Yes, leave out the priests, and we had three hundred men. Was I the only one of us to recognise the number’s significance? Silly question.
By the time we reached the foothills of the mountain and late afternoon was turning fast to early evening, we might have been taken for an army of several thousand. The numbers we would lead round the mountain might be limited. Not so the numbers following behind to see us off. As we came to a place where I could stand on some rocks and make the speech I’d been turning over in my head, I knew that, even if the attack did go wrong, those murder squads Chosroes had unleashed wouldn’t have it so easy here as on the other side of the big pass. Every man had his spear, every boy his bow and arrows. The very women were carrying arms.
I stood up and lifted my hands for silence. I waited for the tense babble of conversations to die away. I called Rado beside me. After a frigid stare in her direction, I allowed Antonia to come and sit at my feet. A speech in the Senate must be in the correct Greek of the ancients. You can be learnedly convoluted or as direct as Demosthenes. But the rule is to use a syntax and vocabulary, and even sometimes a regard for vowel quantities, that only those educated beyond a certain level can perfectly understand. If you find that the common people, when allowed in to watch the proceedings, are following what you say, you get some very sniffy looks from all the other persons of quality. It’s pretty much the same in gatherings of bishops. Today, I was speaking to an audience of illiterates. Most of them hadn’t so much as seen the walls of a city, let alone been admitted to its more refined entertainments. I needed to inform, and I needed to inspire. No room, then, for allusions to Marathon and Thermopylae, or other things of no meaning to these people. At best, I might work in a reminder to how Samson routed the Philistine army with the jawbone of an ass. And, if possible, I’d leave even that out.
I took a deep breath in and out. I wiped sweaty hands on the seat of my trousers. I looked about for Eboric. I saw him near the front. I frowned at him for the gross disregard of orders in which he’d been Antonia’s accomplice. He smiled sweetly back until I had no choice but to break into a smile of my own. I looked away and took another deep breath.
‘People of the mountains!’ I cried in my best and loudest speaking voice, ‘you will have heard that a great and terrible army is approaching the land that you and your ancestors have known since time out of mind. I have seen this army with my own eyes. I have seen the King who leads it — a tyrant worse than Herod himself, who delights in blood and suffering. And I have seen the trail of death and utter devastation that the King and his army have already left on the far side of the big pass. Whatever you have heard, whatever you may imagine, is nothing compared with what I have seen.’
I stopped and waited for the scared murmur to die away. ‘You can try running away. You can hide with some of your livestock in the far mountains. Perhaps the tide of blood will not follow you there. Perhaps it will finally recede, leaving you with your lives. But your homes will be burnt and your churches demolished. Your crops will be taken. Your livestock will be driven away. You may — perhaps — keep your lives. But you will return to nothing.
‘You can run — or you can fight.’ I stopped again and put a firm look on my face. ‘Though it is so large that the earth may tremble at its approach, you have no cause to tremble at this army. It is filled with miserable slaves. They fight only because, if they turn and run, their own officers will punish them with death. They are demoralised by the weather. No serious thought has been put into feeding them. They are squeezed into a place where they cannot fight in their accustomed manner. There is a good chance that, few as we are, we can send them, falling over each other in their haste, all the way back to the Euphrates.’
I allowed myself a longer pause. No one was laughing at me. I’d go on to the end. ‘I am Alaric, Lord Treasurer to the Emperor. I am the author of the law that has made you into the owners of your land. Because of me, you are beholden neither to landlords nor the tax gatherer. I have given you the right to arm yourselves and organise for your common defence. I have given you the right to turn yourselves, for the first time in a thousand years, from two-legged farm animals into men. I now call on you to defend what you have against those who would take it from you.’
I had thought of a final invitation for anyone who didn’t fancy throwing himself under the stampeding elephant that was the Persian army to turn and go back home. The burst of enthusiastic cheering that followed what I’d just said cancelled the need for that. I looked over my little army of wiry men and grown-up boys, and told myself not to think how many of them I’d be leading to their deaths. This alone told me I wasn’t the right leader. I glanced at Rado. He’d got the generality of what I was saying and had a look on his face of grim anticipation. This was what he’d been born to do. But for his capture, he’d by now be doing to us in the Thracian mountains what he was now about to do with us to the Persians. He’d put up with me in Constantinople — no, that was unjust: he was completely and unquestioningly mine. But I’d never again refer to his time as a dancing boy and sex companion. Long before he grew his first proper beard, the smell of horse leather would have soaked indelibly into him.
Antonia banged a fist on to one of my feet. ‘Has everyone enough food to get us there and back?’ she asked in her manly voice.
I glared down at her. ‘This is the moment,’ I said heavily, ‘when Rado chooses five good riders to go off with you and Eboric to Trebizond.’
‘Oh, shut up, Alaric!’ she snapped. ‘We aren’t married yet and I am the Emperor’s niece. Try coming the Big I Am with me and I’ll make you look two inches tall.’
I tried to copy Rado’s grim look — quite hard when you know your face is turning bright pink. ‘If you think you’re riding into battle with me,’ I whispered, ‘you’ve picked the wrong husband.’
‘Then it’s agreed that I’m coming with you as far as the battle,’ she said. She got up and turned to the crowd, a small sword in her hand. She raised a loud cheer of her own.
Grimmer than Rado in their black robes and huge, scruffy beards, the priests were in a tight group at the front of the crowd. Once the most senior of these had preached his sermon on the evils of the Persian idolatry and the efficacy of the relic he’d brought along, and once they’d all raised their icons aloft to heaven, I’d give quiet instructions for Antonia to be sat on when it came to the fighting.
We made our camp at the halfway point round the mountain. On our right was a drop of several hundred feet, to our left a place sheltered enough to let a fairly thick grove of trees grow. The scouts we’d sent far ahead were uniformly reporting no enemy presence. Even so, we kept fires to a minimum and were ready to dart under cover at first sign of trouble.
Our only disturbance came about the midnight hour — long after everyone else, except the watch, had turned in. I was sitting up late with Rado in a makeshift tent. We were into our third cup of a sort of beer made with oats.
‘It would be useful for Priscus to show himself,’ I said in Slavic, answering his objection, ‘because he has military experience and we have none. A certain forced courage and handiness with a sword doesn’t make me into a general of any sort. As for you, with all respect, your only experience of battle against regular forces ended with your whole family dead and you standing unwashed in my office. And, until you can prove that you’re the next Alexander, your age is somewhat against you.’
He looked happily at his feet — something else, I realised, he was copying from me. ‘It’s too late for second thoughts now,’ he said. He put his cup down and played with the lamp. ‘If you’d asked my honest opinion this morning, it would have been to load up four horses and get all four of us back to Constantinople. That Persian rubbish could then have carried on killing and burning everything in reach. If they ever made it to Constantinople, we’d have had plenty of time to find somewhere else to go. But you didn’t think to ask my opinion. Now these people have fed us and hailed us as saviours, that’s what we’ll have to be. And isn’t that what your duty — and, since you freed me, mine — requires?’