The Emperor spurred his horse to the ranks of his senior aides, who were grouped in front of the standards of the Grand Hetairia and wore gold-tinted mail shirts and plumed golden helms of the Imperial retinue. The Emperor, armoured identically to his officers, differentiated only by his purple boots and cape, directed a command to his principal orderly. ‘Droungarios, the report of the Mandator General!’
The Mandator General rode forward and bowed; a stout, not particularly military-looking man who always wore a small enamel icon round his neck, he was responsible for the final summary of all intelligence gathered by the akrites whom he supervised, his spies in the enemy camp, and the local peasants. ‘Majesty, they are encamped roughly according to the Roman practice, though not without critical variation. In lieu of an earthwork perimeter and a cordon of caltrops, they have simply spread stakes. They may also have dug leg-breaking pits. They assume we will pursue a limited engagement today, striking at their flanks with light cavalry. As the ground is quite soggy at the Bulgar front, their deployment there will be light initially. However, the site is suitably graded to allow them to move reinforcements quickly.’
The Emperor wheeled his horse and studied the Bulgar line, visible as a jumbled mass of wagons, horses and mules. Behind this defence, the smoke from the morning camp-fires rose in thin tendrils that blurred, greyed and merged into a huge foggy column, finally disappearing among the high clouds. It was a strange portent, as if the sky had hung a vast ashen shroud round the Bulgar camp. ‘Let the priests go among the men,’ said the Emperor softly. The hundreds of priests began to circulate, the wisps from their smoking censers marking their passage through the ranks, their sonorous chants like a dirge.
When the priests had worked all the way to the rear guard, the Emperor removed his simple gold-and-pearl diadem, handed it to an attendant eunuch; a second eunuch brought him his engraved gold helm on a silk pillow. The Emperor placed the conical helmet on his head. His chest worked in slow heaves. ‘Grand Domestic,’ he said evenly, ‘begin your diversion.’
The band signalled the attack with the characteristic blaring of trumpets and pounding of drums and cymbals. ‘The cross has conquered!’ bellowed the units of the Imperial Scholae – five ranks of mounted archers and lancers – as they lurched forward, picked up speed, and began their thundering charge on the Bulgar centre. The Scholae quickly reached bowshot of the Bulgar lines and the first volley rose like a dense flock into the air, then abruptly alighted; here, there, a horse went down. The Scholae stampeded the Bulgars’ outermost cordon of pack animals and wagons, then veered sharply towards the Bulgar flanks to divert the enemy’s attention away from the centre they had just left vulnerable. Soon the flanks were heavily engaged; Bulgar standards could be seen moving towards the left and right perimeters of their enormous encampment. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, hundreds of akrites rode from a small copse just beyond the Bulgars’ left flank, directly through the remnants of the Bulgars’ mule-and-wagon wall. Puffs of flame appeared as the akrites hurled clay shells filled with liquid fire into the wagons. The fire and smoke drove most of the remaining pack animals away. Visible behind the black pillars of smoke was the vast mass of the Bulgar army.
‘Domestic of the Hyknatoi!’ shouted the Emperor. The Imperial Hyknatoi charged off as the Scholae had before them. This time many horses and men went down as the charge hit the exposed centre of the Bulgar formation. After several volleys of arrows and spears the Hyknatoi retreated to join the flank attacks; in the wake of their assault, wounded and dying horses could be seen kicking the air like toppled clockwork miniatures. A mandator came galloping back towards the Roman ranks, his horse steaming in the cold rain and his face bright red. ‘Majesty, the flanks are fully engaged.’
‘Domestic of the Numeri!’ Haraldr felt fear, as if awakening to a knife in his ribs. The Numeri were the infantry division of the Taghmata; they would support the Varangian assault once -if- the breakthrough was made. ‘Hetairarch! Manglavite!’ Haraldr ordered his men to dismount; batmen circulated among the ranks of the Middle Hetairia and led the horses to the rear. Haraldr walked to the horses of the Emperor and his aides. Mar, also dismounted, came to his side. His ice-hard eyes already glimmered with Odin’s gift.
‘Proceed in ranks, Hetairarch.’ Before Mar could turn and give the order, the Emperor astonished everyone within seeing by arduously dismounting from his towering white Arabian. If he felt pain upon standing, he did not display it; there was only a furious resolution on his powerful features.
‘Majesty . . .’uttered the Droungarios helplessly.
‘Send my horse for me when our attack has been successful, Droungarios,’ said the Emperor. ‘These men fight on foot, and as I am joining them, so will I.’
Mar led the Grand Hetairia out in two relatively narrow ranks; the Middle Hetairia followed, also in two ranks of two hundred and fifty men abreast. The Emperor walked alongside Mar, beneath the dragon standard of the Grand Hetairia, his step heavy, purposeful. Fifty paces out of bowshot. Mar turned and shouted ‘Boar!’ The ranks of the Grand Hetairia folded like wings against the Middle Hetairia, creating a layered flesh-and-metal pyramid, with Mar’s men on the outside and Haraldr’s men forming a compact, solid inner wedge. The Emperor took his place just ahead of Haraldr at the snout of the boar-within-a-boar. Mar stood alone at the apex of the outer boar, his face twitching with fury.
The guttural cries of the Bulgars stilled as the Varangian formation, a huge lethal arrow, pointed directly at their centre. It was possible to hear a dying man wail ‘Theotokos’ over and over. The rain fell in large, clear drops. Mar raised his gilded axe. In unison the Varangians slammed their axe blades flat against the hard oak planks of their shields; the sound was like the breathing of some colossal beast. Again, again, mesmerizing, terrifying. The boar advanced to this deadly cadence.
The Bulgar arrows descended in buzzing swarms but largely clattered harmlessly off byrnnies, helms and shields. Shouts came back to watch for the rows of sharpened stakes, and the wedge rocked and surged as men manoeuvred round the crude barriers. Two Varangians in the first rank tumbled into a shallow, concealed pit; one scrambled up but the other screamed as he was impaled on a stake. The Bulgars became individual faces, stubbled chins, red noses, bad teeth.
Mar’s oath could be heard, curiously muted, above the almost deafening din. He pounded the canvas-clad infantrymen at the Bulgar front with huge, bludgeoning strokes, so relentlessly that it seemed his foes were ritualistically kneeling before him, except that these supplicants had been anointed with brilliant blood as Mar split their skulls and hacked off their arms. Mar stepped over his writhing, butchered victims, and before he had killed half a dozen men the Bulgars fell back without even offering him resistance, shoving and trampling their own in an effort to escape the Varangian scythe. The rest of the boar followed Mar into the frantic, scrambling Bulgar retreat, moving almost as steadily as it had when unopposed.
In the middle of the boar, Haraldr and his men had little more to do than protect themselves against arrows and step over the grotesque, akimbo corpses, most of them with gaping axe wounds. At first the bodies lay in only a few inches of dark, watery muck, but soon the dead and dying were virtually submerged in the clinging ooze. Both the Varangian advance and the Bulgar retreat slowed inexorably. The hail of arrows and spears became heavy and steady. Now Varangians fell into the mud. The boar stopped. Haraldr stood on a dead man’s back and looked ahead. Mar was immobilized in muck up to his knees, crouched behind his shield as the archers and javelin throwers pelted him. Mar’s men surged up to protect