All around: desperate roaring and clashing of iron sounded from back over the boulder pile. Apion stooped to pick up his kontarion and shield, then splashed through the crimson shallows of the spring.
He slid over the boulder pile and saw it: five skutatoi remained standing, backs pressed together in a last stand as some twenty Seljuk spearmen harried and jabbed at them. The other nine lay like broken flotsam in the spring, punctured with arrows and their flesh ripped open by scimitar blades. In the shimmering heat outside of the thicket, a dust cloud billowed up from a moving mass. Blinking, he made out the seemingly infinite train of heavily armoured spearmen, archers and cavalry, a sea of banners bearing the horizontal bow emblem of the Seljuks. The akhi in the thicket were merely a light vanguard. He remembered briefly Bey Soundaq’s words at the mountain pass.
A storm approaches from the east, and the Falcon soars on its wrath. Byzantium’s time is over.
He turned back to the last stand, only two skutatoi stood now. This would be the end, surely. He gripped his scimitar hilt firmly, rushing for the nearest Seljuk with a roar. His blade sunk into the warrior’s neck and before the Seljuk next to him could turn to meet the attack, Apion had his sword free and scythed it round and into the man’s chest, bursting the unarmed ribcage, showering the ground in a shrapnel of bone and gore. The next man he fought mouthed screams but Apion heard only the blood pound in his ears, feeling the heat of gore on his face and the dull shudder of every blow he hacked into the man’s lamellar.
Then the next man came at him, shield raised, scimitar hooked over the top. Apion butted forward with his own shield and the man staggered but remained composed. Then Apion lunged forward for a killer strike. The Seljuk took a step back and let the blow fall through the air, sending Apion sprawling into the midst of the Seljuk mass pressing on the last two skutatoi. He scrambled to stand but slipped on the carpet of gore. Clawing at the crimson mush, he tried to pull his way clear of the melee until a pair of hands grappled on his ankles and pulled him back. A sea of snarling faces roared, jabbing their scimitars down at him. He grasped a shield from a dead skutatoi and, like a desperate animal, he tucked his torso behind it and kicked out as the Seljuks rained blows on the battered skutum. One scimitar ripped into his ankle and he could barely hear his own pained scream. He tucked his leg in and saw another skutatos drop to the ground beside him, eyes staring, jaw missing and blood haemorrhaging from the wound. He roared at the impotence, the certainty of death, then pushed to standing with a roar, lifting his scimitar and swiping round at the cluster of Seljuks. If he was to die then he would die fighting. Then a hand wrenched at his neck, yanking his entire body up and off of the ground.
He retched as his midriff landed on the back lip of a saddle, legs and arms dangling either side. Suddenly the acrid stench of blood was pierced by horse sweat. He righted himself to see what chaos his world had fallen into. He saw a stern grimace and forked beard of the rider. Cydones! He caught sight of some thirty other kataphractoi riding with the strategos. The akhi party lay shattered where they had stood just moments before. Then the wind grew into a whistle and the horse juddered as it thundered back through the mountain pass. The patter of arrows smacking into the dust around them thinned and then stopped and the jeering of the massive Seljuk column fell away behind them.
‘Ferro!’ Cydones cried over the wind. ‘Break off detachments of three, get word to each of the tourmae. The campaign army will not be enough – not nearly enough – we need all of our reserves, even the garrison from Trebizond. Send word to the emperor: tell him we need the support of the tagma or the eastern frontier will fall!’
‘Aye, sir,’ Ferro slowed and yelled orders to the rest of the kataphractoi. Sub-groups of riders splintered off and shot ahead at full gallop, lowered in their saddles.
‘Sir,’ Apion said, righting himself to sit in the saddle, ‘the Seljuk army, they’re not coming through the pass for Argyroupolis. They look to be headed south, around the mountains?’
‘Tugrul means to draw us out into the field,’ Cydones replied. ‘They are forcing us to break one of the tenets of the art of war, they are forcing us to fight them on their terms.’
‘Do we have the strength to meet them on the field?’
‘They outnumber us vastly, four of them to one of us. The Falcon means to crush us,’ Cydones said. ‘But we will face them. We must!’
***
Grey clouds scudded across the sky, driven by a warm summer wind. The wall guard at Argyroupolis stood stiff-jawed and attentive, looking over the sea of tents massed on the flat ground outside of the town walls. Meanwhile, inside the town, the barracks had been transformed: a contraflow of wagons and mule trains entered and left the enclosure, the warehouse their destination, laden with bare essentials such as tents, mallets, sickles, spades, axes, cookware and hand-operated grain mills along with caltrops, disassembled artillery, spare bows, swords and armour.
