Ravenna, December 17–23, 476 AD
Three wooden posts were erected in the Ravenna square before dawn.
The posts were simple. Raw, unplaned oak, its bark still rough and the smell of its sap mixing with the biting December morning air. At the top of each post, a horizontal crossbar formed a grim letter T. From each crossbar, a rope hung with a knot tied by the city executioner who was awoken in the middle of the night and told his services were needed before sunrise.
The people of Ravenna gathered slowly. Not because they were invited. There was no official announcement. But in a city this small, news travels faster than horses. Merchants opening their stalls in the morning market saw the three posts and stopped arranging their wares. Wives going to fetch water at the public well saw the crowd and joined. Children playing in narrow alleys quietly slipped between the legs of adults to see what was happening.
Romulus stood on the palace balcony overlooking the square.
He wore a purple cloak buttoned tightly up to his neck, not out of formality but because the morning air was very cold and his thin body did not possess many reserves of warmth. Beside him, Gelasius stood with hands folded behind his diaconal robes. Spurius on the other side, back straight as a pillar, eyes staring straight ahead.
Below, three men were brought out from the palace side door leading directly to the square. Chains on wrists and ankles. Four soldiers escorted each prisoner.
Gisulf walked first. The large man puffed out his chest even though the chains restricted his steps, his head held high, his eyes sweeping the crowd with a gaze that dared anyone to show pity. He did not want pity. He wanted his enemies to see that he died like a warrior, even if they chose the noose instead of the sword.
Torsten walked second. Calm. His steps were measured and dignified, as if he were walking to the market to buy fish, not to the gallows. His face showed an acceptance that was not resignation but something more mature: an acknowledgment that the game was over and that refusing to accept the outcome was a waste of energy he no longer possessed.
Hrodic was brought last. He had to be supported by two soldiers because his wounds from the previous night's battle were still open in several places, blood seeping through the bandages wrapping his chest and arms. But his eyes, his eyes still burned with the same fire he had ignited since the first day he was captured. A fire that would not extinguish until his heart stopped beating.
One by one, they were stood beneath the posts. Ropes were looped around their necks. The executioner checked the knots with a professional efficiency that required no emotion.
Romulus watched from the balcony. He did not look away. Gelasius had once taught him that a leader must witness the consequences of his own decisions. So he stood there, hands gripping the cold stone railing, and watched.
Gisulf fell first. Not silently. He shouted before the stool was kicked from beneath his feet, a long shout in ancient Gothic that was understood by no one in that square except one person standing in the farthest corner of the crowd with a hood covering her face. The words were a curse. An ancient curse passed down through generations of Gothic warriors, aimed at those who betray blood. The rope went taut. The massive body swung. And the curse was cut off mid sentence like a song robbed of its final note.
Torsten fell second. In silence. His eyes remained open until the end, staring at the gray Ravenna sky as if searching for something up there more interesting than what was happening below. He found nothing. The rope went taut. The silence he carried throughout his life finally became permanent.
Hrodic fell last. The man who could barely stand refused the executioner's help. He pushed away the hands supporting him and stood alone on the stool with trembling legs but a raised chin. His eyes found Gisela in the distance. He did not shout. Did not curse. He just stared, and in that final gaze there was something heavier than hatred. Disappointment. The disappointment of an old warrior watching the next generation choose a path different from the one he believed in his entire life. The rope went taut. His eyes did not close until his body stopped swinging.
The square was silent.
Three bodies hung on three posts beneath the gray winter sky. The wind blew them slowly, a movement gentle and horrifying at once, like a pendulum counting the time no longer possessed by anyone.
On the balcony, Romulus released his grip on the stone railing. The imprints of his fingers were left on the dewy stone surface. He turned and walked inside without saying anything. Gelasius followed. Spurius remained on the balcony for one more minute, ensuring the crowd dispersed orderly, then followed.
In the farthest corner of the square, the hooded figure stood alone after everyone had left. Gisela stared at the three hanging bodies. The people who once called her brother. The people who asked her to kill for them. The people she trapped for someone else.
Her tears had run dry yesterday. What remained was only an emptiness as heavy and cold as an uncarved tombstone.
