Count Belisarius (56 page)

Then suddenly the trumpet blew the Alert. In a moment all games ceased; every troop formed up speedily under its pennant and trotted to join its own squadron. At another trumpet call, with promptness and precision, the squadrons formed up in two long double lines, making an avenue of welcome. The Ambassador passed through, feeling rather uncomfortable, I imagine. There were 6,000 of them, and never was a finer choice of men ever brought together. They appeared far less interested in him than he in them, and eager to return to their sports. At the top of the hill was pitched Belisarius's tent of plain canvas. Belisarius sat before it on a tree-stump, without even his general's cloak, wearing white linen like his men, and looking as if he had never a care in the world. After exchanging salutations with the Ambassador he ordered the trumpeter to blow the Dismiss. The 6,000 men returned with a cheer to the plain.

The Ambassador asked: ‘Are you indeed Belisarius? I expected to find a man in gilded armour, with servitors in crimson-silk uniform ranged about him.'

Belisarius replied: ‘Had your royal Master warned us of your approach, we should have received you with greater formality, not in this undress. However, we are soldiers, not courtiers, and wear no scarlet or gold.'

The Ambassador delivered his message. He said that the Great King was at hand, his armies being like locusts in numbers, and wished to discuss peace terms.

Belisarius laughed softly. ‘I have fought in many lands and observed many strange customs, but never before have I met a case like this — a king who is at pains to bring 200,000 soldiers with him in order to discuss peace terms. Tell your royal Master that our country, though hospitable, cannot act as host for so lavish a retinue as this. When he has dismissed them I shall be prepared to discuss peace terms in an amicable fashion. I will grant him an armistice of five days in which to send them back home across the Euphrates. I thank your Excellency for visiting us.'

The Ambassador returned and reported to Khosrou: ‘My advice, Great King, is to return home at once. If their main body resemble their advance guard in the least respect, then you are utterly lost. For discipline, manliness, and skill in arms I have never seen their like. Moreover, it is clear that they are very numerous; they would not otherwise dare to base themselves on an unwalled town like Carchemish or behave with such confidence when on outpost duty. As for their general, Belisarius: in my quality of Mage I am accustomed to read the souls of men, and I see joined in him all the military and moral virtues which our primitive ancestors esteemed. You cannot risk a battle with such a man. If you make the smallest mistake, not one of your men will ever see Babylon again.'

Khosrou believed the Ambassador because he spoke without flattery. He decided to return, though even this seemed a dangerous course to take, with Belisarius's army threatening his rear. The nearest way home was over the Euphrates and back by way of Mesopotamia, but on the farther bank of the river he had seen ten or twenty troops of Roman cavalry, who appeared, by the continual smoke-signals that they sent back across the plain towards Edessa, to be the vanguard of another army. He was afraid to attempt a crossing, for fear of being attacked in the midst of operations; though this ‘other army' had no real existence — what Khosrou had seen was only 1,000 of Belisarius's troops from Carrhae, making the most of themselves. But the Mage pointed out that Belisarius had never yet broken his word and that if King Khosrou crossed the river within the five days allowed, he would be safe enough.

Khosrou crossed in a hurry, unmolested. Persian armies always carry bridging material with them (short timbers which hook together), and therefore the widest and swiftest streams present no obstacle to them. As soon as he was safe on the farther bank he sent a message
to Belisarius, asking for an ambassador to discuss peace terms as he had promised.

Belisarius himself then crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma with all his forces. He sent an ambassador to tell King Khosrou that, if the Persian Army returned through Roman territory without doing any damage, Justinian would arrange with him that the terms agreed upon in the previous year were put into effect.

Khosrou consented to this, and the next day began his homeward march. But he was afraid to pass through Mesopotamia because of the imaginary army; so returned along the left bank of the Euphrates, putting his men on short rations. Belisarius began following him, always one day's journey behind, as he had done many years before with the Persian general Azareth. However, when he reached a point just opposite Barbalissus he was obliged to desist: he himself and nearly all his generals were recalled to Constantinople by a peremptory summons from the Emperor.

