Triumph (3 page)

That applied very much to a man in whom Justinian was willing to confide, had been too often alone with and had proved to be a superbly successful soldier, a set of credentials that in the past had led to imperial usurpation. Added to that, Flavius Belisarius was popular with the people, cheered wherever he went in his consular year. How could he not hanker for more?

‘How went the parley?’ Photius asked, once more admitted to his stepfather’s command tent.

‘In the balance I would say.’

The trio of worthies had been back three times and so far nothing had been concluded, each time the excuse of consultation being advanced to continue delay. Flavius knew that was only partly true; they were really waiting to see if the Goths of Ravenna were going to come to their aid.

‘And if they do not?’

‘Then it depends, Photius, on only one factor. Do the notables of Naples think we can win in Italy or do they expect us to be defeated by Theodahad, in which case surrendering to us would be a very precarious move indeed, for there would be retribution on a scale of which only the Goths are capable. Perhaps we shall get a better indication tomorrow when they have promised to return with a definitive answer.’

Flavius put an arm round the shoulder of the youngster, still looking troubled by the information he had brought from Sicily. ‘Enough of this, come join me on my nightly stroll.’

It was a habit of Flavius, when circumstances permitted, to walk the lines of the encampment before his men bedded down for the night. If they called out to him he would answer, if they seemed
inclined to talk he would indulge them, and if one or two yelled out a demeaning joke, that would invoke genuine laughter.

Flavius was ever aware that leading an army was personal; these men might in truth be fighting for Constantinople but they would only do so effectively if they were also fighting for him.

It was a lone envoy that came the following dawn. Stephanus, shown to the general’s tent by Solomon, carried with him a list of demands so comprehensive and challenging that he was genuinely embarrassed to deliver them. Questioned, he admitted that the list had been drawn up at the insistence of his two fellow negotiators, Asclepiodotus and Pastor, who held the greatest sway in the senate and the city. It was telling these two had not dared to consider delivering them alongside Stephanus, no doubt fearing for their heads.

Having played a careful hand, Flavius had kept his overriding purpose well hidden. The city he needed to take possession of was not Naples but Rome. To do that he must get to the city before Theodahad reinforced it to such a degree that a siege would be difficult, if not impossible – the Eternal City, well defended, was too huge a task for an army of the size he led.

Naples mattered only in that, like Rhegium, he could not leave it behind and hostile on what was his line of communication and his possible line of retreat in case of failure. Outside a very tight circle of senior commanders such an eventuality was never discussed, but it would be a poor general who did not consider the possibility. Every one of his inferior commanders had been just as circumspect as he, but they too would keep it in mind, the object in falling back being to keep the army intact so as to fight another day.

‘Stephanus, I feel you have been honourable in this.’

‘I seek only that which is best for my city,
magister
.’

‘Tell me, if I accede to these demands will that get me what I want?’

The envoy, a plump and prosperous-looking individual with greying curls and rounded cheeks had the good grace to look embarrassed, which prompted Flavius to look kindly upon him.

‘I bid you go back to your council of notables and tell them I agree.’

Flavius looked at the list once more so did not see the surprise on the face of Stephanus. He was being told that he would be required to pay a huge indemnity in talents of gold; that his soldiers could not enter the city and he could only do so by invitation, while the Goths in the fortress would be given the option to remain or depart unharmed, added to which his fleet must return to Sicily, this to be verified by a Neapolitan escort vessel.

‘
Magister
, I—’

Flavius held up his hand to stop the clearly uncomfortable envoy, who even with his plump cheeks seemed to suddenly age, so concerned was his expression, which underlined what Flavius supposed: accept these demands and more would follow.

‘You are an honest man, Stephanus and I suspect that you are singular in that regard, but tell your fellow citizens this. My design on their city is one in which I seek to secure my own safety and that of my men. I have no wish to fight to attain that but if I must I will, and do not let them think their walls will be enough to protect them. I bid them consider this. Naples is not the first fortified place to defy the kind of men I lead, so I suggest they consider the fate of those which did so in the past.’

