Harry Turtledove - Justinian

"Yes, I see it," I said. "But what-?"

Bardanes did not answer, not in words. Instead, he reached out and yanked the reed out of the water. It had, I saw to my surprise, neither roots nor leaves, being merely a length of stem. A moment later, I got another, larger, surprise. A Sklavinian popped to the surface where the reed had been. Bardanes had dropped it and snatched up his bow. I quickly drew my sword.

At Bardanes' peremptory command in the Sklavinian language, the man came up onto the bank of the stream. Water dripped from his long yellow hair and from his beard. He was naked but for a sword belt. Bardanes spoke again. The Sklavinian loosed the belt and let it fall. A couple of the excubitores came hurrying up to take him away. He went off between them, careless of his unclothed state.

"How did you know he was lurking there?" I asked Bardanes.

"Emperor, hiding in the water is a favorite Sklavinian trick," he answered. Picking up the reed, he showed me its entire length had been hollowed out. "They'll stay down there for hours, even a day, at a time, breathing through one of these, waiting till their enemies go away. But you can usually spot them, because they cut the ends of the reeds straight across, where a naturally broken reed"- he pointed to a couple-"has a jagged end."

"Cunning," I said. "Barbarously cunning. With tricks like that, no wonder they've given us Romans so much trouble down through the years."

"I'm glad I spied this one," Bardanes said. "Who knows what mischief he might have done had you come here alone?"

"Who indeed?" I said. "Thank you, Philippikos."

So that was how Bardanes Philippikos caught Justinian's eye, was it? I didn't happen to be one of the excubitores who came and got the Sklavinian, so I couldn't have told you the tale for certain. He saved Justinian's life, eh? Or he made Justinian think he had, which amounts to the same thing.

Philippikos turned out to be more dangerous than any dripping Sklavinian, to Justinian and to me, but that tale is a long way down the road as yet. We haven't even got to Thessalonike, have we? No, I didn't think so. Still a good ways to go yet.

On our entering the country Neboulos claimed as his own, opposition from the Sklavenoi did become fiercer, as the men he had sent to me warned it would. Bands of barbarians, some armed with shields and javelins, would burst from the woods and undergrowth and rush the lines of Roman horsemen, shouting horribly. When we stood fast, they would melt away as quickly as they had advanced. I do not care to think what might have happened had we shown flight during any of these attacks: that would have fanned the fire of Sklavinian impetuosity, where in fact our steady demeanor damped that fire.

Skirmishes though these were, in them we both gave and received wounds. In them, too, I learned hard lessons about the aftermath of battle, where the cries most commonly are not, as the poets would make you think, the exultant shouts of the victors but the groans and screams of hurt men from both sides.

I went with the physicians as they did what they could to repair the damage edged metal had wrought. But, though churchly law forbids it as murder, the kindest thing a physician can do for a Sklavinian with his guts spilled out on the ground is to cut his throat and let him die at once, and, while cauterizing the stump for a Roman who has lost a hand may perhaps, if God so wills, save his life, the fresh torment the hot irons inflict will make him wish for a time it had not.

After the first small battlefield, I was simply numb with disbelief. After the second, I drank myself into a stupor to keep from thinking about what I had seen. After the third, I summoned Myakes to my pavilion.

When he came in, he had a blood-soaked bandage on his left arm. "You're hurt," I exclaimed. That he could be hurt made the horrors of battle even more immediate than they had been: if such a thing could happen to him, it might even happen to me.

But he shrugged off the wound, saying, "You should see the damned Sklavinian." His voice was thick and rather slurred; he had had some of the physicians' poppy-laced wine to ease his pain while his injuries were sewn up.

"How can you go into a fight, knowing something like this or worse is liable to happen to you?" I asked, meaning not that alone but also, How can you obey the orders of superiors who send you into fights?

He shrugged again. "You can die of the plague, you can cough yourself to death, you can get a flux and die of that the way your father did, the way I almost did last year, you can be smashed in an earthquake or burn up in a fire, you can get a scratch and have it fester and rot. You go into a battle, either you win or you have a fair chance of dying quicker and easier than a lot of other ways."

I had not looked on the matter from that point of view. Having lost my brother, my father, and my wife in quick succession, I thought of death as something to be avoided, averted, shunned. Myakes' way made more sense. Sooner or later, I would die, try as I would to flee my fate. Furthermore, as a Christian, I knew in my heart the world to come was far preferable to the one in which I passed my bodily existence.

Making the sign of the cross, I said, "You are wiser than I." I doubt I ever sounded humbler than at that moment.

"Me?" Myakes first stared, then started to laugh- yes, he was drunk. "There's a joke for you, Emperor. All I am is a half-bright soldier who wasn't smart enough to keep a howling barbarian from taking a slice out of hi m. If that's wise, Christ have mercy on the foolish." He crossed himself too.

Superficially, he was right. But that did not make me wrong. He accepted the world as it was and did his best within those confines. I have often wished my nature were more easygoing. But it is not, and I have come to accept that.

We pressed deeper into the shadowy realm Neboulos had built up within the confines of the Roman Empire. I say shadowy not only because his rule had no right to exist, but sprang like a toadstool from the shadow of Roman weakness, and also because, in the forests the Sklavenoi infested, we were literally in shadow so much of the time that we once got east and west confused and cried out in fright to discover the sun, as we thought, rising in the west one morning. But it was no prodigy, only our own error.

Captured Sklavenoi told us where Neboulos made his headquarters. When- after some fumbling and mistakes, as I have said- we came to that valley, we found what was not quite a town and not quite a nomad encampment like that of the Bulgars which my father had assailed. The Sklavinian kinglet had circled the huts of his people with a number of wagons, making a fortified position of no small strength.

From inside those wagons, and from behind them, and from below them, the Sklavenoi howled defiance at the Roman host. Brandishing their javelins, they screamed what had to be bloodcurdling threats in their revolting dialect. And, indeed, had we had to storm our way past those wagons, it might well have cost us dear.

But the Sklavenoi, in their barbaric ignorance, did not yet fully understand all that facing Romans entailed. We won our wars not merely thanks to the courage of our soldiers (though when that was lacking we failed, as my father had against the Bulgars) but also by using the wits God gave us. And so, seeing the wagons full of fair-haired savages, I said, "Let the liquid fire be brought forth."

Acting on my command, my officers determined the best way to employ the fearsome fire that had routed the followers of the false prophet when they sought to capture Constantinople. The wind was blowing out of the west, so they chose to use the fire-projecting tubes and bellows on the western side of the Sklavinian position, to let the breeze spread the flames it created. The one drawback to the liquid fire was that it had to be projected onto the target to be burnt from a range far shorter than bowshot. The corresponding advantage, this first time, was that the Sklavenoi would not know what we were doing with the fire until we had done it, by which time it would be too late.