Strategos: Island in the Storm

by Gordon Doherty

  The cicada song seemed to grow deafening, and his knuckles whitened on the cane. There had to be a way, a way to gather the Doukas supporters, to break him and Psellos free of this powerless tedium of exile.

  A crunching of boots in scree sounded as Psellos came from within the villa to sit by his side then. He braced himself for some caustic, wordy rhetoric – that had been Psellos’ speciality in these last months, usually accompanied by frenzied scratching at the mysterious affliction that burgeoned on the advisor’s chest. But this time, something was different. He was grinning. ‘Advisor?’ John whispered.

  Psellos waited until the watching varangos turned away, then leaned a little closer. ‘The lines of communication are open once more, Master.’

  John frowned, then saw the bread boy descending the gentle dusty slope to leave once more.

  ‘And he did it for just a bronze nomismata,’ Psellos’ shoulder jostled in mirth.

  ‘He brings news of Diogenes’ campaign?’

  Psellos’ grin widened. ‘It seems there was some dark soul who brought the emperor to his knees with poison.’ The grin faded a fraction. ‘Yet the poisoner was outed and slain.’

  John’s hopes sank. ‘Then your ploy failed,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Did it?’ Psellos replied, the grin returning. ‘The bread boy told me how close the campaign army had been to revolt. Word of this has spread across imperial lands. The people are doubting Diogenes once again. More . . . ’

  John made to interject, but Psellos raised a finger, silencing him. The advisor’s eyes shut tight for a moment, his face wrinkled in agony and paled. He reached a hand up to his chest and made to scratch at the lesion under his linen robe, but hesitated, wincing at the lightest touch. A patch of pinkish-red, sticky fluid blossomed from the point where he had made contact. John’s skin crept as he saw something else under that translucent patch of linen; something writhing. Shuddering, the advisor composed himself, pulling his robe clear of his skin. The grin returned, albeit pained.

  ‘ . . . more, the boy brought me word and will take word with him. Riders will take that word to your followers, Master. To those in the capital and those all around the empire’s lands. Prime them, ready them for what is to come.’

  John’s brow knitted. ‘What is to come?’

  ‘I planned for many eventualities before we were sent into exile, Master. The poisoner was but one string to my bow. The first of many.’

  12. The Lion’s Fury

  The Seljuk artillery groaned and creaked. The Byzantine garrison on Edessa’s battlements gawped. The searing hot midsummer day was silent for but a moment. Then the artillery commander threw a hand forward like a catapult arm. ‘Loose!’ he roared, a thick spray of spittle clouding before his lips.

  At once, the air was filled with the thwacking of ropes, the bucking of vast timber war machines – nearly thirty onagers and six trebuchets, lined on the crest of the war-scarred hills nearest the city’s southern walls – and the whistle of colossal rocks hurtling through the ether. With a crash that shook sky and earth, the rocks battered the city walls. Thick clouds of dust puffed into the air as sections of the battlements were gouged away where the rocks struck. Skutatoi were crushed on the walkway or punched like insects into the city streets below, leaving just a crimson stain where they had stood. The foundations shuddered where the rocks landed lower down, cracks snaking from the point of impact. But it had been this way for twenty three days now. And still the beetling and ancient bulwark remained tenaciously unbreached.

  Watching from behind the artillery lines, Alp Arslan calmed his panicked mount. As the beast stilled, he felt his blood pound like thunder in his ears. He had woken that morning, annoyed by the rich red wine he had consumed in an effort to bring on sleep, needled by the knowledge that Edessa, this thorn of a city, awaited his attentions for yet another day. The city, garrisoned only by some three hundred Byzantine spearmen, had withstood all his artillerymen could throw at it. The Byzantine ballistae mounted on the high towers had been broken almost every day by the longer-ranged Seljuk trebuchets, only to be repaired at night. The sapping tunnels he had ordered to be dug had been countermined and destroyed, killing hundreds of diggers in the process. The horde of some fifteen hundred akhi spearmen he had assembled to storm the city had sat and watched, idle, their spears untarnished. As the days had worn on, he had even taken to leaving his battle armour, helm and weapons in his tent, so sure was he that each day would pass without a conclusion to the siege. This had been planned as a swift siege, the first of many, breaking the easternmost of Byzantium’s cities in order to prize open their southern borders just as he had gained a foothold in the Lake Van region. But then the cursed Fatimid boil had risen once again. Cities all across Syria had turned upon their Seljuk garrisons and declared themselves under the protection of the Fatimid Caliphate – Aleppo the biggest loss of all. All his progress from recent years was close to crumbling, and his rivals watched on with glee.

