Eric Flint - An Oblique Approach

No, Menander held his tongue. There was no purpose in antiquarian pettifoggery. Perhaps the children would never need to know such things. Menander and Ezana had done all they could, in their bloody lives, to ensure that they wouldn't. And if, in the course of time, some of the children learned these ancient lessons for themselves, well—best they came to the lesson filled with the innocent and simple courage imparted by veterans' tales.

But, for all their infantile blood-lust, the children's favorite part of the tale was always the aftermath. The story of those wondrous days when the seeds of that Roman-Axumite alliance, which the children accepted as the nature of their world, first bore fruit. The days when a comradeship was forged, a comradeship which had long since entered the legends of Thrace and Ethiopia (and Constantinople and Rome, and Arabia; and India, come to it).

Above all, the children loved the tale when it finally told of the night when great Belisarius first spoke to that company of heroes of his purpose, and his mission, and his quest; and bound them to it, with oaths of iron. Of the rise of Satan, and the warning of a monk; of a captured princess, and a hero to be found, and a dagger delivered.

And the Talisman of God.

They would tell the tale, anew, would Menander and Ezana. And tell it well, each augmenting what the other forgot or misremembered. But, even in that practiced telling, the minds of the two veterans would drift and wander, back to the time itself.

They would tell the children, and hold back nothing. (For there were no secrets, now, to be kept from Satan and his hosts. The hosts were gone. And, though Satan was not, the monster was paralyzed for a time, chained in the Pit and gnashing at his own terrible wounds.) No, they would hold back nothing, but the children would never truly understand the tale. The children would understand only the grand adventure, and the glory of Belisarius, and the faithful heroism of his companions.

They would never understand the heart of that moment, that night when Belisarius bound his brotherhood.

The sheer, pure, unadulterated wonder of it.

Another change had taken place, the day after the battle. At Belisarius' request— firm request, but there had been no need for belligerence—Venandakatra had agreed to provide his guests with quarters in the hold below. Heretofore, the Romans and Axumites had been forced to make their quarters on the deck, sheltered only by their own tents.

In truth, neither the Romans nor the Ethiopians had minded the previous accommodations. Except for Belisarius, in fact, none of them had given the matter any thought at all. Sleeping on deck was the normal procedure, in those times, when traveling by ship. Few vessels were of a size to provide enclosed sleeping quarters for any but the captain. Decent quarters, at any rate. Common sailors often slept in the hold, under conditions which were so cramped and noisome that passengers would have recoiled in horror.

For all its size, the Indian craft was not much different. In his cabin amidships, and the smaller cabins which adjoined it, Venandakatra and his priests enjoyed comfortable surroundings. Luxurious ones, in the case of Venandakatra. The officers of the ship, and the commanders of the Malwa and Ye-tai troops, also possessed small cabins of their own, located in the stern. As for the rest—the soldiers enjoyed the comparative comfort of the deck, accepting the elements as the price for relative spaciousness and fresh air; the common sailors festered in the hold.

But there were a few quarters available for Belisarius' company. A storage cabin was found, in the bow, whose contents could be removed. Foodstuffs, in the main: amphorae filled with the grain and oil out of which the common fare of the soldiers was prepared. Some of the amphorae were stowed elsewhere, including all of the oil. Many of the amphorae filled with grain were simply pitched overboard. The amphorae were crude and cheap, and the extra grain was no longer needed due to the heavy casualties suffered by the Ye-tai in the battle.

Belisarius' companions had not been filled with joy, actually, upon learning of the new arrangement. The storage cabin was filthy until they cleaned it, and rat-infested until the weapons of cataphract and sarwen were put to inglorious use.

True, they were now sheltered from the wind and the rain and the sea-spray. They were also sheltered from clean air and sunlight, and crowded as badly as if they were in a dungeon. And if the seeping planks of the gloomy cabin were any less damp than the deck above, it was not noticeable to its disgruntled inhabitants.

But the general's companions made no objection, after they gave the matter a bit of thought. For the storage cabin in the bow had one outstanding feature, which they knew was Belisarius' purpose in obtaining it. Privacy.

Belisarius had needed that privacy, two nights after the battle, when his small company had settled into their new quarters. He had things to tell, and a thing to show, which no Malwa must hear or see.

For that purpose, the storage cabin served to perfection. Much better, in fact, that would one of the comfortable cabins amidships. The storage cabin was isolated, far distant from any Indian sleeping (or feigning sleep), and easily guarded from spies and eavesdroppers.

It was in those noisome surroundings, thus, that Belisarius imparted his great secret to his companions. He did so with neither reluctance nor hesitation. Nor, now, simply from a sense of obligation, or a need to forestall rumors of sorcery and demonism.

Those reasons remained, of course. But his overriding purpose in telling his companions his secret was that he now had a plan—or, at least, the beginnings of one. It was a plan which would require their combined efforts to succeed and would, moreover, require several members of his company to do things which would seem utterly bizarre unless they understood the reasons which underlay them. And for that, they needed to know the secret. Not so much for its own sake, but for the sake of his stratagem.

In some strange manner, in the very fury of the battle, the framework of his plot had come to him. Had sprung into his mind, actually, in midstroke of his sword.

Later, so magical had that moment been, that he had suspected the jewel was its cause. In the quiet hours which followed, he had probed the barrier relentlessly. But the jewel had reacted not at all. It was exhausted again, he realized, and with the realization came an understanding of just how feverishly the jewel had worked to augment his senses during the battle.

It was that augmentation, he thought, which had produced the sudden image of his stratagem. The plan was his, not the jewel's. The jewel was responsible for it only in the sense that its efforts had enabled his mind to work in such a wondrous manner. He understood, too, that the human subtleties and nuances which were the essence of his stratagem were utterly beyond the capabilities of the jewel. For now, certainly; perhaps always.

And so it was, in the gloom and stench of a taper-lit storage cabin, that Belisarius introduced his comrades to glory and wonder and terror.

He told the tale first, all of it, from its very beginning in a cave in Syria. He stressed that the jewel had originated with Michael of Macedonia, and had been brought to the general with the blessings of that monk and the bishop Anthony Cassian. For his cataphracts, he knew, those names would bring great assurance. And he thought the Ethiopians would take comfort in them also. True, none of the Ethiopians had probably ever heard of Michael of Macedonia or Anthony Cassian. Still, they were Christian folk, even if they were heretics. (Monophysites, essentially, though not without their own stiff variations on that creed.)