To finance the expedition the treasuries of both East and West were emptied, yielding one hundred and thirty thousand pounds’ weight (fifty-eight tons!) of gold. Thus was raised a vast combined operation: a fleet of eleven hundred ships transporting a force, according to Gibbon’s estimate (and his figures are usually reliable), upward of a hundred thousand strong. In June 468, the great armada set sail from the Bosphorus, carrying with it not only one of the largest armies the world had ever seen, but the hopes of salvation for the Western Empire.
* The efficient state post used relays of horses operating from postal stations 8-10 miles apart. Subject to official permit, it could be used by civilian VIPs.
PART I
PROLOGUE
Like an endless row of needles, the mast-tips of the approaching fleet rose above the horizon, followed by the white flecks of sails then dark hulls — hundreds upon hundreds of them. The Vandal scout, watching from the northern tip of Mercurii Promontorium,* the monstrous headland pointing like an accusing finger from the African coast towards Sicilia, tried for a time to estimate the number of ships, then abandoned the attempt. As well essay to count the pebbles on a beach. Scrambling into the saddle of his waiting mount, he spurred off to bring the news to his master, Gaiseric, king of the Vandals.
The swirling crowds that filled the streets and squares of Carthage — from the forum crowning Byrsa Hill, to the quays beside the great twin harbours (naval and trading) and the sprawling suburbs of Megara to the west — seethed with aggressive excitement. Almost all the faces were of Romans, Moors and native Berbers. Those Vandals rash enough to venture out of doors had encountered a barrage of jeers, insults, rotten fruit, and even stones. For at last the Romans had arrived, to drive out the swaggering yellow-haired tyrants, with their harsh German voices and ugly sun-reddened skins, who for nearly two generations had bullied and oppressed the citizens of Roman Africa. Like wildfire, the news had spread that the Roman fleet — of over a thousand sail, some claimed — was even now riding at anchor less than forty miles to the north. The hour of deliverance had surely come.
Seated before his council within the great basilica of Carthage, where the baying of the mobs sounded only as a distant murmur, Gaiseric, though he gave no outward sign, was worried, deeply worried. Since seizing Roman Africa forty years before, he had maintained his grip on the territory by a mixture of luck and cunning, fomenting dissension between his enemies to play them off against one another, then striking when, divided, they were at their weakest. But now, it seemed, luck, fate (the ‘weird’ of his ancestors in their cold northern forests), call it what you will, had finally deserted him. For let the army of the Romans, currently aboard their fleet at anchor off the western shore of Mercurii Promontorium, once disembark, and he was finished. He was certainly outnumbered, probably vastly so, and, while his Vandal warriors would fight with ferocious courage, they were no match for the armoured Romans with their iron discipline. Nor could he rely on the support of his native auxiliaries; anticipating a Vandal defeat, they would undoubtedly desert to the Romans.
The only counter left him in the game was to play for time. If only the Roman commander (one Basiliscus, so his spies in Constantinople had informed him) could be prevented from landing his army, until. . Until the wind reversed direction, pinning the Romans against the western shore of the great promontory? Lead might float. At this time of year the prevailing south-easterly, famed for its constancy from time immemorial, could be expected to blow for weeks yet. With the wind in their favour, the Romans could sail at any time they chose, to establish a beachhead westward of their present position.
Gaiseric rose, to address his assembled war-leaders and advisers. Though stooped with age, and lame from an early riding accident, the Vandal monarch, white mane falling to his shoulders, was still an impressive figure, an aura of ruthless will and power seeming to emanate from him.
‘Who can tell me of this Basiliscus?’ the king demanded, in his deep, guttural voice.
‘Sire, he is the son-in-law of Leo, the Greek who sits on the throne of Constantinople,’ offered a battle-scarred veteran. Like many present, he had adopted the burnous of the local Berbers, a hooded cloak of light material affording some protection from the fierce sub-tropical sun, to which the Vandals’ fair skins were especially vulnerable. ‘An able general, it would seem. They say he drove the last of Attila’s sons from Dacia and Macedonia when they tried to find sanctuary within the Eastern Empire.’
‘Does he love gold?’
‘What Roman does not, Sire?’ answered a grey-haired councillor. ‘But if you mean can he be bribed? Unlikely, I would say. The man is hardly poor, so why risk his reputation?’
Further discussion concerning the relative strengths of the opposing forces served only to confirm Gaiseric’s worst fears. Dismissing the council, he sent for Engedda, a ‘cunning man’, skilled in the arts of healing, wise in the ways of beasts, and the lore of weather. When the sage arrived — a tiny shrivelled Ethiopian whose black skin hung in wrinkled folds from his ancient frame — Gaiseric put the question ‘Will the wind change, and if so when?’
‘Two questions, Mighty One,’ cackled the sage. ‘My fee is therefore double. Let us say. . twenty fat kine? To great Kaiseric, who is a river to his people, such a price is nothing. As it says in our Holy Book, “The labourer is worthy of his hire.”’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Engedda,’ growled the king, secretly amused by the little man’s effrontery. With Gaiseric’s hatred of all things Roman common knowledge, no one but Engedda would have dared address him as ‘Kaiseric’, incorporating the title of a Roman emperor into the monarch’s name. As for the ‘our’, referring to the Bible, Gaiseric had to remind himself that the Ethiopians had been converted to Christianity even before his own people. (As Arians, however, the Vandals were heretics in the eyes of the Orthodox Romans.) ‘When may I expect an answer?’
Engedda rolled his eyes portentously. ‘First, I must consult the spirits of my ancestors,’ he intoned. ‘Tomorrow at noon, ask what they have told me.’
On being informed by Engedda, at the appointed time, that in five days the wind would begin to blow from the north-west, Gaiseric felt a stab of hope. In thirty years he had never known the Ethiopian to be wrong. (Of course, he told himself, Engedda’s claims concerning supernatural assistance were just part of his persona, like his magician’s rattle and the bag of bones around his neck. The sage’s uncanny ability to predict the weather had to rest on a skill at reading signs, imperceptible to others, in the behaviour of birds and insects, cloud-patterns, the dryness or dampness of the air, etc.) If, for the next five days, the Romans could somehow be kept from weighing anchor, disaster might yet be staved off. Filled with renewed vigour and purpose, the old king began to lay his plans.
‘For God’s sake, Basiliscus, give the order for the fleet to sail!’ shouted Iohannes, the commander’s senior general. He banged the table in frustration, making a silver wine-jug jump, spilling ruby drops on a chart of the North African coast. They were in the great cabin of the flag-ship, Perseus, one of the dromons that made up the strike force of the fleet. Monster galleys, these were armed with viciously pointed bronze rams which could punch a gaping hole in an enemy vessel below the waterline, causing it to sink. ‘Every hour that we delay allows Gaiseric to strengthen his resources.’