Strategos: Born in the Borderlands (37 page)

‘Aye, my stomach is bottomless it seems.’ He nodded to the crumbs scattered atop his own pack by the spring. ‘We could stop for the rest of the day and I don’t think I’d be able to take in enough water or food.’

‘Ha - maybe you could hide in here! There’s enough fruit and water for a man to live on?’ He joked, and then wondered at the possibility.
You go out from the town today as a sixteen. You return as a fifteen.

Sidonius did not reply, his face riddled with guilt.

‘You didn’t come in here to eat, did you? You came to slip away.’

The lad’s shoulders slumped and he held out his hands. ‘I’m not cut out for army life.’

‘When you’ve signed up, you have no option.’ Apion kept his face stern.

‘I’ve tried, but I feel like a child amongst all these veterans. My father is a rich farmer in Trebizond, but I am not cut out for that life. So I came here to prove I was more than a rich man’s son, but I don’t fit in here either.’

‘I see,’ Apion sighed. ‘Then you’ve answered the question already. Run for home and you will not find happiness. Stay here and at least you can protect your family by protecting the borders. Neither option is pleasant, but the latter is the correct one.’

Sidonius’ head dropped and he kicked out at a pebble. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, sir, for being weak, I mean. I am sorry I spoke of this. I will not show such weakness again.’ He stepped forward to pick up his pack and leave the spring.

Apion stepped forward and grabbed his wrist. ‘Sidonius, wait. There’s something you need to be aware of. When we get back to the barracks. You are in danger.’

Sidonius’ eyes widened and then he tried to laugh it off but stopped as Apion’s expression remained firm under his jutting brow. Then panic set on the lad’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m in as much danger as you. It’s the tourmarches
.
’

‘Officer Bracchus?’

‘You have not been here for a week yet, Sidonius, but you have probably heard the rumours already; he has no honour and his heart is black.’ His expression intensified and his grip on Sidonius shoulder grew vice-like until the lad’s face wrinkled in fear. Then a thud shook the pair, followed by a gurgling. Sidonius’ eyes grew wide and a hot crimson spray jetted from his mouth and nostrils, covering Apion’s face. Apion stepped back, mind spinning. Had the fire behind the dark door made him do it without realising? He leapt back and touched a hand to his sword hilt and dagger – both were still sheathed, but doubt laced his veins as he noticed his sword arm: knotted, scarred, sun burnished and adorned with the red stigma of the
Haga
.

Then his eyes locked on the arrow quivering in the lad’s neck, arterial spray fountaining from the wound. Sidonius grasped at the arrow shaft, mouthing silent cries for help, before slumping to his knees, his eyes distant. By the time the lad’s body crumpled onto the pebbles, Apion was crouched and scanning the undergrowth, a rhiptarion held horizontally, eyes narrowed. Then he saw a figure in the foliage: a Seljuk archer, fumbling for another shaft, darting glances at his weapon and then up at Apion. The Seljuk raised his bow just as Apion launched his throwing spear. With a thwack of cracking ribs and a shower of blood, the Seljuk was thrown back into the foliage. Apion dropped shield and spear and leapt into the green, whipping his dagger from his belt to land on the man, who was already shivering in his death throes, pink foam bubbling from the javelin wound, the cotton vest the man wore useless from a strike at such close range. Apion held his dagger to the Seljuk’s throat but the light in the man’s eyes was already dimming. Then a cry rent the air.

‘Allahu Akbar!’

