Unarmed

"There is a kind of courage that is nothing but exhaustion wearing armour, and a kind of surrender that is the bravest thing a man ever does. From outside, they look the same."

Zuberi would not stop shouting.

He had been shouting for the better part of an hour, in the dim smoky heat of the war-tent, with his scarred jaw thrust out and his grey beard bristling and his two great fists planted on the map-table among the little stones that marked the divisions. He was a big, hard, weathered man of sixty, who had followed Jabari from the first day at the burning gate to the last day of the long march, and in all that time had never once raised his voice to his king in the hearing of another. He raised it now. He raised it until the guards at the flap shifted uneasily from foot to foot, and the captains who had been summoned to the council stood along the walls with their eyes lowered, looking at the carpet as men look at the ground when two lions quarrel.

"It is a trap!" Zuberi said. "I do not need to be a clever man to see it. I am a stupid man, and I see it! She comes to the camp of the Sun that Rises Twice, alone, with a smile and a purse of tears. She says: I have a son. He is the one you have fought. Come out on the plain tomorrow and lay down your sword. And you say, Yes, my love, I will come. My king, in the name of the river, hear yourself."

"I hear myself," said Jabari.

He sat in his high-backed chair at the head of the table with his hands folded on the arms and his back very straight, and looked at the old lieutenant with a quiet, bright, exhausted patience. He had not slept again. He had sat on the cushion by the lamp until the dark thinned, turning the half-sun over in his fingers, and then he had washed and dressed and sent for his captains, and when they had come he had told them what she had told him, in the plainest words he knew. He had not asked their leave. A king does not ask leave. But he had wanted them to hear it from his own mouth, and to see his face while he said it, and he had seen their faces change.

"She told me the truth about the cup," he said. "You heard her. You were there that night, and you burned the note."

Zuberi's mouth snapped shut.

It was a cruel thing to say, and Jabari said it gently. He did not raise his eyes from the old man's face. The captains along the wall had gone suddenly motionless, and from somewhere outside came the slow knocking of a mallet on a tent-peg, and the shout of a sergeant, and the far-off whinny of a horse.

"You did not tell me what was written on it," Jabari said. "I asked you twice. You said it was a lie, and a cruel one, and that it would only hurt me. I believed you. I have believed you for twenty years, my friend, and I do not blame you for it, because I think you did what you thought was kind." He drew a long breath. "But she says it said The Mahali does not run dry. Is that true?"

For a long moment the old man did not answer. The muscle at the corner of his scarred lip twitched. He stood with his great hands flat on the table, and Jabari saw something happen in his face that he had not seen there since the day at Leptis, when the first of the Roman standards fell: a collapse, small and terrible and entirely silent, like the slow fall of a wall that has stood too long.

"It said that," said Zuberi hoarsely. "And a drawing. A river with three marks."

"Why did you not tell me?"

"Because you would have gone back." The old soldier's voice cracked. "You were so sick, my king. You lay in the cart with the fever on you for eight days and you did not know your name. You woke with your eyes empty. And Neema said, Let him hate her. A man can live on hatred. He cannot live on hope that the woman who saved him is still in the house of the man who whips him. I thought she was right. I thought, if I give him the note, he will run back to Rome and die in the street." His fist came down on the table, weakly. "I was a fool. I was a loyal fool."

"You were loyal," said Jabari. "That is not the same as a fool."

"It is very nearly the same, my king."

"Perhaps." A faint, weary smile touched his mouth. "But it is the reason I have you at my right hand and not another."

The old man bowed his head. When he lifted it again his eyes were wet, but his jaw was set, and Jabari saw with a sort of rueful affection that he had not given up the argument. He had only changed the ground.

"Then she told the truth about that," Zuberi said. "I grant it. But she did not tell it for love, my king. She told it because it is a key. A woman who has run a Roman household for twenty years, who has been the hand behind a Senator and a general and, if the tales are true, a throne, does not do a thing without three reasons. I do not know the other two. I know only that I do not like the look of a plan that costs the enemy nothing and asks you to lay down the only thing that keeps you alive."

"It costs her something."

"What?"