Every patch of free space in the muster yard and the space outside the barracks was packed with the fully mustered thema army and the shattered remnant of the Colonea Thema that had staggered in the previous evening. Thick clusters of infantry and riders stood, chattering nervously and drinking from their skins, nibbling carefully on their rations, cracked wheat and yoghurt cakes being a cheap favourite given their ease of being cooked down into a nourishing stew as needed or eaten solid while on the move. The occasional whinny came from the loose rabble of five hundred mounted Pechenegs that Cydones had managed to hire when it became clear that the emperor would not be sending the tagmata to support them. These Turk mercenaries were swift and deadly with their bows, if lightly armoured and liable to digress from orders. The populace crammed around the perimeter, eager to hear the latest word on the war. Fathers, mothers, wives, sons and daughters with faces wrinkled in concern for their kin who readied to engage the Seljuk advance. Tucked into the corner of the enclosure by the officers’ quarters, Apion stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sha, Nepos, Blastares and Procopius. The rest of the depleted bandon stood behind him.
‘Come on, come on,’ Procopius shuffled in discomfort, hands clasped over his groin. ‘I’ve got two jugs of the amber stuff sloshing around in here!’
‘Keep a lid on it, you’re just making it worse,’ Blastares hissed, breath reeking of the ale the pair had been quaffing all morning to calm their nerves. Then he jabbed a finger up to the battlements. ‘The big man’s about to speak.’
Three blasts on a buccina drowned out the rabble of soldiers and whinnying of horses and at once the crowd fell silent, the ranks inside the barracks rippled into neat bandon squares, Chi-Rho banners lifted high. Then the wall guard about-faced to glare into the city.
‘Warriors and citizens of the thema!’ Cydones strode along the battlements, fully armoured and gleaming, plumage whipping in the wind. He stopped at a crumbling section that straddled the barrack compound and the market square. He held his arms outstretched, his face shaded under the brow of his helmet. ‘Tugrul means to claim glory for his god and his people, but the fire is with us. God is with us! By the end of the month, the Seljuk threat will have been extinguished, these pretenders driven from our lands and back to the east. As you can see, our armies number greatly and our men hunger to wield their swords.’
‘The Seljuks number greater though!’ A lone voice heckled.
The skutatoi punctuating the throng of the populace surged for the man who had spoken out. Apion knew the man had a point though. The emperor had not sent any reinforcements, not even a token detachment of kataphractoi to raise morale.
‘That they may,’ Cydones countered, halting the soldiers with his words, ‘yet we have won fine victories against greater number before, and we will win many more.’
‘But while you’re out there, who’ll be left to defend the cities?’
Cydones paused before replying and the citizen seemed to shrink back into the crowd in the ensuing silence. A smart technique, Apion noted. ‘A garrison will remain in ea
ch of the population centres. Should Tugrul fall upon one of our cities or towns, then this army you see before you will fall upon him, dashing his army against the walls. He and his horde will not be allowed to roam freely in our lands!’
The crowd murmured, unconvinced. They all knew that a skeleton garrison, fewer than half of the normal number at barely two hundred men – half a bandon of infantry and a handful of archers – would be remaining while the thema army moved out. ‘The emperor must send more forces! We need the tagmata!’
‘The emperor knows well of our situation, the tagmata are being readied.’
‘Bullshit,’ Nepos muttered under his breath. ‘All of it. The tagmata aren’t even mobilised from what I’ve heard. The emperor sits in Constantinople scratching his arse and letting us take a battering from the Sultanate. The Armenians, fifty thousand men, would have been marching with us but for the purple-blooded fool’s ridiculous decree.’
Apion tilted his head back a little to direct his words to Nepos. ‘Cydones’ hands are tied though, are they not? He has to feed these people with hope or the battle is lost before it has begun.’
‘Aye, this is true. I wish it were not,’ Nepos concluded. ‘Yet I fear even the strategos cannot stir victory from the number he has mustered.’
‘Have faith. He won’t engage unless he knows he can win,’ Apion replied.
‘May God above march at the head of our ranks!’ Cydones roared, beating his spathion against his shield, freshly painted with the Chi-Rho. Two priests walked to flank the strategos and together they raised an enlarged, crimson standard, decorated with the image of the Virgin Mary, rippling as the cloth caught the wind. At last the populace cried out in fervent support.
Procopius sighed from behind as the fervour died, then there was a rhythmic patter of urine hitting the dust. ‘Bloody ale!’ The old soldier grumbled.
Blastares groaned and Nepos grimaced. Apion tried to ignore the warm spray showering his boots, noting the kataphractoi readying for the signal to move out. ‘Bandon!’ He roared, nodding to the standard-bearing skutatos. ‘Prepare to move out!’
Apion sucked in a breath, pulled on his helmet then hoisted his pack, kontarion, rhiptariai and skutum. The men of the bandon rustled into readiness and he stood to one side as they marched forward past him. Then a hand landed on his shoulder.
‘Not so fast. You’ve got more business to take care of,’ Vadim sneered, then leaned in to his ear. ‘Bloody business.’
