Читать книгу The Iranian Conspiracy - greg fisher - Страница 3

Near Edessa, Turkey, AD 259

In the third campaign, when we advanced against Carrhae and Edessa and were besieging Carrhae and Edessa, the Roman Caesar Valerian marched against us. He had a force of 70,000… and at Edessa we joined a magnificent battle with Caesar Valerian. We made prisoner, through our own hands, Caesar Valerian, as well as all the others, the leaders of that army, the praetorian prefect, and the senators. We took all of them as prisoners, and transported them to Persia.

From the Deeds of the Great Shapur, Naqsh-i-Rustam, Fars Province, southern Iran, written in the late third century AD.

*****

On a hot afternoon, in a wretched storm of dust, noise, sweat, and blind terror, Bassianus, centurion, third century, fourth cohort, Sixth Legion, had watched his unit fall apart, run, and be slaughtered. It should not have gone that way, of course; there were far more of them than of the enemy, some of whom looked weak and unprepared over their shields as the two lines closed after the Romans had successfully resisted the initial punch of the Iranian armoured horsemen. Despite the bloody flux which had afflicted them all, weakening them and taking some of his soldiers, Bassianus was confident of his abilities and those of his men, whom he had trained hard and worked, day after day, drilling them so that their movements under pressure came automatically, the responses to the orders of their officers and sergeants natural. But something had gone horribly wrong, and Bassianus had stared, spellbound, as the army slowly gave way and crumbled about him. At last, deciding that there was nothing more to be done, he had pulled off his helmet with its ornate decoration, a filigree done for him by an armourer in Antioch, the crimson transverse plume from the tail of a fine horse that the mendacious merchant claimed was descended from Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus himself, and threw it the ground. He had seen in disbelief the Emperor taken, along with the senior army commanders and at least two senators, and Bassianus thought to make himself as obscure as he might. He was a Syrian from the north whose family had risen to prominence with the Caesar Decius; his father had drowned in the same filthy Balkan swamp as his Emperor, as the ill-fated army had blundered into the barbarian trap which awaited them. But he could, if he wanted, with his olive-sheened skin and dark eyes, make a pretence of a local caught up in the present drama, if God allowed, or at the very least, pass for a common trooper. He knew that the Praetorians, soft as they were, rich and pampered, and the senior commanders, would make fine prizes for Shapur. Not for the first time, Bassianus was grateful that he had opted to stay with the legions instead of those purple-robed buffoons. So, with a silent prayer looking for absolution for what he was about to do, and remembering the ancient words of the Greek poet Archilochus of Paros about the practicality of committing the terrible sacrilege of throwing away one’s shield, Bassianus had done just that, stripped off his remaining armour and weapons, and run for his life.

Of course, he had not been successful. He was rounded up by horsemen with round faces and almond-shaped eyes, terrifying in their victory. As he was marched with the others away from Edessa, eastwards, taunted by the cocky and victorious guards who were boasting of their success in an alien tongue and who were less than shy about reminding with the stick, spear, or the axe, he looked for the other officers in the cohort, desperate to find some companionship. He thought he had made out Drusus at the front – a rare breed, actually from Italy, teased for his old-fashioned name, and Caecus, one of the best, the name meaning ‘the blind’, given to him for the eye he had lost in Germania several years earlier. Caecus had repaid the favour by taking the eyes of a whole village, but nobody wept for the Germans. He called out to Drusus, and a stink of rotten teeth and the stench of stale goat’s milk arrived with a sharp blow to his kidneys as the heavy guard punched him once, and then again. Blacking out, he fell the ground, breaking his lip and a front tooth, and vomiting hard into the dirt. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness was the shuffling of feet over his head, the odour of unwashed tunics stained with sweat and ordure, and the jeering of the guard who hit him once, hard, in the head with the flat of his short sword. When he woke up, he was alone, left for the vultures which still circled the piles of the dead.

