I was saved from the embarrassment of puking up my lunch by the arrival of one of our scouts. He rode straight in from the south and cried a happy greeting when he saw the blood his people were shedding. I looked carefully at the message scrawled by one of the priests on a piece of linen. I moved closer to Rado. ‘Shahin’s been lecturing Timothy and Simon in Greek about the arrangements,’ I said in Slavic. ‘There’s to be a dawn meeting at the junction of the two passes. He’ll present the cup to Chosroes. After a speech from Shahrbaraz, the army will be called to order and marched along the Larydia Pass.’
Rado smiled. ‘Then we attack at dawn,’ he said. ‘They’re plainly not expecting us. Even if we don’t persuade them to turn back, we can make it look as if your cup and its box are worth fighting to recover.’
He fell silent and looked again at the stomach-turning slaughter beside the stream. As if reading my thoughts again, he put his hand on my arm. ‘The punishment is just,’ he reminded me. ‘This isn’t a war between mercenaries. When Greek swords are sheathed this time, there will be nothing left over for the slave markets.’
I nodded. This was what I should have seen when I first called him ‘General’ Rado. It was also clear demonstration to men who’d never seen violence on any collective scale that here was an enemy who could be beaten. And the weapons we’d taken would be useful, and the bigger horses. It would take far longer than we had to train our people to fight in armour. But we must have taken fifty swords.
I cleared my throat. ‘When they’re dead, we can dump them in those bushes,’ I said.
It took a while before they were all dead. Afterwards, laughing and splashing each other in the stream, our men turned the waters back to a dull pink.
The rest of the day went well. No one who saw us lived to pass on the news of our approach. And many did see us. Some fought back — and we lost twelve men to death or serious injury. But our own losses only served to settle nerves and to shape us into a more cohesive force. Most of the Persians we came across, though, were too tired, or too drunk from beer or killing, to do more than throw down their loot and beg for a mercy that didn’t come. Our initial recruits were running out of patience for slow torments. Not so the local survivors. They fought with little skill, but made up for this with a reckless ferocity that gave us ten of our twelve losses. After the fighting was over, they could have been taking lessons from Chosroes in the infliction of pain. They didn’t even join in the retaking of the booty.
As the afternoon wore on, crude spears were entirely replaced by swords and shields and fighting axes. Our newest recruits now had their choice of horses, and many of the others were able to retire their own horses to carrying the supplies we’d seized. Though small, there was no doubt we were an army. Rado and I rode at its head. Behind us, as if that were their appointed place, rode Antonia with Eboric. Behind them were the priests, some holding their icons aloft, others carrying Persian battle clubs. Behind them, silent but for the occasional chanting of one of the more bloodthirsty Psalms, rode the men.
In England, I’d often joined with bandits. In the Empire, I’d seen regulars in action. I hadn’t imagined anything in the way of what I saw unfolding from one encounter to another. No one could mistake our men for other than irregulars. But they were irregulars made into ruthless and effective killers by a combined passion to defend what was theirs, and revenge for what they’d lost, and now by a swelling religious mania. Any feeling I’d had, that I was leading men to a meaningless death, was at least temporarily washed away in the cataracts they opened of Persian blood.
Antonia summarised things as the sun began to sink lower in the sky. ‘Why did you spend so much money for Daddy,’ she asked, ‘on hiring barbarian mercenaries? It can’t be just because he’s a shit leader that every army you gave him ran away at once. Is arming the people part of your plan to beat the Persians?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. The truth was that I’d been pushing the militia idea for local defence, and because I’d never got over a barbarian’s disgust at the thought of an unarmed people. One day of this and I’d have been mad not to arrive at the idea of a whole army — offensive as well as defensive — made up of armed farmers.
Or perhaps I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t say how often I’d been through Herodotus, or how much I despised the standard commentaries on him. It wasn’t because, in some blurry sense, the ancients had been more noble than us, or because the matchless eloquence that inspired them hadn’t required years of hard study and forgetting of their own language before they could understand it. They’d sunk their differences and come together to fight like cornered rats against the Persians because, each and every man of them, they’d had something to lose greater than their own lives. What I’d enabled probably had been in my plan from the start. I just hadn’t dared put it in one of my memoranda to the Emperor.
We’d spoken in Latin. Rado now broke in. ‘Give us ten thousand more like these,’ he said, ‘and we’d burn Ctesiphon to the ground in two years.’
I smiled. ‘It might take a little longer than two years, though,’ I said. Being me, I also thought of the money we’d save.
The previous night, camped on the mountain path, had been one of nervous apprehension. This evening, in a hollow above the Larydia Pass, we might already have been a victorious army. I had to deliver a long speech, filled with warnings and descriptions of what we’d soon be facing, before I could bring everyone back to sobriety. I was helped by the closeness of the main enemy. Since late afternoon, I’d been taking messages from our scouts about its approach. Still in no apparent order, it was gigantic enough to have got my clerical spies writing in words and tone lifted straight out of Revelation. Now, with rising force, the wind blew from the east. Seven or eight miles weren’t enough to dissipate the clatter of drums and cymbals, or the shriller sounds of the thousand eunuchs in full voice.
Before the darkness fell entirely, I set off with Rado for some reconnaissance of our own. We led our horses into the pass and walked with them over moderately smooth ground. The moon was past its best and a return to patchy cloud gave us a poorer view of the coming day’s fighting ground than I’d have liked. Bearing in mind my ability to commit whole books to memory on one reading, and a generally powerful memory, I’ve always been surprised, where not ashamed, of my vagueness over the details of topography. But, for all his public deference, I was there to accompany Rado, not the other way round. He took me on a slow zigzag along the pass, stopping every now and again to pay special attention to some feature of the ground, or to dwell on the slope of some downward approach.
The junction of the two passes covered about the same area, and was about as smooth, as the Circus in Constantinople. The remains of several stone buildings and the bigger parts of a crude statue suggested how important the junction had been in very ancient times. A brief flash of moonlight from behind the clouds showed deep notches over the statue base. I had little doubt this was a kind of writing and no doubt that I’d not be able to read any of it.
‘This is where we’ll hit them,’ Rado whispered. I turned from looking at the statue. It was covered in writing, and this was broadly similar to the scripts I’d seen in the ruins of Babylon. This was a natural place to put on a show and I was sure this had to be the place where Shahin would present the Horn of Babylon, together with its supposedly more precious container, to Chosroes. All the chief Persians who’d come along with the Great King could behold and wonder. It was in this broad space that what sounded a slow and chaotic approach could be mustered into a regular march towards the coastal plain.
‘We can hide ourselves a half mile behind Shahin,’ Rado added. ‘We can ride forward in silence. When I give the signal, we can pull together into the formation we’ve practised and sweep forward. If it all goes right, we’ll hit them like a mailed fist into a eunuch’s belly. We can kill a few hundred of them before pulling back. When their own cavalry try to follow, the archers above can let fly. If there is no pursuit, they can move forward and rain death in places we can’t reach. After we’ve pulled back, we regroup and attack again elsewhere. That’s how my people do it. It will have to do. Whether it’s enough. .’ He broke off and shrugged.