The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  XV

  THE KHA-KHAN OF THE OÏGHURS

  WHILE THE FOREGOING EVENTS WERE BESTOWING power on Alexis, the rest of the world did not stand still. None of the great powers involved through the years and the ages with the history of the Empire had escaped upheaval within or danger without. Since the time of King Regis, Sicily had been conquered three times and was still coveted far and wide for its fruit and corn, its fair blue sky and hills rising sheer from the sea, and its strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean. Pomposa, rent by civil war and faction, still had succeeded in extending its maritime and commercial empire. Countering Sicily and its series of conquerors, it had occupied Rhodes and Crete, and continued to dominate all the eastern Mediterranean. But the most sweeping changes were those that affected the barbarians.

  The reader may recall the large-scale migrations caused by the invasions of the Ainus and the Khmers in the time of Basil.[1] The great intermixing of populations that had forced toward the Empire hundreds of thousand of men, women, and children, horses, chariots, tents, sheep, and cattle—from those defeated at Amphibolus to rival tyrants driven out by Alexis—had gone on ceaselessly on the steppes and in the forests. The barbarians of Amphibolus, admirers of the Empire, whose religion and often customs they shared, and who had only fought against it in order to become part of it, had been submerged by a flood of much more primitive, dangerous, and bloodthirsty peoples from the depths of Asia. Dozens, hundreds of tribes, bands, and peoples fought among themselves and against the then great states of Persia, China, and India. There were scenes of revolting barbarity and cruelty. From the great ice-bound rivers to the deserts crossed by camel trains laden with spices and treasures for kings or gods, there was nothing but terror and suffering. Happy were those beheaded by the sword or transfixed with pike or arrow. The favorite amusement of the nomadic barbarians was to impale their victims, or to suspend them by the feet over live coals so that the bodies writhing with terror and pain gradually had their eyes, lips, and faces eaten away. We cannot attempt to give even a brief account of the confused and complicated history of the relations between the Hiung-Nus, Hu-Wuans, Khazars, Kaptchaks, Petchenegues, Comans, the Huns of the Caucasus and the Don, the Oïghurs, and the Hunigurs. The princes or chiefs bore the title of Kha-Khan, Chagan, or Tanju. They were named Mundzuk or Tchitchi, Ugek or Roïlas, Gadaric or Oktar, and massacred one another. The high plateaus, the limitless steppes, and the forests of the north provided them with almost inexhaustible supplies of horsemen and mounts. They galloped across the plain armed with bows and arrows that never missed their mark, and with long leather whips that whistled as they whirled them round their heads and inflicted dreadful wounds on the enemy and their horses. Like Arrhideus in the north of the Empire, they lived on horseback from childhood until they died. Legend had it that they were descendants of the centaurs, and according to tradition they were seen actually asleep on horseback, supported by their spears—whole armies of men and beasts, outlined, motionless, against the starry sky that hung above the endless steppes and fertile plains they laid waste to in their fury. They ate raw meat and drank fermented mare’s milk—but they also drank the reeking blood of their dismembered enemies, out of their skulls. Winter and summer they wore leather and animal pelts flung carelessly over their shoulders. Variations of climate or temperature, from the stifling heat of the deserts or the damp of the river valleys and marshes to the icy solitudes of mountains, plateaus, and snowy peaks, seemed all one to them. Women were at once terrified and fascinated by their ugliness—their bodies deformed from a life in the saddle, their slit eyes and flat faces striped with scars. Nothing could stop them: rivers, mountains, mothers’ prayers, fear of the gods, the stoutest ramparts—all gave way before the flood of their countless squadrons. They would swim rivers, lakes, and creeks, hanging on to their horse’s tail or mane. Whole nations fled in terror before their approach.

  They loved war. With only a few years between forays, they are to be found attacking the towers and fortifications built along the vast frontier of China by the emperor of the Middle Kingdom, invading the Caucasus, invading the valley of the Indus. As the wind raised the sand, they flew with it across the steppe, sacking, destroying, sowing death and destruction. They are not known to have had any gods to speak of. Religion, fear, morality, and pity were all equally unknown to them. Far from them the community of mind that existed between the Empire and the barbarians of old. They had nothing but scorn for the worship of sun, oak, or eagle. What they worshipped was a sword dripping with blood and driven into the sand among the chariots. To pull it out and parade it amid the war cries and acclamations of the tribes was the signal for fighting to begin. At the sight of it everyone armed and prepared for fresh exploits. In the wake of the warriors on their horses, safe from lances and pikes, herds of sheep and cattle and cartloads of women and children moved toward new loot. The barbarians were the scourge of men and gods, but they were also the youth of a world both brilliant and dark. They were ignorant of the charms of ease, luxury, indolence, avarice. For them, virtue was in the service of death.