Stephanus tried to speak but he could not find the words to respond; he merely bowed low and left. Flavius followed him out of the tent and looked south to where the great volcano of Vesuvius smoked from its cone, that sending out a larger belch of sulphur,
which seemed to him, as he crossed himself, to be a harbinger of something awful.

‘Solomon, a call to my officers, if you please, to assemble here so we can finalise the plans for the assault on Naples.’

‘They will not surrender?’ Photius asked.

‘No. They think they can keep us talking and to no purpose.’

As was supposed, the acceptance of such conditions did not satisfy the likes of Pastor and Asclepiodotus or the factions they led; such men had made up their minds to resist from the very beginning, fearing the Goths more than Flavius Belisarius. Put upon Stephanus was again the unfortunate bearer of this news, at which point Flavius gave him the option of staying within the Byzantine camp or returning to Naples. Dignified as ever, he chose to go home.

T
he first aggressive act was the cutting of the aqueduct, but it was imparted to Flavius by a sympathetic citizen that there were too many wells in the city for this to be totally effective. Time being of the essence – with winter coming the place of safety lay within the walls of Rome – Flavius could not depend on starvation to bring about a surrender, which meant a costly assault on the well-maintained walls, repulsed by Goths aided by armed Neapolitans.

He lacked the men with the skills required to construct a siege tower or the luxury of time to do so, which meant yet more assaults by ladder and that faced all the options open to defenders outside mere arrows and spears, which included rocks dropped onto the heads of those climbing.

Even worse, if the location of the attack was anticipated they had time to move into place their ballistae, which meant a barrage of stones faced just to get to the base, where they would be subjected to great urns of boiling oil, this tipped over the battlements to scald the skin. Flavius was losing men and that he could ill afford.

To take a city like Naples required a force at least three times the size of that available, one that could so threaten a single section as to leave another part of the parapet short on defence. Flavius was
everywhere, both in these attacks and afterwards, to reassure and cajole but in his heart he knew that some coup would be needed to bring on success, that or a change of heart within the city.

Accompanied by Photius and a personal escort, he spent every passive moment inspecting the defences, seeking some as yet unseen flaw. It was his stepson who clambered up a supporting pillar to stand on the undamaged side of the broken aqueduct, his call for his stepfather to join him one Flavius was reluctant to ignore; he would never concede agility even to one so young. Once alongside Photius, they splashed down the gentle slope of the waterway to the point where it had been broken, the water falling into a line of barrels set below.

On the other side of the gap the arched roof that prevented evaporation was still intact and defenders had used the rubble from the destruction to block access, creating a wall of fragmented stone that seemed impassable. Had Photius asked to be allowed to jump the gap permission would have been refused; he did not. The youngster just ran and leapt, leaving Flavius with his heart in his mouth, his anxiety made worse when the lad landed badly and had to roll to avoid a fall backwards.

He then stood up and grinned to reassure his stepfather, the shout of admonition Photius acknowledged with a backwards wave as he closed with the blockage and began to claw at the unmortised stones, in his efforts managing to create a small opening, one that he began to enlarge. In this he seemed to be succeeding, at which point his stepfather called softly that he should cease his furious scrabbling.

Flavius was not up to the leap achieved by Photius; he had to clamber down one side and up the other, this time followed by his guards, issuing instructions when on the sloping surface that the attack on the masonry should be carried out with quiet care. Two
things were obvious apart from what was before him, the most evident being one he had already recognised: silence, which denoted the lack of any guards on the inner side. The second was that they were far enough from the city walls to be able to work unobserved, hidden by what remained of the arched canopy of the aqueduct.

Stones were being removed gently now and it was obvious the construction had been haphazard, relying on depth rather than mortar or the skilful interlocking of dry stonework that was really required. It took a long time to get a result but the sudden feeling of cold air on the face told a now filthy and dust-covered Photius that they had made a breakthrough.

‘Enough,’ Flavius commanded. ‘Replace that last rock and rebuild something behind it to cut out any light.’

‘We will be coming back?’

‘Most certainly, but this needs to be thought through.’

‘If we do assault by this route I ask to be given command.’