Then the same cry rang out in a hundred foreign tones all around the thicket, followed by a chorus of swords rasping from their scabbards. The ground rumbled and Apion’s eyes narrowed on the foliage all around him, his skin anticipating the first lick of a sword blade or arrowhead. Then it happened. A scimitar split the air above his forehead and he ducked just as a Seljuk swordsman chopped the weapon down into the bark of a palm. Apion then leapt up to crunch an uppercut into the man’s jaw, sending teeth spraying across the spring. The Seljuk pulled his scimitar free of the bark and jabbed at Apion, who leapt back just too late, but his klibanion saved him, the blade chinking from one of the iron plates. Apion grasped for his own scimitar, then pulled his hand back from the hilt with a roar as the Seljuk’s blade tore across his knuckles. The Seljuk came again and again, ripping the blade past Apion, scoring the flesh on his forearms as each strike came closer. At either side, more and more Seljuk fighters poured into the thicket, ignoring the duelling pair and heading for the other fourteen skutatoi. Between parrying blows he shot glances around for his shield. Then he stepped on a wet pebble, his boot slid out from under him and he was prone, and a Seljuk warrior leapt for him. Apion swiped his scimitar round with a guttural roar, drowning out the snapping of sinew and bone as the Seljuk’s leg was sheared in that one blow. The Seljuk fell, screaming until Apion silenced him with a strike through the heart.

All around: desperate roaring and clashing of iron sounded from back over the boulder pile. Apion stooped to pick up his kontarion and shield, then splashed through the crimson shallows of the spring.

He slid over the boulder pile and saw it: five skutatoi remained standing, backs pressed together in a last stand as some twenty Seljuk spearmen harried and jabbed at them. The other nine lay like broken flotsam in the spring, punctured with arrows and their flesh ripped open by scimitar blades. In the shimmering heat outside of the thicket, a dust cloud billowed up from a moving mass. Blinking, he made out the seemingly infinite train of heavily armoured spearmen, archers and cavalry, a sea of banners bearing the horizontal bow emblem of the Seljuks. The akhi in the thicket were merely a light vanguard. He remembered briefly Bey Soundaq’s words at the mountain pass.

A storm approaches from the east, and the Falcon soars on its wrath.
Byzantium’s time is over.

He turned back to the last stand, only two skutatoi stood now. This would be the end, surely. He gripped his scimitar hilt firmly, rushing for the nearest Seljuk with a roar. His blade sunk into the warrior’s neck and before the Seljuk next to him could turn to meet the attack, Apion had his sword free and scythed it round and into the man’s chest, bursting the unarmed ribcage, showering the ground in a shrapnel of bone and gore. The next man he fought mouthed screams but Apion heard only the blood pound in his ears, feeling the heat of gore on his face and the dull shudder of every blow he hacked into the man’s lamellar.

Then the next man came at him, shield raised, scimitar hooked over the top. Apion butted forward with his own shield and the man staggered but remained composed. Then Apion lunged forward for a killer strike. The Seljuk took a step back and let the blow fall through the air, sending Apion sprawling into the midst of the Seljuk mass pressing on the last two skutatoi. He scrambled to stand but slipped on the carpet of gore. Clawing at the crimson mush, he tried to pull his way clear of the melee until a pair of hands grappled on his ankles and pulled him back. A sea of snarling faces roared, jabbing their scimitars down at him. He grasped a shield from a dead skutatoi and, like a desperate animal, he tucked his torso behind it and kicked out as the Seljuks rained blows on the battered skutum. One scimitar ripped into his ankle and he could barely hear his own pained scream. He tucked his leg in and saw another skutatos drop to the ground beside him, eyes staring, jaw missing and blood haemorrhaging from the wound. He roared at the impotence, the certainty of death, then pushed to standing with a roar, lifting his scimitar and swiping round at the cluster of Seljuks. If he was to die then he would die fighting. Then a hand wrenched at his neck, yanking his entire body up and off of the ground.

He retched as his midriff landed on the back lip of a saddle, legs and arms dangling either side. Suddenly the acrid stench of blood was pierced by horse sweat. He righted himself to see what chaos his world had fallen into. He saw a stern grimace and forked beard of the rider.
Cydones!
He caught sight of some thirty other kataphractoi riding with the strategos. The akhi party lay shattered where they had stood just moments before. Then the wind grew into a whistle and the horse juddered as it thundered back through the mountain pass. The patter of arrows smacking into the dust around them thinned and then stopped and the jeering of the massive Seljuk column fell away behind them.

