We both stood up. Shading my eyes, I looked into the sun. This was a big plain and the mountain was a long way off, across a landscape of grass and woods and more undulations than I’d seen the night before. The nearest village was five miles away. The messenger we’d sent wasn’t back yet. What he told us would decide the matter. The earth walls I’d seen were encouraging, but not final proof. Was this a district where my law was in force and where the men had regular practice in arms? Or were the men here the same eunuchs with intact organs of increase who’d been slaughtered on the other side of the pass? If it was the eunuchs living here, we’d have no choice but to pull back to one of the armed districts. We could raise a decent force there and harry the Persians most cruelly. But there’d be no more chance of stopping them in their tracks. Over in the big pass, Shahrbaraz would still be pulling hairs out of his beard with the frustration of getting his army of soldiers and his armies of camp followers ready to start out in good order. Strike now, and we’d have a sitting target.
Even as I squinted into the sunlight, I had my answer. Their priest leading them, I saw another dozen men marching forward with spears pointing up. Their glitter in the noonday sun lifted my spirits for the first time since I’d left Antonia variously weeping and raging like Ariadne on Naxos.
I turned to one of the young men standing beside Rado. I remembered myself in time and spoke to Rado. ‘Not everyone will be riding,’ I said. ‘How long to march a few hundred men to the big pass?’
Rado shrugged. ‘My people never marched anywhere,’ he said. ‘Walking was for slaves and women. However, if we time the march so we can camp tonight in the mountain, we can keep out of sight tomorrow by skirting the far plain. That will get us in place for a dawn attack the day after next.’
‘Sounds reasonable,’ I said. ‘But it all depends on how much influence Shahrbaraz may presently have with Chosroes. I suppose we’ll soon have some indication.’ I pointed to the stripped bodies of the Persians. ‘Their non-return must by now have been noted. If the Grand General is still in charge, the whole army will stay put while he gets it ready for defence against a Greek army he’s pretty sure is lurking in the mountains. If he’s being countermanded by his raving lunatic of a master, there will be a search party for the missing ones and the army will be driven forward, ready or not.’ I touched his arm. ‘Which does my general prefer?’
Rado shut his eyes, as if thinking back to his days of national banditry. ‘I’d rather have the Great King in charge,’ he said. ‘An army on the move is always a better target. If you’ll pardon the comparison, that armed rabble we saw the other day is a bit like old Samo – attack him when he’s leaning against a wall and he’ll kill you; get him into a run down the road and he’ll fall dead for you.’ We both laughed.
There was a rider approaching. Rado was right about these people. He was coming up impressively fast. He stopped close by a heap of stones and jumped right off to run across the next few dozen yards to where Rado was sitting.
The young rider spoke rapidly in a Greek dialect with misplaced consonants. I had to interpret. Briefly put, he’d found Shahin and his jolly crew about twenty miles from the junction of the passes. They’d been joined by about a hundred men in uniform but there was no sign as yet of the main army.
‘We can presume it’s on the move,’ I said. ‘We’ll see which of the three forces involved gets first to the junction of the passes.’ Rado nodded. Almost absent-mindedly, he began tracing lines on the grass with his right boot.
Chapter 65
The lunch we ate exhausted all the supplies Antonia’s militiamen had brought from wherever she picked them up. But word had gone round every village of what was happening beyond the mountain. Every place we passed gave up its own tribute of food and clerical blessings and more armed men. By late afternoon, Rado had closed our numbers at just over three hundred, plus priests. There was no shortage of recruits, and all were on horseback. Rado put every one of them through a stiff test. Their horses were smaller than our own. The riders would have looked absurd if they hadn’t also been small. But a lifetime of riding up mountains and over bare hills, and two years or so of practising in arms – and even Rado was clicking his toung with approval as he watched them dash this way and that in the formations he’d ordered.
‘Come on, Alaric, I’ll race you!’ Antonia had called out as we approached another fortified village. My reply was a dignified harangue about her condition. In truth, I must have been the worst man on horseback in a hundred miles. Shahin, with his stunted legs, might have been less clumsy in the saddle than I was.
Three hundred we took for the fighting. Rado could have taken twice that number and more. But the unexpected number of volunteers only made him stiffen his test. Some earlier recruits he even sent back. We’d agreed there was a limit to the numbers we could effectively lead into battle. We also had to consider the need for a fallback defence if things went wrong.
Yes, leave out the priests, and we had three hundred men. Was I the only one of us to recognise the number’s significance? Silly question.
By the time we reached the foothills of the mountain and late afternoon was turning fast to early evening, we might have been taken for an army of several thousand. The numbers we would lead round the mountain might be limited. Not so the numbers following behind to see us off. As we came to a place where I could stand on some rocks and make the speech I’d been turning over in my head, I knew that, even if the attack did go wrong, those murder squads Chosroes had unleashed wouldn’t have it so easy here as on the other side of the big pass. Every man had his spear, every boy his bow and arrows. The very women were carrying arms.
