Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (18 page)

The journey back took me ten days, but the land was still at peace when I placed the crow-sealed orders personally in the hand of our governor and general, Caesennius Paetus, although the statue had fallen long before then and the crows had circled and we had drunk sour milk and knew that he brought ill luck on all of us.

You can well imagine that only Horgias was happy when, in direct defiance of Corbulo’s command, we were ordered to march out of our camp across the Taurus Mountains to assault eastern Armenia and its people for the ‘crime’ of failing to be Roman citizens.

We – the XIIth, the IVth and the two companies of Pannonian archers Paetus had brought with him – crushed undefended towns and villages who had dutifully paid their taxes to Rome in the past and might do so in the future.
We
slaughtered anyone who might conceivably have held any affection for Parthia, and so ensured that, whatever they had felt before, their families hated us, and loved our enemy.

We ruined their crops and spoiled their grain and were not even allowed to requisition carts and haul it back to camp for our own use, for, in Paetus’ words, ‘Why should Roman legions feast on the grain of defeated peasants?’, as if this was not exactly what we had always done.

We did not take Tigranocerta, which was held now by Vologases’ brother. We didn’t try particularly hard, for we knew the inside of that city brick by brick and knew that such a thing was impossible with only two legions, and told Paetus so. It would still have been impossible even had he summoned the Vth to join us, but he didn’t do that – he sent them instead to Pontus to ‘recuperate’ for the winter, which meant that he did not have to pay for their winter keep. That’s the kind of man he was.

Left without a victory, we marched back over those high, deep-clefted mountains to Melitene at autumn’s end leaving a hornet’s nest behind us, and nothing good to show for it.

Paetus, of course, would not have it that we had failed. He sent a letter to Nero that … I can barely bring myself to tell of it, but I wrote it and so I have it verbatim in that part of my memory that cannot let go of the past. I repeat it here for you, with only the warning that not one word of it is true.

To the Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, from L. Caesennius Pontus, governor of Cappadocia, greetings
.

To the greater glory of Rome, and in honour of your divine self, we have this late season assaulted all the key positions of the enemy as may have been reached in so short a time
.

Next year, when the rains have passed and the season
for
battle commences again, we shall show our spirit and our power and take for you the foremost cities of Armenia. In the meantime, I send to you such spoils as we have gathered: they are a poor people, and have little of worth, but such as it is, I commend to your care
.

The ‘spoils’ were a cartful of weapons, some mail, some poor gold plate that when scratched showed bare copper or even iron beneath, and a crown that had been made, I think, for some religious ceremony and had no official use whatsoever. All of these, Paetus sent to Rome in the care of the sixth cohort of the IVth legion, thereby sending away its best men.

The rest of us were summoned to the main square of our winter quarters. It was a mellow autumn day. Leaves made flags for us in a dozen shades of beaten copper, of bronze, of old rust and polished amber. The mountains stabbed the sky and it bled sunlight on to their ever snowy peaks, so that they shone too brightly to look at.

Our armour shone likewise, for we were the sixth cohort, vying with the first to be best in all we did. Cadus might not have liked Paetus any more than the rest of us, but he was not going to let one ill-starred commander ruin his legion.

He had us run through our display in front of him, and what amazed me then – and still now – is that we could do it each time with the freshness of a new task; we never tired of finding ways to be faster, sharper, more effective.

If Paetus was impressed, he did not show it. Rather, he affected boredom and paid more attention to a distant carter loading late hay on to his donkey cart. The hounds running at his heels caught a rat or some such in the ditch by the road, but even had they not they would have been more interesting to Paetus than us, his men, putting our all into our display.

We came to stillness, sweating in the cool morning air. Lupus was furious, I could tell by the tilt of his chin and the
triple
pulse at his throat that only came when he was grinding his teeth. Outwardly, he was as bland as a statue, and in any case, we were not centre front: that place was reserved for Cadus and his century.

Corbulo would have spoken to us of our display, would have noted the good points, the good centuries, the good men, the parts that needed more work, and we would have trusted that he was right. Paetus did not so much as acknowledge what we had done, but launched at once into his reason for calling us.