  For centuries the barbarians had lived divided into nations and tribes that fought among themselves. After many vicissitudes, reminiscent of tales of adventure but unfortunately too numerous to recount here,[2] they were finally united. This came about through such men as Bayan, Bleda, Theodomir, and Ertrogrul, but it was above all the work of Balamir, one of the most fascinating leaders of men in history. He was a descendant of the Great Khan of the Oïghurs who had met Basil at Famagusta, and the son of a petty princeling of the steppes. He had seen his family, and almost all his tribe, massacred: first it was the Chinese, then the Persians, then the Scythians, then the other barbarians. Naturally enough, this had imparted to Balamir himself a fearful violence, an insatiable thirst for cruelty, and an appetite for power, domination, and revenge. In darkness and silence he gradually won back, first from his own people, then from neighbors farther and farther away, the lands his father and grandfather had lost. He began patiently to forge the instruments of his power. At first he had only a handful of men, but they were subjected to a crushing discipline. Before being admitted into the group each warrior, on pain of death, had to stab and kill his wife or his son with an arrow or a dagger; bachelors who boasted of loving no one and nothing but glory in battle and loot afterward had to sacrifice their one attachment—their horses. When they had slain all they might have loved, all who might have weakened them, Balamir’s men acclaimed him on a plain strewn with corpses. These five or six hundred warriors, stripped of everything, bound to their leader, drunk with blood, free, were ready now to conquer the world. And they did conquer a considerable part of it.

  Then and thereafter, on the steppes and high plateaus, came long years of battle and negotiation. Allying himself with some against others, lavishing gifts on the strong and promises on the weak, pitiless toward any who dared resist, capable of magnanimity as well as of the most terrible crimes, Balamir not only carved out an immense empire based on the terror inspired by what were now hundreds of thousands of horsemen, but also succeeded in uniting under his sole authority all the barbarian tribes from Siberia to the Caspian and from the Danube to the Great Wall of China. Alexis was still an outlaw when Balamir had already been reigning for several months as absolute master over boundless plains, impenetrable forests, and the snowy summits of Caucasus and Altai. Always dressed in sable, at once rough and luxury-loving, greedy for gold and glory, Balamir was Tanju of the Hiung-Nus, Chagan of the Khazars and the Kaptchaks, Kha-Khan of all the Oïghurs; and he would say with pride that neither the sun nor the moon ever set on his territory.

  One evening as he was sitting in his tent of felt decorated with silk and purple and gold, the floor covered with furs and rare carpets, his guards announced that a man of middle age, sumptuously clad and riding a magnificent but apparently exhausted black horse, was asking to speak with him. Since the stranger bore no weapon but a slender dagger inlaid w
ith ivory and precious stones, the Kha-Khan ordered him to be brought in. The unknown horseman, who had been traveling day and night for nearly two weeks, bowed low before the prince and, following the custom, kissed the hem of his long robe of leather and sable. The Kha-Khan raised him up with all the courtesy due to strangers and, as was the habit then, asked after the health of his sons and the state of his horses, crops, and forests. The traveler answered that all this amounted to little compared to the vast wealth of the lord of the Oïghurs. Then the Kha-Khan asked the horseman to reveal his name and the reason for his visit, and learned with surprise that the stranger with the black horse who was drinking green tea in his felt and gold tent was none other than Simeon, brother of Alexis, come to offer Balamir his services against the Emperor.

  A few months before, in a letter to Philocrates,[3] Alexis had said that in his opinion no one was ever deliberately wicked. Of course, Simeon knew nothing of this, but it applied very aptly to his own case. The elder son of Roderick and Helen was ambitious, of herculean build, an ardent hunter and warrior when it pleased or suited him, but incapable of understanding the motives or the success of “the mystical sensualist bastard,” as he called his brother in private, and sometimes, when he was drunk, in public. The two brothers had nothing in common, and to Simeon the rise of Alexis had been unbearable. Historians are divided as to the explanation of this hostility. Some hold that Simeon was too ordinary and too jealous to be able to appreciate the vast sweep of Alexis’s ideas or his mind, at once open and strong, rich and inflexible. The rivalry and emulation evident in their youth had intensified, first after the wolf hunt but especially after Alexis’s return and rise to fame, into an unbridled hatred that also had something to do with Helen and her passion for the younger brother. Others, however, maintain that Simeon was moved by less disgraceful motives. According to this theory Simeon, passionately fond of his northeastern forests, had been disgusted to hear of the life Alexis was leading among the pleasures of Alexandria. Alexis’s subsequent disappearance into deepest Asia only confirmed Simeon’s view that his brother was unbalanced, oscillating between debauchery and asceticism. The younger son’s elevation to the throne of the Empire appeared to Simeon not only a denial of justice, an insult to the memory of his father and of all the most sacred traditions, but also a threat to the Empire itself, which was now at the mercy of an unstable character perverted by Asia, foreign religion, orgies, and mysticism. It is certain that Simeon had been fascinated since childhood by treason, by the need to assert the worth that those around him failed to recognize, and by a curious mixture of puritanism derived from the traditions of the forest and the self-destructive violence that had once made him side with Gandolphus’s army against Balkh and Fabrician and that now brought him to the Kha-Khan’s tent. It is not impossible that his strange soul harbored all kinds of different and even contrasting motives, and with unconscious insincerity hid a twisted love of evil and hate behind a noble-seeming concern with justice, legitimacy, and the salvation of the Empire by fire and sword.

