Behold a White Horse
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat upon him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
1.
Spring had come, and with it, war; and Stephanakios, Duke of Syria, felt a love for life he had not felt in years.
The duke wasn’t yet an old man, but he was an aging man, and he gave thanks to God for the chance to go to war again, having long assumed he would die in the twin tyrannical grips of Peace and Pleasure. Stephanakios wasn’t a violent man, in that he wept at the suffering of Christians, but he was a man who derived a great sense of adventure from the rape and massacre of heathen peoples. He was, in short, a man who loved his country and his god; two entities he knew to be as just and wise as they were eternal. Peace was to him a war so long as he lived in a world divided, and Pleasure a cancer to nations. War, he felt, was the only cure to both.
Stephanakios wasn’t sure why or how the war had actually begun. There were vague pretenses about land and other ancient offenses, but the duke needed little justification. On one side was the Roman commonwealth, and therefore the one true Mother Church; on the other was the ancient tyranny of the Sassanids, a nation of fire-worshipping infidels. There was no choice for a pious and contemplative man like Stephanakios. He would serve Christ’s terrestrial kingdom until it covered the surface of the world or die in that pursuit.
All that gave the duke some pause was the fact the emperor had appointed a new Master of Soldiers. This news initially delighted Stephanakios. The senate was littered with men he would have given anything to serve. But instead of any of the great patricians who had given decades of service to Christ and the state, the emperor had chosen a young staff officer with no wartime experience. The duke’s contacts in Constantinople told him the man’s name was Belisarius, that he came from a military background, and that he had served in the imperial guard for a little over four years before the emperor grabbed him from total obscurity and vested him with supreme military power.
It was unusual, but not without precedent. Nobody had ever heard of the emperor’s predecessor before he was acclaimed autocrat by the senate, people, and army. But more importantly, the duke took comfort in the knowledge that the emperor was the rightful and supreme lord of all the nations of the world and was therefore guided by divine and perfect wisdom. His word was natural law. It preceded all form in the universe and was put into language alone by his decree. This war, its birth, and its ultimate conclusion had all been set at the first breath of Time. Every minor note played its part in the symphony of Creation. With this in mind, Stephanakios gave thanks to God for the chance to meet this mysterious Belisarius, and rushed about the palace throwing open windows and dusting off the paintings on the walls in preparation for the young marshal’s arrival. After many months of delay, Belisarius and his retinue had finally made landfall, and were due within a day.
It wasn’t a minute too soon. Violence was stirring along the frontier, and Stephanakios had already drawn the first blood of the war after confronting a band of the Sassanid shah’s Arabian mercenaries as they torched a village near the town of Apamea. Though thousands of refugees fled toward Antioch in terror after news of the attack had spread, the raid in reality had been conducted by a hundred and thirty half-starved teenagers who took the shah’s commission for a chance to secure something to eat more than anything else. Stephanakios and his retainers slaughtered them to a man, and the Arabians’ heads, hands, and genitals were nailed to boards and carried in triumph through the cheering streets of Antioch.
While he pined every day for another chance to whet the blade of his piety, Stephanakios found his short time of public glory interrupted by a number of monotonous bureaucratic concerns that quickly sucked up all of his time and attention. Soldiers and horses had to be fed, and their food and fodder was carried on the march. The movement of supplies required additional personnel and pack animals, who in turn had to be fed, which therefore required more oxen and wagons, more people to drive them, and so on until some kind of equilibrium was achieved. This all required money, which therefore required accountants, clerks to keep their paperwork, and scribes to issue orders and write contracts and bills of sale. Those documents were usually drafted, proofed, and dictated by attorneys, who also ensured all operations were up to church, civil, and military law. These people all in turn needed to be fed, moved, and paid, which then, of course, caused further complications. Since these clerks, accountants, scribes, and attorneys were all of soft patrician upbringings, they each came with slaves and other creature comforts that needed to be moved and fed. And so on. Stephanakios found it all tedious and low, and not in the least bit noble, but he supposed (with some regret) that it was necessary for the war effort and therefore the virtuous, Christian thing to do.
The streets of Antioch were thrumming as they did in the throes of Saturnalia. Soldiers were everywhere, squatting in the gutters and spilling from the drinking halls as they poured their pockets on the people of the city. Monumental wagon trains carrying tens of thousands of tons of grain and fodder and other needed supplies had strangled the highway north to Tarsos, and a flea-ridden shantytown of mercenaries, merchants, and prostitutes had established itself all along the field outside the city where the army sat encamped. The Ram’s Gate in the west and the Lion’s Gate in the east were choked with traveling merchants hawking sheets of silk from Serika, mountains of multicolored spices from the lands beyond the Indos, Aksumite ivory, fine cloth slippers, and rugs with detail stitched in gold. There were lions, peacocks, and all manner of caged exotic animals for sale, and craftsmen with experience in mosaics announced themselves from the gutter, calling out the names of famous churches where they had done the floors or portraits on the walls. Coins rang and sang as they passed from hand to hand to teeth and pocket, and fortunes were made at the cursory wave of a quartermaster’s hand. For the first time in years, the imperial coffers poured their bounties on the people, who sang and danced and praised the war and the love of their gentle benefactor, the worshipful Duke Stephanakios. There were men selling boots, new saddles, fresh socks, and whatever else a soldier might have worn out on the march. Others pushed carts through the strangled streets, all stacked high with sweet breads, jars of local wine, and salted fish and pork. Herdsmen came in from the countryside with long chains of bleating goats and snorting hogs in tow, and fishermen bore up vast racks of catch with scales still wet and gleaming from the river. Horse tamers had established enormous camps along the banks of the Orontes, all of which were full of half-wild stallions from the far-flung wastes of Parthia and Arabia. These men crowed in a dozen different frontier dialects as they waved their hands and touted the fantastic strength and intelligence of the beasts in their pens. Meanwhile, ravenous brigades of prostitutes stalked up and down the boulevards of Antioch, shaking their skirts and calling at the soldiers passing by. They came in every shape, size, color, age, and gender, and many found supplemental work as translators, cooks, and porters when the men grew tired of their charms. Most came with masters dressed in gaudy silks and jewels, but a nearly equal number were hardy entrepreneurs, having come on foot from all throughout the diocese, stopping only to wash their rags and bodies in the Orontes before descending on the city. They often had great flocks of bastards trotting along behind them, who many happily pawned off on the soldiers for an extra copper bit. As soon as the money or the soldiers’ vigor started drying up, these men and women would disperse, a fresh generation of recruits for the Army of the East already stewing in a thousand fertile wombs.
Stephanakios found it all distasteful. Just as he feared, the common man was driven only by thoughts of what to eat or fuck. War with the infidel was a sacred thing. There were few acts God loved more than the systematic eradication of non-Christian peoples, and the duke had always felt that a man of upright Roman character — a man animated by virtue and guided by the moral order of Creation — could do nothing but scoff at base and earthly pleasures. But to the duke’s great embarrassment, the men of the Army of the East not only hungrily engaged with prostitutes, but also bought anything and everything they took a fleeting interest in. Hardened veterans with missing eyes and mangled jaws spilled their wallets to have their fingernails painted or boot laces tied. The duke found it all incredibly crass, and thought for a moment that war was wasted on the poor. But then he reminded himself that war would be impossible without the poor, and was forced to admit, once again, that perhaps it was all for the best.
The whole idea depressed him. Homer never mentioned accounting summaries, bills of sale, or foreign eunuch pleasure boys. For a moment the duke thought that war was just the result of common market forces, and that the whole idea of a “noble war” might be nothing more than a tired old literary device. But then he remembered his own experiences serving in the last eastern war all those many years before, when he stood in command of the phalanx that broke the Sassanid charge outside Amida, turning back the heathen tide for Christ and Christians everywhere. It had been glorious, well and truly glorious; and Stephanakios knew it to be so.
2.
Belisarius had spent his youth on the wind-blasted steppe of the northern frontier, and the simple solitude of those whispering oceans of grass had imparted in him a sense of unease at the scale and noise and smell of urban life. It seemed to him unnatural; unhealthy; a spit in the face of God. But beyond all that, Belisarius knew that places of great prosperity could not exist without great iniquity, and as he caught his first glimpse of Antioch, he shuddered to imagine all the many millions who labored and died in anonymity to give the people of that city their lavish baths and theaters and monuments.
Antioch sat at a bend in the Orontes where the river split and wrapped around a liver-shaped island before joining again and flowing to the sea. Bridges connected this island to the river’s western bank and the larger part of the city, which sprawled in the space between the eastern bank and the soaring wall-like slopes of Mount Silpios. Even from a distance, Belisarius could see magnificent mansions with private bath houses, opulent chapels, and gardens fat with pear and pomegranate trees, where aristocratic children sat in the shade on hot summer days, learning Homer and the deeds of the saints by heart. Broad avenues busy with life stitched across the city, and smoke from thousands of chimneys buried everything in a gray, gleaming smog. A twenty-foot high stone wall ran along the riverbank and hemmed the mainland side of the city against the mountain’s steep and grassy slope. Another, smaller branch of fortifications ran along the length of the mountain’s narrow ridge, and a small stone fortress stood atop the summit. A banner adorned with an icon of the Mother of God fluttered from its parapets.
The fields around the city crawled with thousands of slaves who were planting, pruning, and drawing weeds up from the ground with heavy burlap sacks around their necks. They looked up and waved as Belisarius and his men approached, and the landowners rode out on their fine racing stallions to ensure the soldiers kept their distance. They regarded Belisarius and his men with a kind of suspicious contempt he had long grown accustomed to in the perfumed palaces of Constantinople. Any patrician could smell plebeian blood like a hound smelling fear, and Belisarius knew that all those handsome aristocrats could see were his mutt-like features and hands worn with work, or the way he slouched as he rode, or his half-broken barbarian horse, or the tasseled Skythian blanket he used instead of a saddle. He looked more like a slave than any of the famous heroes from their ancient genealogies, and Belisarius knew they already hated him for it.
His father and grandfathers had been soldiers, and some of his earliest memories included learning how to shoot a bow or work a shield. While his peers learned rhetoric and philosophy at ancient academies on the blistered shores of the imperial heartland, grizzled old drill instructors taught Belisarius the only rhetoric he ever thought he would need, and his philosophical education was limited to what he heard in church and what was made apparent by the land. He did not have the temperament for any kind of life outside the saddle, and was horrified when the emperor called him into his gilded presence to invest Belisarius with the rods and staff of supreme imperial power. It meant immersion in a world he didn’t understand and to which he felt he would never truly belong: a world of whispered palace secrets, labyrinthine court ceremonial, and the political mire of ever-changing loyalties. But when Belisarius tried to protest his appointment, the emperor silenced him with a single wave of his globe-turning hand.
“There is no man better for the task,” he said.
Belisarius did not think his promotion was entirely undeserved. He felt he understood the sciences of tactics, logistics, and strategy better than most. He prayed and took communion. He did not drink or overeat and started every morning with a round of calisthenics. He could ride and shoot and wield a sword as well as any other. But there had been about two dozen senior officials in line before him who better deserved the appointment: famous generals who had cut their teeth and earned their fortunes bringing war to the hill people of Isauria, protecting Constantinople from rebellions in Thrace, or campaigning on the dark and distant shores of the Euxine Sea. The youngest of them all was nearly twice his age, and the least well-known still had streets and temples that bore his name in Constantinople.
As Master of Soldiers for the East, Belisarius was the acting theater commander for all military operations from the Bosporos Strait in the west to the Sassanid frontier in the east; and from Armenia in the north to Ethiopia in the south. On top of commanding the field army, which numbered twenty thousand fighting men, he also had a supervisory role over all the many frontier forts and their garrisons and the various provincial militia responsible for safeguarding the nation’s borders. The number of soldiers he was responsible for alone made him sick; and that was without counting all the many thousands of support personnel needed to make an army run. The total figure easily ran into the hundreds of thousands.
But what troubled Belisarius above all was what would happen if he failed. He knew he could not stop disease, nor the rich and powerful from using the weak and poor like cheap old toys. He could not spare women and children the terrors of a home headed by a tyrant, nor could he bring easy lives to the crippled or insane. But he could protect them from the wholesale rape, massacre, and enslavement they would face under the cruel dominion of Conquest. He alone stood between them and ruin. And it was the weight of that responsibility, ultimately, that terrified him.
A pair of sword and jewelry-wearing soldiers came riding up the road from Antioch. Both men had their hair carefully coiffed and their faces clean of beards and wore deep emerald and amber-colored tunics with white silk tights and ebony shoes with heavy silver buckles. They hailed, approached, and dipped their heads in supplication. Belisarius flinched at the overwhelming stink of their perfume.
“Hail and blessings to Flavius Belisarius, our most magnificent Master of Soldiers. Stephanakios, worshipful Duke of Syria, is eager to make your acquaintance,” one of them said. “There are some matters that require your immediate attention.”
“Stephanakios is here?”
“He is, your magnificence.”
“Why?”
3.
Hermogenes, Master of the Offices, was a man few knew and even fewer loved. Long-armed and slender, with leaden eyes and painted wooden teeth, Hermogenes had brought the emperor’s original declaration of war to the Sassanid ambassadors in Antioch and remained ever since, attending plays and feasts and balls with all the noble houses of the city. Whether because of his empty gaze or perfect androgyny, Stephanakios found something about Hermogenes slightly unsettling, and largely avoided him since the day he first arrived. But when the news finally came that Belisarius had made landfall, the duke’s curiosity became too much to bear. He went and asked Hermogenes his opinion of the new field marshal. The Master of the Offices knew Belisarius personally, and also controlled every imperial spy from the foggy gutters of Londinium to the misty depths of the Nile. There wasn’t a single man who knew more about anyone anywhere else in the Christian world, and the eunuch’s eyes lit up at first mention of the marshal’s name.
“Oh, how should I put it?” Hermogenes said. “I’m sure he would be perfect for the role, were he older and of, perhaps, a bit better breeding.”
“Better breeding?”
“I thought you knew!” Hermogenes cooed in his quiet, boyish voice. “It’s all the talk in Constantinople. Yes, the magnificent marshal is of common Thracian stock. Thankfully, our most pious lord lacks the old prejudices shared by many in the senate. But his origins aside, all the imperial peers are in accord that his lack of practical experience might prove detrimental to the war effort. We said as much to our inviolable sovereign, may he always be victorious, but his nobility expressed a higher, deeper wisdom. Such is the grace and piety of our most virtuous augustus. However, I am firm in my belief that Belisarius might have been an … imperfect choice. But then I suppose we must allow him to make a display of his talents before we put our opinion to them!”
“How common?”
“Is the marshal?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let me put it this way: one couldn’t get any more provincial without leaving the provinces entirely. One of the good marshal’s grandfathers was even a Hun, if I’m not mistaken. I believe the other was a Goth.”
This news alarmed Stephanakios, but through the raw power of his Antiochene, Stoic, and Christian convictions, he managed to reserve any final judgement for his initial meeting with the man. After all, it would not be the first time a citizen of exceptional ability had emerged from among the masses. The emperor himself had begun his life as a poor Illyrian swineherd, and the empress a woman of scandalous repute. God was mysterious, and his plan often perplexing, and Stephanakios supposed this was one of the many ways by which the divine encouraged Man to look upon the fabulous machinations of Creation in all their ceaseless glory. This revelation pleased and comforted the duke, and he retired to his garden to meditate upon the matter further.
He spent much of the next week making ready for the marshal’s arrival. A feast would have to be prepared, and it occurred to Stephanakios that anybody used to the utter splendor of Constantinople might find a healthy, conservative, and well-mannered Antiochene supper a little dry and old fashioned, no matter how provincial the person in question might happen to be. He therefore sent for all the great and ancient names of Antioch and the finest pipes of vintage wine from the deepest vaults of the palace. On the day Belisarius was due to arrive, the duke assembled his retainers on the parade ground of the governor’s palace and rushed up and down the lines himself, tightening straps, smoothing tunics, and straightening messy strands of hair. As a final touch of ornamentation, the duke had a dozen of the raiders’ heads he had collected near Apamea coated in tar and mounted on stakes. The ruined forms watched him work with black and vacant stares.
Stephanakios was still hard at work when a trumpet sounded and the first of the marshal’s complement came riding through the gate. The marshal’s retainers, about fifteen-hundred men in all, made up the bulk of the column. These mercenaries had been recruited from across the hardest parts of the country, and because of their high rate of pay, could afford to arm themselves with all the best equipment from the imperial armories in Constantinople. All of them wore iron scale coats over shirts of mail and heavy padded tunics. Their horses were all firmly muscled and energetic, having been raised and broken in the open wilderness north of the Danube river. Trained to fight in every useful style, these men could be deployed as shock troops with a shield and spear or as mounted archers with a bow. They wore large beards or Germanic mustaches and sported strange foreign tattoos and cheap bronze jewelry. The language they spoke was a tongue of their own invention: a barking stew of Latin, Greek, Gothic, and Hunnic alongside an arsenal of harsh barbarian slang.
One large contingent of Huns and another of Heruli had also come with the marshal from Constantinople. There were about six hundred men in each complement, drawn from tribes settled along the northern frontiers. Small men on wild horses, all were leathered from a life in the sun, and their cheeks had been ritually scarred in adolescence to prevent the growth of facial hair. They wore skins blackened by age and the elements and were more graceful on horseback than most men were on their own two feet. Gold flashed on their teeth or in their ears, and every one of them carried tightly-curved bows made from wood and animal bone which, if the stories were true, could easily drive an arrow through shield, armor, and muscle all the way up to the fletching.
Stephanakios was not entirely comfortable serving alongside pagans, much less pagans so savage, but decided that if the emperor – in all his divine, revelatory wisdom – had decided they were helpful to the war effort, he would fight alongside them and be thankful for the chance to do so. Besides, he reasoned, these foreigners were only heathen because they were not Christians yet, and what better way to evangelize than through a display of victorious Christian arms? Granted, a peaceful baptism was always preferable, but even Saint Constantine himself had been convinced of Christ’s everlasting grace through victory in battle.
Another trumpet sounded and the duke looked up in time to see a silk banner marked with an icon of Saint Christophorus carrying Christ across a river. The men who escorted the standard were the marshal’s bodyguards, and they wore purple silk armbands to mark their rank. Stephanakios could immediately tell who among them was Belisarius by his age alone. Short, with the lean and stocky body of a wrestler, Belisarius wore a thick black beard and matching curly hair. He was also younger than the duke expected; only twenty-three or twenty-four years old.
Belisarius leapt off his horse with the grace and agility of a champion charioteer and crossed the yard on the balls of his feet. He wore no armor, nor the purple sash of an officer of the imperial cabinet. Just a cheap linen tunic, faded Hunnic trousers, and a sword in a plain leather scabbard.
“My most glorious master,” Stephanakios said, reaching for the young man’s hand to kiss his ring. He could see Belisarius was filthy from the road, and almost flinched at the smells of campfire, dust, and horse manure emanating from his hand. “Welcome to Antioch.”
“Thank you,” said Belisarius, his tone cold and flat.
“I hope your journey wasn’t too distasteful,” said Stephanakios. “As I’m sure you’ve heard, the infidel has already made a number of intrusions into the lands of our most sacred commonwealth. I met one such force in battle barely fifty miles east of here. Owing to the force of Roman arms and a faith in Christ triumphant, I brought back what remained as a gift to you and the other good companions of our high and sacred sovereign.”
Stephanakios gestured at the tarred and rotten heads. Belisarius cut them a quick, contemptuous glance. After a moment he clicked his tongue at one of the duke’s slaves and gestured at the stakes.
“Take those down,” he said. The boy scurried off to fetch a ladder and Belisarius turned back to the duke. His eyes danced everywhere, meeting anything and everything but the duke’s own gaze. “Why are you here?”
“I’m not sure what your magnificence means.”
“I mean why are you here, in Antioch?” Belisarius hissed, his voice suddenly laced with acid. “You’re nowhere near your sector. Where are your men?”
“Apart from these men here I have two mounted regiments billeted in Epiphania and three more at Beroea.”
“Then you need to go there,” said Belisarius. “You’re their leader. Lead them. By Christ, man. There could be a hundred thousand Persians marching through Syria right now and I wouldn’t even know. Pack your shit and get out there as quickly as you can. And bring your men down from Beroea. They’re no use there. Thank you.”
With that, the marshal stalked off into the palace, asking after his baggage and his quarters. Stephanakios was left leering like a moron in his wake, his back and shoulders rigid at attention. He drummed his fingers on the pommel of his sword. The slave Belisarius ordered to take down the Arabians’ heads had returned with a ladder and was trying to lift the first of the heads off its perch. The tar and rotting gore had formed a kind of glue that fused the fetid mass to the rough wood of the stake and the slave nearly shot from the ladder with surprise when the duke barked out his name.
“Leave it,” Stephanakios commanded.
The slave, worried that he might be the victim of some cruel joke, paused and turned on the ladder with the head’s filthy, tar-covered hair still wrapped around his knuckles. He stared at the duke for a moment, unsure of what to do, until Stephanakios drove him away with an impatient flick of his hand.
On the far side of the yard, Hermogenes stood with his hands in his robes, watching Stephanakios with his cold leaden eyes. Stephanakios nodded and the eunuch bared a curling wooden smile. There was a silent kind of rage in the thin man’s grin, and the duke, uneasy, withdrew inside the palace.
4.
The feast began in the palace garden shortly after midnight. There were dancers and music and dogs performing tricks, and most of the guests were afoot, chatting about the war and the duke’s recent victory, with golden cups of fine local wine splashing in their hands. Others were sprawled across colorful velvet couches with animated conversation leaping from their lips. They marveled at the duke’s well-trained dogs and the grace and refinement of his slaves, and drank toasts to his health and hospitality at every chance they had.
All the town’s elite had come. There were bookish academics and nervous literati engaged in passionate debate about Plato and his compatibility with a well-led Christian life, while young officers and their wives drifted from couple to couple of their kind, reciting a rote ballet of inoffensive comments on the music, weather, and wine. The town councilmen of Antioch were also there in all their regal bearing, draped in silken vestments the color of piss, waving away petitioners with snorts of contempt as they waddled from dish to dish. Their wives and daughters trailed behind, heavy in their rings and ropes of pearls and amulets of glass. Their flowing skirts and cloaks were patterned with polygons or the outlines of flowers or trees or birds taking flight, stitched in profile with gleaming copper thread.