‘Men! Winter is upon us and we have shown the enemy our mettle. Vologases, who is king of nothing’ – how I ached to show him the glories of Hyrcania as he said that – ‘has returned to his den to lick his wounds. We will see nothing of him until spring. I therefore offer to every man of you the opportunity to take three months’ leave. The roads are yet fit for travel; those who remain will march with me to new quarters at Rhandaea on the banks of the Murad Su, but the rest, those who choose freedom, may return to your homes, to your families, or remain here and enjoy a winter in the town, unhampered by your duties. If the numbers wishing to avail themselves of this opportunity grow too large, we shall draw lots for it. But first ask your centurions and they shall say who must march with us, and who can stay.’

He had been a consul in Rome, the highest order a man may hold who is not emperor. He had spoken before crowds many times, and knew the jinks and tricks of rhetoric that pull men to cheer him as he delivers ordinary news. He tried them all now, and stood before us with his arms raised as the last words rang off the palisades behind us – and was met by a fog of silence so thick, it might have smothered him there and then.

The smile crawled from his face. His arms came slowly down. He frowned at us, as a man who has woken into the
wrong
life, and does not know how to get back to all he holds dear, and then he turned on his heel and left us in our ranks, without so much as a salute of dismissal.

We held our silence until he was safely out of earshot, then Cadus stepped to the fore and turned. ‘Not a man of the first cohort shall leave this compound unless it is to war. The rest of you, decide for yourselves.’

Lupus did not have to say the same to us of the sixth cohort; he simply turned to face us and ran his eyes down our lines. ‘The man who wishes to leave us, raise his hand.’ It was thus understood that the leaving would be permanent, not three months’ unpaid idleness in the town, gaining unfortunate rashes and making children and drinking ourselves to poverty while Paetus lined his own pockets with the money that would have paid for our keep. If we left, then when we came back we would find ourselves in a new cohort, probably the second.

No hand was raised. The eighth cohort was the same, and rightly so, as the next most competent in the legion, and, oddly, the second; but the third, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth and tenth lost nearly half their men each.

The IVth legion went through the same process, to the same result, with the added insult that they had already lost their sixth cohort as bodyguard to some gilt shinings sent to Rome as victory spoils. The archers, I am told, lost not a man; they had their own code of honour, and it surpassed all but the best of ours.

Even so we were decimated by Paetus’ hand, for, by the end of that day, we had two legions of just over half strength, where a month before we had been three, as fully manned as any in the empire.

Lupus marched us back to our quarters and set us to packing for the march east.

‘Where’s Rhandaea?’ Rufus asked. ‘And why are we going
there?
What’s wrong with Melitene? We spent last winter here, and the town loves us.’

Rufus had a woman in town who was heavy with his first child and he had sworn to be with her when it came. Syrion, as ever, had a handful of different women all vying for the right to warm his bed. The rest of our unit, but for me, Tears and Horgias, all had whores or women they cared for in Melitene and were loath to leave.

Lupus swept his hand across his face. He was relaxed with us now, at least in private; we had fought for him and with him and behind him and alongside him so often that he was one of us. He had saved our lives and we had saved his, and we were owed his honesty.

‘Rhandaea lies on the Murad Su,’ Lupus said, and was answered by blank stares from us all. ‘It’s a river. It rises out of the Taurus Mountains and runs into the Euphrates. Paetus plans to set up camp on the north bank so that we are technically in Armenia.’

‘We can’t do that,’ Syrion said. ‘Corbulo promised Vologases that Rome wouldn’t cross the Euphrates if Parthia would keep to her own side. If we do this, we will break his promise.’

‘Which is exactly why Paetus wants us to do it.’ Lupus was taking apart his bedframe with a contained but brisk intensity. ‘He thinks the battle season is over, and that we’ll be safe in Armenian territory until spring, and that we’ll have an advantage when the fighting starts again after the rains have stopped. He thinks he’ll write clever letters to Nero, telling him how he faced down the enemy when Corbulo was hunkered safe in Syria. He thinks …’ Lupus swept a hand through his iron hair. ‘I don’t know what he thinks, but I know that he’s wrong.’

