Enemy of My Dreams

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Frigidus River, Julian Alps

September 9, 394 AD

Three days after the last battle ended, the mighty bora still stalked the floodplain. It shrieked and murmured amongst the broken war machines and sent dust spirals walking amidst the dead. The men were saying it was the wind that won them this war, that the gods had sent it to drive the enemy’s arrows back in their faces. Alaric of the Goths set his back to the battlefield, the bora snapping his cloak around his heels.

Someone should tell the gods, then, that the thrice-damned battle is over.

Before him, the usurper Eugenius knelt on the ground. Even kneeling, he was thin and stooped as an overtall reed. The wind filled the executioner’s stained cloak like a tattered sail and snatched the words from the condemned man’s mouth.

Ten thousand of his own dead to achieve this. Half the foederati . And the Romans had barely scratched their breastplates.

A heavy hand clapped down on Alaric’s shoulder.

“Well done.” The general Stilicho smiled, jovial as Saturnalia. “Without you, we never would have taken that valley. You have covered yourself in glory these past days.”

Glory. Alaric felt a muscle in his jaw clench. There had been nothing glorious about what happened in that valley. He’d walked out covered only in blood, his men’s as much as his enemy’s.

The emperor Theodosius stepped out of the crowd below, swollen with his own importance. He interrupted Eugenius’s last words with a speech about the Christian god who’d brought them victory. Mercifully, the wind obscured most of it.

“The emperor will want to see you,” Stilicho said. “He will want a count of your dead. And if you play it right, there will be a reward.”

“You mean the homeland he promised?” Alaric could not keep the bitterness from his voice. For years Theodosius had been promising land. Always after the next great victory, and the next. His people were still landless and homeless, and now half of them were dead. If that was a coincidence, he’d eat his own boots.

“ Must you do this every time?” Stilicho let out an aggrieved sigh. “The emperor owes this victory to you. But you must be politic , Alaric. You stand to gain much, given time.”

Alaric shook his head grimly. If there was one thing his people did not have, it was time . He remembered the Huns sweeping down from the eastern hills, lines of homesteads burning. It was an old memory, one from his childhood, but it was still happening.

Stilicho glanced at his battered, bloodstained cuirass and frowned. “Be sure to clean yourself up first. Cut your hair, for God’s sake—try not to look so much like a barbarian.”

Down below, Theodosius had finished with his talk of God. He gave an impassive nod to the executioner.

The bora stopped just as the axe fell.

* * *

The Imperial tent was full of rich fabrics and rare wood, all the comforts the emperor could not do without on campaign. Theodosius sat with his head bent over a solid oak desk, making scratch marks on a wax tablet, his scalp pink with sunburn. Alaric thought of the bent backs, the sweat and suffering, that had brought the emperor’s desk this far.

At length, Theodosius spoke. “Your report?”

“By my reckon, we lost ten thousand.”

The emperor’s hand stilled. “Tell me how you managed to lose half of the foederati .”

“The scouts told us that the rim was clear. It wasn’t. The archers picked us off like turtles in a bucket.”

“And you lost ten thousand of my Gothic troops.” Theodosius set his stylus down and regarded him coldly, eyes narrowed like a merchant who suspected weevils in the grain. “Stilicho says that without your valor, we would all be meat for the crows. But I know that God won us this war. He was the one who sent the wind.”

“Emperor. With respect ,” Alaric said flatly. “Your god did not suffer and die to win you that valley. And it serves you to credit him, since he asks neither payment nor land in return.”

“You have a lot of nerve.” Theodosius frowned. “Perhaps you do not realize you are speaking to your greatest ally, Alaric. I’ve defended you before the Senate, and you’ve done nothing to make my work easier. Your people are ungovernable. They pillage when they should be farming. I visit your camps to find women and children wandering about in a war zone. If I granted your people land now, how would I know they would farm it, rather than simply using it as a base for plunder?”

“They would not have to follow my army if they had land of their own. If the women and children had somewhere safe to go—”

“I’ve offered to settle them in camps.”

Over his steaming corpse. “People die like rats in those camps.”

“How do you think it will look to the Senate if I settle ten thousand armed Goths in the Danube Valley so soon after Eugenius turned? If your people turn to pillaging honest Romans, I’d expect to be stoned in the streets.” Theodosius paused to pour himself wine, offering none. “Eugenius was part Frankish, you know.”

“My people are Tervingii. That isn’t even the same tribe.”

“You know that, and I know that. But to the Senate and the people, you are all the same.” Theodosius picked up his stylus and resumed his scratchings. “You are dismissed. You will keep your current position, but only because the foederati are loyal to you. Be grateful for my generosity.”

Alaric felt his teeth clench. As if it were not abundantly clear how the Romans saw his people. Barbarians , all of them. The Romans could give them the trappings, but in the end, it was his people in the valley, fighting more of his people, and the Romans reaping the reward.

Stilicho would want him to bow and scrape, to make a conciliatory gesture toward the emperor’s god. But he would fear no little man in a tent. Not after what he’d lived through.

“How long do you think I can keep the foederati loyal, Emperor,” Alaric said quietly, “if they are not paid in full?”

Theodosius’s eyes snapped up. “Is that a threat?”

“When I make a threat, you will know it.”

For a moment everything stilled. In the emperor’s face was the usual calm disdain. Something made Alaric glance at his upraised hand. It trembled.

The emperor feared him.

Suddenly Alaric understood. Theodosius had known he would walk into a slaughter. And Stilicho had given the order. To thin out his numbers against future rebellion.

They both thought he’d be next to turn.

Deliberately, Theodosius put down his stylus. “You’ll do well to remember whose camp you are in,” he said evenly, “and whose guards are just outside.”

“And you will do well to remember exactly who the foederati are loyal to.” Alaric bared his teeth in an expression that was nothing like a smile. “Pay my men what you owe them, Emperor. Otherwise you had better pray to your god for another wind.”

Stilicho thought he would turn. It would be a shame to disappoint the great man.