The marshal’s men were also scattered throughout the garden, unsettling the guests and terrifying the slaves. Fara, the lanky copper-haired commander of the Heruli, was blackout drunk and reclined on a couch with a flower in his hair and a pair of comrades in his arms, bellowing a song from the shores of his distant homeland. Octar, commander of the Huns, was engaged in Socratic dialectics with a pair of junior deacons. He sat with his legs crossed and hands together as he listened to the two explain how Christ had been created by, and was of equal substance to, God the father. Meanwhile, the marshal’s bodyguards reigned large and loud over a table near the stable door the duke reserved for slaves. These men were Tobias, the ex-priest; old Andronikos, the one-eyed; Kyrillos, the harelipped; young Taumas, the gap-toothed; and Smallfoot, the Makedonian. They sat in hot and drunken company, crowing in their marching tongue as Constantius, the marshal’s deputy, crushed walnuts with his big scarred fist. Constantius had lived every life a poor man could live, having worked as a miner, a bear tamer, and a galley rower all before becoming a soldier. But before all that, he had begun his life as a slave, responsible for the sweltering and agonizing work of heating the public baths in Constantinople. It was in this capacity, after stealing an extra piece of bread from his master, that Constantius lost his nose. Because of this, he wore a prosthetic nose cast from lead to cover the old wound up, which was in turn fixed to a rusted iron basket he wore around his head. Rot had mangled the corner of his mouth, which pulled it upward in a snarl, and a whistle emanated from the place where his nose used to be. Andronikos and Tobias were pounding the table with laughter at something he had said, while young Taumas, ever the lamb, asked a nearby serving slave if she could please bring them all more wine. Belisarius watched them laugh with envy from afar. Old Andronikos had taught him how to shoot; Smallfoot, the Makedonian, taught him how to ride. It had been Tobias, not some grave patrician bishop, who first convinced Belisarius of God’s existence. They were incapable of irony, judgment, or deception. When he was among those old bandits – those harelipped, one-eyed, tattooed, gap-toothed, poetic, and thuggish brothers in arms – the marshal felt complete.
Belisarius wished more than anything to sit with his companions and revel in their old war stories, but unfortunately, his rank required him to make a certain appearance for all the duke’s distinguished guests. He was the Master of Soldiers; the emperor’s eyes, ears, mouth, and sword. A companion of the Sacred Cabinet. A member of the imperial household. He could not be seen associating with pirates and cutthroat half-barbarians when there were members of ancient patrician dynasties about.
As he always did in Constantinople, Hermogenes had gathered a crowd about himself as he preached about the insidious trappings of human affection. He had exchanged his wooden teeth for a set of yellowed ivory dentures which were, much to the marshal’s shock, somehow more disgusting than the splintered mess that normally formed his smile. His long spindly fingers worked an unseen loom before him as he spoke, and his words seemed to hover where he left them in the air, gathering and smothering all within reach of his breath. The sight gave Belisarius chills. Everybody around him seemed to forget that when the former Master of Soldiers for Thrace was declared emperor by his troops and marched against Constantinople in the summer of 515, Hermogenes stood beside him, serving as the rebel’s personal advisor. Only the full might of the imperial navy had been able to turn them back; yet somehow, through what Belisarius felt must have been some perfect combination of guile, luck, and — perhaps ironically for a eunuch — balls, Hermogenes obtained a pardon and, within a short twelve years, climbed his way up through the palace to become one of the most powerful men in the country. There was no official tally of all the personal enemies Hermogenes had muted, blinded, and banished, but Belisarius was confident that if one of them had the guile, luck, and balls to track down all the eunuch’s other victims, that man would have enough blinded and exiled mutes to march on Constantinople for himself.
So Belisarius kept his distance from the eunuch. He found a bench in a quieter corner of the garden and there sat in silence, watching and waiting for the party to disperse. But to his great horror, more guests appeared as the night wore on. Before too long, the quiet corner of the garden he had staked out for himself was overrun with a horde of the duke’s drunken and distinguished guests. These drifted by Belisarius to kiss his hand and offer their respects. Many commented on his Hunnic eyes or Gothic nose, or the way his hands were rough like the hands of a slave. Some, aware of his close relationship with the emperor, came to Belisarius with imperial petitions. Phokas, a local arms manufacturer, begged Belisarius to please pass along his most sincere and gracious thanks to their supreme lord and sovereign for at last bringing war against the infidel. Mousoulios, self-acclaimed curator of rare and exotic entertainments, said he sold the best girls, boys, and mules in all of Syria. The Patriarch of Antioch, a lifelong politician, was in a wild drunken fury, and Belisarius was forced to listen to the witch-like old man rant long about how the emperor’s exorbitant new tax code had forced him to sell one of his villas on the island of Kypros.
“I mean really,” the patriarch roared with a dramatic and dismissive snort, “How much more does he need?”
“How much more do you need?” Belisarius snapped back.
The patriarch stared at him for a moment, a shiny drop of saliva glistening on the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t think you’re innocent in any of this,” the patriarch said, his face cold and grim. “For what is war but a contest for property?”
Belisarius did not know what to say. He had seen the emperor’s eyes come alive too many times at the idea of a world unified under a single Christian state to think he wanted anything else. A world without division. A world cured of the scourge of war. And if the heathen nations had to be baptized at the point of a sword, Belisarius felt that, within a few generations, their descendants would be happier for it. But the marshal was not a confident communicator, and when he tried to express his beliefs about the emperor’s motivations, the patriarch just sneered and shook his head.
“Acceptance of the Truth can require no compulsion. If our augustus were only interested in spreading the Gospels, why must he make due with palaces, slaves, and a harlot for a wife?”
On the other side of a long row of rose bushes, Stephanakios was holding court at the center of the garden. He was perched like a king in a carved ebony throne, his shoulders thrown back and chest puffed out so much that he resembled a springtime sparrow flaunting for a mate. He had one hand on his cheek like a man in deep and Christian contemplation, and the other on the ruby-studded pommel of his sword. A massive red velvet cloak made him appear bigger than he really was, while a pair of white silk tights and small ivory slippers revealed a petite and boyish frame beneath. A dozen guests surrounded him, all vying for attention like the suitors of a young and wealthy widow. The duke seemed to revel in it all, laughing with might at their tired, flaccid jokes.
“Well, our God is mysterious,” he bellowed, “but I’d not have it any other way! The cultic practices of our pre-enlightened ancestors were so transparent one wonders how they failed to see the utter falsity of their beliefs! It is indeed a better age, and I am thankful for it. But these Arabians — much like those I left on the fields of Apamea, carrion for the birds — these savages live and fight like animals, more out of hunger or necessity than divine and sacred purpose. Just as one must euthanize a hound whose mouth begins to foam, one must also eradicate these ruffians before they cause harm to those living in the light and goodness of the Lord. Indeed, our God is just. I thank him daily that I might ease the spiritual suffering of the heathen while also seeing to the public good.”
The suitors all nodded in agreement, praising the duke for his virtue and wit. The patriarch tapped his cane on the marble underfoot in praise of what the duke had said before he shot Belisarius a contemptuous sneer and joined the audience gathering at the duke’s small feet.
Belisarius let his head fall in his hands. Life had been much simpler in his youth. People were straightforward and honest. Plain. Simple. But if he had learned anything from his short time in the palace, it was that the world was full of, and dominated by, men like Stephanakios. How a man as gentle and fair as the emperor made it to the top simply baffled Belisarius, and he was left to wonder if the patriarch was right. They were all a part of the same hypocrisy. Mankind was flawed, and Belisarius had known that as a boy. But he was slowly coming to think that, whether through design or some fundamental misunderstanding of God’s great genius, the more one sinned, the higher he or she would climb.
Belisarius was turning these thoughts over in his mind when a nearby serving slave stumbled and spilled a pitcher of wine across his boots and lap. Belisarius jumped to his feet, regained his composure, and slapped the slave across her face. The girl’s lip broke and bled and she tumbled to the floor with a shriek. The sound of the slap echoed around the garden, and Belisarius became dimly aware that the music and conversation had fallen silent. And, he realized with a creeping sense of dread, everyone was staring at him.
5.
Stephanakios had always admired his father. The elder Stephanakios, who had been named after his father and so named his own son after him, formed his early reputation as a tireless tiger in the fearsome law courts of Antioch. During the last of the Sassanid wars, when the younger Stephanakios served with distinction at the battle of Amida, the elder Stephanakios received the prestigious appointment of first division commander in the Army of the East by then-field marshal Hypatios. When the war ended, the elder Stephanakios went on to serve on the Antioch town council for nearly fifteen years before he passed away at the age of eighty-two. He became a prolific letter-writer in his later years, and two hundred of his most profound and well-regarded epistles were collected and published in a single volume upon his death. The work was rapidly circulated in the aristocratic circles of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople, and Latin translations even made the rounds in Rome, Carthage, and other prominent western cities. Therein, the elder Stephanakios mused on everything from his favorite passages of scripture, to whimsical childhood anecdotes, to explanations for certain maneuvers and battlefield decisions he made while serving in the army. The collection received much praise, and fully cemented the old man as a great and honored figure in the minds of his peers.
But the elder Stephanakios had also been a limitless well of profound Stoic wisdom, and wrote close to fifty letters to his son the duke during this period, in which he reflected upon classic Stoic mantras like “Change is Nature’s only constant,” “Love your fate,” and “Remember you must die.” The younger Stephanakios cherished these letters and insisted they be included in his father’s collection. While those essays received somewhat tepid responses from most readers of the work, the duke was pleased that his father’s words would live on to advise and console those of future generations.
So when the duke was torn from his conversation by the awful crack of Belisarius hitting a serving girl, one of his father’s most enduring maxims shot into his head: “Only foreigners and tyrants hit their slaves.”
His father proven right once more, the duke made a mental note to thumb through the old man’s book again before he rose from his chair and sat with Belisarius. The party resumed as soon as the duke left his seat, and Stephanakios allowed a few moments of silence to pass before he opened his mouth.
“Your magnificence,” he said slowly and deliberately, relishing what he was about to say, “I’m not sure what the custom is where you’re from, but we do not hit our slaves here in Syria, much less in Antioch, and we certainly don’t hit slaves that belong to other people. Now since I understand, as I said, that the custom may be different where you’re from, I harbor no ill feelings toward you. I only ask that you do not do it again.”
“I apologize,” said Belisarius. His eyes were wide and fixed on his shoes. “It is not the custom where I’m from.”
Stephanakios was giddy. The boy really was nothing more than some simple half-cooked barbarian. That name, Belisarius, so queer and resoundingly foreign. The duke’s mind gleefully erupted with wild speculation as to which distant heathen race had spawned that awful name. Huns? Goths? A people yet unknown?
“Where is that?” asked the duke, affecting as much charm as he could stomach. “I was just wondering about your name. You’re the only Belisarius I’ve ever met.”
“It was my grandfather’s,” the marshal said quietly. “He was from north of the river.”
“The Danube River?”
“Yes.”
“On the Virgin’s sacred blood! And you pass so well as Roman! I’m the one who should apologize. I misread your race. Please accept my most sincere apologies if I caused you any embarrassment. I should have explained things to you ahead of time. But your language, your style, your dress — an unassuming observer could easily mistake you for Roman. And with how busy I’ve been, it seems I was simply too preoccupied to give your birth or cultural literacy much thought.”
“Thank you,” mumbled Belisarius. He met the duke’s gaze for the very first time. His eyes were pools of dancing amber in the firelight, and for a moment the duke was shocked to see the unmistakable glimmer of Destiny peering back at him. It vanished as quickly as it appeared, and the marshal’s cheeks clenched as he slowly ground his teeth. “But my parents are both second generation. I spent many years in Constantinople. I am a Roman through and through.”
“Yes, I suppose you would think so,” said the duke. “I think it’s marvelous. What a fantastic thing, our commonwealth: a place where even foreign heathen can, in time, wear the honorable mask of civilization. Just think, my friend. In a thousand years, our ships will be on every shore. Our flags on every city wall. Every man who walks the Earth will think himself a Roman, and keep the creed of orthodoxy ready on his lips. Yes, we’ve only seen the beginning of the long arc of our sacred history. If we can make a convincing Roman from your blood within a scant few generations, then the one world city under Christ might soon be a reality. Imagine!”
Belisarius did not join in the duke’s speculation. He mumbled vaguely in the affirmative and then said something about some business that needed his attention before he shot up from his seat and powered off in the garden with that odd, tip-toed way of walking that he had. It took almost all of the duke’s considerable resolve to stop himself from laughing at the sight.
With Belisarius gone, Stephanakios took up his chair again. His guests were filtering away, and the first purple breath of dawn had lit the farthest reaches of the eastern sky. The duke smelled the springtime dew, still sweet and cold from the darkness of the night, and a creeping sense of wonder made him look upon the heavens. That sky; that quiet, empty sky. That same eastern sky Alexander himself had looked upon on countless early mornings all those many years ago. Stephanakios instinctively fingered a foggy silver ring he wore on his thumb, a plain old band marked only with an etching of the chi-rho (☧). His father had worn the ring just as his own father before him. According to family tradition, the ring originally belonged to the duke’s most ancient ancestor: a Makedonian phalangite in Alexander’s army.
As he looked upon the sky, Stephanakios did all he could to picture the progenitor of his line sitting on the ground outside his tent, listening to the distant sounds of Darios and his host fleeing for the vastness of the desert. Stephanakios could almost hear the anguished wails of the camels and oxen as the enemy soldiers dragged them from their sleep, or the ghostly shrieks of the camp followers as they realized they were being abandoned to the hunger of the Makedonians. The duke saw the footmen rising to assembly, a hardy crowd of leathered veterans with tottering sixteen-foot spears balanced on their shoulders. All was aclatter and the men took long, lusty drinks of uncut wine from rough leather sacks. The storm of dust that rose above their towering spears caught fire in the roaring brilliance of the cresting morning sun. The flutists wailed and the drummers beat their skins and the soldiers sang a paean to their ancient heathen gods that kept the tempo of their marching as they fell into place on the plain before the walls and ditches of their camp.
The duke could not imagine the rest. Even though memories of the last war were etched like scars across his mind, the memories he had of the fighting itself were nothing more than isolated flashes of color and emotion. He saw the heathen charge as a solid iron wall with the speed of an eagle falling on its prey. All that weight; all that fury. It was quiet; all he could recall of the sound of their approach was the way it caused his teeth to rattle as those massive armored horses beat the hard dry earth like a drum.
A very dear friend, a boy called Leannatos, was killed in that attack. The two grew up together, studied together, and spent many chirping summer evenings in each other’s company as they hunted wild boars in the hills above the walls of Antioch. When Stephanakios later found him on the field, he identified Leannatos by his curly red hair, a feature so uncommon in that part of the world, and held his ruined body in his arms and cried.
The duke caught his breath. Had those memories always been there, lurking in the shadows of his mind? Had that boy really ever walked the Earth? Had he, the aging man, the duke, really been there, weeping at his friend’s ruined form?
Stephanakios pushed those thoughts away. He was tired. He always mused on regrets and times gone by whenever he stayed up too late. His bed was calling out his name, and he rose and stretched his limbs to heed its lonely voice. Even the slaves had filtered away, and the duke saw that he was, for the first time in a long time, completely and totally alone. There were just the looming palace walls and the crows of distant roosters stirring in the city. Soon the streets would fill with people going about their chores, and the duke’s hazy memories of fear and fallen friends would be buried again by all the noise and necessities of life.
“Remember you must die,” he heard his father say.
Life was far too short to dwell on senseless memories. Only fame was everlasting. This would be the duke’s final war — he knew that much every time his joints creaked and ached. His last chance to seize his rightful share of immortality. And he would make the most of it.
6.
The Romans broke their camp and set out on their march at dawn. Thousands of onlookers crowded the shoulders of the highway, praying and singing as the soldiers marched away. Their footfalls shook the earth as they bellowed marching songs to keep their pace. They moved due south along the orchards and vineyards that circled the city, taking drinks of wine and kisses on their cheeks from the country peasants weeping tears of adoration. The army would keep its course for two days before the highway turned east over the Bargylos mountains, through the Syrian interior, across the Euphrates, and into the ancient lands of Mesopotamia.
Belisarius watched the column pass from the summit of a nearby hill. It was the first time he had seen the field army in full marching order, and as he watched it unfurl along the road below, rank by rank, company by company, its tip and tail both out of view, Belisarius could not fight the sense that he was not a participant in history, but a victim of its whims and a hostage to its course, doomed to simply sleepwalk to his destiny. The dice had been thrown. He was powerless to stop whatever was coming. And as he watched the standards pass, and heard the soldiers sing, and saw their weapons gleaming in the sun, Belisarius knew the cost would far exceed the worth.
The footmen were an ugly patchwork of former slaves, farm boys, foreigners, and thieves, and were some of the hardest men Belisarius had ever seen. Their faces were like beaten bronze and they moved with the swaggering, shuffling, spitting pace of mules. Their many weeks in the fleshpots of Antioch had left them feeling perfectly invincible, and their minds were on the slaves they would take, the coin they would make, and the women they would meet along the road. They swapped lies about all the varied and cosmopolitan pleasures they made use of in the city while they sang old army songs or bawdy country ballads and teased each other like children as they giggled and swore and called the men beside them playful names in hazing jest like “One-Eye,” “Bastard,” or “Gimp Dick.” The sun was up, and God was on their side, and the reality of what they were doing and where they were going was nothing more than a string of strange and senseless words. Lean like hungry dogs, they wore tattoos and ragged beards and gaudy bits of jewelry, and coated themselves in heavy shirts of iron mail and thick dented helmets adorned with dyed horse hair tassels and raptor feathers, each according to his rank. They could sleep standing up, or liked to claim they could, and loudly scoffed at the sissy horsemen who got to go to war while sitting on their asses. They carried oval wooden shields painted with their regimental insignia and eight-foot spears of ash or oak with leaf-shaped iron tips. While many others carried swords, the poorest among them came equipped with bows and wore no armor beyond rotten leather caps and tunics and trousers padded out with wool. One man, much to the marshal’s amusement, marched stark naked, wearing only his boots, ruck, and freedman’s cap. When Constantius caught sight of him, the noseless old mercenary lashed the naked soldier once across the back with his riding crop.
“Where’s your kit, spear?” Constantius barked.
“Come and ask me standing up, candy-ass,” the soldier spat right back.
While their plebeian comrades wallowed in administrative neglect, forced to pass down rusted arms and busted armor straight from the dead to fresh recruits, the cavalrymen were decked out in equipment fresh from the imperial armories in Antioch. Most of these men grew up playing polo on their lavish country estates and sat perched on their mounts with a haughty, privileged air. They wore heavy tasseled helmets and lamellar coats over shirts of mail and overlapping banded iron tubes up and down their arms and legs. Their massive warhorses were similarly adorned in sheets of metal scales that draped down past their knees, and the men came armed with spears, swords, and small round shields. While the footmen slavered at tales of their comrades’ many depravities in the brothels and donkey shows of Antioch, the horsemen talked instead of Homer and the acts of the Apostles, of national destiny and the strange course of Time. They knew each other by their fathers’ names or the feats of adventure they enjoyed in their youthful years at the honored academies they had attended across the Roman world. These patrician warriors cared little for loot or slaves. They measured worth instead by heroism, virtue, and honor, and every man among them ached for a chance to etch his name in the gilded halls of Posterity.
The officers of the field army staff all belonged to the latter caste and accordingly carried all the splendors of power with them on campaign. So while his days were full of all the standard duties Belisarius expected (namely, sitting a horse), the evenings soon came to resemble any one of a thousand palace nights in Constantinople, at which crowds of pale imperial peers gathered in the gilded Hall of Nineteen Couches to smoke opium and listen to performances of esoteric Egyptian poetry while they danced and devised the conquest of the world. Hermogenes soon became the darling of these gatherings, and those silken brigadiers of Antioch sat in rapt and pious silence for hours on end as the Master of the Officers decried petty human weaknesses like love or empathy and praised instead the “supreme immortal virtues” of reason and crusade.
“What is peace?” he said one night in the dancing shadows of the headquarters tent. “If all the many varied races of Mankind were meant to live in total harmony, why would God give us the ability to kill one another, or the passions that inspire wrath? No. Violence is, in fact, our only and most sacred purpose, and Conquest its best vehicle. As soon as Mankind was divided at Babel, God made the reason for Creation plain: it is nothing more than one vast gladiatorial arena, in which his chosen people must fight to earn his affection.”
The brigadiers all crossed themselves and tapped their riding crops on the tables in support of what the eunuch said. Belisarius clenched and unclenched his hands. He felt as if he had wandered into an asylum or some ancient cultic festival in which the real was thrown aside in favor of the reckless passion of the human heart, and the moral orders of eternity were cast away for the bitter chaos of hedonistic oblivion. Their faces were rabid and their eyes were wet with lust for war. Belisarius felt sick. He stood up from his seat. The brigadiers all stood up to attention. Hermogenes uncoiled from his seat with his lips pulled back in a slimy wooden grin.
“That’s enough,” said Belisarius. “This is a war camp. Not one of your smutty garden parties. You’re here to fight. Not talk. Go see to your men. We march at dawn.”
The brigadiers and their virtuous young staff officers frowned and mumbled among themselves but nonetheless still nodded in salute and shuffled from the tent.
The next morning, as the army trundled through the verdant fields of eastern Syria, Belisarius was approached by his chief of staff, a Constantinopolitan senator named Prokopios. The marshal never really cared for him. He was too much like every other bureaucrat and government official who worked in the Sacred Palace: he had that same haughty, blue-blooded strut, the precise attention to rank and title, and the soft hands of an academic. He was not much older than Belisarius, maybe thirty or thirty-five, but his hair was already completely grey. His fingertips were always stained with ink, and he ate little, drank even less, and never seemed to smile. His work was his life, and his self-worth measured by whether men addressed him as “honorable” or “respectable.” He seemed incapable of laughter, or even understanding anything trivial, and struck Belisarius as a bit of a snob. The marshal secretly suspected that the man was a closeted pagan.
“What do you need?” he said.
“My apologies, marshal. I just wanted to say that I appreciate what you said to his magnificence the Master of the Offices last night.”
“Hermogenes.”
“Yes.”
“So say Hermogenes.”
“I appreciate what you said to Hermogenes. You have more allies in your company than you might think.”
Belisarius studied him. Hard black eyes. The distant gaze of a soldier. The simple style and manner of a frontiersman.
“Where are you from?”