She stood there until the wind became too sharp for skin unprotected by enough fabric. Then she turned and walked away, leaving three swinging shadows behind her back.
Gelasius found Romulus in the library two hours after the execution.
The young emperor sat in his usual chair, the book of Marcus Aurelius open before him but his eyes not reading. His eyes stared at the page without seeing the words, like a man staring at the surface of a lake without seeing the water.
Gelasius sat in his own chair. Said nothing for several minutes. Letting the silence work. Letting Romulus start if and when he was ready.
"That is the second time," Romulus finally said. His voice was hoarse. "The first time with a butcher knife in a dark tent. The second time with words in a bright hall." He paused for a moment. "The first made me vomit. The second made me silent. I do not know which is more horrifying."
"Perhaps both are horrifying in different ways," Gelasius said. "The first is horrifying because you feel the death with your own hands. The second is horrifying because you do not feel it at all. You only nod, and others execute."
"Is that better or worse?"
"It is different. And that difference is the burden you must carry as emperor. A soldier kills with his hands. An emperor kills with his decisions. Both take lives. But a good emperor is an emperor who never stops questioning whether his decisions are right."
Romulus stared at Gelasius.
"Was my decision right?"
"I cannot answer that for you," Gelasius said. "Because answering that means taking that burden from your shoulders, and that burden must remain there. An emperor who does not feel the weight of a decision to kill is an emperor who has stopped being human."
Romulus looked down. His fingers traced the edge of the book's page aimlessly.
"I pardoned forty men," he said softly. "And hanged three. Does the pardon of one erase the cruelty of the other?"
"No," Gelasius said. "There is no goodness that erases violence. There is only balance. You sought a balance between justice and mercy, and that balance is never perfect. There is always something left behind on one side. What matters is that you continue to seek that balance and never stop feeling uncomfortable with it."
Romulus nodded. Slowly. Not a nod of agreement. The nod of someone accepting a burden too heavy for his shoulders but who has no choice but to carry it.
That afternoon, Romulus summoned Gisela to the Strategy Hall.
Not to the underground cell. Not to the training yard. To the Strategy Hall, the room where imperial decisions were made, the place where Vitus moved pieces on a map and Spurius calculated wheat reserves. The place that until this day had never been entered by Gisela.
She arrived with her female guards. Stood at the threshold, hesitating. This room felt foreign to her. Not because she was unaccustomed to large rooms. But because this room was neither a prison nor a training yard, two places where she already understood her position within them. In this room, she did not know where she stood.
Romulus sat in the chair at the head of the table. Spurius beside him. Gelasius in the corner, observing. Paulus, the new bishop of Ravenna, was present as the official religious witness.
There was no grand ceremony. No parchment scrolls or lead seals. Just Romulus speaking from his chair with a voice still too soft for the size of the room but which now possessed a clarity that could not be ignored.
"Gisela."
The first time that name was spoken officially in front of others besides Spurius. Paulus raised an eyebrow. Gelasius did not react because he already knew it from Spurius.
"Starting today, you are not a prisoner. Not a prisoner of war. Not a tolerated stranger." Romulus swallowed hard. "You are granted the status of Amicus Caesaris. Friend of the Emperor. You are free to enter and leave the palace whenever. You are free to see me whenever. No guard may stop you. No door is closed to you."
Pause. Romulus glanced at Spurius, whose face showed the mixture of reluctant acceptance and worry that had become his permanent expression every time Gisela's name was mentioned.
"And you are free," Romulus added, his voice slightly softer, "to be whoever you choose to be."
That last sentence was not about political status. Everyone in the room understood that. That sentence was about the tunic too large at the shoulders and the linen cloth wrapped tightly around the chest and eight years of living as someone else.
Gisela stood at the threshold of the Strategy Hall. Her hands which were usually firm and steady now trembled at her sides. Her lips moved soundlessly for a few seconds before words finally found their way out.
"Thank you," Gisela said. Two words that came out wetter than she planned.
Romulus nodded. Awkwardly. Not knowing what to do after a moment like this. He picked up his water glass from the table and drank it just to give his hands something to hold.
