Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (17 page)

I gave one last thrust with the shield and backed away, fast, then spun to my right where I found Horgias and Proclion fighting for their lives against six Parthian cavalrymen, each armed with two curved swords.

Something snapped in me then, some deep final cord that had kept me civilized. Bellowing like a madman, I ran at them, wielding my stolen shield as a club to break their noses, their faces, their heads. I reached Proclion and put my shoulder against his elbow, for he was that much taller than me, and became his shield-man and he, great bear of a man that he was, grinned down at me, as if we were on a routine training run.

‘Never thought I’d hear that kind of noise from you, fox-cub. Shall we kill them, you and I?’

I was dazzled by his praise, for Proclion was a born fighter who had killed his man long before he entered the legions. Moonstruck and battle mad, I threw him a matching grin and took a breath and let out the animal scream building inside and we sprang forward to meet the Parthians.

We were a whirlwind, reaping death around us. We were gods, fighting mortals who stood no chance. We were welded together, two men with one mind, and that mind bent on murder. I remember one slice that cleaved the mail on my shoulder and would have killed me but for the skill of the Damascan armourer, and I remember the return backhanded strike of mine that cut the wrist of my assailant half off and left him bleeding to death – but the rest is a blur of hot blood and savagery that came to rest only when five of the six Parthians were dead; and Tears and Horgias were still alive and Sarapammon had come with thirty men who now surrounded us so that the last of our assailants had no choice but to surrender, or die on his own sword.

So we thought, all of us. We lowered our blades and drew breath and I felt Tears move up behind me and was about to
turn
to see if he was truly all right when the Parthian threw himself at us.

My shield floated up of its own accord and took his first blow but he was doubly armed and the second was hissing straight at my head. Tears blocked it, I think, but I never saw and never asked for the Parthian had rolled away from both blocks as if we had poured him full of power and in that roll he struck both blades, lightning-fast, at Proclion.

‘No!’ Horgias was on him even as the second blade struck, pounding his own blades into the Parthian’s neck, his head, his throat, his groin. The enemy went down in a heap of macerated flesh, but too late to save our man.

‘Proclion!’ I fell to the turf at his side. He was our giant, our great bear of a brother, and he was not simply wounded: his life blood was spilling from a gaping flap in his belly and a second, sliced cut on his thigh, which might have unmanned him, but in fact had cut the vessel that pumped the blood to his leg, so that it pumped instead over me as I knelt at his side.

‘Proclion?’ I lifted his hand and felt the ridges where the sword had worn into them. His fingers dwarfed mine. He gave a squeeze and squinted to focus on my face.

‘We’ll get help,’ I said. ‘We’ll bind your leg and—’

He gave the faintest shake of his head and forced a smile. ‘You fought well, fox-cub. I’ll wait for you where the warriors go. Don’t grieve for me. You can have …’ He coughed and stopped and his gaze lifted over my shoulder to where Syrion stood. ‘Give the fox-cub the horn. Tell Lupus I said he was worth it.’

It cost him a breath to say that much, his gift to me – to us all – and then his eyes slid off me to Horgias who was kneeling at his other side, in the grip of such grief as I could only imagine, and did not wish to, for by then I knew that
to
see Tears dead would have destroyed me, and we were not yet as close as they two had been, nor might ever be after the damage done on Hawk mountain.

There were no words then, just the waiting and the numb beginnings of grief. The men of the VIth walked softly around us, stripping the dead Parthians, binding them up and setting boughs about them for a fire. It’s not the Parthian way, but Aquila planned, he said, to signal to those left alive the magnitude of their defeat. They killed the prisoners.

As they worked, we who were Proclion’s brothers stood vigil for the only man we had lost, at a cost of thirty of theirs, not knowing what to say, or what to do, except that we must not look away while he passed from us.

We watched his last struggle, saw his skin turn white and then grey and then a queer translucent blue, heard him speak Horgias’ name, and the tenderness that was in it, and saw Horgias cease to weep at last, after the final shudder, and rise with Proclion’s bloody blade in his hand.