“Kaisairia, marshal. Palestine.”
“What’s it like there?”
Prokopios looked out over the fields.
“Not too unlike this,” he said. “But you can stand in the wheat and still hear the crashing of the sea.” He closed his eyes and took a long slow breath. As if savoring the residues of memory. “This is the closest to home I’ve been in nearly twenty years.”
Belisarius followed the Palestinian’s gaze across the fields and saw in his mind the boundless grasslands north of the Danube, where his ancestors hunted game in the way people of the steppe had been hunting since Man first hunted horseback. Sleeping on the ground and sometimes in their saddles but always underneath the stars, they fashioned bows from the horns of their kills and worked the strings with their leathered hands and thickly corded arms as they sang songs older than memory in the campfire light. They drank horse blood mixed with mare’s milk and ate hard black jerky and grasshoppers fried in a pan when there was no game to be found, but when their kills were fresh and abundant they gorged on the flesh like wolves. Yet still their animal gluttony paled in comparison to the appetites of the oligarchs in Constantinople, who ate only for pleasure, or imported rare birds and wines lost on shipwrecks in open displays of wealth. Belisarius knew his years in the palace already made him a foreigner in his own country, and he shuddered to imagine how his grandfather, that stoic old Hun, would think of the man he had become.
“I’ve also not seen home in far too long,” he said.
“Well,” Prokopios said, “If we must fight for something, let it be our homes.”
From that point on, Belisarius chose to ride beside Prokopios, passing long days in the saddle engaged in conversations that mostly went over his head. The Palestinian was a voracious reader of history, and he lectured Belisarius at length about all the invisible curiosities they passed beside the road. A village on the grounds of an Assyrian battlefield. A pig pen where two local saints met their martyrdom. As best Belisarius could tell, it seemed that Prokopios existed in dual realities: the first was the real waking world, full of men and prejudice and chores, and the second was the historical world, the cumulative world, which all Mankind was passing through and adding to with every step. Prokopios understood Time and Creation not as a single straight line from Adam to the present, but instead as a thing that simply was, like a cloud of fog or a bowl of soup, in which all the many parts lived alongside each other, always floating past and always in existence. In the evenings, when the sun dipped within a finger’s width of the horizon, the fields resembled vast sheets of polished copper. Belisarius had always imagined Alexander and the Makedonians pursuing Darios through cruel and barren desert. But suddenly the marshal saw them there, young boys and greybeards, all of them poorer than dirt, marching through a land that seemed to bleed prosperity. He saw them run their leathered fingers through the wheat and shake their heads in wonder as they felt the land’s naked age, and at the countless lives in bygone years who walked upon that very road beside those very same canals and watched that very sun make ancient grasses come alive.
For the first time in his life, Belisarius found himself wondering how much of the story of Mankind remained untold, and how the people of years to come would look upon that place and sun and sky, and stand in wonder at their feeble imaginings of the Romans as they trundled off to war. And then Belisarius gained a dim sense of the fact that the death of any single person was the death of countless unborn nations, and was forced to wonder how many languages, works of art, and marvelous architectural achievements each fallen arrow would annihilate. Lifetimes gone unlived, pale autumn skies left unseen. It was like the felling of a tree: every leaf, branch, and blossom died with the trunk. Every death disfigured posterity. Entire forests of human potential had been ravaged by Alexander and the ambition of his generals. And Alexander died young. Belisarius knew he would die an old man, and that his career was only just beginning. He felt the escalating pressure of the lives and fears of millions driving him toward another historical object of great mass and influence – and their meeting, which had been arranged at the birth of Time, would decide the shape and face of Man forever.
Once all that finished running through his mind, Belisarius pulled over to the side of the highway and vomited.
7.
Stephanakios floundered and failed to remember anything of note that had ever happened in Epiphania. His host, an overweight old bishop named Theophanes, was thrilled to relate the city’s history to the duke, professing himself an avid student of the annals.
“Well,” he sighed with a gentle smile, “the current agora was built in the consulship of Bassus Herculanus and Flavius Sporacius. It was constructed by the prefect at the time, a man called … uh … what was his name?”
Stephanakios supposed that a man of less refinement could be duped into thinking the town was a place of some repute. There was a small stone wall that seemed adequate. The main thoroughfare was swept. There were two theaters, one of which barred the admittance of pagans and Jews. The city’s main basilica was low and plain; an old administrative building. The locals killed stray dogs and street people, so the alleyways were mostly safe and clean.
But Epiphania was not Antioch, which was exactly why Stephanakios had moved his headquarters there from Epiphania in the first place. To make matters worse, peasant farmers and their families were streaming into town from all outlying communities in ever-increasing number, hoping to find some safety hidden behind the walls. This added a chaotic extra layer to the tide of passersby who normally swamped the city: Arabian merchants with long camel trains, bands of ragged pilgrims headed to Jerusalem, and foreign-born Christians seeking work, citizenship, and asylum. While some of the duke’s softer friends might have praised the cosmopolitan character this mixing of peoples gave Epiphania, Stephanakios had about a dozen other words he would rather call the place. Worse yet, a pervasive funk always hung about the town, and Stephanakios was not sure if the smell was something unique to Epiphania or if it was just the average stink common to all Mankind. When he mentioned it to Theophanes, the bishop simply shrugged and scrunched his brow.
“I couldn’t say, your worship,” the bishop said. He tapped his nose. “Allergies.”
Unsatisfied, Stephanakios took the matter to every man he could. The city prefect could not pick the smell out, and neither could the officers on the duke’s own staff. One of the town councilmen thought he noticed something foul, only before he realized that it was a patty of dog shit clinging to his shoe. The priest sweeping the steps of the church could not smell anything out of the ordinary. Out of sheer desperation, Stephanakios even consulted the head of the local Platonic academy.
“A smell?” said the academic.
“A smell most foul,” said Stephanakios.
“By most I assume you mean a smell so foul it surpasses all other smells in its … its what? Its repugnancy? Its atrocity? Its noxiousness?”
“It could not be more foul.”
“That is interesting,” the academic said as he stroked his beard. “But that begs the obvious question: what does it mean to be foul?”
“I feel that’s self-apparent.”
“No doubt. Though not particularly useful in our search for the truth. For what is one man’s foul but another man’s lunch?”
“What?”
“My point being, your worship, that you must give me a better sense of the smell’s qualities, not your judgement of them.”
“It smells foreign.”
“Ah, my good duke,” the academic said, shaking his head with a patient, good-natured smile. “We can’t understand what is foreign without first understanding what is native.”
“You want to know what Roman smells like?”
“It seems necessary before we can answer what does not smell Roman.”
“Well, I smell Roman.”
“So a foreigner is anyone who doesn’t smell like you?”
Stephanakios paused. He supposed the academic did not smell like him. Dry and musty, like an old leather shoe. But the duke could not determine if the academic was a foreigner. His skin was lighter than the duke’s and his beard less well-kept, but the duke knew a number of poorly-groomed and light-skinned Romans. The duke thought the church was all that bound them in their Roman-ness before he remembered there were foreign Christians and Roman pagans, as regrettable as that might have been. He further supposed that he had met a number of well-scented, even personally pleasant, foreigners, and for a few panicked seconds, Stephanakios wondered if all that differentiated what was foreign from what was Roman was an imaginary line drawn somewhere in the open reaches of the eastern desert. But then, realizing the absurdity of such an idea, the duke laughed to himself and bade the academic well.
After all, there was work that needed done, and the duke could not waste all his time talking in circles with some pederastic old hermit. The only problem was that the work that needed done was just as boring and inglorious as Epiphania itself. Paperwork. It all came down to paperwork. Stephanakios could not think of a single toil that was more spiritually vacuous. Action reports occasionally came into his office from around the sector, but most of them were completely banal. They described the movement of caravans, the coming and going of various government officials, rumors of holy portents supposedly witnessed by the lay population, accounting summaries, quartermasters’ audits, the names, ranks, and units of various soldiers dead or incapacitated with disease, and so on. On the rare chance that something of note came across his desk, that information was passed directly on to Belisarius. Sometimes those letters came sealed with wax and string, and Stephanakios had to forward those north without ever even knowing what they said. He knew many of the seals by heart: the dukes of Phoenicia and Arabia were both dear old comrades. Yet their letters always came for someone else’s eyes.
The war was already passing him by, and the real fighting hadn’t even begun. A number of reputable reports already told of a large Sassanid force amassing in Mesopotamia, which Stephanakios would never see. It was far beyond his sector. He could already see the war’s few moves unfolding: Belisarius and his opponent would meet at some frontier town, exchange a few blows, and retire. That might repeat until a clear victor emerged, or the emperor and shah might agree on terms after that first inconclusive meeting. If that were the case, there would be several more months, perhaps even a year, of truce and cold war while the two monarchs kicked the treaty they were drafting back and forth. But the real moves, the grand strategy, the mobilization of peoples, arms, and faith, would have come to an end. And Stephanakios would have to sheath his sword, hang up his armor, and be enslaved again by a life of comfort and anonymity.
“How do you cope?” he asked Theophanes one night as the two sat down for dinner. “There’s a war for Christ and country going on and I’m chained to a desk writing letters.”
“We are honored to have your worship in our presence.”
“That’s all well and fine,” said Stephanakios. “But what’s the point of any of this? Is this really all that life amounts to? I come from a long line of very famous men, your excellence. I have a certain reputation to uphold.”
“What is a good life?” said Theophanes. “I would posit that a good life is not one in which much has been done, but one lived in accordance with Nature.”
“Your excellence, I haven’t come to bandy words about philosophy. I have had more than enough of that lately.”
“There is a line that comes to mind from time to time that goes: a city is not made beautiful by monuments but by the men who call it home.”
Stephanakios knew he had heard the mantra somewhere else before but did not care enough to ask the author’s name. It sounded like much of the same self-congratulatory nonsense that ruined whole generations of men by softening and enfeebling them. Christ was a human god. The leader of a well-ordered Christian life therefore strove for human godhood. One could not achieve salvation by being only good enough. Not when the world was one vast heathen sea, unconquered and uncivilized. Mediocrity had given Epiphania a bishop like Theophanes, whose only concerns were what he would eat and when. Mediocrity had allowed a city as bland and unadorned as Epiphania to exist in the first place. Mediocrity caused the collapse of the western provinces. Half-measures bred no glory. Sloth and self-acceptance would never create a city as grand and everlasting as Antioch, and the commonwealth itself would have been impossible without entire generations of iron men giving their lives and toil to posterity. Now their children, hopelessly vain and self-involved, and too ignorant of the great strain required to build this grand achievement of social engineering, could only sit and watch it collapse.
After some silence, Stephanakios told Theophanes all that he had been thinking. He told the bishop about the sacrifices of their ancestors and the modern softening of Roman youth. How nobody cared for glory or virtue anymore, nor the ancient families who cultivated both. He found himself complaining about the marshal’s savage and provincial nature, and decried the use of heathen troops and the utter immorality of the common marching man. He cursed women and all their witch-like enchantments, as well as the needless abstraction of Homer’s poetry by pagan, sky-headed academics. But most of all Stephanakios cursed his luck — how he, worshipful Duke of Syria, who had broken the Immortals at Amida, son of the great philosopher and statesman who shared his name — how he, Stephanakios, had been relegated to a backwater sector by an incompetent and undeserving commander where his talents would be wasted and where the locals seemed to revel in the rotting of their motherland.
Theophanes watched Stephanakios as the duke ranted about all these and other complaints. The bishop sometimes nodded and sometimes gave a neutral grunt. He never touched his drink. He waved the slaves away. At times he coughed into his napkin, but he never took his eyes off the duke.
“Can I tell you,” Theophanes said after Stephanakios finished, “what I love about this town?”
Stephanakios had worked himself up far too much to care. He just grunted and nodded, shooting down a few tepid dregs of wine at the bottom of his cup.
“This is a place,” said Theophanes, “where the people don’t care for glory or immortality. They are horrified by fame. Here the people care not what they’ll eat, but that they’ll eat, and work not for pay, nor thanks, but purpose. They know and love their neighbors, and are happy with their circumstances. Simple places breed simple people, your worship. But our God was a simple man. And I, for one, am honored to serve him here, among the simplest of his flock.”
“You’ve never wanted more?”
“What is fame? If it were a necessary part of our nature, we would all be known to all at birth.”
Something about the bishop’s smile sickened Stephanakios. He could feel a vastness of wisdom in what the bishop said; the massive weight of an entire ocean of tradition, inquisition, and naked curiosity. If exposed to such a well of sinful knowledge, Stephanakios knew he would at once become a vacant imbecile like Theophanes, blinking in wide-eyed wonder at the poor cutting grass in the fields. He had experienced such a feeling only once before, when a lecturer at the academy in Athens he attended in his youth asked if God could create an object so heavy even He could not lift it. Stephanakios had not followed that destructive line of inquiry then and refused to do so now.
“Well,” he said as he rose and straightened his cloak, “as my father always said: to each their own.”
“Indeed,” said Theophanes, that same fool smile on his fat and greasy face. “Speaking of which, I have always been an admirer of your father’s letters. He seemed a wise and penitent man. And I was delighted to read a fellow student of the Stoics.”
“Yes, he and I both. If you’ll remember, his published letters on the epistles of Seneca were all addressed to me.”
“That’s right,” said Theophanes. “Forgive my … forgetfulness, your worship. I didn’t realize you thought yourself a Stoic.”
Stephanakios frowned.
“Isn’t it self-apparent?”
Theophanes furrowed his brow.
“No,” the bishop said slowly. “I must admit … it is not.”
8.
After crossing the Euphrates, Belisarius and the Romans found that the well-worn highways of the interior quickly gave way to a twisted network of rugged old frontier roads that were poorly kept and rarely paved, and the army’s long trains of supply wagons stalled several times a day because of shattered wheels and broken axle rods. Dust and heat agitated the oxen and mules, and the animals often stopped at the hottest point of the day, ignoring the whips and curses of the men who drove the wagons. The countryside immediately bordering the river was just as lush and green as the hills around Antioch, but tens of thousands of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels quickly turned even the richest earth into a storm of hot dust that reeked of manure and polluted everything the soldiers ate, wore, and drank. The silken brigadiers and all their virtuous young staff officers had stopped dining at headquarters, choosing to take their meals instead with Hermogenes. Rumors of dissent and dissatisfaction with Belisarius and his command floated about the camp, and he went armed night and day and in the company of his bodyguards. No campaign was complete without a general strike among the men, and the marshal feared he would soon have to cross swords with his comrades.
So Belisarius was relieved when, about a month after the army set out from Antioch, the crenelated walls of the city of Daras finally rose upon the distant plains. Built by Anastasios after the last of the Sassanid wars, Daras was designed to withstand and repel a large professional fighting force. But as he neared, Belisarius could see that Daras was far from the fortress city the military manuals made it out to be. The circuit wall had collapsed in several areas, leaving gaps so wide that goatherds from the countryside drove their flocks through the holes on their way to the city cisterns. Many of the homes in the city had also been abandoned, and an earthquake the previous winter had caused half the market quarter to collapse. The locals were all drunk, filthy, and ridden with pox, and starving dogs followed the soldiers everywhere they went, whining for scraps, while girls and boys as young as twelve sold themselves in the agora, charging bits of food or meager coppers for their services.
Bouzes, Duke of Mesopotamia, had repeatedly promised Belisarius that all eight thousand men of the provincial militia would be mustered in Daras by the time he arrived. But the duke had barely pulled together half that number, and those who answered his summons were either beardless and scrawny or crippled by age. The few men who owned any armor beyond their tunics and trousers came in helmets and cuirasses nearly rusted past the point of use. Only a few of these men came out to see the regulars as they settled like a massive flock of migratory birds in the city’s weeded yards and potholed streets. The rest of the militiamen were busy in the only local businesses: the drinking halls and brothels.
The duke himself was a middle-aged man with a paunchy gut and a face scorched and leathered by the harsh eastern sun. His hands and jaw shook from years of rampant alcohol abuse, and he smelled like a dead man walking. The burgundy cloak that marked his rank was mottled and faded, and he wore a pair of ragged old sandals instead of a soldier’s boots. A one-eyed dog followed him everywhere, shedding fleas and patches of greasy fur as it shuffled along, and the duke’s wayward kicks only caused the mutt to bark and gnash its fangs.
Bouzes bowed and kissed the marshal’s ring. Belisarius slapped him across the face.
“You wrote there are fifty thousand Persians at Nisibis.”
“Yes, marshal.”
Belisarius slapped the duke again. He whimpered as his nose cracked and bled.
“You’ve fucked us.”
He pushed Bouzes away, swept his books and papers off his desk and knocked over a nearby chair. Their only other option was to surrender the city and take up a defensive posture on the western side of the Euphrates, thereby handing all of Mesopotamia over to the invaders. Yet in spite of all that, and apparently unaffected by the marshal’s rage, Bouzes just stood there with his mouth half open, blinking slowly like a cow in the sun.
“A thousand apologies, your magnificence,” Bouzes said. “But what’s a man to do?”
“Your fucking job,” spat Belisarius.
So after sticking Bouzes in a small corner office where he felt assured the duke could do no harm, Belisarius set the men to work. Each regiment was assigned to repair a different stretch of fortifications, and while some saw to the wall with fresh bricks and concrete, others dug ditches in between a pair of low hills in the plain before the town. The trenches were arranged in a system of three parallel lines, each about two bowshots long, a stone’s throw wide, and a shovel’s length deep. They were arranged in such a way that two ran in sequence ahead of and parallel to the third, so that the network formed a kind of flattened “V” with the mouth toward Nisibis.
The men assigned to the walls started by tearing down a collection of abandoned buildings and transporting the rubble to their worksites by wheelbarrow and mule-drawn cart. While some mixed concrete in vast copper pots, others put up ladders, pulleys, and scaffolding. As men affectionately nicknamed “mules” dashed up and down the ladders with wicker baskets of rubble slung across their shoulders, the bricklayers, who sweated with trowels in hand and concrete at the ready, worked with the ferocity of sailors damming up a sinking ship. While the ditch-diggers sang and laughed and cursed as they worked, the men on the walls didn’t have the same luxury: if they could not finish their repairs before the Sassanids arrived, they would all be forced to take the field.
Daras was flooded with refugees by the end of that week. Some drove herds of sheep or goats while their weeping children clung to travel-eaten robes, but most carried nothing but their clothes and their lives, and even then their eyes saw nothing, as the eyes of dead men saw. Their faces and bodies were often stained with smoke and their limbs weak and hobbling with hunger and thirst. A few of the dying or wounded were heaped in carts, moaning and writhing and rasping for water.
Pillars of smoke soon appeared on the horizon as the Sassanids approached and razed the farms and villages along their line of march. The sight of this drove the locals into a panic, and a mob formed at the town’s western gate as thousands chose to save themselves and flee for the interior. Belisarius appeared in the agora to calm the people with his presence but went unnoticed in the madness. That night, when he took a final tour of the circuit wall, he could see the Sassanids’ campfires glow against the cloudy eastern sky.
An entourage of Sassanid dignitaries came the following morning to demand the city’s surrender. They were led by a young nobleman called Azarethes, who kept a mustache on his lip and his hair in the Roman fashion. He wore a blue padded overcoat that draped to his knees and was decorated with long colorful ribbons that danced along the ground and swam behind him as he walked. There were three large ropes of pearls around his neck, golden rings on all his fingers, silver hoops in his ears, and a scabbard wrapped in tiger skin on his hip.
He met Belisarius and his officers warmly, and the parties sat for lunch. All the Sassanid officers spoke perfect Greek. They made no mention of the war as they ate, and Azarethes regaled them all with tales of his time as a hostage in Constantinople. He smiled with fondness at his memories of the old emperor Anastasios, whose audiences he always found to be profound lessons in grace, humility, and poise. Then he led the Romans in a raucous round of laughter at his recollection of the bone-rattling races in the circus, and the depravities of the women who lived by the shore. It was not until the meal concluded and the dishes were carried away that either side approached the reason for their meeting.
“My master’s demands are plain,” Azarethes said. “The excellent Peroz, Grand Marshal of the Nations, gives his sworn and sacred word that no harm will come to you, your soldiers, or the citizens of this city if you lay down your arms at once. Failing that, we will have no choice but to bring our wrath against you.”
Thereafter, the Sassanids excused themselves and the Romans convened to discuss the offered terms. All the silken brigadiers of Antioch, with their six-month-old commissions and family names more ancient than Time, tore their clothes and beat their riding crops on the tables as they raged against the Persians and their long traditions of decadent eastern cruelty. Their virtuous young staff officers echoed those same arguments, gently refining certain points where their commanders had fallen flat. Hermogenes stirred their wrath with reminders that the eyes of all the world and all posterity were upon them, and that the honor of their nation, church, and God relied upon the strength and fire of their courage. This threw the men into a frenzy, and they begged Belisarius to allow them the honor of death in battle.
Belisarius beat his fist against the table and ordered everyone out of the room, telling only his bodyguards to stay. Prokopios was shuffling from the room with the other civilian advisors when Belisarius spotted him and insisted he join the war council. Hermogenes was the last to leave. He nodded at Belisarius and licked his lips before closing the doors behind him.
Once alone, Belisarius asked his companions what to do. Tobias, the ex-priest, advocated for a period of fasting and meditation and, if necessary, Dionysian prophecy, to divine God’s desire for them from the mysteries of nature. Andronikos, that great lover of protocol, insisted they stick to the plan and hold the city from within. Kyrillos, Roman patriot that he was, suggested they make a night attack on the Sassanid camp and burn it while they slept. Constantius, with all his years of wisdom, said they should take the trenches and meet the foe in the field. Belisarius listened to each in turn. Satisfied with what they had to say, he then asked Prokopios the same question.
“I’ll say only this,” said Prokopios. “The heart is easily swayed by words like us and them or right and wrong. But Nature doesn’t make such distinctions. Mankind is one in essence and purpose. Its division is unnatural. The only ethical way to proceed is to admit our fault and accept our defeat. Offer the Sassanids truce. Offer them tribute. Think of how many lives could be lost playing out a game that’s already been won. Give them our apologies and end it here today.”
“They’ll just say no and wipe us off the goddamn map,” said Constantius.
“Then the result will be the same as if we decide to fight. Getting them to agree to a truce is the only way we’ll win.”
“I disagree.”
“So we beat them here. Then what? They have twice the resources. Twice the manpower. You’ve all seen the condition of our troops. Barely ten thousand are up to standard and only a third of them have ever seen combat. Peroz is approaching with fifty thousand men at arms. If, by some miracle, we win against them here, we will never survive a second attack.”