I stood up and lifted my hands for silence. I waited for the tense babble of conversations to die away. I called Rado beside me. After a frigid stare in her direction, I allowed Antonia to come and sit at my feet. A speech in the Senate must be in the correct Greek of the ancients. You can be learnedly convoluted or as direct as Demosthenes. But the rule is to use a syntax and vocabulary, and even sometimes a regard for vowel quantities, that only those educated beyond a certain level can perfectly understand. If you find that the common people, when allowed in to watch the proceedings, are following what you say, you get some very sniffy looks from all the other persons of quality. It’s pretty much the same in gatherings of bishops. Today, I was speaking to an audience of illiterates. Most of them hadn’t so much as seen the walls of a city, let alone been admitted to its more refined entertainments. I needed to inform, and I needed to inspire. No room, then, for allusions to Marathon and Thermopylae, or other things of no meaning to these people. At best, I might work in a reminder to how Samson routed the Philistine army with the jawbone of an ass. And, if possible, I’d leave even that out.
I took a deep breath in and out. I wiped sweaty hands on the seat of my trousers. I looked about for Eboric. I saw him near the front. I frowned at him for the gross disregard of orders in which he’d been Antonia’s accomplice. He smiled sweetly back until I had no choice but to break into a smile of my own. I looked away and took another deep breath.
‘People of the mountains!’ I cried in my best and loudest speaking voice, ‘you will have heard that a great and terrible army is approaching the land that you and your ancestors have known since time out of mind. I have seen this army with my own eyes. I have seen the King who leads it – a tyrant worse than Herod himself, who delights in blood and suffering. And I have seen the trail of death and utter devastation that the King and his army have already left on the far side of the big pass. Whatever you have heard, whatever you may imagine, is nothing compared with what I have seen.’
I stopped and waited for the scared murmur to die away. ‘You can try running away. You can hide with some of your livestock in the far mountains. Perhaps the tide of blood will not follow you there. Perhaps it will finally recede, leaving you with your lives. But your homes will be burnt and your churches demolished. Your crops will be taken. Your livestock will be dr
iven away. You may – perhaps – keep your lives. But you will return to nothing.
‘You can run – or you can fight.’ I stopped again and put a firm look on my face. ‘Though it is so large that the earth may tremble at its approach, you have no cause to tremble at this army. It is filled with miserable slaves. They fight only because, if they turn and run, their own officers will punish them with death. They are demoralised by the weather. No serious thought has been put into feeding them. They are squeezed into a place where they cannot fight in their accustomed manner. There is a good chance that, few as we are, we can send them, falling over each other in their haste, all the way back to the Euphrates.’
I allowed myself a longer pause. No one was laughing at me. I’d go on to the end. ‘I am Alaric, Lord Treasurer to the Emperor. I am the author of the law that has made you into the owners of your land. Because of me, you are beholden neither to landlords nor the tax gatherer. I have given you the right to arm yourselves and organise for your common defence. I have given you the right to turn yourselves, for the first time in a thousand years, from two-legged farm animals into men. I now call on you to defend what you have against those who would take it from you.’
I had thought of a final invitation for anyone who didn’t fancy throwing himself under the stampeding elephant that was the Persian army to turn and go back home. The burst of enthusiastic cheering that followed what I’d just said cancelled the need for that. I looked over my little army of wiry men and grown-up boys, and told myself not to think how many of them I’d be leading to their deaths. This alone told me I wasn’t the right leader. I glanced at Rado. He’d got the generality of what I was saying and had a look on his face of grim anticipation. This was what he’d been born to do. But for his capture, he’d by now be doing to us in the Thracian mountains what he was now about to do with us to the Persians. He’d put up with me in Constantinople – no, that was unjust: he was completely and unquestioningly mine. But I’d never again refer to his time as a dancing boy and sex companion. Long before he grew his first proper beard, the smell of horse leather would have soaked indelibly into him.
Antonia banged a fist on to one of my feet. ‘Has everyone enough food to get us there and back?’ she asked in her manly voice.
I glared down at her. ‘This is the moment,’ I said heavily, ‘when Rado chooses five good riders to go off with you and Eboric to Trebizond.’
‘Oh, shut up, Alaric!’ she snapped. ‘We aren’t married yet and I am the Emperor’s niece. Try coming the Big I Am with me and I’ll make you look two inches tall.’
I tried to copy Rado’s grim look – quite hard when you know your face is turning bright pink. ‘If you think you’re riding into battle with me,’ I whispered, ‘you’ve picked the wrong husband.’
‘Then it’s agreed that I’m coming with you as far as the battle,’ she said. She got up and turned to the crowd, a small sword in her hand. She raised a loud cheer of her own.
Grimmer than Rado in their black robes and huge, scruffy beards, the priests were in a tight group at the front of the crowd. Once the most senior of these had preached his sermon on the evils of the Persian idolatry and the efficacy of the relic he’d brought along, and once they’d all raised their icons aloft to heaven, I’d give quiet instructions for Antonia to be sat on when it came to the fighting.
We made our camp at the halfway point round the mountain. On our right was a drop of several hundred feet, to our left a place sheltered enough to let a fairly thick grove of trees grow. The scouts we’d sent far ahead were uniformly reporting no enemy presence. Even so, we kept fires to a minimum and were ready to dart under cover at first sign of trouble.