Much later on, after the sun had set on the bloodied battlefield, the bodies gathered up and burned, the wounded finished with thrust of sword or spear or necks quickly and quietly broken, plunder taken, and the light from the sun diffused red and brown and black through a pall of greasy smoke, Bassianus was found by a small group of soldiers who had survived the massacre and avoided being taken in the chaos which followed. They were making, they said, for the west, towards the setting sun, but were wary of groups of roving cavalry whom they had seen and which they presumed were still looking for stragglers.

‘Quintus, second cohort of the Sixth’, the man said, holding out a hand and pulling Bassianus up, noting the ugly, angry welt on his head, the way he held his side, and his dazed look.

‘Bassianus, fourth of the Sixth’, he replied, weary, but recognising with a small smile a new officer who had joined the legion after his predecessor died of the flux.

‘We’re heading to Antioch and the reserve units – if we can get there’, Quintus said, adding, ‘me and my boys managed to get away before the rest got clobbered. You’re welcome to come with us mate, but you look pretty rough. Don’t slow us down.’

Bassianus stood up, then bent over, retching again and coughing into the dust. His mouth felt like it had been rubbed with coarse Egyptian parchment and tasted like the hide of a Thracian donkey. The smell of fear, he thought, and sweat from the horses, and from the men, hung all around them. Antioch seemed like a good idea – and, for Bassianus, it was near his home. Coughing again, he looked at Quintus and the grim faces of the legionaries with him – tough men, hard men, some still with their swords but almost all without shields or helmets. ‘The Emperor…,’ he asked, although he knew the answer.

‘Taken’, replied Quintus, looking away for a moment; ‘we saw the bastards ride off with him. Almost all the army, too. And they got Asclepiodotus’ – the colonel of the Sixth, and Bassianus’ commanding officer – and the praetors and tribunes with him. By Poseidon, Christ, Mithras, and all that’s left that’s holy, what a disaster.’

‘Let’s be gone, then.’

They walked for hours west, stopping when the sun finally sank below the low hills nearby. Bassianus was weak and cold, but was buoyed by the spirits of the men with him. The Sixth had good men, and these, suffering along with him and in shock from the magnitude of the defeat, refused to give up. They dared not light a fire for fear of being seen and curled up on the ground, shivering, for the night was cold. They had nothing to eat and little to drink – one leather flask of sour wine between the six of them – and Bassianus could not sleep. He stared up at the stars and the clouds which lay over them, thinking of his family in their village near Antioch, who lived in a small stone house, facing into a courtyard, animals downstairs, rooms upstairs, and an olive press worked by the villagers. A good life, one that Cincinnatus himself would be proud of, Bassianus thought.

‘Wake up,’ came a voice from nearby, followed by a stiff prod – ‘time for your picket. Sir’, the man added respectfully.

‘Right’, Bassianus grunted, and, wrapping himself the best he could in his clothes, he sat up to keep watch while the other man, a rough German whose name he didn’t know, fell gratefully into a fitful sleep.

It was close to dawn when he heard the noise which they all dreaded. A thin pall of dust hung in the sky, and the sound of hooves came with it. Bassianus, his watch over, had attempted to get some more rest but had given up, and now sat up straight like a spear – ‘Christ! They’re on to us’, he whispered hurriedly to Quintus, but Quintus was already awake and stirring his companions to action. Quickly they realised that the odds which they faced were too great – at least a hundred heavily-armed horsemen came out of the gloom towards them, circling, whooping, laughing, and then the first arrow sliced out of the whirlwind and took Quintus in the neck, the heavy shaft snapping his spine and dropping him to the floor. Bassianus was terrified, but rallied the other five men to face death. And then, for the second time in the space of a day and a night, he was struck over the head, and fell to the ground. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness was the surprised look on Quintus’ face and the clouded, vacant eyes.