There was a sense of resignation in the Palestinian’s hard black eyes, as if Prokopios had seen this day a thousand times before and knew exactly where it headed. As if the human mind were as predictable as the turning of the stars. Belisarius retreated to a nearby window and looked out on the dusty streets of Daras. The gutters were choked with crying refugees. An eastern wind carried distant echoes of the invaders singing as they put up their camp alongside the pungent smells of their latrines, altars, and cookfires. As had happened on the road some weeks before, Belisarius felt the smothering weight of history envelop him, and sensed his impotence in the face of the mad tumbling chaos that was the rise and fall of nations, and ordered Azarethes and his men back in the room. He explained his terms as he clenched and unclenched his hands: the Sassanids would return to Nisibis with tribute in hand and a non-aggression pact agreed while Peroz and Belisarius each awaited instructions from their two respective monarchs. Azarethes nodded along and praised the marshal’s wisdom and restraint and retired again before returning later that evening with his commander’s decision.
“Against my advice, my master is of the opinion that you Romans are an inherently devious people, and that you tend to make war when Fortune smiles and peace when she frowns,” he said. “Accordingly, he asks you only this in response: that a bath and lunch be prepared for when he enters this city in triumph.”
9.
Stephanakios could feel himself being relegated to the margins of history.
“Does that bother you?” said Theophanes.
“Does it bother me?” the duke said coldly. The two were sitting on a pair of couches on the palace veranda, which granted commanding views of the town and fields beyond the wall. It was a market day, and the people were about their business as if a war for Christ and Christendom were not raging just a hundred miles away, and that Duke Stephanakios, who turned the heathen tide before the high stone walls of Amida, had not been relegated to a dusty backwater where he spent his days in idle conversation with a tedious and obese ecclesiastic. “Of course it bothers me.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why do you care?”
Theophanes shrugged and smiled. A slave came to collect the dishes from their breakfast.
“What killed Achilles?” the bishop said.
“Paris.”
“Not who. What killed Achilles?”
“An arrow. Why are you bothering me with this?”
“I’m a man of the cloth,” said Theophanes, a patient smile on his wide and ruddy face. “I must ease afflictions of the soul wherever they take root.”
“How noble.”
“Pride killed Achilles, if I can answer my own question,” said Theophanes. “He was given a choice: he could either stay home to enjoy a long life, but die in anonymity, or go to Troy and find everlasting fame — at the cost of a young and violent death.”
“All men must die,” said the duke, proud of his Stoic wisdom.
“Though some invite it needlessly,” said Theophanes. “If God wanted us dead, why give us life at all?”
“I’m startled by your blasphemy.”
“I think it’s a fair question.”
The bishop’s slave returned with a bowl of pears and a crystal pitcher full of wine. Stephanakios grabbed the servant by his wrist.
“Tell me, boy,” he said. “Would you trade your life for your master’s?”
The slave glanced sideways at Theophanes. The bishop smiled and nodded.
“This slave would not, your worship.”
“Tell him why,” said Theophanes.
“One life’s good as any other,” said the slave, straightening with confidence. “I am free in ways my master is not, just as he is free in ways that I am not. To breathe and feel the sun and eat each night’s a blessing. And my master is fair.”
“Thank you, Eumaios,” said Theophanes. The slave bowed and left them alone.
“Impressive,” said the duke. “My cousin once trained a Saxon he owned to recite any passage from the Gospels on command.”
“Eumaios has taught me far more than whatever I’ve taught him,” said Theophanes, reaching for the wine. He poured them each a brimming cup. “Your worship is a famous man already. Twenty years on from your actions at Amida and you’re still the toast of all the East. You’re not a young man anymore, Stephanakios. Let the children have their chance at glory.”
“Like Belisarius?” the duke said with a snort.
“Yes, like Belisarius. Why not?”
The duke grumbled and turned away. A produce cart had overturned in the street below, and a crowd had gathered to help the aging merchant get the cart back on its wheels. The man was bent at the hip, disgusting in his feebleness. He threw his hands and smiled at the young men lifting his cart, waving at his joints as if apologetic for his age. Stephanakios felt nothing but contempt for the crone.
“I think the marshal represents something dangerous,” the duke said at last, turning back to face Theophanes. “You and I are a dying breed, your excellence. I shudder to imagine what the world will be once men of our ilk are buried and forgotten.”
“Such is the anxiety of old men all through time,” said Theophanes. “When Belisarius comes within sight of the grave, and his body starts to fail, he too won’t recognize the world he leaves behind. And so on and so forth until the final trumpet calls. Yet still the sun will rise, and our children go to play, and the long slow dance that is our time upon the Earth will still go on, in perfect rhythm with our Lord’s great symphony. Is that really so terrible?”
“I can think of nothing worse.”
10.
Horns rang out on the morning of the first of May and the army took the trenches, sweeping through the streets of Daras like a flood of liquid steel. The people of the city crowded the gutters and ramparts and pressed their hands against the soldiers as they passed with whispered words of prayer. Meanwhile, the Sassanids churned up massive clouds of dust as they mustered in the furrowed fields before their camp, which rolled across the plain and fell like snow on the city and the soldiers as they rushed off to assembly, each man calling “God is good” when he marched out through the gate. The army was arranged in three separate divisions, each in turn arrayed in two parallel lines behind the three shallow trenches. Kyrillos commanded the left division, Bouzes the center, and Constantius the right. The first line of each division was composed entirely of cavalry, while the infantry stood behind them in support with their spears and shields at rest in the dirt. The Huns were posted on the wings of the central trench, where Belisarius held command with his retainers in a third line of mobile reserve behind the infantry stationed there. Behind the hill that marked the army’s left extremity, Fara and the Heruli laid in wait with their bellies in the grass. As the soldiers filtered into place along the trenches, the various regimental commanders and their aides ran up and down the line, making sure the men stood parallel to the shaft of a flat-lain spear.
Then there came a rolling blast of trumpet and the Sassanids appeared. Glinting in the sun and fantastic through the dust, their spears bristled up from the dirt like a million naked trees, and colorful banners of countless battalions fluttered in the wind while distant war drums beat a marching tempo to the thunderous rhythm of the foreigners’ footfalls as they inched across the field. Belisarius felt himself unable to swallow. The shah had not sent an army – he had sent a nation; a plague; a disaster of mythic proportion to wipe the Romans from the memory of Mankind. The stink of shit filled the air as thousands of men on the line lost control of their bowels, and the nervous chatter of countless sets of teeth sang out like cicadas emerging from their long decades of sleep. Horses gnashed their bits and fresh recruits called out for God, their mothers, their fathers, the saints, and primitive spirits too ancient to name. Then, just as the momentum of the day seemed ready to drive the two armies toward irretrievable destruction, the drums fell silent and the Sassanids halted just out of bowshot.
After a period of stillness, the bishop of Daras appeared and walked along the Roman trenches with an entourage of priests who burnt incense and held a copy of the Gospels up for all the men to see. Runners flitted back and forth, carrying messages between Belisarius and the various regimental commanders, but otherwise, everything was still. Despite threats from their superiors, it was not long before the footmen went from slouching on their shields to sitting on the ground, cursing the heat and the Sassanids and drinking deeply from their waterskins.
About an hour after noon, some six hours after the Romans assembled, distant Sassanid trumpets blew and the enemy host began to swell across the open field. Half an hour passed before the Romans could make out individual men in the approaching ranks and the ornate, colorful patterns painted on their shields. Another minute passed before the invaders blew their trumpets again and filled the air with arrows. The sun dimmed as the missiles passed before it, and then they did not fall so much as they appeared, coating the ground, the men, their horses, and their shields. Most bounced off the Romans’ heavy iron helmets or broke against the cataphracts’ gleaming iron scales, but where the projectiles found flesh the men went down in heaps. Some wailed, grasping at the places they had been hit, while others fell in silence, dead before they met the ground. Some took their wounds and weathered on, wincing at the pain. The wounded horses were more pitiful to see, confused as they were, and some riders were thrown when their mounts, stuck and limping, ran away in fear.
The Romans lifted their bows and shot back, and soon the air between the armies darkened. The battle continued in this way for almost half an hour. But as the fighting wore on, the Sassanid arrows came to come in smaller, ever-more isolated bursts until they slowly stopped entirely. Their ammunition exhausted, a division of heavy Sassanid horse beat their shields and charged across the field. After two quick feints, they angled themselves toward the Roman left division and launched into a gallop. The Romans on the line began to roar and beat their shields in return, ready to engage. Once the Sassanids came within a stone’s throw of their lines, the Romans drew their darts and tossed them in the rising iron tide. Many men fell hard beneath the weight of the missiles, but the first to die in this barrage was Xerxes, a veteran of the previous eastern war, who lost two fingers on his left hand from a Roman sword at the battle of Amida. A Roman dart struck him underneath the collarbone and sent him toppling backward from his saddle. The wound was not lethal, and Xerxes was still awake and aware when he fell beneath the hooves of his comrades’ horses. Ever the soldier, he accepted his death with cool rationality, uttered a simple prayer to Ahura Mazda, and watched his soul flee his body.
The Romans managed to throw their second round of darts bare moments before the two lines met in a deafening clash of spear and shield. As each successive wave was cut down or beaten back on the lip of the trench, another swept in to quickly take its place, and as the battle wore on, the trench began to fill with fallen corpses. Kyrillos, the harelipped, was in command of this division, but the dust stirred up by the fighting made it hard to see how the men in the front were doing. Accordingly, Kyrillos dispatched a pair of staff officers to get a view of the battle from atop the nearby hill. But when these two returned with only vague estimations of how the men were faring, Kyrillos roared in a rage and rode up to the rear of the cavalry to make his own inspection.
Hundreds of slaves and battlefield surgeons rushed back and forth to fetch the wounded from the line, hauling their patients away through the dust with wet and gory hands. The wounds were as varied as the men who suffered them. Theon, a sergeant serving in the Antiochene Horse, was dragged to the rear after his upper thigh was cut open with the razor edge of a spearhead. His blood-soaked trousers were split open and a fat hunk of flesh, skin, and muscle hung limp, bouncing slowly as the slaves wrestled him onto a stretcher. Theon’s mind was dumb with shock, and he kept reminding the slaves that he was in the hundred-meter sprint that night and needed his leg fixed by the time the race began. Himerios, who lay in the stretcher next to him, was forced to flee the fighting when a Sassanid soldier shattered his collarbone with an ax. He slapped and clawed the surgeon tending the wound with slick and bloody hands. The surgeon, his face a mask of gray determination, spit the boy’s blood away as his blackened fingers danced along the jagged maw of broken, weeping bones.
These and other wounded were escorted to the army’s triage site, a shady hillside behind Belisarius and his retainers where the dead and dying were laid out in rows, their bones or brains or guts exposed, their skin gone cold and pale. With nobody there to swat them away, flies swarmed about them in the heat. While some of the wounded shook or seized, most lay still, attended only by the priests who rocked and prayed beside them as they died.
Belisarius could not see the fighting itself from where he sat. He could see the cloud of dust it kicked up, and could hear the awful sounds of men doing violence to each other, which cast up a din like the sound of distant thunder. But the men in the field hospital were the first effects of the battle Belisarius could actually see. He made a point to study them. A man with his cheek torn open. Another with his guts held in place only by his belt. He saw a third man with a smashed kneecap, and a fourth with a ragged stump where his wrist used to be. All of them, in no small way, harmed by Belisarius. He knew this to be true, and he knew it was a truth he would be forced to bear for the rest of his life. As he thumbed his signet ring, Belisarius asked himself if he would be able to manage this burden. No answer seemed forthcoming.
Back on the left, Kyrillos had just completed his first inspection of the cavalry, and was about to perform a second, when a Sassanid javelin struck him in the head. The Romans had been forced to spread themselves thin to account for the invaders’ advantage in number, and the harelipped mercenary made an easy and obvious target to any Sassanid fighting near the front. Kyrillos had already escaped more than twenty attempts on his life during his first inspection of the front by mere chance alone, and the Sassanids let up a cheer when they saw the Roman general slump and topple from his saddle.
The men escorting Kyrillos surged forward, seized him, and rushed him to the rear. Once out of danger, the men cried out for surgeons, but to their surprise, Kyrillos stirred in their arms and shot up where he sat. His companions crowded about, anxious to know his condition. After a moment, the harelipped mercenary unlatched his chinstrap and took off his helmet to reveal himself totally uninjured. Kyrillos cautiously touched his temple, where the javelin had bounced off his helmet. When his fingers came away clean of blood, his face lit up and he burst out laughing before he turned around and informed the Sassanids with as much volume he could muster that by the time the day was done he would personally rape all their mothers and eat all their dogs. This amused nobody other than Kyrillos himself, who bent over laughing and wheezing at his own joke.
But the Romans who saw Kyrillos fall were not aware that he survived and saw no humor in their present situation. They instead saw their general fall dead, and themselves facing a host more than twice their size, and started the simple calculations of their survival. Men began to drop their weapons and flee. Not in any great number; at first they fled by ones and twos. But as more men fled, more men were emboldened to flee, and soon the trickle became a flood, and the entire division turned and put to flight. The Sassanids rushed in on their heels, hurling up triumphant, taunting chants, while the rest of the Roman army, sensing that the day was lost, began to shriek and howl with fear.
Seeing this, Belisarius turned to Smallfoot and made a lasso-throwing motion over his head. The Makedonian nodded, took up his trumpet, and blew three blasts in quick succession: one long, one short, one long. At this, the Heruli exploded screaming around their hill, shooting as they rode. Unlike the Romans or Sassanids, whose armies fought as vast machines, the Heruli fought as individuals with a mind toward the one, circling and swarming like a cloud of angry bees. Each man charged this way, then the other, shooting as they went and throwing javelins in the clustered mass of enemy horsemen. Dozens fell without a thought to what was happening, and the full momentum of their charge stopped cold as they were forced to turn and address their attackers. Fara, the copper-haired commander of the Heruli, had spent the morning working up a powerful drunk that gave a grace and confidence to his movements he lacked when he was sober. He led the charge from the front, and shot and killed Zacharias, the son of an Antiochene soldier who met a Persian woman while serving in the last eastern war and married her to farm on the Tigris in the twenty years between. Zacharias grew up idealizing his father’s tales of courage and adventure from his time in the army, and secretly dreamed that he would one day meet a Roman woman to follow back to the lands of his ancestors. Instead, he died afraid and full of pain, his trousers soaked with piss and shit, after Fara’s arrow punched through his side and put a hole in his stomach. Although he died bare moments after being hit, his corpse remained in the saddle, and his horse, in a bid to save itself, carried them both many miles west before coming to a stop on the reeded banks of the Euphrates. There at last, Zacharias fell from its back and sank in the mud of the land of his ancestors.
Before the Sassanids could organize and meet the Heruli, the Huns positioned on the left of the center division charged and attacked the Sassanid flank, fighting in the same swarm-like style as their Herulian cousins. Arrows hissed and whined through the air. The Sassanids were bunched so close together that every shot found a target, and those terrible Hunnic arrows flew with such force that they punched clean through shields and sheets of mail and drove men from their saddles. Octar, leading from the front, shot and killed Mashya, a common herdsman from the singing plains of Parthia, who answered the shah’s conscription order on his aging father’s behalf. Mashya’s comrades would never learn that he was actually Mashyana, her father’s only child and daughter. But Mashyana’s father, who had always borne great love for her, never surrendered the hope that she might one day return and carry joy back in his life. He spent the weeks and months after she marched off to war combing the nearby towns and countryside in search of her, asking anyone who would lend an ear if they knew of the army’s progress west. Long after Mashyana was killed, and her body interred in a pit outside the walls of Daras, he arrived at the city in search of her, after learning of the battle that took place there. With no body to speak of, and no clear evidence of her death, he set out again upon the road, asking after news of a Parthian woman dressed as a soldier. He went about the world in this way until the months wore into years and his body turned old and frail. Yet still he wandered on, even after cataracts consumed his eyes, living off the generosity of men of all nations and creeds. After nearly thirty years of fruitless search, he turned up at last in a city that felt familiar but which had been ravaged to dust by earthquakes and war. There, in the ruins, the blind man asked what country he was in, and the people who called it home, and the name of the city in which he stood. There, in the darkness of his age, the voice of a woman told him that he was in Mesopotamia, that the people of this city had no country, but that once the Romans called it Daras. Upon hearing this, the blind man nodded, as if what the woman said was right, and his soul fled his body.
Thirty years before that day, as the battle raged in the plain before the city, horns rumbled and shrill whistles blew, and elements of the broken left division reformed and attacked the stalled Sassanid horsemen at a gallop, bellowing and beating on their shields. Kyrillos had reorganized the bulk of his mounted regiments after greeting the troops from a hilltop with his unmistakable features, and led them in their charge. The routed infantry, inspired by their comrades, rushed in on their heels as if pulled along by the tide, lifting and shaking their spears as they cried wicked curses on their foes. Many of the Sassanids, locked in tight formation, could not turn to face the Romans and were killed without even lifting their arms in self-defense. Horses toppled from the punches of spears and some went mad with fright, knocking over nearby riders and their mounts when they tripped and broke their legs on those that were thrashing wounded on the ground. Gore leapt up from the mob like rain falling heavy on a pond, and some of the Sassanids threw their hands up in surrender only to be killed. Others fought their way to safety. Then, with the same suddenness as the Romans mere minutes before, the Sassanids broke and fled.
The Romans let up a cheer, but there was little time to celebrate. Opposite the army’s right, another division of heavy Sassanid horsemen raised their weapons and roared. Their standards dipped and trumpets blew, and then they thundered across the field at a gallop, their spears level with the ground. Constantius, who commanded this division, cried out for his men to hold firm, but they did not bother waiting to meet the Sassanid spears. They put to flight and ran.
The first to perceive this calamity and understand its implications was a local woman named Hypatia, who watched the battle unfold from a tower near her home. Her father, a deacon, had been a rabid student of military history, and because of his years of household lectures on fronts and flanks, Hypatia understood implicitly that unless the right division managed to reform as the routed elements on the left had done, the entire Roman army stood likely to collapse. She cursed Fate for giving her a place in Time from which she could do little to alter the course of History and where she would likely meet a ruinous doom, and she clutched her two young daughters and kissed them both atop their heads.
Belisarius made a series of hand signs at Smallfoot. Two fingers up, two pumps of the arm. Bodyguard, about right. Charge. Then, at the call of the Makedonian’s trumpet, Belisarius and his retainers lurched to the right, slowly gathering speed until they matched the roaring terror of an avalanche. With their shields afront and spearheads out, they crashed into the Sassanid flank at a gallop, stopping their charge in an explosion of blood, dust, and steel.
The first to draw blood in this clash was Ioannes, a new addition to the company, who travelled from the coastal country of Bithynia in his father’s helmet and mail. He trampled to death a Persian slave who followed his master to the battlefield in search of loot before being killed himself by a Sassanid spear that caught him in the throat. The spear that killed Ioannes had not been thrust at him in particular, nor even thrust at anyone at all, as the man wielding it had been busy remarking to his tentmate and cousin riding beside him that they would be within Daras by nightfall. Raba, the Bithynian’s accidental killer, later found himself in a small clearing in the battle from which he could see the unmistakable purple horsehair tassel on the Roman field marshal’s helmet. Driving his horse to a gallop, Raba raced to cross the clamorous gap before it closed, a bulbous iron mace above his head. Belisarius, stupefied by the drowning roar of the battle, did not notice his attacker until Smallfoot lashed out with his sword and cut Raba’s arm in half at the elbow. Raba was too shocked to realize what had happened and swung his stump down at Belisarius as if his mace and the fingers that still clutched its handle were not lying dead in the dust below. Blood arced from the wound, coating Belisarius with a hot metallic spray, and Raba, only dimly aware of what was happening, reached out to touch his pulsing stump before young Taumas grabbed him by his tunic and struck him in the face with a short Thracian ax. Raba’s helmet crumpled like a piece of foil as blood and brains and other matter oozed up around the ax head. Meanwhile, Tobias, the former priest, put a spear through another man’s armpit, and the Sassanid’s battle harness broke and fell away as he toppled to the ground with a whimper somehow audible over the awesome din of the clash. Nikolaos, one of the marshal’s father’s men, was killed when a wounded Sassanid horseman, making his way to the rear, blindly threw his spear into the crowd. Shortly thereafter, Menelaos, a drinker, had his face smashed in with a shield. Smallfoot, the Makedonian, threw a javelin at a man but missed, hitting and killing another man’s horse instead. He pumped his fist in celebration all the same. Meanwhile, Athanasios, a former captain in the emperor’s Excubitors, was killed when a young Sassanid soldier named Boran bested him at swordplay. Boran’s sword was a curved Serikan saber with a fine leather handle and a round jade pommel, and its scabbard was embossed with small gold characters in the language of its maker’s distant land. The sword was a gift from the shah himself, given when the owner of the weapon rescued one of his sovereign’s hunting dogs from the swollen waters of a mountain creek.
After a time, the Roman horsemen routed by the Sassanids’ initial charge re-entered the fight, inspired by the sight of their commander rushing to their aid. Their courage was helped by Constantius, that noseless old mercenary, who whipped himself up into tears chastising his men for their cowardice. After calling them traitors to their God, sovereign, and nation, he lifted up his sword and charged back into the fight. Both ashamed and inspired, his men quickly followed after. They were further supported by the Huns and Heruli, who swarmed the Sassanids from behind and showered them with arrows. Demoralized and attacked from the rear, the Sassanids who could still escape then turned and fled for their camp. The rest, surrounded, were butchered to a man. With the best of their comrades dead or in flight, the rest of the invading army joined in the rout, and the day went to the Romans.
11.
News of the victory at Daras incited waves of celebration all across the diocese. Belisarius was mentioned alongside the emperor during the Patriarch of Antioch’s observation of the holy offices, and the people poured libations from their cups while uttering his name. Plays and games were held in Alexandria, and the Christians of Jerusalem celebrated with a routine sacking of the city’s Jewish quarter. In Epiphania, church bells rang for days on end and the markets and courts were closed for drinking, feasting, and parades. Thousands poured in from the countryside to take advantage of the public meat and wine, and races and gymnastic performances were hosted in the hippodrome. Spirits were high, and made all the higher later that summer when the Army of Armenia crushed a second Sassanid offensive near the mountain town of Satala. A number of local Sassanid-leaning warlords thereupon declared their fealty to the Roman people and agreed to be baptized. A mission of trusted church officials and other Roman dignitaries were dispatched to see this through, and the Sassanid governors of the region were all either cast out or killed.
