Count Belisarius (22 page)

‘Could you not appeal to the Patriarch for a dispensation from this vow?' she asked.

‘I could do so, but I would not, because of the others, who must remain still bound by it. My beloved Antonina, whose image has lingered in my heart these fifteen years, be patient and wait! To know that when I return to the City the greatest reward in the world will be awaiting me, this surely will hasten the victorious return that the Emperor has wished for me.'

Though my mistress Antonina could not press him in a matter which touched his honour, neither could she conceal her disappointment. She asked: ‘Oh, Belisarius, are you sure that you are not making excuses to gain time?' But this was pure rhetoric, for never was delight written so plainly on any man's face as on his.

Belisarius and my mistress returned to the tribunal-hall, and both resumed their official looks and accents. Belisarius recalled Narses, and invited both him and my mistress, and the officers of their escort, to a banquet with himself and his staff that night. My mistress had no further opportunity to speak to Belisarius in private, and both of them were careful not to reveal by word or look the great love that each felt for the other. The banquet was a sober affair, because of the vow against drunkenness which nearly everyone present had taken, and because table-delicacies are not easily procured at Daras. On the next morning Narses and she returned home, armed with letters of humble gratitude to their royal Master and Mistress. But Narses had guessed my mistress's secret, and whispered to her as soon as they were seated privately together in a gig: ‘May he be as fortunate in your love, most Illustrious Lady, as you in his!'

My mistress replied in words that pleased him as much as his had pleased her: ‘And may you, Distinguished Chamberlain, be as successful when the general's purple cloak flaps from your shoulders as you have been these many years while dressed in the stiff crimson silks of your Palace appointment.'

When we were back again at Constantinople my mistress found
two letters from Belisarius waiting for her that had come by a quicker route. They were written in such simple, elegant language and indicative of such honest ardour that, since this love was not only sanctioned but positively enjoined upon the two of them by Imperial orders, she broke a life-long rule, and committed her own amorous feelings to writing. Many scores of long letters passed between them until his return to her some eighteen months later.

The next phase of the war was a Persian invasion of Roman Armenia; but it was energetically checked by Sittas, Belisarius's former comrade, who was brother-in-law to Theodora. The Roman name being now held in greater respect than formerly, a number of Christian Armenians from the Persian side presently deserted to the Imperial armies. Kobad also lost the revenues of the gold-mine at Pharangium, a town situated in a fruitful but almost inaccessible canyon on the border between the two Armenias; for the chief engineer there elected to put the city and mines under Roman protection. Kobad, with the obstinacy of old age, refused to withdraw his troops from the neighbourhood of Daras, though Justinian sent an embassy to re-open peace negotiations. Each side tried to fix the moral responsibility for the conflict on the other. Kobad told the Roman ambassador that the Persians had done meritoriously in seizing and garrisoning the Caspian Gates, which the Emperor Anastasius had refused to buy from the owner even at a nominal price; since, by doing so, he had protected both the Roman and Persian Empires from barbarian invasion. The garrison was costly to maintain, and Justinian should, in justice, either pay a half-share of the expenses or, if he preferred, send a detachment of Roman troops there sufficient to permit half the Persian garrison to withdraw in their favour.

Then King and Ambassador discussed the breach of an ancient treaty regarding frontier fortifications. The Roman fortification of Daras, Kobad pointed out, had made it strategically necessary for the Persians to keep a strong frontier force at Nisibis; and this again was an unfair tax on his country's resources, and was one injustice too many for him to accept. He now offered Justinian three alternatives to choose from: contributing to the defence of the Caspian Gates, dismantling the fortifications of Daras, renewing war. The ambassador understood the King to mean that a money tribute, speciously disguised as a contribution to common defence against the barbarian menace, would end the conflict.

Justinian could not yet decide whether or not to offer a money tribute. While he deliberated, Kobad was visited by the King of the Saracens, his ally, with a plan for a severe blow at the Romans. The Saracen was a tall, lean, vigorous old man, whose Court was at Hira in the desert, and who for fifty years had been raiding Roman territory between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian borders. He would appear suddenly from the wilderness with a force of a few hundred horsemen, plunder, burn, massacre, take prisoners – by the thousand sometimes – and then disappear again as suddenly as he came. Several punitive expeditions had been made against him, but all had been unsuccessful; for the art of desert warfare is only understood by those born to the desert. He had cut off and captured two strong Roman columns operating against him and held their officers to ransom.

