Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [89]
The room was plunged, again, into an eerie silence, broken only by the sound of Gaius's fan swishing through the air.
Ì am ready to listen to reason,' Thalius said at last. ‘And I suspect that the general is also willing.'
The row of twelve guards lined up in the cobbled street of the Greek quarter, stood rigidly to attention and then, at the barked command of their sergeant, shouldered their arms. Captain Drusus Felinistius walked along the row of plume-helmeted soldiers, their gleaming silver breastplates reflecting his own face back at him. He stopped next to legionnaire Marinus Topignius and tapped him on the arm with his gladius.
'Stand by the door, legionnaire,' he said, quickly. 'Move on my instructions.'
'Aye, sir,' said the soldier from the side of his mouth, so tight was the chinstrap that clamped his helmet to his head. ‘Just like old times, sir.'
Felinistius was thinking exactly that. Just like fifteen years ago in Judaea when he and his men had formed the most feared and respected murder squad in all of Rome's legions. After such days as those, Byzantium had little to offer by way of comparison.
`Remember,' the captain told his remaining soldiers, 'this action should not require casualties, Straight in, seek out the objective, secure it and straight out. Any local resistance, you are authorised to use force, but make sure it is only so much as is necessary. If anyone goes in swinging their sword indiscriminately, I shall have you publicly flogged, is that understood?'
There were grunts of acknowledgement from the men. ‘Is that understood?' bellowed Felinistius.
'Aye, sir,' they chorused, loudly.
In the window of one of the houses nearby, a curtain flickered, and a stray shard of candlelight briefly illuminated a portion of the street.
`Go,' shouted the captain, turning towards Marinus Topignius. `Go, go, go.'
Two swift blows from the legionnaire's foot and the door to the house burst open, light flooding into the street from inside.
The soldiers poured into the house and Felinistius brought up the rear, arriving to the sound of a woman's high-pitched scream.
'Silence,' he cried as he stooped to enter through the low-framed door. `Where is the girl?'
In the room, Felinistius saw a man pinned to the floor by two of the soldiers, a look of anguish and pain on his face as one of them tied his hands together with coarse rope. Beside the fire, a large woman, her face reddened by a single, stinging blow to the cheek, was also sprawled on the floor, a legionnaire towering over, her, ready to repeat the dose if she gave him any cause, 'Where is the girl?' repeated the captain angrily.
`Here, sir,' said Marinus Topignius, throwing back a rough blanket under which cowered two pairs of terrified eyes.
Felinistius marched across the room to the two young girls and demanded, 'Which, amongst you, is the Briton?'
`Neither of us,' said Vicki, quickly. 'We're both as Greek as...' She stumbled to a pause. 'As Greek can be,' she concluded.
'This one,' the captain noted, and the rough arms of two soldiers hauled Vicki from beneath the blanket. 'She is the one. No Greek child would be so forward. Bring her.' He turned to Georgiadis, struggling against his bonds. 'Our business is concluded in this place, Greek,' he said, sweeping out of the door without another word, followed by his troops, dragging the terrified Vicki with them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jigsaw Feeling [A Poem for Byzantium]
And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day;
that they might accuse him.
Mark 3:2
Byzantium. The imperial city.
Approached from the sea, as most travellers would do, their ships passed from the Aegean through the Hellespont and then crossed the foaming, brilliant Sea of Marmara, the Pontus Euxinus of antiquity.
From there, the city dramatically rose as if by a trick of the light from the peninsular between the pale-blue sky and the hazy waters of the Golden Horn, the scimitar-shaped estuary of the Bosphorus. The domes and minarets and towers of Byzantium rose