Stephanakios took no part in the festivities. It was clear to him that the war had been won, and that the shah’s official surrender was only a soon-to-be-settled formality. These revelations threw the duke into a depression from which nothing could retrieve him. Ignoring the bishop’s many visits to his door, Stephanakios spent his days locked away in his apartments with the curtains drawn shut, engaged in many hours of long and fruitless meditation. The slaves who delivered and then took away his untouched meals were the only visitors he permitted, and he said nothing to them apart from joyless greetings and mumbled words of thanks. Before too long, he started losing what little weight he had and his skin began to pale. The thought occurred to Stephanakios that such austerity might kill him; and, with that revelation in mind, he pursued these measures of self-denial with a fresh and focused intensity.
But on the tenth and final day of the duke’s agonizing meditations, a perfumed young aristocrat from Constantinople arrived with a confidential letter for Stephanakios that roused him from his efforts at self-annihilation. The message was postmarked from Daras and bore the unmistakable apple seal of Hermogenes, the Master of the Offices. The duke’s heart jumped in his throat as he broke the gore-colored wax. The letter, which seemed to be written in the eunuch’s own hand, was addressed to “The Cherished Stephanakios, Most Worshipful Duke of Syria, Whose Very Grace Fills Christians Everywhere With Awe.” The actual body of the letter was brief, and merely informed Stephanakios that Hermogenes, as part of his ongoing supervisory duties in the East, would soon visit Epiphania to perform an inspection of the city’s stores and garrison.
Feeling somewhat disappointed by the routine nature of the message, Stephanakios tossed the paper on his desk and turned to dismiss the boy who delivered it. But upon being dismissed, the boy touched his nose and winked and suggested that Stephanakios give the letter a second reading under “warmer light.”
Confused, Stephanakios thanked the boy and sent him on his way. He held the letter up to the window and, to his surprise, saw the transparent tracings of invisible ink etched in the margins of the page. He lit a lamp and passed the letter over it. Only then did the eunuch’s hidden message darken and reveal itself. Hermogenes wished to meet with him in private, saying they had urgent matters to discuss.
Stephanakios took care to keep the letter safe from the torrent of joyful tears that ensued as he read and reread the eunuch’s precise and delicate calligraphy. A secret message within a secret message. High urgency. From the Master of the Offices himself.
Excited to share the news, Stephanakios brought the letter to Theophanes. The bishop was bent over a multi-volume commentary on the works of Homer in a sunny corner of his study. He greeted Stephanakios warmly and straightened up with happy surprise at the duke’s good cheer. But the bishop’s smile started to fade as Stephanakios explained the root of his enthusiasm, and it disappeared completely once Theophanes read the letter for himself.
“Be careful with that man,” the bishop said, pushing the eunuch’s letter back across his desk.
“What do you mean?”
Theophanes paused for a moment and gazed at the ink-stained surface of his desk. He slowly closed the volume he had been reading and folded his hands on its worn leather cover.
“My worry is that you’re dealing with a man you barely understand,” he said. “You’ve only ever known a world of honor and tradition, Stephanakios. Those two words still mean something out here. But they’re mere punchlines in Constantinople.”
“What are you talking about?”
The bishop leaned back in his polished ebony chair.
“I’m an old man,” he said after some silence. “An old man. I’ve met many people in my years. I wouldn’t dare to suggest that all my many dealings with the people of our race have endowed me with the thing that we call wisdom, but I’ve been around the course a time or two and have developed what I think is fair to call a decent nose for character. And Hermogenes reeks of Constantinople.”
Eumaios, the bishop’s slave, entered with two crystal cups and a pitcher of wine balanced on a gilded silver tray. Stephanakios was quiet as Eumaios put the cups on the desk and poured the men a measure each. Theophanes nodded in thanks and the slave excused himself, quietly closing the study’s ornate mahogany doors behind him as he went. Theophanes gestured at the duke’s cup, urging him to drink.
“I didn’t mean to offend your worship,” the bishop said. “I just want what’s best for you.”
“Shut up,” said Stephanakios. “You think you serve God? Getting fat here in your palace, reading heathen books. I’ve bled for my God. I’ve killed for him.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Theophanes. “For they shall be called the children of God.”
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,” said Stephanakios.
Theophanes shrugged and took a sip of his drink.
Hermogenes arrived the following afternoon. In spite of the supposedly secret nature of his mission, he had done little to hide his identity or destination as he traveled down the wide Tiberian Way in a massive eight-wheeled carriage adorned with golden statuettes of naked dancing cherubim. Apart from Octar and his six hundred Huns, who had come with Hermogenes from Daras, a great flock of magicians, fortune-tellers, travelling merchants, wandering ascetics, prostitutes, and pilgrims had also attached themselves to the column, seeking work or safety from the soldiers. These travelers announced the eunuch’s generosity and good will in every town they passed, causing the column to swell all the more as it made its way through Syria. The rumors reached Epiphania long before Hermogenes himself, and thousands of citizens swarmed the city gate and walls to see him for themselves, holding out their battered hands for alms or scraps of food. While another man of his station might have stayed hidden away inside the confines of his carriage, Hermogenes instead leaned out the window with a smile, tossing handfuls of coin at the grasping fingers of the masses.
It took Hermogenes and his companions most of the afternoon to work their way through the crowd, by which time the town councilmen and other local elites had learned of his arrival. They swarmed the eunuch as he stepped down from the carriage with an endless stream of gifts and petitions. Each man struggled to usurp the others’ compliments. They kissed the eunuch’s ring and fingers like a band of long-lost lovers, and Hermogenes welcomed their affection with the grace of a king, flashing his chipped and splintered smile as he slithered through the crowd.
Not wanting to be upstaged by a bunch of lowly provincial bureaucrats, Stephanakios had taken great pains to stage a welcome feast he thought suitable for a man of Hermogenes’s tastes and prestige. There was fresh-baked bread and jars of glistening olive oil from the duke’s own presses on the slopes of Mount Silpios, seared fish and roasted lamb and snails drowned in garlic butter, all to be topped off with crisp red apples and pears and dripping hunks of honeycomb. Afraid the local wine might serve only to embarrass him, the duke had also called for several pipes of a Palestinian vintage he felt Hermogenes would find agreeable — the timely delivery of which had only been possible at great personal expense.
Hermogenes carefully surveyed the spread, praising the duke’s cooks and well-practiced palate before he sat and asked one of the slaves to bring him a bowl of salted barley porridge.
“My apologies,” the eunuch said as he took his dentures out and set them on a napkin. “I’m afraid my condition allows me very little dietary flexibility.”
Stephanakios, his face growing hot, stammered out an apology and professed his ignorance of the eunuch’s needs. Hermogenes waved his hand, silencing the duke.
“It’s of no concern,” he said. “Besides — we have more important matters to discuss.”
Once the slave returned with his porridge, Hermogenes ordered all the staff to leave. They glanced uneasily at Stephanakios until he nodded and waved them away.
“My informants tell me that you’re a man who can be trusted with critical matters of state,” Hermogenes said after the doors clicked shut. “Would you say this is a fair assessment?”
“If I could be so bold, your magnificence.”
“Excellent,” the eunuch said, licking porridge off his grey and mottled gums. “While it’s true that our most penitent and merciful sovereign, may he always be victorious, possesses a great deal of fondness for our young Belisarius, our augustus is, truth be told, a man with a man’s imperfections.”
“I see,” said Stephanakios.
Hermogenes gave the duke a flat, toothless smile.
“I’m sure you’re aware of our sovereign’s humble origins.”
“I am.”
“Mysterious are the ways of Creation, to place the mind of a perfect monarch in the body of a poor country peasant. But then I suppose our Christ was a humble man. It is a beautiful lesson, in its way. Nonetheless, whether because of his rudimentary upbringing or simple purity of heart, our sovereign is incapable of facing painful truths about certain men in his cabinet, and is especially incapable of hearing such faults about the good Master of Soldiers. You see, the emperor has a certain soft spot for our magnificent Belisarius. The marshal is, after all, a fellow Latin-speaking provincial, and spent some time on the emperor’s staff when our lord was Count of the Excubitors. He sees him like a son. However, Love is one of Mankind’s most pervasive obscurers of Truth, and I’m afraid that our lord’s love for Belisarius has prevented him from seeing the marshal’s greatest and most dangerous faults.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor should you, being a man of pure and honest heart. It pains me to expose you to the minds of men so depraved. But the defense of our commonwealth is no easy task, and its continued survival requires us to endure discomfort from time to time.”
“Of course.”
Hermogenes pulled back his thin pink lips to show a slimy, toothless grin.
“You are a Roman and a patriot, my friend,” he said. He paused and slowly stirred his porridge as he gazed in the bowl. “I still remember the day our good Belisarius arrived at the Sacred Palace. He’d been given command of a company of Excubitors and so came to be granted the favor of our lord’s predecessor in the purple. He was a handsome youth — barely sixteen with a boy’s growing muscles and a face devoid of hair — and his beauty and provincial humility immediately left an impression on us all. But he left an especially devious impression on one of us in particular. You see, at the time, one of the shah’s cousins, an eminent young man called Azarethes, was completing his fifth year as a hostage in the palace. We all thought him an honorable and distinguished guest, and many were saddened by the fact that he was scheduled to soon return to Persia. However, it seems that Azarethes felt a compulsion to taste all the sweetest fruits of Romania before he returned to his homeland, and — the mind recoils! — it appears that his many years among austere and honorable Romans did little to stem his depraved oriental appetites.”
Stephanakios felt a pang of nausea.
“Your magnificence, I hope you’re not implying —”
“That Azarethes and Belisarius engaged in sodomy? I am. And I hope that you forgive my plainness in this matter. Considerations of state security allow us little chance for decency.”
Hermogenes produced a crumpled piece of paper and slid it across the table. Thereupon, in ink scrawled in the wild throes of Love, Stephanakios read depraved remembrances of past erotic acts alongside promises of future bouts of pleasure and pain. The duke barely finished reading the letter before he pushed it away in disgust.
“Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.”
“I’m afraid that it’s exactly as it appears,” said Hermogenes. “Azarethes and Belisarius were given a chance to reconnect at Daras, and it seems their meeting only served to fan the embers of their love.”
“This isn’t love.”
“So let’s call it as it is: a threat to state security. I shouldn’t have to tell you that a man who fails to keep the sanctity of his own body intact should never be trusted with ensuring the sanctity of the body of the nation. And let’s not lose track of the fact that he yielded his honor to the guiles of a foreigner. A foreigner who, if my informants tell it true, stands ready to invade in the spring with nearly twenty thousand men at arms.”
Stephanakios could barely hear Hermogenes over the rush of rage that torched the walls of his mind.
“What would you have me do?”
Hermogenes swabbed his gums with a napkin and donned his dentures once again.
“I think you know.”
12.
The rest of the campaigning season ended without incident. Belisarius oversaw the completion of the Daras city walls and the annual harvest festival was held in Antioch later that same autumn. The marshal’s name was sung with cheer in cups across the diocese, and the people made use of the great number of slaves captured in the fighting. There were fairs and parades and thanksgiving feasts, and the emperor in Constantinople put up a victory monument that bore the marshal’s name in the Forum of the Bull.
But not all was right in the lands of the Romans, and ominous portents witnessed through the winter warned of coming trouble in the spring. A silversmith in the Palestinian town of Kaisairia told a neighbor that his dog had uttered the word “Babylon,” which incited panic among the people there. Local authorities failed to obtain a confession of witchcraft from the silversmith under torture, and the dog was taken and kept for observation. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, rumors spread that a hen had birthed a snake, and the Christian citizens of the city incited a purge of all the Jews and pagans living in the area. No further portents were reported, and the accumulated wealth seized from those killed in the massacre was distributed among the perpetrators. Perhaps most remarkable of all, numerous witnesses in Alexandria reported the sun rising and falling twice in a single day, and a local girl was seized by a terrible fit of spasms in the agora. Those near enough to hear reported to official church investigators that she had uttered the phrase “Woe to the crown of pride,” in perfect Greek. The girl, an Aksumite slave, had no familiarity with the language. She was taken and subjected to torture but died before a confession was produced.
In spite of the wide reporting of these incidents, and thorough investigations by civil and church authorities, nobody was prepared for the calamity that came in the spring of 531. A force of fifteen thousand Sassanid horsemen and another five thousand Arabian allies crossed the Euphratasian frontier near Kirkesion and started laying waste the region there. Roman military officials had long thought such an attack impossible, since the desert in that area was considered too vast and barren to support a conventional army. But the Arabian scouts who guided the invaders through those burning Assyrian wastes were far from conventional fighters, and the attack caught local security forces completely unprepared. Thousands fled in fright from the might of the invasion, and the Sassanids sacked every unfortified settlement along their line of march. Soon fires raged across the western bank of the Euphrates, and the Sassanids, advancing unopposed, set their sights on Antioch, and the riches waiting for them there.
13.
That winter was hard on the people of Daras. The soldiers were getting restless, and Belisarius found his office flooded daily with local citizens complaining of robberies, rapes, and countless acts of vandalism. Graffiti sprang up all over town and certain neighborhoods were abandoned to the soldiers, who raged like drunken heathen kings in long and violent bacchanals that left men dead from drink and whole flocks of livestock stolen, slaughtered, and consumed to appease their bottomless appetites.
Belisarius tried all the standard proscriptions. Violators were whipped, beaten, and thrown in stockades, and a few especially rowdy platoons were put on half rations and made to do hard labor. Belisarius forbade the quartermasters from distributing wine, but the men always found a way to quench their thirst. Those with the means to do so traded with the locals, most resorted to stealing, and some even fermented a foul and noxious liquor made from rotten fruit.
Things finally reached a head in the first weeks of the new year when a seventeen-year-old trainee was assaulted and robbed by a footman from another regiment. After finding the footman drunk and alone one night, the trainee beat him to death with a broken iron rod. A few soldiers keeping watch nearby found and arrested the boy when he tried to hide the body in a granary. During a half-hour hearing before a tribunal made up of Belisarius and other officers, the boy proudly confessed to the crime and showed them all the scars he received in the fighting at Daras. While he had no previous disciplinary record, the man he killed had been court-martialed more than a dozen times in his five years of service for crimes ranging from insubordination to petty theft, and once received a hundred public lashings for the rape of an old woman while on garrison detail in Antioch. Belisarius did not doubt that the trainee had been justified in killing him, but the law was plain. The only choice the marshal had in the matter was the color of ink he used to sign the execution order.
The trainee was brought to the agora to be killed that very afternoon. A crowd of onlookers gathered to watch him die, and they taunted the boy as they pelted him with wads of mud and pots of piss. He was blackout drunk and stumbling and colorful strings of vomit dripped from his wiry, adolescent beard. Then, to the crowd’s great amusement, the boy’s eyes widened and he freely pissed himself when he caught a glimpse of the tools of his demise: a wooden mallet, a tub of lard, and a sharpened wooden stake.
The boy shrieked and vomited again, slurring out confused and jumbled cries for mercy. The two men keeping him aloft, both barely older than himself, patted the boy on the back and whispered reassurance in his ear. He laughed, wailed, and laughed again, and one of the men kissed him on the head. The other squeezed his shoulder. Then, at a word from their sergeant, they pulled off his clothes and laid him on his belly. A fourth man started greasing the length of the stake while a fifth tied the trainee’s wrists behind his back. The sergeant, a one-eyed man with scarred and tattooed calves, squatted next to the boy and shared a few words of encouragement. Then, after tousling the trainee’s hair, the sergeant stood to see the order through.
The boy wept as he was hoisted and impaled, and was dead before the stake’s tempered point emerged from the back of his neck. The spectators, all either disgusted by the sight or disappointed with how quickly it was done, shook their heads and whispered back and forth as they dispersed. The boy’s executioners, their faces gray with shock, took hold of his feet and pulled him further down the stake to ensure that he was gone. Then, at a nod from their sergeant, they bowed toward Belisarius and made their way from the square. A few stray dogs came to sniff at the dead boy’s feet but soon lost interest and trotted away. Curious locals drifted to and from the execution mound to see what kind of evil deserved such a fate, but quickly left confused, having only seen a naked boy spitted on a stake.
The execution troubled Belisarius. He spent the rest of the day in a haze, thinking over and over about the boy’s final moments. In search of some relief, he sought the advice of his companions. Tobias, the ex-priest, told Belisarius that the law, though an imperfect instrument of human reason, was still built upon the perfect moral bedrock of Christian wisdom, and therefore any judgement issued thereunder was just by its very nature. Andronikos, that great lover of protocol, pointed out the very article and subsection of the military code that prescribed impalement for the murder of a comrade. Kyrillos, Roman patriot that he was, insisted that the army was long overdue a blooding, and that they should impale one man in every ten just as an example. Smallfoot, the Makedonian, said it was indeed a sad fate for the boy, but that all men must die at some time or another. Constantius, with all his years of wisdom, said the boy’s very purpose was to die. Unsatisfied, Belisarius rode out from the city and meditated on the summit of an empty hill. There the marshal remembered his father, who cried with a soldier’s simplicity when Belisarius left the frontier to grow old in the distant heart of power. Then his mother, tough as the land that bred her, her hawk’s eyes pinched in mourning as she watched him ride away. Their faces both more distant by the day.
Headquarters was a flurry of activity by the time Belisarius returned later that evening. The silken brigadiers of Antioch and their virtuous young staff officers were shouting acclamations for the emperor’s health and vitality. Slaves tipped out jars of rare and expensive wine as the bishop of the city read a feverish and militant mass in the palace chapel from an esoteric eastern book of mad desert ravings long scorned and lost by the greater body of the church. Prominent Sassanid captives kept for ransom were brought up from the basement and forced to parade naked up and down the hall while the Romans jeered and whipped them with their belts. Bouzes, Duke of Mesopotamia, had passed out drinking hours before, and was snoring in the fetal position in the threshold of his own audience chamber. The mangy dog that followed him everywhere had taken advantage of its master’s incapacity and already pissed several times on his faded magisterial vestments.
Prokopios appeared in the madness like a sloop in the morning fog. His face was stern. He held in his ink-stained hands a scroll that bore the familiar red-ribbon seal of a message of great urgency. War had come upon them once again.
14.
Stephanakios cupped his hands around his eye to curb the desert’s glare. Scalding wastes as far as he could see. Syria. God’s country.
The duke took a breath, savoring the hot and sandy air as one would do an antiquated wine. Antioch would always be his home, but its sweet orchards and rose-lined avenues could turn the toughest men to pulp. The desert was a whetstone. Men were made or broken by it.
Stephanakios had been in the desert a little more than a week and already felt like a man born anew. There was an energy in his bones he had not felt in years; a thirst for life; a bursting, stemless love for every rock and rotten shepherd’s hovel he passed on his long days in the saddle. He rose with the dawn and slept with the stars and sang thanks to God for the dust and sores and bug-infested hardtack that defined a soldier’s life when on campaign. He prayed the gift of war would never leave the hearts of men.
He had escaped Epiphania without having to share some tiresome farewell with Theophanes, and although the bishop wrote him a letter, Stephanakios destroyed it as soon as it arrived. His many months in the fat old bastard’s godforsaken city felt like a terrible bout of madness that had warped his senses of self, time, and worth. But now, with his banner floating on the wind, fresh blisters on his hands, and the stink of the trail in his nose, the memories he had of those long and bitter months in Epiphania slipped away like sand between his fingers. He knew who he was once again. And what he had come on Earth to do.
Far below, a dozen riders stitched across the sun-baked valley floor. They moved like foxes, slouching and slinking, one with their horses and the stones underfoot. They wafted uphill and came to a rest where Stephanakios and a few of his retainers sat mounted on the summit. The dozen Huns were pale with dust from their night in the desert. Octar, their leader, poured water from a goatskin down his face and neck. It cut clean swathes through the grime on his skin.
“What’s the word?” said Stephanakios.
“They’re foraging forty miles north,” muttered the Hun, spitting water from his lips. “Going by the river, stripping the fields.”
“And their number?”
The Hun scratched his chin and said something to one of his men in their language. The man shrugged and mumbled something back. Octar grunted.
“More than fifteen-thousand,” he said. “No more than twenty-five.”
“Then we can’t waste a moment!” cried the duke.
The aesthetics of a well-built camp pleased Stephanakios more than any of the ancient works littering the palaces of Antioch, and the camp his men had built was a prime example of the craft. The tents all formed a perfect grid, and the men were busy about their tasks like an energetic hive of bees. They made a fine bunch of drones. Apart from Octar and his six hundred Huns, the men of the duke’s brigade were all hardy Syrian boys. True men of the frontier. They had all spent what little youth the barren country of their birth allowed learning how to shoot, ride, and read the land. Every man of those five thousand knew the awesome terror of battle, having been beaten and bled countless times before by the Arabian raiders and roving packs of bandits that plagued the Syrian countryside. Some had even shared the field with the duke before the high and tired walls of Amida all those many years ago, and all had unwavering faith in his command and a wish to meet the heathen spear-to-spear. The invasion was not just an affront to their Roman honor, but a real and pressing threat to their homes, lives, and livelihoods. And Stephanakios intended to let them have the blood they clamored for so hungrily.
It was indeed a happy time for war. The Pascha was a scant few weeks away, and the men were seeing omens everywhere they looked. Just the day before, an officer’s slave reported witnessing an eagle fly above the camp with a newborn lamb clutched unharmed in its claws. Another man claimed to have seen an icon of the Virgin weep real tears, which his tent mates, their eyes drunk with wonder, joyfully confirmed. Many others told of dreams in which various saints or the Mother of God herself appeared to offer cryptic bits of wisdom they forgot as soon as they woke up. The duke was no theologian, and so could not speak to the orthodoxy of these omens, but nonetheless felt there was something right and pure in what his men had seen. He hummed a hymnal to himself as he rode through the camp, smiling and saluting at the men who stood to greet him as he passed. They were his blood; his boys. Pride burst from his very fingertips at the sight of their battle-hungry grins and lousy, greasy hair, and he felt the need to hug them as a man would do his sons.
A tent containing the brigade’s standard and icons stood sealed and guarded at the center of the camp. A group of men lay prostrate around its perimeter with their palms and foreheads pressed against the dirt. Some had already begun the season’s fast, which astounded Octar and the other pagans in his company. The Hun shook his head at the men lost in prayer as he rode to a halt beside the duke.
