Though Athens lies on a wide plain, this itself is watered from three lowish sets of mountains. There is Aegaleos to the west, and Brilessus to the east. To the north is the Parnes chain. Decelea guards — rather, it had guarded — the easiest southern passes through this chain. I’d thought, the previous day, that the Great Chief had finally arrived outside Athens. No one bothered telling me anything at all as, bound and gagged, I was thrown across a small pony and taken north. But it was fair to assume that it would be somewhere close by the smoking ruins of what had been a town of about a thousand people that I’d be ushered into the presence of Kutbayan himself.
There is, I hope you’ll agree, no such thing as luck. It is a most vulgar concept — much called on to explain facts that would make perfect sense if the long chains of cause and effect by which everything happens could only be made to reveal themselves. At the same time, I’ve never met anyone who failed to act but on the assumption that there is good luck and bad luck. As the sun rose higher in the sky, and I tried to slither into a less uncomfortable position on my pony, I had plenty of time to reflect on the really awful run of luck that had brought me here. I really should have taken one look into that blackness of the open tunnel and set myself to thinking how it could be sealed up again for good. Instead, I’d gone into it with Priscus of all people. Everything since that one choice had followed with an unbreakable run of the most rotten luck.
Once or twice, I heard Priscus raise his voice in a manly laugh as he discussed another of his interminable battles. It had been a surprise to learn that he’d ever won a single battle, let alone against the Avars. No one had spoken of this in Constantinople. Certainly, Priscus himself had never mentioned it. The impression I’d always had was of a Commander of the East promoted because there was no one else to put in the job, and because he did at least know how to retreat while his enemies wore themselves out.
We stopped for a while at noon. It was then that someone ungagged me and squirted water into my mouth. I made myself swallow every drop of the dark and brackish stuff, and tried to ignore the omnipresent smell of death. ‘I want to speak with your head man,’ I managed to croak. I didn’t really believe I could talk my way out of the relative positions Priscus had managed to establish between us. But it was worth trying. It failed. The only answer I got was a light punch in my side and a hurried replacement of the gag. I could suppose it was a mercy that this was a proper slave gag — that is, it was one of those things that resemble a short strap-on dildo, and only keep you from speaking without stopping your breath.
Once we were moving again, and I’d got my tongue into the least awful position against the roll of much-employed leather, I managed to pull my head up long enough for a look round. I’d supposed the dead were human. In fact, it was herd after herd of cattle that had been killed and stripped and left to rot in the sun. I could see shrivelled women and children darting from one heap of bones to another, stuffing their mouths with whatever scraps of stinking offal had been left. I would have looked more. It was a change from looking down at the stones of a very bad road, but hardly pleasant enough to risk choking. I made myself go limp and went back to reflecting on the defects of an enquiring mind.
Before I could be trussed up like a beast to the slaughter, my tunic had been ripped down to my waist. I could feel the opening pains of sunburn on my back as the afternoon grew hotter and more oppressive. I had to fight like mad not to scream, and then start blubbering from the pain and horror of it all, when someone slapped me on the back at our next stop. This time, I drank what was given me and didn’t try looking up.
It was only as I felt the power go out of the sun that the beast carrying me began to slow, and the continuous mumble of laughed conversation from behind me died gradually away. Someone held a knife before my face and giggled. Then he cut the leather straps that had kept me in place, and I slithered off to land on my back in the dust. A grinning red-bearded face looked down at me as I squirmed from the sudden pain and tried once more not to cry out. Still holding his knife, he bent slowly over me. I didn’t suppose that, having been carried all the way here, I was to be done in by someone of such obviously low quality. More likely, he was trying to scare me. I looked steadily up at him as he moved his head to left and right, now blocking and now showing the sun. At last, he pulled a face and put his knife away. He stood up and stretched his arms with a loud cracking of sinews. When he bent forward again, it was to loosen my gag. I still couldn’t speak, but there was no longer that leather stump jammed against my teeth.
‘Get him on his feet, and get him washed,’ I heard Priscus call from somewhere out of sight. ‘You can take a comb while you’re at it to that pretty hair of his. It’s thick with dust.’ He laughed and went into Greek. ‘You’ll surely allow,’ he chuckled at me, ‘that you look a proper sight.’
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting, bent forward with my head on the ground. Because I hadn’t slept in over a day, I might have nodded off for a while. If so, I’d only dreamed that I was sitting all alone in the middle of a wide ring of tents. Every so often, really or in my dream, dirty children came over and stared at me. An old man may have come over for a while and lectured me for a long time in the language of the Avars. What he said seemed full of meaning. But, since I had no Avar, and was in no position to try him in Slavic, his meaning was lost on me.
The light was fading when I was pulled back into full awareness by a gentle slap on my still exposed back. I sat up with a suppressed cry and tried to look round. ‘I’m going to cut your hands free,’ someone young said in passable Latin. ‘If you try anything, I’ll hurt you badly. Do you understand?’
I nodded. A moment later, and I was trying to rub feeling back into my swollen hands. My legs were tied so I could walk only with the limited movements of the very old. It was thus that I finally shuffled within the stinking interior of one of the larger tents.
‘Oh, you still do look a sight, my poor dear boy,’ Priscus cried with what anyone who didn’t know him might have taken for genuine concern. ‘Someone give the lad a drink.’
‘I’ll allow that you have indeed brought us the Lord Senator Alaric,’ someone said from the other side of the tent. He spoke the good Greek of Constantinople, but was sitting on the far side of a ring of lamps, and I couldn’t see him. But it was the voice of a eunuch. It may have been a eunuch of my own age. Or it may not. These creatures can sound young far into middle age. As I tried to look through the glare of the lamps, the eunuch sniggered. ‘If you’re trying to see who I am,’ he said with evident glee, ‘I see no point in disappointing you. It isn’t, after all, that there’s anyone you can grass me to.’ He laughed again and got up.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ I said with my best effort at contempt as he came over and stood before me. ‘I’d never have guessed you would risk yourself in barbarian hands. But I’ll finally grant that, whatever you are now, you were at least born into the male sex.’ I smiled and repeated with the emphasis of insult, ‘The male sex.’ I tottered past Seraphius, eunuch of the third grade, and sat carefully in the chair beside Priscus. As I took the offered cup of beer, I heard another eunuch voice — this one from behind me.
‘The lack of respect you show for your betters has once again been noted,’ the voice said.
I looked up from my beer and sniffed. I’d been expecting all day to meet the Great Chief Kutbayan. Despite his alleged lack of humanity, I might have had some chance with him. As he came round and stood beside Seraphius, I looked into the grinning face of a bald and, if possible, a still more obscenely fat Ludinus. I knew then that I was lost.
‘The most I’d expected when I came out here,’ he said, falling into that slow and ceremonious eunuch drawl that was halfway to singing, ‘was that I might be able to identify your body. I now see that I did very well indeed to assume personal supervision for the will of the Great Augustus.’