we shall all come home some other day.
[…]
At this point the would-be eparch Godinas disappears totally from our histories, vanished somewhere in the Balkan uplands. What became of him cannot be known, or even honestly speculated.
[…]
The next year an outbreak of the Red Death provoked an entrenchment of local Mekhanite beliefs.
—The Unsecret History: the waning of the Eastern Roman Empire, Foundation Parahistorical Press
Preparing her flock for their deaths did not get easier with practice.
On the other side of the valley the cataphracts gleamed, half a hundred men bearing lance and ringmail, preparing for their ride into paradise. Though she liked to imagine their proud Roman sign cast into the mud where it belonged, she did not have the heart to deny it: they would fall on her people like vultures and make an end of it. Three months of flight up and down the Illyrian highlands had bought the children a few more hours of play among their tents. But even on the move, they were young and old, wounded and sick, carrying their lives with them. The wolves of the Basileos were steel that marched, nothing more.
Perhaps the ranging-lord Safishah might have rallied the dozen or so good men left to him and made a stand on the high ridge, buying the weak and helpless another three days or so. Some would have made that trade, but not him, and not her.
So instead the Karcist Eleanor prepared her daughters to die.
First spoke Safishah in the plain manner of his people. They had rehearsed the phrases a dozen times. He stood on a rough dais fashioned from nothing but a few logs and some canvas, arranged beneath him the sixty or so remaining Avars that had escaped the hunting-packs of the Thracian theme.
“When ION came to us in the East, He told us that men had warred on this world as long as His spirit had walked it. And across those hundred thousand years of conquest and tyranny, we remember only a scant handful: a thousand years of sword-swingers and shrine-burners. The rest are gone. History has swallowed them.”
The poor things were sullen at the knowledge of their deaths. How could she blame them, she who could not even deny it? But as he spoke a few of them began to lift their heads. Something about him could not be denied. It was her turn to sing to them now. She stood beside him, two hands supplicant in prayer, two clenched at her sides. And when she spoke it was only truth, but bitter all the same.
“And it is known that good lasts, and evil fails. Is this not so? The men who piled their skulls and flayed their skins ten thousand years ago are not even ghosts. What do we recall from before our people’s days? The net, the spear, the whisper that calms the blood and stills the muscle. Their names are not known, but the numberless women who wove these things are remembered forever. Their memorial is every child not stillborn, and every winter stomach filled. Even the slave-markets of Black Adytum were empty, when their masters died, and their blood-gutters ran dry. But the beauty of the towers, and the mastery of their arts, remained and remains still! The evil that man does crumbles into dust, and the good endures as long as any man remains!”
The promise of this great good might have inspired resentment, only a few days ago. Now with their death riding so close among them, all that was in their eyes was sorrow, and longing. Amid their edges a few of her trusted women moved, casting blood here, meat there. Few of the crowd paid them any mind, for now Safishah cried out again, his voice waxing hard.
“And know this: the Rome of Caesar is fallen, and will be forgotten. So I promise this Rome of Peter will fall, and be forgot! And when ION was returned at Nazareth, he said: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to Me what is Mine’. So for Him we preserve our eternities. And to these would-be Caesars, we give the deaths that are theirs!”
The young men looked at him with fire in their eyes. His speech was a single one, and could inspire men to madness. And women, too. It could inspire a woman to come down from the Mother of Cities, and wander in the wild, and go to her death smiling. But beyond the young men Eleanor saw the mothers, and the dread in their eyes. She could not soothe what she felt herself. She could only remind them of their purpose. She had to hope her prepared speech was enough.
“This is known: that evil creates, and good corrupts,” she proclaimed, ”For vile Nature made your flesh a thousand thousand beasts, each struggling to devour the other. But the wise spirit beguiled them into peace, and they built the forms we clothe ourselves in. In the camps and the tents, women are moved by Nature to strife and spite and faction, and the great spirit conspired to see them build the laws, and the cities, and the nations. And when the cog-men, mimicking Nature, fashion their rigid brass and steel to arms and injuries against us, the beauteous spirit sees them jam and rust and fail, while all flesh mutates and is fecund. Empires fall, and chains are broken, and even when we die it shall be so.”
The crowd no longer had any hope in them. Their faces were hard-set. Even in the most hotblooded, that speech had given them some notion of what was about to happen. Or perhaps it was her daughters cutting small slivers of gristle from the fruit that sprouted on the ground where they cast their offerings. The spawn of Yaldabaoth’s womb was known to all.
“And how shall we die? Lying silent in this midden, gored like hounds on the Emperor’s steel? Is this the way of the Avars? Is this the way of the Nälka?”
And the crowd replied, quiet but not cowed: No!
How could he so easily rouse men’s hearts? Even having been drawn out here by him she could scarcely believe it. It was something about the way he moved, that speech, those eyes. It was good to savour such things at the end.
“Do you count it wise to go quietly in the dark when their banners rise about us? Do we meet the stride of Roman men with monkish bowing? Do slavers rule our people still?”
And they cried, louder, wild and weeping as the grief set in at last: NO!
“If you think it fit to go meekly to your end, then let it be so. But I am an Avar. And we Avars are not knelt. Let these pale Thracian hinds meet their end in our embrace. Let us give them all their red deaths!”
Her daughters moved about them, handing out their poisoned fruit. One last reassurance, before they fell. Eleanor did not look at Safishah. It would not do, to weep before those who gave so much for one who had done so little. If she spoke well, they would remember their purpose, or so she hoped.
“We know that evil dies. But we know also that good is born from it! Of the cancerous beasts of old came our flesh. Of the cruelty of women came the cities. And it shall be so again. When this Flesh takes us, the evil we do shall be fleeting, and die with us. But the good we do, the freedom we win for your kin across the mountains, shall last ‘til the last star dies. Do not despair, children of the mountains. Adytum falls, and Rome falls, and we shall all come home some other day.”
ION, guide them to your union, she thought, Let this sin be mutated into a great good. Remember us.
And one by one her flock swallowed their deaths. Hers tasted faintly of honey, and of the first taste of Safishah, and of the wine at the court of the Basileos. She clasped hands with her husband and felt the skin bind together. With a newly keen gaze she looked down the hill where the cataphracts rose as one great line of steel. At their head the shining Kentarchos glanced up with eyes of flint. He looked at them as if they were nothing but a final nuisance.
He would learn.