THE JOURNEY FROM the very edge of the world, Britannia, to its new centre, Ravenna, took Hagan several weeks, during which time winter turned to early spring. It was a huge distance, but under normal circumstances it should not have taken that long. Imperial messengers, galloping on the network of roads that spanned the Empire and were dotted with mansiones that allowed them to change horses every ten miles, could cover the distance in eight or nine days.
The Empire, however, had lumbered into a new crisis. The Huns, Hagan had learned, had crossed the Danube and torn a bloody swathe through Germania and northern Gaul. The roads between northern Gaul and Italia were not safe. Therefore they had sailed most of the way on board a ship of the Imperial Navy.
Hagan found it ironic that the Huns, the murderous Roman lapdogs who had slaughtered his people, had now turned on their masters just at the time he was on his way to visit the general responsible for unleashing them.
Hagan’s former comrades – Arminius and his Saxon mercenaries – had kept a close watch on him the whole time. On the ship he had been reasonably free to walk around; there was nowhere for him to run away to, after all. But on land, and especially now in the crowded streets of the Roman capital, they huddled close around him. He was not bound or treated like a common prisoner or slave – they had enough respect for him as a warrior who had fought beside them not to allow that – however there was always a guiding hand on his arm, and the Saxons’ hands never strayed far from the hilts of the seax knives they wore at their belts. The message was clear: if he tried to run, the knives would come out.
Whatever General Aetius was paying them to deliver a live Burgundar, it must be worth it. Why he wanted one was another question but no one seemed to know the answer to that.
Arminius, like Hagan, had once been a Roman soldier. Unlike Hagan, however, as the son of a Cherusci king, Arminius had been an officer. On retiring from the Army the German had used what he had learned fighting for Rome to set up his own private army, hiring out warriors to barbarian kings and warlords who needed trained men to augment their own.
In the chaotic world left by the ever-shrinking Roman Empire, there was a lot of work for men like the ones Arminius supplied, and he was not the only ex-Roman soldier plying this trade. As it turned out, they also had not totally cut ties with their former paymasters either. Rome herself often had need of mercenaries to augment her legions so it was good business sense to stay in touch through the network of old soldiers that spanned the known world.
It was through this that Aetius had sent his request for any surviving Burgundars with military experience to be sent to him, where they could be exchanged for a hefty sum in gold and silver. For what purpose he did not say. Suspecting the Britons they were working for were on the verge of sending an appeal for help to the Roman Magister Militum, Arminius had seen a way to kill two birds with one stone and get paid twice for the same journey: once for guarding Vortigern’s emissaries on their dangerous trip to Ravenna and again for delivering a Burgundar to Aetius while they were there.
‘You Burgundars are like the rarest of spices,’ Arminius had told Hagan on the voyage. ‘Very scarce and hard to find.’
‘Thanks to Aetius,’ Hagan had replied.
Arminius had told Hagan that Aetius meant him no harm, but Hagan suspected he was only saying this to keep him quiet on the voyage. He suspected that perhaps Aetius had sent out this plea for surviving Burgundars so he could finish the job he started at Vorbetomagus all those years ago and make sure every last one was annihilated.
Two could play that game. If he got within striking distance of the general, Hagan could get revenge for the death of his folk. Though, as he knew from bitter experience, such chances were very rare indeed. He had been close to Aetius a number of times during his army years and knew the man was always surrounded by bodyguards.
At Ravenna they disembarked at its bustling port. The emissaries of the Britons, which included Bishop Cadoc, huddled together while Arminius sought the correct officials who could ensure they got access to the general. After some time he returned, now accompanied by several civil servants in togas and a cohort of soldiers, comitatenses of the interior field army. After that they set off into the city, their legs still unsteady from the long time spent at sea.
They pushed their way through the crowded streets. It was past midday and the stone-paved streets of the city were thronged with people. Ravenna was one of the largest cities in the world now. It had already been a major port before the Imperial Court had moved there from Rome forty years before, and that re-centring of power had accelerated the growth of the city tenfold.
The soldiers went in front and behind, making room for the timid Britons and their mercenary bodyguards. Hagan was surrounded by Arminius’s Saxons, just in case he decided to try to make a run for it at this very last leg of the trip.
It was cold and rain began to spit from the sky, as benefitted a day in very early spring, though nowhere near the snow and biting cold that had accompanied this time of year in Hagan’s homeland.
