Count Belisarius

The enemy waited quietly for the expected attack and held their fire until our men should be within easy range. The trumpets blew, there was shouting and shooting from our men, but the ladders were advanced only at a single point, 300 paces from the cistern; here the Goths came crowding up to repel the attack. In spite of this diversion the Isaurians did not escape notice as they scrambled up the rock and stole inside the cistern. The Goths realized that they were the victims of a ruse and made a furious sortie from the postern-gate close by, intending to capture the five men. Belisarius led an immediate counterattack and held them off. It was bitter work, for the Goths were more numerous and had the advantage of the steep hill; but Belisarius's companions were sure-footed Isaurians and Armenian mountaineers, who loved this sort of fighting. Like them, Belisarius fought on foot, wearing only a buff-coat and armed with two javelins and a cutlass. He kept urging them to renewed efforts, though their losses were heavy. The longer the five Isaurians could work undisturbed in the cistern, he reckoned, the shorter would the siege be.

The Goths retreated about midday. As Belisarius rushed forward in pursuit a sentry on the neighbouring tower took a steady aim at him with a javelin; he cast, and the javelin came darting surely down. Belisarius did not sec it, for the sun was shining in his eyes from the south, immediately over the edge of the battlements. It was the spearman Unigatus, at Belisarius's side, who saved his life. Being a much shorter man than his master, he was already under the shadow of the wall and could sec the javelin coming. He leaped forward and sideways, catching at it. The long head pierced his palm and cut all the sinews of the fingers, so that lie was crippled in that hand for the rest of his life. But he said: 'To save my lord Belisarius, I would gladly have interposed my breast.'

Belisarius went down into the cistern himself. Though the Isaurians had been hammering and heaving away with all their might at the big stone blocks, they had not succeeded in shifting so much as a pebble. It was the habit of the men of old to build not for a year, or even for a lifetime, but for ever. The stones were jointed so closely together and the interstices filled with so iron-hard a cement that it seemed a place hollowed out of the living rock. There was nothing else for it but to do what Belisarius had a natural repugnance against doing: he fouled the good water by throwing into the cistern the corpses of horses and quicklime and poisonous shrubs. The Goths, who were already reduced to eating grass, must now rely on a single well inside the fortifications and on rain-water from the house-roofs caught in tubs. But this was a year of drought, and no rain fell.

Fiesole yielded from famine in the month of August, and Belisarius displayed the captive leaders to the garrison at Osimo, hoping to persuade them to yield. Yield at last they did, for Belisarius offered them generous terms. He would not make slaves of them, but they must renounce their allegiance to King Wittich and swear loyalty to the Emperor Justinian, and also give up half their wealth to our men in lieu of plunder. By now they were angry with Wittich for abandoning them to their fate when his armies were still much more numerous than those of Belisarius – who was a soldier after their own hearts. They all volunteered to serve in the Household Regiment. They were picked men, and Belisarius enrolled them gladly. Thus the last of the fortresses southward from Ravenna had fallen to our arms.

Meanwhile King Wittich's nephew Uriah had been encamped at Pavia on the upper Po, prevented by the two Johns from marching to help his uncle at Ravcima. One day in June he heard good news – the embassy to King Theudebert had taken effect and 100,000 Franks had crossed the Alps and were marching to his aid through Liguria. These Franks are Catholics in name only, and still retain many of their bloodthirsty old German customs; they have, moreover, a greater reputation for perfidy than any race in Europe. They are not horsemen, like the Goths and Vandals, their distant kinsmen, except that a few lancers accompany each of their princes and that every gau-leadcr is mounted as a mark of dignity. They are infantry, very brave and very undisciplined; and are armed with broadswords, shields, and their dreaded franciscas. These franciscas are short-handled, double-headed axes which, as they charge, they throw in a concerted volley; the blow from such an axe will shatter any ordinary shield and kill the man behind it.