People nowadays say Constantine didn't take the Bulgars seriously enough. What? How do I know what people say nowadays, Brother Elpidios? Well, there you have me. Am I blushing? I ought to be. Twenty years ago, when I was still out in the world, people said Constantine didn't take the Bulgars seriously enough. There. Are you happier, Brother? You'd make a fine canon lawyer, I have no doubt of that.
Whenever people say- said- that about Constantine, it makes- made, excuse me- me angry, for it isn't so. He had detachments from all the military districts of Anatolia cross into Thrace for the campaign. Why not? We were, for once, at peace with the Arabs, and they were paying us tribute. He didn't figure they'd jump us from behind, and he was right.
Most of the troops from the military districts slogged north toward the Danube on horseback. The rest, along with us excubitores and the Emperor, sailed up the coast and inland by way of the Danube. The Bulgars, in those days, didn't live south of the river. They stayed up beyond it, in the swampy country in the angle between the Pruth and the Seret. They had a sort of a camp there: not really a town, but a bunch of tents all in the same place, and ringed round with palisades of brush and sticks and whatnot, as much for keeping their cattle in as for keeping enemies out.
They must have been pissing themselves when we came up toward that camp, let me tell you. We made a proud spectacle: thousands of men on horseback, all of us in chainmail that glittered in the sun, the imperial guards with silk surcoats dyed in all sorts of bright colors, banners and crosses and icons going before the companies and regiments and divisions of the army. The Bulgars took one look at us, fled back inside the camp, and didn't come out for three days straight. We could have gone right in after them, too, easy as you please.
But what's that the Book of Proverbs says? "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall"? Yes, that's the passage I meant, Brother Elpidios. Thank you. You give me those so quick, I don't have to grope for them with my own poor wits. We thought the Bulgars would flee back to the eastern lands they'd come from, but they didn't.
Oh, other things went wrong, too. The soldiers from the Anatolian military districts didn't care for the country they were in: it was damp, it was boggy, it was misty, it was everything the land they were used to wasn't. And everybody remembered that the last Roman army that had gone north of the Danube was the one that had mutinied and murdered Maurice, back an old man's lifetime before. No one said anything about that, but you could tell it was in people's minds.
Even with that, though, everything might have been all right if only Constantine's gout hadn't flared up. But flare it did, not only in his big toe- which was where it usually bit him- but also in his heel and up the calf of his leg.
I happened to draw guard duty outside the imperial pavilion the night everything went sour. He should have been asleep in there. He'd brought up a featherbed covered in silk and stuffed a cubit thick with goose down, so soft it'd be sinful for a proper monk to think about it, let alone lie down on it. You'd take oath a man could set that featherbed on knives and still sleep sound.
Except Constantine couldn't. He'd moan and he'd curse and he'd moan a little more and he'd curse a lot more. What he wanted to do, I think, was scream, but he wouldn't give in to the pain enough for that. Finally, when the stars said it was getting close to midnight- time for me to roll up in a blanket a lot scratchier than what Constantine had- he came hobbling out on two sticks, his leg all swaddled like a baby and bent so his foot wouldn't accidentally bump the ground and make him hurt even worse than he did already.
He looked bad. He looked old. He couldn't have been thirty yet, but shadows from the torchlight filled and deepened all the lines in his face. You could see white streaks in his beard. Even in the torchlight, he was pale. "Mother of God, help me," he groaned. "I have to get some rest."
I glanced over at my partner, a thick-shouldered Armenian named\a160… named\a160… well, whatever his name was, all those years ago, he looked as worried as I felt. "Wine with poppy juice in it, Emperor?" I suggested.
Constantine shook his head. His face was shiny with sweat, not on account of the heat but because he was maybe a step and a half away from keeling over dead. "I can't," he said. "I need my wits about me. I've beaten all my other enemies, all around the borders of the Empire. Once I smash these louse-eating Bulgars, too, I'll have made a clean sweep."
My partner and I looked at each other. What were we supposed to say, Brother Elpidios? You have to stop or you'll die? For one thing, we didn't know that was so. Only God knows such things. And for another thing, do you think Constantine would have listened to us? If you had any sense, you wouldn't have bet a forty-follis copper piece against a stack of gold nomismata that any Emperor from the line of Herakleios would listen to anybody. By the way he sounded, Constantine didn't care whether he went on living or not, so long as he got rid of the Bulgars.
He said, "I'm going back inside, boys. I will get some rest." He was giving orders not to us but to his own body, which didn't much feel like obeying. But he was clumsy with his sticks, because he didn't need them all that often, and as he turned himself around to go back, he whacked himself right in the sore foot with one of them.
Poor devil. He started to fall down. I grabbed him, so that didn't happen, but he threw back his head and howled like a wolf. Everybody awake in our camp must have heard him, and he probably woke half the troopers who were sleeping. Except for the sizzle of my own eyeballs cooking, it was the most dreadful sound I ever heard. Christ, wouldn't surprise me if it woke up Asparukh, the Bulgar chief.
