Strategos: Born in the Borderlands (15 page)

He threw the remaining nomismata into the bowl of a one-legged beggar in passing.

‘God bless you, boy,’ the beggar called.

Apion hobbled on and did not look back. When he pushed into the centre of the market square, something caught his eye from atop the town gates. He stopped and looked up. His blood ran cold and the bustle around him fell away.

Three new heads adorned the spikes above the gate. His heart wept as he recognised the features of Tarsites and the two archers who had accompanied him that day by the river.

***

It was mid-morning and the valley air was pleasant under a thin veil of cloud. Mansur strolled over to the wagon and rummaged in the box behind the driver’s berth, the chickens and goats clucking and bleating in misguided expectation of being fed. ‘Your mood troubles me today, lad. I’m not so sure sword practice is the best idea?’

‘I am sure,’ Apion replied. He had returned from Cheriana yesterday and found his thoughts incessant and chattering, but one thing was sure: if he was to find and face the master agente, then he would need to be ready to fight and fight well. He and Mansur had been practicing for the best part of a year now, and Apion’s good leg and both arms were leaner and stronger for it, but he knew he had not yet stretched himself to his full potential.

Mansur threw one of the two scimitars to him and Apion caught it by the ribbed and well-worn ivory handle. He hefted the light blade in his grip and eyed the edge: this was Mansur’s scimitar, while the old man used Kutalmish’s, from years past when they had both been Seljuk soldiers. He remembered Mansur’s words when they had first practiced with the weapons.
Now I beg you, be careful; they call this weapon the lion’s claw for a good reason. The curve means that all the force of a strike is channelled into the section that makes contact with your foe - it can cleave a man’s head in one blow.

‘So do you want to practice or admire your reflection in the blade?’ Mansur smirked.

Apion issued a half-grin in return as Mansur began to circle him slowly. Then Mansur executed a flurry of swipes, lightning fast, before Apion’s face. Apion tried his best to disguise a flinch and kept his eyes on Mansur: the old man’s movement and poise exactly as it was back when they had fought with poles, but there was something different when practising with the blade, an icy reality that one slip, one slow parry and he would be spliced open. His scar flared, the damage of a scimitar was already written all over his body. Added to that, where Apion had once found his crutch a steadying centre point, it now felt like a hindrance and he wanted to throw it to one side, to bring his other hand round to hold the blade steady, yet he knew if he was to do so he would crumple to the dust after a few moments of agony. He shook his head clear of the thoughts and glanced to Mansur’s footsteps, knowing that the old man’s right knee always bent a little before he lunged.

When Apion noticed Mansur’s knuckles whiten on his sword hand, he shot a glance to the old man’s knees and saw the left knee bend. Confused, his body tensed and he pulled the scimitar up to parry but with a flash of sunlight on iron, he found himself empty-handed, his scimitar spinning through the air to land by the point in the dust, quivering.

Mansur’s scimitar tip hovered by Apion’s heart. ‘Never,
never
, assume anything of your opponent, lad.’

Apion gawped at the glinting blade, frowned and then squinted up to Mansur. ‘I will master this. It might take time, but I will.’

Mansur stabbed his own blade into the ground then wrapped an arm around him. ‘I know you will. You possess a sharp mind, lad and I wish you would not put it to use only with the sword, but if mastering the sword makes you the happy boy you were before this obsession you have with the Agentes, then I will teach you all I know.’

***

Summer turned to autumn, dappling the green lands of Chaldia with gold and every day Apion focussed his efforts on sword practice and every night he pored over what little he knew of the Agentes. This night, however, Mansur and Apion sat opposite each other at the table, the shatranj board separating them, each with four pieces left in the game that had run into its sixth night. Apion examined every possible move again but there was no option that would not result in exposing his king, neatly tucked into one corner behind his pawns and flanked by a rook.

The game was a welcome distraction to him. It had been three months since that day in Cheriana, but the image of poor Tarsites’ severed head still sent a shiver through him every time he closed his eyes. Every fortnight since, he had taken Mansur’s wagon into the market at Trebizond. In those visits, he had spoken with more rogues, racketeers, assassins and swindlers then he could remember, all to no avail, the unsavoury characters dismissing him as just a boy, or falling silent and tight-lipped at the first mention of the Agentes. The backstreets of the bustling city held the answer to it all, an answer that was as yet utterly elusive. His knuckles whitened as he ground them into the table, seeing the dark door in his mind, the knotted arm reaching for it.

‘It’s tortuous, isn’t it?’ Mansur grinned.

‘Sorry?’ Apion looked up, startled.

‘The game,’ Mansur nodded to the board.

Apion shook his head. The old man was worried for him, he could sense it. ‘Every move I plot in my head looks good,’ Apion spoke, his words echoing both the puzzle of shatranj and the riddle of the Agentes, ‘until I see the move after that and then the next. All moves lead me to a place I don’t want to go.’

Mansur nodded. ‘So do you sacrifice a piece to take one of mine, perhaps? Is it worth it?’

Apion frowned, looking the old man in the eye. ‘No, that opens too many doors.’ They held each other’s gaze for some time.

