Always, in those visits of the future, the time would come when Menander and Ezana would remember that ship on the Erythrean Sea, and speak of it. At those times, the children would cease their play, grow silent, and gather around. This was their favorite tale, and they never tired of it; neither they, nor the old veterans who told it once again.
(Menander’s wife tired of it, of course, and grumbled to the village matrons who were her friends. But the men ignored the grumbling with the indifference of long experience; wives were a disrespectful lot, as was known by all veterans.)
The children who listened to the tale loved all the parts of it. They loved the drama of the sea battle: the dragon-fire and the boarding, the cut-and-thrust at the bow, and—especially!—the charge to the stern led by the legendary Belisarius. Oh, marvelous charge!
And if the description of the fury at the stern bore certain small improvements to the uncouth truth of history, there was none to set them wrong. Ezana said nothing while Menander embroidered—just a bit—the tale of his great wound. (Here, as always, the children would demand to see the grotesque scar on his belly, and Menander would oblige.) The sword which caused that wound had become, through the transmutation of veteran tales, the blade of a mighty Arab warrior, who overcame, through his legendary cunning, the skill of a valiant young Roman foe. There was nothing in the tale, now, of the confusion of inexperience in the chaos of battle, and the sheer luck which had enabled a nameless and unknown pirate to stab, without even knowing his exact target, a brave but clumsy novice.
No, Ezana said nothing. Nor did Menander speak, when, in the course of the tale, Ezana came to show his own honorable scar. The sarwen would bend his head, here, that the eager children might gather and spread the mat of kinky grey hair, and shriek with delighted horror, as always. Menander said nothing of what he might, now, from the experience of the many battles which had come after. He said nothing to the children of the panic which he knew had filled Ezana’s heart at that moment, blood-blinded in the midst of murder.
No, Menander held his tongue. There was no purpose in antiquarian pettifoggery. Perhaps the children would never need to know such things. Menander and Ezana had done all they could, in their bloody lives, to ensure that they wouldn’t. And if, in the course of time, some of the children learned these ancient lessons for themselves, well—best they came to the lesson filled with the innocent and simple courage imparted by veterans’ tales.
But, for all their infantile blood-lust, the children’s favorite part of the tale was always the aftermath. The story of those wondrous days when the seeds of that Roman-Axumite alliance, which the children accepted as the nature of their world, first bore fruit. The days when a comradeship was forged, a comradeship which had long since entered the legends of Thrace and Ethiopia (and Constantinople and Rome, and Arabia; and India, come to it).
Above all, the children loved the tale when it finally told of the night when great Belisarius first spoke to that company of heroes of his purpose, and his mission, and his quest; and bound them to it, with oaths of iron. Of the rise of Satan, and the warning of a monk; of a captured princess, and a hero to be found, and a dagger delivered.
And the Talisman of God.
They would tell the tale, anew, would Menander and Ezana. And tell it well, each augmenting what the other forgot or misremembered. But, even in that practiced telling, the minds of the two veterans would drift and wander, back to the time itself.
They would tell the children, and hold back nothing. (For there were no secrets, now, to be kept from Satan and his hosts. The hosts were gone. And, though Satan was not, the monster was paralyzed for a time, chained in the Pit and gnashing at his own terrible wounds.) No, they would hold back nothing, but the children would never truly understand the tale. The children would understand only the grand adventure, and the glory of Belisarius, and the faithful heroism of his companions.