Rado reached out to guide my horse round a hole in the ground I hadn’t seen. ‘So you do want to make the Greeks more like us.’ He said. ‘Is that why everyone hates you?’
I laughed bitterly. It saved me the embarrassment of yet more thanks. ‘Talking of “us”,’ I asked, ‘do you imagine anyone will ever take our land away from us? Any foreign invader with sense in his head takes one look at armed men and tries his luck elsewhere.’
They also keep the bastard rulers under control, I might have added but I’d seen something shining up at me from the ground. ‘It’s a mailed glove,’ Rado said, following my glance. I didn’t answer. ‘It was probably left behind by whoever needed a bare hand for carving up those boys.’
Still, I said nothing. No longer bumping my way through those mountains, I slid off the horse with a semblance of grace and reached down for the mass of silvered chain mail. I walked stiffly over to a felled tree and sat down for a proper look. I raised my voice. ‘I may have some bad news,’ I said with a ghastly smile. I reached inside the glove and plucked at its lining of yellow silk. The Royal Guard was never sent into battle. This wasn’t some fixed law of the Persians. It was simply that the Royal Guard’s sole function was to protect the Great King, and no Great King in over a century had left Ctesiphon except to run away from his own people, or to shift himself to one of his summer palaces.
You could take the whole flash of light inside my head and work it into a syllogism: This glove is part of the Royal Guard’s parade uniform; the Royal Guard never leaves the Great King’s side; therefore, what we’re headed towards is the biggest invasion force since Xerxes, and Chosroes is at its head. I put this in looser terms to Rado and the boys. I also accepted that one swallow didn’t make a spring — the glove might have been a present, or a trophy, or a talisman. But I no longer had any reasonable doubt of the truth. Why else kill everyone in sight, unless it was to keep the invasion under wraps till fifty or a hundred thousand men could burst out of the passes and make for the coastal cities? And I could imagine how Chosroes had enjoyed giving the order. Policy aside, he really was the sort of man who made wicked old Phocas the Lamb of God by comparison.
We rode on in silence. Insensibly, the fertile uplands were giving way again to harsh wilderness. The smell of death had gone from our nostrils. The horses were calmer. The boys were cheering up. More and more, Rado was intervening to keep me moving in his appointed course.
All at once, we came to the peak of the hill we’d been climbing. Before us, the land fell away to another endless expanse of bare hills and shadowed valleys.
I got off my horse again, and stood as close as I dared to the edge. In silence, I pointed south. I didn’t need to get out my map or to guess where the big pass might be. There, ten or twenty miles away, was all the proof I could have needed of what I already knew. The dust cloud thrown up by the advancing army put me in mind of a city on fire.
Rado spoke first. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a whole people on the move.’ I nodded. I’d never seen the like either. Though I’d read about it, and often sat with Priscus in his talkative moods about the past, I’d always thought it was one of the conceits bad poets like Leander use when they can’t make anything sensible scan.
I stood away from the edge and sat down. I smiled at Eboric. ‘Be a love,’ I said, ‘and get my writing case from your saddlebag. You’ll be carrying an oral message back to Trebizond. But it’s time to get your pass in order for the postal stations along the road.’
Even as I spoke, a long peal of thunder drifted across the valley.
Chapter 55
I poked my head cautiously forward and looked once more down to the bottom of a pass that had no name I ever heard. I call it a pass, though the word may put you in mind of a gentle dip between two mountains. A better word might be canyon. It might have begun, countless thousands of years before, as a river which, in its spring flooding, had insensibly worn its way several hundred feet down. More likely, it was a split in the world’s outer skin — a product of the forces that had raised the hills and mountains in the first place.
Whatever the geographic truth, the long straggling column filling the pass was as I’d imagined it. No, it was worse. After little flurries on and off all night, the skies had finally opened with the dawn. By the time we were able to peer down to the bottom of the wide pass, we could have been forgiven for thinking it was a defeated army creeping along before us from right to left. Without visible beginning or end, often knee-deep in water, the vast invasion force might have had trouble keeping up with a garden slug as it hurried out of the sun.
Rado pointed at a long covered wagon pulled by eight white oxen. ‘Is the Great King in that?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere big enough or grand enough for Chosroes,’ I answered. ‘Besides, he’ll be at least half a mile away at the front of the column — fresh ground to look at, sweeter smells for his nose, and so on.’ I fell silent and leaned a few inches forward. Most likely, the wagon was to carry the less important secretariat officials, or some part of a cousin’s household. Its wheels had long since come off. In their place were fitted improvised runners that would have done better on snow. All that stopped it from scraping and bumping and turning over into the grey and littered water was its speed of progress. I leaned forward still further. Yes — it was for someone’s dancing girls. They’d been kicked out to trudge behind it in their bedraggled finery. Slaves struggled behind them, carrying ruined musical instruments and bundles of soaking clothes. Behind these came drivers of animals for someone’s kitchen. Still further behind, I could see another big cart. Covered with purple canvas, surrounded by monks — probably of the Nestorian heresy, probably singing in Persian — it was anyone’s guess what this carried. I’d missed any sign of the fighting men. They would have been bunched about Chosroes.
It was a nuisance having to watch this lot go by. I had no doubt Chosroes himself was down there. Almost certainly, so was Shahrbaraz. Somewhere out of sight was the cream of the Persian armies. They were all shuffling along — without weapons, without armour, wholly out of formation. Except for the colour of their faces, you’d have been pushed to tell the difference between the Royal Guard and the dregs of the south-eastern levies. Even with Nicetas in charge, you could send a few thousand of our own men into action and the greatest war our world had known since Alexander’s conquests would be over in time for dinner. And here I was, reduced to watching the chance of this drift by in the rain. We couldn’t even start a landslide — not that this would do any good: as said, Chosroes and the people who mattered were already out of sight.
I pulled myself back and clambered with Rado down the rocky outcrop. The boys were already down and waiting. Glancing right and left along the path for sight of yet another patrol, we made for the clumps of bushes where we’d left the horses. From the state of the ground, I could guess the patrols had been more active when the Great King himself was passing by. Though still about, they were no longer much of a worry. It helped that, if no longer driving, the rain had settled into one of those continuous drizzles that soak almost without declaring their presence. Most of the Persian scouts up here, I knew from experience, would be huddled under their makeshift shelters.
We led our horses over the four hundred yards of broken ground that led to the forking of the mountain streams. I’d opened the matter to discussion the day before. The boys had the same right to be heard in this as Rado and I. All that had come out of this was who should be the one to leave us. I’d settled that by a disguised testing of whose Greek was less basic. Nothing was left in doubt. We’d had a day to get used to what was inevitable. It was as if we were walking to an execution.