‘Ferro!’ Cydones cried over the wind. ‘Break off detachments of three, get word to each of the tourmae. The campaign army will not be enough – not nearly enough – we need all of our reserves, even the garrison from Trebizond. Send word to the emperor: tell him we need the support of the tagma or the eastern frontier
will
fall!’

‘Aye, sir,’ Ferro slowed and yelled orders to the rest of the kataphractoi. Sub-groups of riders splintered off and shot ahead at full gallop, lowered in their saddles.

‘Sir,’ Apion said, righting himself to sit in the saddle, ‘the Seljuk army, they’re not coming through the pass for Argyroupolis. They look to be headed south, around the mountains?’

‘Tugrul means to draw us out into the field,’ Cydones replied. ‘They are forcing us to break one of the tenets of the art of war, they are forcing us to fight them on their terms.’

‘Do we have the strength to meet them on the field?’

‘They outnumber us vastly, four of them to one of us. The
Falcon
means to crush us,’ Cydones said. ‘But we will face them. We must!’

***

Grey clouds scudded across the sky, driven by a warm summer wind. The wall guard at Argyroupolis stood stiff-jawed and attentive, looking over the sea of tents massed on the flat ground outside of the town walls. Meanwhile, inside the town, the barracks had been transformed: a contraflow of wagons and mule trains entered and left the enclosure, the warehouse their destination, laden with bare essentials such as tents, mallets, sickles, spades, axes, cookware and hand-operated grain mills along with caltrops, disassembled artillery, spare bows, swords and armour.

Every patch of free space in the muster yard and the space outside the barracks was packed with the fully mustered thema army and the shattered remnant of the Colonea Thema that had staggered in the previous evening. Thick clusters of infantry and riders stood, chattering nervously and drinking from their skins, nibbling carefully on their rations, cracked wheat and yoghurt cakes being a cheap favourite given their ease of being cooked down into a nourishing stew as needed or eaten solid while on the move. The occasional whinny came from the loose rabble of five hundred mounted Pechenegs that Cydones had managed to hire when it became clear that the emperor would not be sending the tagmata to support them. These Turk mercenaries were swift and deadly with their bows, if lightly armoured and liable to digress from orders. The populace crammed around the perimeter, eager to hear the latest word on the war. Fathers, mothers, wives, sons and daughters with faces wrinkled in concern for their kin who readied to engage the Seljuk advance. Tucked into the corner of the enclosure by the officers’ quarters, Apion stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sha, Nepos, Blastares and Procopius. The rest of the depleted bandon stood behind him.

‘Come on, come on,’ Procopius shuffled in discomfort, hands clasped over his groin. ‘I’ve got two jugs of the amber stuff sloshing around in here!’

‘Keep a lid on it, you’re just making it worse,’ Blastares hissed, breath reeking of the ale the pair had been quaffing all morning to calm their nerves. Then he jabbed a finger up to the battlements. ‘The big man’s about to speak.’

Three blasts on a buccina drowned out the rabble of soldiers and whinnying of horses and at once the crowd fell silent, the ranks inside the barracks rippled into neat bandon squares, Chi-Rho banners lifted high. Then the wall guard about-faced to glare into the city.

‘Warriors and citizens of the thema!’ Cydones strode along the battlements, fully armoured and gleaming, plumage whipping in the wind. He stopped at a crumbling section that straddled the barrack compound and the market square. He held his arms outstretched, his face shaded under the brow of his helmet. ‘Tugrul means to claim glory for his god and his people, but the fire is with us.
God
is with us! By the end of the month, the Seljuk threat will have been extinguished, these pretenders driven from our lands and back to the east. As you can see, our armies number greatly and our men hunger to wield their swords.’
 

‘The Seljuks number greater though!’ A lone voice heckled.

The skutatoi punctuating the throng of the populace surged for the man who had spoken out. Apion knew the man had a point though. The emperor had not sent any reinforcements, not even a token detachment of kataphractoi to raise morale.