"No doubt you're right, Philippikos," I replied, and he beamed at me: he preferred that thoroughly Greek name to the Armenian one his father had given him as a sign of his ancestry. I went on, "I trust the army will be ready to meet their onslaught man to man, shield to shield."
"In an open fight, we'd smash them to bits," he said. "They aren't likely to give us an open fight, though. They'd rather spring ambushes, and"- he looked around-"this country is made for that sort of thing."
He was right, the land being rough and broken and woody, the roads leading north off the Via Egnatia no better than cattle tracks and, now that we had moved a couple of days' journey inland, sometimes disappearing altogether. He was also right about the Sklavenoi. As our horsemen, having no other choice, went up a game path in single file, javelins flew out of the woods and wounded one of them and two horses. After that, I dismounted some of the soldiers and sent them through the undergrowth to either side of the road. The Sklavenoi shot arrows, some poisoned, at them, but they caught and killed a good number of barbarians, too. Our advance through the Sklavinias continued.
Not all the Sklavinian chiefs and petty kings fled on hearing of our approach. Some yielded themselves and all their people up to us. I resettled them just as I had the Sklavenoi we had captured and overcome in war, although I allowed them to take along their livestock and carts and wagons filled with their belongings, the better to start their new lives in Anatolia.
You could never tell what would happen in any particular little Sklavinia. All depended on the will of the chieftain who ruled that patch of ground. Rather more of them, I think, chose to fight than to surrender. Their poisoned arrows were weapons not to be despised. Several of our men died from them, while others were mutilated: the sole cure the physicians knew was to cut away the flesh around the arrowhead to keep the venom from spreading throughout the victim's system. The physicians gave these poor fellows great draughts of wine infused with poppy juice before plying their scalpels, but screams still echoed through the gloomy forests of Thrace.
A certain Neboulos was kinglet of the largest and strongest Sklavinia not under the control of the Bulgars; it lay north and east of Thessalonike. This Sklavinian had the arrogance to send envoys to me warning me not to enter the territory he reckoned his. "You do that, he kill all your men, all your horses," one of these men said in bad Greek.
"He will have his chance," I said.
"He kill you, Emperor, in particular especial," the envoy warned redundantly.
"He will have his chance," I repeated, and sent the Sklavenoi away with the message that Neboulos could either yield or face the weight of Roman wrath.
That evening, our army camped by a stream with a marsh and reeds on the far bank. More reeds grew on the western bank, where we were encamped. I took my horse down to the edge of the stream to water it and to get a drink for myself, having been in the saddle all day. Nikephoros's son Bardanes (or, again to use his own coining, Philippikos) went down to the stream alongside me, intent on the same errands. Stooping to fill a cup of water for himself, he suddenly froze in place. Then he pointed to one of the reeds that seemed to me no different from any of the others. "Do you see that, Emperor?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, I see it," I said. "But what-?"
Bardanes did not answer, not in words. Instead, he reached out and yanked the reed out of the water. It had, I saw to my surprise, neither roots nor leaves, being merely a length of stem. A moment later, I got another, larger, surprise. A Sklavinian popped to the surface where the reed had been. Bardanes had dropped it and snatched up his bow. I quickly drew my sword.
At Bardanes' peremptory command in the Sklavinian language, the man came up onto the bank of the stream. Water dripped from his long yellow hair and from his beard. He was naked but for a sword belt. Bardanes spoke again. The Sklavinian loosed the belt and let it fall. A couple of the excubitores came hurrying up to take him away. He went off between them, careless of his unclothed state.
"How did you know he was lurking there?" I asked Bardanes.
"Emperor, hiding in the water is a favorite Sklavinian trick," he answered. Picking up the reed, he showed me its entire length had been hollowed out. "They'll stay down there for hours, even a day, at a time, breathing through one of these, waiting till their enemies go away. But you can usually spot them, because they cut the ends of the reeds straight across, where a naturally broken reed"- he pointed to a couple-"has a jagged end."
"Cunning," I said. "Barbarously cunning. With tricks like that, no wonder they've given us Romans so much trouble down through the years."
"I'm glad I spied this one," Bardanes said. "Who knows what mischief he might have done had you come here alone?"
"Who indeed?" I said. "Thank you, Philippikos."
MYAKES
So that was how Bardanes Philippikos caught Justinian's eye, was it? I didn't happen to be one of the excubitores who came and got the Sklavinian, so I couldn't have told you the tale for certain. He saved Justinian's life, eh? Or he made Justinian think he had, which amounts to the same thing.
Philippikos turned out to be more dangerous than any dripping Sklavinian, to Justinian and to me, but that tale is a long way down the road as yet. We haven't even got to Thessalonike, have we? No, I didn't think so. Still a good ways to go yet.
On our entering the country Neboulos claimed as his own, opposition from the Sklavenoi did become fiercer, as the men he had sent to me warned it would. Bands of barbarians, some armed with shields and javelins, would burst from the woods and undergrowth and rush the lines of Roman horsemen, shouting horribly. When we stood fast, they would melt away as quickly as they had advanced. I do not care to think what might have happened had we shown flight during any of these attacks: that would have fanned the fire of Sklavinian impetuosity, where in fact our steady demeanor damped that fire.
Skirmishes though these were, in them we both gave and received wounds. In them, too, I learned hard lessons about the aftermath of battle, where the cries most commonly are not, as the poets would make you think, the exultant shouts of the victors but the groans and screams of hurt men from both sides.
I went with the physicians as they did what they could to repair the damage edged metal had wrought. But, though churchly law forbids it as murder, the kindest thing a physician can do for a Sklavinian with his guts spilled out on the ground is to cut his throat and let him die at once, and, while cauterizing the stump for a Roman who has lost a hand may perhaps, if God so wills, save his life, the fresh torment the hot irons inflict will make him wish for a time it had not.
After the first small battlefield, I was simply numb with disbelief. After the second, I drank myself into a stupor to keep from thinking about what I had seen. After the third, I summoned Myakes to my pavilion.
When he came in, he had a blood-soaked bandage on his left arm. "You're hurt," I exclaimed. That he could be hurt made the horrors of battle even more immediate than they had been: if such a thing could happen to him, it might even happen to me.
But he shrugged off the wound, saying, "You should see the damned Sklavinian." His voice was thick and rather slurred; he had had some of the physicians' poppy-laced wine to ease his pain while his injuries were sewn up.
"How can you go into a fight, knowing something like this or worse is liable to happen to you?" I asked, meaning not that alone but also, How can you obey the orders of superiors who send you into fights?
He shrugged again. "You can die of the plague, you can cough yourself to death, you can get a flux and die of that the way your father did, the way I almost did last year, you can be smashed in an earthquake or burn up in a fire, you can get a scratch and have it fester and rot. You go into a battle, either you win or you have a fair chance of dying quicker and easier than a lot of other ways."