That was the end of resistance. Regulars, camp followers, eunuchs in what had been golden robes, useless cavalry in their heavy mailed armour — all were swept backwards and lost. Far ahead of us, trumpeters blew their lungs ragged. They were barely heard above the pandemonium of screams and clashing of metal on metal and of breaking wood. No one obeyed the orders they tried to pass on. Our horses stepping carefully over multiple layers of the dead and dying, we picked our way down each of the big steps. We pushed and sometimes hurried forward, killing and killing and killing until we’d run out of energy to lift our swords. I stopped for what seemed a moment and leaned forward over my horse. When I looked up, the closest Persians were already fifty yards ahead of me. This low in the pass, the floodwaters hadn’t yet finished receding. If we continued forward, the bodies underfoot would be floating. But there was no need to continue. Roaring with fear and pushing and stabbing and slashing at each other not to be at the exposed rear, and increasingly falling over in the stinking water, the Persians wouldn’t be back.
I sat up straight and stared at my notched, slippery sword. Rado was beside me. ‘Are you wounded?’ he asked.
The bruises I’d got from that battleaxe and a few cuts on my forearm didn’t count. But I suddenly noticed how my arms were red with gore. If the rest of me was like this, he’d only have been able to tell me from my size. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘How about you?’ He shook his head. I turned my attention to the now distant enemy. ‘I could prose on about ancient and largely forgotten battles, like Gaugamela and Magnesia. But did you ever listen to Father Macarius and his sermons about Samson and his jawbone?’
‘Not really,’ said Rado. ‘You see, you always slept through services. So did everyone else out of respect for you.’
I couldn’t think of any answer to that. So I sat up straighter and stretched out my hand. ‘General Rado,’ I said very loudly, ‘the day is yours.’ There was a ragged cheer behind us. Not turning, we both looked again at the fleeing wreckage of what had to be one of the greatest invasion forces in history.
Someone spoke behind me. ‘As a full participant in the battle, the Lady Antonia claims her right to share in the booty.’
Chapter 70
However they disgust you at first, you soon get used to the carrion birds. The noise of their flapping and squabbling was the chief sound in the vastness of the dead that stretched as far as the eye could see. I won’t mention the flies. You can take them as read. So far as it could be done, the throats of the wounded enemy had been cut, and some beginnings had been made on gathering in the immense booty that had fallen to us. But that, we’d agreed, would have to wait properly until help could be procured from the far side of the mountain.
Rado coughed behind me. ‘If you please, My Lord Alaric,’ he said softly. I turned and saw him with one of the priests. Rado himself was illiterate. This was something we’d have to see to when we got home. A bloodied priest held out a big square of parchment ripped from a Persian book. On the clean side, he’d scrawled the answer to my question.
‘A hundred and fifty more or less uninjured,’ I read. ‘Ten badly injured and like to die before evening. Fifteen bodies found so far. The rest unaccounted for.’ They both nodded. I looked at the sky. The sun would soon be going down on this day of slaughter. Those unaccounted for almost certainly meant we hadn’t been able to tell our own dead from the multitudes of enemy dead. Of the men we’d led into battle, I’d have to accept that we’d lost nearly half. Was this good or bad as these things went? I didn’t know. Rado’s own experience didn’t stretch to casualty rates. In my view, it was a hundred and fifty men too many.
Of course, it was worse than that. I turned and continued looking at the dead from the flank attack. These hadn’t enjoyed our luxury of almost permanent insulation from anyone who could hit back. From the Persian dead who lay all about, they’d rushed down upon one of the regular army units. If any of them had got out alive, I hadn’t yet seen him. Add a hundred to my previous figure, and make it a fraction of our whole little army. Bearing in mind we weren’t talking about exact numbers, I could take it that we’d lost three-fifths of everyone we’d led here. What would Priscus say about that?
I’d never find out. His body had been pulled out from beneath a mound of the Persian dead. I hadn’t seen him in proper light for about eighteen months but I’d not seen him this dark and shrivelled. It was as if he’d been burned up in the sunlight. I recognised him only from his lower face. Even in death, he kept that look of amused contempt for the world. But he was pushing seventy and it must have been a difficult journey from Constantinople.
He’d been a bastard in life. Oh, he’d been more than a bastard. The words might not exist to describe the beastliness of his life, or the misery he’d inflicted on the world. But he was now gone from the world. And, if a strict moralist might have thrown up his arms in despair at the recitation of his sins, and announced there could be no set off against a tenth of them in any Divine Court of Justice, I could say he’d made some atonement. Without that unsung and unsingable repeat of Thermopylae, the rest of us might easily not have lived to behold the mournful joys of victory.
A few feet closer to the high wall of the pass lay the boy who’d run all those miles to us. I hadn’t learned his name. I hadn’t so much as spoken to him. I’d thought he was about fifteen. In death, he looked younger. I looked away, and found I could still see his dead face. I swallowed and clenched both hands into fists. These had been volunteers among volunteers, I told myself. Leave Priscus aside, this was atonement of their own for having lived after everyone dear to them had died.
I’d been faintly aware of a voice babbling insanely away on my left. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ Theodore cried in Syriac. ‘So proud and boastfully squirting in life — all now burn in the lake of black fire that awaits us!’ Not up to walking, he crawled from body to body, calling indiscriminately at our dead and those of the enemy. It would have been easy to give the order. A dozen swords would have rasped from their sheaths, to be buried in that twisted body. But he’d spoken in Syriac. The only insults to the dead worth punishing are those heard by the living.
‘Fuck off, Theodore,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m putting you straight into a monastery when we get back. If I ever have to see you again, I’ll put a black mark against the day it happens.’ A look of mad cunning spread over his face. He raised one of his hands in a gesture of malediction but crawled out of kicking distance. The last I noticed of him, he was propped against a smashed cart, his arms about knees that he’d drawn up to his chin.
Rado touched me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a group of perhaps thirty horsemen picking their way towards us. Each wore full armour and carried a long spear. I looked at our own men. They were still knocked out. But the man at the front of the group climbed down from his horse and began picking his way towards us. He was wearing yellow boots and had to keep stepping aside to avoid the pools of jellied blood. I waited till he was a dozen yards away before bowing. ‘Greetings, Shahrbaraz,’ I said in Persian.
He gave me one of his dead looks. ‘The customary agreement in these circumstances,’ he said without bowing, ‘is that we should be allowed to watch over our dead till the seventh hour of the night.’
‘Then let it be as the custom prescribes,’ I replied. I could explain later to Rado that the Persians don’t bury their dead, but leave them to be devoured by wild beasts. Shocking to any Western sensibility, this had its convenient side. Burying that lot, in a place without earth, would have been out of the question. Even our own small number of dead I’d decided to leave till help arrived.