He smiled to take the sting out of the threat. ‘Let us hope for a wind on the morrow, but if it fails us again then it is to these fields we will return, for my friends, I tell you there is no amount of training that constitutes too much. What the enemy will do I have no idea. But I must know what we will do, and I must have the confidence to confound any move they make.’
It was not wind that came on the morrow but something close to a calamity. A whole chiliarch of his infantry were unable to parade when called forth by the horns at dawn. Of the three thousand men afflicted, a high number succumbed during the day, dying in an agony of severe stomach pains. This was a situation in which the suspicious and superstitious made merry with rumours of either conspiracy or evil portents.
Flavius had to gather the local priests to go amongst the army and institute prayers, as well as to scotch any wild imagining, and those same priests were to later bury nearly five hundred men. Those who survived, indeed the entire army, needed to know what had happened and the common cause was narrowed down to infected bread baked to look as it should, but with some ingredient within that was potentially deadly. Archelaus was summoned for an explanation.
‘All I do, Flavius Belisarius, is indent for supplies. In the case of bread it is the imperial granaries that provide them and they do so on the instructions of the Cappadocian.’
‘It was not inspected prior to distribution?’
‘Why would it be, we are still in imperial territory?’
Flavius knew it was no good laying blame on Archelaus; the bread had been consumed and the aforementioned John was back in Constantinople, where it would be impossible to prove that he had a hand in what was clearly an attempt to cheat and save money by using questionable and less costly ingredients.
‘It must be disseminated that John is responsible.’
‘He might not be, he would have asked the provincial governor to provide.’
‘He is a villain with enough guilt to spare for his many thefts, so let him carry the responsibility for this. It cannot be you, Archelaus, or the men will lose faith in our provisions.’
The wind came the following day but that had to be ignored; many were still too sick. It was another two days before they could think to depart and they would be leaving behind a mass grave of their unlucky comrades. The now overcrowded argosy finally raised sail and dropped oars, heading due south in sight of the Greek shore, heading for the twin capes that formed the south of the Attic mainland.
Flavius, with little to do, was happy in the company of Antonina and the closest officer members of his comitatus, while she seemed delighted to entertain a group of young and admiring men who set out to flatter her, that is till the weather turned foul and she found herself once more confined and retching to her cot.
Procopius succumbed too, but Flavius kept a steady stomach and was often on deck, his body whipped by the wind, easing and stiffening his legs with the role of the ship. These were the very waters Odysseus sailed through on his return from Troy, and if it was fanciful of him to think himself on a similar odyssey, it was pleasant listening to the breeze singing in the rigging and imagining it to be the voice of the siren Circe.
CHAPTER TWENTY
No matter how good a general a man is, no matter the state of the army he leads, good fortune must attend his efforts and Flavius Belisarius was lucky. Crossing the Adriatic, the only time the fleet was out of sight of land, a contrary wind, not anticipated by the vastly experienced Calonymus, meant that the journey took many days longer than he anticipated. That meant a shortage of water, for to carry enough for both the men and the horses was too taxing even for such a large quantity of transports, and it became brackish and undrinkable. Even then men consumed it until it ran out, adding illness to a raging thirst.
The results would have been catastrophic had the wind not swung round just in time; the horses were in a bad way and the soldiers and sailors Flavius led were worse: it takes very little time in mild weather to suffer from thirst. At sea, with a hot wind and a scorching temperature, confined between stuffy and crowded decks, an hour of deprivation became critical and the time was approaching where the only sustenance for the humans would be the blood of the equines.
Flavius sent the fighting galleys ahead in the hope they could make a landfall and return with enough water to stave off disaster. The abiding sound before that change of wind was of men praying to God, mixed with the neighing of distressed horses and then Hosannas, as they felt the breeze shift and saw the sails swing and the water before the bows begin to cream. They raised Brindisi with little time to spare, glad to find that their galley captains had barges setting out to save them.
There was no pumping to fill barrels, just a stream of pumped water aimed at the crowded decks which the men took at full force into grateful faces before filling buckets for their mounts. From now on and all the way to Sicily, they would again be in sight of the shore, only when they crossed from there to their destination would the same threat occur, a lesser one given the shorter distance between islands.
Restored, it seemed as if everything went in their favour as a fair wind took them round to the Straits of Messina. At Syracuse they found a special market had been set up for them by the Queen of the Goths where they could cheaply buy fresh produce to supplement their rations. The locals were Catholic coreligionists, likewise ruled by Arians, though the Goths allowed them the freedom to worship. They hated the Vandals not only for their persecutions but for the memory of raids and depredations all along the coast: rape, theft, the taking of slaves and murder, so the thought of chastisement of these barbarians was welcome, the people set to carry it out treated as champions.
There had been a constant stream of news and encouragement from Constantinople: Tripolitania was still in revolt and the province of Byzacium was on the verge of an uprising, intelligence supplied by disaffected Christians. There was a message from the leader of the revolt on the island of Sardinia saying he needed scant help in terms of soldiers and certainly no one to command him, which meant little diminution of the forces Flavius would have available.
Procopius went investigating again. Left behind once the fleet sailed on, his task was to interrogate anyone who might provide intelligence on the enemy. Again luck played a part; Procopius ran into an old acquaintance with whom he had studied law. The man was now in the seaborne trade and had recently had a ship and cargo return from Carthage. The master of that vessel was summoned and he was adamant that the Vandal capital was peaceful.
No one there behaved as if an invasion was imminent and Gelimer was not even in the capital city, he was rumoured to be in the eastern province of Byzacium to cow the disaffected populace, which fitted with what had been heard from home. Even more important was the information that he had despatched a force of five thousand of his soldiers, under his brother Tzazon, to quell the rebellion in Sardinia. The sailing master was taken to be questioned by Flavius, now anchored off the southern tip of Sicily.
The other information he provided was just as valuable. As a regular visitor to Carthage he knew how the society of the region was constituted and that again fitted with what was already known. The Vandals had done nothing to integrate with the indigenes until the accession of Hilderic, and with him now in prison they had reverted to old habits and renewed religious persecution.
The barbarians held themselves separate from those over whom they ruled and were very much in the minority, using fear and oppression to keep a grip on the country. They also maintained their migratory traditions: there were no Vandal farmers; every man was a warrior, expected when called upon to heed any call to arms to maintain ethnic supremacy. Only when it came to tactics when fighting was the seafarer at a loss, never having seen them do more than harass people in the crowded streets of the old city, which left Flavius still uncertain of what they would face when he landed.