Free Triumph by Jack Ludlow Page B

friend Antonina sail for Carthage with her husband, and if at the time Flavius had wondered at the reason for such a request, he was eventually disabused by Procopius.
    Antonina and Theodora were bosom friends from their days working in those taverns so beloved of Justinian. When the latter had moved into the imperial palace as wife to the then co-emperor, Antonina had been granted an apartment of her own so they could remain close. It was a gloomy thought on which Flavius spent much time in reflection; the way he and she had been brought together, sucking him into a marriage that at the time had seemed to him a gift from God.
    Older than him and previously married, Antonina already had a son in Photius who, delightfully, had treated him from the very beginning as if he was his real father. His wife was vastly moreexperienced in so many ways than her paramour, not least in the bedchamber, a fact in later consideration being not one to dwell on. If Theodora had been no saint it was reasonable, if uncomfortable, to assume the same applied to her close friend.
    Scales had covered his eyes and Flavius too often recalled the day they were frayed by his secretary. Procopius had risked his own position to tell him of two truths: that Antonina had a passion for Theodosius and secondly and no less disturbing, she was in constant communication with the Empress. In effect he thought she was spying on him.
    ‘I’d rather have Witigis sharing my Roman villa than you, my dear.’
    These whispered sentiments were expressed as he affixed his seal to the latest missive telling Antonina she must stay in Naples. To have her in Rome would mean facing the demons of the knowledge he had, too much of a distraction for an army commander trying to win a desperate battle.
     
    The seven palisaded camps Witigis had set up to invest Rome might seem formidable, and in normal circumstances could have been so. What the Goth could not calculate for was the nature of the man and the army he faced. Even many of those who had not been personally trained by Flavius Belisarius had fought with him for several years now, the junior commanders included, though that did not always apply to his immediate subordinates, men whose views required to be accommodated.
    Given he knew his men well and they trusted him, this allowed Flavius a flexibility denied to any contemporary general. Nowhere did that hold more true than within his own comitatus , the bucellarii component forming a unit he had first brought into being, marrying the abilities of the Sassanid heavily horsed and armoured cataphracts with the fast-riding archery tactics of the Huns.
    There were light cavalry too, but men so well taught and their leaders so experienced they acted with a different state of mind to those they generally opposed. If they charged, which they were eager to do, it was with a specific aim in mind, to either rout a fleeing enemy or, more often, to break up any infantry attack. That achieved they would quickly re-form and get back to the position from which they set out, to remain a cohesive asset to their general.
    With their siege equipment destroyed and seemingly at a loss to conjure up any variation of tactics, Flavius calculated Witigis was not planning any immediate assaults. This presented a window in which the Goths would remain in their camps until their king was ready for another bout, and they were far enough apart to allow for each to be tested in turn.
    It was necessary to order the walls to be cleared on the day of his first sortie. A parapet crowded with the now mainly male citizens of Rome would merely alert the enemy to the fact of impeding action. Nor were there trumpets; Flavius sent two centuries of his men out of the Porta Salaria with orders to occupy the crown of one of the many vine-covered hills that dotted the landscape and sat within close proximity to one of the Goth camps.
    The reaction was as had been anticipated; the enemy quickly gathered to repel this