Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

It was a nuisance having to watch this lot go by. I had no doubt Chosroes himself was down there. Almost certainly, so was Shahrbaraz. Somewhere out of sight was the cream of the Persian armies. They were all shuffling along — without weapons, without armour, wholly out of formation. Except for the colour of their faces, you’d have been pushed to tell the difference between the Royal Guard and the dregs of the south-eastern levies. Even with Nicetas in charge, you could send a few thousand of our own men into action and the greatest war our world had known since Alexander’s conquests would be over in time for dinner. And here I was, reduced to watching the chance of this drift by in the rain. We couldn’t even start a landslide — not that this would do any good: as said, Chosroes and the people who mattered were already out of sight.

I pulled myself back and clambered with Rado down the rocky outcrop. The boys were already down and waiting. Glancing right and left along the path for sight of yet another patrol, we made for the clumps of bushes where we’d left the horses. From the state of the ground, I could guess the patrols had been more active when the Great King himself was passing by. Though still about, they were no longer much of a worry. It helped that, if no longer driving, the rain had settled into one of those continuous drizzles that soak almost without declaring their presence. Most of the Persian scouts up here, I knew from experience, would be huddled under their makeshift shelters.

We led our horses over the four hundred yards of broken ground that led to the forking of the mountain streams. I’d opened the matter to discussion the day before. The boys had the same right to be heard in this as Rado and I. All that had come out of this was who should be the one to leave us. I’d settled that by a disguised testing of whose Greek was less basic. Nothing was left in doubt. We’d had a day to get used to what was inevitable. It was as if we were walking to an execution.

I smiled nervously at Eboric’s brother. ‘You will get rid of the package if you think you’re about to be stopped?’ I asked again.

Already mounted, he took his cap off and swept wet hair away from his eyes. ‘No one will see me go,’ he said calmly. ‘No one will ever catch me.’ He glanced at the sealed package in his hands. ‘The biggest danger is that I’ll be hanged as a thief when I show this to the Greeks.’

I relaxed slightly. He wouldn’t be able to read the tiny script that covered both sides of the parchment sheet. But it confirmed in outline everything he could describe in his own words, and gave him plenary authority to command whatever assistance he felt he might need. ‘Show that to any of the postal officials and you’ll be hero of the hour,’ I said. ‘Use your common sense with the gold.’

There were other things I wanted to say. But none of them amounted to more than an excuse for delay. The light was good. The rain was manageable. The Persians weren’t about. It was time to go. The boy leaned forward for me to embrace him. Eboric and Rado patted him gruffly on the back and shared a joke with him — incomprehensible even in Latin — about picking mushrooms on a mountain top.

The boy set off and let his horse carry him slowly to the first stage in the long climb. He turned and looked back at us. ‘I won’t fail you, Alaric,’ he called back softly. ‘But I want you to know that we’re doing this for you, not a bunch of shitbag cowardly Greeks. You just get the Lady Antonia and don’t stop running away from this lot till you’ve joined me in Trebizond.’ With that, he wheeled round and, with a jump forward that reminded me of a ball shot from a catapult, was almost immediately lost to sight.

‘He won’t be stopped,’ Eboric said with easy certainty. ‘The Greeks only caught us when we came back for our mother’s body.’ He pushed his chest out. ‘We were only boys then,’ he added. I nodded and continued looking at the last place his brother had been visible. There were great banks of mist rolling down from the mountains. If they reached the pass — especially before nightfall — we could look forward to a still slower and more chaotic progress of the army. That was what we needed. Leaving aside the general considerations, we had to get through that struggling mass of humanity to continue our journey to the right interception point. A touch of mist would do us no harm.

I wondered again just how many men Shahin had with him. I’d told Rado the boys hadn’t come along to help in the fighting. But, if we couldn’t creep in by night and do our business, what use would the two of us be? Whatever use all four of us might have been, there were now just the three of us. The whole journey here, I’d been racking my brains for any better plan than I’d made up in Constantinople. Nothing so far had occurred to me.

Rado swore suddenly in Slavic. ‘Patrol in sight down below, and I think they’ve seen us,’ he said in Latin. I looked round. Three men in uniform were leading a horse over an expanse of jagged stones. I’d taken it for granted no horses could be got across that. So, it seemed, had Rado and the boys. By tacit agreement, we’d gone round it ourselves. I nearly felt cheerful at the thought of their joint failure. But, from the direction they were taking, I found it hard to believe the men had seen us. Even before the mist arrived, the rain had softened everything to a gentle blur. How visible were we — unmoving and against a background of colours that blended with our clothing? The three men looked more interested in taking a short cut than in flushing out possible spies.

Oh, but one of the men had now seen us. Pointing and waving his arms, he was jabbering to the others in the shrill argumentative whine usual among the Persian lower classes. The other two stopped and looked in our direction. If we looked back and didn’t move, they might move on. But they’d finished their deliberations and were coming in our direction. We could make a dash for it. They were a quarter of a mile away and the horse wasn’t bred for mountain work. There was no chance they’d catch us. But they might then raise an alarm that would force us into another detour — and how many more of these could we afford?

‘Let’s see how well we’ve rehearsed,’ I said. I put up a hand to check that the turban we’d made from one of the blankets was still in place. The appearance of ochre that Eboric had made on my face with a burnt twig had probably turned to black rivulets, running down cheeks whitened with cornmeal. Not that it mattered how sordid I looked — that was the desired effect. The men had found their way to smoother ground and were coming rapidly closer. I waited till the man in front had stopped and mounted the horse. It was time for action. I waved my arms theatrically and pushed Rado to the ground.

‘What are you doing out of the pass?’ the mounted man asked in a voice that was plainly intended to sound both gruff and haughty, but that managed neither. It was low-grade provincial. It even had a tinge of Syriac — he was dark enough for south-east of the Euphrates. He looked thoughtfully at our horses. ‘I asked you a question,’ he said, raising his voice.

I stopped pretending to thrash Rado and made a perfunctory bow. ‘Greetings, O Master of all creation,’ I said in a Persian that sounded both greasy and heavily Armenian. ‘Will you honour me by taking your ease with one of my brothers?’

The mounted man shifted on his saddle and looked at his two companions. His uniform aside, there was no sign of the martial virtues in him. The companions were about as low as you can get once you hit the dregs of an army. Not even a morning of driving rain had washed all the dirt from their faces. The weeping scabs about their lips were hideous things to behold. Their shapeless, stunted bodies made the wretches who’d rioted outside my palace robust by comparison. They clutched at each other, whispering and giggling, now looking at Eboric, now pointing at me. Their conference over, they plucked at the mounted man till he bent down and listened to their urging. ‘We’ll be late,’ he whispered down at them. ‘Orders are orders and it’ll be flaying alive if we don’t get there in time.’