The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  Rado pulled a woman’s dress down to make her body respectable. ‘You did say, Master, that the highlanders weren’t able to carry the food away.’ He sat beside me and watched the boys as they went about filling buckets from the village stream. My people had run out of people to kill and rape and things to burn a century before I was born. Regardless of the wider questions of right and justice, I’d grown up in a world of small farming communities and it was natural to pity these unfortunates. Rado and the boys came from bandit races. They’d been too young to join in the killing before they were taken. At the same time, they’d been fed and brought up on the proceeds of collective murder. Pity must have been as alien to them as it was natural to me. The boys were less put out by the horrors we’d stumbled across than I’d been by that body outside my palace. They were much more interested in getting water for the horses and in seeking out anything edible that hadn’t been carried away.

  To be fair, Rado was on the edge of disapproval. Our first sight of death had been something so fiendish, and so plainly inspired by joy in suffering, that he’d let his horse rear sideways. He looked at the dead face of one of the children. ‘They could have used these people to carry the food for them,’ he said. He clenched his fists and looked up at the sky.

  I sat in gloomy thoughts until the sound of buzzing flies became a cause of depression in itself. ‘We know there’s more than one village in these parts,’ I said. ‘Or someone else might have come along afterwards for the foraging.’ I stared at the jumble of animal prints and cart grooves that led to the south. A distancing tactic I’d often found useful was to see death as evidence of something else. ‘It must have been a big party to justify so big a foraging operation and so far off its probable course. How big do you suppose Shahin’s escort might be?’

  Rado continued looking at the open eyes. ‘It’s not an escort but an army,’ he said quietly.

  ‘A big army too,’ I agreed after a long internal sigh. ‘And you know we’ll need to see it for ourselves.’ I was holding my linen map. I spread it on the grass before us. I’ve said our agreed plan was to head straight for the Larydia Pass, and hurry along it, so we could creep down behind Shahin from his right. I drew a finger along the big pass without a name. Looking there would take us at least a day off course. ‘Tell me, Rado – how long would it take one or both of the boys to get a message to Trebizond?’

  He looked away from the map and stared fixedly at the burnt shell of what had been a little church. I made my own calculations. The fleet should by now have arrived at Trebizond. It should be carrying whatever forces Heraclius had been able to draw away from the defence of Thrace. Even without the Great Augustus in charge, it would take an age to get everyone this far south. If what we could see about us, however, was general between here and the big pass without a name, it was much more than an escort Shahin was hurrying to meet.

  ‘Eboric is the youngest and lightest,’ Rado said after his long silence. ‘Alone, he could be back on the main road within five days. With money and a sealed permit from you to use the posts, he could be in Trebizond two days after that.’

  Seven days back to Trebizond! I’d guessed their grudging praise every evening had been clever jollying along. I’d thought, even so, I was doing better than that.

  Rado looked me in the face. ‘And the Lady Antonia?’ he asked slowly.

  I looked back at him. I could have given him a curt instruction to help get the horses under cover. He’d have obeyed and not raised this matter again. But, young as I was, I’d already freed slaves by the hundred and kept many close by me afterwards. Rado had come to a moment I’d seen again and again, and only regretted when I didn’t see it. It was as if I were watching the last taint of slavery fade from his spirit. It was time to start treating him as a man.

  ‘If you are serious about joining the army,’ I said, ‘I will get you started as a junior staff officer – once, that is, you’ve learned to read and write and to understand Greek. The hardest thing you’ll then learn isn’t obedience to orders. You’ve had enough experience of that and, much as you hated it sometimes, it was always fundamentally easy. So long as you take it seriously, authority is harder. It dumps on you an endless series of decisions that affect the lives of others. Many of these decisions involve setting aside personal considerations.

  ‘You know well enough I’m not soldierly material. But I do help govern this Empire. We came out here on a personal rescue mission that involved ending a possible threat to the Empire’s security.’ I waved at another of the bodies and at another that had already been pulled about by some scavenging beast. ‘You can imagine as well as I can what may be coming through that pass. I don’t know if we have the forces to drive it back. But our duty is to do our personal best. You asked yesterday if you had become a Greek. The plainest answer is that we are both Greeks – by circumstances and the law of nations, if not by birth. These are our people and there are tens of thousands more along that army’s line of march.’

  I paused and waited for all that I hadn’t said to go through his mind. I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘The boys came along as scouts, not as fighting men. The fighting was always to be done by us. We’ll get to Antonia and we’ll carve up the fuckers who lifted her out of Constantinople. But the plan has to be changed. We need to see what’s in the big pass. We’ll cross the pass in its wake and hurry forward to Shahin across the long side of the triangle. There’s a risk we’ll miss the interception but that’s a risk Antonia would take if our positions were reversed. It’s a risk you’d have to take if you were in my position. Life is often rather shitty. You don’t make it better by going for the soft option.’

  I stood up. ‘Let’s get inside the barn. We’ll rest till noon. You and I will take turns with keeping watch.’

