Gordon Doherty - Strategos - Born in the Borderlands

The girl pursed her lips and frowned, then stared at the wagon. She couldn’t see Apion but he returned her gaze through the slats.

‘A boy.’

‘A boy?’

‘Same age as you, I reckon. He’s not well and,’ Mansur paused, ‘he needs looking after. He’ll stay with us. Our house will be his home.’

Home . Apion thought of the sorry heap of rubble downriver. Somewhere I can never return to .

Mansur flicked his head toward the wagon. ‘Come, I’ll introduce you.’

Apion’s heart hammered, his mouth drained of moisture and anxiety needled his skin. Reality beckoned.

He braced himself as the wagon door swung open with a groan and the dying evening sunlight fell upon him. His eyes narrowed and he pulled a hand over them, peering through the cracks.

‘He’s a Byzantine,’ she uttered almost accusingly, taking a step back.

Apion bristled, proud of Mother’s Rus ancestry, proud of Father fighting for the empire. A retort formed in his mind but the words lodged in his throat.

‘He’s a boy who needs a family,’ Mansur sighed, placing his hands on her shoulders.

Apion’s eyesight tuned into the brightness at last and Maria’s face was the first thing he set eyes upon. She was boyish, her eyebrows fuzzy and unkempt, her nose broad and her chin rounded like her father’s.

‘Well his hair’s a funny colour — like the sunset,’ she wrinkled her nose and pursed her lips, her head tilting to one side as she beheld him and then the sun as it slipped behind the hillside.

Apion felt a surge of self-consciousness, reaching to brush his locks from his brow, sitting up straight on the wagon bench.

‘Aye and he might think you’re a bit different too, madam,’ Mansur added with a chuckle. ‘Maria, I’d like you to meet Apion. Apion, Maria.’

Maria continued to eye him in a petulant standoff.

‘Well, you two are welcome to stand out here till it gets dark,’ Mansur sighed, ‘but I’m going in for supper. . as ordered! Join me if you wish,’ Mansur fixed his cap back on his head and strolled towards the farmhouse, whistling. He pushed open the door, revealing a simple hearth room with three cobbled chairs around an oak table bedecked with Maria’s feast. He glanced back at Maria, who remained fixed to the spot, scrutinising Apion, then he groaned and went inside.

Apion held Maria’s glare with a mix of terror and defiance until, with a dismissive sigh, she turned, following her father’s steps with exaggerated strides and made for the farmhouse too. He watched her matted hair swing behind her all the way to the door, which she slammed behind her with gusto. He stared at the farmhouse, mind awash. A gust rattled the wagon, bringing with it the first bite of night chill, then he glanced up as a lone bat rapped across the sky, black against the coming twilight. A shiver danced across his skin.

Suddenly, the farmhouse door was pulled open again and an exaggerated sigh pierced the air. Apion blinked: Maria stood in the doorway, arms folded, face creased with impatience.

‘Well are you coming in or not?’ She scowled. ‘It’s extremely rude not to eat what someone has cooked for you!’

The Seljuk ghulam dipped to the right of his saddle as his mount thundered forward through the melee, then he pulled his scimitar to one side and let loose a guttural roar.

Time slowed for Cydones. Grounded, his mount crippled and whinnying in terror in the slop of blood, flesh and bone underfoot, the ageing strategos felt the moment pass where long ago his nerves would have shuddered. The ghulam had it all: armour, high ground, momentum and morale. For Cydones, klibanion torn and hanging from one shoulder, spathion bent and shield lost in the fray, his years of bitter experience were all he had to counter the attack. He pushed to his feet and braced.

‘ Allahu Akbar! ’ The ghulam cried.

Cydones stood firm, squinting in the sunshine until he could see the red wetness at the back of the rider’s throat, neck muscles clenched, scimitar held aloft and ready to lop off the strategos’ head. The split instant flashed before him: the ghulam’s blade scything for his neck but both mount and rider’s flank lay wide open and undefended. Cydones shot his twisted spathion straight up in a two-handed grip to catch the scimitar blow. His shoulder jarred, a spray of sparks stung his face and his ears numbed at the metallic din as the two swords screamed at one another. The blow parried, he pirouetted and lunged to punch his blade into the gelding’s chest. In a high pitched whinny, the beast threw the ghulam rider forward then splattered down into the gore, thrashing in the foam of its own blood. Cydones stalked over to the rider, lying motionless in the bloody swamp. The Seljuk lay with his face pale and his eyes closed. Cydones made to turn for the next man to fight, when the ghulam’s face burst back into life in a fervent rage as he whipped a dagger from his boot, thrusting up at Cydones’ thigh.

The pain barely registered. A sharp blade it must have been and on the classic weak spot of the armoured body of a kataphractos. Hot blood flooded over his thigh and his limbs trembled but he held firm to turn his spathion over, blade down, to thrust it through the ghulam’s throat with a crunch of vertebrae and sinew. Then he crumpled to his knees, eyes fixed on the ghulam’s final gaze. Together, their blood pumped into the scarlet mire that had only this morning been a verdant plain.

The battle was won and Byzantine victory cries rang out over the atrocious scene. Cydones felt his mind wander and his vision dull.

‘The strategos!’ One voice called out. ‘The strategos has fallen!’

‘No,’ Cydones croaked, raising a hand. He had felt the tearing near-certainty of an arterial death blow before, the angry welt of scar under his thick forked beard a testament. This was a bad wound but not one that would kill him. Heart thundering, a chill sweat bathing his skin, he shivered and rose to stand. The handful left from the hundred he had led out that morning stood, panting, exhausted, some throwing up into the bilious swamp as the battle frenzy drained from their limbs, the Christian Chi-Rho on their battered crimson kite shields spattered in blood. They had fought for their emperor and for God. Now they looked to their strategos to vindicate them for the lives they had taken today. Cydones acknowledged this all too familiar numbness in his heart but he raised a fist and mustered all his strength to roar the holy victory cry.

‘ Nobiscum Deus !’

A torch burst into life on the short timber platform the men had erected on the hilltop plateau and the two men on the first guard shift watched the pitch black countryside manfully. A roll call had been taken and it had been worryingly swift: three kataphractoi and twenty one skutatoi were all that was left of the hundred that had marched from the barracks at Argyroupolis that morning. A score had fled when the Seljuks had attacked but the rest were cold and dead. The truth was, Cydones mused grimly, the remaining and spent handful were also as good as dead if another Seljuk raiding party decided to investigate the firelight. The imperial maps might say otherwise, but this far east it was definitely borderland. Thanks be to God for the loyalty of the Armenian princes, he thought, without their subjects, the borders would be threadbare of manpower.

He ran a filthy hand over his bald scalp and pulled at his forked beard, swigged water from his skin and then let his thoughts drift. He thought back to his old stamping ground, Constantinople: the tales of the rise and fall of emperors, often in inglorious circumstance, reached these outlying themata all too frequently. He still shivered at the report of the last emperor’s demise: the feckless Michael the Fifth had been pulled from his horse as he tried to flee the city, his pleas for mercy going unheard as the populace pinned him to the street and prised his eyes from his sockets. Emperor Constantine Monomachus now sat at the pinnacle of Byzantium and so far he had proved only how short-sighted a leader could be, disbanding garrisons all across the land in order to line the bare imperial treasury with a few pounds of gold.