The Lost Ten

by Harry Sidebottom

  The Persian surged forward to press his advantage. But another horse – the enormous black stallion that had been ridden by the officer – swung around sideways, threatening to dash the puny combatants to the ground with its mountainous shoulders and flanks and haunches. Both men had to scamper out of its way like children.

  When the horse was gone, the Persian settled on the balls of his feet, legs close together, sword out two-handed in front.

  Leading with his left boot, Valens dropped into the ox guard: half turned, shield well forward of his body, sword held back overhand, its tip level with the rim of the shield.

  From all around came the clangour of battle. Off to his right, Valens saw a Persian grabbing at the trailing reins of the black stallion. Steel flashed and rang to his left. This should have been easier. The Persians were outnumbered and surprised. They were unarmoured and had no shields. Yet they were neither running nor being cut down. These warriors were no strangers to standing close to the steel. If they had to die, they intended to sell their lives at a high cost.

  Valens advanced cautiously, side on.

  The Persian turned slightly, watching his every move.

  Two quick, short steps, and Valens rolled his wrist and aimed a high cut at his opponent’s head. The long straight Sassanid blade flicked up. Valens slipped to one knee, altering the angle of strike down to the thigh. The Persian got his blade in the way, moving inside the blow.

  Tucking his shoulder inside his shield, with all the strength in his legs, Valens surged upwards at the Persian. Too late, the Persian tried to step back. The boss of Valens’s shield hit him square in the chest. The Persian tottered backwards, arms circling as he fought to steady himself. Valens punched him in the face with the metal boss. Still the man did not fall. Valens hit him again. Now he went down.

  On his hands and knees, the Persian scuttled sideways like a crab. Valens brought the heavy blade slicing down into the back of his head. One blow was enough. Planting his boot on the man’s back, Valens wrenched the sword free of the ruined skull.

  The back of the officer was just ahead. Narses was still defending himself, but the heels of his boots were right on the edge of the canyon.

  The officer must have sensed Valens coming. He sidestepped away from Narses, turning to meet this new threat.

  Valens swung first. The officer parried with skill. His riposte got past Valens’s shield. Only a wild twist of his whole body prevented it driving through his armour and skewering his stomach.

  Both gathered themselves, shifting on their feet, each searching for an opening.

  With its hooves smacking into the road, the black stallion pranced behind Valens. It was barely under control, but there was a rider on its back. The Persian must have gathered the reins. The horse was heading up the road.

  ‘Narses, use your bow,’ Valens shouted. ‘Don’t let him escape!’

  The break in his concentration was nearly the end of Valens. The officer’s blade struck like a serpent scenting blood. Valens tried to hurl himself aside. He was too slow. The sharp steel rasped across his chest, snapping the rings of his mail.

  Valens’s legs had gone from under him. He sat down hard, pain scorching up his back. The officer retrieved his blade, shaped the final blow. Valens scuttled backwards on his arse, the soles of his boots slipping on the gritty surface of the road.

  And then the officer wheeled away. Two Romans came at him from either side. Hairan and Decimus, working as a team, intent on taking him down.

  Valens left them to it. There was something more urgent.

  The Persian had almost mastered the stallion. It had quit its high-stepping sidle, and was breaking into a trot. Narses had his bow in his hand, an arrow nocked.

  ‘Shoot him!’ Valens yelled.

  Narses raised the bow, took aim, drew the string back to his ear. But, arm trembling, he held his pose, and did not release.

  The horse had reached a canter.

  Valens grabbed the bow, arrow and all, from Narses. With one motion he drew and released. The shaft flew wide.

  The stallion was galloping, fast disappearing up the road. Fifty paces, sixty, the distance stretching with each heartbeat.

  Valens took another arrow from the quiver. His hands were shaking.

  Seventy paces, eighty.

  Emptying his mind, Valens took a deep breath, and exhaled, then drew a shallower breath, and held it. With no conscious thought, relying on instinct and the memory in his muscles, he raised, drew and loosed in one motion.

