Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

Water flask in hand, Rado slid down beside me. I let him straighten and massage my legs as if I’d been Nicetas in one of his more helpless moods. ‘It’s a bit like where I was a boy,’ he said wistfully. He looked round at the edge of the ravine. ‘My father’s people sweep down from mountains like these to burn or levy tribute on the Greek cities.’ He laughed. ‘I remember how we once took on a whole column of the Emperor’s soldiers, when they marched out from Thebes to force us back to the Danube. We threw big rocks down at them till they were all dead. I don’t think they even saw us!’ He laughed again, now fiercely. Leaving me to drink from the flask, he got up lightly and perched again on the edge of the ravine. If there was room for a bug to crawl between the front of his boot and the edge, I’d have been surprised.

‘Am I a Greek now?’ he asked uncertainly, not looking round.

I took advantage of being unobserved to loosen the collar of my quilted jacket. So high up, the wind was icy. A few moments out of it, and though dipping now towards the western horizon, the sun was hotter than on the coastal plain. I could already feel the sweat running down my chest. Avoiding the sun, I looked up into the astonishing purple of the sky. That alone was enough to set my nose twitching. I looked back at the stony ground. We were thousands of feet above sea level. But the smoothness of the smaller stones put me in mind of the pebbles on Dover beach. That, in turn, put me in mind of Xenophanes and his claim of endless vistas of time preceding the emergence of man. Could it be that thousands — indeed, tens of thousands — of years before, this had been a seabed? How violent must have been whatever earthquakes had brought about the present order of things? And everyone was fighting over a cup that was young by comparison!

Rado hadn’t yet looked round for his answer but I was aware of how long since he’d asked his question. ‘Yes, you are now a Roman Citizen,’ I said. Everything else was beyond me but I could still sound authoritative on the Law of Persons. ‘The normal rule is that no slave freed before he is thirty can become a citizen. Instead, he recovers the nationality of his previous condition. In your case, however, and that of all the other underage slaves I freed, this rule was set aside on my declaration that you had saved my life. In the formal sense, you are no longer a barbarian. I suppose we should be speaking to each other in Latin rather than Slavic. Unless you plan to settle in Africa or Italy, you should also learn some Greek.’

The legal niceties went over his head. Or perhaps they didn’t matter. ‘Samo told me too I’m now your son,’ he said. ‘But my father was put to death when we got taken in the western mountains.’

How to answer that one? Every time you want something fast, you can trust lawyers to take a complex law — rendered more complex by some ‘clarifying’ decree that Heraclius might or might not have published — and make a total balls-up of it. The other manumissions could go through the normal process. Even after backdating the special cases to the day of my Regency, though, I’d been assured adoption was the only way of cutting through the complexities. An hour after registration, you can be sure, the lawyers had dropped in again, carrying enough papyrus rolls to fill a latrine trench, and begged my pardon for getting it wrong. By then, the number of my sons had expanded irrevocably from two to five — none of them mine other than in the sense prescribed by law.

Thoughts of children actually sired by me brought on another stab of the ache deep within that dwarfed the pain of riding. I closed my eyes and focused on that until it went away. Nothing good came of dwelling on things beyond my knowledge and control. I’d made my plans and I’d carry them through grimly, not flinching though I went to my death. I smiled at the back of Rado’s neck. ‘It’s a formality required by Greek tribal custom,’ I explained. ‘It makes our own relationship somewhat irregular. But you’d soon have been fully grown in any event.’

I was saved the trouble of further explanation by a rattling of hooves on loose stones. Without any other warning, my other new ‘sons’ emerged from what I’d taken for a sheer drop. From the pleased looks they flashed us, they’d been competing again at who could ride fastest without any noise. It was easy to guess that Slavs could move about this sort of terrain like a cat over roof tiles. That’s why I’d brought Rado. If I weren’t so aware of my own failings, I’d have been pleased to be shown again that Lombards were the same.

Jealous, I kicked out at the dead goat Eboric threw at my feet. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked sharply in Latin.

‘It fell off a rock and died, Master,’ he said with a winning smile. His brother was already dismounted and going at it with a knife. I dropped the pretence of envy posing as anger. Eboric was getting prettier by the day. His brother wasn’t less than easy on the eye. Besides, it would be nice to have something for dinner that didn’t give the four of us a bellyache.

I told myself not to feel — or, failing that, not to show — any pain, and got unsteadily to my feet. I walked over to my horse and took out the big map I’d brought from Constantinople. Rado brushed some dust from a flattish rock and waited for me to unfold the linen sheet. ‘If you’re right,’ I said in Slavic, ‘we must be here.’ I jabbed my finger at one of the stylised blobs that signified a mountain. ‘The village from where the boys stole the goat is probably this one.’ I pointed again. There was no certainty in either claim. The map had been another rush job — superimposing my own drafting office coordinates on a military map was bound to multiply any initial errors. Rado stared intently at what I was sure meant very little to him. He made a casual remark in Latin and looked quickly round to make sure the boys were watching his show of equality with the Great Lord Alaric. Purely for my own benefit, I traced a depressingly long route from where we might have been to another blob. ‘The Larydia Pass will be over here,’ I continued. ‘All this being so, the question is whether we’ve outrun them.’

‘I think we have, Master,’ Rado said, still in Latin. ‘You tell me the Persian’s legs are too short for him to ride a horse properly. If the Lord Prefect is with them, he can’t ride at all. That means they would have to come down the secondary road.’ He looked at me for support and ran his finger along a blue line. Either he was learning to understand the map or he’d got lucky. I nodded. ‘From the distance you told me the road covers, we must be three days ahead of them — perhaps more.’ I nodded again. The agreed plan was to intercept Shahin and his people as they moved through the narrow pass that Rado believed was the only one they would dare attempt. It joined at what the map said was a suspiciously exact right angle with a much wider pass that would, with a few detours, bring a small escort of honour directly from the zone of Persian occupation. They’d be worn out from their own dash southward. They’d be in no kind of formation. Carrying Timothy, and travelling over broken and nearly impassable ground, would soak up much of the effort that, on the road, would go into providing an armed escort. They’d be more focused on their triumphant meeting with the Great King’s representatives. The four of us stood no chance against an armed band hurrying along a level road but the night smash and grab I had in mind was just conceivable in the pass. Or so it had seemed in Constantinople.

Eboric came and stood on the other side of the stone. He looked in awe at the broad linen square. ‘The streams show the valleys are descending the further inland we go,’ he said shyly. He ignored Rado’s look of outrage. ‘We’ve surely outrun them. But they might not be so far behind us.’