Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

Even as I squinted into the sunlight, I had my answer. Their priest leading them, I saw another dozen men marching forward with spears pointing up. Their glitter in the noonday sun lifted my spirits for the first time since I’d left Antonia variously weeping and raging like Ariadne on Naxos.

I turned to one of the young men standing beside Rado. I remembered myself in time and spoke to Rado. ‘Not everyone will be riding,’ I said. ‘How long to march a few hundred men to the big pass?’

Rado shrugged. ‘My people never marched anywhere,’ he said. ‘Walking was for slaves and women. However, if we time the march so we can camp tonight in the mountain, we can keep out of sight tomorrow by skirting the far plain. That will get us in place for a dawn attack the day after next.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I said. ‘But it all depends on how much influence Shahrbaraz may presently have with Chosroes. I suppose we’ll soon have some indication.’ I pointed to the stripped bodies of the Persians. ‘Their non-return must by now have been noted. If the Grand General is still in charge, the whole army will stay put while he gets it ready for defence against a Greek army he’s pretty sure is lurking in the mountains. If he’s being countermanded by his raving lunatic of a master, there will be a search party for the missing ones and the army will be driven forward, ready or not.’ I touched his arm. ‘Which does my general prefer?’

Rado shut his eyes, as if thinking back to his days of national banditry. ‘I’d rather have the Great King in charge,’ he said. ‘An army on the move is always a better target. If you’ll pardon the comparison, that armed rabble we saw the other day is a bit like old Samo — attack him when he’s leaning against a wall and he’ll kill you; get him into a run down the road and he’ll fall dead for you.’ We both laughed.

There was a rider approaching. Rado was right about these people. He was coming up impressively fast. He stopped close by a heap of stones and jumped right off to run across the next few dozen yards to where Rado was sitting.

The young rider spoke rapidly in a Greek dialect with misplaced consonants. I had to interpret. Briefly put, he’d found Shahin and his jolly crew about twenty miles from the junction of the passes. They’d been joined by about a hundred men in uniform but there was no sign as yet of the main army.

‘We can presume it’s on the move,’ I said. ‘We’ll see which of the three forces involved gets first to the junction of the passes.’ Rado nodded. Almost absent-mindedly, he began tracing lines on the grass with his right boot.

The lunch we ate exhausted all the supplies Antonia’s militiamen had brought from wherever she picked them up. But word had gone round every village of what was happening beyond the mountain. Every place we passed gave up its own tribute of food and clerical blessings and more armed men. By late afternoon, Rado had closed our numbers at just over three hundred, plus priests. There was no shortage of recruits, and all were on horseback. Rado put every one of them through a stiff test. Their horses were smaller than our own. The riders would have looked absurd if they hadn’t also been small. But a lifetime of riding up mountains and over bare hills, and two years or so of practising in arms — and even Rado was clicking his toung with approval as he watched them dash this way and that in the formations he’d ordered.

‘Come on, Alaric, I’ll race you!’ Antonia had called out as we approached another fortified village. My reply was a dignified harangue about her condition. In truth, I must have been the worst man on horseback in a hundred miles. Shahin, with his stunted legs, might have been less clumsy in the saddle than I was.

Three hundred we took for the fighting. Rado could have taken twice that number and more. But the unexpected number of volunteers only made him stiffen his test. Some earlier recruits he even sent back. We’d agreed there was a limit to the numbers we could effectively lead into battle. We also had to consider the need for a fallback defence if things went wrong.

Yes, leave out the priests, and we had three hundred men. Was I the only one of us to recognise the number’s significance? Silly question.

By the time we reached the foothills of the mountain and late afternoon was turning fast to early evening, we might have been taken for an army of several thousand. The numbers we would lead round the mountain might be limited. Not so the numbers following behind to see us off. As we came to a place where I could stand on some rocks and make the speech I’d been turning over in my head, I knew that, even if the attack did go wrong, those murder squads Chosroes had unleashed wouldn’t have it so easy here as on the other side of the big pass. Every man had his spear, every boy his bow and arrows. The very women were carrying arms.

I stood up and lifted my hands for silence. I waited for the tense babble of conversations to die away. I called Rado beside me. After a frigid stare in her direction, I allowed Antonia to come and sit at my feet. A speech in the Senate must be in the correct Greek of the ancients. You can be learnedly convoluted or as direct as Demosthenes. But the rule is to use a syntax and vocabulary, and even sometimes a regard for vowel quantities, that only those educated beyond a certain level can perfectly understand. If you find that the common people, when allowed in to watch the proceedings, are following what you say, you get some very sniffy looks from all the other persons of quality. It’s pretty much the same in gatherings of bishops. Today, I was speaking to an audience of illiterates. Most of them hadn’t so much as seen the walls of a city, let alone been admitted to its more refined entertainments. I needed to inform, and I needed to inspire. No room, then, for allusions to Marathon and Thermopylae, or other things of no meaning to these people. At best, I might work in a reminder to how Samson routed the Philistine army with the jawbone of an ass. And, if possible, I’d leave even that out.

I took a deep breath in and out. I wiped sweaty hands on the seat of my trousers. I looked about for Eboric. I saw him near the front. I frowned at him for the gross disregard of orders in which he’d been Antonia’s accomplice. He smiled sweetly back until I had no choice but to break into a smile of my own. I looked away and took another deep breath.

‘People of the mountains!’ I cried in my best and loudest speaking voice, ‘you will have heard that a great and terrible army is approaching the land that you and your ancestors have known since time out of mind. I have seen this army with my own eyes. I have seen the King who leads it — a tyrant worse than Herod himself, who delights in blood and suffering. And I have seen the trail of death and utter devastation that the King and his army have already left on the far side of the big pass. Whatever you have heard, whatever you may imagine, is nothing compared with what I have seen.’

I stopped and waited for the scared murmur to die away. ‘You can try running away. You can hide with some of your livestock in the far mountains. Perhaps the tide of blood will not follow you there. Perhaps it will finally recede, leaving you with your lives. But your homes will be burnt and your churches demolished. Your crops will be taken. Your livestock will be driven away. You may — perhaps — keep your lives. But you will return to nothing.

‘You can run — or you can fight.’ I stopped again and put a firm look on my face. ‘Though it is so large that the earth may tremble at its approach, you have no cause to tremble at this army. It is filled with miserable slaves. They fight only because, if they turn and run, their own officers will punish them with death. They are demoralised by the weather. No serious thought has been put into feeding them. They are squeezed into a place where they cannot fight in their accustomed manner. There is a good chance that, few as we are, we can send them, falling over each other in their haste, all the way back to the Euphrates.’