The attack went on during the whole first part of the night. The sky, which had been clear for week after week, grew gradually over-cast, and javelins and arrows traced fiery trajectories against blackest darkness. The children had been quick to grasp what they had to do. They watched out for the brand’s trail, calculated by instinct where it would fall, sheltered themselves behind a tree or a wooden shield, and pounced on the torch as soon as it touched the ground. Thus half or three-quarters of the firebrands were quenched before they could spread their dancing destruction. But the rest, those that the children and old men could not extinguish in time, were enough to turn Balkh into a furnace.
On the twenty-fourth day the fortunes of battle changed. Some twenty of the attackers managed to get through a breach in the fortifications and reach the outlying cottages of the city. But they were wiped out by Fabrician and his men. The evening was quieter. Both sides were getting their breath back. The next night was favorable to the besieged. Ever more threatening clouds had been massing in the sky, and soon after midnight the rain began to fall and quench the fires that had not yet been put out. Hope revived in the hearts of the forest warriors. Perhaps every hour that passed brought Roderick and his army nearer. All resolved to hold out to the limit of their strength. And the twenty-fifth day did not go too badly. At sunset, taking advantage of a lull both in the weather and in the fighting, the defenders gathered in the public square surrounded by wooden huts and, standing in front of the big mansion with double staircase and oak balcony that Justus Dion calls the palace, they cheered Helen and Fabrician loud and long. The princess and the priest heard the shouts of those who were about to die, and who included them both in the same devotion. It was the culmination of their strange, brief encounter, which in any case was already over. Those who acclaimed them knew nothing of any hidden love. They knew their own true life had only just begun, in tribulation and courage, and that it was drawing to its close.
At nightfall, when the rain had begun again, Fabrician sent a boy of eleven or twelve through the enemy lines to meet Roderick. It was impossible to remain in doubt any longer; they had to know if he was coming. But unknown to Fabrician, the child was killed a couple of hundred yards outside the enceinte. Roderick was now only twenty hours’ ride away by paths he knew by heart. He had slept for three or four hours among his men, sheltering as best he could from the rain that was still falling. The sun was shining when he awoke and sprang into the saddle. He would be in Balkh by next day.
It was the twenty-sixth day of the siege. The weather was fine. Pressure on the city became more and more severe. The defenders had now lost more than two hundred men, women, and children, killed or seriously wounded. The wooden dwellings and the towers on the ramparts were afire again. At two or three points at least the defense was weakening. Toward noon Fabrician attempted a sortie on the side of the town backed by the forest at its densest. The object of the operation was a kind of outflanking movement that would take the main body of the enemy from behind and make them think Roderick had come. The diversion was a partial success. It sowed panic in the enemy ranks and killed many of their men. The vise was loosened for three or four hours. But before dark, the assault began again.
It was the nightmare everyone had already glimpsed in their worst dreams. Balkh burned more fiercely than ever. There was fighting in the moats, on the ramparts, on the palisades, on the barriers improvised from the ruins of burned-out houses. Fabrician joined two horses together with a rope to which were tied clubs and big pieces of wood. Then he loosed them into a gap a hundred yards wide that had been reduced to ashes by fire and through which the enemy was pouring. In a few minutes the horses were laid low, but not before, maddened by the whip, the din, and the flames, they had knocked down and trampled on whole rows of enemy soldiers. The battle went on all night. The defenders fell back step by step, hiding in holes and attacking from the rear the assailants who had already passed by. People were fighting now with lances, clubs, axes, and bare hands. Women threw live embers and firebrands into the enemies’ faces. Children fought with slings, wooden swords they had plunged into the flames, any toy that came to hand. But the odds were too unequal—the defenders were outnumbered. Huge Syrian and Scythian archers swung children round in the air and hurled them as missiles. It is said one little girl of five or six was saved by her grandfather, who caught her in his arms. When dawn broke, the fortifications hastily erected by Fabrician were breached on almost all sides. Gandolphus’s troops had entered the city and were converging on the center and the palace, where a few fanatics, led by Fabrician and Helen, still fought on. Helen sent to ask for a truce in which to gather in the dead and tend the wounded. But the enemy refused, anxious lest the main body of Balkh’s army return, and eager to end the siege and either raze the city to the ground or fortify it for their own fight against Roderick. Fierce fighting broke out again. By noon only the palace was resisting still, together with a few strong points nearby. Helen and Fabrician had already bidden one another farewell, in haste, with the noise of battle at the very doors of the palace. Feelings find swift expression in the face of danger. They exchanged a last kiss.[6]
“I die happy,” said Fabrician, “because I have known you. Do not die. Remember.”