This time they had him. Taken east, far east, with the other five. For days they were dragged over the dusty ground, fed just enough; Bassianus drank filthy water, and on the third day had a high fever, and was racked with powerful cramps which emptied his bowels and enfeebled him. He kept going; he was determined to survive, knowing that if he fell out he would surely die, his eyes picked out by the women who taunted their ragged column and stood ready with curved knives and hooks. On the fourth day they stopped while their captors handed them over to a new group of horsemen, who took them on with a larger group of Roman captives which they had rounded up elsewhere. The respite was welcome; slowly Bassianus gained strength, and the food improved slightly, although Marcianus, one of Quintus’ men, died that afternoon on the road. Bassianus kept his head straight and walked by Marcianus’ corpse, ignoring the stares of one of the horsemen who dared him to stop and pay his respects. Bassianus said a silent prayer for Marcianus and his soul, and his family, if he had one. He refused to take the challenge from the guard, his eyes daring any of the captives to stop for a fellow Roman, an act which he was sure would get him killed. He walked on.

Much later they arrived at a great city; one, Bassianus thought, which rivalled Antioch, but full of people who spoke a strange language, and who watched them with unbridled hatred. Here they met thousands of other captives from the rout at Edessa, but did not stay long; instead, they were taken south and set to work on a great bridge which they learned was named, in mockery, after the defeated emperor who had led them to their doom at Edessa. The years passed, and they steadily learned to forget their old lives. There was to be no going home – no more fights with the Sixth, no more days on the road looking for new enemies. In time, they had reached an accommodation with the people around them, and Bassianus thought that his family was probably dead; he himself had taken a new wife, a local girl, and learned her language, although he spoke it haltingly and with a poor accent, for which she teased him. She had borne him two fine boys – dark, like their father, and with the high cheekbones of their mother, who, she said, had come west from a mountainous and proud land of lapis, jade, and silk. The people who had defeated them so completely on the battlefield and who humiliated Bassianus as he dirtied his tunic, suffering from dysentery on the march, had forced them to settle and find new lives for themselves. It had always been clear that there would be no return for them, although tales were told at night about Xenophon’s Ten Thousand and even the men of Alexander’s expedition, some of them heading west to Macedon after ten years fighting to find old farms, old wives, and children they hadn’t fathered. Better this way, they convinced themselves, some with greater fervour than the rest.

*****

In his new life, Bassianus had found his skill as a cutter of inscriptions, his job before he joined the army, in some demand. He created dedications for the tombs of his Roman comrades as they died – a little rough, to be said, for he had lost the daily practice required for precision. He even worked on some of the funerary monuments for some of the petty Iranian nobility in the city where he lived. Over the years, he acquired some sort of a reputation for his art. One autumn morning, the settlement where they lived was woken to a commotion. Bassianus rubbed water into his face and dragged his fingers through his white beard. His wife had died several years ago and one of his sons had fallen in a skirmish somewhere to the north against an enemy who took the devilish name of the Hepthalites, a people whom Bassianus had never heard of before. He was an old man, but he understood well enough the meaning of the horseman who rode into the camp, shouting. The message was clear. The King-of-Kings, Shapur, the man who had beaten them so long ago, was dead. The news spread quickly, as did the demand for workers to create the most elaborate tomb the Iranian Empire had ever seen. It would rival, they said, the monuments of Darius and Xerxes, and the long inscription commemorating the Great King’s many victories over his Roman enemies would need to be finished. Together, the King’s tomb would proclaim the cultural might and political suzerainty of Shapur, and spread the message of his victories over Rome to all who saw it, and taunt the ambassadors of the impertinent Romans when they came to Iran to beg for mercy and forgiveness. Bassianus, having little to do, his wife gone, journeyed with the rest of the masons, stone-cutters, artists, and makers of inscriptions to a desolate spot, many days south. There he laboured for many days, finishing the great story at the Kaaba of Zoroaster, wryly completing Shapur’s great boast of his slaughter at Edessa. We made prisoner, through our own hands, Caesar Valerian, as well as all the others, the leaders of that army, the praetorian prefect, and the senators. We took all of them as prisoners, and transported them to Persia. ‘You weren’t that good’, he thought to himself with a grimace as he incised into the fresh rock the fanciful numbers of Roman dead, and the names of all the peoples whom Shapur had conquered. Later, he and his companions travelled even further into the wasteland to a huge cliff-face, where an elaborate carving showed Shapur receiving the divine sanction of his god, Ahura Mazda; it reminded Bassianus of one he had seen at the place where he had completed the great inscription, which showed Valerian, the Roman Emperor under whom Bassianus had fought at Edessa, kneeling before Shapur in submission. This one was different, though – far bigger, it was to be Shapur’s final resting place. Over the next year, he and hundreds of others carved the rocks for the tomb, and finished the inscriptions which recorded, again, the King’s feats and endeavours. Inside the chamber chiselled out of the cliff-face, elegant marble panels repeated some of the images and motifs and showed Shapur’s brilliance. Bassianus was one of the small group chosen to work these panels and complete the inscriptions which lay on them. As he completed the job, he added, in Latin, his own testament. Finally, his job done, he returned to his home, where he died, content, a few years later.

