"And the standard they're fighting under," another scout added.
"What standard is this?" I asked.
The scout hesitated, then answered, "Emperor, they've skewered a rolled-up parchment on a spear and carry it before them, saying it's the treaty you've broken."
"Liars!" I shouted. "Satanic hypocrites! They're the ones who broke the treaty, not I. They've put their own false, filthy words on their coins and on their papyrus, and I'm going to punish them for their presumption."
"Yes, Emperor," the scout said hastily, bowing his head. "All I'm doing is telling you what I've seen and what I've heard."
"Very well," I said, reminding myself the messenger was not responsible for the news he bore. A thought occurred to me: "Does Abimelekh lead them in person?" I saw myself parading the miscalled commander of the faithful through Constantinople in chains before sending him to the mines to work himself to death.
But all the frontier guards shook their heads. "No, Emperor," said the one who had told me of the Arabs' lying standard. "It is his brother Mouamet, the prince of northern Mesopotamia."
A prince of the Arabs' ruling line struck me as good enough prey. Having dismissed the scouts, I took counsel with Leontios, discussing how best to defeat the Arabs and drive after them into their territory. When the general heard who commanded the followers of the false prophet, he looked solemn. "This Mouamet is not a warrior to be despised, not a man to hold in contempt, Emperor. He sheds blood without pity. When the Arabs were fighting their civil war, he took Mesopotamia and Syria and Armenia from the rebels and restored them to Abimelekh's rule."
"You've beaten the Arabs before," I told him. "Surely, since God is on the side of us Christians, you can win another victory." Leontios's large head bobbed up and down. Relying on his ability to duplicate the successes he had enjoyed in the past, I sent him away and summoned Neboulos.
"We fight soon, Emperor?" the Sklavinian chieftain asked. "I hear these Arabs, they come into your land like you come into my Sklavinia."
Ignoring the comparison, I said, "Yes, we will fight them. The brother of their ruler commands this army of theirs. I want to capture him and treat him as he deserves for breaking the treaty."
"You treat him as bad as Sklavenoi whose hands you cut off?" Neboulos said.
"Worse," I promised, at which he looked suitably impressed. I should have paid more attention to the tenor of the questions he was asking. Looking back, I see that. Unfortunately for the Roman Empire, at the time I did not.
***
We moved east from Sebastopolis the next day. We did not go as far as I would have liked, the Sklavenoi, who marched on foot, compelling the cavalry from the military districts to slow down so that the two parts of the army would not separate from each other.
Leontios rode up to me, fuming. "Look at those disgraceful barbarians," he said, pointing to the men of the special army.
"You have known for some time they are foot soldiers, have you not?" I asked, annoyed at the tone he took with me.
"Yes, Emperor," he said, but still without the proper submissiveness. He pointed again and, as was his wont, repeated himself: "Look at them. Disgraceful."
Look I did. The Sklavenoi were not marching in neat, well-ordered ranks and files. They ambled along in groups that might have been made up of friends or relatives or men who came from the same wretched little village. As they walked, they sang and joked and passed skins of wine back and forth. Their weapons stuck up at all different angles. They certainly lacked the disciplined appearance of the regiment of excubitores accompanying me.
But, however unaesthetic their progress might have been to the eye of the military purist- such as Leontios was giving every indication of being- they were moving along every bit as fast as the imperial guards. I pointed this out to Leontios. "Well, so they are, Emperor," he said. "And if anything goes wrong, which God forbid, you'll see them run a lot faster than the excubitores, too."
"What do you know of the Sklavenoi?" I said angrily. "You never fought against them- your station has always been here, in the east. I was the one who beat them, Leontios. It wasn't lack of courage that caused their defeat. We had liquid fire, and they did not. And they were broken into clans and tribes that did not support each other."
"Why should they support each other now, then?" he replied, not knowing when to give up the argument. "They're still broken up into clans and tribes, not so?"