“I shall not die,” answered Helen. “I shall live on, to remember you, and that you may not quite die.”
Helen kept her word and did not die. Fabrician was killed by a spear thrust, defending the palace, at the very moment when the distant sound of Roderick’s horn announced his entry into the ruins of the city. Some say the priest deliberately sought death. Gandolphus’s men were taken in the rear and slain—every one. Roderick found Helen in the palace, with Fabrician’s corpse in her lap. She was motionless, calm, unweeping. But the ordeal of the siege and the fighting had left her as if unconscious. The young priest was buried at night by torchlight in the midst of the ruins, with a hero’s honors. Three years later Roderick was murdered by one of Nandor’s brothers. He had made peace with the Empire and died rich and powerful, but he had never been able to rebuild Balkh, which had suffered such destruction and lost so many of its women and children. A son had been born to him during the winter following the siege. Helen had named him Alexis.
IX
THE WOLF HUNT
PEACE AND SILENCE HAD RETURNED TO THE GREAT forest. The oaks were recovering slowly from their wounds and the tempest. The memory of massacre had gradually faded, and the cries of the dying had been swallowed up into the past. Those who still heard them during sleepless nights found a kind of pleasure in recalling the siege and its sufferings. Even cruelty and horror come to inspire in the human heart something of the affectionate melancholy that belongs to things past. Time and life had done their work. Balkh, destroyed by the flames, was abandoned—for the young it was no more than a far-off and even somewhat tedious myth. History, though it consists of memory, has a poor memory. Death and disaster come fast, and so do forgetfulness and the wish to survive. Roderick and Helen had taken up residence 100 miles to the northeast of Balkh, in a great house flanked by wooden towers and surrounded by moats, where life must have been very grim. But those who were loyal were there, and so were the trees and the forest.
We know little of the relations between Roderick and Helen after the siege and destruction of Balkh. The evidence that survives speaks only of the renewal, less than two years after the conflict, of the alliance between Basil and Roderick. Roderick recognized the supremacy of the emperor and agreed to pay him tribute, but the Empire granted him various new rights and the enjoyment of extensive territories and their resources. Politics and history offer almost as many examples as love does of reversals that would have appeared incredible a few months or days or hours before. Men’s hearts and men’s interests seem to vie with each other in inconsequence and to share the same liking for the unforeseen and unforeseeable. Imagination exhausts itself trying to guess the course people and things will take. Logic and reason seize on them only afterwa
rd to give an appearance of order and necessity to the seething abundance of life. We meet Roderick again in Onessa, where several accounts bear witness to his presence and where he very probably met both Thaumas and Gandolphus. But we know practically nothing about the end of his life, apart from the fact, already mentioned, that Nandor’s own brother stabbed him to death with a dagger. A romantic reader who saw this as a passionate act of revenge would be jumping to conclusions. It seems the deed arose rather out of a conflict of interests, probably aggravated by overindulgence in rye brandy.
Meanwhile Alexis was growing up in the forest with his mother. Many years later, when he had reached the heights, he was to speak of his obscure childhood as the happiest time of his life. There is nothing very unusual about that. Childhood escapes history; it belongs to the magic world of poetry and, even in lives most brightly lit by fame, retains an aura of happiness that neither power nor glory can destroy or tarnish. Alexis’s childhood was bound up with the forest. How he loved it! Whether in Tartar or Kirghiz desert, amid the splendor of the cities of the East or on the shores of the Mediterranean, Alexis would always miss his birches and oaks. Right up to the end of his life he would talk of the sights of the forest: the hunt after roebuck and young boars, the sky seen through the leaves, the sweet melancholy of evening, the snow on the bare branches, the brilliance of light and the sun as the sap returned with the spring. The forest mingled with his games, his walks, and later with his rides and earliest adventures—it was first and foremost his youth. When, many centuries later, in the spring of 1847, Turgenev followed Alexis’s footsteps through the forest, he experienced, or thought he experienced, some of the feelings the son of Helen must have known. But he attributes inclinations to the future emperor that belong rather to himself, as when he describes to Pauline Viardot-Garcia, pupil of Liszt and sister of La Malibran, the beauty of the birches and oaks, and Alexis’s horror of aspens. Right up to the end of the last century the vast forest between Balkh and Tsarkozy-Wilozlaw remained almost unchanged.[1] In 1869, Alexandre Dumas conjured up forest life during the time of Alexis in a witty, lively, and imaginative letter to George Sand in which the past of the world came to be identified with his own.