Gisela turned and walked out. Her steps in the corridor sounded different. Lighter. Or perhaps it was only Spurius's imagination, who stared at her back from inside the room and realized, with a feeling he found hard to define, that for the first time since he knew this person, those shoulders were not pulled back with the stiffness of a pretending male warrior.
Her shoulders dropped. Natural. Like someone who had just taken off a suit of armor they had worn for eight years without ever taking it off, even to sleep.
The next day, for the first time, Gisela appeared in the palace without the linen cloth binding her chest. Without the oversized male tunic. She wore a simple female tunica loaned by one of her female guards, rough wool fabric that was neither beautiful nor elegant but which fit her body in a way never possessed by a single garment she wore during her eight years of disguise.
Her hair, which had been cut short and kept messy to look like a man, was now combed back and tied with a simple leather strap. Not long. Still very short for a woman. But it was enough to show the neckline and cheekbones that had been hidden behind dirt and disguise all this time.
Theron, who happened to be walking down the corridor when Gisela passed by, dropped the stack of parchments he was carrying and stared with his mouth open for five full seconds before Gisela stared back at him with a look that said 'one word and I break your nose' and Theron picked up his parchments and ran in the opposite direction.
Drusus, who crossed paths with her on the stairs, bowed with an awkward respect before walking away with a face showing he had just processed information that would take several hours to fully digest.
Decius, the only one who showed no reaction whatsoever, merely nodded when passing by as usual. Perhaps because as the head bodyguard, he had already been informed by Spurius beforehand. Or perhaps because Decius truly never showed a reaction to anything that did not directly threaten the emperor's safety.
Four days after the execution, Gelasius visited Theron's workshop.
He did not announce his arrival. He just walked to the east wing of the palace where the clean and orderly corridors ended and the hallways smelling of oil and hot metal began. Theron's workshop occupied three rooms that used to be armories, renovated and transformed into laboratories that half resembled hell's kitchen and half resembled an exploded library.
The thick wooden tables were covered in tools Gelasius had no names for. Glass tubes filled with colored liquids bubbling softly over small furnaces. Parchment scrolls with diagrams that looked like maps of undiscovered lands. A sharp and biting smell, a mixture of sulfur and acid and something sweet and horrifying that made Gelasius's nose wrinkle.
Theron stood in the middle of that chaos like a priest at his own altar. His hands wore leather gloves burned in several places. Before him, on the table, lay an object Gelasius had never seen.
A clay sphere. The size of two adult fists. Its surface was smooth and tightly sealed, without cracks, without holes. On one side, a short fuse of wax-dipped cloth poked out.
"Master Theron," Gelasius said from the doorway.
Theron jumped. Nearly dropped the clay sphere. Caught it with both hands and hugged it to his chest with an expression showing that dropping this object would be the last decision he ever made in his life.
"A-Archdeacon! I did not hear you come in." Theron set the sphere back on the table very, very carefully. "You should not come without announcing. Some objects here can... react... if disturbed."
"What is that?" Gelasius asked, his eyes fixed on the clay sphere.
Theron stared at the sphere. Then stared at Gelasius. In his eyes there was a brief battle between the pride of an inventor and the wariness of a man who knows that what he created is not something entirely to be proud of.
"This is... an evolution," Theron said. He picked up the sphere and turned it slowly in his hands. "Ignis Dei in a new form. The mixture is the same. Naphtha, Sulfur, Bitumen, Calx Viva. But instead of being sprayed from a bronze tube onto the surface of the sea, the mixture is sealed inside a tightly closed clay container."
He placed the sphere back on the table and pointed to the protruding wax fuse.
"This fuse is lit before being launched. When this sphere strikes a hard surface, the clay shatters, the mixture inside spreads, and the fire from the fuse ignites it instantly." Theron drew an arc in the air with his hand. "From a catapult, this sphere can be launched two hundred or three hundred paces away. And when it lands..."
He made an explosion gesture with both hands. His fingers opening from fists to flat palms. The small sound coming from his mouth, a quiet and almost shy imitation of an explosion, did not match the destruction it depicted.
"A fireball," Gelasius said flatly. "You made a fireball that can be launched from a catapult."
