The Curse of Babylon (70 page)

Just yards before smashing into the crowd, Rado shouted the final command. When he’d got us practising the move on foot the previous afternoon, even he was dubious of its success. Now, on horseback, we might have been professional cavalry. Like a hunter’s net, unfolding as it’s thrown, a column sixteen deep became a row five deep. At the very last moment, it became two separate rows. We struck in a loose line that filled half the big pass. No longer scared – no longer thinking very much – I knocked the unarmed eunuchs out of my way and struck at the first Royal Guard in reach. With a recoil that moved me on my saddle, I got him above the collar bone. He went down, screaming and spurting blood. Shouting in a mixture of English and Greek, I moved to the next, and then to the next. For a moment, I was aware of Rado beside me. His face shone with the sort of exaltation you see when a relic is held up in church. On my left, I had a brief sight of our standard bearer. With his free arm, he was slashing all about him. Then, someone in leather armour thrust a spear at me. It caught on one of the rings in my chainmail and nearly pulled me down. But I managed to stay on my horse. I took hold of the spear in my left hand, ramming the pommel of my sword into its bearer’s face.

I’d been worrying about how my horse would take the noise and movement of a battle. After a few signs of alarm, it soon appeared to be enjoying things more than I was. We darted here. We darted there. For the first time since I’d climbed on its back, the creature was doing as I asked.

When you’re writing the history of a war, battles are easy to describe. The hardest part of describing them to my mind – at least, it is in Latin – is keeping to the right sequence of tenses in the exaggerated
oratio obliqua
. You start with a silly speech, such as no winning general ever gave, and proceed through accounts of attacks and counter-attacks in which the individuals present might as well be counters on a gaming board. It may be, as I keep pointing out, that I have no feel for military things. But my general recollection of this battle – as of every other in which I’ve had to take part – is the moving from one brutal kill to another. Once or twice, there was the inevitable dawning fear that a tickling in my side was first warning that I’d been done for, or, when splashed in the face with someone else’s blood, that I was blinded. But this was less a battle than a slaughter. If we’d gone at them in the rain, they’d have put up more of a fight. When we’d struck, everyone armed had been drawn up on parade and was squeezed on every side by the unarmed. What little fighting order had remained was then erased by the continuing deathly hail from our archers. After the first wild slashing and stabbing, my own problem was finding anyone remotely worth killing. I think most of those I killed would have had trouble hurting a mouse.

One notable event, though, I must record. I was formally in charge and this would have been the ultimate in what the Romans of old called the
spolia opima
. I’d finished carving up someone in a fancy robe, whose beard turned out to be a falsie, when I saw Chosroes himself. Well, I saw his public security cage. A dozen eunuchs were pulling and pushing frantically at its wheeled base to get it from a fighting zone that was spreading along the pass almost as fast as they could move. Spurring my horse, I raised my sword and made a dash towards it.

‘Die, fucker!’ I shouted in Persian, taking the head off one of the eunuchs. That got the others out of the way. I knew the cage would be locked on the inside. The weakest point would be the front grille. Though doubled, this was only of bronze. I snatched at the spear I hadn’t yet bothered using and rammed it at the grille. Straight in it went, passing through something soft before it jarred against the iron plates behind. I heard a bubbled scream for mercy that included my own name. I hadn’t struck a killing blow – but the next one might kill. I pulled on the shaft of the spear. The head stuck fast in the bronze bands.

And that was the end of my second chance to end the Persian War in one stroke. Before I could do more, a whole mass of armed foot soldiers were driven at me – desperate to get away from three berserk farmers on horseback. By the time I was able to cut my way through them, the wheeled iron box was gone. In its place, hundreds of eunuchs were on their knees, arms outstretched to create the impression of a thicket of human flesh.