Shapur was buried in the tomb. For years his body lay there, a place of reverence and honour. A fire temple lay nearby, the god, Ahura Mazda, present for the man who had served him so well. Within the family dynasty to which Shapur had belonged, known as the Sasanian dynasty, new leaders came and went, and the Empire of Iran’s fortunes rose and fell with them. Finally one, Khusrau, who took the epithet ‘Parvez’, ‘Ever Victorious’, emerged, who could fulfill the aspirations of the Sasanian dynasty’s founder, Ardashir, a man who dreamed of reclaiming and reconquering for Iran all the lands which lay to the west, taken by Alexander, and then governed by his successors, Seleucus, Ptolemy, and the sons of Antigonus, and then, at last, by the leaders of Rome. And so it was, that under the guidance of Parvez, Shapur was given new life.

*****

Near Dura Europos, Syria:

Three centuries later

Jabala, leader of the Jafnid Arab clan, lay with his belly pressed against the hot, dry earth. His deep green eyes scanned the distant horizon, looking out from a face worn and marked by childhood diseases and a lifetime of exposure to the searing suns of the Syrian desert. A fresh cut was inscribed across his right cheek, a souvenir of a savage fight with the lying Roman thief who called himself Magnus – the man who had betrayed his father, al-Mundhir, whom the Romans called Alamoundaros in their own barbarous tongue. Jabala had taken revenge for that treachery, filleting Magnus as if he were a common snake from the desert or a rat from the sewers of the stinking Roman city of Constantinople, where Jabala had restored the honour of the Jafnid family and taken a new commission from the Roman Empire, reinvigorating a dead alliance which stretched back a century when a man who bore his own name, Jabala, his great-grandfather, emerged from the desert wastes of Arabia and made an agreement with the Roman Emperor Anastasius. Jabala and his family, taking the name of the Jafnids, after Jabala’s ancestor, Jafna, prospered under their alliance with Rome, taking titles, becoming rich, courting the centre of power in the imperial city of Constantinople, and taking the Roman religion, Christianity. As Christian allies of a Christian Roman Empire, they had fought loyally for their Roman brothers, roundly defeating the enemies of the heathen Sasanian Empire of Iran who came in never-ending waves from the east and broke themselves on the huge walls of the great fortresses of the Roman Empire, on the swords and spears of Rome’s legionaries, and on the vicious knives, sharp axes, and cunning, of the Arabs who fought for Rome. Who could forget the son of the first Jabala – a man called al-Harith, whose name, a clever title which was less name, and more propaganda statement, meant the reaper, a man with the ear of the Emperor Justinian and a friend and confidant of the Empire’s most powerful woman, the Empress Theodora. Al-Harith, who took the Greek name Arethas in Constantinople, had won the respect and admiration of all for his exploits on and off the battlefield. Who could forget his courage, his daring, when he calmly walked beyond the ranks of Roman legionaries and Arab warriors who stood fast, ready to do battle? There he had thrown down his shield, held out his hand, and challenged the Empire’s most hated enemy, the barbarian leader of the Nasrids, the sons of Nasr. The Nasrids, Arabs like Arethas and Jabala, had decided to throw in their lot with the Sasanians, turning their backs on Rome to take Iranian offers of riches and a glittering city of gold in the land of Iraq. Arethas had spat on his hand and grasped that of his enemy, and looked him in the eye, and then, in less than five dazzling strokes of his sword, grasped his enemy’s life and ripped it from his body, leaving him bloodied and broken on the ground. How the Romans had clamoured! They banged their shields and their spears and their swords as the enemy army, stunned, bereft of its leader, broke and ran. The Emperor himself had lauded Arethas in Constantinople, garlanding him, giving him land, money, power, all that he wanted or required.