  The shaft flew as if guided by the hand of a god. The horse and rider were a hundred paces distant. The arrow knocked the man sideways, the horse shied violently, and the man slid to the ground. Freed from its unwanted burden, the stallion eased to a canter, then pulled up. It turned across the road, and regarded the object on the road with suspicion.

  Valens looked back.

  The road was littered with Persian dead. The Romans stood isolated from each other, motionless, as if stunned by the return of silence. Narses stood a little apart, looking aghast.

  ‘Is anyone hurt?’ Valens asked.

  Iudex raised a hand like a schoolboy. ‘It is nothing.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Hairan, catch that stallion.’ Valens handed the Hatrene the bow. ‘If you can’t, shoot it.’

  ‘That would be a shame,’ Hairan said.

  ‘A cruel necessity.’ Valens gathered his thoughts. ‘Decimus, Aulus, get back to the camp, get your mounts, and round up the other loose horses.’

  Now they needed to dispose of the corpses.

  ‘Look!’

  Forgotten by everyone, the driver must have hidden under the wagon. Now he ran across the road and started to scramble up the slope.

  One of the soldiers started in pursuit, then they stopped. The face of the cliff the wagoner was attempting was sheer and could not be scaled.

  An arrow snapped off the rocks above the man’s head.

  ‘Come down,’ Hairan called.

  ‘Please, don’t kill me,’ the man pleaded in bad Greek. Another arrow splintered closer to where he hung. ‘Don’t shoot me. I am coming down.’

  ‘And stop wasting my arrows,’ Narses said, retrieving his bow from Hairan.

  Clemens and Decimus disarmed the wagoner, then brought him before Valens and pushed him to his knees.

  ‘I am just the driver. By all the gods, don’t kill me.’

  ‘Death is the last thing that you have to worry about,’ Valens said. The words of crafty Odysseus to the Trojan scout he had captured on the windy plains before Ilion.

  ‘I will drive the wagon wherever you want.’

  ‘We can manage the wagon ourselves.’

  ‘But I can help you. I know things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A rider passed not long ago. A messenger of the King. He will have riches, even the harness of his horse has a gold chain.’

  ‘We saw him pass.’

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘Do you always drive the supplies to the castle?’ Valens asked.

  ‘What?’ In his fear, he was distracted by the question. ‘No, this is my first time.’

  ‘And do the same soldiers always escort the wagon?’

  ‘No, they were complaining about it. They had done it last year. They were moaning that it was not their turn to go to the horrible place again so soon.’ A look of cunning came into his eyes. ‘You will never get in there without me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I know the password. I will drive, say the word at the gate. I will not betray you.’

  Valens looked at Narses.

  The Persian shrugged. ‘There were no passwords in my day.’

  ‘It is the warden. The soldiers were saying Naduk is a daemon. Always thinking of new things, making the life of the garrison hell.’

  ‘You had better tell us.’

  ‘Then you will kill me. Please, I don’t want to die.’
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br />   Valens pointed at Iudex. ‘You see this bald man here, the one with the face of a baby.’

  The wagoner gazed over fearfully.

  ‘His looks are deceiving. He is skilled with the knife, good at making people tell secrets.’

  Iudex smiled, and fished a long, wicked blade from his boot.

  ‘No, not that.’

  Iudex stepped forward. Clemens and Decimus tilted up the man’s head, gripping him so tight that he could not move.

  ‘He takes pleasure in his work,’ Valens said.

  ‘It is a weakness of mine,’ Iudex agreed. ‘Always start with the nose. Some think the genitals, but I swear by the nose. It is extraordinary how painful a slit nostril is, and so much blood.’

  ‘Things will go better for you, if you tell us,’ Valens said.

  ‘I will, if you swear he will not cut me.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘Perozshapur, it is Perozshapur.’

  ‘It means the victory of Shapur,’ Narses said.

  ‘That is what the officer must say at the gate. Please don’t let him hurt me.’

  ‘I gave you my word that he would not,’ Valens said. ‘Unfortunately that does not bind the rest of us.’

