be widened by picks.

   Excitement swelled inside me.
Here was a secret route into the city.

   I carefully dropped back onto the floor. It was vital I returned to Belisarius at once, and informed him of this unlooked-for doorway to
Naples.

   Not unlooked-for: Procopius must have
suspected its existence from his studies, and sent me to search for it.

   My fear of dark and enclosed spaces lifted as I ran back down the passage, replaced by glorious visions of being publicly
fêted as a hero, the man who saved Belisarius from almost certain defeat. He would be grateful, that was certain, and perhaps even give me a command. I pictured myself at the head of a troop of cavalry, proud mailed lancers on good horses, and knew that Arthur’s shade would be proud of me.

   I stopped dead. Some echo had reached my ears, a snatch of whispered conversation, quickly stifled.
It drifted from somewhere up ahead, the dark stretch of passage which no light could reach.

  
There it was again:

   “You should not have come…”

 
This was a man’s voice, deep and low.

  
“I had to. I wanted to see his face. Once more…”

  
A woman’s voice this time, with an awful familiarity about it that made me shiver. It could not be. My mind was playing tricks, or else the ghosts of my past had somehow found a voice in this subterranean hell.

  
The voices were stilled, but then I heard footsteps, very faint, but definitely there. Someone – no, two people – were trying to move quietly, but the echo was defeating their efforts.

   I pressed my back flat against the wall. M
y mouth had dried up. Terror clouded my thoughts.

   Antonina had sent her murderers after me.
Was that the true reason for Procopius sending me here, alone, where I could be quietly killed and my body disposed of? Had he betrayed me? Did I have no true friends in this world?

  
I forced myself to be calm. The sound of footsteps was getting louder. If they were assassins, they were careless about their work. Over-confidence, perhaps. The presence of a woman puzzled me. Female assassins were not unknown, but the butchering of an armed soldier in the dark was work for men.

  
“Once more…”

  
Those words replayed in my mind. I had a suspicion of who had uttered them, and it tore at my heart. Still, she had betrayed me once, so why not again?

  
I looked around desperately for a hiding place. The conduit inside the channel was the most obvious. I would have preferred a recess in the wall, but there was none. The walls of the passage stretched away either of me, smooth and flat and featureless.

  
“See, here are his marks…”

  
The man’s voice again.
He had discovered my footprints. I clambered up the arch in front of me, gritting my teeth as I scraped my wrists and ankles on the rough stone. There were plenty of handholds, and I quickly scrambled up and over into the dry conduit, where I lay flat on my back. I slowly drew Caledfwlch and laid the blade across my chest, ready to use.

   Now their steps were right beneath me. I could hear their breathing: rapid, heavy, the sound of people in fear. That was some comfort. These were no cool, ruthless killers, but novices, every bit as nervous and frightened as their prey.

   It would have been easy to remain hidden, but my soul revolted against being stalked like an animal. I had the advantage, not they, and would use it.

   I turned on my side and peered over the channel. Two people were almost directly under me. The light was dim, but I could see one was a slender woman with glossy black hair flowing to her shoulders, and her companion a heavily-built man in the scale mail and crested helmet of the Guards.

   I silently leaped over the edge and dropped down onto the guardsman. He folded under me, and together we went down in a tangle of limbs and curses.

  
He dropped his sword, but was sharp enough to seize my wrist instead of trying to retrieve it. His helmet had also come loose. I smashed my knee into his face, felt bone crunch against bone, and clawed at his eyes with my free hand. The guardsman’s companion might have helped him, but instead she took to her heels.

  
I was the stronger, and managed to get on top of him, my left forearm pressed down on his windpipe.

   Now I could see
his face. He was indeed a Guard, though I didn’t know his name. I had seen him in drills and on the march, though he always kept his distance. We had never spoken.

  
I eased the pressure on his windpipe a little. “Why do you hunt me?” I demanded. His fingers on my wrist had slackened, and I threatened him with Caledfwlch, holding the tip a mere half-inch from his right eye.

  
His eyes were full of fear, but he made no answer. “Come,” I said, “I cannot believe Antonina inspires such loyalty. You are in her pay, are you not? Would you truly die for her?”

   Sti
ll no answer. I recalled that Antonina inspired terror in her followers. A man in her service would rather die a quick death at the point of a blade, rather than suffer the penalties she inflicted for failure.

   The running footsteps of his companion were dying away. If I tarried much longer, she would have made good her escape.

   “Well,” I said regretfully, “it seems a pity.”

   He tried to jerk
his head away, but I seized him by the throat and stabbed Caledfwlch into his eye. The blade slid easily into his brain, killing him almost instantly. His body stiffened under me and went still.

   Leaving him, I got up and ran down the passage, plunging into  darkness and emerging at the bottom of the sloping floor that led up to the entrance.
The shadow of my quarry flitted ahead of me, and was briefly silhouetted in the narrow opening as her slender form darted through into daylight.