The Jafnid leaders found their apogee under Arethas. All they had asked for was to be left to run their own affairs as they saw fit, in return for unstinting loyalty and service. The Roman Emperor Justinian, a proud man, and a man of honour, Jabala remembered, honoured the agreement. But the son of Arethas, Alamoundaros, met a quite different world when Arethas died quietly in his sleep, in his stone house south of Damascus. After the funeral rites had been performed, and the priest had buried Arethas under a marvellous marble panel, adorned with precious stones and mosaics made at the Christian centre of Nebo – where Moses himself was buried – Alamoundaros made the customary visit to the Roman capital to seek their assent for his leadership of the Jafnid armies. He promised to fight Rome’s enemies, to uphold the Christian religion, to care for the people in Syria and northern Arabia – and how he did, Jabala thought. He fought as hard as Arethas had ever done, striking deep into Iranian territory, but to no avail. Magnus. The cheating coward, acting on the orders of that weakling Emperor Maurice, took Alamoundaros when Jabala was just a young man. Jealousy and a craving for power lay behind the Emperor’s betrayal; the alliance was shattered forever, or so it seemed, until Maurice, along with his family, was castrated, disembowelled, and thrown to the ravens in a palace coup. The new leader, Phocas, gave Jabala a chance to gain revenge for the injustice done to his father – and Jabala, with the long, curved knife which Arethas had taken from the body of his Arab enemy so many years ago, had taken a screaming and struggling Magnus to the Jafnid stronghold, a burned, remote, blasted place one day’s march south of the city of Damascus. There, at the crest of the black hill which looked down into a lake made fresh by the previous day’s rains, Jabala had dispatched the Roman in a single combat which honoured not only his dead father, but the bravery of Arethas, his grandfather. Magnus had landed only one blow on Jabala, slicing his cheek with the Roman straight sword, the Spanish gladius, leaving the welt which Jabala still bore.

He traced the line which the blade had left in his cheek. How it burned. Killing Magnus had been a release; it erased the shame of what had been perpetrated. Jabala, like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, felt a fierce loyalty to the world which was Rome. He worshipped their god and detested the godless, heathen armies of his enemies.

Which was why he was lying on a hot, dusty ridge, in the burning Syrian sun.

Waiting.

*****

War had started that year, shortly after Maurice had been killed by the usurper Phocas. Khusrau Parvez, the Emperor of Sasanian Iran, the shaninshah, the King-of-Kings, owed his success in an internal rebellion some years ago to Maurice, who had marched Roman and Arab armies to the Sasanian capital city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Iraq to install Parvez on the throne. Now, with Maurice dead, Parvez seized his opportunity to gain what he had always wanted: the Roman realm. None on either side could have predicted the fire which now consumed the whole of the inhabited world, and which would plunge everyone within it into a generation-long burning inferno. Indeed, the war was still young as Jabala and his army tracked the Iranian forces northwest from the old Roman fortress at Dura Europos, where they had crossed the Euphrates River. Dura Europos had been deserted for years, ever since it was stormed by the forces of the Sasanian Emperor Shapur the Great, its garrison deported to Iran, the huge walls left to bake in the desert and the inside to fall into ruin. He had heard the stories, of course – the ghosts of the Roman and Iranian soldiers killed in an underground tunnel, seen on the battlements at night by Arab traders who plied this route and who refused, even in the worst sandstorms, to seek shelter in its empty, lifeless streets. The people of Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian desert where Jabala had often stopped for shelter, food, and women, were less cowed by the memory of the defeat, and hunted gazelle and other game which roamed the massive and vacant city. Jabala was superstitious; he never went there, and forbade his soldiers to visit. They had given the fortress a wide berth on their way up here.

