The Dance of Time: Chapter Eleven

Chabahari, in the Straits of Hormuz

    Chabahari seemed like a nightmare to Anna. When she first arrived in the town—city, now—she was mainly struck by the chaos in the place. Not so long ago, Chabahari had been a sleepy fishing village. Since the great Roman-Persian expedition led by Belisarius to invade the Malwa homeland through the Indus valley had begun, Chabahari had been transformed almost overnight into a great military staging depot. The original fishing village was now buried somewhere within a sprawling and disorganized mass of tents, pavilions, jury-rigged shacks—and, of course, the beginnings of the inevitable grandiose palaces which Persians insisted on putting anywhere that their grandees resided.

    Her first day was spent entirely in a search for the authorities in charge of the town. She had promised Dryopus she would report to those authorities as soon as she arrived.

    But the search was futile. She found the official headquarters easily enough—one of the half-built palaces being erected by the Persians. But the interior of the edifice was nothing but confusion, a mass of workmen swarming all over, being overseen by a handful of harassed-looking supervisors. Not an official was to be found anywhere, neither Persian nor Roman.

    “Try the docks,” suggested the one foreman who spoke Greek and was prepared to give her a few minutes of his time. “The noble sirs complain about the noise here, and the smell everywhere else.”

    The smell was atrocious. Except in the immediate vicinity of the docks—which had their own none-too-savory aroma—the entire city seemed to be immersed in a miasma made up of the combined stench of excrement, urine, sweat, food—half of it seemingly rotten—and, perhaps most of all, blood and corrupting flesh. In addition to being a staging area for the invasion, Chabahari was also a depot where badly injured soldiers were being evacuated back to their homelands.

    Those of them who survive this horrid place, Anna thought angrily, as she stalked out of the “headquarters.” Illus and Cottomenes trailed behind her. Once she passed through the aivan onto the street beyond—insofar as the term “street” could be used at all for a simple space between buildings and shacks, teeming with people—she spent a moment or so looking south toward the docks.

    “What’s the point?” asked Illus, echoing her thoughts. “We didn’t find anyone there when we disembarked.” He cast a glance at the small mound of Anna’s luggage piled up next to the building. The wharf boys whom Anna had hired to carry her belongings were lounging nearby, under Abdul’s watchful eye.

    “Besides,” Illus continued, “it’ll be almost impossible to keep your stuff from being stolen, in that madhouse down there.”

    Anna sighed. She looked down at her long dress, grimacing ruefully. The lowest few inches of the once-fine fabric, already ill-used by her journey from Constantinople, was now completely ruined. And the rest of it was well on its way—as much from her own sweat as anything else. The elaborate garments of a Greek noblewoman, designed for salons in the Roman Empire’s capital, were torture in this climate.

    A glimpse of passing color caught her eye. For a moment, she studied the figure of a young woman moving down the street. Some sort of Indian girl, apparently. Since the war had erupted into the Indian subcontinent, the inevitable human turbulence had thrown people of different lands into the new cauldrons of such cities as Chabahari. Mixing them up like grain caught in a thresher. Anna had noticed several Indians even in Charax.

    Mainly, she just envied the woman’s clothing, which was infinitely better suited for the climate than her own. By her senatorial family standards, of course, it was shockingly immodest. But she spent a few seconds just imagining what her bare midriff would feel like, if it didn’t feel like a mass of spongy, sweaty flesh.

    Illus chuckled. “You’d peel like a grape, girl. With your fair skin?”

    Anna had long since stopped taking offense at her “servant’s” familiarity with her. That, too, would have outraged her family. But Anna herself took an odd little comfort in it. Much to her surprise, she had discovered over the weeks of travel that she was at ease in the company of Illus and his companions.

    “Damn you, too,” she muttered, not without some humor of her own. “I’d toughen up soon enough. And I wouldn’t mind shedding some skin, anyway. What I’ve got right now feels like it’s gangrenous.”

    It was Illus’ turn to grimace. “Don’t even think it, girl. Until you’ve seen real gangrene...”

    A stray waft of breeze from the northwest illustrated his point. That was the direction of the great military “hospital” which the Roman army had set up on the outskirts of the city. The smell almost made Anna gag.

    The gag brought up a reflex of anger, and, with it, a sudden decision.

    “Let’s go there,” she said.

    “Why?” demanded Illus.

    Anna shrugged. “Maybe there’ll be an official there. If nothing else, I need to find where the telegraph office is located.”

    Illus’ face made his disagreement clear enough. Still—for all that she allowed familiarity, Anna had also established over the past weeks that she was his master.

