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mind went wrong, it was a route to certain death.
    To acknowledge it was open to severe risk was an understatement and that became more obvious as he worked out in detail what needed to be done. Flavius knew the men to whom he allotted this task would have to make the attempt during the hours of darkness and they needed to get to the end of what would be an unlit tunnel and one that could not be reconnoitred in advance.
    If there was a strong body of defenders at the point where it crossed over the city wall they would only discover that with contact. If not, and once inside, they would need to keep going until they cameacross a wide enough conduit to provide an exit, something like a side channel that fed a set of baths. They would likely be close to the centre of a densely inhabited city in which the natives were hostile.
    The Isaurians, four hundred in number, were chosen to mount the raid, they being a body of fighters he knew were keen to impress him, having been absent from of all of his previous battles in both North Africa and Sicily. He had with him a Goth-speaking cavalry commander called Magnus, directed to accompany Ennes, the man selected to lead.
    He was a member of the general’s close bodyguard and a noted warrior; if they were challenged Magnus would seek to fool the defenders, if that failed Ennes would try to fight his way through. Every tenth man was directed to carry an unlit torch and the whole was to be accompanied by a pair of trumpeters.
    Timing was critical; he needed those men to be ready to debouch from whatever exit they found just as dawn broke, this while the rest of the army made a feint against that section of the walls close to the aqueduct to distract the garrison.
    Thus, from the battlements, in the hours of darkness, the Neapolitan defenders observed many a torchlit group of attackers move into position and the reaction was as expected. The threatened section of the walls was reinforced by the more martial Goths and many a taunt echoed in the darkness to tell these fools what fate they could expect.
    Flavius, keen to encourage these exchanges, took another Goth speaker as close as he dared to engage the defenders with offers of gold if they surrendered, their attempts greeted with jeers and catcalls. Hopefully these were loud enough to drown out the noise of that barrier being dismantled and, following on from that, such a body of soldiers struggling in total darkness along a narrow corridor in whichthey were barred from using their torches, there being too many gaps in the aqueduct brickwork that might leak light.
    Some of them found the Stygian darkness and the eerie echoes too much to bear and Flavius found himself called from the walls to consult with Magnus, who had led half the badly shaken attacking party back out into the starlight. Flavius quickly called for two hundred replacements from his comitatus , an act that so shamed the Isaurian retirees that they insisted on going back.
    There was no time to argue; dawn was not far off and there was still the need for distraction, perhaps more now that the invasive force numbered six hundred instead of four. The Goth speaker was still where Flavius had left him, now sending insults towards the walls about their manhood and wayward mothers that got a furious and satisfyingly noisy reaction.
    For a commander, indeed for the lowest soldier, waiting can be the hardest part of war and Flavius was doubly cursed by not having any notion of how matters were proceeding where it really counted. That changed when the first trumpet blew, soon followed by the sight of numerous waving torches from two of the towers that stood either side of the nearest of the great gates.
    The horns of the main force blew to sound the advance and the whole of the besieging army surged towards walls nearly denuded of the previous defenders, who were now too busy trying to retake those towers. The noise now was not of jeering but metal on metal, the yelling of men