David Pilling - The Red Death

The sight of so much gold made my eyes bulge. Each coin or solidus was stamped with a stylised portrait of the Emperor and worth twenty-four Greco-Roman carats, or about four and a half grams of pure gold per coin. The solidus was the standard currency of the Empire, which gives some idea of the almost unimaginable wealth that flowed through the imperial coffers.

Thus a bargain was struck, and we became the chattels of a Roman military officer. His name, as his clerk curtly informed my mother in Greek, was Domitius, though we were to refer to him as Kurios (master).

As I had feared, Domitius kept Caledfwlch for himself. I did not see the sword again for many years.

Domitius had his house at the upper end of the Mese, near the Milion and the vast, looming complex of the Great Palace, where the Emperor Anastasius and his court resided. As a high-ranking officer or doryphoroi in the Imperial Army, Domitius was wealthy enough to afford a fine villa inside a walled enclosure with grounds and gardens, and to employ a considerable household of clerks, servants and slaves.

Slaves, of course, were the lowest of the low in Roman society, and supported the weight of that society on their backs. They could be worked to death, abused and flogged as their masters liked, with none to protect them. This was the degraded state my mother and I were reduced to.

Domitius had us taken to his house immediately after purchasing us from Clothaire. I am happy to note that we never saw or heard from the one-legged Frank again. May God excuse my lack of Christian forgiveness, but I sincerely hope he died alone and in great pain.

We saw little of our new master. I suspect Domitius had bought us as an afterthought, since his household was a large one and could always find a place for extra staff. His real interest lay in Caledfwlch. His one and only interview with my mother, whom he summoned to his presence shortly after our arrival, concerned the sword.

“I told him almost nothing,” Eliffer told me later that evening, “but pretended to be ignorant of Caledfwlch’s history and previous ownership. Domitius reeks of ambition. The less he knows the better.”

“I want it back,” I complained, with all the snivelling selfishness of a child. “He has robbed me.”

“Let us work our way into his good graces,” she said soothingly, “and make him think that the sword is nothing but a common gladius. In time, once he realises that it can do him no good, he will give you back your property.”

She was wrong, for a slave has no property, and Domitius was intelligent enough to guess something of the sword’s provenance. I was desperate to retrieve it, and could not sleep properly or perform my duties adequately. Cleaning latrines and mopping floors are tedious enough duties at the best of times, and I earned a number of stripes on my back for my perceived sloth and insolence.

When I did manage to sleep, my dreams were haunted by vague images of slaughter on shadowy battlefields, accompanied by the echoes of war-shouts, clashing steel, blasting trumpets and all the panoply and splendour of war. The only solid presence in these dreams was Caledfwlch, glittering in the midst of a bloody haze.

A host of faceless men wielded the sword. One by one they were cut down, though not before reaping their enemies like ripe corn. The last of them was a gigantic figure, faceless like the rest, but his outline shone like the last rays of the setting sun. A kind of glory surrounded him. When Caledfwlch fell from his hand the glory faded, leaving a dim afterglow that quickly faded into darkness.

My mother despaired of me, and lived in terror that I might commit some supreme folly, such as attempting to steal Caledfwlch from our master’s bedchamber while he slept. Fortunately, God or fate intervened, and some weeks after he purchased us Domitius was summoned away by the Emperor.

He was ordered to accompany his patron, a high-ranking Roman general, on a diplomatic mission to Carthage in North Africa, which was then ruled by the Vandals under their king, Hilderic. Hilderic was careful to maintain good relations with the Eastern Empire. North Africa had once been part of a Roman province, and the Romans occasionally cast jealous eyes at their lost territory.

The sea-voyage to North Africa was long and dangerous, and it would be months before Domitius returned. He was unmarried – I suspect his interests lay in his own sex, though thankfully he never pressed them on me – and inspired little affection among his servants, so his departure was greeted with sorrow by no-one except me.

Domitius took Caledfwlch with him. The prospect of being parted from the sword for so long, perhaps forever, almost made me run mad. I suffered more bad dreams, and neglected my duties to the extent that the freedman who watched over Domitius’s slaves threatened to have me turned out of doors.

“I have thrashed him until my arm aches,” he warned my mother, “and still he refuses to work. It is not good enough. Discipline him, or out he goes. And you with him.”

Eliffer tried her best to bring me to my senses. A mixture of threats and entreaties, salted with her tears, succeeded in extracting from me a reluctant promise of obedience.

“We must play our parts here,” she said, holding me close and stroking my hair, “at least for a little while. Would you have us beg and starve on the streets?”

I kept my word, and gave the freedman no further cause to wear out his vine rods on my back. In the weeks after Domitius’s departure I performed all the dull, menial tasks allotted to me with sullen diligence, fuelled by the intensity of my hatred for them.

The other slaves of the household were a crude, base-born set of Thracians and Bulgars and I know not what else. None were fit to clean my royal mother’s sandals. They mocked us constantly, calling us contemptible little Britons, the progeny of pigs and devils, and shunned our company.

Life in that villa seemed to stretch into eternity. My mother was worked mercilessly hard, and as the weeks turned into months her proud spirit started to crack. All her hopes had been vested in finding a new life in the city of the Romans, one that befitted the rank and status she had enjoyed in Britain. Instead she found herself treated like an animal, and her only son condemned to the same fate.

The stresses and strains on Eliffer’s mind gradually worked their way into her body. Her health started to fail, and made worse by the brutish indifference of the freedman, who had little compassion for slaves that fell ill. One day she fainted in the kitchens, overturning a pan of boiling soup and scalding her legs. The other slaves present could hardly ignore her plight, and carried her to the infirmary.

She lay there for several days in that squalid, ill-lit chamber, neglected save for one ancient female slave whose age rendered her unfit for any task save spooning gruel into the mouths of the sick. There was no medicine on hand, or at least none that the freedman was willing to expend on Eliffer. He was already stretched to the limits of his mercy by allowing her to die indoors. In any case, I think there was no medicine on earth that could cure the wasting sickness in her mind.

I visited her as often as I was permitted in those last days, and sat by her side while she drifted in and out of delirium. At times she thought herself back in Britain, in the halls of Caerleon or Caerwent, and recited conversations she had enjoyed with men long dead.

Much of my long life has been hard and violent, and I am rendered immune to most feeling save the love of Christ that has ever sustained and nourished down the long years. It is hard for me now, in the barren and dried-up prison of old age, to describe the visceral anguish of a child about to lose that which he loves most in the world. Or perhaps simply too painful: there is a locked vault in my heart where I store all the worst that has befallen me in life. To open it would risk self-destruction.