Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Seldom could the Goths get meat in the land where even the gods are sheep-footed and goat-footed. Such cattle as they had brought died of epidemic disease—this one of the Gothic afflictions was not of Stilicho's working—and the Goths died from eating the carcasses. They had brought no sheep or goats, depending on the Greek countryside for these, but these animals were herded into the new-walled villages at every approach of the Goths.

  The meadows were burned before them, bridges destroyed, pools poisoned. They knew epidemics in the swamps, while the Romans were well in the towns. They were subject to a countrywide blockade.

  Alaric attempted the strong towns of Megalopolis, Mantinea, Tegea, Tripolis, Messene, Olympia, Filiatra—one after the other. He took none of them. He left several thousand dead around their walls. Every town had either a sea entrance or a short sea road by which the Romans could reinforce. The Goths had the feeling that Stilicho was reading their minds and predicting their moves. The Goths would come, after sudden decision, by forced marches to one of the walled towns and see the ships riding high and empty—already unloaded; and see Roman soldiers with the Greek militia on the walls.

  Alaric met Greek fire from the walls, and Roman ballistae from within. He had started his campaign from too narrow a base, and had not anticipated the absolute investure by Stilicho of all elements. Stilicho could obtain numerical superiority wherever he desired it. He could personally leave the Grecian field for other affairs, putting competent generals in charge; and he could return when he wished. The Goths would keep; they weren't going anywhere.

  The gibbet stood on the high place all that late winter and spring and summer. The Goths had not seen it, but they had heard rumor of it. Now they seemed to move at random north through Arcadia, but they did not actually move at random. They were being herded carefully by Stilicho. Alaric was harried over the playing board, put in check on play after play, and forced to withdraw—sometimes for lack of water, sometimes for lack of grass and grain. He was compelled always into rougher country for what food could still be found; and the Goths would have starved but for the wild game and wild fruit.

  Often there was but one possible move for Alaric. Stilicho planned astute combinations, for he was a master at this play. Alaric found his freedom of motion abridged, and he could not understand it. His will was not his own; there was another will anticipating his will. The moves of Alaric were to his own harm and to Stilicho's gain.

  In late autumn the Goths were far north in Arcadia, where the three sub-provinces of Arcadia and Elis and Achaea come together. The Goths began to climb, and the foothills below them were invested as they left them. The Gothic army was trapped on the mountain or high plateau of Pholoe. They had insufficient food and water, and a deadly winter—nearly as severe as that two years before—came on them.

  All through the tail-end of the winter before, through the spring and summer and autumn and into the new winter, it had been true that the Goths could defeat in fair field any army brought against them. But there came a day, after their wasting away on Pholoe, when this was no longer true. Alaric had a fine instinct for this. He knew to the day, almost to the minute, when his forces had diminished to the point where they would no longer be supreme.

  It was not only in Castles and Knights and Ships and Queens that Stilicho had the advantage over him now. Stilicho could now, or would soon be able to, defeat him with foot soldiers on any field, at any time. But it should not be on any field or at any time; Stilicho had selected the site of it and the day it would be, one year before. Today the Roman Master General could beat the Goths flat before the sun was down. Within a week he would be able to rout them within an hour, so rapidly were they weakening.

  It was at this time that Alaric, hounded with his men to the furthest extent of Pholoe, looked across the miles and saw, for the first time, the gibbet that Stilicho had built for him—standing black against the new snow.

  Alaric had been driven in a series of a hundred interlocked and inevitable moves to the farthest wasteland of rocky Arcadia. He had arrived there by a string of choices and decisions, and now realized that not a single one of his choices had been his own. Stilicho had seen every move of the game from the beginning, and there had been no moment when Alaric could have acted in any other manner or made a different choice or move.

  Alaric had lost the game on his first move of the game. He had ravaged Greece against the orders of the Master General. Stilicho called “check” on him for the last time. Alaric moved in starvation and desperation to the furthest extreme of Pholoe. Stilicho called “mate” and there was no move left for Alaric.

  The game was over, and the gibbet stood waiting.

  11. Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing

  The first King who played the game of King, of chess, was the Persian Pad-Shah Shapur II, who was taught it by his wazir who had invented it. The wazir was the better chess player, but the King was always the winner of the game.

  The King attained victory by the ingenious device of overturning the chessboard at a crucial point of the game and declaring himself winner. This showed an imagination of the sort that the wazir did not have; and it was for this reason that Shapur was the King, and the wazir would never be anything but wazir.

  The larger view, the seeing that a problem need not be confined to one narrow framework, is useful in many fields. It comes into the solution of certain puzzles and riddles where a narrow framework, implied but not stated, limits the ordinary mind and prevents the solution by such. But the breaking out of the framework gives the answer to a mind with more scope.

  The Master General Stilicho had a mind that was nearly perfect in its own way, but it worked by patterns and within a definite framework. The mind of Alaric, not nearly so profound, was nevertheless wider and was not given to setting any limits on itself. It was for this reason that Stilicho did not hang Alaric on the gibbet he had prepared for him.