    “Let’s go,” she repeated firmly. “If nothing else, that’s probably the only part of this city where we’d find some empty lodgings.”

    “True enough,” said Illus, sighing. “They’ll be dying like flies, over there.” He hesitated, then began to speak. But Anna cut him off before he got out more than three words.

    “I’m not insane, damn you. If there’s an epidemic, we’ll leave. But I doubt it. Not in this climate, this time of year. At least... not if they’ve been following the sanitary regulations.”

    Illus’ face creased in a puzzled frown. “What’s that got to do with anything? What regulations?”

    Anna snorted and began to walk off to the northwest. “Don’t you read anything besides those damned Dispatches?”

    Cottomenes spoke up. “No one does,” he said. Cheerfully, as usual. “No soldier, anyway. Your husband’s got a way with words, he does. Have you ever tried to read official regulations?”

    Those words, too, brought a reflex of anger. But, as she forced her way through the mob toward the military hospital, Anna found herself thinking about them. And eventually came to realize two things.

    One. Although she was a voracious reader, she hadn’t ever read any official regulations. Not those of the army, at any rate. But she suspected they were every bit as turgid as the regulations which officials in Constantinople spun out like spiders spinning webs.

    Two. Calopodius did have a way with words. On their way down the Euphrates—and then again, as they sailed from Charax to Chabahari—the latest Dispatches and the newest chapters from his History of Belisarius and the War had been available constantly. Belisarius, Anna had noted, seemed to be as adamant about strewing printing presses behind his army’s passage as he was about arms depots.

    The chapters of the History had been merely perused on occasion by her soldier companions. Anna could appreciate the literary skill involved, but the constant allusions in those pages were meaningless to Illus and his brother, much less the illiterate Abdul. Yet they pored over each and every Dispatch, often enough in the company of a dozen other soldiers. One of them reading it aloud, while the others listened with rapt attention.

    As always, her husband’s fame caused some part of Anna to seethe with fury. But, this time, she also thought about it. And if, at the end, her thoughts caused her anger to swell, it was a much cleaner kind of anger. One which did not coil in her stomach like a worm, but simply filled her with determination.

    The hospital was even worse than she’d imagined. But she did, not surprisingly, find an unused tent in which she and her companions could make their quarters. And she did discover the location of the telegraph office—which, as it happened, was situated right next to the sprawling grounds of the “hospital.”

    The second discovery, however, did her little good. The official in charge, once she awakened him from his afternoon nap, yawned and explained that the telegraph line from Barbaricum to Chabahari was still at least a month away from completion.

    “That’ll mean a few weeks here,” muttered Illus. “It’ll take at least that long for couriers to bring your husband’s reply.”

    Instead of the pure rage those words would have brought to her once, the Isaurian’s sour remark simply caused Anna’s angry determination to harden into something like iron.

    “Good,” she pronounced. “We’ll put the time to good use.”

    “How?” he demanded.

    “Give me tonight to figure it out.”

    It didn’t take her all night. Just four hours. The first hour she spent sitting in her screened-off portion of the tent, with her knees hugged closely to her chest, listening to the moans and shrieks of the maimed and dying soldiers who surrounded it. The remaining three, studying the books she had brought with her—especially her favorite, Irene Macrembolitissa’s Commentaries on the Talisman of God, which had been published just a few months before Anna’s precipitous decision to leave Constantinople in search of her husband.

    Irene Macrembolitissa was Anna’s private idol. Not that the sheltered daughter of the Melisseni had ever thought to emulate the woman’s adventurous life, except intellectually. The admiration had simply been an emotional thing, the heroine-worship of a frustrated girl for a woman who had done so many things she could only dream about. But now, carefully studying those pages in which Macrembolitissa explained certain features of natural philosophy as given to mankind through Belisarius by the Talisman of God, she came to understand the hard practical core which lay beneath the great woman’s flowery prose and ease with classical and biblical allusions. And, with that understanding, came a hardening of her own soul.

    Fate, against her will and her wishes, had condemned her to be a wife. So be it. She would begin with that practical core; with concrete truth, not abstraction. She would steel the bitterness of a wife into the driving will of the wife. The wife of Calopodius the Blind, Calopodius of the Saronites.

    The next morning, very early, she presented her proposition.

    “Do any of you have a problem with working in trade?”

    The three soldiers stared at her, stared at each other, broke into soft laughter.

    “We’re not senators, girl,” chuckled Illus.

    Anna nodded. “Fine. You’ll have to work on speculation, though. I’ll need the money I have left to pay the others.”