"All of which have come under the leadership of Neboulos." I put ice in my voice. "General, your objections have been noted. You shall now carry on with the campaign and defeat the Arabs."
"Yes, Emperor," Leontios said tonelessly, and rode away.
When we encamped for the night, the disorder among the men of the special army was enough to distress me, too. I sent for Neboulos. He waved my concerns aside, saying, "Who cares how we camp? We fight good." Since that was what I had told Leontios, I let myself be persuaded.
***
Leontios sent scouts out a good distance ahead on our breaking camp the next morning. Well before noon, some of their number came galloping back, having encountered the outriders of the army Abimelekh's brother commanded. Horns rang out and banners waved, ordering my force to deploy from marching column to line of battle.
With so many thousands of men and horses involved, that maneuver is more complex than any of the dances concerning which the fifth-sixth synod registered its disapproval. Being practiced at the drill, the cavalry from the military districts went through their evolutions smoothly enough. The men of the special army performed less well. Not only were Neboulos and their officers shouting at them to hurry, but every Roman captain who could spare a moment screamed for them to move faster, lest they give not only themselves but also the entire army over to destruction.
By the grace of God, we had taken our position- perhaps fifteen to eighteen miles east of Sebastopolis- when the followers of the false prophet came into sight. Their scouts and ours exchanged arrows, our men raising a cheer when one of theirs pitched from the saddle and groaning if one of our own men fell.
Before long, the whole of the army the prince Mouamet led grew visible from the cloud of dust it had raised. The Arabs raised a great shout: "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" Chills ran up my spine. I had heard that war cry as a small boy, standing on the seawall of Constantinople beside my father when the deniers of Christ came to besiege the imperial city. We beat them then. I expected us to beat them again.
"Christ with us! The Virgin with us!" the men from the military districts shouted back at the Arabs. They also shouted my name, loud and long: "Justinian!" The Sklavenoi were shouting, too, a great bellowing like the howls of wolves and the roars of lions. I sent one of the excubitores running over to Neboulos to ask what their war cries meant.
When he came back, he was grinning, and reported, "Emperor, the barbarian says what they're shouting is, 'We'll make soup out of your bones.'a160"
"That," I said, "is an excellent shout."
As the scout had told me, the Arabs did carry, in place of their usual banners, a rolled-up sheet of parchment or papyrus impaled on a spear. Their standard-bearer rode out ahead of their army and called out in good Greek: "We have not broken what we and you Romans agreed to with oaths." He waved the spear. "God will judge the truth, and take vengeance on those who abandon it."
My army waited to hear what I would do. Pointing to the Arab, I did some shouting of my own: "A pound of gold to the man who brings me that lying standard!" My voice carried, as it has a way of doing when I am angry. Up and down the line, a score of horsemen from the military districts spurred their mounts toward the man holding the spear on high.
Followers of the false prophet galloped out to meet the Roman cavalry. A small battle developed then and there, ahead of the larger one to come. Neither the horsemen from the military districts nor the Arabs drew back by so much as the breadth of a finger. Men tumbled from their horses, struck by arrow and sword and spear. To my an
ger and disappointment, the Arabs' standard-bearer kept on upholding the spear alleged to bear on it the treaty they alleged I had broken.
Fighting soon became general all along the line. From my position not far behind the special army, I soon lost sight of the ends of the left and right wings, tens of thousands of horses kicking up so much dust from the dry ground across which they galloped as to screen those distant formations from my view as if fogbanks lay between me and them. In front of me, Neboulos was screeching orders like a man possessed. What he was saying I do not know for certain, as he used his own idiom rather than Greek. The Sklavenoi he led shot their envenomed arrows at the followers of the false prophet, and hurled great volleys of javelins when the foe drew close enough to give those some hope of hitting.
Had the Arabs pushed close enough to try handstrokes, the men of the special army would have been at a disadvantage, they having most of them only daggers, not swords, with which to defend their persons. But the torrents of missiles the Sklavenoi loosed against them prevented their making that discovery for themselves.
