The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  He’d been a bastard in life. Oh, he’d been more than a bastard. The words might not exist to describe the beastliness of his life, or the misery he’d inflicted on the world. But he was now gone from the world. And, if a strict moralist might have thrown up his arms in despair at the recitation of his sins, and announced there could be no set off against a tenth of them in any Divine Court of Justice, I could say he’d made some atonement. Without that unsung and unsingable repeat of Thermopylae, the rest of us might easily not have lived to behold the mournful joys of victory.

  A few feet closer to the high wall of the pass lay the boy who’d run all those miles to us. I hadn’t learned his name. I hadn’t so much as spoken to him. I’d thought he was about fifteen. In death, he looked younger. I looked away, and found I could still see his dead face. I swallowed and clenched both hands into fists. These had been volunteers among volunteers, I told myself. Leave Priscus aside, this was atonement of their own for having lived after everyone dear to them had died.

  I’d been faintly aware of a voice babbling insanely away on my left. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ Theodore cried in Syriac. ‘So proud and boastfully squirting in life – all now burn in the lake of black fire that awaits us!’ Not up to walking, he crawled from body to body, calling indiscriminately at our dead and those of the enemy. It would have been easy to give the order. A dozen swords would have rasped from their sheaths, to be buried in that twisted body. But he’d spoken in Syriac. The only insults to the dead worth punishing are those heard by the living.

  ‘Fuck off, Theodore,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m putting you straight into a monastery when we get back. If I ever have to see you again, I’ll put a black mark against the day it happens.’ A look of mad cunning spread over his face. He raised one of his hands in a gesture of malediction but crawled out of kicking distance. The last I noticed of him, he was propped against a smashed cart, his arms about knees that he’d drawn up to his chin.

  Rado touched me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a group of perhaps thirty horsemen picking their way towards us. Each wore full armour and carried a long spear. I looked at our own men. They were still knocked out. But the man at the front of the group climbed down from his horse and began picking his way towards us. He was wearing yellow boots and had to keep stepping aside to avoid the pools of jellied blood. I waited till he was a dozen yards away before bowing. ‘Greetings, Shahrbaraz,’ I said in Persian.

  He gave me one of his dead looks. ‘The customary agreement in these circumstances,’ he said without bowing, ‘is that we should be allowed to watch over our dead till the seventh hour of the night.’

  ‘Then let it be as the custom prescribes,’ I replied. I could explain later to Rado that the Persians don’t bury their dead, but leave them to be devoured by wild beasts. Shocking to any Western sensibility, this had its convenient side. Burying that lot, in a place without earth, would have been out of the question. Even our own small number of dead I’d decided to leave till help arrived.

  Shahrbaraz was looking at Priscus. ‘So the old fox was alive after all,’ he said thoughtfully. He looked away. ‘Am I right in believing a barbarian boy, even younger than you, did this to us?’ he asked. I nodded and put my arm about Rado. For a long moment, Shahrbaraz stared in silence. Then he bowed gravely. ‘The young man is to be congratulated,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t take this as a victory. If today’s battle is over, I need only pick out a few hundred veterans of the Syrian War and lead them against you tomorrow. You’ll not be so lucky then. I’ve seen your numbers. Or are you going to lie to me that this is only the vanguard of a Greek army of defence?’

  ‘Where is Chosroes?’ I asked.

  Shahrbaraz reached up to stroke his beard. ‘Alive,’ he said cautiously. ‘His Majesty was wounded in his right shoulder by your most disrespectful spear thrust. He is being carried back in all haste to our own territory to secure the appropriate medical treatment for a wound sustained on the field of battle. After that, he will return to Ctesiphon.’

  I smiled. ‘Then you can drop your silly talk of coming back for second helpings.’ I walked over to a large stone beside the wall of the pass. I pushed a dead Persian from it and sat down. ‘Let me put a case to you, My Lord General.’ He came and leaned against the wall. His men were a long way off. No one was able to follow us here, so I kept my voice loud and steady.

  ‘Either you’ve been defeated by the vanguard of a Greek army, or you’ve been routed by a local militia. The former is an occupational hazard, the second a disgrace that can lead only to the impaling stake. If you ignore this plain consideration and press forward, you won’t get much deeper into the Home Provinces. This isn’t Syria. Between here and Constantinople, every farmer is now also a soldier. You can forget supply lines. Your zone of occupation will be measured in the square inches that each of your men is standing on at any particular moment. Never mind whether we beat you in a regular battle, you’ll be lucky to make it back to Chosroes at the head of a hundred men. And, with no army to your name, how long before His Majesty decides he doesn’t like the sour expression on your face?’

  For the first time that day, I was almost enjoying myself. ‘So let’s agree that there is a bloody great army hurrying along the Larydia Pass. Why not take my offer of continued truce and go back to the Euphrates? We won’t harry the retreat. You can blame everything on Shahin. He was working for us all along. He led us here. The Horn of Babylon was a fraud he made up with us for the purpose of murdering Chosroes. Its silver body was covered in a poison that could turn a man to grey slime in three days.’

  ‘And how will the Lord Shahin be persuaded to admit to so dastardly a betrayal?’ came the obvious question.

  ‘You’ll take his signed confession back with you, of course,’ I said with a smile. ‘You can present him with a choice between the discomforts of being flayed alive and the mercy of the sword. He’ll sign. Take his head back with the confession. So long as you’ve an army for invading Egypt next year, or the year after, Chosroes will decide to believe you. My understanding is that he made no official announcement of the invasion. This being so, there’s no need to announce its defeat. I promise that Heraclius won’t celebrate his victory.’