"Her son," said Jabari. "He will stand before his army and see his father unarmed in front of him, and he will learn what she has hidden for twenty years. It will break something in him. She knows that, and she is willing to do it." He looked down at his hands. "I have never seen her do a thing that cost her nothing. That is how I know that this is true."

It was, he thought, not an answer that would convince anyone. It was hardly an answer that convinced him. But it was what he had, and the old man across the table looked at him a long time, and sighed, and let his shoulders fall.

"I will come with you," he said.

"You will not."

"My king—"

"You will stay with the army, and if I do not return by sunset you will break the camp and march south, and not stop till you reach the river. That is an order." He rose from the chair, slowly, with a hand on the table. "I am not going out to be killed, Zuberi. I am going to see my son."

…

They set the meeting for the third hour of the afternoon, on the open plain midway between the two armies, where the ground ran flat and bare and white as a bone for the better part of a mile.

It was Claudia who chose the place. She had walked out alone at dawn, with a Kavanu guide a few paces behind her, and stood for a long while on the crest of a low dune looking down over the plain, her cloak whipping round her ankles in the wind, a small straight figure against the vast pale sky. When she came back she had told them what she wished: a table, and two chairs, and a canopy of undyed linen to keep off the sun; the armies drawn up a bowshot behind their respective leaders, and no man to approach within two hundred paces on either side; the Dux and the Tyrant to meet alone, in the middle, unarmed, with only the Lady of Mercy to speak between them. She said that it must be so, or the Romans would suspect. She said that it must be soon, or the Dux would grow suspicious of the delay. She said it all in a low, steady, practical voice, standing beside the bench with her hands clasped, and Jabari had thought: She has done this before. She has stood in a room full of men and arranged for them to do what she wanted. And I did not even see it, in the dungeon, when she did it to me.

He had thought it, and it had troubled him, and he had set it aside.

Now he stood in the bright cold glare of the noon, outside his tent, among his officers, and let them take his armour off.

It was done slowly. There were four of them, young captains, and they went about it with a kind of awkward solemnity, as men go about the dressing of a corpse. They unbuckled the bronze scales from his shoulders, one by one, and laid them on a blanket. They unclasped the heavy gold torque from his neck and the arm-rings from his biceps, the cloak of the royal white and the girdle of the sun. They took the long curved sword from his hip and held it a moment in their hands, a great notched sickle of dark steel that had cloven the skulls of eleven years, and then, with a gesture like a priest laying down a sacred vessel, put it into its scabbard on the blanket. He stood in his plain linen tunic, with his arms bare, and his throat bare, and nothing at his belt but a wooden comb.

"My king," said the youngest, in a trembling voice. "The dagger."

"Leave it."

"But—"

"I said, leave it." Jabari held out his hand, and the boy placed the little bone-handled knife in his palm, and he turned it over once, and gave it back. "Take it. A man who is going to meet his son does not carry a knife."

He did not know whether it was wise. He knew only that when he tried to imagine the moment, the long approach across the empty ground, the tall figure in the white cloak rising from the table, the first sight of that face, he could see himself in no other state. He could not walk to his child bristling with steel. He did not think he could walk to him at all, unless his hands were empty.

At the last he took the cord from round his neck.

He had worn it since the Ostia quay. It was an old, soft, much-knotted thing of braided leather, worn pale at the nape, and the upper half of the little ebony sun hung from it, dark and smooth, its jagged copper-pinned edge warm against his chest. He held it a moment in his palm. The sun rose and fell with his breathing. Then he did what he had done on a thousand nights in a thousand camps: he kissed it, quickly and awkwardly, as a man kisses the hand of a sleeping child, and slipped it back inside his tunic, against the skin.

Half a sun, he thought. He has the other. If the gods are kind.

…

The march across the plain was the longest of his life.

He went alone. The two armies stood drawn up behind him in the white glare, silent as painted figures, the Kavanu in their loose ranks of white and ochre to the south and the Romans in their rigid squares of red and iron to the north, and between them lay the bare flat floor of the desert, shimmering, empty, a mile of nothing under a sky the colour of pewter. A wind was blowing from the east, thin and dry, carrying a smell of dust and dead thorn. It flapped at the loose sleeves of his tunic. It played with his hair. He could hear his own feet on the packed earth, an even, measured crunch, and under it, very faint, the beating of his heart.

