Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

They hadn’t served him well in the matter of the pickled goat’s brain I’d let him pilfer from my dish. But Chosroes was leaning forward and slapping his thigh. ‘Brilliant, Urvaksha!’ he called out. ‘Why is no one else willing to speak truth to power?’ He tugged affectionately on the golden chain, catching his seer off guard and pulling him into a puddle. ‘I will address the army on my feet,’ he said, getting up and stepping forward to where he had his best view of the tired and perhaps nearly mutinous assembly in the pass. If only I could have got past the armed guards to give him one hard shove — if only one of the sodden eunuchs hurrying forward with the canopy had stumbled in the right direction — it wouldn’t have been another missed chance of ending the war. But it was missed. As if he’d heard what I was thinking, he looked suspiciously round and stepped away from the edge.

‘Time, I suppose, to weep,’ he said in Greek. ‘A hundred years from now, not one of these men will be alive.’ He stopped for a low peal of thunder to roll down from the mountains. ‘If I have any say in the matter,’ he tittered into his sleeve, ‘a hundred years will be more than pushing it. Ten is too many for this assembly of human trash.’ He turned to Shahrbaraz. ‘I’m ready to face my loving people,’ he said in Persian.’

Somewhere behind me, a gigantic gong rang out, louder than the renewed thunder that accompanied it. I couldn’t see into the pass from where I was standing but there was a ragged blare of trumpets from down there. After a long silence, the eunuchs struck up in unison:

Dārom andarz-ē az dānāgān

Az guft-ī pēšēnīgān

Ō šmāh bē wizārom

Pad rāstīh andar gēhān

Agar ēn az man padīrēd

Bavēd sūd-ī dō gēhān

Their voices and the bell-ringing accompaniment died away to reveal more thunder. This was blotted out again by a roar of cheering from below. While this continued, Chosroes mounted a small platform that had been carried forward. How the canopy bearers kept him dry was a tribute to the education of his court eunuchs. The rain was coming on harder and beat against us in great, heavy sheets. But Chosroes had now put on his biggest crown and, his unwetted beard poking forward, he raised both arms to take in the adulation of his army. He spun round and round, the heavy silk of his robe spreading out to make him look like a cone. The priests stood up and bowed. The Royal Guardsmen roared and beat their swords on their shields. We, the military rubbish, let out an inarticulate cheer. Far above, the clouds lit up in a dim flash. This time, the thunder rolled on and on. Depending how wet you were, you could take this as a further nuisance or as a dramatic accompaniment. Chosroes was able — and, I suppose, required — to take it as the latter. He raised his arms and walked quickly up and down his platform.

The cheering reached its end. Chosroes stood at the front of the platform and looked steadily at a depression in the far wall of the pass.

‘Men of Persia,’ he began, ‘I have allowed you into my presence so that I may share with you the plans I have been revolving in my mind.’ Whoever was in charge of the acoustics had messed up badly. His voice sounded weak at twenty yards. Through rain and thunder, how much of what he was saying could be heard down below was hard to say. The Persians never had been much good at the technical side of things. But this was a failing that, in itself, might tell something about the planning behind the invasion.

Chosroes stroked his beard in a manner that must be striking terror into his acoustics adviser and raised his voice to an undignified shout. ‘There are those, men of Persia, who say that we are weak. They say that our crops blacken in the fields, and that our men sicken and die of the sweating pestilence. They say that our victories are a product of Greek failure — that the Greeks are badly led and that they have too many other frontiers to guard.

‘But I tell you, men of Persia, that we are strong. We are the children of destiny. We are the ones whose glory shall be remembered at the end of time.’ I was right about the acoustics. There’d be no free places on his impaling stakes once this was over, and once he’d laid eyes on whoever had told him to speak towards the far wall of the pass. He stopped for applause. Because he had stopped he got the applause, but it was more polite than frenzied. Everyone round him, to be sure, cheered himself hoarse. It was the wise thing to do. I think it took every mind off a sky that had turned the colour of lead.

Chosroes gave another glare over his shoulder and raised his voice to a scream. ‘When my royal ancestor, Xerxes, invaded Greece a thousand years ago, he made one fatal mistake. That was to leave the Greeks he had conquered with their lives. In every age of their history, the Greeks have been an irreverent, faithless race. Whether in philosophy or theology, they go out of their way to unsettle every mind. The Greeks cannot be conquered until they are silenced. They cannot be silenced until they are dead.’

He stopped to clear his throat and for the praise of those who could hear him. ‘Oh, bravo, bravo,’ we cried. ‘Death to the Greeks. What have they ever done for us?’ and so on and so forth. Down in the pass, the only noise was of raindrops on spread canvas. A couple of eunuchs hurried forward to place covered lamps about the Great King. They made it easier to see him, though the upward lighting did nothing to remove the impression that we were being addressed by the monster from a particularly lurid nightmare.

Chosroes turned and spoke directly to us in his normal voice. ‘I have given orders for every Greek we encounter on our march to be put to the sword. We left not one living creature in the cities of Pentopolis and Alanta. Every farmer, every shepherd on our march, has been hunted down and killed without mercy. That is the policy we will adopt as we press through the Home Provinces of the Greek Empire. Constantinople itself will be taken and it will be sacked till not one stone is left standing on another. We will kill its people. We will demolish its buildings. We will burn its libraries. When we have dealt with the great city of filth and corruption that sits upon the two waters, we will race forward and take Athens and then Rome. I will, on my return to Ctesiphon, give supplemental orders for the cleansing of Antioch and Jerusalem and every other Syrian city of the Greek pollution. It will be the same for Egypt, once it is returned to its ancient loyalty.

‘And we will spread our message of cleansing wider yet. The lands and islands of the remotest West shall not be suffered to harbour one student of the accursed civilisation. It is my intention that no record shall be left to future ages of the Greek and Latin races. Their books and languages will be wiped from the face of the world.

‘But let us return to present concerns. In every step of our progress to Constantinople, let our army wade knee-deep through the blood of slaughtered Greeks. None must be spared. Compassion for those we conquer is treason to me.’

He stopped, realising perhaps he was drifting away from the big themes. He turned back to face his army and took a deep breath. ‘I, Chosroes the Mighty,’ he bellowed, ‘will take final revenge for the outrages heaped upon our nation by Alexander the barbarian.’

I doubt if it mattered whether the army could hear him. Probably everyone in the pass had heard of Alexander, though not of who he really was. As for Xerxes and his failed invasion, and all the other ancient Kings of Persia, perhaps one in a hundred down there had heard their names. I’d soon learned in Ctesiphon that Chosroes had Herodotus on the brain. Those Persians who didn’t know any Greek had no history but childish chronicles with notions of dating that changed from one chapter to the next.