    “What ‘others’?”

    Anna smiled grimly. “I think you call it ‘the muscle.’”

    Cottomenes frowned. “I thought we were ‘the muscle.’ ”

    “Not any more,” said Anna. “You’re promoted. All three of you are now officers in the hospital service.”

    “What ‘hospital service’?”

    Anna realized she hadn’t considered the name of the thing. For a moment, the old anger flared. But she suppressed it easily enough. This was no time for pettiness, after all.

    “We’ll call it Calopodius’ Wife’s Service. How’s that?”

    The three soldiers shook their heads. Clearly enough, they had no understanding of what she was talking about.

    “You’ll see,” she predicted.

    It didn’t take them long. Illus’ glare was enough to cow the official “commander” of the hospital, who was as sorry-looking a specimen of “officer” as Anna could imagine. And if the man might have wondered at the oddness of such glorious ranks being borne by such as Illus and his two companions—Abdul looked as far removed from a tribune as could be imagined—he was wise enough to keep his doubts to himself.

    The dozen or so soldiers whom Anna recruited into the Service in the next hour—“the muscle”—had no trouble at all believing that Illus and Cottomenes and Abdul were, respectively, the chiliarch and two tribunes of a new army “service” they’d never heard of. First, because they were all veterans of the war and could recognize others—and knew, as well, that Belisarius promoted with no regard for personal origin. Second—more importantly—because they were wounded soldiers cast adrift in a chaotic “military hospital” in the middle of nowhere. Anna—Illus, actually, following her directions—selected only those soldiers whose wounds were healing well. Men who could move around and exert themselves. Still, even for such men, the prospect of regular pay meant a much increased chance at survival.

    Anna wondered, a bit, whether walking-wounded “muscle” would serve the purpose. But her reservations were settled within the next hour after four of the new “muscle,” at Illus’ command, beat the first surgeon into a bloody pulp when the man responded to Anna’s command to start boiling his instruments with a sneer and a derogatory remark about meddling women.

    By the end of the first day, eight other surgeons were sporting cuts and bruises. But, at least when it came to the medical staff, there were no longer any doubts—none at all, in point of fact—as to whether this bizarre new “Calopodius’ Wife’s Service” had any actual authority.

    Two of the surgeons complained to the hospital’s commandant, but that worthy chose to remain inside his headquarters’ tent. That night, Illus and three of his new “muscle” beat the two complaining surgeons into a still bloodier pulp, and all complaints to the commandant ceased thereafter.

    Complaints from the medical staff, at least. A body of perhaps twenty soldiers complained to the hospital commandant the next day, hobbling to the HQ as best they could. But, again, the commandant chose to remain inside; and, again, Illus—this time using his entire corps of “muscle,” which had now swollen to thirty men—thrashed the complainers senseless afterward.

    Thereafter, whatever they might have muttered under their breath, none of the soldiers in the hospital protested openly when they were instructed to dig real latrines, away from the tents—and use them. Nor did they complain when they were ordered to help completely immobilized soldiers use them as well.

    By the end of the fifth day, Anna was confident that her authority in the hospital was well enough established. She spent a goodly portion of those days daydreaming about the pleasures of wearing more suitable apparel, as she made her slow way through the ranks of wounded men in the swarm of tents. But she knew full well that the sweat which seemed to saturate her was one of the prices she would have to pay. Lady Saronites, wife of Calopodius the Blind, daughter of the illustrious family of the Melisseni, was a figure of power and majesty and authority—and had the noble gowns to prove it, even if they were soiled and frayed. Young Anna, all of nineteen years old, wearing a sari, would have had none at all.

    By the sixth day, as she had feared, what was left of the money she had brought with her from Constantinople was almost gone. So, gathering her now-filthy robes in two small but determined hands, she marched her way back into the city of Chabahari. By now, at least, she had learned the name of the city’s commander.

    It took her half the day to find the man, in the taberna where he was reputed to spend most of his time. By the time she did, as she had been told, he was already half-drunk.

    “Garrison troops,” muttered Illus as they entered the tent which served the city’s officers for their entertainment. The tent was filthy, as well as crowded with officers and their whores.

    Anna found the commandant of the garrison in a corner, with a young half-naked girl perched on his lap. After taking half the day to find the man, it only took her a few minutes to reason with him and obtain the money she needed to keep the Service in operation.

    Most of those few minutes were spent explaining, in considerable detail, exactly what she needed. Most of that, in specifying tools and artifacts—more shovels to dig more latrines; pots for boiling water; more fabric for making more tents, because the ones they had were too crowded. And so forth.