***
The thema had set out in good spirits, marching to the war drums, priests flanking the strategos, chanting and raising the Chi-Rho and Virgin Mary standards to cheers from the bristling column in their wake. Over seven thousand fighting men followed the strategos and the symbols of God: three and a half thousand skutatoi, one thousand toxotai, two thousand light infantry, five hundred kataphractoi, five hundred Pecheneg horse archers and then the massive train of mules, siege engineers and the detritus of traders and merchants who clung to the mobilised army like pilot fish.
As feared, Tugrul’s forces had skirted the towns and cities of Chaldia and turned back, drawing the thema army from its homeland and into the south-eastern reaches of the defenceless Colonea Thema. Then they marched east for three days, into southern Armenia, the familiar mountain ranges tapering into an arid brushland. Rumours swept round that Cydones had expected to meet a contingent of one hundred mercenary Frankish heavy cavalrymen – the kataphractoi of the west – but they were never sighted. Nerves were frayed as soldiers worried about their own lives and those left behind. Somewhere here Tugrul’s army was camped, but it was another kind of army they came across; the decaying remains of the Colonea Thema.
Carrion birds formed a dark cloud above the never-ending heap of bones, flesh and putrefying guts. So Cydones ordered the dead be buried, an enormous and morale-sapping task, but one that not a single soldier griped at. After a day, the deed was done and the priests had blessed the graves. When they set off again, the arid ground and burning sun sapped the bluster of the thema and even rallying calls and shows of the Virgin Mary standard from Cydones and his officers had seemed to lose their gravitas.
At the end of the most brutally hot day yet, they stopped to set up camp on a yawning plain, dangerously exposed but utterly necessary given condition and morale. While the kataphractoi and the Pechenegs patrolled the area, the banda set to work on the standard marching camp. The exterior ditch and rampart was dug, then the palisade wall and four gates were erected, then caltrops, roped together, were sown into the dust outside the walls.
Before the sun dropped the weary infantry were finally relieved. Then the thema had gathered as usual to sing the hymn to the Trinity before settling in their respective tents with their wooden cups and bowls to eat an evening meal of millet porridge and hard tack bread, washed down with a sparing amount of their water ration, then nuts and honey to replenish the energy lost in the day’s march.
Now, the sun was dropping, illuminating the dusty plain and painting the camp in a lazy orange. Apion and his trusted four were sitting in silence inside his pavilion tent, and he and Nepos were locked in a game of shatranj. The tent was one in a sea of hundreds, with the standard ten sets of quilted bedding laid out, feet around the centre pole, spears dug into the ground by the head of each set of bedding, shield and armour balanced alongside it. As officers, the four no longer shared a bunk section or a kontoubernion tent and would soon have to disperse to their own tents, shared with the men they each led. Yet every night so far they had congregated like this.
‘Ah!’ Nepos broke the silence.
Apion looked up; the Slav was lifting the war chariot piece to hold it over a square for a moment, then he looked up with a wry grin. ‘Hmmm . . . nice try,’ he said, replacing the piece.
Apion leant back with a sigh, wiping the sweat from his brow; this shatranj game had become an epic. Six nights of this had seen them play alternately cagily and aggressively, but still no outcome. Now as the sun slipped into the horizon it was the same again. Staying engaged with Nepos like this was both a tonic and a pox on his mind. Since Vadim had given him his latest order, Apion had a third, darker concern.
For by the sunrise, the Slav was to die.
Bracchus had found out Nepos’ dark secret: back in his home thema, the Slav had led a mob in the beating of what Bracchus called ‘one of his chosen men’, which Apion took as a euphemism for an agente. So the Slav had fled east, seeking refuge in the border garrisons, unaware that the master agente himself ran the very barracks he had run to. Bracchus’ diatribe rang in his thoughts. Once again, the truth comes to me late, but it always comes to me. It seems that your Slav friend dared to stand against one of my . . . chosen men. As the years passed, Nepos may have thought he was to go unpunished for his crime. Not so. I will spare him the fate I have laid out for you, though, and instead grant him a swift death. So he will die tonight. Open Nepos’ throat before sunrise or your whore and her father are as good as dead. Riders in the camp will take word back west and it will be done.
He tried to focus on the shatranj board but his stomach turned over again at the order. Surely there had to be some way to get past Bracchus, get word to Cydones, to end this cycle. Yet in his heart he knew Bracchus’ men were all over the land, ingrained like a tumour. Nepos would have to die, Apion concluded with a swimming nausea. He glanced around the tent for something, anything to distract him from what lay ahead.
Sat at the other side of the tent was Blastares. Roaring drunk only a short while ago, he seemed to have blunted his inebriation with tomorrow’s ration of bread. The big soldier had watched the shatranj game, but with glassy eyes, no doubt his mind was replaying some rutting session. Procopius was snoring violently and Sha buffed his armour by the tent flap, eyes narrowed as he gazed into the setting sun.
‘What do you see on the horizon tonight, Sha?’ Apion asked with a smile, but his words sounded terse.
Strategos: Born in the Borderlands Page 31