Jack Ludlow: Vengeance

Decimus Belisarius was convinced that most of the Sklaveni, certainly the older members, were content to live in peace, and given they had as much to fear from Alans and Huns as did the citizens of the empire, they should be counted as potential allies, not as enemies or a source of ill-gotten profit.

‘Who can blame them if they respond in like manner?’

His father would always splutter this protest when the subject came up, which it too frequently did, usually following on from some rapid vengeful response that, coming in reprisal, he was called upon to contain.

‘Taking good citizens from farms I struggle to protect, using those they kidnap as a means to bargain?’

Not that Senuthius was willing to trade those slaves he had acquired; able, given the number of fighting men he could muster, to protect his own property, it mattered not to him that others suffered from small and revenge-driven raiding parties, citizens taken from their destroyed dwellings to a life of servitude well north of the Danube, for the Sklaveni would not keep them in an area from which they might escape; they passed them on to the Huns or Alans.

Pleas for mercy were left to Decimus Belisarius, who had only insufficient coin and his own honesty to offer in exchange. His coffers were far from full and not every tribal elder trusted his protestations of non-collusion. Too few of those taken ever came home, while attempts to curtail these activities fell on the stony ground of private support.

Senuthius was a senator, and if that was a moribund body that met rarely, if at all, he was still a leading citizen of the empire with well-placed friends and one high-ranking relative at court. It was doubly a problem that he had an ally in Conatus, the too willing to be bribed magister militum per Thracias , based in Marcianopolis. When Decimus complained to his military and gubernatorial superior, Conatus did not even deign to respond.

His cousin Pentheus was likewise a senator, a sly courtier in the imperial household, so even bypassing Conatus produced no results, the functionary being well placed to dismiss or rubbish any written submissions from Decimus Belisarius detailing the Senuthius misdeeds, while praising him as an upright citizen, a man who paid substantial taxes without complaint into the imperial treasury and was continually rated as honourable by the military governor closest to him.

Nor, unlike many of the citizens of the Thracian diocese – and this counted as much as any other factor – did he question the emperor’s right to set the codes of Christian belief that his subjects should follow. These factors had made it impossible to either chastise the swine or to have him indicted for his blatant transgressions.

The person of Gregory Blastos, the local bishop and a close associate of Senuthius, compounded such difficulties, the cleric being a blatant pederast and corrupt priest who was held in the Belisarius household to be a disgrace to his calling. Blastos was a man who saw his Christian duty, which stood above that of looking after his flock, as lining his purse and slaking his carnal desires. Worse, he was a trimmer, a man willing to bend to any prevailing wind to maintain his position.

The empire had been locked for decades in discussions over two competing dogmas concerning the human and divine nature of Jesus, a matter supposedly resolved at a convocation called the Council of Chalcedon. It was not: the dispute simmered on despite the passing of much time, in excess of sixty years, given the bishops of Armenia, Syria and Egypt fought hard to overturn the conclusion. They held on fiercely to a different set of beliefs to that which had been agreed.

Blastos had come to the Diocese of Dorostorum preaching the doctrine as decided at Chalcedon, only to switch when Emperor Anastasius announced his personal endorsement of the Monophysite interpretation and took forcible steps to see it implemented throughout his domains. It was not hard to fathom his reasons, even if many wondered at his principles. Bishops who stuck to the Chalcedonian interpretation and defied Anastasius were, by imperial decree, being dismissed from their diocese and the thought of that Blastos clearly could not abide.

Such suppleness gave him, too, a sympathetic ear in Constantinople; a patriarch who seemed either blind or indifferent to his faults as reported, as long as the revenues he anticipated were forthcoming and the doctrine the emperor insisted upon and he preached was being spread. Any attempt to blacken the Blastos name tended to rebound on the complainant and had done so more than once; the Church, of whatever persuasion in dogma, did not take kindly to accusations that its priests were anything less than saintly!

The citizenry were not blind; if a man of the rank of Senuthius could do as he pleased and their bishop could flaunt his catamites as well as his peculations with impunity, while trimming his principles to suit himself, then why should they too not behave as they wished? The transgressions this caused led, with the wealthier citizens, to furious confrontations and threats of legal redress rarely taken to a satisfying conclusion. With the poorer folk it manifested itself as many a severe whipping, none of which were imposed with any great pleasure, for crimes, many of which were misdemeanours.

The public peace had to be maintained and Decimus Belisarius, even after six years in post still an outsider to this part of the imperial lands, was the man tasked to maintain order – the result being that he was not loved in the first instance as the agent of a state seen to be tax greedy as well as over-intrusive, and he was also resented for his palpable probity, as well as for being the overseer of any physical chastisement of wrongdoing.

Rising ground overlooked the Danube as well as the flat, sometimes flooded plain bordering its waters, land that produced abundant crops, wealth for a few, a good living for many and labour for droves – in all a tempting prosperity. In cresting the ridge Flavius was presented with a panorama of an unfolding military engagement and one that seemed to favour the Roman side, as well as elicit admiration from the observer. Instead of riding to drive back the raiders his father, as indicated by the position of his distant banner, had succeeded in getting between them and the riverbank, thus cutting them off from their boats.

It was a deadly manoeuvre and very obviously a surprising one: the youngster could see the enemy milling around in apparent confusion, noting they were exceedingly numerous, several hundred in number, he reckoned, which made what was already unusual truly exceptional, for in such numbers they could not all be Sklaveni. By closer examination they looked, judging by their distinctive helmets and armour, to be not Sklaveni, but mainly Huns.

‘How did they get to here without anyone knowing?’ Ohannes asked, when Flavius made the identification.

‘Why would the Sklaveni stop them if in doing so they put their own folk and farms at risk? Best to stand aside and let them do their worst to us.’

‘They won’t all be Huns.’

‘No,’ Flavius acknowledged; too many of their close neighbours, seeing a chance of both plunder and revenge, would have joined in. ‘Though from what I can see they are all in a bind, from wherever they hail.’

Between the barbarians and a city full of fearful citizenry stood the local militia, now seemingly fully assembled, and they would match their enemy in strength. They were under the authority of Senuthius, who with his senatorial rank was deferred to and acted as the militia commander. Added to that, he could muster more fighting men than the imperial cohort.

Flavius imagined him to be salivating at the prospect of how many prisoners he could take to sell, for these raiders were likely to be the fittest of their race and he would have a good chance of mass captures. Present too was the Bishop of Dorostorum, his ecclesiastical banner, bearing a golden cross on a white background, raised high to inspire the faithful to deeds of valour that would elevate them in the eyes of God.