Swords From the Sea (79 page)

When they yelled to Justinian bring out Belisarius, he pretended not to hear. The great emperor was jealous of this veteran who had been the general of the army. For Belisarius had once licked the Vandals, who had taken Africa for themselves, and after that he had outfoxed the Goths who had settled down around Rome in Italy. He was a soldier's soldier, by which I mean he never understood the politics of war, only the fighting part. There was never his match for finding a way to win a battle.

Now of course Justinian had to work nights, to keep his RomanByzantine empire out of the hands of the barbarians. If these barbarians got Constantinople, they got the jackpot and the game was over. So Justinian, the emperor, used Belisarius, the general, like something expendable, sending him from one front to another. No sooner had Belisarius paraded in down the avenue to the palace, the Gothic king and all the German commanders as row's, than Justinian told him he was needed on the east front, to put a stop to the Persian King of Kings.

At that point Theodora, the empress, spoke up and said Belisarius hadn't had time to unpack his bags, and Belisarius, who had the screw loose in his head, said that was all right-he'd send his kit east without unpacking. Theodora had a gleam in her eye and Justinian noticed it.

"Why did she?" demanded Lailee.

Well, she was about Belisarius's age and she had played in the streets when he played hooky from military school. When she went on the stage-which means the circus here-Theodora did a strip-tease act that was something to see, with her impish eyes and mane of dark hair. Belisarius, who was landing in Sicily then, didn't see it, but Justinian did, and married her. He was only a senator then.

After Justinian was elected and Theodora became empress she had a whole troop of pompadoured ladies to help her bathe, and Russian minks for her wraps. She loved this being empress, but she still had her circus temper, and it broke at times.

Belisarius, who had loved her as a kid in the streets, worshiped her as empress from afar. She was beautiful.

When he had finished with the Persian King of Kings on the east front-and they say it took a miracle to do it-Belisarius had been through twenty-four years with the troops, and he had picked up that limp, along with a twitch to his nerves. He'd spent his pay for bread for his own division, when the commissary biscuits were bad. Still his eyes lighted up when he bowed in his scarlet campaign cloak before his two sovereigns on their gold thrones and emerald-jade footstools.

"Noble Belisarius," cried Theodora, "you have grown quite gray. But it's very becoming," she added quickly.

Now the real reason for Justinian's jealousy of the soldier was Theodora. Also, he didn't relish the popular ovation given his victorious general.

So Justinian declared that Constantinople had never had such a hero as Belisarius, and on the spot he named him First Citizen. Then he took steps to ensure that his Master of the Armed Forces wouldn't stay hero. First he sent away all the biscuit eaters-the veterans of spearhead division-to duty on distant frontiers, which were all at peace after the winning of the last Persian war. Then he promoted the soldier to a desk upstairs by making him Commander of City Militia. The militia had nothing to do in peacetime but hold field days in the Hippodrome.

For a while the crowds in the Hippodrome would cheer the retired Belisarius when he showed up, but soon the citizens went back to their favorite chariots. It seemed as if everyone had forgotten Belisarius in peacetime, except Theodora.

Driving out on the avenue each day, she would halt her imperial carriage, drawn by white mules, and her escort of household guards, to stand up and wave at him, and he would take off his civilian hat to bow to her. It was like an act she put on. Until the day of doom-

It came because of the peace and prosperity Constantinople had within its triple walls. Why, every citizen had a cart in his stable, with the Hippodrome and government bread for the unemployed. The gold reserve of the world was locked up in the palace treasury.

Out in the steppes above the Black Sea, the Khan of the Utigur Huns heard about all this wealth behind the walls of Constantinople. Without bothering to declare a war, the Huns started moving in on it, and, being mounted on steppe mustangs, they came fast.

They rode across the River Danube on the ice. When the news was flashed by blinkers to Justinian, he told his cabinet in the palace not to be alarmed. They had the army of the Danube and the new Master of the Armed Forces-a general named Sergius-and the wealth and fortification of their city to stop the Huns. What Justinian heard next was that Sergius had been captured by the Huns after his army had been scattered over the countryside.