  As the artillery stretched once more, the sultan pinched the top of his nose and bowed his head. For a blessed moment, he was spirited from the chaos all around him. He thought back to February, just a few months ago. Before turning his attentions on Edessa, he had sought first to assimilate or conquer the defiant Marwanids, one of the rebellious factions holding out against him in the city of Amida. They held out for four days. When the gates were smashed open, his armies sped to pour inside, eager to sack the homes and temples and put the populace to the sword. But he had ridden to their head and halted them with a raised hand.

  His men had looked at him in disbelief, but he had defied any of them to challenge his order. ‘Today is not a day for slaughter,’ he had told them, thinking of his son, born that morning, ‘today, the battle is won. It ends here.’

  And he had ordered just a handful of his finest beys to ride inside and negotiate a surrender. Then he had twisted in his saddle and looked up to the battlements of the city. The Marwanid prince stood there, smoke-stained and beleaguered. Alp Arslan simply raised a hand, then passed the palm over his face, showing his desire for a peaceable end to the day. And so Amida had fallen into the Seljuk dominion, swiftly and with minimal bloodshed. He gazed at his palm – the same one that had halted his army and granted mercy on all those citizens.

  A scream rang out, tearing him from his reverie. He looked up to see that the latest bombardment of Edessa had brought down another section of the battlements. A Byzantine soldier was responsible for the screaming, his legs and pelvis crushed by a rock, the rest of him propped there in a dark pool of blood, arms thrashing.

  Just then, hands barged him from his horse. He landed on the ground just before a Byzantine ballista bolt plunged into his horse’s throat. The beast reared up and collapsed, thrashing in a pink froth. The unseen hands dragged the sultan back.

  ‘They have done something to increase the range of their weapons,’ Bey Taylan said, his sparkling green eyes shaded under the rim of his helm, ‘we must draw the lines back. Kilic, the other who had pushed him from the path of the bolt, helped him to his feet.

  Alp Arslan cursed himself for being so negligent, so certain of dogged but eventual victory, that he missed this. Seljuk war horns blared all along the noose of men encircling the city, and the lines drew back. As he buckled on a coat of leather armour handed to him by Kilic, he noticed a lone rider emerging from the city gates. Another on foot slapped the horse’s rump and sent it galloping towards him. The rider was unarmed, his tunic sweat-slicked and his dark face dominated by his wide eyes and dark moustache. A Seljuk prisoner of war, Alp Arslan realised as he came closer, seeing his wrists were roped together. ‘Speak,’ he said flatly as akhi spearmen helped the man from the saddle and cut his bonds.

  The man gulped and bowed. ‘My Sultan. The Byzantines send you this,’ the man rose gingerly and reached for an amphora tied to his saddle. ‘Iced water. They said the River Scirtus’ waters are pleasant at this time of year and that there is plenty to go around.’
And then he produced a parcel of salted meat and bread. ‘And their storehouses are . . . bountiful.’

  ‘So they can hold out for weeks, months?’ Alp Arslan shrugged. ‘I can wait just as long to see their wells run dry and their food spoil,’ he lied. He traced the snaking silver course of the River Scirtus across the land, cursing it for entering the walls of the city under a ferociously protected culvert and lending the defenders such an advantage. While his men could also drink until their hearts were content downstream from the city, food was much less abundant. He saw the two akhi who bookended the wretched rider. These, his finest spearmen, looked like beggars, their cheeks gaunt and their eyes black-ringed. The Edessan garrison had done well to burn the farms and orchards of the countryside in advance of his arrival. He sighed, squinting into the sun, then glancing around for inspiration. He looked over his shoulder to the line of Byzantine soldiers roped together there, kneeling. ‘I could send one of them into the city to tell the proud Byzantines that their hubris will be their downfall. I’d wager that they in fact have very little food left. Did you see these full storehouses?’