Now, from his vantage point on the ridge looking into the desert, he could see what he and his men had so carefully followed. A plume of dust rose in the sky as the caravan moved northwest, staying between the lush lands of the river Euphrates and the desert which lay beyond them to the west. Jabala knew what the caravan contained; a prize worth taking. Four Roman spies had died gathering news of its contents. Those men were members of the sinister and secretive Roman unit known, misleadingly, as agentes in rebus – literally, ‘agents in things’ – created by the paranoid government of the Emperor Constantine three centuries ago, and still used for all manner of activities, including domestic espionage, enforcement, and dangerous cross-border missions to report on Rome’s enemies – and, frequently, to spy on Rome’s friends, too. One of Jabala’s own men had also died discerning the contents of the caravan, and the man’s son, leader of a cavalry squad, sharpened his spear each night, his eyes glittering with his anger, dreaming of taking ten Iranian heathens in revenge. Jabala smiled. He liked the mettle of his troops – men you would want with you, in a fight. Like the men whom Jabala’s Roman liaison officer had sent him as well, four centuries of legionaries from their sun-scorched sandy base at Aila, where the Red Sea met the Roman province of Arabia. Rumours in the army were that these beach warriors were softened by their posting, where long sunsets lit beach campfires and who-knew-what. But he saw the fire in them, the desire to fight. They were all ready.

After the sun had almost completed its descent into the western skies, Jabala gave the signal to attack. The small caravan was well-protected, but his forces, close to thirty thousand, outnumbered the Iranian footguards who died, to a man, to preserve their charge. The Roman centuries he had placed on the left wing, himself in the centre, his son, Hujr, on the right, and the cavalry from Palmyra screening both flanks. They had circled round behind the caravan and now attacked out of the setting sun. The Romans fixed the strongest part of their enemy in place and held their ground, and Jabala used the overlap on his right wing to flank the body of Iranian infantry which resisted them. Their eyes went wide in terror as they saw the long curved swords and knives of Jabala’s foot soldiers advancing towards them from the side, and then there was panic in the ranks as the cavalry thundered into the them. Jabala himself killed two, including the enemy commander, a proud man with a hooked nose and a heavy golden helmet which surmounted a burnished, olive face. The man had shown no fear, and died hard. Jabala respected that, and silently said a prayer for his dead enemy.

