by Scarik » Thu Jul 19, 2018 8:35 pm
Rufus almost laughed at the sight of him after the fighting and surely would have had he not seen his brother's face first. It will be an amusing story soon enough but not quite yet.
Maybe its his injuries or the fact that he ignominiously fell of the siege ladder and then foundered like a skewered hog when his family is renowned for their strong swimmers. Maybe its the necessity of war and the fury of the re-armed Gauls. But the destruction weighs on him and challenges his ideals.
All be can do, he decides, is to hold back his household and his vassals from the rape and the bloodletting and comprt themselves as before: forage, even destroy, but raise arms only to those who fight. It may seem strange given they have few places to run and hide, but it is more than nothing. Perhaps they will escape through the gate he pulled Bleddyn's eschille away from to offer a meager chance to those who took it. Perhaps they will hide in the famed crypts and sewers of this old, Roman city and then escape later.
He prays that God will be merciful and forgive him that he has failed to be. Though Persidius wonders if He would care about the prayers of the excommunicated for the souls of pagans.
He rides through in the wake of the devastation with his guards until the reach the church square and he sees the grand cathedral in ruins. He stops, then dismounts, and walks forward dreading what he will find.
Once inside he is struck by the destruction and the disgrace. The floor is rotted away, the stained glass shattered, and refuse from animals is everywhere. He sees a glint and stops to pick up a piece of blue glass with a small piece of white still joined by the lead. He holds it up to the window and for a second he imagines the blue robes and white habit of the Blessed Virgin.
With the fragment still in his hand he wanders into the yard and to the catacombs. Rufus follows with a torch and lights it as they enter. In the flickering light they walk past centuries of Christian tombs that, without exception, have been broken and looted. The names of the dead and the icons of the saints are scratched out and disfigured. In some cases they are left in pieces, in others just eerily empty.
The shelves that once held the bones of the common citizens are cleared though bits of broken skulls still litter the floor and some skulls are left like trophies with their heinous wounds on display. From the stains it seems they may once have been entire heads; likely of the priests and the bishop.
Through it all he feels hollow, seeing glimpses of his own moral failures in these lost souls.
And then they reach new construction. It lacks the skill of the Roman tunnels, faced as it is with crudely mortared stone and supported with timbers instead of brick arches, but it is sturdy and meant to last many years. In it are more tombs but these are not open, the bones are not cast into the corners and ground into fragments, no blody trophies remain to taunt the dead.
Here he finds graveboxes filled with human ashes, worked with pagan runes and the icons of their bloody gods. They are stored with ritual and honor and dignity along with goods and symbols of the status of the dead. Persidius stops there and stares at them. He turns away and as he does he can see both the peaceful, Frankish graves and the destroyed, Christian ones.
With a snarl he turns back to the Frankish catacomb, seizes the first box in both hands and smashes it to the stones with all his strength. Then another, and another until his breathing is heavy and his heartbeat thunders in his ears.
"Bring everything the Franks have put here out and pile it on the Cathedral stair," he tells Rufus in a deadly, quiet voice through clenched teeth.
When they exit back into the sunlight Persidius's rage has turned cold. He watches as the boxes and goods are brought out and piled in two places: one for the remains and one for the loot.
"Bring oil and straw and burn the supports," he says without looking away from the stairs.
"Bring everything else from the city here as well and set camp in front of the keep. When the city can give us nothing more we will storm the walls and end the Frankish presence here."