The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

modus operandi,

  and to divine a method of defeating him.

  You may imagine my astonishment as I listened to him speak, although I must tell you it never crossed my mind to doubt him. The reverence in which he was held was all too apparent. The Proconsul himself deferred to this young man!

  In short, Flavius Stilicho thanked me for his life and offered me manumission

  —

  for all my men — if I would serve with him and give him my allegiance. He assured me I could do so with honour, for he would require me neither to divulge information concerning Magnus's plans nor to bear arms against the soldiers among whom I had fought my way across Gaul. Father, I did not even hesitate before accepting his offer. I knew, somewhere in my soul, that I was born to fight beside this Flavius Stilicho. And I had decided long before then that I was unhappy in the ranks of Magnus Maximus. I chose to be Stilicho's man, and my soldiers all chose to follow me.

  Since that day, I have not looked backward. Offered the chance to leave and wait for Stilicho elsewhere, far from Magnus, I chose to remain with him. Three months later we were in Asia Minor, and for the next nine months we went soldiering wherever Stilicho was needed. Then, three months ago, Theodosius promoted him to Commander of the Imperial Household Troops, and we have been in Constantinople ever since. I suspect we will not stay much longer. Stilicho lives on horseback and detests the confinement of a city, and besides, there are too many battles to be fought throughout the Empire.

  My rank is now that of prefect. I am a cavalryman, and a cavalry man by conviction. But that is another story, and I am presently composing another letter

  —

  this one is already too long

  —

  in which I will tell you of the developments in Stilicho's mind, and in my own.

  Farewell, Father.

  My love to Aunt Luceiia, and to the tribe of small Varri who, I am sure, run all of your lives. I shall send this in care of Pontius Aulus Plautus, Publius Varrus's friend in Colchester, by military courier. He will see that it reaches you from there.

  Your dutiful son, Picus

  I read that first letter from Picus four times without pause, from start to finish, when Cay eventually passed it on to me. I had been awaiting it impatiently for a long time, schooling myself to be calm. Cay had received no fewer than fourteen letters in all, none of them short and none of them showing, externally, any sign of order, process or continuity. Picus stood revealed, by the end of all of them, as a highly conscientious and able correspondent, but an unthinking one in that he seldom gave any indication of the dates on which he was writing. In consequence, his father had to read all of his letters in random order as they came to hand, and only after that could he begin to place them in some kind of temporal progression.

  He then extended to me the privilege of reading them as a series of consecutive observations. And they were fascinating. The first of them, of course, was probably the most moving of them all, emotionally. But the second amazed me, recalling to my mind instantly a comment, by our friend Alaric, to the effect that God has willed it that no great idea should ever occur to one man alone. When the truly great developments in mankind's progress appear, they always seem to appear simultaneously in many lands, promulgated by many intelligent and visionary people.

  Greetings, Father,

  Already, having completed the first step, it seems this writing task grows easier. I suppose that is due to the difficulties I had with my first attempt, when the array of subjects to refer to and deal with seemed endless. This letter, by comparison, is much simpler; it has but one major component.

  Father, I wish to write to you of horses

  —

  horses, cavalry and the way in which a single man's perception of the importance of both may alter history. The man in question is, of course, Flavius Stilicho

  —

  nothing I write to you in future will be untouched by his influence, even should he die tomorrow, which the gods forbid!

  I know you are aware of the debacle at Adrianople some years ago, in 376. That was the year I first joined the Eagles. Irrespective, however, of your own personal judgment on that affair, I have to regurgitate it here, since it has a direct bearing upon the entire tenor of this letter.

  The officially sanctioned story of that fiasco, as I am sure you will recall, is that the Imperator Valens, co-Emperor at the time with Valentinian,

  was careless and silly enough to march a consular army of eight legions

  —

  40,000 men!

  —

  through hostile territory without taking even the most elementary precautions. His army then, in extended line of march along a lakeside, was surprised by a migrating tribe of Ostrogoths who, being mounted on horseback for their journeying, seized the moment and the day by charging at Valens's host in an undisciplined but deadly, densely packed mob. Their concerted attack, completely unexpected, rolled Valens's extended legions up like a parchment scroll before they had time even to think of deploying into line of battle.

  It was a fluke, we are told, one of those unforeseen and unforeseeable developments that, in war, must simply be accepted and accommodated.

  Flavius Stilicho will have none of that. He asserts

  —

  and none who listen can argue against his thesis or his logic

  —

  that it is inconceivable that any haphazard attack by an undisciplined rabble, no matter how huge their numbers or how densely packed their mass, could totally demoralize and destroy an entire Roman consular army of 40,000 men, killing all of them, including an Emperor and his entire staff.

  That such a thing happened is incontrovertible. How it happened, how it

  could

  happen, is a matter open to the wildest conjecture. How it is

  likely

  to have happened, however, is a conjecture that one might analyse quite pragmatically, and Stilicho has succinct ideas and opinions on that topic. From those ideas, and his deliberations concerning them, he has drawn a number of conclusions, and upon those conclusions he has constructed an amazing calendar of future events. Being privy to his thinking, and without any disloyalty or fear of being censured, I have decided to apprise you of Stilicho's thoughts, knowing that they will interest you both generally and specifically, and knowing also that the effort of detailing them for you will assist me personally in assimilating them.