‘Vologases will attack before spring,’ I said, and I might have been looking at Lupus, at Syrion, at Horgias, but I was
seeing
a clearing in a forest in Hyrcania, with a group of vassal kings planning a winter campaign. ‘The Parthians don’t care if it’s winter. If they know we’re there, they’ll come and fight.’

‘Then we had better be ready for them,’ Lupus said grimly. ‘Be packed by dusk, and make sure your stakes are good and sharp and hardened in the fire. We might have need of them at long last.’

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

MUD.

What I remember of Rhandaea on the northern bank of the Murad Su, before the ill omens and the chaos, before the sea of cataphracts and the light cavalry and the archers and the slaughter … before any of that, abiding and overwhelming, what I remember is mud.

We marched there from Melitene in the first rains of autumn, across ground that was no worse than damp before the leading ranks met it but had been churned to slurry by the time the last man of the first cohort had passed.

Two legions and two companies of archers later, the last five hundred men were wading knee high through sucking, suppurating glue, and the bullock carts got jammed so hard and so often that it was easier to raise them up on rails and have teams of sixteen men carry them, four to each corner.

Our clothes were wet, our tents were wet, the firewood was saturated beyond any hope of a flame; we slept in wet bedding and ate cold, uncooked food and our mail rusted on our backs and when we finally reached the south bank of the Murad Su, we found it a swollen, churning cataract far wider
than
its tame little brother, which had so efficiently protected the city at Tigranocerta.

And so we spent our first half-day there hacking at wet trees with rusted axes to build the bridge that might give us access to the location that Paetus, in his insanity, had chosen for our winter quarters.

In summer, I’ll grant you, it would have been acceptable; a wide, flat basin with a small town nearby for trade and girls, and, more important, with the river behind to hold us safe from the south and west and a good distance between us and the mountains to the north and the east so that even Vologases’ fast light cavalry could not have come at us without half a day’s warning.

Here, now, at the end of the battle season, we were faced by a flood plain laid slick with the first silverings of water. We gathered the bullock wagons on to the only high land and stood about them, trying to see places we could set our tents that might keep them dry for the six months Paetus intended us to stay here.

Our general, of course, did not sleep in a tent; our first duty, even before we dug ditches for the ramparts, pitched the tents or set the palisades, was to cut more timber for his living quarters, float it across the river and help the engineers to erect a house fit for a senator and his family.

Yes, his family. You will not believe me when I tell you that his wife was there, but it is true. His wife, Antonia, who had spent her life learning how to manipulate the socialites of Rome, was there with his son, less than six months old. They sat together that first afternoon in nothing grander than a bullock wagon, stunned to insensibility by cold and mud and unimagined hardship.

We lost three days building quarters for them; three days in which our tents were pitched in a handspan of water, and we were not making dry our grain for the winter, or exploring
the
land, except for a few scouts – Horgias was one – who were sent out to check the most likely routes Vologases would take when he came.

When
, not if – for we were certain that the King of Kings knew we were here; how could he not when we had marched two legions across the Euphrates? And we knew we were not yet ready to face him.

We finished the ramparts in the second half of the month. I remember stopping at the end of the last ditch some time in the late morning and glancing up at the wide winter moon that hung white as a slug in the sky.

I jammed my mattock into the mud at my feet, spat away a mouthful of dirt and took a long drink of gritty water from the skin at my belt.

Blood smeared where my hands had been and, looking down, I saw that the blisters on both palms had burst, and long, deep cracks ran from each.

The pain was old and hot, and I had not so much forgotten it as lost it in the greater discomfort of the day. I risked a glance down at my feet and was glad they were lost in the mud for they made my hands look pretty by comparison. I was walking on soles turned to waterlogged sponge and dreaded the morning when I woke to find the skin peeled completely away, leaving raw flesh and bone beneath.