The Curse of Babylon

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What do you say to a boy of fifteen when you’re sending him to his death? The easy answer is you say nothing. After so many repetitions of the dream, there was nothing more to be said. I was staring into the face of someone who’d been dead over seventy years. He’d volunteered to serve. He’d then volunteered for nearly certain death. If that weren’t enough, I had been only nominally in charge at the Battle of Larydia. I’d been a mile away when he went into battle. At the head of a frontal assault, I was hardly out of danger myself.

The easy answer never mattered. I looked into his eyes and saw him try for a nervous smile, then reach up to touch crisp and very dark hair. Another moment and I’d hear a voice behind me explain the plan of attack. It had all the boldness of desperation. We were three hundred men against forty or fifty thousand. Once the Persians were out of the mountain passes, nothing at all might stop them till they reached the walls of Constantinople. Hit them in the passes, though — and hit them in a manner suggesting we were the first wave of a bigger force — and they might crumple and make a run for it. But this part of the attack was the ultimate in desperation. Of the hundred men about to run down into the battle not one would return. A boy who was now shivering in the cold of a mountain dawn wouldn’t live to feel the noonday heat.

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