  ‘But you said death was the last of my worries.’

  ‘Yes, and that is true for every man.’

  CHAPTER 28

  The Castle of Silence

  BARBAD HAD SEEN THE RIDER coming up the trail. The man was mounted on a dromedary, the beast staggering with exhaustion. They must have travelled all night. It had still been early, the sun just risen. The slanting autumn sunshine had glinted off the gold chain on the camel’s harness. The morning meal had arrived, but the boy had not yet awoken.

  Now, elbows propped on the sill, he was staring out of the window, wrapped in a cloak against the cold wind. He had become more withdrawn, and had recently spent much of his time silently looking at the mountains. There was snow on the peaks. It fell in the night, and every morning it had advanced down the slopes. Soon the high passes would be closed.

  Barbad wondered what the boy was thinking. Sasan had turned eleven in the summer. Persians made much of birthdays, so Barbad had done what he could. There had been no question of gifts, but he had put his soul into the stories he had told. Under the dark-eyed gaze of the boy, he had recounted the boyhood of Cyrus. How he had been exposed to die, and how, having been saved by a loyal servant, he had returned to claim his kingdom. Now Barbad pondered if the hope implicit in the tale had been cruel.

  If only Barbad had not seen the rider. He had been watching for the supply convoy. By his reckoning – a crude scratching of days on the wall of the privy – it was due any time now. If only the messenger had been delayed. It would not be long before the passes were blocked for the winter. Perhaps he had been mistaken?

  But Barbad knew his eyes had not been deceived. He had not been mistaken. A lone rider, travelling fast. The golden chain on the bridle of his mount. A messenger of the King of Kings. It was every subject’s duty to speed him on his way. To hinder or detain such a messenger brought the death penalty.

  Perhaps it was nothing to do with Sasan? For all Barbad knew, there were other prisoners in the Castle of Silence. He had no evidence, but they might exist. Or could it even be the messenger brought the order for the release of the young prince?

  No, such thoughts were like a drowning man clutching at a straw. After all these months there would be no pardon for Sasan’s father. Most likely he was already dead. Tortured, broken, and dead. Shapur was a man of blood, of infinite cruelty, like Ardashir before him.

  Now the time had come, the enormity of his duty pressed down on Barbad. It was a terrible thing to contemplate. To kill in cold blood a child you loved was unthinkable. The eunuch’s heart quailed.

  Yet if he did not act . . .

  Barbad forced himself to think of the day he was cut, and the days before that. Painfully, he dredged up the memory of the troughs.

  There was no crueller method of execution. The condemned man was secured inside two tightly lashed together wooden troughs, shaped like small boats. Unable to move, only his head, hands and feet protruded. He was given food. If he refused, they pricked his eyes until he ate. He was given milk and honey to drink. They poured it into his mouth, let it run over his face.

  His eyes were turned to the sun. Soon, swarms of flies would hide his face. Inside the troughs he lay in his own filth. Before long, worms and maggots seethed up from the rottenness and corruption, devouring his body and eating their way into his vitals.

  Barbad’s father had been a strong man. He had taken ten days to die.

  Barbad would spare the boy such a fate.

  In a sense, the messenger was unimportant. Winter was fast approaching. Barbad had turned seventy-five a couple of months before. He was getting very old, his strength failing. He had a persistent dry cough. The rooms at the top of the tower could be made snug with their shutters and braziers, their hangings and rugs. But Barbad knew he would not survive winter in the mountains. The messenger had merely brought forward what he had to do.

  The boy left the window. He sat on the floor by a brazier. On the rug, he spread out the bits of kindling that he used as toys. It was awful to see the prince brought so low.

  Sasan arranged the sticks in lines of battle. Frowning with concentration, he began to manoeuvre the blocks of troops. Barbad had had to rack his memory to summon up the details of battles from his reading long ago. This was Issus, from the Anabasis of Arrian. Sasan liked to replay the battle, trying to devise strategies which would reverse history, would bring the Persian King Darius victory over the Macedonian Alexander. The last time he had solemnly declared that it was only the cowardly flight of Darius that had lost the battle. Already, the boy had something of the man about him; the man he would not live to become.

