More than a thousand years before, the poet Arkhilokhos had sung the same song, having thrown away his shield to escape the barbarous Thracians. In the words of the historian Menander Protector, who recorded the deeds of the first Justinian and his successors, "The changing circuit revealed such things before our time, and will reveal them again, and the revelations shall not cease, so long as there be men and battles."
The sun had nearly set by the time we approached Sebastopolis. As we drew near its protecting walls and towers, the men cried out in dismay, for they saw, as did I, another army moving rapidly toward the city from the north east. I sent out scouts to hold off the enemy while the rest of us gained safety. These men soon came riding back, not in headlong retreat but shouting for joy: the other army did not belong to the followers of the false prophet, but was in fact our own left wing, also falling back on Sebastopolis.
Commanding them was Leontios. I had rather hoped, considering his sorry performance in the battle itself, that the Arabs had made away with him. God, however, was not so kind. And not only had Leontios brought that half of the cavalry from the military districts out of the fight, but also the several thousand Sklavenoi who had neither fallen to the Arabs nor gone over to them. That struck me as wasted effort. Their fellow tribesmen having proved themselves traitors, how likely was I ever to trust these barbarians again with weapons in hand?
Still, for the moment, the Sklavenoi were a more welcome sight than Arabs would have been. In the failing light, it took us some small effort to persuade the garrison within Sebastopolis we were in fact Romans and not deniers of Christ attempting a ruse. I finally had to approach the walls and shout up a warning about what would happen to those garrison soldiers if they did not open the gates and admit us forthwith. Enough of them had heard and seen me to be convinced, which was as well, for I meant every word of my threats. The gates opened. The army on which I had pinned such hopes passed within, beaten but for the moment secure.
MYAKES
Till then, Brother Elpidios, I hadn't known whether Justinian had courage. He'd never needed to show any, if you know what I mean. He had spirit, he had temper- he had temper and to spare- but you can't tell what a man will do when somebody tries to kill him till you see it happen. He turned out to do just fine, thank you. The biggest problem was keeping him away from the Arabs. He wanted to kill every last one of them himself.
The Sklavenoi, Brother? He spent a lot of the retreat to Sebastopolis cursing Neboulos and every one of the barbarians, ranting and fuming about what he should have done to them when we were fighting back in the Sklavinias. He wasn't joking, either. Like he said there, when he said something like that, he meant it. That worried me.
Then he got quiet. That worried me even worse.
Inside the citadel, I stared at Leontios, wishing I could turn him to stone as the monster Medusa had with her victims in pagan myth. "You disobeyed me," I told him in a deadly voice.
"Emperor, I did what I thought best, seeing how things were," he answered. In fact, against him Medusa might have glared in vain, his head already having been formed from solid marble. He went on, "I've been fighting battles for your father and you longer than you've been alive. I know something about them, that I do."
"You disobeyed me!" This time I, shouted it. "You disobeyed me, and we lost the battle on account of it. The blame is yours- yours!" Looking back on it, the last word was probably a scream.
But screaming at Leontios was like screaming at a post. All he did was bow his head slightly, as a traveler in wet weather will do to keep the rain out of his eyes. "Emperor, I didn't do a thing to lose the battle," he said. "Not one thing. If the special army hadn't betrayed us, we might have won."
If your special army hadn't betrayed us, was what he meant, but not even Leontios was blockhead enough to say such a thing to me. Snarling, I answered, "If we'd had a decent attack from the left, not the paltry one we got, we would have smashed the Arabs before the cursed Sklavenoi went over to them. They would have stayed loyal if we'd been winning."
Leontios bowed his head a little farther. "Maybe so, Emperor," he said. "It could be so, I suppose."
He could not have said, Liar, any louder had he bellowed it at the top of his lungs. I sprang to my feet. Had I still been wearing my sword, I would have cut him down where he sat. How much grief and torment that would have saved me in years to come! But God does not reveal to mere men what lies ahead, and, in any case, I had taken off the sword on coming into Sebastopolis. And so, rather than striking that large, hard head from his shoulders, I hit him in the face with my fist, as hard as I could.
He too leaped, with a roar of pain. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. I hit him again. This time, expecting the blow, he bent his head down so that my fist slammed into his skull. Pain shot up my arm: he was hardheaded indeed. I hit him again and again. He did not strike back. Had he done so, even once, I would have given him over to whatever half-skilled torturers a provincial town like Sebastopolis boasted. All he did was keep his head down and bring up his arms to protect his face to some degree.
At last, having done to him what, thanks in great measure to his wanton disobedience, I had not done to the followers of the false prophet, I told him, "Get out, and be grateful for my mercy."
He stumbled away, leaving a trail of blood drops on the timbers of the second-story floor. I was certain I had blackened one of his eyes. Maybe, come tomorrow, he would explain his bruises by saying he had walked into a door, as beaten wives, I am told, often do. Had he been truly considerate, he would have leaped off the city wall and broken his neck, but that, I supposed accurately, was too much to hope for.
I stood there in my chamber, breathing hard. Beating Leontios had left me excited in another way. Going to the door, I spoke in a low voice to one of the excubitores standing guard outside it. He nodded and, after consulting for a moment with his comrade, hurried away.
After about a quarter of an hour; he returned with a woman, as I had asked him to do. I barred the door. Smiling, the woman began to pull off over her head the long tunic she wore. "No," I said harshly. She paused, her face puzzled. I shoved her down onto the bed, ignoring her squawk of surprise, and took her as if by force, pretending she was my captive though she was there of her own free will. I took her several times through the night, using her almost as roughly as I had Leontios. When morning came, I rewarded her well, as her complaisance deserved. And, I vowed, I would reward Leontios as he deserved, too.
Although they had suborned Neboulos and the large majority of the Sklavenoi, although they had defeated the army I had assembled against them, the Arabs did not try to bypass the fortress of Sebastopolis and penetrate deeper into Romania, nor did they linger long around the town. The force we still had was too large to let them split up into raiding parties, which it might have defeated in detail on sallying forth, and large enough to remain a threat to their entire army. After burning some fields and pasturelands nearby, they withdrew.
Had I worn Prince Mouamet's shoes, I would have been bolder. But then, I had seen Leontios's quality only too well, while the Arab might have remained ignorant of the depths of his fecklessness. At any rate, scouts having confirmed that the deniers of Christ were indeed withdrawing, I counted myself and the Roman Empire lucky, in that they were not gaining so great an advantage from their victory as they might have done.