I had not looked on the matter from that point of view. Having lost my brother, my father, and my wife in quick succession, I thought of death as something to be avoided, averted, shunned. Myakes' way made more sense. Sooner or later, I would die, try as I would to flee my fate. Furthermore, as a Christian, I knew in my heart the world to come was far preferable to the one in which I passed my bodily existence.
Making the sign of the cross, I said, "You are wiser than I." I doubt I ever sounded humbler than at that moment.
"Me?" Myakes first stared, then started to laugh- yes, he was drunk. "There's a joke for you, Emperor. All I am is a half-bright soldier who wasn't smart enough to keep a howling barbarian from taking a slice out of hi m. If that's wise, Christ have mercy on the foolish." He crossed himself too.
Superficially, he was right. But that did not make me wrong. He accepted the world as it was and did his best within those confines. I have often wished my nature were more easygoing. But it is not, and I have come to accept that.
We pressed deeper into the shadowy realm Neboulos had built up within the confines of the Roman Empire. I say shadowy not only because his rule had no right to exist, but sprang like a toadstool from the shadow of Roman weakness, and also because, in the forests the Sklavenoi infested, we were literally in shadow so much of the time that we once got east and west confused and cried out in fright to discover the sun, as we thought, rising in the west one morning. But it was no prodigy, only our own error.
Captured Sklavenoi told us where Neboulos made his headquarters. When- after some fumbling and mistakes, as I have said- we came to that valley, we found what was not quite a town and not quite a nomad encampment like that of the Bulgars which my father had assailed. The Sklavinian kinglet had circled the huts of his people with a number of wagons, making a fortified position of no small strength.
From inside those wagons, and from behind them, and from below them, the Sklavenoi howled defiance at the Roman host. Brandishing their javelins, they screamed what had to be bloodcurdling threats in their revolting dialect. And, indeed, had we had to storm our way past those wagons, it might well have cost us dear.
But the Sklavenoi, in their barbaric ignorance, did not yet fully understand all that facing Romans entailed. We won our wars not merely thanks to the courage of our soldiers (though when that was lacking we failed, as my father had against the Bulgars) but also by using the wits God gave us. And so, seeing the wagons full of fair-haired savages, I said, "Let the liquid fire be brought forth."
Acting on my command, my officers determined the best way to employ the fearsome fire that had routed the followers of the false prophet when they sought to capture Constantinople. The wind was blowing out of the west, so they chose to use the fire-projecting tubes and bellows on the western side of the Sklavinian position, to let the breeze spread the flames it created. The one drawback to the liquid fire was that it had to be projected onto the target to be burnt from a range far shorter than bowshot. The corresponding advantage, this first time, was that the Sklavenoi would not know what we were doing with the fire until we had done it, by which time it would be too late.
To distract them further, a large contingent of cavalry from the Anatolian military districts delivered a spirited attack against the eastern side of their wagon wall. If our men broke in there, well and good. If not, they would at least help distract the barbarians from the truly important point.
Distract them they did; through the gaps between wagons, we saw hide-clad barbarians carrying throwing spears and bows and arrows rushing toward what looked to be the most threatened area. At my signal, the excubitores advanced on foot against the barrier the Sklavenoi had thrown up, their shields protecting the relative handful of artisans who trundled along the carts that carried the liquid fire and the bellows and bronze tubes through which it was projected.
My greatest fear had been that the Sklavenoi would swarm out from their wagons and try to overwhelm the excubitores by weight of numbers. But we had cavalry on either wing to protect the imperial guards, and they, with their mailshirts, helms, and shields, and with their spears and swords, had to be foes to make unarmored barbarians think twice about engaging in close combat with them.
MYAKES
If Justinian was nervous, Brother Elpidios, I have to tell you I was about ten times worse than that. The Sklavenoi were screeching and shrieking louder than anything you can imagine. Boys- maybe girls, too, for all I know- kept running up and bringing them bundles of javelins and whole great sheaves of arrows.
I was in the front rank as we marched up to the wagons. That's what I got for being an officer, that and a fancier shield and a helmet with a tuft of red-dyed horsehair sticking up out of the top. So the Sklavenoi didn't want to kill me just on account of I was there, the way they did your ordinary excubitores. They especially wanted to kill me because I was close to 'em and I looked important. Lucky me.
By the time we got near enough their wagons for the clever lads with the liquid fire to do their work, my fancy shield had so many javelins and arrows stuck in it, it looked like it was practicing to be a hedgehog. One javelin hit me square in the chest, but my mailshirt- Mother of God, thank you- didn't let it through. And a couple of arrows clattered off my helmet, too.
Some good men weren't so lucky. My chum Anastasios, who'd eaten beans with me ever since I joined the imperial guards, took an arrow right in the eye. Like I told Justinian, not the worst way to go. He never knew what hit him, anyhow- that one would have killed him whether it was poisoned or not. And he was far from the only one who fell, too.
The biggest thing we had going for us was that the Sklavenoi didn't know-
What? Justinian says the same thing? All right, then, tell me what he says. He'll probably put it better than I could, anyway.
JUSTINIAN
Our greatest advantage, as I have said, was that the barbarians, being ignorant of the liquid fire, did not fully grasp why this body of foot soldiers was approaching the wooden rampart from which they were conducting their defense. Like the Achaeans when the warriors of Troy reached their beached ships, they aimed to keep fighting against us as fiercely as they could.
But we Romans had rather better incendiary tools at our disposal than our Trojan ancestors had known in that earlier age. A trumpet blared a command. The excubitores in the front rank stepped hastily to one side or the other, exposing the tubes and bellows and the men who worked them.
Eager as a small boy, I watched events unfold. Truly, I felt swept back to my own boyhood, having last seen liquid fire employed against a foe in the final year of the Arabs' siege of the imperial city. "Now!" I shouted to the military engineers. "Burn them now!"
They could not have heard me, not from so far away through the din of battle. And the Sklavenoi were showering them with missiles of every sort. Without the protection of the excubitores' shields along with their own, several of them were struck down in quick succession. But, having prepared for that case as well as every other, they brought up replacements and went on with their work.
Torchbearers sprang out in front of the mouth of each of the half-dozen bronze tubes aimed at the enemy. A javelin knocked one of them down, but a brave military engineer snatched up his torch in the nick of time and held it to the tube's mouth. Thus all six streams of flame were projected together against the wagons of the Sklavenoi.
Great, thick clouds of stinking black smoke rose from the streams of flame. The barbarians' shrieks of horror were as sweet as honey, sweet as wine, in my ears. I shouted with glee to watch some of the heathen Sklavenoi, caught in the fire, twist and writhe and burn, gaining for themselves in this world a tiny foretaste of the eternal flames of hell they would assuredly know in the next.