Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [25]
For a second, Vicki believed that she saw Barbara trying to fight her way through the crowd towards her. The girl reached out her hand towards Barbara's and they almost touched across the heads of the surging crowd. But then she was gone - the last image that Vicki had of Barbara was of her friend falling to the ground, her face frozen in terror, amid a stampede.
Vicki began to lose consciousness, fully aware of how ridiculous it was that she was going to die two-and-a-half thousand years before she was even born. But just as she was about to collapse to the floor, she was grabbed by strong hands and hauled out of the crowd and into a twisting series of back alleys.
'Keep moving,' said a male voice, holding onto her hand and literally dragging her away from the dense centre of the crowd. 'If you want to live, keep moving.'
Chapter Eight
Right Here, Right Now
And if a kingdom be divided against itself that kingdom cannot stand.
Mark 3: 24
It did not take the arriving Roman soldiers long to put down the insurrection.
They were experienced and tough. Hard men, battle-scarred and terrifying to look at. They had fought across the length of the empire against conspiracies and revolutionaries of all shades, creeds and persuasions. In Britannia. In Gaul.
In Germania, Dalmatia, Macedonia, Judaea, Syria, Galatia and Assyria. Through all of the lands of the known world and into the barren wastes beyond. They were a superior race of men and they feared absolutely no one. For they fought with mayhem and violence in their hearts and the promise of the emperor's money uppermost in their minds. What place had true faith and the bleating of sheep against such power as this?
With crimson cloaks, dull-grey body armour and plumed helmets, their black-and-gold shields glinting in the sun and their eagle standards held high, the legion charged into the square and panic rippled across the face of the crowd in a visible wave. They came rushing in a fearsome, shouting, terrifying volley of shields and swords, javelins and nets, separating the crowd with a pincer movement that sliced straight through the heart of the packed market-place.
Everyone was pushed back until those at the edges of the crowd were forced into the narrow passages that surrounded the square. And, once a few had begun to dissipate, like a cork from a wine bottle, this freed the route for others to follow.
The air was filled with dust, whipped up by thousands of scampering feet.
Plus screams and cries for help. And for blood.
Some of the desperate crowd were crushed as they tried to flee the advancing Romans, but many found an exit eventually, tearing their way past those weaker and less mobile than themselves. They fled for their lives from the men with glinting swords, hot on their heels, their stinking breath on the necks of those they pursued.
After an hour of almost operatic violence, the market-place was littered with hundreds of broken bodies. From the vantage point of a turret overlooking the market-place, Basellas and some of his followers were jubilant at the sight.
`Look upon that,' Basellas noted with pride at a job well done. ‘Look upon that, you Roman dogs, and despair.' He turned, jubilantly to his men. `See you what has come to pass within this place?' he asked. 'We have spoken. And they have been forced to listen, and listen well.’
`Your good brother should have been here upon this day and witnessed with his own eyes the carnage that we have brought down upon their noble heads,' Ephraim shouted in a sarcastic voice above the noise from below them.
The moaning and wailing of the dying.
`For we have given the Romans a merry thing to think on, this day, have we not?'
Basellas said nothing. He merely watched the comings and goings beneath him, like a general observing movements on a battlefield.
Instead it was Ephraim who spoke for him. And for all of the Zealots watching the activities in the market-place. 'This is a great day for Byzantium,' he noted. 'A great day. The brutish