the guidance of Parvez, Shapur was given new life.
*****
Near Dura Europos, Syria:
Three centuries later
Jabala, leader of the Jafnid Arab clan, lay with his belly pressed against the hot, dry earth. His deep green eyes scanned the distant horizon, looking out from a face worn and marked by childhood diseases and a lifetime of exposure to the searing suns of the Syrian desert. A fresh cut was inscribed across his right cheek, a souvenir of a savage fight with the lying Roman thief who called himself Magnus – the man who had betrayed his father, al-Mundhir, whom the Romans called Alamoundaros in their own barbarous tongue. Jabala had taken revenge for that treachery, filleting Magnus as if he were a common snake from the desert or a rat from the sewers of the stinking Roman city of Constantinople, where Jabala had restored the honour of the Jafnid family and taken a new commission from the Roman Empire, reinvigorating a dead alliance which stretched back a century when a man who bore his own name, Jabala, his great-grandfather, emerged from the desert wastes of Arabia and made an agreement with the Roman Emperor Anastasius. Jabala and his family, taking the name of the Jafnids, after Jabala’s ancestor, Jafna, prospered under their alliance with Rome, taking titles, becoming rich, courting the centre of power in the imperial city of Constantinople, and taking the Roman religion, Christianity. As Christian allies of a Christian Roman Empire, they had fought loyally for their Roman brothers, roundly defeating the enemies of the heathen Sasanian Empire of Iran who came in never-ending waves from the east and broke themselves on the huge walls of the great fortresses of the Roman Empire, on the swords and spears of Rome’s legionaries, and on the vicious knives, sharp axes, and cunning, of the Arabs who fought for Rome. Who could forget the son of the first Jabala – a man called al-Harith, whose name, a clever title which was less name, and more propaganda statement, meant the reaper, a man with the ear of the Emperor Justinian and a friend and confidant of the Empire’s most powerful woman, the Empress Theodora. Al-Harith, who took the Greek name Arethas in Constantinople, had won the respect and admiration of all for his exploits on and off the battlefield. Who could forget his courage, his daring, when he calmly walked beyond the ranks of Roman legionaries and Arab warriors who stood fast, ready to do battle? There he had thrown down his shield, held out his hand, and challenged the Empire’s most hated enemy, the barbarian leader of the Nasrids, the sons of Nasr. The Nasrids, Arabs like Arethas and Jabala, had decided to throw in their lot with the Sasanians, turning their backs on Rome to take Iranian offers of riches and a glittering city of gold in the land of Iraq. Arethas had spat on his hand and grasped that of his enemy, and looked him in the eye, and then, in less than five dazzling strokes of his sword, grasped his enemy’s life and ripped it from his body, leaving him bloodied and broken on the ground. How the Romans had clamoured! They banged their shields and their spears and their swords as the enemy army, stunned, bereft of its leader, broke and ran. The Emperor himself had lauded Arethas in Constantinople, garlanding him, giving him land, money, power, all that he wanted or required.
