Usurper: A Novel of the Fall of Rome by Rodgers David Gray

Author:Rodgers, David Gray [Rodgers, David Gray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Southern Gaul & Hispania, 408

XX: Valentia Julian, late March, 408

The moon hung where the horizon should have been, a ghostly blur that was unable to penetrate the fog that billowed off the Rhone. It was almost April, but the air retained some of winter’s spite, and it found its way through my armor which now hung loosely on my diminishing frame. I had eaten only a small amount of broth in the last two days, now that Valentia’s grain and wine were long-gone. The city had roughly fifty thousand souls, and there was nothing coming in or out.

We had not been prepared for the siege, but with careful management and stark discipline what food there was had lasted through the bitter winter. But now it was truly gone, and all the horses of the rich had been confiscated, and all the stray animals in the city had been hunted down. For once, a rat was a lucky find. With the grimness that is often the last weapon against despair, men joked about what would come next. There were certainly enough dead from starvation and disease, mostly among the citizenry – who suffered worse than we did. But I knew that it would not come to that. We would soon be done here; and I could only hope that Constantine would choose to end it with a charge against our captors instead of the meek surrender and probable slaughter that Sarus offered us. We could die gloriously – a hero’s death – defending our ideals and our emperors to the last; and as the food ran out and the violence of winter assailed us, a glorious death was a warming thought indeed.

I stood on the battlement trying to force my eyes to see through the darkness and fog. I had an arrow notched to my bowstring, and though my body trembled from cold or from weakness I was eager to use it. I had become quite a good shot over the past few months; with each man I felled becoming some small taste of revenge over the army that contained us, and each corpse-fed dog buying me and a few of my friends another day of life. Some of my victims had been enemies who had wondered too close to the walls, especially in the imagined safety of the outer town. Some had been killed as we repelled organized attacks from Sarus’s troops, though these attacks had been relatively few. However, a few of my bow’s victims had been judiciously executed shots on the insurgents or mobs within our city – men who rushed our troops and tried to open the gates for the enemy.

Most of these men had simply been desperate. They were watching their families starve, and believed that our besiegers would be content to kill us and let the people of Valentia live. But the occasional coordination of these internal attacks with attacks from Sarus’s army testified to the presence of frumentarii or other agents within the city.

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