Cavalry from the reserve went hurrying off toward the right, no doubt at the request of some officer I could not see. If the crisis had been invisible, so was the solution. That a solution had been found, however, I inferred from the Arabs' failure to break through our line of battle.
If the Sklavenoi in front of me wavered, I intended to throw the excubitores into the breach. My own guards were looking now this way, now that, eager to find a place where they could battle the deniers of Christ. They shouted for me to send them into the fray.
MYAKES
Some of them did. The troopers were young men, Brother Elpidios, and the horsemen from the military districts had been teasing us- they couldn't lose their tongues or their prongs for that. "Toy soldiers," they called us, and "sweets in fancy wrappers" on account of our gaudy surcoats, and other things I won't soil your ears with. We'd had some fights with them, and broken some heads, too.
Me? Shouting to get into a battle? I'd been in a battle, against Neboulos's men, and I found out it was a lot more fun to think about than for real. And I was past thirty by then, too, getting to the age where your blood doesn't boil quite so fast.
I wanted us Romans to win. I didn't want Neboulos's Sklavenoi to- what was the word Justinian used?- to waver, that was it. For one thing, if the special army did a lot of wavering, there weren't enough excubitores to plug the gap they would have made. For another, if they didn't waver that much, my men and I would be fighting the Arabs with the Sklavenoi alongside us. And if they turned their backs and ran then, who'd be left in the lurch? That's right, Brother Elpidios- me and my chums, that's who.
But it didn't happen. That first day, the special army- Eh? What's that, Brother? Justinian has a good deal more to say? All right, read some more of the manuscript. We'll see how what he remembers stacks up against what I recall. Somewhere in there, we might even find some truth.
JUSTINIAN
Had there been need, I would not have hesitated for a moment over sending the excubitores into battle. I knew how well they could fight; I had seen as much when we took Neboulos's village, and also on other occasions. I also knew they could protect my person as effectively, or perhaps more effectively, while fighting at some distance from me than gathered in a tight-packed mass around me.
Leontios had wanted the battle to unfold like the great victory Hannibal had won over the Romans at Cannae more than two hundred years before our Lord's Incarnation: the center- here, the special army- holding firm while the cavalry on either wing swept out and enfolded the foe in a box from which there would be no escape.
That was what he wanted. What he got proved a good deal less, he being no Hannibal and the Arabs proving far cannier than the Romans whom the wily Carthaginian had lured to destruction. When the wings of the cavalry from the military districts tried to fold round the followers of the false prophet, the Arabs' flank guards held them in check after scant progress. The deniers of Christ thus remaining unsurrounded, strategy became secondary to the courage displayed by the soldiers on both sides.
Here a Roman smashed an Arab in the side of the face with his sword, making the wretch reel in the saddle and then dispatching him with a blow to the neck that sent his soul to eternal torment and half severed his head from his body. There another Roman, already bleeding from a dozen wound s, grappled with an Arab and dragged him from his horse so they both fell together.
I also saw then what I remembered seeing when the followers of the false prophet besieged Constantinople in my youth, and what the history of their wars against the Roman Empire had shown: that they, despite their misbelief, had courage aplenty. When they rode close to the Sklavenoi to ply them with arrows, one of them had his horse take a javelin square in the throat. The animal crashed down as if it had run headlong into a wall, allowing its rider barely enough time to kick his leg free so it was not pinned beneath the horse.
That rider could have fled away, back toward his own line. Instead, scrambling to his feet, he drew his sword and ran straight for the Sklavenoi. He killed or wounded several of them before they dragged him to the ground once more and slew him.
Neither side giving way, then, and neither side being able to gain any great advantage, the fight went on from the time when it was joined till sunset without a substantial advance or retreat. If anything, we Romans had the better of the day, and when evening came it was the deniers of Christ who withdrew from combat. But they made no great retreat, only pulling back out of bowshot and leaving enough skirmishers out ahead to show that they intended to renew the fight when morning came again.