When the fight was over, the Jafnid commander inspected what they had found. So. The spies had been right. Packed into wagons, hitched to now dead and injured oxen, were dozens of marble panels, wrapped carefully in straw and protected by wooden pallets. The panels were ornately carved and inscribed, showing equestrian scenes, depictions of hunting, and a panorama of long ago battles. The main panel showed a figure on a horse, holding up the hand of a defeated enemy in triumph, trampling on battle standards and armed men, all watched over by what Jabala knew to be a representation of the god of the Sasanians, Ahura Mazda. Moving down the line of wagons, Jabala searched until he found the golden sarcophagus, elaborately carved with more battle scenes and with the face of its occupant etched carefully into the death mask at its head. Panels in the wagon belonged to the front of the tomb, which, when reassembled, would be a large, squat, rectangular enclosure. Elaborate writing in a language and script which Jabala could not read, but which proclaimed the greatness of Shapur, his deeds, and his family achievements, lay on one of the larger marble panels. As Jabala ran his fingers over the carefully incised writing, he heard a gasp from the Roman officer, the commander of the four centuries borrowed from the Tenth Legion at Aila. Resplendent in his tall, plumed helmet, now stained with dust, and flecked with dried blood from the fight, he strode forward and pointed at the bottom right of the main panel. He spoke to Jabala in Greek, a language which Jabala had learned, as his father and his forefathers had also done, the better to work with their Roman brothers. The Roman explained that, in the area which he now pointed out, there was a small graffito picked into the stone. He knew, he told Jabala, that the language was Latin, the old speech of the Romans from many moons ago when they worshipped different gods and looked to the far-away land of Italy, now reconquered by the armies sent generations ago by the Emperor Justinian, and restored to the Christian Roman realm. He knew that, he continued, since they still used it in the army for parade ground orders. Jabala smiled, and clapped the Roman on the shoulder. He could not care less if the writing was made by fairies from the underworld. Let the commander have his Latin. He, Jabala, knew what he saw, and he knew that he had captured a prize worth more than he or his ancestors could ever have hoped to win. The lives of the spies had been a price worth all of this; and surely, now, the fame of the Jafnids and their army would be written for all to see. For here, within the panels, lay the tomb of Iran’s greatest hero, Shapur the Great, the age-old tales of whose exploits still struck terror into the hearts of Romans throughout their far-flung Empire. None had equalled Shapur – and none ever could. But the Roman spies had reported, breathless, that Parvez sought to emulate him, using his body and bringing it in the invasion as a talisman to give a new birth to the Sasanian Empire, by ripping the soul out of its hereditary Roman enemy, taking its land, taking its people. The body of Shapur, his tomb, the panels showing his life and victories – all would bring fire to the bellies of Iran’s conscript levies, restore the pride of its nobility, and start a new golden age of Iranian cultural and political dominance which embraced the whole of the east just as the Iranians, before Alexander the Great had invaded and destroyed them, ruled everything from Turkey to Afghanistan. But now that dream would come to nothing, Jabala thought, as he smiled at the sarcophagus. Not for you, the Roman Empire. My Empire.

Jabala sent word of his success to Constantinople, but his dream of making a grand entry to the imperial city, walk its flower-strewn streets, and luxuriate in the adulations of a grateful Emperor and People of the Roman Empire were disappointed. Jabala had taken the panels and the tomb, and his convoy reached southern Syria, crossing the desert away from the Iranian invasion route, which ran northwest along the Euphrates river, to avoid detection and ambush. But a large Roman force sent to escort his prize was diverted suddenly to defend the fortress city of Halabiyya in northern Syria, thought to be impregnable. The fortress fell, and the Roman legions sent to defend it were swallowed up in the maelstrom, never to be heard from again. And so it came to be that the body and the panels were stored in safety at the Jafnid stronghold south of Damascus, preserved at the volcano in the blasted, black desert, guarded by a special force of one thousand of Jabala’s most trusted warriors. The Jafnids became the custodians of the body of Iran’s most celebrated leader, Shapur the Great. Months and years went by, as the war raged closer and the capital city itself was threatened. Despite all the best efforts of the guards, some of the panels were broken and went missing, although the body itself remained intact. And then, abruptly, amidst the fire which threatened everything, word came that Phocas was dead – and a new man, calling himself Heraclius, had taken the purple with the promise to stop the rot. And so it was that, years later, at the bidding of the Emperor Heraclius, Shapur the Great made the final leg of his remarkable journey, carried to the imperial city of Constantine to be enshrined in its greatest sacred place to prove the Christian victory of the Christian Empire over the invaders from the East.

The entire Roman world revelled in Heraclius’ triumph, but all was soon to fade. Shapur, the greatest enemy of the Roman Empire, and the Jafnids who had snatched his body away, preventing Parvez from finding his true destiny and rebuilding the ancient Iranian Empire of his forefathers, were quickly forgotten as a new and unstoppable force from the deserts of Arabia, carrying a new banner – Islam – swept all before it. The Sasanian empire crumbled, the Roman Empire collapsed in on itself, and what had taken place on that dusty afternoon in the year 602 quickly passed away into myth, legend, and darkness.