  Shahrbaraz rested his eyes on the body of Priscus. ‘Will Heraclius be told about the part played by a man who died in disgrace over a year ago?’ he asked. It was a feeble threat. But I’d let him get away with it.

  ‘I understand that your affairs are somewhat embarrassed by the confiscation of your brother’s estate,’ I said, repeating some gossip I’d picked up a few days earlier while my legs were being shaved. His eyes narrowed. ‘There’s a Jewish banker in Damascus called Josiah ben Baruch,’ I continued. ‘If you go to him in confidence, you’ll find him a most generous subject of the Persian hegemony.’ I paused. ‘His brother runs a bank in Constantinople. I’ve always found the whole family very confidential in their management of funds.’

  Shahrbaraz stood up and brushed dirt from his sleeve. ‘We need till the seventh hour of the night,’ he repeated stiffly. He began walking slowly back across the sea of his own dead. Almost out of hearing, he suddenly turned. ‘Shahin has a Greek with him called Simon,’ he called over. ‘Would you like me to send him back to you for punishment?’

  ‘I thank you for the great kindness of your suggestion,’ I answered. ‘However, you might find that executing him in the manner of your choosing might awaken Shahin all the more to the joys of literary composition.’

  I watched until he and his men were gone. A polite cough from within a low crevice reminded me that there was yet more unfinished business for my attention. ‘You can come out of there, Timothy,’ I said. ‘I won’t kill you. I know you’ve been on our side all the time – or enough of the time not to make any difference that counts.’

  He had lost weight! He stood looking at the body of the only man who could possibly have made him seem pure by comparison. ‘He liked you a lot, you know,’ he said.
‘I knew from the start you’d given him refuge. Priscus wasn’t the sort of man to die in some random Avar swoop on the suburbs. Since there was no one else mad enough to take him in, he had to be with you. He told me everything on the night of Leander’s big recitation. Or perhaps he didn’t tell me everything – Priscus never did that.’

  Timothy paused and looked into my face. ‘By the way, where is that silver cup? I do believe Shahin dropped it. He never let me see it properly on the way here and I feel some obligation to look at the proximate cause of all our troubles. But for that, we’d none of us be here and our lives would not have been so amended. Forgive me if I confess to a somewhat philosophical interest.’

  He had a point. I looked vaguely about. The thing could be anywhere. With all the human movement over this ground, it might still be half a mile away. Or it might be here, under one of the bodies, or lodged in one of the rocky clusters. Doubtless someone would find it and claim it as loot. But none of us would see it again. For good or ill, an object which had burst into our lives, transforming them in unexpected ways, had now, just as abruptly and mysteriously, vanished.

  Timothy brought himself back to more pressing matters. ‘I trust you’ll put in a word for me with Heraclius. And, if you have gone through the motions of confiscating it, I want my property back. Above all, though, I’d like to go home. I’d really like that, Alaric. Indeed, I’d like to go home much more than you must.’

  I frowned. ‘How do you arrive at that, my dear Timothy?’ I asked.

  He creased his face into an oily smile. ‘Because, my dearest friend in the world, when I get back to Constantinople, I’ll not find unanswered correspondence flowing out of my palace into the street.’

  Will you think less of me, Dear Reader, if I say that I joined him in laughing till the tears ran down my cheeks?

  Epilogue

  Canterbury, Wednesday, 9 September 688

  I’ve done it. I’ve told the story. And let’s end it here. Rado’s at the start of a career as glorious as Priscus had guessed it would be. Shahrbaraz is already counting his bribe. Shahin will soon have an offer put to him that he can’t refuse. And Simon has two or three days of wishing I’d got lucky with the lamp I threw at him on board that ship. Timothy ends rather well – though that isn’t revealing much: Timothy is a born survivor and will soon return to his accustomed size.

  Eboric will be beautiful to the last, fancied by all who saw him, loved by all who knew him, unable to think ill of anyone. More important, he’ll be happy to the last. Lucky the man who is that.

  What of Antonia? Well, we did get back to Constantinople. Heraclius was as good as his word over the marriage. Even before then, and never mind her growing belly, we were hard at work, fucking each other’s brains out. We were still at it fifty years later. My only regret is that I didn’t go first.

  I don’t think I need talk about the Empire. It’s still there, now having good times, now bad. It will outlast me. I’m reasonably sure, Dear Reader, it will outlast you.

  But you may have noticed, I still haven’t made it back to Jarrow. The reason for that is complex and may be the starting point of another story. I’ll only say that, with Theodore far advanced into a second, though assuredly no more happy, childhood, the English Church needs someone to hold things together in his name. Somewhere in the mass of papyrus I’ve generated, I mention killing, lying, scholarship and ruling. Well, it seems that I’m back, for the moment, to doing all these things. We’ll see how long that lasts.

  Oh, and the cup – the fabled Horn of Babylon. Before the catalogue of his library was entirely wiped, Theodore said having the thing back would make me as unhappy as he’d been. Of course, that was a sign that he was on the way out. It’s a lump of silver, no more, no less. This being said, I did pass it straightaway to Good King Swaefheard. You’ll not imagine how grateful he was. He said he’d have it made into a crown and that, in one form or another, it would be possessed forever by all who ruled Kent, or even the whole of England.

  Perhaps the speed with which I handed it on tells you something about me that I don’t choose to admit. But, when you get to my age, you really can’t be too careful.