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men, women and children who could be sent on to the markets where such unfortunates were sold, all the way to the rich buyers in Constantinople if the younger ones of either sex were fair of hair and comely enough.
    Nor did he respect anything of a religious nature; if the men who carried out his bidding came across a temple or a sacred burial site, pagan or Christian, it would be razed to the ground or desecrated, further antagonising the Sklaveni elders, while at the same time firing the desire for revenge among the younger tribesmen.
    Decimus Belisarius was convinced that most of the Sklaveni, certainly the older members, were content to live in peace, and given they had as much to fear from Alans and Huns as did the citizens of the empire, they should be counted as potential allies, not as enemies or a source of ill-gotten profit.
    ‘Who can blame them if they respond in like manner?’
    His father would always splutter this protest when the subject came up, which it too frequently did, usually following on from some rapid vengeful response that, coming in reprisal, he was called upon to contain.
    ‘Taking good citizens from farms I struggle to protect, using those they kidnap as a means to bargain?’
    Not that Senuthius was willing to trade those slaves he had acquired; able, given the number of fighting men he could muster, to protect his own property, it mattered not to him that others suffered from small and revenge-driven raiding parties, citizens taken from their destroyed dwellings to a life of servitude well north of the Danube, for the Sklaveni would not keep them in an area from which they might escape; they passed them on to the Huns or Alans.
    Pleas for mercy were left to Decimus Belisarius, who had only insufficient coin and his own honesty to offer in exchange. His coffers were far from full and not every tribal elder trusted his protestations of non-collusion. Too few of those taken ever came home, whileattempts to curtail these activities fell on the stony ground of private support.
    Senuthius was a senator, and if that was a moribund body that met rarely, if at all, he was still a leading citizen of the empire with well-placed friends and one high-ranking relative at court. It was doubly a problem that he had an ally in Conatus, the too willing to be bribed
magister militum per Thracias
, based in Marcianopolis. When Decimus complained to his military and gubernatorial superior, Conatus did not even deign to respond.
    His cousin Pentheus was likewise a senator, a sly courtier in the imperial household, so even bypassing Conatus produced no results, the functionary being well placed to dismiss or rubbish any written submissions from Decimus Belisarius detailing the Senuthius misdeeds, while praising him as an upright citizen, a man who paid substantial taxes without complaint into the imperial treasury and was continually rated as honourable by the military governor closest to him.
    Nor, unlike many of the citizens of the Thracian diocese – and this counted as much as any other factor – did he question the emperor’s right to set the codes of Christian belief that his subjects should follow. These factors had made it impossible to either chastise the swine or to have him indicted for his blatant transgressions.
    The person of Gregory Blastos, the local bishop and a close associate of Senuthius, compounded such difficulties, the cleric being a blatant pederast and corrupt priest who was held in the Belisarius household to be a disgrace to his calling. Blastos was a man who saw his Christian duty, which stood above that of looking after his flock, as lining his purse and slaking his carnal desires. Worse, he was a trimmer, a man willing to bend to any prevailing wind to maintain his position.
    The empire had been locked for decades in discussions over two competing dogmas concerning the human and divine nature of Jesus, a matter supposedly resolved at a convocation called the Council of Chalcedon. It