Everyone did now see us. The front of the crowd dissolved into a terrified blur. I distinctly heard Shahin’s wail of terror as he took to his heels. He stumbled forward, still holding his box aloft. We skirted the table. We ignored Shahin’s unarmed and useless flunkies. The last sight I had of him, he was vanishing into a crowd of court officials. The box was empty.
Just yards before smashing into the crowd, Rado shouted the final command. When he’d got us practising the move on foot the previous afternoon, even he was dubious of its success. Now, on horseback, we might have been professional cavalry. Like a hunter’s net, unfolding as it’s thrown, a column sixteen deep became a row five deep. At the very last moment, it became two separate rows. We struck in a loose line that filled half the big pass. No longer scared — no longer thinking very much — I knocked the unarmed eunuchs out of my way and struck at the first Royal Guard in reach. With a recoil that moved me on my saddle, I got him above the collar bone. He went down, screaming and spurting blood. Shouting in a mixture of English and Greek, I moved to the next, and then to the next. For a moment, I was aware of Rado beside me. His face shone with the sort of exaltation you see when a relic is held up in church. On my left, I had a brief sight of our standard bearer. With his free arm, he was slashing all about him. Then, someone in leather armour thrust a spear at me. It caught on one of the rings in my chainmail and nearly pulled me down. But I managed to stay on my horse. I took hold of the spear in my left hand, ramming the pommel of my sword into its bearer’s face.
I’d been worrying about how my horse would take the noise and movement of a battle. After a few signs of alarm, it soon appeared to be enjoying things more than I was. We darted here. We darted there. For the first time since I’d climbed on its back, the creature was doing as I asked.
When you’re writing the history of a war, battles are easy to describe. The hardest part of describing them to my mind — at least, it is in Latin — is keeping to the right sequence of tenses in the exaggerated oratio obliqua. You start with a silly speech, such as no winning general ever gave, and proceed through accounts of attacks and counter-attacks in which the individuals present might as well be counters on a gaming board. It may be, as I keep pointing out, that I have no feel for military things. But my general recollection of this battle — as of every other in which I’ve had to take part — is the moving from one brutal kill to another. Once or twice, there was the inevitable dawning fear that a tickling in my side was first warning that I’d been done for, or, when splashed in the face with someone else’s blood, that I was blinded. But this was less a battle than a slaughter. If we’d gone at them in the rain, they’d have put up more of a fight. When we’d struck, everyone armed had been drawn up on parade and was squeezed on every side by the unarmed. What little fighting order had remained was then erased by the continuing deathly hail from our archers. After the first wild slashing and stabbing, my own problem was finding anyone remotely worth killing. I think most of those I killed would have had trouble hurting a mouse.
One notable event, though, I must record. I was formally in charge and this would have been the ultimate in what the Romans of old called the spolia opima. I’d finished carving up someone in a fancy robe, whose beard turned out to be a falsie, when I saw Chosroes himself. Well, I saw his public security cage. A dozen eunuchs were pulling and pushing frantically at its wheeled base to get it from a fighting zone that was spreading along the pass almost as fast as they could move. Spurring my horse, I raised my sword and made a dash towards it.
‘Die, fucker!’ I shouted in Persian, taking the head off one of the eunuchs. That got the others out of the way. I knew the cage would be locked on the inside. The weakest point would be the front grille. Though doubled, this was only of bronze. I snatched at the spear I hadn’t yet bothered using and rammed it at the grille. Straight in it went, passing through something soft before it jarred against the iron plates behind. I heard a bubbled scream for mercy that included my own name. I hadn’t struck a killing blow — but the next one might kill. I pulled on the shaft of the spear. The head stuck fast in the bronze bands.
And that was the end of my second chance to end the Persian War in one stroke. Before I could do more, a whole mass of armed foot soldiers were driven at me — desperate to get away from three berserk farmers on horseback. By the time I was able to cut my way through them, the wheeled iron box was gone. In its place, hundreds of eunuchs were on their knees, arms outstretched to create the impression of a thicket of human flesh.
I wheeled round just in time to parry a big man who was riding at me with levelled spear. The tiniest delay and it was an attack that would have driven a spear right through my chainmail. I’d no sooner scared him out of reach when a blow from behind knocked me sideways. Nearly dropping my sword, I clutched at an increasingly maddened horse. I found myself looking into the face of another big man whose battleaxe looked inescapably directed at one of the less well-covered parts of my body. I pushed myself upright and tried to raise my sword. The blow never came. Even as he began to swing at me, the man dropped his axe and settled into a position on his horse held only by the rigidity of his armour. An arrow had gone in through one of his temples and was poking four inches out through the other side of his face.
I gave the briefest look to where the arrow must have originated. I nearly fell off my horse again. Halfway down one of the slopes, I saw Antonia and Eboric on horseback. He had a bow in his hands. She seemed to be directing him where to shoot. From what little I could see, they both seemed remarkably pleased with themselves. If I hadn’t got into a viciously unequal fight with some footmen, I’d have been straight up there to give the pair of them a good hiding.
But one of the younger men was now beside me, pulling at my reins. ‘My Lord, My Lord!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you hear the signal? Withdraw and regroup.’ I might have heard it. For sure, I hadn’t paid it any attention. But this was the order and we picked our way together, over ground that was thick with the dead, to where Rado and the standard bearer were waving everyone into position behind his appointed leader. Two dozen of the younger men got behind me. At the renewed steerhorn blast, we rode back into the battle. When I looked again, Antonia and Eboric had withdrawn to the top of the pass and he was taking aim at someone deep within the swirling mass of the enemy. The archers had now run out of arrows and had joined us on horseback. Even the priests were joining in. Clubs in hand, they hopped from pocket of resistance to another.
But it was no longer a battle. Over the vast expanse of the fallen that lay before us, there could be no repeat of our first charge. Nor, when we caught up with the fleeing, shoving camp followers who separated us from the actual fighting men, was there any more killing than took our fancy. Fifteen deep into the retreating mass, the fighting men could have thrown us back into the Larydia Pass and far along it. These were the real soldiers of the army that had fought its way through the streets of Jerusalem. But they never got to us. Even as they cut a path through their own people, they were overwhelmed by the stampede. It was less an assault than a mounted herding of two-legged cattle.
Simply because they couldn’t get to us, I can’t call the Persian regulars cowardly. But any chance they might have had to stand and fight now vanished for good. In one of his last revisions to the battle plan, Rado had incorporated a stepped descent about a mile into the big pass. I’d stared wonderingly at the six rows of pebbles one of the locals had placed far into the pass — far, far beyond the marked point of our own engagement. One row after another, the Persian regulars fell backwards over the first of these steps. It was rather like watching foam carried down the rapids of a stream.