It was pure inspiration that made Flavius ask if his stepson spoke Goth, it was the shake of the head that allowed him to decline the request and he was not about to say that which was as yet only an idea; if what he had in mind went wrong, it was a route to certain death.

To acknowledge it was open to severe risk was an understatement and that became more obvious as he worked out in detail what needed to be done. Flavius knew the men to whom he allotted this task would have to make the attempt during the hours of darkness and they needed to get to the end of what would be an unlit tunnel and one that could not be reconnoitred in advance.

If there was a strong body of defenders at the point where it crossed over the city wall they would only discover that with contact. If not, and once inside, they would need to keep going until they came
across a wide enough conduit to provide an exit, something like a side channel that fed a set of baths. They would likely be close to the centre of a densely inhabited city in which the natives were hostile.

The Isaurians, four hundred in number, were chosen to mount the raid, they being a body of fighters he knew were keen to impress him, having been absent from of all of his previous battles in both North Africa and Sicily. He had with him a Goth-speaking cavalry commander called Magnus, directed to accompany Ennes, the man selected to lead.

He was a member of the general’s close bodyguard and a noted warrior; if they were challenged Magnus would seek to fool the defenders, if that failed Ennes would try to fight his way through. Every tenth man was directed to carry an unlit torch and the whole was to be accompanied by a pair of trumpeters.

Timing was critical; he needed those men to be ready to debouch from whatever exit they found just as dawn broke, this while the rest of the army made a feint against that section of the walls close to the aqueduct to distract the garrison.

Thus, from the battlements, in the hours of darkness, the Neapolitan defenders observed many a torchlit group of attackers move into position and the reaction was as expected. The threatened section of the walls was reinforced by the more martial Goths and many a taunt echoed in the darkness to tell these fools what fate they could expect.

Flavius, keen to encourage these exchanges, took another Goth speaker as close as he dared to engage the defenders with offers of gold if they surrendered, their attempts greeted with jeers and catcalls. Hopefully these were loud enough to drown out the noise of that barrier being dismantled and, following on from that, such a body of soldiers struggling in total darkness along a narrow corridor in which
they were barred from using their torches, there being too many gaps in the aqueduct brickwork that might leak light.

Some of them found the Stygian darkness and the eerie echoes too much to bear and Flavius found himself called from the walls to consult with Magnus, who had led half the badly shaken attacking party back out into the starlight. Flavius quickly called for two hundred replacements from his
comitatus
, an act that so shamed the Isaurian retirees that they insisted on going back.

There was no time to argue; dawn was not far off and there was still the need for distraction, perhaps more now that the invasive force numbered six hundred instead of four. The Goth speaker was still where Flavius had left him, now sending insults towards the walls about their manhood and wayward mothers that got a furious and satisfyingly noisy reaction.

For a commander, indeed for the lowest soldier, waiting can be the hardest part of war and Flavius was doubly cursed by not having any notion of how matters were proceeding where it really counted. That changed when the first trumpet blew, soon followed by the sight of numerous waving torches from two of the towers that stood either side of the nearest of the great gates.

The horns of the main force blew to sound the advance and the whole of the besieging army surged towards walls nearly denuded of the previous defenders, who were now too busy trying to retake those towers. The noise now was not of jeering but metal on metal, the yelling of men fighting and the screams of those wounded or dying.

With his men climbing their ladders and coming face-to-face with a poor defence it looked to Flavius as if they might overcome the walls without the aid of those of their comrades within. But Ennes had other ideas and right before his eyes the gates between the towers swung open and their general watched as his troops surged through.

There was no attempt to control them once they were inside, indeed it would have been dangerous to try. Naples had defied the army of Justinian and it would pay the price in both blood and rapine. All Flavius could do was gather to him Solomon, Photius and a large and well-armed body of his
comitatus
to enter the city and seek out the leading citizens, either to cast them in chains or, if they were of the stripe of Stephanus, to keep them alive.

