Looking over toward the left wing, I could not see that Leontios had materially strengthened it. Perhaps he had done so in such a stealthy way, both I and the followers of the false prophet were deceived. If so, well and good. If not… I sent one of the excubitores trotting off to him to inquire.
The guardsman came back a few minutes later. "Emperor, he says he didn't, because of the night attack the Arabs made on our right. He says that if they had made a larger attack there later on, they might have broken through if he'd thinned things out too much." He looked nervous, as any man might who was bringing the Emperor of the Romans news he would not care to hear.
"I gave him an order," I growled. "He said he would obey it."
"Yes, Emperor." The excubitor's nods were quick, placating. "He says he knows that, and he's sorry, and he'll take the blame if things go wrong."
"He certainly will," I said. But Leontios was, or was supposed to be, a general. If he put his own judgment on the scales against mine, I had to believe- or so I told myself- he had a good reason. I waved for the excubitor to leave my presence. Leave he did, as if glad to escape.
"Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" The Arabs' war cry rang out: pounding, rhythmic waves of sound lifting their spirits and casting down those of the men who would oppose them. The Romans and Sklavenoi shouted back, as loudly as the followers of the false prophet but more as individuals than as drops of water in a wave. That second day, their lying cry of "God is great!" outdid our shouts, I fear.
As before, fighting spread all along the line. I had hoped that, by concentrating our forces on one wing, we could break them. Since Leontios, in what he judged his superior wisdom, had chosen not to do that, my hopes had to shift: either we might beat them in straight-on fighting or, demonstrating that we ourselves were steadfast and could not be made to retreat, we might force the Arabs, rather than facing further combat, to retreat from Roman territory.
Prince Mouamet, I assumed, had plans that might be described as the mirror image of my own, with his chief aim to break through the Roman line by hard fighting. That he thought like a serpent had never occurred to me.
For more than an hour, Roman horsemen and their Arab counterparts shot arrows at one another and sometimes came close enough to one another to hurl javelins or to slash with swords. The followers of the false prophet did not assail the Sklavenoi in Neboulos's special army so strongly as they had the day before. That pleased me beyond measure. Turning to Myakes, I said, "The Sklavenoi have taught them respect."
"It looks that way," he replied, and then scratched his head. "I wonder why, Emperor. The barbarians- your barbarians, I mean, not the Arabs- didn't fight all that well yesterday."
"They fought like lions," I said indignantly. Myakes shrugged. I allowed him more liberties than most men, but even he fought shy of coming out and contradicting me. I pointed ahead, to the fighting. "If the Arabs don't think so, why aren't they pressing them harder today?"
"That I can't tell you, Emperor."
"Then keep your ill-founded opinions to yourself," I snapped, and Myakes bowed his head in submission.
I sent a messenger up to Neboulos, ordering him to advance on the enemy if they hung back from attacking the special army. The messenger returned with Neboulos's promise of obedience, but the Sklavenoi did not advance. I sent another messenger. He returned with more promises, but the special army remained where it had lined up. I cursed. Here I had a perfectly good army, but none of its generals felt like doing anything with it.
Then, in the very center of the line, an Arab trumpeter rode out ahead of the army Mouamet commanded. Raising a horn to his lips, he blew three loud, discordant notes.
The Sklavenoi- not all of them, but far and away the greater number of them, at least two men out of every three- left off what they were doing and stood very still and very straight. Neboulos shouted something to the special army in their own barbarous dialect. Thanks to the sudden stillness on the part of the Sklavenoi, I recognized his voice without possibility of confusion.
Never having bothered to acquaint myself with the ugly tongue the Sklavenoi speak, I did not understand what Neboulos had shouted to his men. Yet I did not long remain in doubt as to its meaning. As if with one accord, those men who had stood straight and still abandoned the line of battle they had been holding and trotted across the dry, dusty plain toward the followers of the false prophet.
Hope dies hard. Deceiving myself as long as I could, or even a moment longer, I said to Myakes, "See! They are attacking the Arabs after all."
Mournfully, he shook his head. Even then, he did not offer direct contradiction. He pointed ahead of us, the action there disproving my words more effectively than any countering words of his could have done.
For the Sklavenoi, although trotting toward the Arabs, were not attacking them. Nor did the deniers of Christ offer any injury to Neboulos or the special army. Instead, they welcomed them as comrades, as brothers. And the Sklavenoi reached up and clasped in friendship the bloodstained hands of the mounted Arab warriors.
Later, I learned that, the night before, the prince Mouamet, alarmed at Roman steadfastness, sent a man to Neboulos with a purse loaded with goldpieces, promising him also land for himself and the Sklavenoi in Syria and women of their choosing. Not content with the honors I had given him- not gratefully remembering I had let him live when I could and should have given him a slow, painful death- Neboulos, accepting the gold, turned traitor to the Roman Empire. The flank attack that had paralyzed Leontios was, I suppose, intended to draw Roman attention to the right and away from the center, and achieved its purpose all too well.
At the time, I knew none of this, although, as I say, I could hardly avoid noticing the brute fact of the special army's defection. I could also hardly avoid noticing that, the Sklavenoi having switched sides, the center of our line was a line no longer, only a gaping hole. The Arabs could not avoid noticing as much, either.