  I walked across the litter of bodies and smashed possessions to where the two boys were throwing water at each other. I turned and called back to Rado in Slavic: ‘You will never call me or any other man “Master” again. You do know that, don’t you?’ He nodded.

  I was right about the foraging. Our journey so far had taken us through regions too bleak to be populated. These uplands had enough covering of soil to support much grazing and even a few hardy crops. Or they would, had there been either people or animals left to share the work. Foraging inside enemy territory is never gentle. Even if you forget about the rape and the random killing, it means stripping people of all means of support – usually not excepting their bloodstock or seed corn. You feed an army by starving everyone else within reach. But whoever was in charge here seemed to have commanded a general extermination. Again and again, we passed by burned villages with not a single survivor. Sometimes, the dead were fresh enough to be advertised only by the clouds of flies generated to feast on their blood. More often, they were announced, and in full sick-making horror, by sudden shifts of the breeze.

  There were no survivors to look at us as we passed. Everywhere was picked too clean for the Persians to bother with patrols. But for the flies and all the other beasts of carrion, we were as alone as if we’d still been in the honest wilderness of the mountains. An entire subdivision of a province that paid reasonably large taxes lay about us in desolation. And it was worse than desolation. Village after village – even the few monasteries in our path – had been made into museums of human beastliness. There came a point at which even the boys left off their chattering. If only, after hitting that low point in the journey, we’d been able to justify leaving a path that took us through every place of former habitation.

  On the second afternoon of this nightmarish progress, Rado tried for a conversation above the instrumental. He’d stopped to wait for me to look in a shattered church – I needed a village name to reconnect me with the map. ‘Samo told me,’ he said when I rejoined him, ‘that you’d commanded everyone in the Empire to be armed.’

  I looked away from a circle of impaled children. The boys among them had all been castrated. I could see their tiny genitals gathere
d into a heap of solidified slime. ‘Only where the new land law has been brought into effect,’ I answered. ‘Though right on the frontier, southern Pontus remains effectively on the old system.’ Would he understand the politics of local obstruction? He might, but with more explanation than I felt able to give. ‘Forbidding arms and military combinations to the people,’ I added, ‘was the policy of rulers in more settled times, who thought it the best way to guarantee the peace. All it does in the end, though, is to disarm victims.’

  I looked at the sky and tried to clear my head. The hazy cloud I’d seen coming on all day was thickening into heavy banks of grey. The sun still shone to my left but would soon be blotted out.

  Rado watched me. ‘It won’t rain till evening,’ he said. I could be glad of that. Mountain storms aren’t for riding through and I was longing for better shelter than another scorched charnel house.

  I thought again of politics in the Imperial Council. ‘Since you can’t be expected to know the answer,’ I said, ‘I won’t ask it as a question. Instead, I’ll say that, of all the provinces or districts within provinces where the land law has been brought fully into effect, not one has fallen to the Persians. In every case, professional armies have been driven back by irregular units filled with men no different from these.’

  Rado reached out to guide my horse round a hole in the ground I hadn’t seen. ‘So you do want to make the Greeks more like us.’ He said. ‘Is that why everyone hates you?’

  I laughed bitterly. It saved me the embarrassment of yet more thanks. ‘Talking of “us”,’ I asked, ‘do you imagine anyone will ever take our land away from us? Any foreign invader with sense in his head takes one look at armed men and tries his luck elsewhere.’

  They also keep the bastard rulers under control, I might have added but I’d seen something shining up at me from the ground. ‘It’s a mailed glove,’ Rado said, following my glance. I didn’t answer. ‘It was probably left behind by whoever needed a bare hand for carving up those boys.’

  Still, I said nothing. No longer bumping my way through those mountains, I slid off the horse with a semblance of grace and reached down for the mass of silvered chain mail. I walked stiffly over to a felled tree and sat down for a proper look. I raised my voice. ‘I may have some bad news,’ I said with a ghastly smile. I reached inside the glove and plucked at its lining of yellow silk. The Royal Guard was never sent into battle. This wasn’t some fixed law of the Persians. It was simply that the Royal Guard’s sole function was to protect the Great King, and no Great King in over a century had left Ctesiphon except to run away from his own people, or to shift himself to one of his summer palaces.

  You could take the whole flash of light inside my head and work it into a syllogism: This glove is part of the Royal Guard’s parade uniform; the Royal Guard never leaves the Great King’s side; therefore, what we’re headed towards is the biggest invasion force since Xerxes, and Chosroes is at its head. I put this in looser terms to Rado and the boys. I also accepted that one swallow didn’t make a spring – the glove might have been a present, or a trophy, or a talisman. But I no longer had any reasonable doubt of the truth. Why else kill everyone in sight, unless it was to keep the invasion under wraps till fifty or a hundred thousand men could burst out of the passes and make for the coastal cities? And I could imagine how Chosroes had enjoyed giving the order. Policy aside, he really was the sort of man who made wicked old Phocas the Lamb of God by comparison.

  We rode on in silence. Insensibly, the fertile uplands were giving way again to harsh wilderness. The smell of death had gone from our nostrils. The horses were calmer. The boys were cheering up. More and more, Rado was intervening to keep me moving in his appointed course.