Leontios also proved willing to halt for the night, which, considering how evenly the battle had gone on the first day, I could hardly protest. Roman forces made three rough camps, those of the cavalry from the military districts to either side and that of the special army in the center, corresponding in that way to the disposition of the soldiers during the battle.
I summoned Leontios, Neboulos, and other, lower-ranking officers to my pavilion to see if we could think of a way to do better than we had done. I was hoping these men, trained in war, would be able to see what I did not. In that I found myself disappointed. "We'll keep hammering at them, Emperor, keep hammering away," Leontios said. "Hit 'em enough blows and I expect they'll crack. How can they keep from cracking if we keep hitting 'em?"
"This is how you won your name as a general?" I exclaimed. Leontios assumed an injured expression. I felt like injuring him, but wondered if he had the brains to notice. I turned to Neboulos, thinking he might have imagination mixed in with his barbarous cunning. "How would you make the fight turn our way tomorrow?"
But all he did was shrug. "You pay us, Emperor, and we do not let Arabs through. You tell us what to do, we do it."
"We'll fight it out, then." I looked at Leontios. Since he showed no sign of having any better idea than that, I said, "It seems we can't enfold them with both wings at once, so why not put more weight on one wing and see if we can use it to break through their line?"
"Aye, I could do that, Emperor," he said. "I could." Plainly, he had had no thought past fighting tomorrow's fight as he had fought today's. He plucked at his beard. "Now which wing should I choose, do you suppose?"
"The left," I said, for no better reason that that I might have been more likely to say the right.
"All right, Emperor, I'll do that." And off he went. Someone had told him what to do, and he was fit to do it. I suppose my father had done that during his reign, too. I wondered how Leontios had won victories on his own not long after my father died. Maybe he had run across Arab generals as hamhanded as himself. We had one. Why not they?
Neboulos saw the same thing I had. "That is Roman general?" he said. "If he fights me, I beat him. To you, Emperor, I lose. I always remember that." He rose, nodded, and also departed. The lesser officers quickly went out into the night, leaving me alone.
Not many battles last two days, which is
as well, for all through the night men who knew they were to continue fighting on the morrow had to listen to the cries and groans and screams of the wounded, knowing such could as easily as not be their fate when the sun rose once more. Some of the injured men had been taken from the field for the physicians to treat, but some, Romans and Arabs both, still lay between the two armies.
Then their mournful voices were joined by cries of alarm from the Roman pickets. I heard Romans calling to one another in excitement and alarm as they dashed over to the right and, from that direction, the sound of fighting. After perhaps half an hour, the racket eased.
Leontios reported to me what had happened: "Emperor, the sneaky bastards tried a night attack to see if we were awake, but we turned 'em back, we drove 'em away."
"Good," I told him. "I hope they paid plenty for their folly."
"I expect they did." His head went up and down, up and down. "There weren't that many of them. Pickets coming over were almost enough on their own. Soon as soldiers from camp joined 'em, the Arabs knew they couldn't do anything to us."
But they had. I remember watching a conjurer at the palace, once years ago. The man was full of empty, distracting chatter; he would wave one hand about, to keep his audience from noticing what the other was doing. And then, with that other hand, the one we had not been watching, he would pluck silk scarves out of thin air, nomismata from our ears, once even a kitten from a Persian skullcap. He was so good, I had his fee doubled. But set alongside Abimelekh's brother Mouamet, he was as a child.
***
Both armies were astir before sunrise, each fearing the other would contrive to steal the battle by striking first. Men breakfasted as they had supped, on whatever bits of bread and cheese and onions and salt pork they had with them. Then, their officers shouting at them to hurry, they rolled up the blankets in which they had slept- if, indeed, they had slept anywhere but on the bare ground- the cavalrymen mounted their horses, and horse and foot alike formed line of battle.
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