Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

We were going uphill again and we got off to lead the horses once we’d reached the line of stunted trees that hid from us the remains of the smoking village.

‘Well, someone had to carry all the food away,’ I said. I sat on the remains of a stone wall and tried not to look at the three children who’d been butchered a few yards from my outstretched feet. The smallest had been dashed, head first, against a rock. The grass was patchy with dried blood and gobbets of brain. The problem with war, I’ve always insisted, is that it substitutes too much chance for the game of skill that is diplomacy. The truth is I’ve never liked the random killing that war involves. Within reason, soldiers on the field of battle are fair game. It’s the non-combatants I feel sorry for. By the look of things, these villagers had been caught as they sat down to their evening meal. They’d all been killed without mercy. Some of them had tried to fight back. Some had been tortured. It had made no difference. They were all dead now.

Rado pulled a woman’s dress down to make her body respectable. ‘You did say, Master, that the highlanders weren’t able to carry the food away.’ He sat beside me and watched the boys as they went about filling buckets from the village stream. My people had run out of people to kill and rape and things to burn a century before I was born. Regardless of the wider questions of right and justice, I’d grown up in a world of small farming communities and it was natural to pity these unfortunates. Rado and the boys came from bandit races. They’d been too young to join in the killing before they were taken. At the same time, they’d been fed and brought up on the proceeds of collective murder. Pity must have been as alien to them as it was natural to me. The boys were less put out by the horrors we’d stumbled across than I’d been by that body outside my palace. They were much more interested in getting water for the horses and in seeking out anything edible that hadn’t been carried away.

To be fair, Rado was on the edge of disapproval. Our first sight of death had been something so fiendish, and so plainly inspired by joy in suffering, that he’d let his horse rear sideways. He looked at the dead face of one of the children. ‘They could have used these people to carry the food for them,’ he said. He clenched his fists and looked up at the sky.

I sat in gloomy thoughts until the sound of buzzing flies became a cause of depression in itself. ‘We know there’s more than one village in these parts,’ I said. ‘Or someone else might have come along afterwards for the foraging.’ I stared at the jumble of animal prints and cart grooves that led to the south. A distancing tactic I’d often found useful was to see death as evidence of something else. ‘It must have been a big party to justify so big a foraging operation and so far off its probable course. How big do you suppose Shahin’s escort might be?’

Rado continued looking at the open eyes. ‘It’s not an escort but an army,’ he said quietly.

‘A big army too,’ I agreed after a long internal sigh. ‘And you know we’ll need to see it for ourselves.’ I was holding my linen map. I spread it on the grass before us. I’ve said our agreed plan was to head straight for the Larydia Pass, and hurry along it, so we could creep down behind Shahin from his right. I drew a finger along the big pass without a name. Looking there would take us at least a day off course. ‘Tell me, Rado — how long would it take one or both of the boys to get a message to Trebizond?’

He looked away from the map and stared fixedly at the burnt shell of what had been a little church. I made my own calculations. The fleet should by now have arrived at Trebizond. It should be carrying whatever forces Heraclius had been able to draw away from the defence of Thrace. Even without the Great Augustus in charge, it would take an age to get everyone this far south. If what we could see about us, however, was general between here and the big pass without a name, it was much more than an escort Shahin was hurrying to meet.

‘Eboric is the youngest and lightest,’ Rado said after his long silence. ‘Alone, he could be back on the main road within five days. With money and a sealed permit from you to use the posts, he could be in Trebizond two days after that.’

Seven days back to Trebizond! I’d guessed their grudging praise every evening had been clever jollying along. I’d thought, even so, I was doing better than that.

Rado looked me in the face. ‘And the Lady Antonia?’ he asked slowly.

I looked back at him. I could have given him a curt instruction to help get the horses under cover. He’d have obeyed and not raised this matter again. But, young as I was, I’d already freed slaves by the hundred and kept many close by me afterwards. Rado had come to a moment I’d seen again and again, and only regretted when I didn’t see it. It was as if I were watching the last taint of slavery fade from his spirit. It was time to start treating him as a man.

‘If you are serious about joining the army,’ I said, ‘I will get you started as a junior staff officer — once, that is, you’ve learned to read and write and to understand Greek. The hardest thing you’ll then learn isn’t obedience to orders. You’ve had enough experience of that and, much as you hated it sometimes, it was always fundamentally easy. So long as you take it seriously, authority is harder. It dumps on you an endless series of decisions that affect the lives of others. Many of these decisions involve setting aside personal considerations.

‘You know well enough I’m not soldierly material. But I do help govern this Empire. We came out here on a personal rescue mission that involved ending a possible threat to the Empire’s security.’ I waved at another of the bodies and at another that had already been pulled about by some scavenging beast. ‘You can imagine as well as I can what may be coming through that pass. I don’t know if we have the forces to drive it back. But our duty is to do our personal best. You asked yesterday if you had become a Greek. The plainest answer is that we are both Greeks — by circumstances and the law of nations, if not by birth. These are our people and there are tens of thousands more along that army’s line of march.’

I paused and waited for all that I hadn’t said to go through his mind. I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘The boys came along as scouts, not as fighting men. The fighting was always to be done by us. We’ll get to Antonia and we’ll carve up the fuckers who lifted her out of Constantinople. But the plan has to be changed. We need to see what’s in the big pass. We’ll cross the pass in its wake and hurry forward to Shahin across the long side of the triangle. There’s a risk we’ll miss the interception but that’s a risk Antonia would take if our positions were reversed. It’s a risk you’d have to take if you were in my position. Life is often rather shitty. You don’t make it better by going for the soft option.’

I stood up. ‘Let’s get inside the barn. We’ll rest till noon. You and I will take turns with keeping watch.’

I walked across the litter of bodies and smashed possessions to where the two boys were throwing water at each other. I turned and called back to Rado in Slavic: ‘You will never call me or any other man “Master” again. You do know that, don’t you?’ He nodded.

I was right about the foraging. Our journey so far had taken us through regions too bleak to be populated. These uplands had enough covering of soil to support much grazing and even a few hardy crops. Or they would, had there been either people or animals left to share the work. Foraging inside enemy territory is never gentle. Even if you forget about the rape and the random killing, it means stripping people of all means of support — usually not excepting their bloodstock or seed corn. You feed an army by starving everyone else within reach. But whoever was in charge here seemed to have commanded a general extermination. Again and again, we passed by burned villages with not a single survivor. Sometimes, the dead were fresh enough to be advertised only by the clouds of flies generated to feast on their blood. More often, they were announced, and in full sick-making horror, by sudden shifts of the breeze.