As he pulled the hood of his cloak up, Hagan thought how far he had come since the days of his childhood. Fifteen winters had passed since he had survived the annihilation of his kindred at Vorbetomagus. In that time Hagan had wandered far and seen many things. On that fateful day he and the other remnants of the Burgundar horde, like his old friend Gunderic, had been marched away from Vorbetomagus and pressed into service in the Roman Army, leaving behind the burned-out ruins of what had once been their homeland.
Gunderic, being the son of a king, had been inducted into an elite cavalry unit. As he watched Gunderic ride away, never to see him again, Hagan had thought how another familiar part of his life was leaving him.
The rest of the Burgundars with Hagan had been drilled in Roman tactics and supplied with weapons and armour. They began intensive training in the Roman tongue, then they were incorporated as a cohort of foot soldiers – pedes – in a legion which was mostly recruited from German tribes.
Their commander, Flavius Maximus, was a Roman of the old kind. His discipline was harsh but, Hagan had to concede, he was always fair to his men. It was clear where you stood with Maximus: any man who followed orders and did not shirk his duty was welcome in the commander’s unit and always got his fair share of the loot after battle. Anyone who didn’t, did not last long.
The Burgundars, Hagan had soon learned, were not the only thorn in Rome’s side. The Empire was under constant attack from tribes outside its borders and rebellions from within. General Aetius’s next task had been to put down a rebellion of the Bacaudae of Armorica in north-west Gaul.
In the fighting that followed, the Burgundar cohort suffered more casualties and it was not long before it was unsustainable as a cohesive unit. They were disbanded and scattered across the other legions to make up for those other units’ losses and Hagan saw the final remnants of his home and his people dispersed.
Hagan knew that standing in a shield wall waiting to die was not the best use of his talents and was eager to find something more suitable. The Army was good at making the best use of its men’s skills – for its own benefit of course. Flavius Maximus recognised Hagan’s hunting skills and thought they would be best employed in the exploratores, the scouts who went ahead of the legions to prepare the way.
In those years Hagan found that the ‘Roman’ army was in fact mostly made up of the people the Romans called barbarians. He found himself fighting alongside men from all over the known world, many of them conscripts like himself. They defeated the Bacaudae then had to march to the other side of the Western Empire to face down invading Gepids and Alans. So it went on, year after year, marching north, south, east and west, to Germania, Hispania and Gaul, defending an Empire he had no love for against invaders or putting down rebels.
Discipline was harsh, the conditions miserable, and pay days came few and far between. Often the tribes Hagan found himself fighting against shared more in common with him than the men who fought by his side did.
The hardest thing he had had to deal with was fighting alongside Huns. General Aetius, he had learned, had been brought up as a hostage in the court of the Hun King, and it seemed he had now come to depend on them for their cavalry. The Huns’ effectiveness was frightening and, when let loose to do as they pleased, they were utterly ruthless. It was understandable, but for Hagan unpalatable after what he had seen at Vorbetomagus.
The Visigoths, the Western Goths, were their most persistent foes. Every time Roman forces defeated this people Hagan somehow knew they would find themselves fighting them again soon. It had been the Visigoths who had sacked Rome itself in his father’s youth. It had been that calamitous defeat that had pushed the Emperor to move his court from Rome to the easier defended Ravenna. That defeat had shocked the Romans to their very souls and the memory of it continued to haunt them. It was the Goths they worried about most and, as if to taunt them, the Goths just kept on coming back.
It was a Gothic spear that had ruined the rusted iron rings of his cheap Army-issued mail shirt and led to Hagan being discharged. The wound was deep and took a long time to heal. The legion had to move on, so Hagan was handed his diploma and left behind to recover by himself.
Then began the loneliest part of his life. Miserable as army life had been, he had now lost the comradeship and routine that was such an integral part of it. He was alone. The years of army life had left him without a wife and while he was still a young man, he was older than most other men when they got married. Not many women would want a husband who was much older than them, especially one with neither land or money.
When Hagan’s shoulder did recover he was faced with the dilemma of what he would do for the rest of his life. All he knew how to do was fight and hunt, but he had no people to fight for, no homeland to defend, no lord to give him bread or gold in exchange for the use of his sword arm. He was nothing. A homeless wanderer.