The pursuit could not be safely trusted to any officer that remained. King Khosrou, aware that he was no longer being followed, continued to the city of Callinicum and captured it without difficulty. As it unluckily happened, Justinian had ordered the defences to be repaired, and the masons had just torn down the half of one wall in order to build it more securely; so the garrison, unable to close the breach, had fled. Khosrou, determined to have something to show for his invasion, disregarded his promise, and carried the entire population of Callinicum into captivity, having levelled the city with the ground. Thus the White Huns gained their expected plunder.

Palestine, however, was saved. Belisarius admitted afterwards that only 40,000 men could have engaged the Persian armies at Carchemish with any confidence of success; and he had had no more than 12,000. Carchemish, he said, was the sweetest of all his victories. He had routed 200,000 Persians with his unarmed Household alone, and not lost a single man. He said too: ‘The Persians were like locusts, but we frightened them from our fields with the clash of steel and the sound of trumpets.'

L
ET
no one think that Belisarius was summoned from the East to receive some great reward from his Emperor for this bloodless and glorious victory at Carchemish. The circumstances that led to his recall were far from pleasant ones. I shall relate them without delay.

Now, this was the year of the plague, which was of the sort called bubonic. It had not caused such extensive havoc since a thousand years before, when the historian Thucydides described its occurrence at Athens. Between war and disease there is a close connexion. In my opinion it is not merely that the pollution caused by fighting – corpses unburied, aqueducts broken, public sanitation neglected – breeds disease, but that the emotions which war excites weaken the mind and make bodies susceptible to every evil physical influence. The plague is a disease which baffles doctors, strikes and spares indiscriminately, is horrible in its symptoms.

The infection had originally been carried from China towards the end of the previous year in a bale of carpets consigned to a merchant of Pelusium in Egypt. He sickened; but the nature of the disease was not recognized, for the first symptoms are always slight and accompanied by no fever. He had infected his fellow-merchants and his family before the characteristic tumours appeared which give their name to the disease. Soon there were a thousand cases in Pelusium; from where it spread westward to Alexandria and beyond, and north-ward to Palestine. In the spring the grain-ships carried the plague to Constantinople, where my mistress was, and I with her. For grain-ships are always full of rats, and rats are subject to the infection and carry the seeds of it about in their furs. These grain-ship rats communicated the plague to the dock-rats of the Golden Horn, a very numerous colony, and they to the sewer-rats, and thus the infection spread throughout the city. At first there were no more than ten cases a day, but soon there were a hundred and then a thousand, and then, in the height of the summer, ten and twenty thousand a day.

The tumours formed usually on the groin, but also under the armpits, and in some cases behind the ears. In the later stages of the disease
there was a great variation of symptoms. Some sufferers fell into a deep coma. They would consent to eat and drink and perform other habitual actions indicated for them to do – if they had friends or slaves faithful enough to nurse them – but behaved like sleep-walkers, not recognizing anyone, not noticing anything, remaining passive and perfectly unaware of the passage of time. Others, however, were seized with a violent delirium; these had to be strapped to their beds, or they would run off down the streets bawling or shrieking that the Devil was in their house, or the Bulgarian Huns perhaps – and many who had nobody to restrain them rushed to the harbour or the straits and plunged in and were drowned. In some cases, again, there was neither coma nor delirium: the sufferers remained clear-minded until the tumour mortified, and they died screaming for pain. In still other cases no pain was felt at all, and death came as peacefully as in old age. Often the whole body broke out in black pustules of the size of a pea, or there was a vomiting of blood; when either of these things happened death always ensued.

Many were utterly immune from the disease, even physicians and undertakers who handled the sick or dead by the thousand; while others who had fled away to the hills of Thrace at the first alarm, and lived there in the pure air remote from all contact with their fellow men, died nevertheless. Neither degree of susceptibility nor peculiarity of symptoms could be foretold according to sex, age, class, profession, faith, or race.