  Balamir soon saw the advantage of having one of Helen’s sons on his side in the fight against the other. It was plain now that war between the barbarians and the Empire could no longer be avoided. In fact, for many long years, since the battle of Amphibolus and even before, the barbarians, ever fiercer, had been exerting a pressure ever-stronger on the frontiers of the Empire. Only the fact that they were divided among themselves stopped them from sweeping away all the defenses and establishing themselves permanently on the rich lands they coveted. Infiltration went on all the time, and the barbarians did succeed in getting a footing inside the Empire. But they operated only in independent groups, quite incapable of constructing and organizing a state. If Astakia and Kanishka, Arrhideus and Mardoch had made common cause instead of fighting one another, Alexis would never have mounted the throne of Aquileus. Balamir was bound to see the threat the Emperor now represented. All the things that might have been possible before were now impossible; and what if Alexis were to repeat the campaigns Arsaphes and Gandolphus had waged against the barbarians? If only Balamir had begun to imitate the Great Khan ten or fifteen years earlier so that his unification of the barbarians had proceeded further, events would have turned out very differently. But perhaps it was not too late. Perhaps if he acted quickly he could, with Simeon’s help, nip Alexis’s ambitions in the bud and topple an Empire still shaken by reconquest and civil strife. Such, in his tent of felt and gold, before the bushy-browed, black-bearded stranger, were the thoughts of the Kha-Khan of all the Oïghurs.

  Meanwhile in Aquileus the thoughts of Alexis were taking quite a different turn. After his coronation, with the barbarians if not destroyed at least reduced to impotence, with peace and order restored, and the Empire reconquered and reunified, Alexis felt once more the temptation to forget the world and withdraw into himself. Every day he felt more keenly the loss of Philocrates and the original Jester, one of whom he had loved for a short time like a father, and the other for many years like a son. All through the struggle for the Empire he had developed so many plans depending on Philocrates that the latter’s sudden absence left the Emperor lonely and lost. He was well aware, too, of the rumors that were beginning to circulate in the Empire, and that may have originated in Simeon’s entourage, about his own supposed ambition and thirst for power. He would have thought it ridiculous, perhaps wicked, to give the lie to these rumors by weakness or compromise. If he was to rule he would rule with firmness, rigor, violence even. But was it worth ruling? Since he returned from exile all his thoughts had been filled with the risks of the conspiracy, the reek of conflict, the exaltation of the victorious captain. Now that the goal had been reached, he longed once more for silence and contemplation. Hardly had the imperial crown been conferred on him in the enthusiasm of victory than there awoke in him the memory and influence of the years of withdrawal and meditation. Fighting, that was fine—but ruling? Gold and purple oppressed him; the company of the stiff and self-important imperial officials seemed to him little improvement on that of the courtesans of Alexandria or the merchants of Samarkand and Bukhara. He was seized with a longing to leave aside the urgent material problems of administration and return to essentials. The essential and the urgent are never the same. For Alexis, the essential was the soul. And it was also the body and its happiness, the delight of cool springs at noon, of walks in the forest with disciples eager for knowledge and understanding, of frugal meals at evening, then love and dreamless sleep. It was the sun he no longer saw now because of the two Moors always sheltering him with silk parasols and ostrich feathers; it was the icy streams he no longer plunged in after strenuous exertion; it was the burning flagstones where he no longer lay before the steps of temples and other men’s palaces. Now it was he who lived in palaces, to him the poor and needy addressed their prayers, and since it was he who gave it was forbidden for him to receive.

  “Ah,” he would say to Jester, the seventh or eighth of that name, a lad of ten or eleven, lively and mischievous as a monkey, “how different riches and honor look to those who possess them and those who seek them. I know it is unseemly for those who have gold and silk, and before whom others bow, to say they scorn fame and wealth. And I think it very possible that fame and wealth can bring happiness to the poor and wretched. But they cannot bring happiness to the rich and powerful. Fame and wealth govern everything, they send people to their death, and the dreams they inspire beckon to perseverance and crime, virtue and vileness. What incredible power they have when they go before like a mirage! And what poverty when you touch them and they vanish between your fingers! We thirst after everything—power, riches, and glory—and then nothing can slake that thirst. How big the world looks at night in the torchlight, to the lad who labors and dreams and thinks, I’ll be rich and powerful, I’ll have flocks and palaces, I’ll lead armies. And how small the world is to the eyes of memory.”

  “My lord,” Jester answered, “are not power and glory the means by which t
he Emperor may change people and things, and make his name and age remembered for centuries to come?”

  “History . . . posterity . . . There are other kinds of eternity. I do not wish to be remembered. I wish for the eternal moment when sun and water, a soul empty and full, an ardor without object and a passionate indifference suddenly reveal to us the soul of the world. You will understand all this later,” said the Emperor, stroking the child’s hair as the boy gazed up at him. “All this, and many other truths that are great and beautiful and reveal something of the order of heaven and earth. Thaumas taught them to Fabrician, who taught them to Philocrates, who taught them to me, who have so often misunderstood. And in my turn, if you wish—” and the Emperor’s voice grew almost humble, “—I will try to teach you what I know.”