I wheeled round just in time to parry a big man who was riding at me with levelled spear. The tiniest delay and it was an attack that would have driven a spear right through my chainmail. I’d no sooner scared him out of reach when a blow from behind knocked me sideways. Nearly dropping my sword, I clutched at an increasingly maddened horse. I found myself looking into the face of another big man whose battleaxe looked inescapably directed at one of the less well-covered parts of my body. I pushed myself upright and tried to raise my sword. The blow never came. Even as he began to swing at me, the man dropped his axe and settled into a position on his horse held only by the rigidity of his armour. An arrow had gone in through one of his temples and was poking four inches out through the other side of his face.

I gave the briefest look to where the arrow must have originated. I nearly fell off my horse again. Halfway down one of the slopes, I saw Antonia and Eboric on horseback. He had a bow in his hands. She seemed to be directing him where to shoot. From what little I could see, they both seemed remarkably pleased with themselves. If I hadn’t got into a viciously unequal fight with some footmen, I’d have been straight up there to give the pair of them a good hiding.

But one of the younger men was now beside me, pulling at my reins. ‘My Lord, My Lord!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you hear the signal? Withdraw and regroup.’ I might have heard it. For sure, I hadn’t paid it any attention. But this was the order and we picked our way together, over ground that was thick with the dead, to where Rado and the standard bearer were waving everyone into position behind his appointed leader. Two dozen of the younger men got behind me. At the renewed steerhorn blast, we rode back into the battle. When I looked again, Antonia and Eboric had withdrawn to the top of the pass and he was taking aim at someone deep within the swirling mass of the enemy. The archers had now run out of arrows and had joined us on horseback. Even the priests were joining in. Clubs in hand, they hopped from pocket of resistance to another.

But it was no longer a battle. Over the vast expanse of the fallen that lay before us, there could be no repeat of our first charge. Nor, when we caught up with the fleeing, shoving camp followers who separated us from the actual fighting men, was there any more killing than took our fancy. Fifteen deep into the retreating mass, the fighting men could have thrown us back into the Larydia Pass and far along it. These were the real soldiers of the army that had fought its way through the streets of Jerusalem. But they never got to us. Even as they cut a path through their own people, they were overwhelmed by the stampede. It was less an assault than a mounted herding of two-legged cattle.

Simply because they couldn’t get to us, I can’t call the Persian regulars cowardly. But any chance they might have had to stand and fight now vanished for good. In one of his last revisions to the battle plan, Rado had incorporated a stepped descent about a mile into the big pass. I’d stared wonderingly at the six rows of pebbles one of the locals had placed far into the pass – far, far beyond the marked point of our own engagement. One row after another, the Persian regulars fell backwards over the first of these steps. It was rather like watching foam carried down the rapids of a stream.

That was the end of resistance. Regulars, camp followers, eunuchs in what had been golden robes, useless cavalry in their heavy mailed armour – all were swept backwards and lost. Far ahead of us, trumpeters blew their lungs ragged. They were barely heard above the pandemonium of screams and clashing of metal on metal and of breaking wood. No one obeyed the orders they tried to pass on. Our horses stepping carefully over multiple layers of the dead and dying, we picked our way down each of the big steps. We pushed and sometimes hurried forward, killing and killing and killing until we’d run out of energy to lift our swords. I stopped for what seemed a moment and leaned forward over my horse. When I looked up, the closest Persians were already fifty yards ahead of me. This low in the pass, the floodwaters hadn’t yet finished receding. If we continued forward, the bodies underfoot would be floating. But there was no need to continue. Roaring with fear and pushing and stabbing and slashing at each other not to be at the exposed rear, and increasingly falling over in the stinking water, the Persians wouldn’t be back.

I sat up straight and stared at my notched, slippery sword. Rado was beside me. ‘Are you wounded?’ he asked.

The bruises I’d got from that battleaxe and a few cuts on my forearm didn’t count. But I suddenly noticed how my arms were red with gore. If the rest of me was like this, he’d only have been able to tell me from my size. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘How about you?’ He shook his head. I turned my attention to the now distant enemy. ‘I could prose on about ancient and largely forgotten battles, like Gaugamela and Magnesia. But did you ever listen to Father Macarius and his sermons about Samson and his jawbone?’