A wealthy trading city and one that had not faced any serious threat for many decades, Naples was ripe for plunder and that was moving forward slowly like a murderous tide, the pace dictated by the rate of pillage. Through every open doorway Flavius could hear the screams of women and children, who would be spared and sold into slavery, as well as the cries for mercy of men who, once they gave up what valuables they possessed, fell silent as their lives were extinguished.

The cobbles beneath his feet were already running with blood, trickling down the slope that led towards the central area and then to the harbour. Bloodlust was being fuelled by ample wine, which required that his bodyguards form a wall of shields before him as gore-spattered men, now becoming insensible through drink, staggered around prepared to kill friend as well as foe.

If such creatures carried severed heads, their more astute comrades had sought out sacks to bear away that which they were busy looting, objects of gold and silver. Others had found money chests and were heading back out of the city to a place where they could be securely left, herding before them the women and children they would subsequently sell. All Flavius could do was let them pass as he struggled to move forward, for he had a more serious purpose.

One time part of Magna Graecia, Naples had been thoroughly Romanised so Flavius knew to head for what had been the Forum
and the Senate House, finding matters easing as he got ahead of his looting soldiery. The area surrounded by the old Roman buildings, as well as the spoke-like thoroughfares and one-time pagan temples now turned into churches, were packed with those who had found time to flee with some of their possessions, the sound of their mass prayers setting up a low hum.

The notables who had defied Flavius had scurried to the Senate House in the hope that they would be defended by what remained of the Goth garrison who had moved out of the fortress to defend the walls and paid a high price in the process. Flavius found what amounted to a small body of men lined up before the oration platform making ready to sell their lives dearly. Before them lay several bloodied and battered bodies, one being that of Asclepiodotus.

Flavius first ordered that the routes to this central precinct be blocked to keep out his own marauding soldiers, then moved forward to parley with the surviving Goths, a mere seventy men now facing hundreds. Stephanus emerged from between the columns of the building, moving through the line of armed men to close with the conqueror and to bow low.

‘It falls to me to surrender to you our city and to plead for mercy.’

‘Too late for that, Stephanus. I have the right to put every man, woman and child to the sword.’

‘Which I hope your Christian conscience will not allow.’

Flavius looked at the body of Asclepiodotus and not just him; the man who had preached defiance was surrounded by what had to have been his supporters as well as the stones by which they had been so cruelly slain. Seeing the direction of the gaze, Stephanus acknowledged an obvious truth: that he and his companions had been killed by his own people.

‘And Pastor?’

‘His heart gave out when he heard he might have to face you.’

‘He struck me as being a fool, perhaps he was not.’ Looking past Stephanus, Flavius now gazed on the line of Goths. ‘These men do not have to die, perhaps that would be better coming from you than me.’

‘What can I offer them, General?’

‘Life, no more. I have no desire to fight them twice, therefore they will, if they disarm, be put aboard a ship for Sicily.’

‘And slavery?’

‘Or they can serve as mercenaries on the eastern frontier of the empire. As I said, life – and if they decline, Stephanus, I bid you look to your own safety and get inside your Senate House, for if fighting breaks out it is never a respecter of persons, however honourable they may be.’

The exchange Stephanus undertook was out of earshot of Flavius or any of his
comitatus
, men whom he suspected were hoping the Goths would refuse to surrender. Their comrades were spilling blood and lining their purse; they too would want that they should have the chance to do likewise. Stephanus obviously had to use persuasion, nothing happening for what seemed an age, until finally, with a clatter of metal on stone, spears and swords were discarded, the Neapolitan notable retracing his steps as Flavius gave his commands.

‘Solomon, keep the cordon I have set up in place. A party to take the Goths as prisoners, the rest may relieve those who came here for safety of what valuables they carry, that to be shared out equally.’ He then addressed Stephanus again, now standing before him, his face ashen. ‘I require you to take me to the city treasury.’

That lay in a separate building, also once a pagan temple and still guarded by Neapolitan troops, who were quickly disarmed. There Flavius was greeted with the sight of large coffers, which once opened
were full of gold and silver coin, so much that it was beyond human ability to carry them any distance. A sturdy cart was ordered up so they could be transported back to his encampment, escorted by Photius, to be given into the care of Procopius.