This old king, then, suggested to Kobad that instead of campaigning as usual among the head-waters of Euphrates and Tigris, where the Romans had a number of walled cities to fall back upon if attacked, he should take a southerly route, which no Persian Army had ever taken before, following the Euphrates. At the point where the river-course turns from west to north he should strike across the Syrian desert. For here, beyond the desert, the Romans, trusting to the natural defences of waterless sand and rock, had built only few fortifications, and these were manned by no troops worth the name. If vigorously attacked, Antioch would fall into their hands without a struggle, because – he was justified in this comment – Antioch is the most unserious city in the entire East, the inhabitants having only four interests, namely wine, sex, Hippodrome politics, and religious argument. (Trade is not an interest, but a disagreeable necessity to which they submit in order to keep themselves in funds for the active prosecution of these four exciting interests.) What a magnificent city to plunder! And the raiders could return safely with their spoils long before any rescue could arrive from Roman Mesopotamia.

Kobad was interested but sceptical. If no Persian Army in the past had found this approach feasible, in what way had conditions altered to make it so? How would an army, unaccustomed to temporary starvation and thirst, maintain itself in the parched, pastureless desert?

The King of the Saracens replied to the first question that hitherto the Great King had never called upon an experienced Saracen for advice. As for the second question: the Persian force should consist entirely of light cavalry – infantry and heavy cavalry were ruled
out – and they should make their expedition in the spring, when there would be ample pasture, even in the wildest desert, for those who knew where to look for it; and they should travel light; and the Saracens would be waiting for them, at a point on the river well within the Roman territories, with sufficient food and water for the last and most difficult stage of the journey.

Kobad was persuaded by the King of the Saracens, though Saracens are a notoriously faithless race; because he could surely have no motive in making these suggestions but to obtain Persian help in a profitable raid which was on too large a scale for himself to undertake alone. All that Kobad needed to guard against was treachery during the return journey, and he would therefore insist on the King of the Saracens leaving his two sons and two grandsons as hostages at the Persian Court at Susa until the campaign was over. The Saracen agreed to do so, and by March of the next year – the year following the battle of Daras – all preparations had been made. The expedition assembled at Ctesiphon in Assyria, 15,000 strong, under the command of an able Persian named Azareth.

They passed the Euphrates just above the city of Babylon and continued along the southern bank through uninhabited country until they reached the Roman frontier station at Circesium, where there were only a few Customs police. From there they pushed on rapidly astride the Roman road, which, after following the river for a hundred miles, curves south to Palmyra and Damascus. They were now joined by a large body of Saracens under their King; who told Azareth that the route lay straight across the desert to Chalcis, a walled town, which was almost the only obstacle to be encountered between them and Antioch, and this was no obstacle either, because it had a garrison of only 200 men. Azareth did not altogether trust the Saracens, though they had brought the stipulated amount of provisions. He therefore waited until scouts, sent ahead under Saracen escort, should report back that the desert pasture was plentiful, and that no ambush had been laid for them on the other side.