  On a night in the early part of the year of 397, when mountain winter had numbed the Goths in their absolute darkness, and when the Romans slept warm in their encircling fortifications with their rings of fires in the foothills—when the Goths had been beaten without recourse in the last move of the year-long game—Alaric suddenly overturned the chessboard and declared himself winner.

  Without fire or light or signal, possibly on sudden inspiration or possibly according to preset plan, Alaric with a few hundred of his Goths mounted on their giant chargers—now lean and savage from the hard winter, both horse and man—charged down the snowy slopes in muffled silence.

  They transfixed sentries and guards on their long lances, carrying them along so by the impetuosity of their charge. They rived men open with axe and heavy sword and broke them down with hand mace. They bruted their way out of encirclements of the doughtiest troops in the world, having to go completely through the Roman camp.

  It was not a case of overwhelming surprise. The Romans were never surprised by attack of day or night. There had been trumpets howling the alarm from the time the first Roman sentry was transfixed on the first Goth lance. The Romans had ten times the numbers of the small Gothic band in arms and alert, on horse and foot, but still the Goths bulled through.

  And when the Goths were trapped irrevocably, they hurdled thirty-foot embanked trenches—impossible for horse within the framework of the mind of Stilicho—and lunged their way to the clear. Two-thirds of the Gothic band were loose, leaving the screams of dying horses and the jarring moans of dying men behind them. They had charged clear out of the framework.

  No man in the Empire but Alaric—with the possible exception of his cousin, the Roman-sworn daredevil Sarus—could have led such a charge. And no other man at all could have carried through the second and third stages of it.

  This was not the main Gothic force. It was an elite group of maddened riders; no more than four or five hundred, and the Romans could set at least five thousand horsemen in their immediate pursuit. And Alaric and his crazy-horse Goths were still entrapp
ed in a double prison. They were thirty miles from water passage, north to the Corinth Gulf at its nearest point; and the Romans controlled all the inlets and seas and had a main fleet in the Gulf of Corinth. There was no way the Goths could arrive at the Gulf, and no way they could cross it if they should arrive.

  The Romans had horses as large as those of the Goths, and in much better shape than those starved animals. They also had animals, smaller but superb, and incomparably swifter. And they had the device of the relay. They could change horses at stations that would be open to them and closed to the Goths.

  The Romans could send picked riders ahead, on special mounts that were one-third swifter than those of the Goths, to alert interceptor garrisons. They could signal with beacons or with trumpet; and already the trumpet codes were being passed along from hilltop to hilltop. But actually their signals would not be needed. The Romans practiced the discipline of the perpetual alert, and every road and path could be blocked effectively at all times of day or night.

  The Goths, even in their breaking out of the framework of Roman procedure, had to use the roads and paths to a great extent. One does not ride roughshod over icy mountains in the night without making use of the elemental trails at least.

  The Goths rode through nine encirclements of numerically superior troops, leaving too many dead at every encounter. They rode their horses to death and arrived, impossibly, in sight of the Gulf of Corinth with not thirty horses still standing, and with possibly one hundred Goths on foot. There was a blizzard, and they floundered through heavy snow.

  The alert was ahead of them by at least an hour, and hostile horsemen lined the shore. The Roman boats would be waiting for them at the only point narrow enough even to consider as a crossing—a spot between Rhium and Antirrhium. Even at this point, which they now broke down to, there was an expanse of three miles of impossibly cold water whipped to frenzy by the high wind. And the Goths swam badly; most of them not at all. They were so tired that they blew a bloody foam from their mouths and it froze on them. But the Roman boats were not waiting for them to kill them there.

  Several years before, on the cemetery island in the middle of the Danube River, the ghostly Gothic “Father” of Alaric had raised his hand to heaven and called down lightning as a sign.

  Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!

  It froze!

  And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned their horses and crossed the ice on foot!

  That is the story of it. The exact details were later brought into doubt, but not in the lifetime or presence of any of the Goths who were there.

  The salt-water Gulf of Corinth has frozen only five times in two thousand years, and it had not frozen during that more severe winter two years before. But, whether or not it was by divine intervention and resulting from the Heaven-compelling cry of Alaric, the Gulf of Corinth had frozen, partially at least in its narrow portion between Rhium and Antirrhium, on that winter night early in the year 397. It had frozen in that limited interval, and the alerted Roman boats could not come to the area from either side. The Goths crossed on foot, and the Roman horsemen, pursuing closely, broke through the ice and could not follow.

  The Goths crossed, and they were in Epirus.

  Their remnant—it has been numbered variously between thirty and seventy men, and was certainly less than one hundred—was immediately surrounded by a large patrol. This was composed, not of Romans, but of Gothic irregulars loyal to Alaric. They were joined, before morning, by some thousands of the troops that Alaric had left in the occupation of Greece north of the Peloponnesus.

  “Hos successes alit,” wrote Virgil, and “Possunt, quia posse videntur—To those successes was good, and the semblance of power gave power indeed.” Or, more modernly “Nothing succeeds at last like success,” but perhaps it should be rendered “Nothing succeeds like last success.” Alaric had the last success, and who should remember the failures that had gone before?