  ‘No, I . . . ’ the man stammered.

  ‘Then you have been blinded by their words.’

  Another day passed, and the bombardment continued. The walls of Edessa began to resemble a haggard cliff-face – scarred and pitted, jutting from the green-gold land. But they would not fall. Alp Arslan came once more to the ridge across from the city’s southern wall.

  ‘They will break today, I can feel it,’ the Sultan muttered.

  ‘They seek parley, it seems?’ Bey Taylan said, again by his side, pointing to the wagon that came from the gates.

  The driver was an aged, bald man. A Byzantine this time.

  Alp Arslan sat taller in his saddle. ‘Their stores are empty at last!’ he hissed.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Look at the driver’s skin – pallid and sickly.’ Just like so many of your own men, a voice hissed in his mind. ‘Let us hear what he has to say.’

  The man slid from his horse and croaked; ‘The Doux of Edessa will turn the city over to you, Sultan. He asks only one thing: that you end the bombardment and put your siege engines to the torch.’

  ‘Never!’ Taylan spat.

  ‘Silence, young Bey!’ Alp Arslan snapped, cowing the snarling Taylan.

  ‘It is a trick!’ Taylan insisted.

  ‘Silence!’ the sultan repeated.

  ‘It is no trick,’ the bald man pleaded. ‘We are running short of food and so are you. Let our people leave the city without the threat of being dashed on open ground by your stone-throwers. Please, destroy your artillery and we will leave. As a token of our good faith, here is all we have in the city treasury.’ He swept the canvas from the back of the wagon to reveal twelve barrels brimming with gold and silver coins. ‘Fifty thousand pieces.’

  ‘They are dinars and dirhams, Sultan. Coin collected – no, stolen – from our people at some point,’ Taylan insisted, squinting at the bounty.

  Alp Arslan shot him another glare of reprimand. ‘Gold is gold and silver is silver. It exists to compel men and stoke their greed. It was doubtless once Byzantine coinage and before that Persian or Roman.’ He turned back to the wagon driver. ‘If this is some ploy, Byzantine, I will have your head,’ he growled.

  The man nodded, holding the sultan’s gaze earnestly. ‘I understand.’

  Alp Arslan gazed upon the gold and silver. Should they renege on their word, he thought, this coin will allow me to hire a mercenary army that I can leave behind to finish the siege. Once more he remembered the good faith with which the siege of Amida had ended. He heard the first cries of his son again. A warmth touched his heart. But let there be no treachery, let this be the last day of this dogged standoff. He turned to his artillery lines. ‘Burn the siege engines.’

  The engineers protested at first, but their commanders soon noticed the fire in their sultan’s eyes and put their men to the task. Within the hour, the siege lines were ablaze, thick coils of black smoke staining the sky and the flames bending and distorting the air. A cluster of akhi spearmen laid down their weapons and shields to lift the barrels of coins from the Byzantine wagon onto one of the sultan’s. They strained and puffed at each barrel’s great weight, then, when they came to the last one, one man stumbled and fell. The barrel tumbled with him. The gold and silver coins spilled across the sand before Taylan and Alp Arslan – but not a barrelful . . . just a smattering. Below the rim, the barrel was filled only with wet sand.

  Alp Arslan’s skin prickled. The stench of his blazing war machines taunted him, and he felt the gaze of all nearby who had witnessed the ruse. He swung to the Byzantine wagon driver. ‘You deceived me.’

  The man clasped his hands together and knelt. ‘I did what I had to in order to protect my people. God’s people. There is enough food left in the city to last a few more days. Your men cannot hang on that long, we know this. So my people will not be leaving the city. You will, however, abandon these lands in search of forage. The siege is over. The city remains in imperial hands.’ With that, he bowed his head and muttered in prayer.