  His deliberations and his findings, stated categorically, follow, and I must inform you, regretfully, that the language and the clarity of thought are Stilicho's alone:

  i

  . Valens and his army, although culpable of dereliction by default, could not collectively have shown the degree of mindless, suicidal ineptitude so clearly alleged in the official version of the incident. Valens had superb generals, legates and distinguished senior officers attached to his staff. Even had Valens been patently insane on the level of a Nero or a Caligula, his commanders would still have retained their military competence and responsibility for the army.

  ii

  . Rome has conquered the world by the excellence of her legions, the greatest military force history has ever seen. Roman armies

  —

  Rome's foot-soldiers

  —

  have been invincible since the days of Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar; the only defeats sustained since then by Roman armies have been at the hands of other Roman armies.

  iii

  . The catastrophe at Adrianople, therefore, was epoch-making: the greatest defeat of a Roman army by a non-Roman force in more than half a millennium. To categorize it as anything other than an unfortunate and regrettable mischance would be an admission that the barbarian forces threatening the Empire are capable of repeating their performance at Adrianople whenever and wherever they please. Obviously, such an admission is officially beyond consideration. The capacity, therefore, to inflict such damage has been attributed to hazard and ill fortune

  �
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  the fact that the barbarians simply happen to have been on horseback at the time of the incident, an eventuality unprecedented in the annals of Roman warfare.

  iv

  . Rome has never relied upon cavalry, other than for the provision of mobile screens of skirmishers and mounted archers to protect the legions while they deploy in line of battle. The cavalry function has always remained, more or less, in the hands of Rome's allies in Germany and Africa. To the Roman military mind, in fact, cavalry has always been deemed an inferior military presence, operating without the rigid discipline and training required by massed infantry formations. To this day, since the beginnings of Rome, there has always been something Jess than

  Roman

  about cavalry and cavalry troops.

  Such are the findings of Flavius Stilicho; from them he has developed the following propositions:

  v

  . That any Roman worthy of the name will discern the four foregoing points for himself, after even the shortest period of analytical thought on the matter, and will accept the verity of the situation and the dominant peril it implies, namely:

  vi

  . That no Roman worthy of the name who has even the slightest knowledge of military matters can seriously doubt the existence of brilliant, clear-thinking generals, equally capable of analysis and action, in the territories of the barbarians. It follows logically and inevitably, therefore, that the action against Valens's army at Adrianople will be recognized by such men for what it was: an overwhelming victory against a supposedly invulnerable force, won by the simple expedient of falling upon the Roman cohorts with sufficient speed to ensnare them before they could deploy on their own ground and in their own battle lines, and then overwhelming them with a sheer mass of men and horseflesh. Granted that realization, at some time in the future, if not now, Adrianople will be emulated and repeated, and the day of the Roman legion

  as it now exists

  will be over.

  That phrase, Father, "as it now exists," contains a seminal thought. Flavius Stilicho has the kind of mind that confronts potential disaster and circumvents it. His propositions continue:

  vii

  . That, accepting the inevitability of such a development, it is incumbent upon the senior legates of the imperial staff to begin immediately searching for effective means of precluding such a possibility, and to do so not by staring gape-mouthed into the future but by searching diligently in the past for an answer.

  viii

  . That the greatest military genius of ancient times was Alexander of Macedon, called The Great, who refined the heavy cavalry techniques of his father, Philip of Macedon, and used that heavy cavalry to conquer the world.

  ix

  . That since the cavalry in general use today consists of light skirmishers mounted on light horses, and the large, heavy horses used by Alexander and his troops are unknown in Roman military life, every effort should and must be made

  —

  immediately and without delay

  —

  to collect such horses, from wherever they may be found throughout the Empire, and to begin a program of breeding them selectively while training and equipping new, large bodies of troops to be the nucleus of a new form of warfare in the Roman world. And

  —

  x

  . That within one decade, or two at the very most, fully 25 percent of the fighting strength of every imperial legion in the field should consist of such heavy, tightly disciplined, highly manoeuvrable cavalry.

  Father, I had the privilege of being present when Stilicho outlined his findings, his conclusions, and his recommendations to the Emperor. Theodosius looked at him, frowning, and asked, "Do you really believe this ? " Stilicho merely inclined his head. "So be it, " said the Emperor. "Let it be done. " And the world as we know it

  —

  a thousand years of military history and tradition

  —

  changed.

  This has been a long letter, Father, but I have enjoyed the writing of it, and I think I have but little now to add. I know you will give it serious thought, and I know you will see the portent of it. We began the task of conversion to cavalry that same night, although it has been largely a paper task to this point. I am embroiled in it, and already we make great progress. Our major difficulty has been finding men

  —

  officers senior enough and flexible enough in their thinking (strange how those two seldom go together) to envision what we are about to do.