He turned to look at all of us, and his eyes were not human, nor seeing us, I think. He said, ‘Wherever they are, I will kill them. You will not stop me.’

I would have let him go, let him run into the night to hunt down every Parthian he could find, until he died himself, but Syrion had more experience of this and he had Aquila behind him, watching.

He stood in front of Horgias and gently pushed his blade down and said, ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can kill them all. Tonight, we are sworn to deliver the mule train to the city. It’s what he died for. You can’t dishonour him by failing in that. Besides, we must take his body back to the priests. We can’t leave him out here for the wolves, nor throw him on the fire with the rest.’

That was what turned it – tending to Proclion’s body. Horgias would not have stayed with us just to keep the mule
train
safe, but it mattered – just – to honour the mortal remains of the one he had loved.

I watched the inner battle and saw the one side win, and by how little, and said to him, ‘We’ll lift him on to his horse. You lead it, it’ll follow you best,’ and it was settled, as much as it could be.

We returned in sombre mood, and saw no more of Monobasus’ men on the way back, so that we were all denied the vengeance we craved.

Once in the city, we left Aquila giving a full briefing to Cadus and Lupus while his men bedded down in a house that had once belonged to a merchant and had more rooms than our barracks back at Raphana. We gave our report as swiftly as we might and then excused ourselves and took Proclion to the temple of Jupiter where we gave him into the care of the priests.

Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring as priests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.

We soon sickened of the noise and the smell, and took Proclion’s horse, his helmet, his sword, almost all that could be carried, and retired with them to our own quarters, a barracks room that had once been a selling hall for corn. There, when we had lit the brazier and broached the ale, I saw a thing happen that I had heard about, but not witnessed, and certainly never been party to.

Syrion set Horgias on a bench with a jug of ale all his own, and bannocks saved from the morning’s bake, then laid out Proclion’s cloak on the ground nearby and set down all of those things that we had brought back from the temple.

Rufus went back to Proclion’s bed and brought out those
few
possessions he had not taken with him: the battered copper mess tin that he carried on march, the one he used daily, not the polished one he kept for parade; the whetstone for his blades in a slick leather pouch; the pack of javelins and the pointed stake we all carried in our kit, to be ready at any moment for the cataphracts; his spare shield; spare thongs for his sandals … all were laid on the cloak for our inspection. All were things we, too, used daily, so that we had no real need for spares.

Even so, Syrion reached out first and took Proclion’s shield, replacing it with his own, so that the same number of things lay on the cloak. ‘It’s better than mine,’ he said. ‘He had thicker bull’s hide on his.’

I saw no difference, but did not say so, and Horgias, set apart from us all, gave a nod, as if his permission had been asked and granted.

Others chose in a kind of order: Rufus took the javelin and left his own on the cloak, saying that his was bent at the end and would not fly true; the Rabbit took Proclion’s wooden stake, for the same reason; Sarapammon found that he needed to replace the thongs on his sandals, and did so, unlacing them with thick fingers, lacing them afresh with the new leather, tying the old neatly and setting it on the cloak.

I took his mess tin, and went to fetch mine from the store under my bed, saying it was wearing thin on the base, which was as true as Syrion’s shield being thin, or Rufus’ javelin bent, which is to say not true at all. In truth, we would all have been content with what we had, but this way each of us carried a piece of the man now gone, that we might remember him each time we ate, or walked, or marched into battle.

It was done without ceremony or displays of grief or any kind of comment to acknowledge that this man was gone, never to return, but it was our wake for him, and more fitting than any wailing of priests or mumbled prayers.

We slept poorly that night, listening to Horgias, who lay awake in the dark and would not weep, and in the morning, dull-eyed, we came before Cadus, who had us present arms and give a show for Aquila before he announced to the entire legion that we were leaving; that, faced by our intransigence, Vologases had agreed to lift the siege of Tigranocerta, in return for which Corbulo had agreed to grant kingship to Vologases’ brother until such time as he could send an embassy to Nero and request that ownership be passed to Parthia.