  All at once, we came to the peak of the hill we’d been climbing. Before us, the land fell away to another endless expanse of bare hills and shadowed valleys.

  I got off my horse again, and stood as close as I dared to the edge. In silence, I pointed south. I didn’t need to get out my map or to guess where the big pass might be. There, ten or twenty miles away, was all the proof I could have needed of what I already knew. The dust cloud thrown up by the advancing army put me in mind of a city on fire.

  Rado spoke first. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a whole people on the move.’ I nodded. I’d never seen the like either. Though I’d read about it, and often sat with Priscus in his talkative moods about the past, I’d always thought it was one of the conceits bad poets like Leander use when they can’t make anything sensible scan.

  I stood away from the edge and sat down. I smiled at Eboric. ‘Be a love,’ I said, ‘and get my writing case from your saddlebag. You’ll be carrying an oral message back to Trebizond. But it’s time to get your pass in order for the postal stations along the road.’

  Even as I spoke, a long peal of thunder drifted across the valley.

  Chapter 55

  I poked my head cautiously forward and looked once more down to the bottom of a pass that had no name I ever heard. I call it a pass, though the word may put you in mind of a gentle dip between two mountains. A better word might be canyon. It might have begun, countless thousands of years before, as a river which, in its spring flooding, had insensibly worn its way several hundred feet down. More likely, it was a split in the world’s outer skin – a product of the forces that had raised the hills and mountains in the first place.

  Whatever the geographic truth, the long straggling column filling the pass was as I’d imagined it. No, it was worse. After little flurries on and off all night, the skies had finally opened with the dawn. By the time we were able to peer down to the bottom of the wide pass, we could have been forgiven for thinking it was a defeated army creeping along before us from right to left. Without visible beginning or end, often knee-deep in water, the vast invasion force might have had trouble keeping up with a garden slug as it hurried out of the sun.

  Rado pointed at a long covered wagon pulled by eight white oxen. ‘Is the Great King in that?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere big enough or grand enough for Chosroes,’ I answered. ‘Besides, he’ll be at least half a mile away at the front of the column – fresh ground to look at, sweeter smells for his nose, and so on.’ I fell silent and leaned a few inches forward. Most likely, the wagon was to carry the less important secretariat officials, or some part of a cousin’s household. Its wheels had long since come off. In their place were fitted improvised runners that would have done better on snow. All that stopped it from scraping and bumping and turning over into the grey and littered water was its speed of progress. I leaned forward still further. Yes – it was for someone’s dancing girls. They’d been kicked out to trudge behind it in their bedraggled finery. Slaves struggled behind them, carrying ruined musical instruments and bundles of soaking clothes. Behind these came drivers of animals for someone’s kitchen. Still further behind, I could see another big cart. Covered with purple canvas, surrounded by monks – probably of the Nestorian heresy, probably singing in Persian – it was anyone’s guess what this carried. I’d missed any sign of the fighting men. They would have been bunched about Chosroes.

  It was a nuisance having to watch this lot go by. I had no doubt Chosroes himself was down there. Almost certainly, so was Shahrbaraz. Somewhere out of sight was the cream of the Persian armies. They were all shuffling along – without weapons, without armour, wholly out of formation. Except for the colour of their faces, you’d have been pushed to tell the difference between the Royal Guard and the dregs of the south-eastern levies. Even with Nicetas in charge, you could send a few thousand of our own men into action and the greatest war our world had known since Alexander’s conquests would be over in time for dinner. And here I was, reduced to watching the chance of this drift by in the rain. We couldn’t even start a landslide – not that this would do any good: as said, Chosroes and the people who mattered were already out of sight.

  I pulled myself back and clambered with Rado down the rocky
outcrop. The boys were already down and waiting. Glancing right and left along the path for sight of yet another patrol, we made for the clumps of bushes where we’d left the horses. From the state of the ground, I could guess the patrols had been more active when the Great King himself was passing by. Though still about, they were no longer much of a worry. It helped that, if no longer driving, the rain had settled into one of those continuous drizzles that soak almost without declaring their presence. Most of the Persian scouts up here, I knew from experience, would be huddled under their makeshift shelters.

  We led our horses over the four hundred yards of broken ground that led to the forking of the mountain streams. I’d opened the matter to discussion the day before. The boys had the same right to be heard in this as Rado and I. All that had come out of this was who should be the one to leave us. I’d settled that by a disguised testing of whose Greek was less basic. Nothing was left in doubt. We’d had a day to get used to what was inevitable. It was as if we were walking to an execution.

  I smiled nervously at Eboric’s brother. ‘You will get rid of the package if you think you’re about to be stopped?’ I asked again.

  Already mounted, he took his cap off and swept wet hair away from his eyes. ‘No one will see me go,’ he said calmly. ‘No one will ever catch me.’ He glanced at the sealed package in his hands. ‘The biggest danger is that I’ll be hanged as a thief when I show this to the Greeks.’