“So for this Christ you starve yourselves?” he asked. “Why?”
“It pleases him,” said Stephanakios. “For us to suffer how he suffered.”
The Hun shook his head.
“You Romans already eat so little.”
Stephanakios shrugged and smiled and patted the Hun on the back. How could one ever put the holy mysteries to words? The duke supposed a pagan would either be impressed at once by their majesty or remain forever unenlightened. Either way, the Christian message would be total in its reach. All the world would come to know baptism or the sword, and this thought gave the duke some comfort in the Hun’s heathen ignorance.
“I’ll never understand the customs of this country,” Octar said as he swung down from the saddle. One of the duke’s slaves came to take the Hun’s horse to the stables but Octar shoved the boy to the ground and kicked him in the head. Stephanakios sighed as the slave scurried away.
“I’m sure I could say the same of yours,” he said.
Octar clicked his tongue and muttered something to his horse in Hunnic. It snorted once and ambled away. The Hun clapped dust from his hands.
“I’ve spent many days in conversation with your priests and still don’t understand,” he said as he studied the men in prayer. “Your faith is one of peace?”
“It is.”
“So why do you kill?”
“There are different kinds of mercy.”
“Curious. And you have one god?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you have three?”
“They are each expressions of the one true divinity.”
“But one expression is the father of another?”
“In a way.”
“And this is your Christ? A living man who died?”
“In a way.”
“But this Christ was a Jew?”
“No. Most certainly not.”
“Curious.”
The duke’s tent was stifling inside but he ordered the attending slaves to keep the flaps tied shut. Octar squatted on the carpeted ground and started gnawing on a piece of jerky he had been keeping in his sleeve. Stephanakios sighed and poured the Hun a cup of wine.
“How soon can your men be ready to ride?”
For the first time that morning, the Hun’s granite face wrinkled with concern. He shook his head at the duke’s offered cup.
“Ride?” Octar said.
“My man, we must attack at once!” said the duke.
The Hun stood and folded his arms across his chest.
“We should tell the marshal,” he said.
“There’s no time!” Stephanakios cried, striking a nearby desk. “We must move today.”
Octar stared at the duke and slowly shook his head.
“We don’t have the numbers. You’ll kill us all.”
For a moment the duke’s eyes flashed with the drunken rage of a conqueror, and Octar saw that Stephanakios meant to return to Antioch either with his shield or on it.
“Does death frighten you?” he hissed. He advanced on the Hun, his movements heavy with an ocean of rage. Decades of sedentary palace life washed off the duke like dust in rain, revealing a man as noble as Hektor and fearsome as Achilles. Octar stepped back, palm on the pommel of his knife.
“I wouldn’t expect a man of your race to understand,” Stephanakios continued, “but there’s more to mortal existence than eating, drinking, and fucking as much as time allows. Far more. So much more that you and I can only ever grovel in wonder at the mere glimpse of a shadow of its majesty. But I can tell you this for sure, horse-man: it would please me a great deal to watch you die beneath a Christian banner. Pray that you displease me. But if you ever question me again I will personally flay you alive. So pass along my command: we’re breaking camp and riding north at noon.”
15.
“You’re leaving?” Bouzes whined, his face a ball of wrinkled old leather. “What with forty thousand Persians on my door?”
“The walls will hold,” Belisarius spat at the drunken old duke. He had already given orders for the army to depart, and the once-idle halls of the duke’s dusty palace had become a violent hurricane of clerks and slaves rushing to make ready. A eunuch on the chief accountant’s staff was in a rage, his songbird voice cutting through the bustle like the cries of a dying quail as he beat a slave struggling to organize a stack of files he had dropped and scattered on the floor. Other men, their minds on wrathful masters of their own, trundled blindly through the pile of documents, thereby only adding to the slave’s consternation. The eunuch, incapable of finding fault in anyone but his servant, danced around the traffic as he spewed an endless stream of kicks and curses on the boy. Belisarius pushed him from his path. “Besides,” he continued, “I’m leaving you three of my best regiments.”
“Only three?”
Belisarius stopped and put his hand on the duke’s chest. He recoiled from the duke’s rotten breath. There was a flash of fear in the old drunk’s eyes.
“I don’t want to hear another goddamn thing out of you,” Belisarius growled. “Just be thankful you’re not me.”
The situation was dire. Peroz and his host were still encamped at Nisibis, just a day’s march away. This new force, driving north with speed, threatened to smash Belisarius and the field army against Peroz like a hammer working iron on an anvil. The Romans could be trapped in Daras or destroyed outright; but either way, Antioch would be defenseless.
Their one hope was to head south and meet the invaders where Peroz could not provide support. The farther from Daras the better, and that meant the Romans had to move as quickly as they could. Belisarius elected to forge ahead with the cavalry while Constantius and the infantry followed under forced march. Bouzes and the Mesopotamian militia, along with three regular regiments, would remain at Daras as a bulwark against any incursions by Peroz. This meant, of course, that there was a good chance that Belisarius and the cavalry would meet the invaders before the infantry caught up. In that event, the Sassanids would outnumber them nearly three-to-one.
To make matters worse, Stephanakios either had not received or was simply ignoring the marshal’s messages. If the duke and his men were still near Epiphania, they stood well-poised to counter-encircle the invaders in conjunction with Belisarius. But this kind of maneuver required a high degree of coordination which was, of course, impossible if the two parties were not even speaking to each other.
The streets of Daras were choked with shouting soldiers, clattering wagons, and mules that kicked and brayed at the noise. Despite the marshal’s disciplinary efforts, the army had become disorganized and sedentary over the course of its long and sinful winter sheltered in the city. Soldiers barked and cussed at their superiors, their bellies fat with drink, their beards ragged, their muscles limp and weak. They had been an ugly patchwork when they first set out the year before, and now somehow were uglier and patchier, hauling rotten old rucks in scuffed and tattered boots, most of them missing a helmet, sword, or spear. A combination of battle and neglect had worn regimental insignia from their shields, so that the shuffling, spitting, and bitching companies that dragged themselves through the Daras city gates more resembled refugees or slaves in revolt than a modern conventional army. Their officers worked them with whips and canes like they were cattle being herded out to pasture, and the people of the city, relieved to be rid of the plague that robbed and molested them all throughout the winter, gathered on the battlements to pelt the troops with spit, stones, and odd bits of trash.
Evidence of the invasion was apparent as soon as the Romans crossed the Euphrates. The highways were swollen with refugees at all times of day, with some fleeing north and some to the west. A number of garrisons along the invaders’ line of march had abandoned their posts to join in the exodus, piling their families in military wagons alongside everything they looted from the cities they had sworn to defend. These men wore the appearance of starving wolves, making clear with yellowed fangs and hateful glares that they would not hesitate to kill anyone who suggested they return to the towering columns of tar-black smoke that covered the southern horizon.
After four days on the road, Belisarius and his men reached the city of Chalkis and crushed the looting taking place there. Thousands of locals had already fled west along the Antiochene Way, including the bishop, prefect, and all of their dependents. Belisarius arrived just as the last men of the town council were evacuating and detained them on the spot. Those honored and distinguished men, weeping like children, begged the marshal to let them follow their friends and family on the road, as the Sassanids were only twelve miles away, sacking the town of Gabboulon, and they were running out of time to make their escape. But instead of making Belisarius sympathetic to their plight, this news made the marshal fear that the infantry would not reach him in time to provide support, and that he and his men would have to make a stand in the town. After reminding the town councilmen of their patriotic duty to the commonwealth, Belisarius pressed every able-bodied man left in the city into service. The gates were shut, barred, and chained to prevent deserters from escaping, and the Romans settled in for the battle still to come.
16.
Gabboulon was a small productive town known throughout the diocese for its reliable exports of barley, goats, and cloth. But as Stephanakios observed it from a half-mile’s distance, belly-down in hot and scratchy scrub, the town looked more like the charred remains of a dying funerary pyre than the bustling center of energy and trade that once formed its reputation. The Sassanids, exhausted by their ceaseless march along the Euphrates, had pillaged the town more completely than the settlements they sacked before. According to the duke’s own scouts, it was the invaders’ third day in the city, and the violence showed no sign of slowing down. As Stephanakios watched from his vantage point, thousands of the invaders worked their way through the sprawling fields beyond the city walls, putting the crops to the torch. The barley was well-watered and the work slow and agonizing; but nonetheless, the Sassanids persisted, which led the duke to think they meant to stay there for a time.
The duke edged his way back from the ridge and joined his retainers where they waited with his horse in the shadows at the bottom of the hill. Their camp was a short distance away, perched atop a rise that offered them commanding views of the surrounding plains for miles in every direction. To the duke’s knowledge, the Romans had yet to be observed, and the fact that the invaders were going about their work so carelessly only made Stephanakios more certain in his suppositions.
It was general knowledge around camp that the duke was making ready to attack, and the men were standing eager by the ditches to hear what he had to say. Stephanakios felt a bittersweet pang prick his heart as he studied their pious, virginal faces. He was sure there had never been a group of men more deserving of the annals.
“I won’t bore you all with idle talk,” he said. The soldiers all leaned forward or stood up on their toes, straining to catch his words where they hovered in the air. “Make ready to attack.”
The men let up a cheer and threw themselves upon the ground to kiss the duke’s fawn hide boots as they cast up hymnals and cries to the saints with a passion Stephanakios was sure would wake the peaceful dead. A procession of monks carried the icons and standard from their shelter in the center of the camp, and the men shrieked with joy at the sight of the Mother of God weeping proud tears of honey.
While the monks led the men in prayer, Stephanakios excused himself to arm and ready his soul. A wave of melancholy ebbed through his bones. For the first time since that quiet night in Antioch the year before, Stephanakios saw the rare red hair and boyish smile of Leonnatos, the greatest friend he had ever known, and the boy’s pale corpse in the heaping dead that filled the fields before the high stone walls of Amida.
In search of some relief, Stephanakios shook the image from his mind and cast himself before an icon of the taxiarch. He tried in vain to conjure up the faces of his ancestors but only saw a crowd of men with hazy features moaning disapproval. A short time later, while prostrate on the floor, the duke was torn from his meditations by the news that Octar and all his men had deserted.
At the duke’s insistence, the Huns had been kept in an auxiliary camp about a quarter mile ahead of the Romans’ main position. His official reasoning was to have a forward-operating base from which Octar and his men could provide early warning of any impending attacks, but unofficially, Stephanakios was afraid that having such a large band of pagans living amid Christians would hamper morale and harm the Romans’ chances of obtaining providential favor.
Desertion had, naturally, been one of the duke’s chief concerns. As a preventative measure, Stephanakios assigned one of his retainers, a half-Hunnic Christian named Petros, to ward over the federates and keep the duke informed on the general goings-on about their camp. A group of four monks and their six novices joined Petros in this endeavor, with the aim to proselytize and bring the light of Christ to as many of the heathen as they could. Though often exhausted by Octar and his endless, blasphemous inquiries, these holy men reported that the Huns had been nothing but gracious hosts and receptive listeners throughout the length of their campaign. But when the duke was torn from his prayer with news of their treachery, he was forced to remind himself – with some sadness – that men are mysterious, and their souls ultimately unknowable.
To announce their desertion, the Huns had decapitated Petros, all four of the monks, and five of the novices, and hung their severed heads from the back of a mule. The youngest of the novices, a vacant-eyed Phoenician boy, had been stripped naked, lashed raw, and forced to walk the mule and accompanying heads to the gates of the Roman camp. The Huns then broke their camp, sacked and burned a nearby village, and rode east to enlist with the shah.
Their confidence eroded by this turn of events, some of the soldiers cried out that God had abandoned them, and rushed to save themselves. Others begged for a chance to pursue the treacherous fugitives and beat their spears against their shields. But most just milled about, some mounted, all in various states of readiness, whispering about this new uncertainty the Huns had thrust upon them.
The duke, aware at once of the fickle hands of Fate, stormed through the camp and made the men give ear. Leaping on a wagon, sword in hand, he railed at length against the corrupting natures of peace and luxury, praised the sanctity of the Roman cause, and valorized what he called the “supreme virtue” of patriotism. He spoke without thinking and, before too long, began to feel that he spoke without speaking at all, engaged instead in direct symbiotic communion with the men who were his soldiers and his sons. Stephanakios told them that he wished God would grant him a voice that could echo through eternity, if only for a chance to lavish praise on each and every man at his command for all the generations yet to come. He wished for the strength of Sampson, so that with his own hands he could build each man a temple to bear their names and shelter their descendants through the terrors that would someday drive them from their beds. But most of all the duke found himself wishing for a mother’s gentleness and care, so he could guide and comfort each man through the pain they soon would endure. Then he called on Nilos, a father of six sons, who stood waiting rigid at attention with his worn old hands around a spear. Stephanakios reminded the veteran of their time beneath the walls of Amida, when the two had barely been older than boys, and there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, broke the charge of the shah’s own guard. The duke then lavished praise on Zenobios, a common farmer, who had the strength to haul a nursing sow across his back. He reminded him of a distant morning many years ago, when Zenobios, wounded in the leg with a raider’s arrow, was carried to safety across the back of his old captain, the duke as a younger man. Stephanakios then announced his admiration for Ezekiel, a Jewish convert to the Roman church, who had seen and wept at the holy relics in Jerusalem and there became convinced of Christ’s divinity. The duke laid bare his soul to him and all the others; he confessed his desires for the future of Mankind. At times he spoke to them with more honesty than he had ever used in speaking to himself, and was at times afraid of what he said. But then, with the certainty of prophecy, he promised a beautiful martyrdom and everlasting fame for every man who joined in the attack. Drawing the edge of his sword against his thigh, he showed them all with his own blood that pain and shame were only apparitions, and that reason – selfish, cowardly reason – would always fail in trials of the soul.
A cloud passed before the sun and cast the camp in shadow. There, alone in the front row, Stephanakios saw Leannatos in bloodstained clothes, weeping at the sight of the man who once had been his greatest love. Ice took hold of the duke as he locked eyes with the vision. Then, with a judge’s cold resolve, he banished the boy to the darkest pits of fading memory, took up his sword, and bade the men go forth. And whatever effect his words had on them all, the attack commenced as planned.
17.
The town councilmen of Chalkis, enraged at the restrictions Belisarius had imposed on them, came together in assembly to protest their internment. While most conceded that the raising of a citizens’ militia was likely necessary to ensure the safety of the city, all were in agreement that men of their rank and prestige should be excluded from this duty. After a motion raised by Kleon, the honorable Committee Secretary for Public Sanitation, the council agreed to nominate a single member of their number to present their case to Belisarius.
They all spoke passionately, and each man gave his case for who should speak and why. Some nominated themselves, some nominated others, and some debated policy or finer points of argument. The debate was fierce, but a leading candidate was quickly identified: a dealer in silks and spices named Heraklios. He was a lifelong local who had grown up in the dusty winding streets of Chalkis, getting to know the people who drifted through and the languages they spoke. Though some of his associates thought him a rustic, and sometimes a bit provincial, he spoke with frankness and honesty, and never once in his career or personal dealings took a condescending tone. Another man nominated him to the position, and though at first he fought it, his other supporters convinced him that a man of the people, a citizen and a man who pays his taxes, and who gets along with everyone, would be the one most suited to speak with a man from a place as metropolitan as Constantinople.
With a great amount of pride in his step Heraklios made his way to the villa where Belisarius had established his headquarters, followed young Taumas through the gate and yard where the marshal’s men watched him pass, and then up into the house, down the central hall, and out through a door that opened to the rear courtyard where the chickens scratched and the slaves’ quarters opened up. Young Taumas led the councilman across the yard to a ramshackle wooden hut no wider than a man stands tall and opened it up to reveal the marshal completely naked, sweating and sitting on the toilet.
“What?” Belisarius grunted.
“Your magnificence,” Heraklios stammered, averting his gaze. He covered his face with the sleeve of his tunic. “Would there be a more convenient time for us to speak?”
“No. Old soldier’s disease. What do you need?”
Against all natural inclination, Heraklios grunted and composed himself and explained that he, Heraklios, son of Heraklios, a Roman and a Christian, had come to speak for the honored members of the Chalkis town council. He reminded Belisarius that the Roman commonwealth was one of natural liberty, in which no free man could be compelled to live in a fashion that betrayed his mores or animus. Failing that, how could they hope to be better than the Sassanids? The raising of a citizens’ militia, he conceded, was likely necessary, as Chalkis was a great and ancient city, and its temples and monuments needed protection. But why, Heraklios wondered, did Belisarius require the service of himself and the town’s other noble oligarchs? There were many thousands of itinerants and refugees left in Chalkis who could accommodate the marshal’s needs, while the town councilmen had property and associates already on the road to Antioch.
Belisarius sat listening before he grunted and shivered and waved his hand.
“That’s enough. I understand. But the answer’s no.”
After he returned to his colleagues with this news, Heraklios was the first in the council to suggest that Belisarius was little more than a half-mad barbarian. Kleon, honorable Committee Secretary for Public Sanitation, seized on this assessment and declared Belisarius an anti-constitutional revolutionary. Unsure of what he meant, the other councilmen did nothing to stop Kleon from gathering a crowd in the agora and there declaring that Belisarius intended to betray the city to the Sassanids.
This mob, which numbered several thousand, took up weapons and descended on the city. After ransacking the few homes that had not yet been looted, they broke into town hall and used the desks and benches of the councilmen to set the place alight. The councilmen themselves, who by this time had come to terms with Kleon’s intentions, withdrew in a body from the chamber and reconvened in a nearby monastery. Once finished with town hall, the mob turned their fury against the bishop’s palace and adjoining church, where they smashed the pews and stole the eucharistic chalices and gilded icons from the sanctuary. The military stables were seized by a band of mutineers who sided with the rioters after declaring Belisarius a Sassanid collaborator. These located and murdered the marshal’s two personal horses, and threatened to kill more of the army’s mounts if anybody attempted to retake the stables. Nightfall was all that brought the street demonstrations to an end, and the mutineers spent the night barricading their position.
Later that night, as he paced in the amber lamplight of his office, Belisarius found himself unsure of what to do. Tobias, the ex-priest, made broad and intricate moralistic arguments in the marshal’s favor that largely evaded Belisarius. Andronikos, that great lover of protocol, reminded the marshal of the authority of his office and the rioters’ and mutineers’ violation of said authority. Kyrillos, Roman patriot that he was, stressed the mutineers’ insufferability and decadent eastern character. But none of their explanations satisfied Belisarius. Whatever ultimately caused the disaster he found himself in, Belisarius knew one thing for sure: if reinforcements did not come soon, he stood to lose control completely.
To bring his master some relief, Smallfoot the Makedonian – known throughout the army and the province of his birth for his riding ability – volunteered to find Constantius and brief him on the situation. Belisarius agreed despite the lack of moonlight. In case of capture by Sassanid scouts, the Makedonian carried nothing but the clothes on his back and a dagger on his thigh, and the only light that guided him along the Antiochene Way was a dim orange haze in the eastern sky where Gabboulon burned.
He rode for many hours in the void, groping blindly at that distant place where the cool blue stars disappeared beneath the black and vacant earth. All that assured Smallfoot he remained true in his course were the sounds of his horse’s hooves on the pavement and the occasional whispers of refugees lying strewn in countless thousands on either side of the highway. Once, as he shivered in his cloak, he saw the crumbling embers of a fire on a hill above the road. A veiled young woman, her silken face aglow, was squatted at the fire’s edge, tending the coals with a charred length of bone. When Smallfoot caught her faceless gaze, she stood and scattered what remained of the fire and vanished in the empty sky beyond. The Makedonian, never much a superstitious man, continued on his way without a second thought.
Near midnight, Smallfoot heard a command to stop as three men rushed forward and grabbed his horse by the reins. One was dragged to the ground and let out a stream of curses as he clattered on the cobblestone. The other two beat the Makedonian’s horse on the shoulders and snout, which caused her to rise and kick her forward hooves. As Smallfoot drew his dagger and ordered the men to identify themselves, the fourth blew life into a long-dead fire and rose with his hands outstretched. Though Smallfoot did not know him, he had the unmistakably feral look of a marching man.
“We’re on your side, you big dumb fuck,” the marching man crowed in a harsh Isaurian accent. “Lucky a man with some principles heads this post. You’d otherwise be dead right where you sit.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Smallfoot said with a grin. “My mother always keeps a candle lit for me.”
Constantius was still awake when the pickets brought Smallfoot to his tent. In an effort to boost morale, the noseless old mercenary had forgone his horse to march beside the men, and the journey from Daras had brought havoc on his body. Wide patches of skin on his ankles and feet had been eaten by his boots and replaced with filthy, rancid-smelling bandages. He had lost almost ten pounds in the short time since his march began and shivered under three separate cloaks as if he were stranded in a bitter mountain storm. Nonetheless, he rose as Smallfoot dismounted and embraced his comrade warmly before offering the Makedonian the only chair in his tent.
After a short meal of hardtack and bitter unmixed wine, Smallfoot described the situation in Chalkis. Constantius was up and applying fresh grease and bandages to his feet before the Makedonian even finished his report. Smallfoot, his mouth full of half-chewed biscuit, frowned and asked him what he was doing.
“What’s it look like?” Constantius said, reaching for his boots. “Getting on the road.”
Orders were dispatched and trumpets blown, jolting the soldiers awake. Although they had bedded down for the night mere hours before, blind fear for the sergeants stalking up and down the camp with cat-o-nines in hand drove the soldiers from their tents as if they had found the pale form of Death snoring happily beside them. In spite of the dark, they broke camp and packed their kits entirely by feel while cursing every saint, king, and man they could name before they greased their feet, laced their boots, and stumbled up the road.
Belisarius could not sleep that night. He spent the hours fretting back and forth across his office, drowning in an ever-growing sewer of anxiety. When his feet grew sore he sat, and once the aching stopped he stood and paced again. Every time he reached the western-facing window he stopped and gazed out in the dark, holding his breath and straining his ears for any sign of salvation. By the time the sky brightened up enough to see the outline of the road, all the marshal could hear were the chirps of pale desert birds nestling in the endless rows of apricot trees reaching outward from the town. As the sun began to break and spill across the fields, Belisarius found himself thinking of home, and the sea-like steppe matched in grandeur only by the sky, which gleamed like beaten bronze in the distant summer evenings of his youth. And then, as he heard the city come alive below, he thought about his father, who always wore his status as a Roman with great pride, and Belisarius decided that if he were destined to die at the hands of his countrymen, he would do so in the trappings of his country. Accordingly, he donned his finest cloak and the epaulets and signet ring that marked him as the Master of Soldiers, buckled on his sword, threw his shoulders back, and took his place on the steps outside to await whatever wrath would come his way.