"If the first Ignis Dei burned the sea," Theron said, his voice dropping to a low tone combining awe of his own work and horror at its potential, "then this one will burn stone walls. Fortresses. Gates. Roofs of buildings. Anything a catapult can reach." He paused for a moment. "No fortress can withstand a rain of fire, Your Eminence. No wall is thick enough."
Gelasius stared at the clay sphere for a long time. A simple little object. Smoothly polished clay. A protruding wax fuse. Inside that unremarkable shell lay the power to change how wars were fought forever. To render every fortress, every wall, every stone barrier that had protected cities and kingdoms all this time meaningless.
"Who ordered this?" Gelasius asked.
Theron swallowed hard. The inventor's pride in his eyes dimmed slightly, replaced by the nervousness of a man who knows he is standing at an uncomfortable crossroads.
"Magister Militum Vitus," Theron answered. "He requested the development of new weapons immediately after the battle at sea. He said... he said we need more than one way to use Ignis Dei. That the sea is not the only battlefield we might face."
Gelasius did not comment. He stared at the sphere for a few more seconds, storing this information in a safe place inside his brain, on a shelf marked things to discuss with the emperor at the right time. Then he turned around.
"Thank you for the explanation, Master Theron," Gelasius said.
He walked out of the workshop. Behind him, Theron stared at the Archdeacon's back with a feeling he could not define. Half relieved that the conversation was over. Half anxious that the real conversation had not yet begun.
He neither praised nor condemned, Theron thought while taking off his gloves and staring at the clay sphere lying on his table like a dragon's egg waiting to hatch. He only stored it. And a man who stores information without immediately reacting is usually more dangerous than a man who immediately shouts.
Six days after the execution, Romulus rode out of the walls of Ravenna for the first time.
Not for war. Not for a military inspection. To see the land he had promised to not only the forty barbarians he pardoned but everyone penned in the barbarian camp. Romulus had ordered the emptying of that camp, giving the land to those who were once caged like cattle to farm on free soil. Land outside the city's southern walls, former fields abandoned by their owners during Odoacer's siege and not yet reclaimed by anyone. Land that was wet and muddy this winter but which, according to Vitus who hated it and Spurius who accepted it and Gelasius who supported it, would be fertile enough to plant when spring arrived.
A small convoy. Romulus on a brown horse too large for him, but he had begun to learn to control the beast with slowly growing confidence. Spurius rode on his right side, back straight even though the December air made his old bones scream in protest. Decius and four soldiers from the Eleventh formed an escort in front and behind.
And on Romulus's left side, Gisela rode.
This was the first time Gisela rode as herself. Not as Fritigern. Not as a masked warrior. As Gisela. The female tunica loaned by her guard was covered by a thick wool cloak she tied tightly at the neck to ward off the wind. Her short hair was covered by a hood, but a few strands escaped and blew in the wind, and for the first time, she did not feel the need to tuck them back in.
They rode past the southern gate and along the muddy dirt road toward the new settlement area. In the distance, thin smoke rose from several spots where the newly relocated barbarians had already begun to make fires and build simple huts of wood and hay.
"They have already started building," Romulus said, his eyes sweeping the landscape.
"They are used to building from nothing," Gisela answered. "That is what my people have done throughout history. Move, then build, and lose. Move again, and finally build again."
Romulus turned to Gisela.
"This time they do not have to move again."
Gisela did not answer. She stared at the thin smoke in the distance with an expression hard to read. There, among those new huts, were people who seven days ago called her Fritigern and respected her. People who now, if they knew what happened in the palace courtyard that night, would call her a traitor.
Spurius pulled his horse slightly back, giving them space. Decius followed. Unasked, without signal. They both understood that a conversation was about to happen that required no audience.
Romulus and Gisela rode side by side, moving away from the group, along the edge of the empty field toward the line of cypress trees on the southern border. Their horses walked slowly, avoiding the deep mud, the beasts' breath forming white steam in the cutting air.
The silence between them was different from the silence in the underground cell. More open. Vaster. The gray sky stretched above them without bounds, and below, the wet earth stretched in all directions without walls and without bars.
It was Gisela who broke that silence. But not with words.
Her shoulders began to tremble. Softly at first, barely visible beneath the thick cloak wrapping her. Then stronger. Her breathing changed, becoming short and erratic, and the sound that came from her throat was not words but sobs that had been held back too long and finally found a crack to escape.