Before the plague reached its full vehemence the dead were buried with the customary rites, each household disposing of its own corpses. But it fast became impossible to display such piety: old tombs were broken into by night for new tenants to be thrust into them. Finally in thousands of houses, even those of very rich citizens, every person was either dead or fled, and the corpses lay rotting unburied. Justinian ordered his Registrar-General to take the matter in hand. The neglected corpses were buried in trenches; but soon the supply of labourers was insufficient to the task. Then the towers of the fortifications at Sycae on the other side of the Horn were used as charnel-houses, the dead being flung in through holes in the roof until there was room for no more. Though the roofs were scaled again a ghastly stench pervaded the city – especially when the wind blew from the north.

At the height of the pestilence more than 20,000 a day were dying. All trade and industry in the city came to an end, and of course social
gatherings were out of the question. But there were services in the churches, which were thronged with terrified believers and became notorious centres of infection. The municipal food-supply failed, because no grain-ship captains dared to anchor in the harbour and the plague had spread to the farming districts too. Thousands who escaped the plague died of starvation. It was a time of signs and visions: ghosts paraded the daylight streets, and, greatest marvel of all, for once there was even peace between the Blue and Green factions. More nobility and virtue and loving-kindness were now shown by penitent evil-doers than ever before or since. Theodosius said to my mistress in this context: ‘Our Lady Plague has a more persuasive voice by far, Godmother, than our Saviour, the Lord Jesus.' He always used a contemptuous tone in discussing the horrors around us, and made his own continued health seem to be a matter of good taste rather than good fortune. My mistress and I were also blessed with immunity. Whether or not this was due to frequent fumigation of the house with sulphur I do not know, but very few of my fellow-domestics sickened. Other houses, equally fortunate, ascribed their immunity to some Christian relic or heathen charm, or to some specific in which they had faith, such as curds or lemon-water or plum-pickle.

At about the time that the mortality began to decrease slightly, a whisper went through the Palace: ‘His Sacred Majesty, the Emperor himself, is sick. It was thought to be a mere cold, but today a tumour has appeared on the groin. He is in a deep coma, and cannot even be persuaded to eat. It is impossible that he will live, the doctors agree.'

Then came the headless rumour spreading swiftly throughout the Empire: ‘He is dead.' Even in that horrible time – for by now every diocese almost was afflicted – the people found heart to thank God that the evil were slain as well as the good. And they prayed that the next Emperor might be kinder to his subjects and more true to his word. When the rumour reached Belisarius he was at Carchemish – it was just before the five days' armistice. His officers came in a body and asked him: ‘From whom do you take orders now, Illustrious Belisarius?'

He answered at once, not wishing to seem evasive or equivocal: ‘The choice remains with the Senate. But my vote will go to Justin, the late Emperor's nephew and nearest of kin, who is highest in rank of all the Imperial Family.' (This was not Justin, the son of Germanus, but another, the son of Justinian's sister Vigilantia.)

They said: ‘But, my lord, the oath of allegiance which all officers have been required to swear is jointly to Justinian as Emperor and Theodora as his wife.'

He replied: ‘That may be. It happens that I swore my oath, under the old form, to Justinian alone. It is unconstitutional for a woman to be Empress in her own right. Though I regard Her Resplendency as a most capable and energetic administrator, I do not approve that a thousand-year-old rule should be broken in her favour. For this reason alone: the Goths and Armenians and Moors and many another race in the Empire would never consent to be ruled by a woman, and would remain in a constant state of rebellion so long as she lived.'

Boutzes agreed, adding: ‘For my part, even if this were not the case, I should refuse to obey Theodora, who (I may now speak without disloyalty, the Emperor being dead) is no less of a monster than he was, but fiercer and more cunning even.'

The others all thought the same thing, but did not express themselves with such freedom.

Then came the news that Justinian was, after all, not dead. Though now in his sixtieth year (held to be the most dangerous time of life), he had recovered sufficiently from his coma to recognize Theodora and Narses. Moreover, the tumour on his groin, having swollen to a great size, had begun to suppurate slightly – a sign that he was on his way to recovery. The tumour broke; presently he was on his feet again and well enough, except that his speech was affected by a partial paralysis of the tongue.