According to the evidence available, Alexis, at the time of the death of Roderick or a little later, was a shy, dreamy child, subject to sudden fits of terrible anger. He seems to have had fair or chestnut hair and to have been rather small for his age, with deep green eyes and an insatiable curiosity about horses, arms, and travelers’ tales. The mutual affection between him and his mother never faltered for a day, until, toward the end of Helen’s life, circumstances and life’s cruelty finally separated them. The child’s passionate attachment to his mother was one of the essential traits in his character, and Freud, in a little-known essay written near the beginning of his career,[2] saw it as one among many clues to the life of the future emperor.
At the end of his Histories and the beginning of his Chronicles, Justus Dion recounts a whole series of anecdotes about Alexis’s youth that many historians have called into question because they are so typically traditional. The lovesick nursemaid who lost the child in the forest; Helen’s distraction; the finding of the child on a bed of leaves, cared for by a she-wolf who kept him warm with her breath; Alexis’s first attempt at archery, when his arrow split an acorn in two at a distance of a hundred paces—these and other stories are too familiar in popular legend everywhere and in every age to be taken very seriously. The only surviving feature that deserves real attention is the revelation to the child that he was a bastard. Of this there are two fairly late, but important, accounts that give versions slightly varying in detail but basically in agreement. One is a mystery play called The True Mystery of the Destruction of Balkh, of which a study was made in 1949 by Prof. E. T. Jones of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University. The other is the fourteenth-century Arabic manuscript mentioned earlier in connection with Arsaphes and Heloise, and discovered in 1953 by Professor Ritter in the archives of the Sublime Porte.
Simeon had returned to his parents, in somewhat mysterious circumstances of which we know little. The most popular theory is that his return was negotiated by Basil and Gandolphus at the time of the rapprochement between Roderick and the Empire, when Simeon was of no use to the emperor or his minister either as a hostage or as an ally. It is likely the negotiations were so protracted that Simeon reached home only a short while before Roderick’s death. The question of whether Roderick ever had any suspicions about Alexis’s birth gave rise to countless contradictory theories, all more or less inconclusive until quite recently, when the problem seems finally to have been settled. The theory encountered most frequently in the chronicles and courtly songs of the early Middle Ages is that Alexis was sired by a god or born by spontaneous generation. Some later historians, including Voltaire himself, even maintain that toward the end of his reign Roderick deliberately fostered the rumor that Helen had been miraculously united with the Eagle of the Empire, which had come to the aid of the unjustly attacked city of Balkh. The legend did him more good than harm and added to the prestige of his family name. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the brothers Grimm related the imperial Eagle of the legend to the fact that Fabrician was a priest from Aquileus or the surrounding region, and, like all priests, dedicated to the Eagle. What is certain, at all events, is that despite his treachery and the proofs he frequently gave of instability and weakness of character, Simeon always remained his father’s favorite. Roderick never liked Alexis. But this may simply have been because he never had time to watch him grow up, since he spent most of the last part of his life hunting and drinking with the elder son now restored to favor. It is also certain that during his last years Roderick neglected Helen for numerous courtesans and several favorites whose names are known to us and of whom one, perhaps even two, seem to have been elevated to the rank of wife in a period of less than three years. Even before Roderick’s death, Helen, for her part, made no attempt to conceal her preference for Alexis. Her highly developed sense of duty and justice prevented her from favoring the younger son at the elder’s expense, but she had been disappointed so often by Simeon’s brutality and falseness that her trust and hope and affection had long been concentrated on Alexis.