Finally, a piece of firewood snapped and Mansur nodded, then tapped the board with a sigh. ‘In shatranj, sometimes sacrifice is the only option. Imagine how the strategos feels, he must make such choices when it is not wooden pieces that are at stake but living, breathing men: whether to send a unit of infantry to their deaths to allow the rest a fighting retreat; to have his cavalry pierce an enemy flank knowing that it will slow their advance but then the horsemen will be hopelessly lost in a nest of speartips as a result; whether to leave his bowmen out front for one last hail of arrows knowing it will critically thin the enemy charge but that the archers will die for it. These are the choices of the strategos.’

Apion frowned and shook his head. ‘I don’t envy the man who has to make that call and then to try to rest at night with the knowledge of what he has done, but I would rather take up the mantle and face the guilt that comes with it and stand against fate, than wander blindly to my death at the whim of another.’

Mansur grinned wryly at this. ‘Then take up that mantle – make your move!’

Apion studied the board again: he had his king, a knight, a rook and three pawns left; Mansur with his king, vizier, a chariot and a pawn. Mansur was positioned around Apion’s bunkered pieces and the onus was on Apion to break forward and make the most of his numerical advantage. He had soon learned the lesson to avoid rushing to victory on impulse, but also that hesitation could sap confidence. ‘Protect the flanks,’ he muttered, ‘but to win I must expose them?’

Mansur smoothed his moustache and considered the comment. ‘Such is the nature of the game. Expose the flanks if you must, but develop the centre in doing so, forcing your enemy to defend.’

Apion studied the board, mapping out the moves his pawns and his knight could make. Then he thought of the oft-passing columns of Byzantine thema soldiers, always the same make up of a head of kataphractoi cavalry, a body of skutatoi infantry and a tail or flanks of toxotai archers with a mule and wagon train to the rear. No elephants, chariots or other such exotic units in sight.

‘Cavalry and infantry; that’s what a real strategos has to work with, isn’t it? That’s what Cydones has in his ranks?’

Mansur looked up as though he had heard a long forgotten voice. ‘Cydones?’ The old man nodded. ‘He is a fine strategos. He manages Chaldia well and leads the fighting men like a lion. His tools are indeed the infantry and the cavalry; the anvil and the hammer. Yet those tools are not enough. No money comes from Constantinople to fund the defence of the empire anymore. Still, that man has been the thorn in the Seljuk advance for over two decades!’

‘The Seljuks won’t stop, will they? Cydones can never win.’

‘As things stand, Cydones can only delay the coming of my people. This will remain the case while the Byzantine emperor chooses not to support his outlying themata adequately and the Seljuk Sultan believes war and conquest is tantamount to glory. The
Falcon
is a driven individual; Tugrul sees every moment of hesitation as a drop of lost glory.’

Apion wondered what would become of the borderlands if the expected invasion occurred. If the Seljuks were to sweep over the land then his life and his quest would be swept away with their charge. Then, as his eyes hung on his pawns, he saw the killer move. He picked up a pawn and moved it away from the other two, pinning Mansur’s chariot against his king. He looked up, grinning.

Mansur pushed his vizier one square forward then cocked an eyebrow. ‘Checkmate!’

Apion’s heart sank; he had exposed his own king and trapped him in the corner. His brow knitted. His first victory over the old man remained elusive. ‘It’s impossible!’ He fumed.

‘Then how is it possible for me to win time after time?’ Mansur asked calmly.

‘I don’t know, our pieces are of equal power, I’ve tried matching your sequences of movements, and I’ve tried striking out with my own patterns . . . ’

‘Our pieces are of equal power, but we are not.’ His words were blunt.

Apion stared at Mansur. Was the old man mocking him?

‘The most powerful weapon in shatranj is the mind of the man who controls the pieces.’ Mansur tapped a finger to his temple and then moved his vizier back to the square it had been on. ‘You are getting better and better. I haven’t been that close to defeat in a long, long time. Had you moved your knight around my flank, you would have limited my next move,’ he pushed his vizier forward, ‘and I would have been forced to expose my king just as you did.’

Apion saw the pattern like a ray of sunlight.

‘You would have won. A boy of twelve years beating a man on his last clutch of summers. You should be proud.’

‘I could have won . . .
should
have won,’ Apion’s spine tingled.

Mansur swept a hand across the board. ‘You are starting to see the board from above, like an eagle, soaring on a zephyr, looking down on the formations. The higher you soar, the greater your eye will be for weaknesses in the enemy line.’

Apion held Mansur’s gaze as the old man’s eyes sparkled in the firelight. ‘Like a strategos?’

‘See like the eagle and you
are
the strategos!’ Mansur grinned.

‘Better to be the
Haga,
with two heads to see the battlefield?’ Apion grinned in return.

Mansur laughed at this. ‘Well put.’ Then the old man held his gaze. ‘To see you smile is like a tonic for me, lad. Does it not make you feel good when you smile, when you let go of your troubles?’

‘It does,’ Apion nodded. ‘But I do not seek out the thoughts that trouble me. Since that day by the Lykos, they come to me incessantly, they will not leave me alone.’

‘You can change that, lad. Let go of this obsession over the Agentes and live the life you have now. Do you think you can do that?’

Apion saw the hope in Mansur’s eyes and held his gaze for a moment, then glanced away to the hearth, and nodded. ‘I will try.’

***

Later that night Apion could not sleep and went to the stable, brushing the mane of the grey mare and speaking to her softly. Then he heard the clopping of hooves. The mare’s ears perked up. Apion looked out into the darkness.