I took a deep breath in and out. I wiped sweaty hands on the seat of my trousers. I looked about for Eboric. I saw him near the front. I frowned at him for the gross disregard of orders in which he’d been Antonia’s accomplice. He smiled sweetly back until I had no choice but to break into a smile of my own. I looked away and took another deep breath.
‘People of the mountains!’ I cried in my best and loudest speaking voice, ‘you will have heard that a great and terrible army is approaching the land that you and your ancestors have known since time out of mind. I have seen this army with my own eyes. I have seen the King who leads it – a tyrant worse than Herod himself, who delights in blood and suffering. And I have seen the trail of death and utter devastation that the King and his army have already left on the far side of the big pass. Whatever you have heard, whatever you may imagine, is nothing compared with what I have seen.’
I stopped and waited for the scared murmur to die away. ‘You can try running away. You can hide with some of your livestock in the far mountains. Perhaps the tide of blood will not follow you there. Perhaps it will finally recede, leaving you with your lives. But your homes will be burnt and your churches demolished. Your crops will be taken. Your livestock will be driven away. You may – perhaps – keep your lives. But you will return to nothing.
‘You can run – or you can fight.’ I stopped again and put a firm look on my face. ‘Though it is so large that the earth may tremble at its approach, you have no cause to tremble at this army. It is filled with miserable slaves. They fight only because, if they turn and run, their own officers will punish them with death. They are demoralised by the weather. No serious thought has been put into feeding them. They are squeezed into a place where they cannot fight in their accustomed manner. There is a good chance that, few as we are, we can send them, falling over each other in their haste, all the way back to the Euphrates.’
I allowed myself a longer pause. No one was laughing at me. I’d go on to the end. ‘I am Alaric, Lord Treasurer to the Emperor. I am the author of the law that has made you into the owners of your land. Because of me, you are beholden neither to landlords nor the tax gatherer. I have given you the right to arm yourselves and organise for your common defence. I have given you the right to turn yourselves, for the first time in a thousand years, from two-legged farm animals into men. I now call on you to defend what you have against those who would take it from you.’
I had thought of a final invitation for anyone who didn’t fancy throwing himself under the stampeding elephant that was the Persian army to turn and go back home. The burst of enthusiastic cheering that followed what I’d just said cancelled the need for that. I looked over my little army of wiry men and grown-up boys, and told myself not to think how many of them I’d be leading to their deaths. This alone told me I wasn’t the right leader. I glanced at Rado. He’d got the generality of what I was saying and had a look on his face of grim anticipation. This was what he’d been born to do. But for his capture, he’d by now be doing to us in the Thracian mountains what he was now about to do with us to the Persians. He’d put up with me in Constantinople – no, that was unjust: he was completely and unquestioningly mine. But I’d never again refer to his time as a dancing boy and sex companion. Long before he grew his first proper beard, the smell of horse leather would have soaked indelibly into him.
Antonia banged a fist on to one of my feet. ‘Has everyone enough food to get us there and back?’ she asked in her manly voice.
I glared down at her. ‘This is the moment,’ I said heavily, ‘when Rado chooses five good riders to go off with you and Eboric to Trebizond.’
‘Oh, shut up, Alaric!’ she snapped. ‘We aren’t married yet and I
am
the Emperor’s niece. Try coming the Big I Am with me and I’ll make you look two inches tall.’
I tried to copy Rado’s grim look – quite hard when you know your face is turning bright pink. ‘If you think you’re riding into battle with me,’ I whispered, ‘you’ve picked the wrong husband.’
‘Then it’s agreed that I’m coming with you as far as the battle,’ she said. She got up and turned to the crowd, a small sword in her hand. She raised a loud cheer of her own.
Grimmer than Rado in their black robes and huge, scruffy beards, the priests were in a tight group at the front of the crowd. Once the most senior of these had preached his sermon on the evils of the Persian idolatry and the efficacy of the relic he’d brought along, and once they’d all raised their icons aloft to heaven, I’d give quiet instructions for Antonia to be sat on when it came to the fighting.
We made our camp at the halfway point round the mountain. On our right was a drop of several hundred feet, to our left a place sheltered enough to let a fairly thick grove of trees grow. The scouts we’d sent far ahead were uniformly reporting no enemy presence. Even so, we kept fires to a minimum and were ready to dart under cover at first sign of trouble.
Our only disturbance came about the midnight hour – long after everyone else, except the watch, had turned in. I was sitting up late with Rado in a makeshift tent. We were into our third cup of a sort of beer made with oats.
‘It would be useful for Priscus to show himself,’ I said in Slavic, answering his objection, ‘because he has military experience and we have none. A certain forced courage and handiness with a sword doesn’t make me into a general of any sort. As for you, with all respect, your only experience of battle against regular forces ended with your whole family dead and you standing unwashed in my office. And, until you can prove that you’re the next Alexander, your age is somewhat against you.’
He looked happily at his feet – something else, I realised, he was copying from me. ‘It’s too late for second thoughts now,’ he said. He put his cup down and played with the lamp. ‘If you’d asked my honest opinion this morning, it would have been to load up four horses and get all four of us back to Constantinople. That Persian rubbish could then have carried on killing and burning everything in reach. If they ever made it to Constantinople, we’d have had plenty of time to find somewhere else to go. But you didn’t think to ask my opinion. Now these people have fed us and hailed us as saviours, that’s what we’ll have to be. And isn’t that what your duty – and, since you freed me,
mine
– requires?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s our duty.’ I drank deeper to steady my nerve. ‘And duty is everything, whatever you feel about doing it. We may or may not be needed to save the Empire. But we have to try to save these people and others like them. What I’m wondering about is the practicalities. When all is said and done, we’re not leading people like yours or mine into battle. These are untried amateurs.’
