I smiled nervously at Eboric’s brother. ‘You will get rid of the package if you think you’re about to be stopped?’ I asked again.
Already mounted, he took his cap off and swept wet hair away from his eyes. ‘No one will see me go,’ he said calmly. ‘No one will ever catch me.’ He glanced at the sealed package in his hands. ‘The biggest danger is that I’ll be hanged as a thief when I show this to the Greeks.’
I relaxed slightly. He wouldn’t be able to read the tiny script that covered both sides of the parchment sheet. But it confirmed in outline everything he could describe in his own words, and gave him plenary authority to command whatever assistance he felt he might need. ‘Show that to any of the postal officials and you’ll be hero of the hour,’ I said. ‘Use your common sense with the gold.’
There were other things I wanted to say. But none of them amounted to more than an excuse for delay. The light was good. The rain was manageable. The Persians weren’t about. It was time to go. The boy leaned forward for me to embrace him. Eboric and Rado patted him gruffly on the back and shared a joke with him — incomprehensible even in Latin — about picking mushrooms on a mountain top.
The boy set off and let his horse carry him slowly to the first stage in the long climb. He turned and looked back at us. ‘I won’t fail you, Alaric,’ he called back softly. ‘But I want you to know that we’re doing this for you, not a bunch of shitbag cowardly Greeks. You just get the Lady Antonia and don’t stop running away from this lot till you’ve joined me in Trebizond.’ With that, he wheeled round and, with a jump forward that reminded me of a ball shot from a catapult, was almost immediately lost to sight.
‘He won’t be stopped,’ Eboric said with easy certainty. ‘The Greeks only caught us when we came back for our mother’s body.’ He pushed his chest out. ‘We were only boys then,’ he added. I nodded and continued looking at the last place his brother had been visible. There were great banks of mist rolling down from the mountains. If they reached the pass — especially before nightfall — we could look forward to a still slower and more chaotic progress of the army. That was what we needed. Leaving aside the general considerations, we had to get through that struggling mass of humanity to continue our journey to the right interception point. A touch of mist would do us no harm.
I wondered again just how many men Shahin had with him. I’d told Rado the boys hadn’t come along to help in the fighting. But, if we couldn’t creep in by night and do our business, what use would the two of us be? Whatever use all four of us might have been, there were now just the three of us. The whole journey here, I’d been racking my brains for any better plan than I’d made up in Constantinople. Nothing so far had occurred to me.
Rado swore suddenly in Slavic. ‘Patrol in sight down below, and I think they’ve seen us,’ he said in Latin. I looked round. Three men in uniform were leading a horse over an expanse of jagged stones. I’d taken it for granted no horses could be got across that. So, it seemed, had Rado and the boys. By tacit agreement, we’d gone round it ourselves. I nearly felt cheerful at the thought of their joint failure. But, from the direction they were taking, I found it hard to believe the men had seen us. Even before the mist arrived, the rain had softened everything to a gentle blur. How visible were we — unmoving and against a background of colours that blended with our clothing? The three men looked more interested in taking a short cut than in flushing out possible spies.
Oh, but one of the men had now seen us. Pointing and waving his arms, he was jabbering to the others in the shrill argumentative whine usual among the Persian lower classes. The other two stopped and looked in our direction. If we looked back and didn’t move, they might move on. But they’d finished their deliberations and were coming in our direction. We could make a dash for it. They were a quarter of a mile away and the horse wasn’t bred for mountain work. There was no chance they’d catch us. But they might then raise an alarm that would force us into another detour — and how many more of these could we afford?
‘Let’s see how well we’ve rehearsed,’ I said. I put up a hand to check that the turban we’d made from one of the blankets was still in place. The appearance of ochre that Eboric had made on my face with a burnt twig had probably turned to black rivulets, running down cheeks whitened with cornmeal. Not that it mattered how sordid I looked — that was the desired effect. The men had found their way to smoother ground and were coming rapidly closer. I waited till the man in front had stopped and mounted the horse. It was time for action. I waved my arms theatrically and pushed Rado to the ground.
‘What are you doing out of the pass?’ the mounted man asked in a voice that was plainly intended to sound both gruff and haughty, but that managed neither. It was low-grade provincial. It even had a tinge of Syriac — he was dark enough for south-east of the Euphrates. He looked thoughtfully at our horses. ‘I asked you a question,’ he said, raising his voice.
I stopped pretending to thrash Rado and made a perfunctory bow. ‘Greetings, O Master of all creation,’ I said in a Persian that sounded both greasy and heavily Armenian. ‘Will you honour me by taking your ease with one of my brothers?’
The mounted man shifted on his saddle and looked at his two companions. His uniform aside, there was no sign of the martial virtues in him. The companions were about as low as you can get once you hit the dregs of an army. Not even a morning of driving rain had washed all the dirt from their faces. The weeping scabs about their lips were hideous things to behold. Their shapeless, stunted bodies made the wretches who’d rioted outside my palace robust by comparison. They clutched at each other, whispering and giggling, now looking at Eboric, now pointing at me. Their conference over, they plucked at the mounted man till he bent down and listened to their urging. ‘We’ll be late,’ he whispered down at them. ‘Orders are orders and it’ll be flaying alive if we don’t get there in time.’
There was more whispering. The nastier of the companions pointed at the three of us, his tongue darting from side to side of his revolting mouth. The mounted man looked at me again. His face twisted into a crooked smile. ‘If you really are a pimp,’ he said, ‘you won’t get much custom up here.’ He waved for support at the rocky waste that lay all about. ‘Why aren’t you down in the pass with everyone else?’
‘We come all the way from the great city of Tibion,’ I whined, twisting my face to make the coating of burnt twig run in nastier rivulets. ‘Yet who will buy my boys? Surely, we should have offered ourselves to the Greeks, for all the fortune I shall make among you worshippers of the female parts.’ I clapped my hands. After a shrill curse in Armenian, I kicked Eboric between his shoulder blades. He got slowly up and began an insultingly feeble rendition of one of his bathhouse dances. There wasn’t much he could do about his pretty face. But the slow, plodding movements in wet clothing might not have raised interest in a profligate high on hashish.
That, however, is what the companions showed various signs of being. Giggling and rolling his eyes, one of them sat on a low stone and began rubbing at his crotch. The other turned his attention back to the mounted man. There was more whispering and pointing. But the mounted man shook his head. He leaned forward. ‘How did you know we were coming?’ he demanded. ‘How could word go round, as far away as Armenia, of an invasion we still haven’t been officially told about?’ He sat upright again. ‘Did you see any Greeks on your way through the mountains? If you did, you’d better tell me. I’m on my way to the Great King himself,’ he finished with a toss of his head.