I drew my sword and shouted to the excubitores: "Forward! We'll fill the gap!"
Forward we went, I on my horse and the excubitores, afoot, all around me. We linked up with the leftmost end of the right wing of the cavalry from the military districts, the Sklavenoi who had deserted to the deniers of Christ having come mostly from the rightward section of their battle line. But an Emperor of the Romans and a regiment of the imperial guard could not hope to cover the ground some twenty thousand men had formerly filled. The remnant of the treacherous tribe still remaining in Roman ranks stretched themselves out toward us, trying to sew shut the tear in the fabric of our military cloak.
Had we had time to make these movements, we might have managed them and saved the battle. But the prince Mouamet, having suborned Neboulos and the Sklavenoi, anticipated the effect of their defection and struck hard into the gap that defection had created. His horsemen, still screaming "Allahu akbar!" as if possessed by demons, stormed at what had been the center of our line and broke through, splitting the Roman army in half.
I had practiced with the sword. Any Emperor with a grain of sense will do as much, in case an assassin should get past his guards or in case those guards should turn against him, as happened to my unfortunate grandfather in the bathhouse on the island of Sicily. But I never thought to have to engage in swordplay in such desperate circumstances.
The Arabs, recognizing my regalia, made for me in large numbers. Being mounted, they overbore many of the excubitores who tried to stand in their way, and, had I not fought, I would surely have been slain or, perhaps worse, captured, a humiliation that had not befallen a Roman Emperor since the days of the luckless Valerian, who ruled two generations before the time of Constantine the Great.
"Die!" one of the followers of the false prophet screamed at me- in Greek, so I could understand and fear. He cut at my head. When I turned his stroke, sparks flew from our blades. Then I cut at him. His swarthy, bearded face took on an expression of absurd surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that I might do such an untow
ard thing. Barely in time, he parried.
"Christ with me!" I shouted, and spurred toward him. My horse was bigger than his. The two of them colliding, his had the worse of it, throwing him off balance. I slashed again. My sword bit. Blood sprayed from his wound, at the joining of his shoulder. He yowled, as a cat will if its tail is stepped on, and clutched at the injury. I smote him again, this time across the face. Features a gory mask, he pitched headlong from the saddle.
"Justinian!" cried the excubitores who were near me- though not near enough to have kept that wretch from assailing me. He was the first man I ever killed with my own hands. Seeing him fall, knowing I had overcome him, hearing the guardsmen acclaim me, made warm satisfaction surge through me, almost as if I had just had a woman.
Another Arab came trotting toward me. This time, not waiting for his onslaught, I set spurs to my own horse and myself attacked. That startled him; he must have reckoned me as sly and cowardly as his own leaders. He soon learned his error. After a sharp, hard fight, I beat down his guard and wounded him first in the arm, then in the side, and then in the neck. Blood streaming from him and staining his white robes, he turned his horse, fleeing for his life.
By then, the excubitores had rallied, once more forming a solid circle around me. Cavalrymen from the military districts also helped drive the followers of the false prophet away from my person. For a brief, heady moment, I thought we might yet win the battle.
But that was not to be, the Arabs having split us in two. Each half of the army defended itself as best it could. Both halves, I daresay, would have gone down to destruction had the deniers of Christ exerted themselves against us. Instead of doing so, though, a great many of them poured through the gap in our line not to attack us but to plunder our camp, which lay less than a mile behind the battlefield. Their officers must have screamed and cursed and invoked their false prophet scores of times, trying to hold the men to their principal task, but in vain.
Seeing that, I tried once more to rally the Romans, shouting, "Strike a hard blow, men! Don't let them steal not only the victory but also your goods!"
No one rode forward against the Arabs. Myakes stood close by me, though I did not recognize him till he spoke, a blow having smashed his helmet down over one ear and driven the brim against his forehead so that blood poured down his face. He said, "It's no use, Emperor. If we manage to save ourselves, we ought to get down on our knees and thank God for that much. A plague take everything else- we can always get more stuff."
He was, unfortunately, correct, I realized. I have never been one to go any way but forward, but his words forced me to recognize the difference between going forward with some hope, no matter how small, of success and throwing my life away as surely as if I were slitting my own throat and damning myself as a suicide. "We'll fall back," I said, the words bitter as aloes in my mouth.
And fall back we did, still resisting attack from the front and using some soldiers not engaged there to form a line defending against attacks from our left flank. These, thanks to the mercy of God, were less severe than they might have been, the Arabs being more interested in plunder than in further fighting once our defeat was manifest. Assaults against me also eased as more Roman soldiers placed themselves between me and the foe.
Saving our camp, saving our belongings, I saw at a glance, was hopeless. "We'll make for Sebastopolis!" I shouted to the excubitores and the horsemen from the military districts. "Once we get behind the walls of the town, we can defend ourselves from the deniers of Christ. If they go blithely plundering the countryside, we'll sally forth and teach them the lesson they should have had on this field." Beaten though I was, I looked toward eventual triumph. That trait availed me little here, but would serve me well in days to come.