He clamped down on it fast as he could- made his mouth close and bit the inside of his lower lip, hard, maybe to make one pain fight another. "I will rest," he said again, in a ghastly voice, and a little blood trickled down off his lower lip.
He made it back inside. My partner and I, we closed the tent flaps after him. He wouldn't rest, not after that. He hadn't a prayer, and we couldn't do a thing to help him. After a while, our reliefs came. I didn't think I'd sleep, either, but I did.
The sun woke me. I sat up, praying God had worked a miracle and healed Constantine overnight. Then I heard a groan from inside the imperial pavilion and knew it wasn't so. God works miracles when He feels like it, not when you feel like it. I snagged myself a mug of wine and went over there to find out what Constantine was going to do. The only thing I was sure of was that, if we attacked, he couldn't lead.
I got to the pavilion about the same time Florus and Kyprianos did. Florus was the ugliest man I've ever seen, with a big nose, no chin to speak of, and big ears that stuck out like open shutters on two sides of a house. Kyprianos, now, Kyprianos looked like a pretty catamite grown up to middle age. You ask me, though, Florus made the better general.
Constantine came out to meet the two of them. He looked worse by daylight than he had in the middle of the night. The purple circles under his eyes said he hadn't slept at all, not even a little bit. When he said, "If I don't get relief, I'm going to die," Florus and Kyprianos both nodded. He meant it, and they could tell as much.
Florus pointed north, toward the Bulgars' camp. "What about the barbarians? What do we do with them if you're not here?"
The Emperor made a rude gesture. "Drag them out of hiding with your lances. You won't need me here for that. They're frightened spitless of Roman power. Make them come out and fight and you'll smash them."
"We shall do as our glorious sovereign commands!" Kyprianos cried. He wore chainmail, but he talked like a courtier.
Florus said, "The men won't like that you're going, Emperor. They'll think you're leaving them in the lurch."
"I have to go," Constantine answered. He wasn't lying about that; just standing up on one foot and two sticks took an effort that left him white and trembling. "I'm sailing down to the baths at Mesembria; after I soak there, I always feel better. I expect I'll see you soon, with captives and booty to show me."
"We shall drag the barbarians forth from their lairs and crush them in your name," Kyprianos said. Constantine nodded. An Emperor always hears yes. Who'd dare tell him no? And Kyprianos wasn't the worst soldier around. He'd helped beat the Arabs a few years earlier, when they'd lost thirty thousand men. I guess he really thought he could do what he promised. But Florus, I noticed, didn't say anything.
Along with five shiploads of excubitores- me among 'em- Constantine sailed down the Danube and then south along the Black Sea coast to Mesembria. It sits out on a rocky peninsula, and makes a good harbor. The Emperor took the waters there. Before too long, he was feeling\a160… not good, but better.
"We should be getting news," he'd say, and try to put his sore foot on the ground. "We should be getting news." He must have felt like a bear in a cage. He talked about going back up to the frontier and taking over again, but he wasn't up to that. He waited. we all waited. If you weren't soaking your foot, Mesembria was a boring place to get stuck. Even the whores were clumsy… Sorry, Brother. That just slipped out.
By luck of the draw, I was attending Constantine when the first messenger arrived from the north. We'd just come out of the basilica called the Old Metropolis, where the Emperor had been praying for victory. A fellow who looked like he'd just about killed his horse getting there galloped up, jumped off the poor, worn beast, and threw himself facedown in the street. "Emperor!" he cried.
"Get up, man," Constantine said. "What news?" He quivered like a bowstring when you've strung it too tight.
The messenger didn't get up. I suppose he didn't want Constantine to see his expression. Still grinding his face into the dirt of the street, he cried, "Disaster!"
Constantine took a step toward him. By the look on his face, he aimed to murder the poor luckless messenger right then and there. Not quite by accident, looking clumsier than I was, I bumbled out between the Emperor and the fellow who'd brought bad news. Constantine had to stop, just long enough to let him start thinking. He was headstrong, but God help you if you thought he was stupid. "What happened?" he ground out.
The messenger spewed out this great long tale of woe. The meat was what Florus had said it would be: without Constantine there, the men wouldn't go forward against the Bulgars. Some of them started saying the Emperor ran away. Then they panicked and ran away themselves, even though the Bulgars weren't after 'em.
"The wicked flee where no man pursueth"? No, not quite, Brother. The stupid fled where no one pursued, more like.
Of course, after a little while the Bulgars figured out the Romans weren't trying to lure them into some kind of trap and really were running away. They came to the Danube and crossed it, sweeping up our soldiers as they went. By the time the messenger got to Mesembria, the barbarians were already down to the Haimos Mountains and threatening Varna, not fifty miles north of where we were.
Constantine listened to it all without twitching a muscle. "Ruined," he said at last, and nothing more. I didn't know what to say. There wasn't much I could say. He wouldn't be able to put together another army like the one he'd thrown away, not for years- too many men gone. Ruined was about right.
He kicked at the dirt, hard, with his bandaged foot. I don't want to imagine the pain that must have cost him. His face didn't so much as twitch. We sailed for Constantinople the next day.