‘Not really,’ said Rado. ‘You see, you always slept through services. So did everyone else out of respect for you.’

I couldn’t think of any answer to that. So I sat up straighter and stretched out my hand. ‘General Rado,’ I said very loudly, ‘the day is yours.’ There was a ragged cheer behind us. Not turning, we both looked again at the fleeing wreckage of what had to be one of the greatest invasion forces in history.

Someone spoke behind me. ‘As a full participant in the battle, the Lady Antonia claims her right to share in the booty.’

Chapter 70

However they disgust you at first, you soon get used to the carrion birds. The noise of their flapping and squabbling was the chief sound in the vastness of the dead that stretched as far as the eye could see. I won’t mention the flies. You can take them as read. So far as it could be done, the throats of the wounded enemy had been cut, and some beginnings had been made on gathering in the immense booty that had fallen to us. But that, we’d agreed, would have to wait properly until help could be procured from the far side of the mountain.

Rado coughed behind me. ‘If you please, My Lord Alaric,’ he said softly. I turned and saw him with one of the priests. Rado himself was illiterate. This was something we’d have to see to when we got home. A bloodied priest held out a big square of parchment ripped from a Persian book. On the clean side, he’d scrawled the answer to my question.

‘A hundred and fifty more or less uninjured,’ I read. ‘Ten badly injured and like to die before evening. Fifteen bodies found so far. The rest unaccounted for.’ They both nodded. I looked at the sky. The sun would soon be going down on this day of slaughter. Those unaccounted for almost certainly meant we hadn’t been able to tell our own dead from the multitudes of enemy dead. Of the men we’d led into battle, I’d have to accept that we’d lost nearly half. Was this good or bad as these things went? I didn’t know. Rado’s own experience didn’t stretch to casualty rates. In my view, it was a hundred and fifty men too many.

Of course, it was worse than that. I turned and continued looking at the dead from the flank attack. These hadn’t enjoyed our luxury of almost permanent insulation from anyone who could hit back. From the Persian dead who lay all about, they’d rushed down upon one of the regular army units. If any of them had got out alive, I hadn’t yet seen him. Add a hundred to my previous figure, and make it a fraction of our whole little army. Bearing in mind we weren’t talking about exact numbers, I could take it that we’d lost three-fifths of everyone we’d led here. What would Priscus say about that?

I’d never find out. His body had been pulled out from beneath a mound of the Persian dead. I hadn’t seen him in proper light for about eighteen months but I’d not seen him this dark and shrivelled. It was as if he’d been burned up in the sunlight. I recognised him only from his lower face. Even in death, he kept that look of amused contempt for the world. But he was pushing seventy and it must have been a difficult journey from Constantinople.

He’d been a bastard in life. Oh, he’d been more than a bastard. The words might not exist to describe the beastliness of his life, or the misery he’d inflicted on the world. But he was now gone from the world. And, if a strict moralist might have thrown up his arms in despair at the recitation of his sins, and announced there could be no set off against a tenth of them in any Divine Court of Justice, I could say he’d made some atonement. Without that unsung and unsingable repeat of Thermopylae, the rest of us might easily not have lived to behold the mournful joys of victory.

A few feet closer to the high wall of the pass lay the boy who’d run all those miles to us. I hadn’t learned his name. I hadn’t so much as spoken to him. I’d thought he was about fifteen. In death, he looked younger. I looked away, and found I could still see his dead face. I swallowed and clenched both hands into fists. These had been volunteers among volunteers, I told myself. Leave Priscus aside, this was atonement of their own for having lived after everyone dear to them had died.

I’d been faintly aware of a voice babbling insanely away on my left. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ Theodore cried in Syriac. ‘So proud and boastfully squirting in life – all now burn in the lake of black fire that awaits us!’ Not up to walking, he crawled from body to body, calling indiscriminately at our dead and those of the enemy. It would have been easy to give the order. A dozen swords would have rasped from their sheaths, to be buried in that twisted body. But he’d spoken in Syriac. The only insults to the dead worth punishing are those heard by the living.