My greatest fear was that this half of the army would simply dissolve around me, the men fleeing this way and that, leaving themselves easy meat for the Arabs. They must have perceived the danger there, though, and realized their best hope for bodily salvation lay in sticking together. Very few deserted our mass. The fate of those who did- they being quickly snapped up by the enemy- helped persuade the rest not to bolt.
After we had retreated past our camp, swinging wide to the south to traverse it at a safe distance, the pressure against us eased. "Let the cursed Arabs have my bedroll and my cot and my tent," Myakes said. "They don't have me. One of these days I'll get those things back again, or others even better."
More than a thousand years before, the poet Arkhilokhos had sung the same song, having thrown away his shield to escape the barbarous Thracians. In the words of the historian Menander Protector, who recorded the deeds of the first Justinian and his successors, "The changing circuit revealed such things before our time, and will reveal them again, and the revelations shall not cease, so long as there be men and battles."
The sun had nearly set by the time we approached Sebastopolis. As we drew near its protecting walls and towers, the men cried out in dismay, for they saw, as did I, another army moving rapidly toward the city from the north east. I sent out scouts to hold off the enemy while the rest of us gained safety. These men soon came riding back, not in headlong retreat but shouting for joy: the other army did not belong to the followers of the false prophet, but was in fact our own left wing, also falling back on Sebastopolis.
Commanding them was Leontios. I had rather hoped, considering his sorry performance in the battle itself, that the Arabs had made away with him. God, however, was not so kind. And not only had Leontios brought that half of the cavalry from the military districts out of the fight, but also the several thousand Sklavenoi who had neither fallen to the Arabs nor gone over to them. That struck me as wasted effort. Their fellow tribesmen having proved themselves traitors, how likely was I ever to trust these barbarians again with weapons in hand?
Still, for the moment, the Sklavenoi were a more welcome sight than Arabs would have been. In the failing light, it took us some small effort to persuade the garrison within Sebastopolis we were in fact Romans and not deniers of Christ attempting a ruse. I finally had to approach the walls and shout up a warning about what would happen to those garrison soldiers if they did not open the gates and admit us forthwith. Enough of them had heard and seen me to be convinced, which was as well, for I meant every word of my threats. The gates opened. The army on which I had pinned such hopes passed within, beaten but for the moment secure.
MYAKES
Till then, Brother Elpidios, I hadn't known whether Justinian had courage. He'd never needed to show any, if you know what I mean. He had spirit, he had temper- he had temper and to spare- but you can't tell what a man will do when somebody tries to kill him till you see it happen. He turned out to do just fine, thank you. The biggest problem was keeping him away from the Arabs. He wanted to kill every last one of them himself.
The Sklavenoi, Brother? He spent a lot of the retreat to Sebastopolis cursing Neboulos and every one of the barbarians, ranting and fuming about what he should have done to them when we were fighting back in the Sklavinias. He wasn't joking, either. Like he said there, when he said something like that, he meant it. That worried me.
Then he got quiet. That worried me even worse.
JUSTINIAN
Inside the citadel, I stared at Leontios, wishing I could turn him to stone as the monster Medusa had with her victims in pagan myth. "You disobeyed me," I told him in a deadly voice.
"Emperor, I did what I thought best, seeing how things were," he answered. In fact, against him Medusa might have glared in vain, his head already having been formed from solid marble. He went on, "I've been fighting battles for your father and you longer than you've been alive. I know something about them, that I do."
"You disobeyed me!" This time I, shouted it. "You disobeyed me, and we lost the battle on account of it. The blame is yours- yours!" Looking back on it, the last word was probably a scream.
But screaming at Leontios was like screaming at a post. All he did was bow his head slightly, as a travel
er in wet weather will do to keep the rain out of his eyes. "Emperor, I didn't do a thing to lose the battle," he said. "Not one thing. If the special army hadn't betrayed us, we might have won."
If your special army hadn't betrayed us, was what he meant, but not even Leontios was blockhead enough to say such a thing to me. Snarling, I answered, "If we'd had a decent attack from the left, not the paltry one we got, we would have smashed the Arabs before the cursed Sklavenoi went over to them. They would have stayed loyal if we'd been winning."
Leontios bowed his head a little farther. "Maybe so, Emperor," he said. "It could be so, I suppose."
He could not have said, Liar, any louder had he bellowed it at the top of his lungs. I sprang to my feet. Had I still been wearing my sword, I would have cut him down where he sat. How much grief and torment that would have saved me in years to come! But God does not reveal to mere men what lies ahead, and, in any case, I had taken off the sword on coming into Sebastopolis. And so, rather than striking that large, hard head from his shoulders, I hit him in the face with my fist, as hard as I could.
He too leaped, with a roar of pain. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. I hit him again. This time, expecting the blow, he bent his head down so that my fist slammed into his skull. Pain shot up my arm: he was hardheaded indeed. I hit him again and again. He did not strike back. Had he done so, even once, I would have given him over to whatever half-skilled torturers a provincial town like Sebastopolis boasted. All he did was keep his head down and bring up his arms to protect his face to some degree.
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