    She spent a bit of time, at the end, specifying the sums of money she would need.

    “Twenty solidi—a day.” She nodded at an elderly wounded soldier whom she had brought with her along with Illus. “That’s Zeno. He’s literate. He’s the Service’s accountant in Chabahari. You can make all the arrangements through him.”

    The garrison’s commandant then spent a minute explaining to Anna, also in considerable detail—mostly anatomical—what she could do with the tools, artifacts and money she needed.

    Illus’ face was very strained, by the end. Half with fury, half with apprehension—this man was no petty officer to be pounded with fists. But Anna herself sat through the garrison commander’s tirade quite calmly. When he was done, she did not need more than a few seconds to reason with him further and bring him to see the error of his position.

    “My husband is Calopodius the Blind. I will tell him what you have said to me, and he will place the words in his next Dispatch. You will be a lucky man if all that happens to you is that General Belisarius has you executed.”

    She left the tent without waiting to hear his response. By the time she reached the tent’s entrance, the garrison commander’s face was much whiter than the tent fabric and he was gasping for breath.

    The next morning, a chest containing a hundred solidi was brought to the hospital and placed in Zeno’s care. The day after that, the first of the tools and artifacts began arriving.

    Four weeks later, when Calopodius’ note finally arrived, the mortality rate in the hospital was less than half what it had been when Anna arrived. She was almost sorry to leave.

    In truth, she might not have left at all, except by then she was confident that Zeno was quite capable of managing the entire service as well as its finances.

    “Don’t steal anything,” she warned him, as she prepared to leave.

    Zeno’s face quirked with a rueful smile. “I wouldn’t dare risk the Wife’s anger.”

    She laughed, then; and found herself wondering through all the days of their slow oar-driven travel to Barbaricum why those words had brought her no anger at all.

    And, each night, she took out Calopodius’ letter and wondered at it also. Anna had lived with anger and bitterness for so long—“so long,” at least, to a nineteen-year-old girl—that she was confused by its absence. She was even more confused by the little glow of warmth which the last words in the letter gave her, each time she read them.

    “You’re a strange woman,” Illus told her, as the great battlements and cannons of Barbaricum loomed on the horizon.

    There was no way to explain. “Yes,” was all she said.

    The first thing she did upon arriving at Barbaricum was march into the telegraph office. If the officers in command thought there was anything peculiar about a young Greek noblewoman dressed in the finest and filthiest garments they had ever seen, they kept it to themselves. Perhaps rumors of “the Wife” had preceded her.

    “Send a telegram immediately,” she commanded. “To my husband, Calopodius the Blind.”

    They hastened to comply. The message was brief:

    ADDRESS MEDICAL CARE AND SANITATION IN NEXT DISPATCH STOP FIRMLY STOP

The Iron Triangle

    When Calopodius received the telegram—and he received it immediately, because his post was in the Iron Triangle’s command and communication center—the first words he said as soon as the telegraph operator finished reading it to him were:

    “God, I’m an idiot!”

    Belisarius had heard the telegram also. In fact, all the officers in the command center had heard, because they had been waiting with an ear cocked. By now, the peculiar journey of Calopodius’ wife was a source of feverish gossip in the ranks of the entire army fighting off the Malwa siege in the Punjab. What the hell is that girl doing, anyway? being only the most polite of the speculations.

    The general sighed and rolled his eyes. Then, closed them. It was obvious to everyone that he was reviewing all of Calopodius’ now-famous Dispatches in his mind.

    “We’re both idiots,” he muttered. “We’ve maintained proper medical and sanitation procedures here, sure enough. But...”

    His words trailed off. His second-in-command, Maurice, filled in the rest.

    “She must have passed through half the invasion staging posts along the way. Garrison troops, garrison officers—with the local butchers as the so-called ‘surgeons.’ God help us, I don’t even want to think...”

    “I’ll write it immediately,” said Calopodius.

    Belisarius nodded. “Do so. And I’ll give you some choice words to include.” He cocked his head at Maurice, smiling crookedly. “What do you think? Should we resurrect crucifixion as a punishment?”

    Maurice shook his head. “Don’t be so damned flamboyant. Make the punishment fit the crime. Surgeons who do not boil their instruments will be boiled alive. Officers who do not see to it that proper latrines are maintained will be buried alive in them. That sort of thing.”

    Calopodius was already seated at the desk where he dictated his Dispatches and the chapters of the History. So was his scribe, pen in hand.

    “I’ll add a few nice little flourishes,” his young voice said confidently. “This strikes me as a good place for grammar and rhetoric.”