  And also Alaric had the sense of the dramatic climax that Stilicho lacked. Alaric cashed in on his grand gesture with forensic negotiations. His cousin Singerich either was already at the Court of Constantinople, or was sent there now. He had been mentioned nowhere as a part of the Grecian adventure; but he was very much a part of the following negotiations.

  Alaric had dutifully abandoned Greece as he had been ordered—so was his case presented—and he had now undertaken the onerous task of settling and clearing wild and forbidding Epirus. The real threat to the Eastern Empire—so ran the bill of particulars of Singerich—was the Master General Stilicho in unauthorized possession of the Peloponnesus.

  The men of the Eastern Court, whatever their weaknesses, had a fine touch of the comic. And Stilicho, whatever his strength, had no humor at all. Yet he realized that he was the butt of a joke that was peculiarly Grecian. The colossal joke that Alaric had played on Stilicho was appreciated in the East, and the empty gibbet became a byword.

  When some years later, in a time of their friendship, Stilicho referred to the incident of the overturned chessboard, Alaric did not understand him; nor had he ever heard of the game. But he had taught the Master General a new ending to it.

  The young Emperor Arcadius had no trace of gratitude to the Master General. He had cried out for Stilicho every time he was in real trouble, and had dismissed him every time the trouble had been cleared. “After thy visitation we forget that we have wept,” as St. Augustine wrote about another matter.

  Though Arcadius may have given tacit approval for the initial Grecian occupation, he had quickly seen the enormity of his error. Those who ruled him now, his new wife Eudoxia and his eunuch Eutropius, were happy that Alaric was finally out of Greece and in Epirus. But they would be much happier when Stilicho had returned to Italy.

  With the arrogance that total weakness sometimes shows to total strength, they sent the orders that Stilicho should withdraw at once from the area. His further remaining in an Eastern province would be interpreted as a hostile act, they indicated. Stilicho remaining, after his momentary usefulness had passed, was always interpreted as a hostile act by the Eastern Court.

  The Goths of Alaric still remaining in the corner of Arcadia, so ordered the Emperor Arcadius, were to be permitted to leave Greece by the Corinthian Isthmus and to rejoin their master in Epirus.

  It was all done. Stilicho accepted his dismissal. He had no personal feelings where the Empire was concerned, and by his word to the Emperor Theodosius he still considered himself the silent guardian of the Eastern Empire. He would not turn against that division in arms. He would return again when he was once more needed; and again he would accept rude dismissal when the need for him was ended.

  And Stilicho was nearly satisfied with the way events had fallen. Alaric was out of Greece and in Epirus—if only he would stay there, and work at the restoring of that sub-province and the greater province of Illyricum.

  Stilicho was even happy that he had not had to use the gibbet, though it galled him that he had to eat his oath. Men of the ability of Alaric are difficult to discover, and it is still more difficult to nurture them to the point of real usefulness; and Alaric had shown, by his fantastic escape, a greater ability than Stilicho had suspected. The man had earned his life with an exhibition of real talent. Stilicho had the master general's appreciation for the master trick that Alaric had played.

  Thereafter they each of them, Stilicho and Alaric, maintained a Gothic leader at the Court of Constantinople. Alaric had his cousin and future brother-in-law, Singerich, who had become a real adept at palace politics. Singerich would have great influence with Arcadius and with his Empress Eudoxia. Privately they were of great friendship, a three-against-the-world group, all of them just coming out of their teens. They were all of them brilliant, even Arcadius under the stimulation of Eudoxia and Singerich, and they fancied themselve
s as powers and not puppets. Singerich was the only close personal friend Emperor Arcadius ever had. Singerich did not—as has sometimes been indicated—despise the weak Emperor. There was never duplicity in the friendships of Singerich. Singerich also worked closely with Eutropius; and while Singerich was in the ascendancy, Alaric could do no wrong in the eyes of that unstable Eastern Court.

  But Stilicho had a Goth of even more effect, Gainas who had killed Rufinus for him, and who was Master of Arms for the city of Constantinople. Actually, the vacillations of that Court had no real meaning, and the rude dismissals of Stilicho were no more than words. Stilicho had his own men in military control of every province of the East; and with Gainas controlling the city of Constantinople secretly in his name, the Eastern Court was of no moment.

  On one word from Stilicho, Gainas would have killed the Emperor Arcadius and his whole clutch of favorites. It was a toy Court that obtained there. Gainas was one of the Goths who was completely loyal to the idea of Empire, and to Stilicho as custodian of that Empire. But the person and the word of the Emperor must be considered as sacred, however the effect was modified privately.

  One other such Empire Goth as Gainas was Sarus, the cousin of Alaric. Sarus, joining Stilicho by sea in Epirus, was a partner in a private move that Stilicho now made—as daring in its own way as Alaric's breaking out of the Peloponnesus.

  Stilicho sent his Grecian army to Italy and Africa by his fleets, after his dismissal by Arcadius. Stilicho then had himself and a very small party set ashore in Epirus. He then rode with only one man through thousands of armed Goths—including those he had lately hounded to the last extremity—to confront the man for whom he had built the gibbet.