A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (i am reading a book txt) 📕

A cripple, and a king.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

High above the plain rolling west from the Theodosian Walls, Emperor Leo the Isaurian – third of his name, and the seventh man to wear the purple in twenty years – stared out from the Gate of St Romanus.

It was the second-highest point in the architect Anthemius’s formidable fortifications, perched atop the Seventh Hill. Byzantium had seven hills, just as Rome had seven hills. But Leo had no intention that his city would suffer its predecessor’s dismal fate.

Katāros attended His Imperial Majesty, along with a small contingent of palace guards and the fat eparch Daniel, who was in danger of melting into a puddle of sweat on the baked pavings of the parapet. A breeze was blowing off the hot plain from the west, but it brought no relief from the unrelenting swelter of the summer sun. And it carried on its breath the stink of an army.

They had been watching all morning, watching the dust cloud grow bigger and wider, watching for it to disgorge its mysteries within.

Scouts had been flying in and out of the city with reports of the Arabs’ advance north from the Hellespont. The Emperor Leo had commanded that the land be razed ahead of them. He had been ruthless, leaving not a stalk of barley standing, and ordered any of the population who wanted to save themselves into the city. They had been pouring in for days.

Meanwhile, Prince Maslama, brother of the Caliph Sulayman, rode at the head of his great army, leaving in its wake a trail of ransacked cities and burned towns all the way back to the Cilician Gates on the eastern frontier.

And now all the rumours, all the reports, all the hearsay of bloodshed and terror, had come to their point in the dust cloud hanging over the plain.

‘There, Majesty – do you see?’ said the eparch.

‘I see.’ Leo’s tone was imperturbable as always.

Sweat was streaming into Katāros’s eyes. He palmed it away and shaded his gaze. Out of the dust, he began to distinguish spear-points glinting in the sun, shields flashing many colours, banners and pennants waving in the westerly wind. Then camels and horsemen and foot soldiers in their thousands.

The host kept coming, column after column, swallowing up the road and all the land around it. ‘Siege machines, there.’ Leo pointed out the tall, ungainly contraptions being dragged by oxen. At that distance they looked like children’s toys, but many a city to the east had learned how deadly those toys could be. ‘They hurl fire and stone.’

‘Some say they hurled shit at Pergamon,’ drawled Daniel. ‘And lime-dust. Even dead animals.’

‘They can throw what they like,’ replied Leo. ‘They won’t break our walls.’

Katāros had heard a hundred people say the same in the last week. ‘They won’t break our walls.’ The Byzantines had good cause to be confident. The western fortifications were monumental. Three lines of defence, sheer cliffs of brick and stone. Massive structures that stretched south to the Marmara shore and north to the Golden Horn, sealing the peninsula of Byzantium behind its triple rampart and the brutishly squat towers that strengthened the walls every hundred paces. He looked away to the south. The parapets were lined with hundreds of spearmen, and arrayed among them on the wider walkways were the Byzantines’ own siege machines: mangonels and onagers that stood silent guard over the defences, ready to cast death on any Arab forces foolhardy enough to attempt a direct assault.

The emperor indicated below and to the right where the valley of the Lycus river fell away. The Lycus was the city’s only natural water source, supplying the myriad channels that would eventually erupt from the fountains and bathhouses in the heart of the city. ‘We have to assume that they will cut the water course. Or else divert it.’

‘Let them, Majesty,’ declared Daniel, his tone irritatingly assured. ‘The city is ready. The cisterns are full. The granaries are crammed to bursting. Maslama’s army cannot hurt us.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ Leo scanned with his soldier’s eye further south, distracted perhaps by the sound of chanting. ‘Here they come again.’ He nodded at the small procession of priests approaching from the direction of the Rhesios Gate along the peribolos – the terrace of ground that lay between the inner and outer walls. ‘If the Almighty is persuaded by he who makes most noise, then no one has done more for the city’s defence than those priests.’

Katāros had never quite figured whether Leo was a devout or a cynic when it came to matters of the Faith. Whenever Katāros took him for one, the emperor made a comment that seemed to prove the other. So Katāros reserved judgement and kept his own thoughts on such matters to himself.

Three times they had listened to Patriarch Germanus and his chanting priests pass below, bearing before them the holy icon of the Blessed Virgin in the hope that she would bless the Byzantines’ defences against the coming onslaught. Her special favour on the city was said to be its surest strength. The chronicles recorded how forty years earlier the Mother of God had stood by the Emperor Constantine Augustus in his hour of peril. And despite five years under the heel of the Arab siege, the walls – and the city – still stood. But would the Blessed Mother stand by the Emperor Leo now? If she didn’t, the empire was lost.

‘Germanus has been hectoring me to declare a Day of Repentance,’ said Leo. ‘Every man, woman and child to perform the Eucharist. What do you think, Lord Eparch? Shall I agree to it?’

Daniel’s fat nostrils flared. ‘Germanus calls for whatever inflates his own standing.’

‘You doubt his sincerity?’

‘Don’t you, Majesty?’

But Leo didn’t answer. His mouth only flickered momentarily with an inscrutable smile.

‘A day of repentance,’ the eparch continued. ‘I mean, what difference could it really make? We have taken every precaution, made every provision. Every