But to the marshal’s great surprise, he went unnoticed in the festive chaos quickly consuming the streets of Chalkis. Smallfoot, bearing the imperial standard, came tearing up the western road, stirring the men on watch with a series of triumphant trumpet blasts. The soldiers in the city, for the first time relieved to see their impoverished brothers-in-arms, lined the circuit wall and avenues with bread and wine in hand and bawdy army songs rolling off their lips. They showered the infantry with grain and praise as those weathered ten thousand came shuffling through the gates, and the locals and refugees still interred in the city fell on the ground to kiss the soldiers’ boots and hands. The mutineers abandoned the stables and fled for the safety of their billets, where many were killed by comrades or officers who knew them to be traitors.
The footmen looked like dead men walking. Their trousers were tattered, their feet were bleeding, and their eyes were burnt-out pits of coal. After shrugging off their rucks and casting off their shields and weapons in disgust, the footmen fell and laid around the town like slaves on a holiday, sprawled out in whatever shade they found, their bandaged feet resting on their helmets, damp towels drawn across their faces. They lifted their heads and squinted with contempt at the washed and rested horsemen of the city, offering mumbled groans of recognition or jokes uttered with the biting scorn marching men always had for the mounted wing of the army.
Belisarius found Constantius, half mad with exhaustion, shriveled up in the back of a mule-drawn cart. The mercenary grunted and smiled at the sight of his commander, and Belisarius, overcome with joy, kissed him on the mouth.
18.
The Sassanids abandoned Gabboulon the following morning and rode back the way they had come. Hoping to press the advantage, Belisarius and the Romans immediately gave chase.
The lands east of Gabboulon had been ravaged with impunity, and the burnt-out streets of the towns and villages the Romans encountered were choked with corpses picked apart by carrion birds and packs of wild dogs. The Sassanids had even slaughtered the farm animals, leaving whatever they could not eat to bloat and rot in the burnt and trampled fields. A long train of sodden and pathetic refugees trailed behind the Romans as they marched and gathered in vast mobs about the camp each night like a frothing lake of boundless human misery. When the army marched out in the mornings, the refugees who still possessed some strength always tried to throw themselves upon the wagons and baggage mules, only for the teamsters and their slaves to beat them back with whips and clubs. Those too sick or hungry to go on collapsed in wailing heaps by the side of the road, their gums all black with scurvy and decay, moaning incoherently with claw-like hands extended as the troops went marching by. Patriotic captains wearing rusted twenty-year service medallions called the Romans’ attention to every roadside atrocity the Sassanids left behind, commanding them to imagine their families, their animals, and their livelihoods in place of all the charred, bloated, and anonymous forms lying strewn and ruined amid the destruction. While most of the soldiers had no families, owned no animals, and practiced no trade apart from the spread of organized violence, they still spat and swore at every mention of their foe. After all, there would be no need to hump a ruck or bear the cracking of the sergeants’ cat-o-nines without the Sassanid attack, and they were anxious to punish the invaders for causing them all the petty discomforts that came with life when on campaign.
Soon the Romans were passing each night on the ruins of the Sassanid camps, and always amused themselves after a long day on the road by lynching the sick and wounded the invaders left behind. Then, their lust for play abated, they would marvel at the shrines their opponents had erected to pay homage to their gods, sniffing at the burnt offerings and spent incense that caked the platforms and wondering with poorly-hidden fear what the purpose and design of those strange and pagan rites might have been. Invariably, one courageous man would always elect to piss on the shrine under study, thereby vanquishing any sense of mystique it once might have conveyed, and by the time the Romans resumed their march the following morning, the artifacts of that strange foreign religion had always been reduced to the status of latrines.
It soon became evident that they were not the only ones hunting the Sassanids, as — just a week after marching east from Chalkis — the Romans encountered two separate fields less than a mile apart strewn with battlefield dead and still being picked apart by birds and local looters. Rumors suggested everyone from Christ himself to some local tough or another, and it was not until their third week out from Chalkis that the army found a makeshift battlefield hospital full of Roman wounded. These men, all members of the Syrian provincial militia, burst with rampant joy to tell their countrymen about the supernatural deeds of Stephanakios, most worshipful Duke of Syria, who had thrice made battle with a far more powerful foe and three times taken the field in victory. The men under Belisarius found the very air full of the sweet scent of providential favor, and the joyful crusading zeal of the wounded Syrians spread in the army like a cancer. While some of the older veterans carried the unconquerable immunity of cynicism, most found themselves observant of the approaching Pascha, and the Biblical deeds of the Syrian militia, and felt their fatigue overcome with a hunger for war.
Finally, on the eve of the five hundredth anniversary of Christ’s resurrection, after weeks of blistered march and scalding sun and moldy bug-infested grain, the army reached the crumbling city of Kallinikon, which overlooked the naked expanse of the eastern frontier from the river’s gentle western bank. The battle-weary invaders, alarmed at the encroaching army’s rate of speed, forded the river a mile upstream and erected their camp on the opposite shore, hoping to cross into Arabia unopposed.
The Syrian militiamen standing guard atop the ruinous walls of Kallinikon greeted the exhausted and sun-stroked regulars with eyes drunk and lively from the pleasures of crusade. One of the Syrians took up a drum and another sounded a horn, and the battle-hungry men of that brigade chanted a paean native to the plains and rivers of their province with voices full of warmth and confidence. They surged forth as the field army marched inside the city, pressing bowls of water to the soldiers’ mouths as if they were nymphs nursing the heroes of old.
Belisarius edged his way through the singing throngs, asking anyone who would lend an ear where he could find Stephanakios. The only man who answered informed him that the duke had joined in communion with the saints, and that asking where he could be found was like asking where joy or peace or love could be found, or where the wind began.
In the end, Stephanakios revealed himself while Belisarius was presiding over a meeting with the senior army staff later that afternoon. A pair of newly-captured slaves, both meek and gray with the recent shock of their castrations, were attending to the duke’s every whim. One fanned Stephanakios with a large palm frond while the other held his helmet, a golden cap in the Gothic style embossed with gemstones and an elaborate crest of peacock feathers. Stephanakios himself was wearing a vest of gilded iron scales and a red silk cloak adorned with lions stitched in gold. He wore a sword in a blue lacquer scabbard that was polished to a point so fine the gathered men could see their own reflections in the wood, and his bow hung from a tasseled leather holster on his thigh. A silver ring studded with a massive gore-colored ruby, a gift from the Praetorian Prefect, twinkled in the sunlight streaming through the window and, much to the marshal’s great disgust, Stephanakios had forgone a soldier’s boots in favor of a pair of ivory slippers. All the perfumed brigadiers of Antioch wept with joy at the sight of the man and kissed his hands and dipped their heads in supplication. Stephanakios tousled their fragrant oily hair as a father would his sons before tossing his cloak over his shoulder and greeting Belisarius.
“Where have you been?” the marshal demanded.
The duke straightened up. His smile quickly faded.
“Serving the people, your magnificence.”
“Then why are you here? Why haven’t you answered my letters?”
“I didn’t find your orders prudent.”
“Not prudent.”
“Your magnificence,” Stephanakios said, crossing his arms, “the people of this province have grown used to living lives free of fear. It’s a great and Christian thing to have accomplished, sparing obedient servants of our God as much pain as can be prevented. A great and Christian thing. So when heathen foreigners come to destroy their homes, loot their possessions, and make use of their bodies, we have failed in our duty to Christ our God and his one mother church as much as we have failed to uphold our duty as citizens of the commonwealth and subjects of our most venerable augustus. I cannot, and will never, accept a command which puts dutiful servants of Christ in jeopardy.”
“Let me tell you something,” said Belisarius, his voice rising. “You don’t have the right to decide what is and isn’t good. That is my right. And in chasing your own glory --”
“My glory? You think this a matter of petty ambition? Let me tell you something, you insolent barbarian. I know what you are. I’m personally insulted to have to address you as my superior, and to see you disgrace the grand office you occupy with your vulgar speech and character. I think you’re a rube with a tongue like a eunuch who somehow conned our lord into granting you a rank nobody of your kind deserves, and were I not bound by the laws and customs of our country or the perfect mores of Christ our God I would say as much to his face.”
Belisarius studied Stephanakios as a wolf would its prey.
“Stand and approach, soldier,” the marshal said.
The duke shook his head with a sneer.
“So you might strike me like a slave?” he laughed. “I will not. I don’t think you understand who I am, boy. When Alexander crossed the Bosporos he was followed by a man named Seleukos, whom posterity would call the Victorious. He had at his command the Silver Shields. Among them was a phalangarch named Axios who saw the cornerstone of my great city installed on the bank of the Orontes. His descendants held the shieldwall against the Ptolemies at Magnesia, and when the Romans came to this country the men of that family were made consuls and tribunes. Others later attained more prominent positions. There was Leander, twice-made Vicar of the East, and Aerobindos, master of combined horse and foot, who received the rods and staff of consulship in Constantinople for his actions against the Isaurians. Stephanakios the elder, a statesman of national renown, received a holy kiss of thanks from our late sovereign Anastasios for his dutiful service in the last Persian war. That man, you might surmise, was my father. So when you speak against my honor, your magnificence, remember that the gold I wear was looted from the lands beyond the Indos, and that a line of kings precede me. So speak again, I dare you, and insult the men of Antioch.”
Belisarius was not given a chance to respond. The other silken brigadiers of Antioch fawned for what the duke had said, and they conveyed him from the chamber with tearful cries of adoration.
19.
The officers in charge of the field army’s baggage train were a hardy pack of gnarled old geezers whose faded scars and missing limbs showed all the world the abuses they had suffered through their many years of loyalty and sacrifice. As a reward for their long and distinguished careers, they had earned the privilege to spend their days lounging in the sun like the eldest lions of a pride, content to swap old stories and share in the joys of nostalgia while they borrowed each other’s mistresses and struck terror in the hearts of the recruits too young to be at the front with performative bouts of rage and cryptic commands that served no purpose but to confuse and fluster the junior trooper unlucky enough to be caught in their collective gaze. They drank and ate and did the work expected of them, and when the sun went down they stayed up late playing dice in the dancing shadows of the headquarters tent. Life was good, and those wizened old captains had long overcome any fears of death or misfortune, content to smile at the setting sun and sigh with pleasure at the humble and familiar taste of hardtack dipped in wine.
After all their many dances with Death, nothing struck more fear in their hearts than that which was unfamiliar, and Prokopios, the marshal’s chief of staff, was unlike any man any one of them had ever met. He was an easterner who spoke with the unmistakable lisp of Constantinople, and he never made any attempts to be friendly or familiar. When he was not working, which was almost all the time, he had his face buried in a tattered copy of the histories of Thukydides. His gray hair and youthful face made his age impossible to ascertain, and a few of the old supply officers secretly feared he was a being of impossibly ancient origin, who crawled upon the Earth unnoticed by the watchful eyes of God. He never prayed, and even seemed to sneer when others did, leading some of the old supply officers to suspect him of being a pagan — a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the only person Prokopios appeared to show the slightest interest in was Fara, the copper-haired commander of the Heruli.
In reality, the only reason Prokopios spent so much time with the copper-haired barbarian was because Fara spoke no Greek, and attached himself to Prokopios for the express purpose of practicing his rustic northern Latin. But since the chief of staff’s only real exposure to the old Roman tongue was through dense legal treatises and the highly-polished ceremonial language of the imperial court, the conversations the two men shared were often mutually unintelligible, and only added to the profound sense of loneliness Prokopios had sunken into since Belisarius first left him in charge of the baggage at Daras.
“Perhaps you could inform me,” Prokopios said to Fara during one of their long and senseless conversations, “the extant literature on your people, as first set forth by the venerable ethnographer Olybrios of Thessalia in his three-volume work on the peoples of the Euxine Sea, but also a number of other eminent authorities, describes a peculiar custom by which the men of your nation have been observed to copulate with mares. Although Olybrios speculates that this practice may serve some ritualistic purpose in the backward religion of your country, and Synesius, a highly regarded student of his whose Ethnographika examined the Heruli and eastern Goths in greater detail, upholds this view, both authorities admit that the exact purpose is, as yet, unknown. Are you familiar with this custom? And, if so, could you elaborate on the reason for its practice?”
“What?”
“Do Heruli have sex with horses?”
Fara blinked and shrugged.
“If there’s nothing else to do.”
So Prokopios sought a respite from his solitude in the company of Thukydides, a man whose genius he felt could never be surpassed. When he heard the long-dead author’s ancient words come tumbling through his head, Prokopios could almost see the historian exactly as he once had been: a man bound by the customs of his time, yes; but a man who nonetheless possessed the horrific knowledge that some human evils were so endemic to the race as a whole that history could never amount to anything more than a long cycle of birth, growth, decay, and collapse. Prokopios could see Thukydides shrink with sadness at the revelatory culmination the long and painful years of his life and work finally amounted to: that the human spirit — lone among all beings in the universe to have the ability to express itself, to look upon the world in wonder, to share that wonder with another, to sing and pass those songs from parent to child, to paint and write and dance and remember, to disperse those joys equally and among all — would instead focus its infinite creative energies upon its own eventual annihilation.
The historian’s rage, horror, and disappointment at this revelation were so palpable in every word he wrote that Prokopios could taste the man’s own bile rise in the back of his throat as he looked upon the ancient darkened fields of his home in exile to weep and beat his fists against himself and beg an answer from the silent, mocking stars as to why Creation was so flawed. Whenever these visions occurred to Prokopios he set his tattered copy of the book aside to rise and gaze out in the darkness for himself in search of the answers the great Thukydides, that giant of unmatched genius, never seemed to find. And just like the man whose words would echo in vain through the bloody halls of human history, Prokopios only ever saw the stars shine in mock and somber silence on the black and vaulted reaches of his vision.
He was in the numbing throes of that same depressive state when the supply column came within sight of Kallinikon and Prokopios saw, to his vast horror, the historian’s genius on display once more. The grassy banks of the Euphrates had become a carnival of mad crusading zeal, with tens of thousands of soldiers mobbed around the lapping muddy water, wrestling requisitioned fishing boats and barges away from their local owners to ferry themselves to the opposite bank. There was little semblance of order in the singing, battle-hungry masses. The craft rode low in the water as they struggled through the swift and hungry current, their decks so full that many men were forced to hang from the gunwales, fighting like dogs to keep their heads above the waves. Upon reaching the opposite side, the loaded barges belched their cargo in the itchy river weeds, where thousands more were hard at work assembling a camp that straddled the eastern road. Some men, too eager to wait their turn, rode their panicked horses through the water to emerge dripping and triumphant in the madness of the marching camp, clutching the standards of their companies as if they had been woven from the cloth of Christ’s own shroud. The various captains and brigadiers of the field army staff peacocked around, grandiose in their gilded helms and colorful cloaks, urging the men on their work with the blind foresight of the mad apocalyptic preachers who spewed their mutant gospels in the Forum of Saint Constantine.
Prokopios found Belisarius wrapped in shadows in a vacant palace that overlooked the river, silently watching the chaos rage below.
“Perfect timing,” Belisarius said absentmindedly.
“What’s going on?” said Prokopios.
Belisarius snorted and nodded out the window.
“Nothing that can be helped now.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I want your help with my will.”
“I’m not doing that, marshal. You have to put a stop to this.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course you have a choice. You’re the only one who does.”
Belisarius was silent for a time. He looked out the window, fidgeted with his belt, and looked out the window once again. After a moment he took off his signet ring and watched the light play off of it.
“My grandfather was born without a single inch of Earth to call his own,” he said at last. “My father gave the army thirty years. They did all they did for this,” he said, holding up his ring. “They gave their lives believing in the Roman cause. For the chance that one of their line might earn the respect they never dreamed could be their own. How am I supposed to turn my back on all they achieved? Think of the insult that would deal their memory. The first and final Roman of the family, a traitor and a coward.”
Prokopios slumped in a nearby chair.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “Can’t you see what you’re saying? Some day there won’t even be such a thing as a Roman. You’re gambling the lives of thousands for something as worthless as an invention of Mankind.”
“I have to.”
Prokopios felt like the marshal had slapped him. He wanted to say more, but in the light of the marshal’s eyes Prokopios saw the grim serenity of a man in surrender to the currents of Fate, and he knew at last there was nothing to be done. Swallowing his nausea, he fetched a pen and paper and withdrew with Belisarius to help the marshal draft his will. With the cool repose of Sokrates awaiting painful death in the dank cells of popular tyranny, Belisarius ordered that his two household slaves be granted their freedom and the pick of his belongings. His home in Constantinople, nestled in the mansions that overlooked the Church of Holy Wisdom, would be dedicated as a hospital to the urban poor. His small collection of books, which consisted of two military treatises and a Greek dictionary, were to be donated to the palatial library. Anything that remained of his estate would be liquidated to fund the hospital his home would become. Then, in agreement with its terms, the marshal sealed the will with his signet ring.
His earthly tasks attended to, Belisarius bade Prokopios farewell and armed himself for battle.
20.
The Romans stayed up through the night singing and praying and fasting, and when the sun came up on the five hundredth anniversary of Christ’s emergence from his earthly tomb, the various regimental commanders brought their standards to be kissed and blessed by Stephanakios, whose very person put forth a radiant glow in the golden morning light. Belisarius watched from the rear of the camp while the duke led the army in their observation of the Pascha and, once the service was complete, arrayed the army in a single line about a mile from the Sassanid camp. Constantius was given command of the infantry, who stood in one continuous phalanx with their left flank anchored on the river. Belisarius and his men were positioned on the infantry’s right extremity, and the rest of the cavalry extended from the marshal’s right to the hills that formed the river’s corridor. Stephanakios and the Syrians were stationed in the center of this stretch, singing songs of their country as they beat their shields together.
After seeing the Romans ready themselves for battle, the Sassanids rode out from their camp and made their own preparations. Then, after their priests made the sacrifices, the point at which the Sassanids normally entered battle, they stood still and silent as a graveyard.
As the hours wore on, and the day grew warmer, the armies simply stood and watched each other as they sweated in the sun and were eaten alive by the clouds of flies that plagued the river’s marshy shore. By noon, the Romans had been standing attentive for more than five hours and some began to faint from hunger and heat, collapsing where they stood or falling from their saddles. Those who could be woken up were ordered to remove their helmets and mail and return to the ranks, while the rest were pulled to the rear and sponge-fed water by the medical slaves. Those who stayed awake were slouching on their spears or bent over their upright shields, gulping air and retching up the lacking contents of their stomachs.
Another hour passed before the Sassanids’ horns began to blow and their entire line advanced as one, creeping up the field until the two armies came within bowshot of each other. The air between them darkened with tens of thousands of arrows that flew in lazy arcs and fell as iron hail. The first to die in that exchange was a fifty-seven year old militiaman in the Apamean Horse called Amos. A stooped old geezer with a smashed-in face and hairless chicken legs, Amos was treated with reverence by his younger comrades, who stood in stupid awe at the marvel of his age. Half deaf and rarely awake, and unable to communicate beyond a system of grunts, nods, and shrugs, Amos always sat alone in the dancing light of the evening fires, ignored by all around him. He was struck twice in that initial barrage, and both wounds would have killed him had he suffered each alone. Amos died with his typical simplicity and toppled sideways from his horse. Shortly thereafter his tentmate and occasional lover, Marios, was blinded when an arrow struck him in the eye. The boy had joined up with the army when it mustered in Antioch the previous spring and charmed many of his comrades with his fresh boyish looks. He alone among all in the regiment knew Amos for the man he truly was: a man of delicate passion who took great joy in the songs of birds and smells of spring. Amos courted Marios over many long weeks as they rode together from Antioch to Daras, gifting him bouquets of dandelions and extra morsels of meat from the regimental stew. They walked hand in hand out among the hills surrounding Daras while Amos sang folk songs he had not heard since his youth. The words of one such song echoed through the mind of Marios as he fell stunned from his saddle, one eye black and the other red with gore. He hit the ground and shrieked a choking scream before his own horse, spooked by the noise and smell of blood, trampled him to death.
Half an hour after their attack began, the Sassanids exhausted their arrows and advanced. They came on steadily, keeping order and speed, until they closed half the space between themselves and the Romans. Then, at the blow of a horn, two regiments of Sassanid cataphracts launched across the field with a clattering roar, heavy in the terrible weight of their armor. They struck the extreme right of the Roman line and the entire field resounded with the tremor of their clash. Manu, a Persian sergeant taking part in this attack, was slain when a Roman spear caught him in the stomach. He was not killed outright, but clutched in vacant horror at the poplar shaft running through his gut as his mind was drawn a thousand miles east and seventeen years past where, as a boy once more, he watched his older sister doing laundry in the river by their home, her hands raw with lye, a song he’d long forgotten on her lips. The man who killed him, a file-leader from the wealthy wine-growing suburbs of Antioch, was driven backward from his saddle at the force of Manu’s impact with his spear. As he struggled to stay upright, choking in the dust and blinded by the raw noise of the violence, one of Manu’s comrades grabbed the Roman by the belt, pulled him taut, and crushed his head with a polished iron hammer. The Roman’s horse, frightened by the sudden scent of blood, rose up and kicked in primal panic, concerned at some dim level for the being who had broken her, raised her, and fed her bits of fig from his hand in an isolated corner of the sprawling estate they both considered home. Then, as she kicked and brayed, another Sassanid horseman struck her with a spear, and she collapsed in the reddening mud without a chance to ever understand her history or fate.
