Harry Turtledove - Justinian

Cavalry from the reserve went hurrying off toward the right, no doubt at the request of some officer I could not see. If the crisis had been invisible, so was the solution. That a solution had been found, however, I inferred from the Arabs' failure to break through our line of battle.

If the Sklavenoi in front of me wavered, I intended to throw the excubitores into the breach. My own guards were looking now this way, now that, eager to find a place where they could battle the deniers of Christ. They shouted for me to send them into the fray.

Some of them did. The troopers were young men, Brother Elpidios, and the horsemen from the military districts had been teasing us- they couldn't lose their tongues or their prongs for that. "Toy soldiers," they called us, and "sweets in fancy wrappers" on account of our gaudy surcoats, and other things I won't soil your ears with. We'd had some fights with them, and broken some heads, too.

Me? Shouting to get into a battle? I'd been in a battle, against Neboulos's men, and I found out it was a lot more fun to think about than for real. And I was past thirty by then, too, getting to the age where your blood doesn't boil quite so fast.

I wanted us Romans to win. I didn't want Neboulos's Sklavenoi to- what was the word Justinian used?- to waver, that was it. For one thing, if the special army did a lot of wavering, there weren't enough excubitores to plug the gap they would have made. For another, if they didn't waver that much, my men and I would be fighting the Arabs with the Sklavenoi alongside us. And if they turned their backs and ran then, who'd be left in the lurch? That's right, Brother Elpidios- me and my chums, that's who.

But it didn't happen. That first day, the special army- Eh? What's that, Brother? Justinian has a good deal more to say? All right, read some more of the manuscript. We'll see how what he remembers stacks up against what I recall. Somewhere in there, we might even find some truth.

Had there been need, I would not have hesitated for a moment over sending the excubitores into battle. I knew how well they could fight; I had seen as much when we took Neboulos's village, and also on other occasions. I also knew they could protect my person as effectively, or perhaps more effectively, while fighting at some distance from me than gathered in a tight-packed mass around me.

Leontios had wanted the battle to unfold like the great victory Hannibal had won over the Romans at Cannae more than two hundred years before our Lord's Incarnation: the center- here, the special army- holding firm while the cavalry on either wing swept out and enfolded the foe in a box from which there would be no escape.

That was what he wanted. What he got proved a good deal less, he being no Hannibal and the Arabs proving far cannier than the Romans whom the wily Carthaginian had lured to destruction. When the wings of the cavalry from the military districts tried to fold round the followers of the false prophet, the Arabs' flank guards held them in check after scant progress. The deniers of Christ thus remaining unsurrounded, strategy became secondary to the courage displayed by the soldiers on both sides.

Here a Roman smashed an Arab in the side of the face with his sword, making the wretch reel in the saddle and then dispatching him with a blow to the neck that sent his soul to eternal torment and half severed his head from his body. There another Roman, already bleeding from a dozen wound s, grappled with an Arab and dragged him from his horse so they both fell together.

I also saw then what I remembered seeing when the followers of the false prophet besieged Constantinople in my youth, and what the history of their wars against the Roman Empire had shown: that they, despite their misbelief, had courage aplenty. When they rode close to the Sklavenoi to ply them with arrows, one of them had his horse take a javelin square in the throat. The animal crashed down as if it had run headlong into a wall, allowing its rider barely enough time to kick his leg free so it was not pinned beneath the horse.

That rider could have fled away, back toward his own line. Instead, scrambling to his feet, he drew his sword and ran straight for the Sklavenoi. He killed or wounded several of them before they dragged him to the ground once more and slew him.

Neither side giving way, then, and neither side being able to gain any great advantage, the fight went on from the time when it was joined till sunset without a substantial advance or retreat. If anything, we Romans had the better of the day, and when evening came it was the deniers of Christ who withdrew from combat. But they made no great retreat, only pulling back out of bowshot and leaving enough skirmishers out ahead to show that they intended to renew the fight when morning came again.

Leontios also proved willing to halt for the night, which, considering how evenly the battle had gone on the first day, I could hardly protest. Roman forces made three rough camps, those of the cavalry from the military districts to either side and that of the special army in the center, corresponding in that way to the disposition of the soldiers during the battle.

I summoned Leontios, Neboulos, and other, lower-ranking officers to my pavilion to see if we could think of a way to do better than we had done. I was hoping these men, trained in war, would be able to see what I did not. In that I found myself disappointed. "We'll keep hammering at them, Emperor, keep hammering away," Leontios said. "Hit 'em enough blows and I expect they'll crack. How can they keep from cracking if we keep hitting 'em?"

"This is how you won your name as a general?" I exclaimed. Leontios assumed an injured expression. I felt like injuring him, but wondered if he had the brains to notice. I turned to Neboulos, thinking he might have imagination mixed in with his barbarous cunning. "How would you make the fight turn our way tomorrow?"

But all he did was shrug. "You pay us, Emperor, and we do not let Arabs through. You tell us what to do, we do it."

"We'll fight it out, then." I looked at Leontios. Since he showed no sign of having any better idea than that, I said, "It seems we can't enfold them with both wings at once, so why not put more weight on one wing and see if we can use it to break through their line?"

"Aye, I could do that, Emperor," he said. "I could." Plainly, he had had no thought past fighting tomorrow's fight as he had fought today's. He plucked at his beard. "Now which wing should I choose, do you suppose?"

"The left," I said, for no better reason that that I might have been more likely to say the right.

"All right, Emperor, I'll do that." And off he went. Someone had told him what to do, and he was fit to do it. I suppose my father had done that during his reign, too. I wondered how Leontios had won victories on his own not long after my father died. Maybe he had run across Arab generals as hamhanded as himself. We had one. Why not they?

Neboulos saw the same thing I had. "That is Roman general?" he said. "If he fights me, I beat him. To you, Emperor, I lose. I always remember that." He rose, nodded, and also departed. The lesser officers quickly went out into the night, leaving me alone.

Not many battles last two days, which is as well, for all through the night men who knew they were to continue fighting on the morrow had to listen to the cries and groans and screams of the wounded, knowing such could as easily as not be their fate when the sun rose once more. Some of the injured men had been taken from the field for the physicians to treat, but some, Romans and Arabs both, still lay between the two armies.

Then their mournful voices were joined by cries of alarm from the Roman pickets. I heard Romans calling to one another in excitement and alarm as they dashed over to the right and, from that direction, the sound of fighting. After perhaps half an hour, the racket eased.