Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

Of the five or six hundred who started on the run, I counted barely a hundred who’d made it far enough into the woods for the Persians to get bored and go off to pat each other on the back for a job well done. Of necessity, these survivors were the fittest and strongest, and those most terrified by the prospect of death into dropping every consideration of love or decency. Looking at the faces of these survivors in the light of a single torch, I saw fear — but I also saw the realisation of a shame in survival that would never fade this side of the grave.

‘Give them food and drink,’ I said. I turned to the priest. ‘Give them what comfort you can.’ I raised my voice. ‘Let anyone who cares join us in the morning. We’ll see how, even without training, men can fight when they have nothing left to lose.’

I paused outside my tent. Inside, Eboric had finally been pressed into giving a fuller description of my dealings with Chosroes than I’d so far given. He didn’t know their full extent, and his lack of Persian blurred his narrative. But I listened to his low, trembling account of our banquet in the night palace as if I were hearing about somebody else. At the time, I’d been scared shitless and I’d been too busy trying to kill the Great King to reflect on things. After that had come the long strain of the escape and, after that, the reunion with Antonia and the preparations for the counter-offensive. Now, I sat down and put my head in both hands. It didn’t help hearing the proud rise in Eboric’s voice every time he found reason to explain how brave I’d been and how devoted to the safety of those I loved.

I looked up at the bright stars. I really wasn’t another Leonidas. I was an English semi-bandit with a thick layer of civilian piled on top of that. Eboric was young and silly. I could expect him to see me as a hero. But Rado could see right through me. How he could have gone calmly back to his tent to sit playing with another of his pebble maps, was beyond me.

‘Stiff upper lip,’ I whispered in the darkness. ‘Stiff upper lip.’ Once more, I found myself speaking in English.

We shed our first blood about noon the following day. Our guides were leading us out of sight through some low hills, when we came on several dozen mounted and unmounted Persians. I won’t say they were actually dripping with Greek blood. But they were close by a village we’d skirted, where every gust of smoke carried over on the breeze smelled of burning meat. The swagger of the footmen and the squealing laughter of them all, told us enough of what they’d been about.

My own inclination was to wait and see if they’d noticed us — and, if they hadn’t, simply to watch them go past. But Rado was already taking out his sword. ‘Get them. Kill them. Strip them,’ he rasped in his functional Greek. ‘No prisoners. None to get away.’ Before I could open my own mouth, he was galloping straight at them, every one of our horsemen close behind him.

It was brutal work, but complete and mostly silent. I cut down one of the horsemen as he tried to escape past me. It was an impressive kill, requiring me to dodge away from his own sword blow, and then skewer him through the side of his throat. Still sitting up and holding his reins, he was dead before I had my sword out of him. But I don’t think anyone was watching. Mine had been the only horseman to survive the first rush of our assault. By the time I was beside Rado again, all attention was on the footmen.

‘Gag them!’ He commanded. ‘Kill slow, but gag them.’

They did both, though with an emphasis on the slow killing. Icons held up to witness the torments, the priests who didn’t join in darted about, exhorting the men to greater excesses. Rado looked on impassively as the banks of a stream now swollen to a small river turned red with gore and was covered with parts cut from the bodies of the living. He raised his voice above the desperate, choking buzz of men who’ve had stones rammed into their mouths to keep them from screaming. ‘This is how they fight their war against us,’ he said. ‘Will you complain if we fight back?’

I might have commented on his shift, in under a day, from speaking of Greeks in the third person to talk of ‘us’ and ‘we’. Instead, I looked about for Antonia. She was holding hands with Eboric and watching as one of the captives had his eyes scooped out. ‘The punishment is just,’ I said flatly.

I was saved from the embarrassment of puking up my lunch by the arrival of one of our scouts. He rode straight in from the south and cried a happy greeting when he saw the blood his people were shedding. I looked carefully at the message scrawled by one of the priests on a piece of linen. I moved closer to Rado. ‘Shahin’s been lecturing Timothy and Simon in Greek about the arrangements,’ I said in Slavic. ‘There’s to be a dawn meeting at the junction of the two passes. He’ll present the cup to Chosroes. After a speech from Shahrbaraz, the army will be called to order and marched along the Larydia Pass.’

Rado smiled. ‘Then we attack at dawn,’ he said. ‘They’re plainly not expecting us. Even if we don’t persuade them to turn back, we can make it look as if your cup and its box are worth fighting to recover.’

He fell silent and looked again at the stomach-turning slaughter beside the stream. As if reading my thoughts again, he put his hand on my arm. ‘The punishment is just,’ he reminded me. ‘This isn’t a war between mercenaries. When Greek swords are sheathed this time, there will be nothing left over for the slave markets.’

I nodded. This was what I should have seen when I first called him ‘General’ Rado. It was also clear demonstration to men who’d never seen violence on any collective scale that here was an enemy who could be beaten. And the weapons we’d taken would be useful, and the bigger horses. It would take far longer than we had to train our people to fight in armour. But we must have taken fifty swords.

I cleared my throat. ‘When they’re dead, we can dump them in those bushes,’ I said.

It took a while before they were all dead. Afterwards, laughing and splashing each other in the stream, our men turned the waters back to a dull pink.

The rest of the day went well. No one who saw us lived to pass on the news of our approach. And many did see us. Some fought back — and we lost twelve men to death or serious injury. But our own losses only served to settle nerves and to shape us into a more cohesive force. Most of the Persians we came across, though, were too tired, or too drunk from beer or killing, to do more than throw down their loot and beg for a mercy that didn’t come. Our initial recruits were running out of patience for slow torments. Not so the local survivors. They fought with little skill, but made up for this with a reckless ferocity that gave us ten of our twelve losses. After the fighting was over, they could have been taking lessons from Chosroes in the infliction of pain. They didn’t even join in the retaking of the booty.

As the afternoon wore on, crude spears were entirely replaced by swords and shields and fighting axes. Our newest recruits now had their choice of horses, and many of the others were able to retire their own horses to carrying the supplies we’d seized. Though small, there was no doubt we were an army. Rado and I rode at its head. Behind us, as if that were their appointed place, rode Antonia with Eboric. Behind them were the priests, some holding their icons aloft, others carrying Persian battle clubs. Behind them, silent but for the occasional chanting of one of the more bloodthirsty Psalms, rode the men.

In England, I’d often joined with bandits. In the Empire, I’d seen regulars in action. I hadn’t imagined anything in the way of what I saw unfolding from one encounter to another. No one could mistake our men for other than irregulars. But they were irregulars made into ruthless and effective killers by a combined passion to defend what was theirs, and revenge for what they’d lost, and now by a swelling religious mania. Any feeling I’d had, that I was leading men to a meaningless death, was at least temporarily washed away in the cataracts they opened of Persian blood.