  The thought almost broke Barbad’s heart. He loved the boy. The irony was not lost on him – Prince Sasan was the grandson of Ardashir, the evil king who had forced Barbad to watch his father’s slow and repulsive death, the tyrant who had massacred his family, had robbed Barbad of his manhood.

  As a eunuch, Barbad had been placed in the household of Prince Papak, one of Ardashir’s many sons. For years, as he trained to be a scribe, Barbad had dreamt lurid dreams of revenge. The blade slicing, the gout of blood splashing bright on the thighs, Papak screaming as his life drained away. An eye for an eye, a life for a life.

  But Papak was not like his father. Trained to ride, shoot and abhor the Lie, Papak was a Persian nobleman of antique virtue. Brave and compassionate, considerate to others, he resembled Barbad’s own father. Having served Papak all his adult life, by the time Sasan was born, Barbad’s hatred had turned to love.

  That degraded cult that worshipped the crucified magician could not be more wrong. No deity would punish the children for the sins of the fathers. Not the first generation, let alone the third.

  The key turned in the lock.

  With the manners of good breeding, the boy got to his feet. Barbad rushed to stand behind him. With trembling fingers, Barbad freed the knife, but kept it concealed in the loose folds of his sleeve.

  Mazda forgive him. He would strike for the neck. The wicked tip of the slender knife should easily slide into the soft flesh.

  The door opened.

  The hilt of the dagger was slick with Barbad’s sweat. Mazda, can I do this thing?

  The usual guard entered, holding the tray. Behind him his companion, watchful but bored, stood on the landing.

  Barbad did not dare try to return the knife to its hidden sheath. Clumsy with fear and relief, he would drop the weapon. If it clattered to the floor, their path to freedom would be barred.

  Without a word, the guard placed the tray on the table. He picked up the one from the morning meal and left. The door was locked behind him.

  With unsteady steps, Barbad walked to the privy, pulled the hanging shut. Would he have struck? Could an old eunuch find the cour
age?

  Anxiously, keeping well away from the latrine and the dizzying drop below the small hole, he returned the knife to its place of concealment.

  Do your duty. Serve my son until the end. Somehow Barbad had to find the resolve.

  Long ago, King Mithradates had entrusted his beloved daughter to the safekeeping of a trusted eunuch. Defeated by the Romans, Mithradates had fled. His daughter and the eunuch had been trapped and besieged in a fortress. With no hope of rescue, the eunuch had not betrayed the King’s trust. Knowing the fate of the Princess if she fell into the hands of the Romans, the eunuch had killed her, then turned the knife on himself.

  Barbad would make the boy’s last hours happy. Tonight, while Sasan slept, the knife would do its duty.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Castle of Silence

  FOR THE LAST MILE UP to the fortress the road was steep. Except for Decimus and Narses, they all dismounted and put their shoulders to the wagon. Decimus led their mounts, and Narses rode a little ahead.

  ‘Halt!’

  They wedged stones under the wheels of the wagon.

  Head down and pushing, Valens had only been able to form a general impression of the castle. Now he stood and studied it.

  The gate was heavy, and bound with iron. It was just wide enough to admit the wagon. The gatehouse was taller than the flanking walls. Like them it was crenellated, but had no projecting bastions from which to enfilade the approach. There were no towers along the curtain wall. The Castle of Silence relied on its natural position for its defence. On this precipitous crag, no enemy could bring to bear regular siege works. No rams or towers could make the ascent, and there was nowhere to site artillery. Set on solid rock, undermining the place was not an option. The masonry of its walls was smooth, and could not be climbed unaided. All approaches were overlooked. Unless the garrison were negligent, a surprise attack would fail. The paths up could be blockaded, and the fortress starved into submission, but otherwise it would only fall to treachery or subterfuge. But, of course, the Castle of Silence was not designed as a secure refuge, but a prison.