That started the panic. Some senators began to figure how there was no longer an army between them and the oncoming Huns. "August emperor," they begged Justinian, "let Belisarius restore the situation."

And that was the one thing Justinian wouldn't do. Instead he called out the city militia and the cadets himself to defend the Long Wall up in the mountains. But those Huns went through the Long Wall like paper.

Then panic really got loose in the city. Suburban commuters tried to cart their belongings into the city gates, while Constantinopolitan families mobbed the boat landings, and the biggest crowds screamed under Justinian's windows, "Mightiest of Emperors, do something quick! Give us Belisarius to defend us!"

In their fear they imagined that the soldier who had won all his battles might save them now from the Utigur Huns.

Justinian had to give in to the mob. Summoning Belisarius before his empress, he said, in effect, "Now listen. You are my Commander of City Militia. It's high time you took command and defended my city."

Being a soldier, the First Citizen was accustomed to getting orders like that. "As of when?" he asked, without batting an eye.

"As of this minute," directed the emperor with sour triumph. "Take over. And that is all."

But what was left for Belisarius to take over with? His own regiments had been sent off to distant frontiers, and even the militia was gone. Justinian had called him in just in time to take the blame for disaster.

"No," spoke up Theodora suddenly, "that is not so. Belisarius, tell me what is the one thing you need the most?"

Standing up there in her purple and gold, she made an eyeful for the admiring Belisarius. "Most merciful glory," he responded, "that these citizens forget about Huns for a few hours."

"I think that can be managed, most noble Belisarius," she told him thoughtfully.

Belisarius did his best, considering that he had little time and no trained regiment left. In his faded scarlet campaign cloak he rode his white horse up the avenue from the palace, telling everyone, "Pass the word for the biscuit eaters. Say Belisarius wants those who have served under him to come to the Strategion Square."

They came up from the speakeasies and down from the tenements. The veterans of Tricameron and the Salarian Gate came running, with flasks on their hips and the best swords they could pick up on the way. From behind counters and gaming tables, they came running. They were all overage and overweight. One, who was blind, asked, "What is this, fellows?"

"It's the old army," they told the blind man, "going out again with Belisarius and the standards."

"We have some Huns to chase," Belisarius told them, at the assembly point. "They'll be hard to catch."

By making a joke of it, he quieted down the panic, some. By sending out for spears from the theaters, armor from the museum, nets and boat hooks from the fishermen, and even silver platters to serve as shields, he armed his mob after a fashion. He took horses from the peasants' carts, and he took the peasants, with planks from the lumberyard and trumpets from the civic orchestra. He even took the prized chariot horses from the Hippodrome stalls with their chariots.

By noon he had three hundred war veterans mounted and pretty well armed. He had two retired brigadier generals, one of them sober, and about five hundred more riders who could swing a spear and obey a trumpet call. More than that, he had a mob of hunters with bows, boatmen with boat hooks, and peasants with the planks. Just about then, all the churchbells began ringing, because smoke showed on the northern skyline, where the Huns were burning villages as they came in.

"Let's look into this. Why should we wait?" Belisarius shouted. "Fall in! ... Guide right on the standards! First lancers, ma-arch! "

The city orchestra played them up the avenue and out the towers of the Golden Gate. Belisarius went out of the walls because he had no trained force to hold seventeen miles of fortifications. A showoff, with a screw loose, he kept on going up the road, to the village of Chettus, toward twenty thousand triumphant and dangerous Huns determined to crack the treasure vault of the city he left behind.

Where the lights of Chettus village straddled the road, with the dark forest beyond, he halted his motley command. It was not an army, and it had no visible means of standing against the oncoming Asiatics. It simply followed where Belisarius led and he kept up the pretense of a great joke they were playing, getting all units to light large fires and keep in mo tion around them. Because he knew the Huns would have scouts at the edge of the forest fronting them and he wanted the encampment to look bigger and better than it was.

