Then, as quickly as it had commenced, the rain cleared — revealing to Justinian an appalling sight. A large party of Galla (who must have descended the path from the fortress to the base of Magdala, under cover of the squall) was charging towards the catapults! Justinian stared in horror at the rapidly advancing mass of warriors — immensely tall men with pitch-black skins, and beardless faces surmounted by monstrous globes of fuzzy hair, their delicate, almost effeminate features contorted with battle frenzy, vicious-looking spears poised to strike. He opened his mouth to give the order to charge — but no sound came. He was aware that instant action was imperative, but seemed frozen in the saddle.
‘Ras!’* exclaimed his second-in-command, turning to him with a desperate expression. The urgency in the man’s cry jolted Justinian out of his immobility; turning to his men, he shouted, ‘Charge!’
The Roman cavalry, the Aethiopians racing at their side, swept down on the Galla; but too late — just — to save the engineers, who perished to a man, skewered by those terrible spears. Justinian saw Valerian go down, a reddened blade projecting a hand’s-breadth from his back. Then the horsemen were among the Galla, cutting them down with lethal swipes of their long spathae. The encounter was brief and bloody. Despite displaying ferocious courage, the Galla — incapable through temperament and tradition of presenting a defensive ring of spears against the cavalry, the only tactic that might have proved effective — fell by scores, before suddenly turning and retreating pell-mell back to the citadel.
In an agony of grief and self-recrimination, Justinian, in conjunction with the Negus and both their senior officers, now threw himself into organizing the assault. The Galla in their sortie had not had time to damage or destroy the catapults; fresh teams of engineers resumed the bombardment, and by noon the main gate had been battered down. After bitter hand-to-hand fighting, a storming-party then managed to clear the entrance long enough for a large contingent from the expedition to gain access to the fortress. As was usual in such circumstances, no quarter was shown to the defenders, who were hunted down and killed like rats.
After the fall of Magdala, the remainder of the campaign came almost as an anti-climax. Without further incident, the expedition proceeded to the coast, where waiting Roman transports conveyed it across the straits to Arabia Felix. Dhu-Nuwas and his army were duly brought to battle and decisively routed, the Himyarite leader being killed in the fighting. With Aethiopian rule and Christianity restored to the Sabaeans, the Negus and his warriors returned to Africa, and Justinian — victorious but sick in soul — sailed back with the Romans to Constantinople.
* The Blue Nile.
* Could these Gelada baboons be the origin of the legend of the ‘dog-faced men’ — a belief that stubbornly persisted throughout the Middle Ages?
* Shoot. Orders in the East Roman army were still being given in Latin.
* Lord.
PART III
NINE
They [Theodora and Justimian] set free from a licentiousness fit only for slaves
the women who were struggling with extreme poverty, providing them with
independent maintenance and setting virtue free*
‘Benedico vos in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,’ intoned Epiphanius, Patriarch of Constantinople, at the conclusion of the marriage service in the great Church of the Holy Wisdom, adorned by splendid mosaics and myriad statues of emperors and saints, with windows glazed by plates of translucent marble. Justinian and Theodora were then given the sacrament of Christ’s body, followed by that of His blood in a silver spoon. The veil held over the pair was now exchanged for nuptial crowns, and hand in hand, they walked slowly down the thronged nave, past courtiers, senators, patricians, officers of the Excubitors and Scholae, ministers and civil servants — all splendidly arrayed in parade uniforms or long silk robes. Peering down excitedly from the gallery, among the assembled ladies-in-waiting, maids of honour, and wives and daughters of the dignitaries in the nave below, were Theodora’s mother, and her sisters Comito and Anastasia.
Emerging from the church into the Augusteum, Justinian and Theodora showed themselves to the vast and enthusiastic crowd waiting in the great square. Only among the upper classes, following the wedded pair in procession, were murmurings of disapproval heard: ‘. . He’s not one of us, that’s for sure. . a pair of upstarts. . He’s got barbarian ancestors, I’ve heard, and she used to be an actress — an actress! Justin had to change the law forbidding stage performers from marrying people of higher rank. . the wedding had to be postponed, you know, until the old Empress Euphemia died; she wasn’t going to countenance that common little tart succeeding to the throne. . and did you see her mother and sisters in the gallery, dressed up to the nines in those ghastly outfits, fancying themselves as good as senators’ wives? I hear that Comito, the eldest daughter is to marry a general; whatever next — patricians’ daughters marrying charioteers. .?’
Theodora’s heart swelled with pride as the crowd began to cheer. Eat your heart out, Hecebolus, she thought, and you Greens who taunted my family and me when we appealed to you for help in the Hippodrome all those years ago, and you narrow-minded snobs among the aristocracy and, worst of all, among the nouveaux riches, who’d looked down on me because I trod the boards. From being regarded as the lowest of the low I’m now above the lot of you, married to one destined to become the ruler of New Rome, the most powerful man in the world. Fondly, she glanced at the tall, handsome figure to her right: this kind, brilliant, sensitive, ambitious, vulnerable man — whom she’d mended and made whole, and who would never come to harm as long as she was by his side. She remembered their first meeting, a year ago. .
Following her return to the capital from Antioch, Theodora invested some of the money Timothy had given her into renting a property in Region VIII near the Julian Harbour — an area populated by small craftsmen, where in consequence the rents were not too high. Above the living quarters of the house was a large, well-lit garret, which (consulting Macedonia’s business plan) she set about converting into a workshop for spinning wool. Bypassing middlemen, she contacted (from a list again supplied by Macedonia) various suppliers from whom she obtained stocks of fine quality wool grown by sheep-farmers in the high central plateaux of Anatolia. Next, following a cause close to her heart, she recruited out-of-work actresses as workers in her business. As she knew from bitter personal experience, they might otherwise be tempted into prostitution to make ends meet. With experienced spinners hired to train her workers, Theodora’s business flourished, as clothiers, soon recognizing the quality of her product, competed to buy her yarns.
She longed to offer employment to girls forced to work in brothels, but accepted, sadly, that this was something beyond her present power to achieve. The plight of such females was wretched, amounting to virtual slavery. With the hope of enlisting a powerful ally in tackling this evil, she decided to approach Petrus Sabbatius (renamed Justinian on his becoming consul, she discovered), to whom she had a letter of introduction provided by Macedonia. His impressive list of titles suggested a man of standing and importance who might, she thought, be able to help provided she could win him round. Her hopes were further raised when she learned that this Justinian was none other than the nephew of the emperor.