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glared at Senuthius. If the fleshy senator saw the look of pure hate it did nothing to affect his demeanour and his voice was steady as he spoke to those who now surrounded him.
    ‘Time for us to sound the advance, I think.’
     
    It was a much-chastened Flavius Belisarius, needing one good arm to support the other and with the taste of blood still in his mouth, who eventually followed in the wake of the advancing militia, men who did so without the need to raise or employ a weapon. The raiders had made it to their boats and were now out on the river, there to jeer and bare their arses as the first of their enemies came to the bank or to hold up as trophies the shields and armour they had taken from their soldier victims.
    In moving forward the militia had passed the mutilated bodiesof the men of the imperial cohort, few of whom had survived. If they had they were now on the water, destined to be thrown out midstream to drown or to be taken north as slaves. Flavius and Ohannes found the bodies of the centurion and his three sons in a tight cluster not far from the riverbank and it was only later, in a visualisation that would come back to haunt him throughout his life, that Flavius realised how his siblings had sought to protect their father, putting their persons before him in a bid to keep him alive and in control of his cohort and the battle.
    It was a dream that would recur often at night, but also a vision that would come to him unbidden during many a day as he recreated time and again the scene, without ever being sure he had the right of it. He would remember with clarity that all four were covered in blood and had multiple wounds, deep cuts to arms and body, so that it was impossible to know which blow was the one to prove fatal, while around them, in ground made soggy by so much gore, lay a dozen corpses of the men they had slain, evidence that they had not been cheaply overcome; the barbarians who had escaped would be jubilant but on this spot they had paid a heavy price to kill the men of the Belisarius family.
    Flavius fell weeping to his knees and if he had suffered mental turmoil before this moment it was as nothing to what he was going through now, that jumbled up with the seeking of a reason why this should have happened. Being alive for fourteen summers did not prepare anyone for this, the sudden realisation that all the pillars that supported his life, barring his absent mother, were gone.
    ‘We must get a cart, young sir, and take their bodies home to be laid out for burial.’
    Ohannes’s soft injunction took time to penetrate the troubledmind of the kneeling youth and when it did that brought forth an image of the slimy, pederast bishop Gregory Blastos overseeing the funeral rites, a thought at which Flavius rebelled.
    If Senuthius had betrayed his family then he had done so with the blessing of a man who did not deserve the ecclesiastical title he wore. Added to that, Blastos would say Mass according to the Monophysite creed, an interpretation of gospel and the nature of God to which his father had never subscribed.
    Decimus Belisarius had worn his Christian faith as a badge of honour and that permeated his family. That said, he had been sure that if salvation existed there were more routes to grace than the one solely provided by a church that was so often corrupt, with prelates and priests who seemed to care more for their own comfort than that of God’s flock. It had also become more Eastern and mystical, less the pure faith into which he had happily been subsumed as a young man.
    Proud to call himself a Roman he had allowed himself no truck with the way the empire leant towards the Greek in both language and behaviour, refusing to allow anyone to address him as
kentarchos
instead of centurion, quick to remind any person unwise enough to use that military title of the nature of the domain of which they were part. It was not a Greek polity even if a high proportion of the population were of that