Perhaps, like Hannibal and the other great commanders of men, he had only that one thing-the ability to keep men following him trusting in him until luck gave him a break.

"I wish we had the band here," he told one of his brigadiers. "I'd like fine to have the enemy scouts report we're having a good time in this village tonight."

"You're crazy," replied the brigadier who was not the sober one. "So am I. I've seen the circus following on."

"How much of the circus, general? And where is it?"

They searched through the campfires until they found it, and Belisarius said something profane when he pushed through the spectators to the vehicle of ivory and gold plate hitched to four white-tasseled mules with a slender pin-up of a woman doing a song routine in it.

"That's all of it," explained the brigadier.

Now, the several thousand males of that forlorn hope in Chettus village had seen Theodora, if at all, robed toe to chin on the throne of an empress. The actress behind the mule team had little enough on.

Getting close to the apparently oblivious Theodora, Belisarius said forcibly, "Most divinely noble-"

"To whom," she rapped at him, "are you speaking, soldier?"

And she went on with the song about how the Vandals ran at Tricameron. That silenced Belisarius, who dared not speak her name, and could not eject her against her will and the inclination of her audience. Her act was a good one-pulling Belisarius up to her cart stage, after the song of how he held the Salarian Gate against the Goths. After she held him in both arms and kissed him, the watching fishermen and veterans shouted, and there was nothing Belisarius could do about it. "It's good for the morale of the troops, darling," she whispered to him.

After she went into the strip-tease routine, over in the lines of the lancers and charioteers, Belisarius had to go out and make a personal check-up of the sentries, to see they hadn't been drawn in to the show. He blessed his star of luck that the Huns never went into an action after dark.

Of course the word got around. Some of the old-timers remembered watching Theodora in her circus days. Perhaps no one quite believed that The Glory of the Purple and The Joy of the World was performing for them in person, but they passed the word along the fires, "It's Theodora, like in the old days." And their morale zoomed in Chettus.

"Don't you think, darling," observed Theodora, putting on her wraps because of the chill in the early-morning air, "that your soldiers have stopped worrying about the Huns?"

"I do," admitted Belisarius, who had braced her to see she took off for the palace. "Now the show's over, Theodora. I want you to go home."

"The show isn't over by any means. I've always wanted to see how you win a victory, Belisarius, and I'll watch this one. The stage is yours now, dearest."

What could Belisarius do with her? If he called over a squad to put her under arrest, all she had to do was pull her rank on him, and there would be a scandal to rock the empire.

"Then for gosh sake stay in the village," he told her.

It jangled the screw looser than ever in his head, to have her sitting out the battle. Not that he could offer any legitimate battle. By experience he knew the one thing Asiatic Huns feared was a trap. But with his fake army he could set up only a phony kind of trap. Until then he hadn't really expected it to work. Now it had to work.

Desperately he tried to imagine what the Huns would be doing. He had to guess right at every point. Well, by then he thought the horsemen of the steppes would be contemptuous of any Christian armies. Their scouts would report the presence of a defensive force maybe several thousand in strength, holding the village of Chettus on the road to the city. So what would their khan decide to do? Why, to advance in column of march along the road, sending perhaps one brigade ahead to strike the village at sunrise and clear out the defensive force so the main body could advance on the city.

Belisarius couldn't waste any more time. Trying to forget about Theodora, he led all his missile throwers-the archers, peasants with javelins, fishermen with hooks and nets-out of Chettus, a mile or so, to the thick forest. There he posted them under cover on either side above the strip of roadway. He left one brigadier there with one trumpet, and told the officer, when the head of the Hun cavalry column came up, to sound off the trumpet and throw everything he had at the road.

"And after that?" observed the brigadier. "Well, we had a good life, Belisarius."

As it happened, Belisarius had guessed right at every point. In the dawn's early light, with the sun breaking through the forest mesh, the dark mass of the Huns flowed silently along the road; the trumpet blared and the varied missiles whammed down, bothering the flanking horsemen. What happened next took the entire galloping column by surprise.