Romulus halted his horse. Gisela halted her horse. They stood in the middle of the empty field, two horses exhaling steam into the cold air, and a woman crying for the first time with a sound she did not hide.
"Traitor," Gisela whispered between sobs. "Snake. Dog. Worm." She repeated the words of Gisulf and Hrodic, one by one, like counting the wounds on her own body. "They were right, Romulus. Every word they spoke. I betrayed my blood. I trapped my own people. I sent three men to the gallows. Three men who once called me sister."
Her crying grew louder. Not a soft and silent cry like in the hall yesterday. This was a cry coming from a very deep place, a place where eight years of disguise and solitude and sacrifice and loss piled into a mountain that finally collapsed.
"And what hurts the most," Gisela continued, her voice breaking on every syllable, "is that I do not regret it. I betrayed them and I do not regret it. And that makes me wonder if I truly am the snake they say I am. If I truly am the worm feeding on the carcass of my own people. Because a good person should feel regret when betraying their blood. And I feel no regret. I am just... I am just sad."
Romulus sat on his horse, hands holding the reins, staring at Gisela crying on the horse beside him. He did not know what to say. He was too young and too inexperienced with other people's emotions expressed directly like this. In the palace, people cried behind closed doors. In the underground cell, their conversations were always wrapped in a darkness that hid parts of their expressions. But here, in the open field beneath the gray sky, nothing could be hidden.
He did not hug her. Did not touch her. Did not say everything would be alright because he knew that was a lie and Gisela would know that was a lie and a lie was the first and last thing not needed between them.
What he did was speak. Softly. With unplanned and unrehearsed words, coming straight from the most honest place inside him.
"You are not a traitor, Gisela."
Gisela raised her face. Eyes red and wet. Cheeks glistening beneath the gray winter light.
"You are not a traitor," Romulus repeated. "You are a person faced with a choice no one should ever have to make. Blood or heart. Past or future. The people who once called you sister or the person who brought you apples in the underground cell." He paused for a moment. Swallowed hard. "You chose. And that choice hurts you. But a choice that hurts does not mean a choice that is wrong. Sometimes the truest choice is the most painful choice."
"How do you know?" Gisela whispered. "How do you know my choice was right?"
"I do not know," Romulus answered honestly. "I do not know if your choice was right or wrong. I only know one thing." His eyes met Gisela's eyes, golden brown meeting wet dark. "I am still alive because you chose. And every day I have starting from now is a day you gave to me."
Gisela stared at Romulus. The thin boy on a horse too large. The boy whose speech sometimes still stuttered when nervous and whose feet did not fully reach the stirrups. The boy who severed a king's head and burned a fleet and hanged three men and still brought apples for his prisoner.
Her tears slowly stopped. Not because her sadness vanished. But because amid that sadness, something else found a place. Not happiness. Too soon for happiness. But an acknowledgment that in a world that had taken everything from her, there was one person who gave something back.
"Foolish but worthy," Gisela said. Her voice was still wet. But at the end of it, on the final syllable, there was the shadow of a smile struggling to be born.
"Foolish but worthy," Romulus answered.
They sat on their horses in the middle of the wet and cold empty field, two young people who had lost too much and possessed too little, and between them, something that had never been spoken and perhaps never needed to be spoken grew like a sprout emerging from the winter earth. Small. Fragile. Too young for the current season.
But alive.
In the distance, Spurius watched from the back of his horse. Decius beside him. Four soldiers behind.
"She is crying," Decius said flatly, observing Gisela from afar.
"Yes," Spurius said.
"And he is comforting her."
"Yes."
Decius was silent. Staring at the two small figures in the middle of the vast field. Then he said something that was perhaps the longest sentence he had ever spoken outside a military context.
"He is growing, Praefectus."
Spurius did not answer. He stared at Romulus and Gisela in the distance, two small dots in the gray and wet winter landscape. And in his eyes that were already too old for many things but not yet too old to recognize beauty when seeing it, there was a gentleness that very rarely appeared on the face of a man who had lived forty years among swords and death.
"Yes," Spurius finally said. "He is growing. As he should."