The Curse of Babylon (58 page)

Urvaksha looked up from muttering over his tangled strings. He turned conveniently sightless eyes in my direction. ‘The knots tell me one of the serving boys ate it,’ he cackled. ‘The knots are never wrong – just let them be read by one who understands them. The knots are never wrong, I tell you!’

They hadn’t served him well in the matter of the pickled goat’s brain I’d let him pilfer from my dish. But Chosroes was leaning forward and slapping his thigh. ‘Brilliant, Urvaksha!’ he called out. ‘Why is no one else willing to speak truth to power?’ He tugged affectionately on the golden chain, catching his seer off guard and pulling him into a puddle. ‘I will address the army on my feet,’ he said, getting up and stepping forward to where he had his best view of the tired and perhaps nearly mutinous assembly in the pass. If only I could have got past the armed guards to give him one hard shove – if only one of the sodden eunuchs hurrying forward with the canopy had stumbled in the right direction – it wouldn’t have been another missed chance of ending the war. But it was missed. As if he’d heard what I was thinking, he looked suspiciously round and stepped away from the edge.

‘Time, I suppose, to weep,’ he said in Greek. ‘A hundred years from now, not one of these men will be alive.’ He stopped for a low peal of thunder to roll down from the mountains. ‘If I have any say in the matter,’ he tittered into his sleeve, ‘a hundred years will be more than pushing it. Ten is too many for this assembly of human trash.’ He turned to Shahrbaraz. ‘I’m ready to face my loving people,’ he said in Persian.’

Somewhere behind me, a gigantic gong rang out, louder than the renewed thunder that accompanied it. I couldn’t see into the pass from where I was standing but there was a ragged blare of trumpets from down there. After a long silence, the eunuchs struck up in unison:

D
ā
rom andarz-
ē
az d
ā
n
ā
g
ā
n

Az guft-
ī
p
ē
š
ē
n
ī
g
ā
n

Ō
šm
ā
h b
ē
wiz
ā
rom

Pad r
ā
st
ī
h andar g
ē
h
ā
n

Agar
ē
n az man pad
ī
r
ē
d

Bav
ē
d s
ū
d-
ī
d
ō
g
ē
h
ā
n

Their voices and the bell-ringing accompaniment died away to reveal more thunder. This was blotted out again by a roar of cheering from below. While this continued, Chosroes mounted a small platform that had been carried forward. How the canopy bearers kept him dry was a tribute to the education of his court eunuchs. The rain was coming on harder and beat against us in great, heavy sheets. But Chosroes had now put on his biggest crown and, his unwetted beard poking forward, he raised both arms to take in the adulation of his army. He spun round and round, the heavy silk of his robe spreading out to make him look like a cone. The priests stood up and bowed. The Royal Guardsmen roared and beat their swords on their shields. We, the military rubbish, let out an inarticulate cheer. Far above, the clouds lit up in a dim flash. This time, the thunder rolled on and on. Depending how wet you were, you could take this as a further nuisance or as a dramatic accompaniment. Chosroes was able – and, I suppose, required – to take it as the latter. He raised his arms and walked quickly up and down his platform.

The cheering reached its end. Chosroes stood at the front of the platform and looked steadily at a depression in the far wall of the pass.

‘Men of Persia,’ he began, ‘I have allowed you into my presence so that I may share with you the plans I have been revolving in my mind.’ Whoever was in charge of the acoustics had messed up badly. His voice sounded weak at twenty yards. Through rain and thunder, how much of what he was saying could be heard down below was hard to say. The Persians never had been much good at the technical side of things. But this was a failing that, in itself, might tell something about the planning behind the invasion.

Chosroes stroked his beard in a manner that must be striking terror into his acoustics adviser and raised his voice to an undignified shout. ‘There are those, men of Persia, who say that we are weak. They say that our crops blacken in the fields, and that our men sicken and die of the sweating pestilence. They say that our victories are a product of Greek failure – that the Greeks are badly led and that they have too many other frontiers to guard.

‘But I tell you, men of Persia, that we are strong. We are the children of destiny. We are the ones whose glory shall be remembered at the end of time.’ I was right about the acoustics. There’d be no free places on his impaling stakes once this was over, and once he’d laid eyes on whoever had told him to speak towards the far wall of the pass. He stopped for applause. Because he had stopped he got the applause, but it was more polite than frenzied. Everyone round him, to be sure, cheered himself hoarse. It was the wise thing to do. I think it took every mind off a sky that had turned the colour of lead.

Chosroes gave another glare over his shoulder and raised his voice to a scream. ‘When my royal ancestor, Xerxes, invaded Greece a thousand years ago, he made one fatal mistake. That was to leave the Greeks he had conquered with their lives. In every age of their history, the Greeks have been an irreverent, faithless race. Whether in philosophy or theology, they go out of their way to unsettle every mind. The Greeks cannot be conquered until they are silenced. They cannot be silenced until they are dead.’

He stopped to clear his throat and for the praise of those who could hear him. ‘Oh, bravo, bravo,’ we cried. ‘Death to the Greeks. What have they ever done for us?’ and so on and so forth. Down in the pass, the only noise was of raindrops on spread canvas. A couple of eunuchs hurried forward to place covered lamps about the Great King. They made it easier to see him, though the upward lighting did nothing to remove the impression that we were being addressed by the monster from a particularly lurid nightmare.