Our only disturbance came about the midnight hour – long after everyone else, except the watch, had turned in. I was sitting up late with Rado in a makeshift tent. We were into our third cup of a sort of beer made with oats.
‘It would be useful for Priscus to show himself,’ I said in Slavic, answering his objection, ‘because he has military experience and we have none. A certain forced courage and handiness with a sword doesn’t make me into a general of any sort. As for you, with all respect, your only experience of battle against regular forces ended with your whole family dead and you standing unwashed in my office. And, until you can prove that you’re the next Alexander, your age is somewhat against you.’
He looked happily at his feet – something else, I realised, he was copying from me. ‘It’s too late for second thoughts now,’ he said. He put his cup down and played with the lamp. ‘If you’d asked my honest opinion this morning, it would have been to load up four horses and get all four of us back to Constantinople. That Persian rubbish could then have carried on killing and burning everything in reach. If they ever made it to Constantinople, we’d have had plenty of time to find somewhere else to go. But you didn’t think to ask my opinion. Now these people have fed us and hailed us as saviours, that’s what we’ll have to be. And isn’t that what your duty – and, since you freed me, mine – requires?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s our duty.’ I drank deeper to steady my nerve. ‘And duty is everything, whatever you feel about doing it. We may or may not be needed to save the Empire. But we have to try to save these people and others like them. What I’m wondering about is the practicalities. When all is said and done, we’re not leading people like yours or mine into battle. These are untried amateurs.’
Rado laughed. ‘Samo told me that untried amateurs like these saw off the Persians last year.’
‘That was a raiding force, at the end of its supply line,’ I said. ‘Also, the numbers were more evenly matched.’
Rado laughed again. ‘You said yourself that, if we hit them in the pass, their numbers won’t count. Also, I don’t think those animals we killed the other day were much above the common level. Our men are fighting for their homes. That means a lot. So long as we keep out of sight tomorrow, we’ll take them by surprise and give them a bloody nose they won’t ever forget.’
This was the moment when everyone woke up. It began as a commotion among the outlying watch. By the time we’d got our swords and were hurrying from the tent, it had turned into a noise, from many throats, of inarticulate horror. It sounded as if it would go on without end. It wasn’t the Persians, we could be sure. But it was all they needed, if any were about, to tell them something was up.
‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ I shouted, sword in hand. I struck it three times against a rock. In the light of the torches that had now been lit, I looked at the hundred or so young men. I could guess they’d blundered into us and the knowledge that they weren’t alone in the darkness had set them off. Sobbing or crying out with terror, shrinking from the sudden light, they cowered on the ground. One of them, I could see, had an arrow or a spear wound on his bare lower arm. Others looked as if they’d been knocked about.
‘Put those torches out,’ I ordered. ‘One light only.’ I turned to one of the priests. ‘Try and shut them up,’ I said. ‘See if you can get any sense out of them.’
It was a nasty story, quickly told. As I’d suspected, the far plain was in a district without militias. Persian foragers had turned up at a cluster of five linked villages. Instead of the usual murder on site, they’d entertained themselves this time by gathering the whole population together and setting everyone off at a run towards our mountain. Those who’d refused to run, or couldn’t, had been burned alive in their church. Of those who could run, those who fell behind were stabbed in the guts and left to bleed to death where they lay. The old went first and then the very young and the women, and then every man who couldn’t keep up the pace set by laughing demons on horseback. Every tie of blood or affection was tested to snapping point. Those that didn’t snap led to certain death. Those of the runners who survived, even for a little time, survived only as individuals – women who threw down their babies, men who cast their children aside, anyone strong enough and terrified enough to pull someone else out of the way and keep at
the front of the terrified, gibbering crowd.
Of the five or six hundred who started on the run, I counted barely a hundred who’d made it far enough into the woods for the Persians to get bored and go off to pat each other on the back for a job well done. Of necessity, these survivors were the fittest and strongest, and those most terrified by the prospect of death into dropping every consideration of love or decency. Looking at the faces of these survivors in the light of a single torch, I saw fear – but I also saw the realisation of a shame in survival that would never fade this side of the grave.
‘Give them food and drink,’ I said. I turned to the priest. ‘Give them what comfort you can.’ I raised my voice. ‘Let anyone who cares join us in the morning. We’ll see how, even without training, men can fight when they have nothing left to lose.’
I paused outside my tent. Inside, Eboric had finally been pressed into giving a fuller description of my dealings with Chosroes than I’d so far given. He didn’t know their full extent, and his lack of Persian blurred his narrative. But I listened to his low, trembling account of our banquet in the night palace as if I were hearing about somebody else. At the time, I’d been scared shitless and I’d been too busy trying to kill the Great King to reflect on things. After that had come the long strain of the escape and, after that, the reunion with Antonia and the preparations for the counter-offensive. Now, I sat down and put my head in both hands. It didn’t help hearing the proud rise in Eboric’s voice every time he found reason to explain how brave I’d been and how devoted to the safety of those I loved.
The Curse of Babylon Page 48