  I shall write again, as soon as I have substance to report. Take care of yourself, Father, and convey my respect and good wishes to all whom I hold dear.

  Picus

  "Strange how those two seldom go together..." It pleased me considerably that Picus should be so evidently the son of his father. That one little observation, whimsical and acerbic at the same time, demonstrated to me, more clearly than anything else I had read, that our boy had a pragmatic and slightly cynical head on his shoulders. Pragmatism is all very well on its own, I find, but it is too often humourless. When it is salted with a healthy and subtle hint of cynicism, however, the result is often humour, wit and irony. Those who possess such a blend of spices in their character are seldom boring.

  I was rereading this second letter from Picus as I walked to a meeting with Victorex, our Master of Horse, and I was smiling at my thoughts as I turned into the huge yard that fronted the main stables. There I found a spectacle that made my smile even wider and my pleasure greater, and I stopped and leaned against a gatepost to watch what was happening.

  Victorex, due mainly to his strange appearance and his almost complete disregard for the concerns of normal men and women (he was obsessed with things equine to the exclusion of all else), had made few real friends in our Colony, and he seemed more than content with that. He had, however, within a very short time of his arrival here made two staunch friends in the Villa Britannicus, both of whom shared his fierce love of horses and neither of whom seemed even slightly aware of the strangeness of his appearance.

  The first of these was my daughter Veronica, and the other was my wife. Veronica, now a beautiful, vivacious ten-year-old, had been besotted with a love of horses ever since she was old enough to tell a horse from a puppy. Her mother, I later discovered, had had the same passion as a girl but had forgotten it, by and large, on entering womanhood. In the past few years, however, her childhood love had been rekindled in the heat of her daughter's enthusiasm, and since Victorex had arrived to take over our horse-breeding program, both of them had spent all of their free time with him and his horses.

  Victorex blossomed under their concern and attentions. He was still as surly and ungracious as ever with ordinary mortals, utterly impatient with their trivial concerns, but he clearly considered my wife and daughter as possessing that extraordinary status enjoyed only by himself and his beloved charges. And thus, according them that recognition, he deferred to them in wondrous ways. His whole demeanour — his entire behaviour — had altered dramatically in the short months since his transfer to the villa. He now took trouble with his clothes and with his personal hygiene... matters that had seemed quite beneath him before the visits of Veronica and Luceiia became daily occurrences. It was true that he still slept in the stables, but he no longer smelled so pun-gently, so succinctly, of the stables.

  Now I found him at the centre of his training circuit, pivoting slowly, holding the end of a long lead-rein attached to the bridle of a beautiful black pony that circled him at a pretty canter, bearing my daughter on its back. The child's face was glowing with pleasure, and the great slabs of Victorex's teeth were exposed in a huge grin as he shouted instructions to her. As I watched, she drew her legs up beneath her and pushed herself erect until she stood, perfectly balanced, on the pony's back, the reins held loosely in her left hand, her right held slightly out and away from her body. It was lovely to behold. Her movements, her control and her poise were so perfectly correct, so natural, that wha
t I had seen, and the danger involved in it, became apparent to me only long afterward, by which time I knew that, had any real danger existed, Victorex would never have permitted the attempt. Knowing I was watching her, she made two complete circuits of the yard, then dropped back astride her mount and kneed him out of the circuit, directing him effortlessly to where I stood. She brought him to a halt and slipped lithely to the ground, where she hugged him briefly around the neck and then rushed to me, her eyes dancing with excitement. As I swept her up in a hug, she spoke into my ear.

  "Daddy, isn't he beautiful? His name is Bucephalus, the same as Alexander the Great's horse, and Victorex says he's giving him to me for my very own. Isn't that wonderful?"

  It was indeed, and surprising. Much as he loved his horses, Victorex owned none of them. They were communal property and therefore not his to dispose of. As I sniffed lovingly at the warm, clean scent of my daughter's hair before setting her down again, I was aware of Victorex approaching, his head cocked to the side as though listening. As he came, he gathered up the long lead-rein in loops, arranging them in his right hand. He read the expression on my face accurately and spoke to forestall me.

  "Master Varrus." He nodded his greeting. "Beautiful day."

  I returned his nod. "Victorex. That's what I was thinking, too, until I discovered that you had presented my daughter with a communal gift."

  He frowned and shook his head, trying to stop me. Veronica took a step backwards and looked from me to Victorex, her face troubled.

  "What's wrong, Daddy? What is a communal gift?"

  Victorex answered her. "It's a gift from many people, Magpie."

  Magpie? That was new to me, but I looked at my raven-haired, white-skinned child and saw the Tightness of it immediately. She was frowning, speaking directly to Victorex.

  "But you said the gift was from you, to me."

  "And so it is. Now take Bucephalus inside and rub him down. I have to speak with your father. And be sure you don't miss any part of him. He deserves the best you can give him."

  "I know, and he shall have it, and he knows that, too. Don't you, boy?"

  The pony whickered and nudged her with his muzzle and she laughed, although her expression was still slightly uncertain. "He knows I have some honey for him, but he doesn't know where it is. Will you still be here when I've finished, Daddy?"