Yet he had found out that the world was a bloody, violent place and there was always plenty of work for a trained warrior. He had sold his skills to the highest bidder, becoming a warrior in many warbands that ranged across the edges of the Empire and beyond. Sometimes he fought for tribes who were foederati, sometimes for enemies of Rome. He had raided with Hermeric, King of the Suebi, along the coast of the Franks, fought with King Bisinus of the Thuringians, and spent some time in the wars beyond Germania the Greater.
He was never completely trusted however, never fully accepted into any of the warbands he fought with. The best positions always went to others whose blood was shared with the king or lord who led the warband. They could be trusted, unlike the sellswords who might stab their leader in the back on the promise of gold. After victories the conquered lands were given to members of the leaders’ own people, the mercenaries were only ever granted coins.
There was no one Hagan could reminisce with. No one who remembered the kingdom of the Burgundars in its days of glory. While other tribes spoke mostly the same tongue as him, however heavily accented, no one knew the poetry of his people, their sagas or their customs. There was no one who he could sing the old songs with.
Eventually he had by chance run into an old Saxon comrade from the Army in a tavern in Germania. The man had told Hagan about Arminius, who was now retired from the Army and looking for good reliable men for his new venture. The Britons were recruiting sellswords to defend them from raids by the Scots and Picts and Arminius, using the logistics skills he had gained in the Roman Army, was organising squads of men from among the Saxons for that purpose. The prospect of being among fellow former soldiers, even men he didn’t know, was too much for Hagan to resist. He had set off north.
Now, as he made his way along the crowded pavement in Ravenna, he mused on how he had travelled around the edges of the known world, and now here he was at the very centre of it. The Empire may not have been what it once was, but Rome, even if you considered it an empire divided nowadays, was still the single greatest power in the world.
Hagan had been in cities before but he could not remember one like this. Arminius had mentioned on the voyage that perhaps fifty thousand people lived in Ravenna. That number was unimaginable to him – it was probably more than the entire Burgundar people had numbered at the time of their annihilation. Now, amid the thronging masses of the crowded city he could well believe it. It was this – the sheer size and scale of the Rome Empire – that made her so enduring and invincible. Individual tribes like his could never hope to stand against such might.
Yet even here, in the very heart of the Empire, there were signs of decay. The packed streets were busy with carts, wagons and other vehicles but the shit of the oxen and horses that drew them had not been lifted in weeks and their wheels ploughed ruts through mounds of it. He passed shops, taverns, three-storey high tenements and brothels, all busy, but many walls were scratched with graffiti or daubed with political slogans. Many of the public fountains and water troughs they passed by were dry and clogged with rubbish. Gangs of young men hung around at every crossroads, looking for the chance to cause mischief or rob unsuspecting passers-by. At the sight of the cohort of soldiers marching Hagan and the others along, they slunk away into nearby alleys.
The further they walked the more the city changed. The tightly packed buildings of the city centre gave way to large villas set back from the road in their own grounds. Eventually they arrived at a particularly large one. Here the company turned off the main road and approached the front door. This could only be the house of Aetius. Hagan felt the Saxons around him crowding closer, just in case he thought of running.
Two soldiers stood guard at the entrance. At the sight of the officials accompanying Hagan and the others, they nodded and stood aside to let them enter the main building.
They walked into the chill of the atrium of the house which had a tiled floor, a high roof and a pool to catch rainwater that came in through a skylight. To the right of the door General Aetius’s old military cuirass and helmet were arranged on a stand, as if his ghost stood guard over the entrance. They were scarred with the signs of many battles. Hagan had seen the general wearing them in anger and conceded that despite his hatred for the man, Aetius had never shirked the responsibility of being at the sharp end of war, unlike a lot of leaders.
The walls on either side of the room were lined with plaster faces. Hagan knew this was a ghoulish tradition of the Romans, who made casts of their relatives’ visages when they died. The line of death masks that now stared blank-eyed from the walls were the general’s forefathers, generations of men who had fought for the Senate and people of Rome.
A male slave met them and ushered them up a set of stairs to a grand set of double doors. He knocked on the door then poked his head in to announce the group’s arrival.
A gruff command to enter came from inside.
The slave turned around, an apologetic expression on his face.
‘The general wishes to see Lord Arminius and the Burgundar first,’ he said. ‘If the rest of you could wait outside?’
The delegation of Britons, the bishop especially, looked most indignant but said nothing.
The slave pushed the door open then stood aside so Hagan and Arminius could enter the room beyond.
There, reclining on a couch, was General Flavius Aetius, the Magister Militum, one of the most powerful men in the Roman Empire and the single person in the world Hagan hated most.