Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

There were no survivors to look at us as we passed. Everywhere was picked too clean for the Persians to bother with patrols. But for the flies and all the other beasts of carrion, we were as alone as if we’d still been in the honest wilderness of the mountains. An entire subdivision of a province that paid reasonably large taxes lay about us in desolation. And it was worse than desolation. Village after village — even the few monasteries in our path — had been made into museums of human beastliness. There came a point at which even the boys left off their chattering. If only, after hitting that low point in the journey, we’d been able to justify leaving a path that took us through every place of former habitation.

On the second afternoon of this nightmarish progress, Rado tried for a conversation above the instrumental. He’d stopped to wait for me to look in a shattered church — I needed a village name to reconnect me with the map. ‘Samo told me,’ he said when I rejoined him, ‘that you’d commanded everyone in the Empire to be armed.’

I looked away from a circle of impaled children. The boys among them had all been castrated. I could see their tiny genitals gathered into a heap of solidified slime. ‘Only where the new land law has been brought into effect,’ I answered. ‘Though right on the frontier, southern Pontus remains effectively on the old system.’ Would he understand the politics of local obstruction? He might, but with more explanation than I felt able to give. ‘Forbidding arms and military combinations to the people,’ I added, ‘was the policy of rulers in more settled times, who thought it the best way to guarantee the peace. All it does in the end, though, is to disarm victims.’

I looked at the sky and tried to clear my head. The hazy cloud I’d seen coming on all day was thickening into heavy banks of grey. The sun still shone to my left but would soon be blotted out.

Rado watched me. ‘It won’t rain till evening,’ he said. I could be glad of that. Mountain storms aren’t for riding through and I was longing for better shelter than another scorched charnel house.

I thought again of politics in the Imperial Council. ‘Since you can’t be expected to know the answer,’ I said, ‘I won’t ask it as a question. Instead, I’ll say that, of all the provinces or districts within provinces where the land law has been brought fully into effect, not one has fallen to the Persians. In every case, professional armies have been driven back by irregular units filled with men no different from these.’

Rado reached out to guide my horse round a hole in the ground I hadn’t seen. ‘So you do want to make the Greeks more like us.’ He said. ‘Is that why everyone hates you?’

I laughed bitterly. It saved me the embarrassment of yet more thanks. ‘Talking of “us”,’ I asked, ‘do you imagine anyone will ever take our land away from us? Any foreign invader with sense in his head takes one look at armed men and tries his luck elsewhere.’

They also keep the bastard rulers under control, I might have added but I’d seen something shining up at me from the ground. ‘It’s a mailed glove,’ Rado said, following my glance. I didn’t answer. ‘It was probably left behind by whoever needed a bare hand for carving up those boys.’

Still, I said nothing. No longer bumping my way through those mountains, I slid off the horse with a semblance of grace and reached down for the mass of silvered chain mail. I walked stiffly over to a felled tree and sat down for a proper look. I raised my voice. ‘I may have some bad news,’ I said with a ghastly smile. I reached inside the glove and plucked at its lining of yellow silk. The Royal Guard was never sent into battle. This wasn’t some fixed law of the Persians. It was simply that the Royal Guard’s sole function was to protect the Great King, and no Great King in over a century had left Ctesiphon except to run away from his own people, or to shift himself to one of his summer palaces.

You could take the whole flash of light inside my head and work it into a syllogism: This glove is part of the Royal Guard’s parade uniform; the Royal Guard never leaves the Great King’s side; therefore, what we’re headed towards is the biggest invasion force since Xerxes, and Chosroes is at its head. I put this in looser terms to Rado and the boys. I also accepted that one swallow didn’t make a spring — the glove might have been a present, or a trophy, or a talisman. But I no longer had any reasonable doubt of the truth. Why else kill everyone in sight, unless it was to keep the invasion under wraps till fifty or a hundred thousand men could burst out of the passes and make for the coastal cities? And I could imagine how Chosroes had enjoyed giving the order. Policy aside, he really was the sort of man who made wicked old Phocas the Lamb of God by comparison.

We rode on in silence. Insensibly, the fertile uplands were giving way again to harsh wilderness. The smell of death had gone from our nostrils. The horses were calmer. The boys were cheering up. More and more, Rado was intervening to keep me moving in his appointed course.

All at once, we came to the peak of the hill we’d been climbing. Before us, the land fell away to another endless expanse of bare hills and shadowed valleys.

I got off my horse again, and stood as close as I dared to the edge. In silence, I pointed south. I didn’t need to get out my map or to guess where the big pass might be. There, ten or twenty miles away, was all the proof I could have needed of what I already knew. The dust cloud thrown up by the advancing army put me in mind of a city on fire.

Rado spoke first. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a whole people on the move.’ I nodded. I’d never seen the like either. Though I’d read about it, and often sat with Priscus in his talkative moods about the past, I’d always thought it was one of the conceits bad poets like Leander use when they can’t make anything sensible scan.

I stood away from the edge and sat down. I smiled at Eboric. ‘Be a love,’ I said, ‘and get my writing case from your saddlebag. You’ll be carrying an oral message back to Trebizond. But it’s time to get your pass in order for the postal stations along the road.’

Even as I spoke, a long peal of thunder drifted across the valley.

I poked my head cautiously forward and looked once more down to the bottom of a pass that had no name I ever heard. I call it a pass, though the word may put you in mind of a gentle dip between two mountains. A better word might be canyon. It might have begun, countless thousands of years before, as a river which, in its spring flooding, had insensibly worn its way several hundred feet down. More likely, it was a split in the world’s outer skin — a product of the forces that had raised the hills and mountains in the first place.

Whatever the geographic truth, the long straggling column filling the pass was as I’d imagined it. No, it was worse. After little flurries on and off all night, the skies had finally opened with the dawn. By the time we were able to peer down to the bottom of the wide pass, we could have been forgiven for thinking it was a defeated army creeping along before us from right to left. Without visible beginning or end, often knee-deep in water, the vast invasion force might have had trouble keeping up with a garden slug as it hurried out of the sun.

Rado pointed at a long covered wagon pulled by eight white oxen. ‘Is the Great King in that?’ he asked.

‘Nowhere big enough or grand enough for Chosroes,’ I answered. ‘Besides, he’ll be at least half a mile away at the front of the column — fresh ground to look at, sweeter smells for his nose, and so on.’ I fell silent and leaned a few inches forward. Most likely, the wagon was to carry the less important secretariat officials, or some part of a cousin’s household. Its wheels had long since come off. In their place were fitted improvised runners that would have done better on snow. All that stopped it from scraping and bumping and turning over into the grey and littered water was its speed of progress. I leaned forward still further. Yes — it was for someone’s dancing girls. They’d been kicked out to trudge behind it in their bedraggled finery. Slaves struggled behind them, carrying ruined musical instruments and bundles of soaking clothes. Behind these came drivers of animals for someone’s kitchen. Still further behind, I could see another big cart. Covered with purple canvas, surrounded by monks — probably of the Nestorian heresy, probably singing in Persian — it was anyone’s guess what this carried. I’d missed any sign of the fighting men. They would have been bunched about Chosroes.