One autumn morning Simeon, with a large escort, set out early to hunt wolves, a sport he loved as much as his father had. Alexis, then eleven or twelve, or perhaps a little older, went with his brother at his own request. A miniature in the Ritter manuscript shows him dressed in green and blue, with a strange turbanlike headdress, and a falcon on his wrist, riding some way behind Simeon among the huntsmen and men-at-arms. The elder brother is alone at the head of the procession, squat, black-bearded, fierce. But though swallowed up among the soldiers and grooms, Alexis is naïvely depicted as slightly larger than the rest, including Simeon. All around them beasts disport themselves; they can just be made out as boars and wolves. In one corner there is even an elephant together with a leopard or tiger—creatures quite foreign to the northern forests of the Empire, but no doubt included by vague association with the legend of the Porphyries. The sky is full of warblers, tits, and partridges, some of them pursued by falcons. The whole has a pleasing freshness oddly evocative both of the miniatures of Samarkand and Bukhara, and of the Emperor Frederick II’s treatise on the art of falconry.
When the little troop had advanced some way through rides and glades into the forest, there was an incident.[3] Alexis was carrying on his wrist Simeon’s gyrfalcon in its leather hood. As was the custom, the elder brother owned this highest-flying of birds and allowed no one else to use it. But just as they were crossing a meadow, the hunters suddenly flushed a covey of partridges, and in the excitement of the moment Alexis loosed the gyrfalcon without waiting for his brother to give the order. The falcon flapped its wings two or three times, rose into the air, then swooped down on the partridges, which were as if paralyzed by the falcon’s swiftness. Simeon, turned in his saddle, lo
oked back on the scene with displeasure, and sent for Alexis.
“Do you not know, brother,” he said, “that the gyrfalcon is mine and I alone have the right to say when he should be unleashed?”
“I ask pardon,” said the still breathless Alexis. “I was carried away by youth and excitement.”
“If you really wish to pass for the son of my father,” answered Simeon roughly, “you had better learn what you ought to have known already.”
The insult and the threat were still disguised. The likeness between Simeon and Roderick was plain; that between Helen and Alexis struck even those who knew nothing about them. Justus Dion tells how a Greek traveler who was a friend of Helen’s recognized Alexis from among a score of playfellows of the same age. It was as if an image of Helen as a child had risen before him. But Simeon’s phrase could also be taken as a reminder of Roderick’s marked preference for his elder son, who took every opportunity of boasting of it. Whether through affectation or indifference, the escort showed no sign of noticing anything. Alexis bowed his head and without replying rode back to his place in the midst of the troop.
Since childhood Alexis had often pondered on his own lack of skill for activities at which Simeon excelled. Lack of skill is hardly correct, for Alexis’s dexterity and even strength were themselves remarkable. But to hunting, roistering, and the other rudenesses of the age, he did not bring the same single-minded enthusiasm as his companions. Already as a boy he was interested in ways of life very different from the customs of the forest. He inherited from his mother an insatiable curiosity about distant lands, for what happened elsewhere, for travelers’ tales and chronicles of times past. When still young he loved, like Helen, to talk with pilgrims and scholars about nature and about the inventions of man. Amidst uncouth warriors thinking only of the present, he nursed dreams that often wafted him far away in space and time. Sometimes he would find himself wondering about his own life and destiny; and he would feel vaguely uneasy. He would suddenly find himself less comfortable, less at home in the forest than the others. He loved it passionately but it did not wholly contain the world he longed to find. One day the old Greek of whom Justus Dion speaks jestingly asked some of the forest children which words they liked best. Some said oak or clearing or roebuck, others war or javelin. But Alexis answered sun and far away. Life did not seem long enough to get to know the great universe of marvels eager to be seen that lay beyond the forest, beyond the mountains and the seas. In everything he felt a yearning to go further. And to this was joined a reflectiveness, a meditativeness even, which led sometimes to sudden moods of excitement. The forest, the sun, the thought of the sea would inspire him with enthusiasms that made his mother tremble. Already, within him, he could feel dawning those dreams of knowledge, contemplation, and sympathy with the universe which drew him both toward the fascination of adventure and toward the peace of the priests and monasteries of Aquileus.
The Glory of the Empire Page 13