As the fighting on the right wore on, the rest of the Sassanid host completed their advance and met the Romans spear to spear. Few could see or hear in the dust and chaos of the fight as easterners and westerners alike were driven back and forth like chunks of flotsam caught and tumbled by the sea. Most of the Romans, already too tired, hot, and hungry to fight with any zeal, kept themselves tucked away behind the safety of their shields, thrusting blindly at their howling attackers. But on the left, where Constantius held command, the infantry was keeping firm. Fallen Sassanid horses formed a kind of bulwark behind which the Romans stood and fought, and which the invaders’ horses were often too afraid to cross. Despite the deprivations of their weeks on the march, the Romans were driven on by the noseless old mercenary, who rode back and forth behind the phalanx, shouting out grotesque old army jokes and tending to the wounded. When Adeodatos, a file-leader adored by the men for his bawdy tales from the portside brothels of his home, was felled by the careless sword-stroke of a comrade, Constantius was all that kept the troops nearby from abandoning their places on the line. Roaring with the rage of a depraved old tyrant, Constantius drove through the ranks of his companions and threw two darts in quick succession, dropping first a weaver’s son and mortally wounding an Arabian adventurer who would never learn that, at that very moment, his lover of two years had been killed opposite the Syrians. The Romans near enough to see the mercenary’s feat, in awe of his martial skill and blind contempt for death, let up a roar and dug the heels of their boots against the ground to fight with newfound courage.
At around five in the afternoon — two hours after the fighting began and nearly twelve since both armies took the field — a tremendous roar erupted from the right of the Roman line, cracking like thunder through the horrible din of battle. Alkibiades, commander of the First Armenian Cataphract, was killed in full sight of his men when he attempted to recover the regiment’s standard, which had been captured by a pair of young and eager Sassanid troopers lusting after their general’s promises of gold and slaves for the seizure of such a prize. Though initially safe behind several rows of his companions, Alkibiades charged forth when he saw the standard-bearer slain, incensed that so many decades of the regiment’s proud tradition would be lost under his watch. Shrugging off the officers who tried to hold him back, Alkibiades broke through the front of the Roman line and there, in sight of hundreds of his men, seized the standard by the shaft. He had it in his fingers for less than a second before one of the two Sassanids who had captured it clove his hand from his wrist. Alkibiades, astonished and confused, looked on with wonder at the severed hand still wrapped around the standard, his silver officer’s ring glinting in the pale orange light of that hazy afternoon. As he looked down at the gushing stump where his hand used to be, Alkibiades laughed aloud at the realization that because of his commitment to those few moldy scraps of fabric, he would never see the verdant humps of Mount Silpios, the sweet vineyards of Antioch, or the bashful grin of his bride of eighteen months ever again. Then, as his sight began to dim, a Sassanid javelin struck him in the chest and threw him to the ground.
The sight of his death sent a surge of panic rushing through his men, whose hunger and exhaustion had long been sapping their will to fight. Dropping their weapons and shrieking with the fear of lambs being driven to their slaughter, the men of the First Armenian broke their ranks and fled, riding for the open safety of the rear. Now with nothing there to hold them back, the Sassanid cataphracts who had broken the First Armenian poured past the Roman line and attacked the nearest unit on its flank and rear. Those men, dispirited by the flight of their comrades, and now under attack from three directions, likewise abandoned their position and joined in the rout. Then, like the sudden rush of an avalanche, the entire line right of Constantius and the phalanx collapsed and fled.
Stephanakios and the men of the Syrian brigade were all who held firm in the face of the rout. As the units on their left and right fled the field in terror, the Syrians were rapidly folded in on themselves like the covers of a book slamming shut. Stephanakios, having found himself inside the press of steel, gathered up his captains to inspire them with his presence. Although he had been wounded in the shoulder with an arrow, and could see enemy standards everywhere he looked, survivors of this encounter later reported that the duke was in high spirits. But as he opened his mouth to issue new commands, a Sassanid soldier threw a stone that struck him in the temple. Because Stephanakios had removed his helmet to calm his companions with the sight of his face, the rock broke his head and with a gasp he fell, blood spurting from the wound as he clutched a nearby soldier’s tunic. He then toppled from his saddle and vanished beneath his comrades’ horses. When the nearby soldiers saw the duke fall dead, immortal Fear passed between them like a plague, and they screamed and wept as they writhed and pressed against each other in a desperate bid to escape. Some broke through the Sassanid ranks and rode away, while the rest resigned themselves to their fate and fought back to back, battered shields affront, standards held up high.
As the Syrians were slowly massacred, and the cavalry routed around them, the men who formed the phalanx, seeing the peril they were in, disengaged and swung in toward the river to form a rough semicircle with their spears out and their backs to the Euphrates. While some of the Sassanids chased down and culled the routing Romans, and others finished off the Syrians, the rest of that great host turned its immense and terrible fury against the hastily-erected shield wall. The footmen held firm against that rising iron tide, but their order had become confused in their rush to organize, and they were fighting not by rank and file so much as wherever they could fit, throwing their weight against the pressure of the Sassanid attack. Romans broke into the formation wherever they could, hurling themselves past their comrades’ shields, many of them unarmed, filthy, and half-mad from the chaos of defeat. Many others, unable to find a way inside, or else unwilling to fight any more, dropped their weapons and leapt in the river, struggling in the weight of their clothes and Panic’s crushing grip.
The Romans in the circle could see nothing but a howling storm of horses, dust, and spearheads everywhere they looked. Rumors spread that the marshal had been killed or fled the field, and Constantius rushed from man to man, stamping out small fires of cowardice wherever they sprang up. He showed them all his ghastly face and sword wet with blood and asked them with an awful, snarling grin why they would ever want to be anywhere else. He told them that men of future generations would marvel at their scars and wonder with jealousy why they had not been given the blessing to stand beside them in this fight, to work a spear and sword and gouge out places for themselves in the gilded chambers of Eternity. Constantius hopped in place and picked up fallen javelins to hurl back in the dusty Sassanid mass, but in spite of his efforts, the noseless old mercenary could feel the morale of his men start to seep away like wine leaking from a cracked old cup, and he knew it was only a matter of time before their attackers drove them in the river.
Then, drawn by sounds of celebration coming from the circle’s southern arc, Constantius peered through the dust and general chaos of the engagement to see that the marshal’s standard, a shining icon of Saint Christophorus, had appeared above the shield wall, shattering and scattering the Sassanids attacking there. The Romans parted just enough to admit the marshal’s retainers, who rode through their ranks in excellent order. After dismounting, the mercenaries stripped their horses of their armor and made the animals swim for safety on the far side of the river before they joined the fight on foot.
This sudden surge of reinforcements prompted the Sassanids to sound the retreat and withdraw. The Romans cheered, and the crowd of local spectators gathered on the opposite shore applauded and sang, but it soon became apparent that the day was far from over. Rather than retire for the evening, the Sassanids were replenished with fresh weapons and horses while their priests re-performed and reappraised the sacrifices. Once ready, they sprang into attack, closing the space between themselves and the Romans at a gallop. With companies of ironclad cataphracts leading the charge, they collided with the Roman lines at three distinct points, hoping to force an opening and shatter their resolve. Though the shieldwall shuddered, it still held firm, and the decapitated heads of those few Sassanids who forced their way inside the formation were shortly flung back into the ranks of their comrades like common throwing stones.
Their momentum dissolved, the Sassanids withdrew and attempted the attack again. They repeated this process five more times, and the Romans lost a bit of their courage every time an assault broke against their spears. In the clamor of the third attack, the Roman captain Xenophon, whose wife and daughters begged him not to go to war, was felled when a cataphract’s mace shattered his right hip. He went screaming in the dust, his mind on a girl he had known in his youth, and on the times they had together. At another place in the struggle, an Arabian called Iyas nearly lost his life when a spear-thrust killed his horse. Having lost his weapons in the fall, Iyas lifted up a nearby stone and with it smashed the knee of Milos, a lifetime marching man. Milos fell backward, shrieking out in pain, hands outstretched to his nearby compatriots. One of these men, enraged at the sight of such a ghastly wound, threw his spear and struck Iyas in the back as the Arabian struggled with a riderless horse, which pierced his lung and sent him gasping to the ground. Meanwhile, where the battle raged its fiercest, a eunuch slave called Tiridates, who had been kidnapped in his youth from the mountains of Armenia, pushed through the maelstrom to rescue Mazda, his master, whose belly had been opened by the hateful strike of a Roman sword. Tiridates suffered seven major wounds across his back and arms as he struggled to pull Mazda to his feet before a final well-placed thrust crushed his sternum and stopped his heart, dooming slave and master both to dim deaths in the itchy weeds beside the river. The killing blow had been delivered by a Roman recruit called Silvios, who joined up with his father’s regiment in Antioch the year before. A penitent Christian, Silvios had been fasting in observance of the Pascha and had not eaten anything since the previous afternoon. Although Silvios held on and fought through his hunger for as long as he could, he finally succumbed to exhaustion shortly after killing Tiridates and fell beneath the boots of his comrades, who — unable to watch their feet in the press — slowly crushed him underfoot. Then, at some point thereafter, the boy’s own father, fighting in the file next to his, looked down at the ground, curious to see what it was that tugged so fiercely at his boot: it was his son, young Silvios, his torso crushed to nothing but a thin sheet of steel. When the boy’s body was recovered later that week, it simply poured out through the links in his chainmail vest.
A thousand miles to the west, in the springtime hills of Makedonia, a widowed governor’s wife named Maria passed away unnoticed by her slaves. In the woman’s household shrine, which she always tended dutifully, the candle she kept lit in honor of her son flickered once and then went out. At that very moment, when the first cool kiss of evening passed across the battle, Smallfoot, the Makedonian, was thrown from his horse after an arrow struck him in the chest. He hit the dust, unsure of what was happening, and when he tried to push himself up from the ground, saw that all the strength had left his arms. Then, as he came to terms with his fate, Smallfoot mumbled a prayer to whichever saint was watching over that terrible carnage, and his soul fled his body.
Young Taumas saw Smallfoot fall beneath the horses and leapt to the ground to recover his comrade’s body. A pair of Sassanid soldiers had already grabbed the Makedonian by his ankles and were trying to drag him through the dust. Taumas roared and threw his heavy-headed Thracian axe, striking and killing one of the looters. He was on the other in seconds and drove him away with a bash of his shield. Taumas shouted out for Kyrillos and old Andronikos, who lept from their horses and rushed to his aid. The three of them together grabbed Smallfoot’s bloody body and wrestled him toward the rear of their lines. They were almost to safety when Haggai, a Jewish conscript forced into service by the shah, struck Taumas in the back with his spear. Haggai’s brother had been killed in front of him by an arrow at the outset of the battle, and he burned with a savage lust for revenge. His thrust did not puncture the Roman’s mail and lamellar, nor even bruise his flesh, and Taumas turned to face his attacker, spinning and drawing his sword in one smooth motion. Haggai roared and attacked again with tears in his eyes. Taumas laughed and lazily batted the conscript’s spear away. Haggai attacked again but Taumas simply stepped away and broke the shaft with a swipe of his sword. Before Haggai could react, Taumas swung his sword up and struck the conscript in the temple. His head broke with a crack and he fell in the dust with a sigh. Taumas in that moment thought about a girl he knew in Constantinople, and whether she would marry a bear like him.
The Romans had nearly been forced into the muddy waters of the river by the time dusk arrived, and the Sassanids, at long last, sounded a general retreat and retired to the confines of their camp. The surviving Romans barely had the strength to beat their swords against their shields and most collapsed, too tired to stand. Others, their legs quaking with exhaustion, refused to leave formation, convinced the Sassanid withdrawal was nothing but a ruse.
The survivors were forced to bivouac on the battlefield, strewn amid the bodies and congealing blood, before the army quartermasters could conscript enough freighters and fishing boats to ferry them across the following morning. They then dragged themselves uphill to the safety of Kallinikon and had their first meal in days. There, with a plain view of the battlefield, they sat and watched the Sassanids emerge from their camp and desecrate the bodies the Romans left behind before castrating and crucifying those few Roman wounded they could find. Then, their work accomplished, the invaders broke their camp and continued on their way to the sun-raked vastness of the Arabian frontier.
21.
News of the battle at Kallinikon stirred reactions of rage all throughout the eastern provinces. Effigies of Belisarius were beaten and burned from the outskirts of Edessa to the tomb-ridden valleys of Jerusalem, and the office of the Praetorian Prefect in Constantinople was flooded daily with written and verbal petitions drafted or presented by religious and civil authorities from the areas of Syria most affected by the terrors of the war, who urged the emperor and his cabinet to try the marshal under every applicable provision of the commonwealth’s sprawling legal code. Prokopios found his own office inundated with lawsuits from common citizens averring irreparable damage to their property and livelihoods because of the marshal’s actions, and the senate held a number of closed inquiries into the matter. The transcripts and findings of their deliberations were quickly boxed up and sealed away in a moldy basement of the Sacred Palace, never to be read, under unsigned orders from an anonymous official whose authority none in the council could challenge.
Worse yet, religious authorities all throughout the commonwealth were bombarded with reports of a rash of vile omens that came in greater number and with darker implications than those that had been spotted over the course of the previous winter. An importer of Asian goods from the ancient trading town of Palmyra appeared before the local bishop in a fright, insisting that the worms lying dormant in a new belt of silk had, all as one, stood up on their tails and in the voice of his long-dead mother sang aloud the Lord’s Prayer in reverse. The bishop then subjected him to torture, but failed to obtain a confession of witchcraft before the merchant died of his wounds. The silk and worms were nonetheless still burned as a precaution, and the merchant’s home and wares were seized and liquidated by the church. A short time thereafter, two goatherds in the grassy uplands of Kappadokia were watching their flock when three bright objects descended from the sky, touched the earth before them, and then shot up again and disappeared. The goatherds collected burnt strips of turf from where the objects touched the ground with the intention of delivering them to a nearby deacon, but the story of their sighting incited panic among the locals, and both men were beaten to death by a mob of their kinsmen before the church was made aware. Worse yet came the news that the Patriarch of Antioch himself had been taken by a vision of what he described as an enormous lake of screaming human remains that steamed and bubbled like a stew. The putrid mix, so he claimed, was stirred by a massive sword clutched in turn by three titanic hands: one of which was gloved in silk, one in iron, and another still in leather. He was so frightened by what he had seen that he sought the counsel of the eunuch Hermogenes, Master of the Offices, who in turn replied that all the patriarch had seen was the practice of politics.
Exhausted by the cost of the violence, both Roman and Sassanid monarchs agreed to bring their warring to an end. Hostages were exchanged, gifts were given, and the emperor in Constantinople toasted the shah in Ctesiphon as the Second Eye of the World, his brother in both sovereignty and majesty; and the shah in Ctesiphon in turn toasted the emperor in Constantinople as a Jewel of all the World, his brother in both power and prestige. Then treaties were signed, promises of good faith made, trade agreements set, and the high imperial palaces in Ctesiphon and Constantinople descended into fits of wild bacchic revelry.
Their bloody work complete, the haggard remnants of the Army of the East trundled slowly back to Antioch through the ashen ruins of eastern Syria. The lands between Kallinikon and Chalkis were still desolate and scarred, and most of the inhabitants of that region were sheltering in vast refugee camps strung along the highways or tucked away in the high alpine valleys of the stony Bargylos mountains. Those brave enough to return to the ruins of their homes came beside the road to spit and curse as the army passed them by, but nobody in Antioch turned out to see the marshal and his retinue conveyed inside the city, and the merchants who once clogged the gates to hawk their colorful wares when the army first set out the year before had long since disappeared.
The Antiochenes mourned Stephanakios for ten consecutive days, turning out in tens of thousands to pull their hair, tear their clothes, and weep and moan in pitiful remembrance of the fallen hero of their city. Full-color portraits of the duke and his deeds were borne aloft from the Lion’s Gate in the east to the Ram’s Gate in the west, and flocks of mourners hurled themselves upon the ground in supplication to an image of a younger Stephanakios standing resolute above a shattered heathen tide before the crenellated walls of Amida, or fell down crying when they saw a recreation of the duke’s final moments, his head and face exposed, his sword and shield in hand despite the many wounds he wore stitched across his form. Survivors of the battle at Kallinikon held vast audiences in rapt and somber silence at their tales of the duke’s final moments, embellishing their fanciful fictions with heroic accounts pulled right from poetry and scripture, which only left their listeners all the more amazed by the duke’s many personal parallels to the lives of beloved saints and mythic warriors. These popular imaginings of the duke and his character were so cherished and well-received that thousands of Antiochenes listening to the veterans tell their tales from the shoulders of their parents would one day regale their own descendants, growing up in the sacked and ruined wreckage of their once-great city, with stories of Duke Stephanakios, Last of the Romans, famous in his time for the cunning of Odysseus, the martial strength of Achilles, the piety of the apostles, and the poise and gracefulness of Christ.
On the tenth and final morning of their long days of misery, countless thousands crowded in the hallowed halls of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow to listen to the Patriarch of Antioch bear witness to the martyred Duke of Syria’s legendary character. So many appeared for the great man’s funeral that the patriarch’s words had to be echoed to the thronging masses standing in the rain outside by a pair of criers perched atop the shoulders of old pagan images arranged beside the great bronze gates of the basilica. The patriarch had to pause his speech time and again for the massive clamor of the weeping stirred by his words to subside, and the service ran long into the evening before he at last decided to table the rest of his speech and reveal instead a bleached and boiled skull carried back from the bloody field beside the Euphrates where the army of the commonwealth met its annihilation. The mourners shrieked in wonder at the sight, and once the tremor of their awe faded away, the patriarch confirmed that the skull he held once occupied the very head of the hero of their city, Duke Stephanakios, now sainted, in communion with their loving God in Heaven, a guide and advocate for faithful Christians for the rest of all eternity.
Such was the funeral of Saint Stephanakios, a hero of his time.
22.
A corps of perfumed investigators from the palace in Constantinople arrived shortly after the Romans returned to Antioch to uncover the cause of their defeat. After conducting a full audit of the army’s supplies and payroll, consulting with the priests, inspecting the horses’ teeth, testing the draw of a random sampling of bows, assessing the quality and makeup of the local soil, measuring the direction and distance of shadows at noon, and tasting the army’s water supply, the investigators turned their attention to the marshal and his staff. Belisarius was interviewed seven times by four different investigators over the course of a week, during which he made clear his belief that defeat had been inevitable, considering the poor quality of the troops and insubordination of their officers. Then he attacked the war at large, and asked why it had been declared in the first place, and how the emperor could justify gambling the lives of thousands of his countrymen, countless tons of coin, and the reputation of his nation for unknown years to come. And he asked why, above all, the emperor had chosen him, a man of only twenty-four with no experience at command and nothing but contempt for the native military class. The investigators nodded, took his testimony, whispered among themselves, cross-checked their notes, and then, satisfied with what they found, sailed back to Constantinople. The faintest scents of cinnamon and rosewater were the only traces of their visit.
Nobody saw Belisarius for two weeks after that. He spent his days locked away in his apartments in the governor’s palace, eating meals left on trays outside the door. Prokopios tried every day to rouse the marshal from his solitude, but only ever met closed doors and the idle silence of self-loathing. There, in the stagnant air of his chambers, Belisarius thought about Smallfoot, and all the distant afternoons when the Makedonian, barely older than himself, taught him how to shift his weight in the saddle and read the subtle hints of a horse’s inner world. Then, as if he stood again in the swampy heat of that long and bloody day on the banks of the Euphrates, Belisarius saw Smallfoot struck down dead, and his body set upon by beasts. He saw a boy’s broken body impaled in the dusty heat of the Daras agora, and dogs shot for sport, and infants tossed in ditches, and the faces of children lying slaughtered in the streets, and the mournful face of his mother when she sent him to the city in his youth, and the smoke-stained icons on the walls of the churches of Gabboulon, silent in their rage, and his hands, and his body, present through it all, a vehicle of misery, and Belisarius, despondent, beat his fists against the floor and begged aloud for the conveyance of all the dead into the company of God.
On the tenth and final day of his agonizing meditations, Belisarius was surprised by the sudden presence of Hermogenes, Master of the Offices, who appeared in his chambers without permission or announcement. The eunuch still wore black in mourning for the mortal form of Saint Stephanakios, but his pale lips were pulled back in a joyful wooden smile.
“Here we are at last,” he said. “Do you share the sense that we’ve been dancing around each other for a while now?”
“No.”
“You never struck me as very bright.”
Hermogenes produced a scroll from within his robes and passed it to Belisarius. It was marked with a purple wax seal adorned with an image of a she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. The emperor’s personal sign. Belisarius turned it over in his hands.
“What is this?”
“Open it.”
“Not before you tell me what it is.”
“Your notice of impeachment.”
“On what grounds?”
“Does it matter?” Hermogenes said. “Incompetence, corruption, moral turpitude — take your pick. All that matters is that you are to surrender your command and come with me to Constantinople to testify before our most high and merciful sovereign.”
“This can’t be.”
“Worry not, sweet boy. Better men have tried and failed.”
23.
The morning after the battle of Kallinikon, a plain farmer’s daughter collapsed inside her home without any cause or warning. When she came to, her parents and sisters found themselves confronted by a girl they did not recognize. She looked, dressed, and spoke the same as the girl they thought they had known, and even answered to her name — but in place of the eyes that once came alive with a smile that brightened the world, there was instead an apathy in every wayward glance she gave. While her younger sisters splashed and chased the feral cats beside the ancient canal that ran along their home, the farmer’s daughter watched from afar, sitting in the dust with her face in her hands.
When her parents asked her what the matter was, the farmer’s daughter answered only vaguely, and in the tone of a person condescending to a child. When she told them at last what she had seen on the day she collapsed, her mother burst into tears and her father drove her from the house.
So the farmer’s daughter went from house to house, seeking what she could from the people of her village. At every door she was asked to explain what had driven her from her home, and there, at every door, she was forced to describe the vision that had come to her. The only person who did not drive her away with fear and disgust was an ascetic monk who lived in a small stone hut in the barren hills beyond the village. Although the holy man refused her shelter in his home, he still urged the girl to make her way to town and seek the counsel of the bishop.
But when she reached Epiphania and sought the bishop at his palace, the farmer’s daughter found herself accosted by two slaves who, thinking her a woman of low repute, refused to admit her into the bishop’s palace. Not to be dissuaded, the farmer’s daughter returned the next morning and again implored the slaves outside to let her see the bishop. When they again refused her entrance to the palace, she bore witness to the things that she had seen. The slaves, terrified, scurried inside and soon returned with the bishop’s personal servant, an educated slave named Eumaios, who sat and listened to the girl tell the story of her vision. Eumaios agreed that the bishop urgently needed to hear what she had to say, but said with some regret that the bishop had taken ill, and was currently bedridden. Eumaios told the girl to return the following morning, expecting the bishop to be well again by then. But when the farmer’s daughter returned to the bishop’s palace the following morning, she was surprised with the news that the bishop had died in his sleep. With nowhere else to go, she turned away and left the town to seek annihilation in the wilderness.