He thought of nothing. It surprised him. He had expected a flood of thought, a rush of memory and fear and hope, and instead there was only the sky and the sand and the small steady sound of his own tread. A lark rose from the stones ahead of him and went up singing into the glare. He watched it climb until it was lost.

Somewhere behind him a drum began to beat.

It was Kito's drum. Kito had stayed in Rome. It was one of the boys in his place, a lad of sixteen with a quick hand and no particular gift, and he beat the old slow measure that Jabari had known since boyhood, the heartbeat of the river, the walking rhythm that the Kavanu used to bring a dead man home. It was an unspeakably sad sound. It came after him across the plain, thudding softly, like a pulse in the earth, and he understood that his captains had given it to him as a gift, and a warning, and a farewell. He lifted his hand without turning round. The drum faltered, and went on.

Ahead of him the white canopy stood alone in the middle of the waste, fluttering a little at its edges. Under it a table, two chairs, a jug. A tall figure stood beside the nearer chair. It wore a cloak of Roman red and a plain bronze cuirass, and it held a helmet in the crook of one arm, and the light struck off the bronze of its cuirass and the pale curve of the helmet. At such a distance he could not see a face. He saw only a shape, straight and still and young, and the way the weight sat on the left foot, with the right knee a little loose; and he had to stop, for a moment, with his hand pressed hard against his side.

That is how I stand, he thought.

He walked on.

…

From the high stand behind the Roman lines, the Lady Claudia watched him go.

She had chosen the place herself. It was a little platform of rough boards, hung with purple, raised ten feet above the baggage-park on the crest of a rise, with a canopy for the sun and a rail round the edge, and from it a person could look straight out across the whole white plain and see the two small figures walking towards the same point from opposite sides. She stood at the rail in her dark cloak, with the wind pulling her veil out behind her like a banner, and no one stood beside her. She had sent the servants down. Her hands were on the wood. Her knuckles were bloodless.

She saw the Tyrant walk. She saw how slowly he went, how straight he held his head, how he stopped once, a long way out, and stood swaying, and moved on. She saw the young Dux come out from under the canopy to meet him, and halt a dozen paces from the table, and stand, quite still, with the helmet in his arm.

It was very quiet. The whole camp was holding its breath. A trumpet-fly buzzed somewhere in the canopy over her head. She was aware of a cold that was nothing to do with the wind, spreading slowly outward from her breast to her wrists and her knees, and of a voice in her head, not the small cold one but a deep, tired, patient voice she had not heard in a long while, the voice of a girl of twenty-two sitting on a stone ledge in the dark. It said: Look at him.

She looked.

He was so small, from here. A man of nearly fifty, grey-bearded and bare-armed on a barren plain, alone, with the sun on his shoulders and the whole weight of the world behind him. He had come with empty hands. He had come because she had asked. And she thought, with a clear and awful certainty that went through her like a knife: He would have come at any time in twenty years. If I had only sent for him. If I had only said his name.

Her eyes went, because she made them, to the tall young figure under the canopy. Her son stood looking at the man. She saw him lift his head. She could not see his face. But she saw the way his free hand rose slowly to the neck of his cuirass, and she knew without any doubt what it had found there, and what it was holding.

Then the Dux turned his head, very slightly, and looked up at the stand.

It was a long way, and there was a great deal of dust. But she knew that look. She had known it since a hot day in Capua, when a boy of eight had glanced up from the dirt of the training-yard at a veiled lady in a litter, to see whether she was pleased. He was waiting. He was waiting for the sign they had agreed upon in the tent the night before, when she had said to him, with her hand on his cheek, If it is as I fear, my love, I will tell you. He did not know what he would be told. He knew only that she would tell him, that she had never yet failed him, and that whatever she asked of him he would do.

Claudia lifted her right hand from the rail.

She held it a moment in the air, open, the fingers spread, so that all the camp might see the Lady of Mercy raise her palm in blessing. Then, slowly, without haste, she closed it, and drew it down across her throat, and let it fall.

Out on the plain, under the white canopy, the two men stood a dozen paces apart. One of them had seen nothing. One of them, who had looked up, and understood, had not yet moved. And between them, in the bright still air, a single lark fell out of the sky, and the drum behind the Kavanu line, very far away, missed a beat.