  Alp Arslan’s chest rose and fell faster and faster with every heartbeat. He looked to Kilic, his battle-scarred bodyguard, standing just a few feet behind the kneeling man. One word to the giant killer and the treacherous Byzantine’s throat could be opened to his spine. Alp Arslan’s mind spun with the possibilities. A quick death? Maybe slow, wicked torture? Or acceptance, acceptance that he had been outsmarted. This last possibility irked him most of all. He turned to Kilic and Taylan.

  ‘Do with him what you will, then ready the army. We must depart for the south at once. There is fodder and game to be had there. Then we will turn our attentions upon rebellious Aleppo.’

  He stalked away. Behind him, he heard a scimitar being unsheathed, then the thick, familiar hiss of slicing skin and bone and the thud of a severed head hitting the dust.

  ***

  A week later, the sultan and his army came to Aleppo. The tall, sun-bleached walls of this desert city shimmered, the battlements packed with jeering Fatimid troops. The sultan’s head pounded. His nostrils and throat were parched and coated in dust, and his mind was thick with the fog of the copious volumes of red wine he had consumed in these last nights. He looked along his armies. They were well fed and watered now, but without the means to breach Aleppo’s towering walls. He looked to the pair of trebuchets his engineers had cobbled together in an effort to replace the burnt artillery – flimsy, weak-looking devices. They bucked and spat forth rocks no bigger than a man’s head. These rocks sailed through the swirling desert air and smacked into Aleppo’s gatehouse. A puff of white dust. Barely any damage to the walls. A moment of silence. Then more haughty cheering from the garrisoned Fatimids.

  The beys nearby began chattering anxiously, offering him advice, each sure they were correct in their words. Alp Arslan was focused on something else entirely though; on the tallest of the city’s gate towers, a handful of Fatimid soldiers were scurrying to and fro, drawing some vast, black cloth with them. They then draped the cloth like a veil over the tower top as if to shade it from the blistering sun and hush the intermittent din of the siege. The laughter that followed echoed from the city and washed out across the Seljuk siege line.

  ‘What is this?’ he spat.

  ‘I believe they are trying to goad us, Sultan,’ Taylan growled. He was the only one who had refrained from offering jabbering advice.

  ‘Goad us?’ he said.

  Taylan nodded to one of the enemy soldiers up there, clasping his hands to his head and pretending to swoon, bringing more laughter from the others with him. ‘They mean to tell us that our siege engines have served only to give their towers a headache.’

  Alp Arslan snatched his wine skin from his nearby mare, uncorking it and lifting it, eager to drink hungrily.

  ‘We must hew more timber to fashion proper stone-throwers!’ Bey Gulten yapped, barging i
n between Alp Arslan and Taylan.

  ‘Send the ladders forward!’ another shrieked.

  The sultan paused, the skin at his lips. Then he threw it down, the wine spilling into the sand. ‘There is no timber in these parts, you oaf!’ he roared at Bey Gulten. ‘And you, feel free to take the ladders forward!’ he bellowed at the other. ‘When you reach the top and find they are five feet short of the wall tops, then perhaps you can ask the Fatimid garrison for a helping hand onto the battlements?’

  Both beys dropped their gaze from Alp Arslan. Bey Gulten did snatch a swift and fiery glare at Bey Taylan, by his side.

  ‘This siege has failed. This year of campaigning was supposed to deliver Syria to me. Instead, my reward is humiliation,’ the sultan snarled. He drew his gaze around each of the men there. How many here were truly with him? How many were as eager to see him fail as his rival, Yusuf, the dog who had tried to assassinate him?

  He felt all semblance of self-control crumbling at that moment, his head thundering and his chest rising and falling in ire.

  ***

  In a niche upon a craggy hilltop east of Aleppo, Diabatenus crouched on one knee, adjusting his eyepatch as he surveyed the scene below. He could see the Seljuk siege lines wrapped around the city like a noose and he had watched the bold move to ire the sultan with the black veil. A weighty move that played with the lives of the citizens, he mused, then weighed the scroll he held. With this one sheaf of paper, he too might save many thousands of lives. To trade cities rather than blows with the sultan was a noble aspiration. He glanced to the dying embers of the small fire he had kindled to cook his midday meal of thick porridge and let his mind wander.