Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (2 page)

At the back on their far right was a silver elephant on a ground of midnight blue that was the King of Kings’ own mark. Vologases rode a grey horse, not as fine as my bay mare – there was no better horse in his empire or ours – but he had thirty men around him on matched blacks that were good enough to keep him safe.

In the front, to their left, facing us, was the blue tern of Adiabene whose king was Monobasus, the fox-faced petty tyrant who had betrayed Parthia and Rome with equal abandon. I fancied he recognized me as I did him, for he spoke once to his men and they readied their spears, bringing them down in a flurry of silk and iron. Their tips hung level, aimed at our hearts.

A man’s shout rose up from their rearmost ranks, and the
enemy
drumbeat changed. As one, in perfect harmony, the oncoming horses rose from a trot to a canter. I could see men’s faces level with my chest, just beyond casting distance for our spears. In the centre of our line, eighty paces to my left, I felt Cadus raise his hand; I did not need to look.

‘Sound,’ he said. That was all.

As one born to this single act, I dipped my lips to meet the trumpet’s mouth even as my hands raised it up to be taken. I breathed deep, set my lips tight, and blew the ripple of eight notes that Cadus and I had planned so many years before in a tavern in Cappadocia. All along the line, the trumpeters of each cohort did the same, and this morning, this glorious morning, we were note-perfect.

Ripe as riven gold, the sound poured out across the morning.

Four things happened.

On the first note, the front ranks cast their javelins and drew their swords and knelt.

On the second note, the second ranks cast their javelins and drew their swords and knelt.

On the third note, the third rank cast their javelins and drew their swords and did not kneel.

On the fourth note, every man in all eight ranks rose to his feet and took one pace to his right, then one pace back for each of the remaining notes, leaving behind hardened oak stakes that stuck out of the earth, angled upwards to meet the bellies and breasts of the oncoming horses.

It was faultless. It was beautiful. The gods themselves could not have done it more cleanly, more sharply, in better time or in more perfect unison.

A thousand drills, in daytime, in deepest night, in summer, in winter, on flat ground and bog, on hill and rock and snow, done over and over until each man could place his stake and step around it in his sleep; these drills proved their worth
here
and now and the men who had cursed Cadus and me for devising it, who had promised our deaths at their own hands on the first battlefield – now these men turned their heads to the front and raised their shields and set their short-swords through the gaps and I read on the face of each one the shine of such pride as made my heart burst.

Cadus brought his hand down, hard. We sounded two more notes and each man pressed his shield edge firm against the one to his right and like that, as a solid wall, we stepped towards the stumbling, screaming, broken ranks of Vologases’ cavalry.

I smelled sweat and spilled intestines; I tasted blood on the thick air; I felt my blood surf in my ears and my muscles bunch across my back and I was shouting, I who had not known I had opened my mouth, and it sounded to me as if my whole life had been building to that shout, that it might reach to the sky and rock the earth in its foundations – and that men might die on the end of it; other men than me.

I looked to my left and Tears grinned back at me and I saw on his face the mirror to my own exultation and knew that he was in love, as I was, with the promise of battle.

I screamed out his name as my battle cry, and then the name of the legion I adored. A spear came past my ear. I ducked under it, stabbed upwards and felt my blade bite through skin and flesh and liquid vitals. I howled as a wolf howls and did not pause. One man dead, and me still alive; that was enough to call myself a warrior.
This is life. This place, balanced on the edge of death – this is what I was made for
.

In five years, I had come to believe that we might win this battle. In doing so, unlikely as it seemed, I had fallen in love with war itself.

Let me take you back those five years, that I might tell you the whole from the beginning, for I did not, as some
do,
grow through my childhood wanting to be a legionary. The lust for war came slowly and if I was naïve in all that I did to begin with, if I see it now through battle-hardened eyes, I ask you to remember that one thing: I did not ask for this.

H
YRCANIA, ON THE
C
ASPIAN
S
EA,
F
EBRUARY, AD 57

I
N THE
R
EIGN OF THE
E
MPEROR
N
ERO

C
HAPTER
O
NE

February,
AD
57

BLUE-GREEN, IRIDESCENT, GLEAMING
in the hazy sun, the peacock feathers shone out at me from a stall in the heart of the market.

The feathers were glorious; bright motes of summer in this place of winter greys that spawned unexpected memories of bright Macedonian mornings, of flower meadows and foaling mares, so that I was left floundering like a landed fish, gagging on the stench of rancid seal fat and gathering stares from the almond-eyed, flat-faced men of the Hyrcanian market.

They despised me; I hated them: these things were taken for granted, but I had never previously made a fool of myself in their presence. That I had done so now gave me yet another grievance against Sebastos Abdes Pantera, the man who served as my superior officer while we remained in this foreign land, and who had sent me, Demalion of Macedon, born a better man than Pantera might ever be, on a slave’s errand.

The familiar sting of ruined pride brought me to my
senses.
I blinked away the memories, snapped shut my mouth and, as I had been ordered, paid over a silver coin for twelve peacock pinions; six from the left wing, six from the right.

The trader tested the silver between his teeth before he parted with the feathers. His eyes were gimlets of suspicion, buried in the folds of flesh that made his face. His beard was brightly black, oiled with fish oil or seal fat or whatever repugnant mess it was that the men here used to keep the frozen sea-wind from splitting their faces.

I still shaved every day, and kept the cold from my skin with olive oil. The Hyrcanians deemed me no better than a woman for it and were only restrained from saying so because Pantera and Cadus did the same, and Vilius Cadus was a foot larger in each dimension than any of them, hewn from raw granite, with a pugilist’s fists and a nose yet unbroken. None of them dared offend him.

