The General Who Almost Knew — The Taurus Frontier, 840 AD

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The fortress was nameless on the imperial maps. It was distinguished by a number: Outpost Twelve, and its mission, written in the same dry hand as everything else in the Logothesia of the Course, was to watch the road.

General Leon Doukas had been assigned there three months ago.

The watched road was the southern one through the Taurus passes, taken by Arab raiders twice in the last decade. It appeared below the fortress like a thread of dust through stone. From the walls, on a clear morning, a man's eye could reach thirty miles into the empire and twenty into the enemy's territory. There was nothing else to look at. The garrison consisted of forty men. The cistern was almost empty in summer and almost dry in autumn. A supply train from Tarsos brought food when it remembered them, which was not always.

It was the same train that Leon Doukas used to send the letters he wrote home.

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He had not seen his twenty-five-year-old wife Theophano for eleven months.

He thought about her in the way men in remote postings think about their wives: not in long visions but in fragments. The way she folded her hands when she was listening. The smell of her hair after the sage water her servant prepared.

He had married her seven years ago, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-six. The empire had moved him from posting to posting, and the love had become something he carried rather than something he lived in.

He wrote her a letter on the third of March.

The mountains here are similar to the ones above Adrianople, but harder. The stone is darker. The wind comes from the south at night and from the east in the morning, and the men say you can tell the season by which side of the wall the snow melts on first. I have not seen Arabs. I have seen their fires, twice. I am well. I miss you.

But he could not send it. The supply train was already three days late, and by the time it finally arrived, a new letter would have replaced this one.

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He was the commander of a poor company. Half were Anatolian peasants levied because their villages owed taxes. A quarter were Armenian mercenaries who had crossed the border for income. The rest were Romans of his own class — third sons of small landowners sent to the frontier because there was no estate left at home for them.

He knew their names. He knew which one had a sister in Iconion, which one had buried a child the previous winter, which one prayed to Saint Theodore before sleep, which one drank too much, and which one would, given a choice, run rather than fight.

He kept them alive by being awake longer than they were.

But there was one named Stephanos, a Roman from Cappadocia, who Leon had been unable to read.

Stephanos was thirty, quiet, careful. He performed his duty well, never complained, never drank, never spoke of his family. Off-watch he sat alone, sharpening his knife or oiling his bowstring. On-watch he watched. He was the most reliable man in the garrison. Leon had nearly promoted him to sergeant in the second week, but had stopped at the last moment. He could not have said why.

Stephanos's eyes did not match the rest of his face.

That was the only thing Leon could put into words. The face was open and tired, like the faces of all the rest. But the eyes belonged to someone who was elsewhere.

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In the third week of March, an order arrived from Tarsos.

A junior clerk carried it to him, sealed with the proper sigil, written in the proper hand. Leon was instructed to patrol the eastern pass for five days with twenty men, half his garrison, and return to the fortress on the sixth.

Leon read it twice to be sure he had understood it.

The eastern pass was twenty miles in the wrong direction. There had been no Arab activity there in two years. The order left the fortress at half strength and removed the commander for nearly a week. It was the kind of order that, in a different war, would have been called a mistake.

He wrote back to Tarsos asking for confirmation.

The reply came back in four days, signed by the same hand.

Confirm. Patrol the eastern pass. Return on the sixth day.

He put the folded order in the inner pocket of his cloak, where he kept his wife's letters. He noticed that he had done it only afterwards.

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Leon could not sleep the night before the departure.

He sat at the small wooden table in the commander's room with a candle that had burned down to its last hour, and he tried to think clearly. He had been a soldier for fourteen years. He had received orders that made no sense at the time and made sense later, and orders that made no sense at all and had been carried out anyway. He was not a man who believed every order had a reason. He was a man who believed that questioning orders, beyond a certain point, was the beginning of the end of an army.

But.

Three things were sitting in his chest like small stones, and he laid them out on the table the way a clerk lays out coins.

First: there was no military sense for the patrol.

Second: the order had come shortly after he had written to Constantinople, on behalf of a friend in the Logothesia of the Course, asking questions about the supply chain through Tarsos. The friend's name was Nikiphoros Phokas. The questions concerned the disappearance of a particular shipment of grain. He had not received a reply.

Third: Stephanos.

He could not connect the three things. He sensed they wanted to become a triangle, but the lines did not yet exist between them. He sat in the dark after the candle had guttered, and then he went to bed. The alternative was to ride to Tarsos instead of east, and that would end his career or his life or both. He did not yet have enough information to make it.

