Legacy I: The Last Son of Rome by Baltas Dimitri

Author:Baltas, Dimitri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

17

ANTIOCH

Lucian felt an unyielding heaviness clamp his heart.

The wagon jolted on the pitted road as it carried them past the forlorn faces and stooped shoulders of people who had lost everything, forced now to the wayside by passing traffic of which he was a part. It didn’t matter who they were or how they travelled; old, young, alone or in groups, the survivors had the same blank expression. It was as though a light within them had been snuffed out with the collapse of their homes and livelihoods. It was a collective shock felt by all the survivors, a collective shock which had only just begun.

Beside him, Procopius maintained an unreadable silence, his gaze fixed on the boards beneath his feet. He rubbed his hands furiously like a man trying to generate heat. Across from him, Andreas stared out the back of the wagon, eyes moist at the parting with Baesus and his crew. It had been hard for him, hard for them all, to deal with the double blows of disaster and farewell. Lucian felt the urge to say something, anything really, but nothing inspired came to him. With impotent guilt, he watched the approaching city gates, hoping, despite knowing it was irrational, that the city had been spared most of what had happened to its port town.

He ran his eyes along the length of the unbroken chain of walls. Like all such defensive works, they made the beholder feel small and insignificant as they passed within its shadow. Some sections of the walls were run-through with jagged rents from top to bottom, and some sections of the battlements were missing completely, as though some giant beast had taken bites out of them. Such signs were simply a foretaste of what lay beyond. Lucian took hold of his pendant and squeezed it. All around them people were hungry, tired, and desperate, bunching up in large groups to enter Antioch and its imagined safety.

Procopius recovered from his silent stupor for long enough to flash the imperial missive to the soldiers controlling the flow of people into the city. The weight of duty appeared to sit heavily on their shoulders. To a man, their movements were slow and laboured, and when their commander took the missive, his eyes seemed to stare blankly through it. It was handed back quickly, and after a lazy gesture, a passage was made for the wagon to steer through. This took no small measure of physical ‘encouragement’ from the soldiers to shift the milling masses. Lucian couldn’t ignore the enraged glares of those they overtook. Duty was supposed to feel enriching.

They passed through the gates. First to strike him was the smell of offal and human waste. The most visible thing he could see, aside from shuffling people, were piles of strewn rubble; a testament to what had happened – but fortunately most of the structures still stood. As they moved deeper into the city, each building told the story of its age. Some must have

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