Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

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.

Shahrbaraz was looking at Priscus. ‘So the old fox was alive after all,’ he said thoughtfully. He looked away. ‘Am I right in believing a barbarian boy, even younger than you, did this to us?’ he asked. I nodded and put my arm about Rado. For a long moment, Shahrbaraz stared in silence. Then he bowed gravely. ‘The young man is to be congratulated,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t take this as a victory. If today’s battle is over, I need only pick out a few hundred veterans of the Syrian War and lead them against you tomorrow. You’ll not be so lucky then. I’ve seen your numbers. Or are you going to lie to me that this is only the vanguard of a Greek army of defence?’

‘Where is Chosroes?’ I asked.

Shahrbaraz reached up to stroke his beard. ‘Alive,’ he said cautiously. ‘His Majesty was wounded in his right shoulder by your most disrespectful spear thrust. He is being carried back in all haste to our own territory to secure the appropriate medical treatment for a wound sustained on the field of battle. After that, he will return to Ctesiphon.’

I smiled. ‘Then you can drop your silly talk of coming back for second helpings.’ I walked over to a large stone beside the wall of the pass. I pushed a dead Persian from it and sat down. ‘Let me put a case to you, My Lord General.’ He came and leaned against the wall. His men were a long way off. No one was able to follow us here, so I kept my voice loud and steady.

‘Either you’ve been defeated by the vanguard of a Greek army, or you’ve been routed by a local militia. The former is an occupational hazard, the second a disgrace that can lead only to the impaling stake. If you ignore this plain consideration and press forward, you won’t get much deeper into the Home Provinces. This isn’t Syria. Between here and Constantinople, every farmer is now also a soldier. You can forget supply lines. Your zone of occupation will be measured in the square inches that each of your men is standing on at any particular moment. Never mind whether we beat you in a regular battle, you’ll be lucky to make it back to Chosroes at the head of a hundred men. And, with no army to your name, how long before His Majesty decides he doesn’t like the sour expression on your face?’

For the first time that day, I was almost enjoying myself. ‘So let’s agree that there is a bloody great army hurrying along the Larydia Pass. Why not take my offer of continued truce and go back to the Euphrates? We won’t harry the retreat. You can blame everything on Shahin. He was working for us all along. He led us here. The Horn of Babylon was a fraud he made up with us for the purpose of murdering Chosroes. Its silver body was covered in a poison that could turn a man to grey slime in three days.’