He decided to keep a constant eye on Stephanos during the patrol.

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They left at dawn.

Twenty mounted men, a packhorse with supplies of bread and dried meat for five days. The road climbed for the first hour and then leveled into a long valley with juniper and red stone and a thin river that ran south. Leon rode at the front and Stephanos in the middle of the column, where his position was supposed to be. He performed his duty well.

They reached the eastern pass on the second day. Nothing there. They camped and watched. Leon spoke to each man during his shift, the way he always did, and asked the things he always asked. Each man answered the way he always answered. Stephanos answered the way he always answered: ''I slept well, sir. The horse is well, sir.''

But in the firelight, his eyes did not match the rest of his face.

On the third day, Leon began to understand.

Not all of it, but a piece. He realized that the order was not a mistake, and that he had been moved to a deserted place where something could happen without witnesses. He did not yet understand who, or why, or how the grain shipment connected to Stephanos and to himself. But he understood that the four things converged.

He sat by the fire that night and thought about his wife — her hands, her voice, the smell of her hair after the sage water.

He thought: if I survive the next three days, I will write her the letter I have been meaning to write for seven years.

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In the dawn of the fourth morning, while the men were saddling the horses, an arrow took him in the back below the left shoulder blade.

He did not hear the bow.

He fell forward against his horse and the horse moved sideways and he went to the ground with his face in the cold dust. He could feel the shaft against the inside of his ribs. He could feel that it had gone deep. He could not feel his left arm.

He understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with thought, that the arrow had come from behind him, and that everyone behind him was Roman.

He turned his head. He saw the men running toward him. He saw their faces. And for one instant, before the faces blurred and the cold rose up his chest, he noticed Stephanos, twenty paces away, lowering a bow.

Stephanos was not running. He was standing still, observing.

His eyes, the ones that had never matched his face, were calm.

Leon tried to say a name. He could not be sure, afterwards, which name he had tried to say. It might have been his wife's. It might have been Nikiphoros's. It might have been God's. He had just begun to understand the connection between the grain, the order, the man, the arrow, and he was trying to hold it in his mind long enough to say it out loud, so that someone, somewhere, would hear it and remember.

But he did not have the time to finish the sentence.

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Stephanos walked over and looked at the body for a long moment, with the same calm watching face. Then he turned to the men, who had stopped running, and said, in a loud voice: "Arabs. From the ridge."

The men looked at the ridge. There was no one on the ridge. There had been no one on the ridge for two years.

But Stephanos was the most reliable man in the garrison, and Leon Doukas was dead, and they were twenty miles from the fortress with a body. They looked at the ridge, and then they looked at each other, and then they did what soldiers do when the thing in front of them is too large to refuse.

They believed the story.

They wrapped the body. They rode back to the fortress. The report that reached Tarsos said that General Leon Doukas had been killed by an Arab arrow in the eastern pass, in a brief engagement with raiders who had withdrawn before pursuit could be organized. It was signed by the senior surviving officer, a peasant from Iconion who could not write, and whose mark was witnessed by Stephanos, who could.

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In Constantinople, the letter reached the Doukas household at the third hour of the afternoon, three weeks later.

Theophano was in the courtyard. Her slave, Eirene, was with her. They were sorting linen for the summer.

The courier was a young man with a dust-stained cloak and a face that had practiced what it was going to say for the entire ride from Tarsos. He said it.

Theophano did not move.

Eirene did. Eirene set down the linen, walked the three steps that had always been between them, and stood behind her, not touching her, not yet, just standing where she was needed.

For a long time Theophano did not speak. When she did, she said only one phrase, in a voice that was very quiet and calm: "From the wrong direction."

Eirene did not understand. She would not understand for three more years, until the sealed letter arrived from another man with ink on his fingers, with a single word written inside it. By then Theophano would have begun to gather the threads: the grain, the order, the eastern pass, the arrow that had come from behind, and the word Remember would not be a beginning but a continuation.

But that was three years away.

In the courtyard, on the third hour of the afternoon, on a day in April, in the year 840 of Our Lord, a woman of twenty-five learned that her husband had been killed on the wrong road, and a girl of sixteen stood three steps behind her without moving.

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The General Who Almost Knew is set in the world of The Keyholder: A Novel of Byzantine Constantinople by S. Kallistos.