The Jafnid leaders found their apogee under Arethas. All they had asked for was to be left to run their own affairs as they saw fit, in return for unstinting loyalty and service. The Roman Emperor Justinian, a proud man, and a man of honour, Jabala remembered, honoured the agreement. But the son of Arethas, Alamoundaros, met a quite different world when Arethas died quietly in his sleep, in his stone house south of Damascus. After the funeral rites had been performed, and the priest had buried Arethas under a marvellous marble panel, adorned with precious stones and mosaics made at the Christian centre of Nebo – where Moses himself was buried – Alamoundaros made the customary visit to the Roman capital to seek their assent for his leadership of the Jafnid armies. He promised to fight Rome’s enemies, to uphold the Christian religion, to care for the people in Syria and northern Arabia – and how he did, Jabala thought. He fought as hard as Arethas had ever done, striking deep into Iranian territory, but to no avail. Magnus. The cheating coward, acting on the orders of that weakling Emperor Maurice, took Alamoundaros when Jabala was just a young man. Jealousy and a craving for power lay behind the Emperor’s betrayal; the alliance was shattered forever, or so it seemed, until Maurice, along with his family, was castrated, disembowelled, and thrown to the ravens in a palace coup. The new leader, Phocas, gave Jabala a chance to gain revenge for the injustice done to his father – and Jabala, with the long, curved knife which Arethas had taken from the body of his Arab enemy so many years ago, had taken a screaming and struggling Magnus to the Jafnid stronghold, a burned, remote, blasted place one day’s march south of the city of Damascus. There, at the crest of the black hill which looked down into a lake made fresh by the previous day’s rains, Jabala had dispatched the Roman in a single combat which honoured not only his dead father, but the bravery of Arethas, his grandfather. Magnus had landed only one blow on Jabala, slicing his cheek with the Roman straight sword, the Spanish gladius, leaving the welt which Jabala still bore.
He traced the line which the blade had left in his cheek. How it burned. Killing Magnus had been a release; it erased the shame of what had been perpetrated. Jabala, like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, felt a fierce loyalty to the world which was Rome. He worshipped their god and detested the godless, heathen armies of his enemies.
Which was why he was lying on a hot, dusty ridge, in the burning Syrian sun.
Waiting.
*****
War had started that year, shortly after Maurice had been killed by the usurper Phocas. Khusrau Parvez, the Emperor of Sasanian Iran, the shaninshah, the King-of-Kings, owed his success in an internal rebellion some years ago to Maurice, who had marched Roman and Arab armies to the Sasanian capital city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Iraq to install Parvez on the throne. Now, with Maurice dead, Parvez seized his opportunity to gain what he had always wanted: the Roman realm. None on either side could have predicted the fire which now consumed the whole of the inhabited world, and which would plunge everyone within it into a generation-long burning inferno. Indeed, the war was still young as Jabala and his army tracked the Iranian forces northwest from the old Roman fortress at Dura Europos, where they had crossed the Euphrates River. Dura Europos had been deserted for years, ever since it was stormed by the forces of the Sasanian Emperor Shapur the Great, its garrison deported to Iran, the huge walls left to bake in the desert and the inside to fall into ruin. He had heard the stories, of course – the ghosts of the Roman and Iranian soldiers killed in an underground tunnel, seen on the battlements at night by Arab traders who plied this route and who refused, even in the worst sandstorms, to seek shelter in its empty, lifeless streets. The people of Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian desert where Jabala had often stopped for shelter, food, and women, were less cowed by the memory of the defeat, and hunted gazelle and other game which roamed the massive and vacant city. Jabala was superstitious; he never went there, and forbade his soldiers to visit. They had given the fortress a wide berth on their way up here.
Now, from his vantage point on the ridge looking into the desert, he could see what he and his men had so carefully followed. A plume of dust rose in the sky as the caravan moved northwest, staying between the lush lands of the river Euphrates and the desert which lay beyond them to the west. Jabala knew what the caravan contained; a prize worth taking. Four Roman spies had died gathering news of its contents. Those men were members of the sinister and secretive Roman unit known, misleadingly, as agentes in rebus – literally, ‘agents in things’ – created by the paranoid government of the Emperor Constantine three centuries ago, and still used for all manner of activities, including domestic espionage, enforcement, and dangerous cross-border missions to report on Rome’s enemies – and, frequently, to spy on Rome’s friends, too. One of Jabala’s own men had also died discerning the contents of the caravan, and the man’s son, leader of a cavalry squad, sharpened his spear each night, his eyes glittering with his anger, dreaming of taking ten Iranian heathens in revenge. Jabala smiled. He liked the mettle of his troops – men you would want with you, in a fight. Like the men whom Jabala’s Roman liaison officer had sent him as well, four centuries of legionaries from their sun-scorched sandy base at Aila, where