There are those who said this was tantamount to surrender, but they had not been there and seen the pointlessness of the fight. Corbulo was a general who saw the greater scale of things and if he thought this was one battle not worth fighting we were happy to go along with him – all except Horgias, who nursed a terrifying hatred of the Parthians and would have happily attacked Vologases’ entire army single-handedly.

He had no chance of that for our orders were to march west, to beautiful Melitene, which lay just over the border in Cappadocia, and there to settle into winter quarters and await the arrival in spring of our new commander, Lucius Caesennius Paetus.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Rhandaea, Armenia, on the northern bank of the Murad Su,
AD
62

IMAGINE MELITENE, LAND
of plenty, under snow and ice and high blue skies; imagine it in spring, with the meltwater running off the mountains and the herds going up to the high pastures to graze and their milk scented with mint and citrus; imagine it in high summer, limpid in the day’s heat, with the hawks circling high above and the mares full fat with foal, swatting flies with their tails.

Imagine that a man enters this idyll who does not know that he has come to paradise, who brings with him such ill luck as to make the statue of Fortune fall on her face at his passing and set the crows circling in murderous groups, eleven at a time, number of ill augur. Imagine such a man causing the minted milk to sour, and the men to sour with it, even before he gives the word to prosecute an unwinnable war, against the orders of his betters; or at least against Corbulo’s explicit command.

Such a man was our new general and while you will have heard of the statue that fell on its face and the other ill omens – they
became
common enough currency in Rome soon after – you may not know that he disobeyed orders when he began his war.

I can tell you and I know it to be true because, although I had been promoted from watch officer to signaller, with Tears as my shield-man, I was still first courier for the XIIth. In that role, I had been present when General Corbulo had gathered his legates together and set the scene for the new autumn campaign.

Vologases, he said, had been rebuffed by Nero. We all knew that the emperor had made a grave mistake, but nobody said so. I will testify to that at my life’s end, if need be: no man present said openly that Nero was wrong to thus provoke the King of Kings. No treason was spoken. The commanders merely accepted it as fact and went on to discuss how Vologases might be managed now that he was angry and had set his armies towards Syria.

I sat quietly and listened – a clerk is invisible at such times, and I was clerk and courier, and so doubly unseen – while they debated strategy and decided that we must hold our side of the Euphrates, and drive Vologases back; that Armenia must be kept neutral until all six legions could march on Tigranocerta and take it back, for we had been in there, and knew how readily it was defended by even a few hardy men, how large were its stocks of food, how infinite its water supply.

I heard the generals agree it, and plan for the ways to keep Vologases in check, if only the north might also be held steady. I heard it said of Paetus, our new governor of Cappadocia – he was not present, having claimed a head cold when invited – that he was inclined to prideful rashness, and might wish for more glory, faster; that, indeed, he had been heard to say that Armenia should suffer for its treachery, and be reduced from a client kingdom to a province, sooner rather than later.

I could have attested to the truth of this last if they had asked me, for Paetus had said exactly that in my presence, but I was not asked, and so held to my clerk’s invisibility until I was needed, which came soon after.

I saw the scorn written on Corbulo’s face, and saw him turn to me, and see me, and set me to take his dictation. In his words, I wrote to Paetus, my own commander, telling him not make enemies of Vologases or his subjects, and on no account to cross the Euphrates or its tributaries into any of the lands east of that river, but instead to hold fast and still and keep his men at peak fitness, as they had been when he had taken charge of them.

The black-dyed wax ran on to seal the scroll, letting loose a summer’s breeze of bees and honey. Over it, Corbulo stamped his mark of the war raven with its sharp beak and bright eye and the ruffle of feathers at its shoulders. All this was given into my care and the following day I set out to deliver it to Melitene, to the land of high mountains and cleaner air than you can begin to imagine.