   I pounded up the s
lope, breath rasping in my throat, and squeezed through the gap. Flinging up a hand to shield my eyes against the glare of the sun, I stumbled outside, looking around for my quarry.

   There she was, tearing feverishly at the bridle of her horse, a fine grey cavalry mount, tethered to a crumbling pillar of rock.
My heart stopped as I recognized her.

   “Elene,” I cried out, “you cannot run from me. Not forever.”

   She threw a terrified glance over her shoulder. Yes, Elene, the first woman I had loved and lain with. Still the same lithe, sinuous creature I knew at the Hippodrome, though she must have been nearing forty by now, with the occasional streak of grey in her long, unbound black hair.

  
She wore a grey tunic of grey silk, tucked in at the waist, and loose breeches. A dagger hung from a brown leather sheath at her hip. A second horse, another cavalry beast, was tethered next to hers. This one had clearly belonged to her dead companion.

  
I started towards her, but she had already swung gracefully into the saddle. Elene had learned to sit astride a horse, like a man, at the arena.

  
She turned her pony’s head away, but hesitated for a moment, looking directly at me. Her long face had lost its youthful bloom, and was now gaunt and tired, the face of one who had wandered too far down dark roads.

  
I groped for something to say. I was almost certain that she and her accomplice had stalked me in the tunnel with the intention of murdering me, but I didn’t want her to flee and vanish from my life again, not yet.

   “Your son,” I said, “does he live?”

   I had last seen Elene in the cells under the Praetorium in Constantinople, where she had tried to persuade me to confess to conspiring with the Nika rioters. She did so, she claimed, on the orders of the Empress Theodora, who had threatened to kill her husband and little son if she refused.

  
Elene had also claimed that the boy was named Arthur in honour of me, even though he was another man’s get. I doubted the tale, thinking it a cruel joke to hurt me, but had pondered it much in the years since. Perhaps there was a son after all. Perhaps she had lied to her husband about the paternity. Elene would have become a practiced liar in the service of Theodora.

   She swallowed hard, and pushed back a strand of black hair from her eyes.
These were as I remembered them, grey and tinged with a strange melancholy.

   “My son is none of your affair,” she replied huskily, “you will not speak of him. Where is Lucius?”

   Lucius, the man I had killed. I noted his name and stored it away for future enquiry. “Dead,” I replied brutally, “I left him to rot in the shadows, as he deserves.”

   A terrible thought occurred to me. “Was he your lover – your husband?”

   For the first time in many years I heard Elene laugh. “No. Merely a man I was obliged to work with. Farewell, Coel. I will see you again, before you die.”

   She turned her pony’s head and heeled the beast into a gallop. I ran for my own horse, tethered in the wood outside the ru
ins, but stopped. There was no point in pursuing Elene. Her pony was fast, and would have outdistanced mine even in a fair race.

   I swore, and thumped the
wall. Elene had escaped me again.

11.

Procopius made a great show of shock and outrage when I told him of the attempt on my life. I carefully searched his face as he paced about his tent, cursing and shaking his fist, and concluded his anger was genuine.

   “Belisarius must not know of it,” I said
when he had calmed down, “Elene and Lucius were almost certainly in the service of Antonina.”

   “I know, I know,” he replied, suddenly weary,
and sat down beside his writing desk, “this is my fault. They must have been watching you. I should have sent you out with an armed guard, but that might have drawn attention.”

   “There are two Huns, lying dead som
ewhere near Membresa, who had cause to regret guarding me,” I replied.

   “God or the Devil must be watching over you,” he said, shaking his head, “that is twice now your enemies have tried and failed. There will be a third attempt, I am sure of it.”

   I shrugged, trying to give the impression that I cared nothing for assassins, though in truth I was badly scared. “I am alive, and unharmed, and one of their hired killers lies dead. Let them try.”

   Procopius closed his eyes for a few seconds and pinched the bridge of his hooked nose. Then he was all business again.

   “This aperture you found,” he said, turning to the scrolls laid out flat on his desk, “at the end of the old channel that leads into Naples. Show me exactly where it is.”

  
His maps of the aqueduct were very old, stained with damp and moth-eaten in many places, but I managed to trace my route through the tunnels. Procopius stared at the parchment, nodding slightly and tapping his chin.

   “Come,” he said suddenly, rolling up the parchment, “Belisarius must be told.”

   We made our way to the general’s pavilion, where we found Belisarius sitting outside under a tree and staring at the walls of Naples. Other than two of his guards, he was alone. Antonina was absent with her ladies-in-waiting, no doubt amusing herself somewhere.

   He greeted us with his usual courtesy, but was in a pensive mood, and clearly in no mood for conversation. His mood swiftly lightened as I told him of my adventure – excluding the murder attempt, of course – and discovery of a secret way into the city.