But to allow himself this delay was to underrate the energy of Belisarius, who had recently introduced a system of linked look-outs, with agreed smoke-signals, as a protection against frontier-raids. Within an hour of the Persians' arrival at Circesium, 200 miles across the Southern desert, Belisarius at Daras had learned the numbers and composition of their forces and had taken his decision. Leaving only slight
garrisons behind in Daras and the other frontier cities, he hurried by forced marches to the relief of Antioch at the head of all the trained troops that he could assemble – which, at such short notice, amounted to only 8,000 men; but he picked up reinforcements on the line of march to the number of 8,000 more. He took the southern road, by way of Carrhae (famous for the crushing defeat by the Persians of Crassus, colleague to Julius Caesar) and managed with his main cavalry forces to reach Chalcis, 300 miles way, in seven days, just in time to man the fortifications. But it was a close race, for by now Azareth was across the desert and only half a day's march away from Chalcis – among the very rocks where St Jerome and his mad fellow-ascetics once lived like angry scorpions, worshipping God indeed, but ungratefully rejecting God's creation of all pleasant and beautiful things. On the same morning Belisarius was joined by 5,000 Arab horsemen from the Northern Syrian desert, where they had been pasturing their horses. They were the subjects of King Harith ibn Gabala of Bostra in Transjordania, to whom Justinian paid a yearly sum in gold on condition that he checked Saracen raids on Syria. These Arabs were not reliable soldiers, however, and King Harith was suspected of having an understanding with the Saracens, because whenever there had been a Saracen raid his men had always arrived two or three days too late; but Belisarius was glad to have them with him, because in the absence of his infantry, who were still on the way, they increased his numbers to 21,000 men.

Azareth was disgusted with himself when his vanguard, pressing on to Chalcis, was suddenly thrown back on the main body by a Roman cavalry charge. He had let his opportunity slip, and could not now reach Antioch without risking a battle against the same general and the same troops that had fought so well at Daras. If he were defeated at such a distance from the frontier, and on the wrong side of the Syrian desert, it was unlikely that a single Persian would survive the return journey – the Saracens would save their own skins, melting into the desert which they knew so well. Even if he were victorious, he would not be able, probably, to prevent Belisarius taking refuge with the surviving remnant of his forces behind the walls of Chalcis. It would be dangerous to continue the raid on Antioch, with Chalcis lying uncaptured in his rear and Roman reinforcements on the way. So he took the wise decision to retrace his steps, with no gains and no losses, while he still had provisions and while the weather remained
temperate. He consoled himself with the reflection that even if he had reached Chalcis before Belisarius, and pushed on to Antioch, and plundered it, then his forces – especially the Saracens – would have been disorganized by victory, and Belisarius would have intercepted him on his return and again had the advantage of choosing the battle-ground and standing on the defensive, as at Daras. The King of the Saracens agreed that retirement was now the only course; he did not dare to break his own forces up into small raiding parties and go off plundering to the southward, for fear that Azareth would report to Kobad that he had been deserted, and that Kobad would put his Saracen hostages to death. So the Persians and Saracens faced about and marched homeward, and Belisarius followed close behind them to make sure that they did not turn and come back again into Syria by some other route. Neither army hurried or attempted any hostilities against the other. Belisarius remained at a day's distance behind Azareth and encamped each night at the place which Azareth had abandoned that morning. He kept a sharp look-out on his own flanks and rear, in case of sudden surprise by the Saracens.

It was the seventeenth day of April, and Holy Friday, the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus. The feast of Easter, which is the day on which He is said to have risen again from the dead, was due to take place two days later. The Persians had now regained the bank of the Euphrates and marched fifty miles along it to the point where the road from Damascus and Palmyra curves round to the river. It was clear that they meditated no alternative plan but would continue on their homeward march along the river. Now, Belisarius had, at Chalcis, severely reprimanded his vanguard commander for engaging the enemy without orders, and thus spoiling a tactical scheme by which the whole Persian Army was to have been trapped; and would have relieved him of his command but for the intercession of the Master of Offices. That Belisarius seemed to discourage the offensive spirit in his men and did not attempt to harry the retreating enemy, made the loud-mouthed talkers of his army accuse him of cowardice; but only behind his back as yet.

Then the Christian fanaticism of Easter, which is always celebrated by a great feast after forty days of frugal living and one or two complete fasts, overcame them. They clamoured to be led against the Persians so that they might win a resounding victory for celebration on Easter Sunday, the luckiest day in all the year. Belisarius that night
entered the small town of Sura; but the Persians had been making so slow a pace, because they did not wish to seem in any hurry to return home, that part of his infantry had now come up with the cavalry. These battalions had not marched all the way to Chalcis, but had taken a short cut down the Euphrates, turning southward from the Carrhae road. Their arrival was the signal for renewed battle excitement: it was said that with 20,000 men Belisarius had no right to avoid engaging a dispirited and weary enemy.