Chosroes turned and spoke directly to us in his normal voice. ‘I have given orders for every Greek we encounter on our march to be put to the sword. We left not one living creature in the cities of Pentopolis and Alanta. Every farmer, every shepherd on our march, has been hunted down and killed without mercy. That is the policy we will adopt as we press through the Home Provinces of the Greek Empire. Constantinople itself will be taken and it will be sacked till not one stone is left standing on another. We will kill its people. We will demolish its buildings. We will burn its libraries. When we have dealt with the great city of filth and corruption that sits upon the two waters, we will race forward and take Athens and then Rome. I will, on my return to Ctesiphon, give supplemental orders for the cleansing of Antioch and Jerusalem and every other Syrian city of the Greek pollution. It will be the same for Egypt, once it is returned to its ancient loyalty.

‘And we will spread our message of cleansing wider yet. The lands and islands of the remotest West shall not be suffered to harbour one student of the accursed civilisation. It is my intention that no record shall be left to future ages of the Greek and Latin races. Their books and languages will be wiped from the face of the world.

‘But let us return to present concerns. In every step of our progress to Constantinople, let our army wade knee-deep through the blood of slaughtered Greeks. None must be spared. Compassion for those we conquer is treason to me.’

He stopped, realising perhaps he was drifting away from the big themes. He turned back to face his army and took a deep breath. ‘I, Chosroes the Mighty,’ he bellowed, ‘will take final revenge for the outrages heaped upon our nation by Alexander the barbarian.’

I doubt if it mattered whether the army could hear him. Probably everyone in the pass had heard of Alexander, though not of who he really was. As for Xerxes and his failed invasion, and all the other ancient Kings of Persia, perhaps one in a hundred down there had heard their names. I’d soon learned in Ctesiphon that Chosroes had Herodotus on the brain. Those Persians who didn’t know any Greek had no history but childish chronicles with notions of dating that changed from one chapter to the next.

He’d finished – and there was no point in continuing. Down below, the eunuchs had started an impromptu medley of war ballads. There were limits to how those of us about him could express our delight at the Royal Eloquence and strategic wisdom. With a face as dark as the sky, the Great King walked from the platform. He didn’t wait for the eunuchs to get their canopy over him.

‘Chosroes,’ I called out in a voice that was surprisingly calm. There are times when fear leaves you paralysed. Then there are times when you realise what you had always intended and what has to be done. ‘Chosroes,’ I called again, this time in Greek and using the Greek version of his name, ‘can I have a moment with you?’

I’d called to him as he was going past about ten feet away. A couple of the Royal Guard had pulled their swords out and were moving swiftly across the rocky ground in my direction. Chosroes stopped and looked round. I took off my helmet and pulled at the black cloth that covered my hair. He gave me one of his blank and disconcerting scares. Then he smiled and hurried forward through the rain. He waved the armed men back into line.

‘Alaric, my dear fellow!’ he cried in Greek. ‘I’d been wondering when you would show your face.’ He took me by the hands. ‘Come out of this awful rain. You’ll catch your death of cold.’

Chapter 58

I held the scroll in each hand, and unwound it to what I knew was a favourite passage. I put my mind into order and read:

Now that he had taken Athens, Xerxes sent a messenger back to the Persian capital, to announce his success. The next day, he called together all the Athenians who had deserted their nation and sworn fealty to him, and ordered them to make sacrifice on the Acropolis in the manner of their nation. It may be that the Great King had himself been ordered in a dream to make this concession. Or it may be that he was sorry to have burned the temple of Athene. Whatever the case, these renegade Athenians at once obeyed.

Chosroes interrupted: ‘I don’t think, dear Alaric, you are making a completely faithful translation of the text.’ He pointed at one of the words on the page I had before me. ‘The Athenians here are described as exiles, not as traitors. Also, there is no mention of fealty in the Greek of Herodotus.’

So far as you can when the man behind you has a sword to your throat, I shrugged. ‘I can’t argue with that,’ I said. ‘However, a literal translation into Persian might not make as much sense as you presently want. Where individual passages are concerned, some degree of paraphrase must be permitted.’ Chosroes nodded and sat back. He looked about to see that everyone had noted his command of his mother’s language. He smiled complacently and motioned me to continue:

I mention this circumstance because, on the Acropolis, there is a temple of Erechtheus, in which there is both an olive tree and a representation of the sea. These commemorate the ancient contest between Athene and Poseidon for mastery of Attica. Now, the Persians had burned this olive tree along with the temple. However, just one day after this, the renegade Athenians saw that the tree had miraculously put forth a new shoot about eighteen inches long.

Though not quite the Prodigal Son, I had few reasons to complain about my reception into the Great King’s bosom. I was bathed and shaved and oiled, and arrayed in a clean and reasonably dry robe. I was sitting beside him, a smell of cooking drifting my way as often as one of the tent flaps was open. After a brief intermission, the rain was back and its rapid and continuous beating on the leather roof meant that I had to keep my voice loud as well as steady.

‘There will be no olive shoots after
my
visit to Athens,’ Chosroes said firmly. ‘Such Mass as I may permit in the converted temple of Athene will be held in Syriac.’ He looked about once more and laughed. ‘But tell me, Alaric, you were in Athens some years ago. Does the sacred olive tree still grow there?’