Rado laughed. ‘Samo told me that untried amateurs like these saw off the Persians last year.’
‘That was a raiding force, at the end of its supply line,’ I said. ‘Also, the numbers were more evenly matched.’
Rado laughed again. ‘You said yourself that, if we hit them in the pass, their numbers won’t count. Also, I don’t think those animals we killed the other day were much above the common level. Our men are fighting for their homes. That means a lot. So long as we keep out of sight tomorrow, we’ll take them by surprise and give them a bloody nose they won’t ever forget.’
This was the moment when everyone woke up. It began as a commotion among the outlying watch. By the time we’d got our swords and were hurrying from the tent, it had turned into a noise, from many throats, of inarticulate horror. It sounded as if it would go on without end. It wasn’t the Persians, we could be sure. But it was all they needed, if any were about, to tell them something was up.
‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ I shouted, sword in hand. I struck it three times against a rock. In the light of the torches that had now been lit, I looked at the hundred or so young men. I could guess they’d blundered into us and the knowledge that they weren’t alone in the darkness had set them off. Sobbing or crying out with terror, shrinking from the sudden light, they cowered on the ground. One of them, I could see, had an arrow or a spear wound on his bare lower arm. Others looked as if they’d been knocked about.
‘Put those torches out,’ I ordered. ‘One light only.’ I turned to one of the priests. ‘Try and shut them up,’ I said. ‘See if you can get any sense out of them.’
It was a nasty story, quickly told. As I’d suspected, the far plain was in a district without militias. Persian foragers had turned up at a cluster of five linked villages. Instead of the usual murder on site, they’d entertained themselves this time by gathering the whole population together and setting everyone off at a run towards our mountain. Those who’d refused to run, or couldn’t, had been burned alive in their church. Of those who could run, those who fell behind were stabbed in the guts and left to bleed to death where they lay. The old went first and then the very young and the women, and then every man who couldn’t keep up the pace set by laughing demons on horseback. Every tie of blood or affection was tested to snapping point. Those that didn’t snap led to certain death. Those of the runners who survived, even for a little time, survived only as individuals – women who threw down their babies, men who cast their children aside, anyone strong enough and terrified enough to pull someone else out of the way and keep at the front of the terrified, gibbering crowd.
Of the five or six hundred who started on the run, I counted barely a hundred who’d made it far enough into the woods for the Persians to get bored and go off to pat each other on the back for a job well done. Of necessity, these survivors were the fittest and strongest, and those most terrified by the prospect of death into dropping every consideration of love or decency. Looking at the faces of these survivors in the light of a single torch, I saw fear – but I also saw the realisation of a shame in survival that would never fade this side of the grave.
‘Give them food and drink,’ I said. I turned to the priest. ‘Give them what comfort you can.’ I raised my voice. ‘Let anyone who cares join us in the morning. We’ll see how, even without training, men can fight when they have nothing left to lose.’
I paused outside my tent. Inside, Eboric had finally been pressed into giving a fuller description of my dealings with Chosroes than I’d so far given. He didn’t know their full extent, and his lack of Persian blurred his narrative. But I listened to his low, trembling account of our banquet in the night palace as if I were hearing about somebody else. At the time, I’d been scared shitless and I’d been too busy trying to kill the Great King to reflect on things. After that had come the long strain of the escape and, after that, the reunion with Antonia and the preparations for the counter-offensive. Now, I sat down and put my head in both hands. It didn’t help hearing the proud rise in Eboric’s voice every time he found reason to explain how brave I’d been and how devoted to the safety of those I loved.
I looked up at the bright stars. I really wasn’t another Leonidas. I was an English semi-bandit with a thick layer of civilian piled on top of that. Eboric was young and silly. I could expect him to see me as a hero. But Rado could see right through me. How he could have gone calmly back to his tent to sit playing with another of his pebble maps, was beyond me.
‘Stiff upper lip,’ I whispered in the darkness. ‘Stiff upper lip.’ Once more, I found myself speaking in English.
Chapter 66
We shed our first blood about noon the following day. Our guides were leading us out of sight through some low hills, when we came on several dozen mounted and unmounted Persians. I won’t say they were actually dripping with Greek blood. But they were close by a village we’d skirted, where every gust of smoke carried over on the breeze smelled of burning meat. The swagger of the footmen and the squealing laughter of them all, told us enough of what they’d been about.
My own inclination was to wait and see if they’d noticed us – and, if they hadn’t, simply to watch them go past. But Rado was already taking out his sword. ‘Get them. Kill them. Strip them,’ he rasped in his functional Greek. ‘No prisoners. None to get away.’ Before I could open my own mouth, he was galloping straight at them, every one of our horsemen close behind him.
It was brutal work, but complete and mostly silent. I cut down one of the horsemen as he tried to escape past me. It was an impressive kill, requiring me to dodge away from his own sword blow, and then skewer him through the side of his throat. Still sitting up and holding his reins, he was dead before I had my sword out of him. But I don’t think anyone was watching. Mine had been the only horseman to survive the first rush of our assault. By the time I was beside Rado again, all attention was on the footmen.
‘Gag them!’ He commanded. ‘Kill slow, but gag them.’
They did both, though with an emphasis on the slow killing. Icons held up to witness the torments, the priests who didn’t join in darted about, exhorting the men to greater excesses. Rado looked on impassively as the banks of a stream now swollen to a small river turned red with gore and was covered with parts cut from the bodies of the living. He raised his voice above the desperate, choking buzz of men who’ve had stones rammed into their mouths to keep them from screaming. ‘This is how they fight their war against us,’ he said. ‘Will you complain if we fight back?’