Whether they would have been as impressed had they known Cadus was a Roman, indeed that he was centurion of the Vth Macedonica legion, favourite of the late Augustus, was an open question. Nobody knew Cadus was a centurion just as nobody knew I was his clerk. Here, we were Greek freemen, no more than bodyguard and scribe to Pantera the horse-trader; necessary parts of his subterfuge.

Pantera had a lot to answer for.

‘Archer! Arrows?’ The fat-faced trader was trying to make conversation. His Greek was appalling; he chopped the words as if his teeth were hatchets, and murdered the vowels.

I forced a smile. ‘Not me.’ I made gestures to fit the words. ‘These are for Pantera,’ and, at the man’s incomprehension, ‘for the Leopard.’

‘Ah!’

The Leopard was their friend, or so they thought. He brought them amber from the far frozen ocean to the west, balsam from the southern deserts, pearls from the
Mediterranean
that were larger, more lustrous than the ones from the Hyrcanian Ocean on whose shores they lived. Better than all these, he brought horses from all over the world; fast, good, tough horses that might survive a Hyrcanian winter, and carry their owners on many hunts through the balmy, rain-blessed summers.

‘Give these!’ The man thrust a fistful of whole raven feathers into my hand. ‘Good arrows. Go fast. Kill many bear!’

‘I’m sure.’ I pressed my fist to my forehead, and remembered to bow as I backed away. Leaving, I wondered if the men here could read minds, or if it was always the case in Hyrcania that some shafts were fletched with peacock flights and others with raven, for I had been sent to buy both.

The peacock flights were required, so I had been told, for the lighter arrows that Pantera had fashioned through the morning, while the raven feathers were destined for the heavier shafts, with the barbed iron flanges at the tip, designed to stop a bear or a boar.

In Macedonia, where I had grown to adulthood, we had used goose feathers for the lighter arrows and swan for the bear-hunters, but nobody had asked me what I thought and I had not volunteered the information. Rather, I had been stunned that Pantera had bothered to tell me anything useful at all; for the past six months he had told me precisely what I needed to know to get through each day and no more.

Cadus always seemed at least three steps ahead of me, but he was my centurion, and while he had never once used that to hold me to silence, I was too young to ask anything, too deeply imbued with a legionary discipline that did not allow a man to question his superiors, too in awe of his battle majesty: I was nineteen years old, a conscript with two years’ training behind me, and I had not yet drawn blood.

My lack of a kill, more than anything, was what I read in the flat stares of the Hyrcanian men. In this land – in all of
Parthia
, as far as I could tell – the boys killed a man or a boar or they died trying. Those who lived became men in that single act and were given women and horses to prove it. If a man was mounted, it was because he had taken at least one life in battle or in the hunt; and everyone rode.

I despised myself for my weakness. I may have dreamed all my youth of life as a horse-trader like my father; I may have railed against my conscription and loathed the legions on principle, but even so, every morning in this place I cursed my lack of valour and every night, when I slept, my traitorous mind brought me dreams drenched in the blood of our enemies as my comrades in the Vth launched themselves into battle, taking risks, winning glory, rising in the ranks, killing the enemy and so becoming men … all without my being there.

The fact that it was winter, when the weather forced a kind of peace on both sides, and that my comrades were currently enduring endless forced marches over the mountains in western Armenia because their general had deemed them unfit for battle, did nothing to hamper my fantasies.

The Parthian merchants were staring at me still. I shook my head clear of imagined gore and continued on through the market, past the reeking stalls of dried and smoked fish, past bushels of shelled nuts that smelled of autumn and threatened more memories, past pickled eggs in stone jars and skinless seabirds packed in salt-barrels.

Near the shoreline, I found the stall marked with the red-stained ewe’s hide where waited a bundle with my name on it that I had orders to open on the spot.

Inside, I found a tunic made of fine undyed lamb’s wool, and trousers the same, and boots that might have been made of bearskin and a belt that certainly was, and a silver brooch the size of a duck’s egg to pin the woollen cloak that was wrapped around the bundle.

All of this was my gift from the new, young, extravagant King of Kings, that a horse-trader’s scribe might attend a day’s hunting in the royal party without offending the royal proprieties. I should have been grateful, but I had had enough of Hyrcania and was churlish enough to disdain it as no more than my due.

When I returned to the tavern – in Macedonia it would have been counted less than a shack and free men would not have deigned to enter – neither Pantera nor Centurion Cadus was present.

They did not return that day, but both were there when I woke the next morning. Cadus lay on his back on the straw pallet, sleeping with the peace of a man who knows that the legionary watch-horns have no power to rouse him.

Pantera, as always, was awake. He sat near the window, fletching the last of his arrows by a thin, grey light that bled in past the shutters.

Pantera the Leopard, trader and friend of traders; Pantera the Roman spy who claimed to have come from the emperor himself, and had letters enough to persuade a legionary commander in Oescus to give him two men; Pantera, who had picked me from four thousand others because, alone of my century, possibly of my cohort, perhaps of my legion, I could read and write Latin as well as Greek.

Out of habit, I cursed my mother’s father, who had paid for the tutor, believing that all his grandsons should be literate. For good measure, I cursed my father, and my father’s father and all the way back up the line to the misbegotten son of a she-ass who had sold the great Bucephalos to Alexander and thus guaranteed that his descendants would be horse-traders for ever more.

Because that was the other thing that had sealed my fate: Pantera might conceivably have been able to find another scribe in one of the legions who could write Greek and Latin
with
equal ease, but there was none who also had a lifelong eye for a horse, and could ride as well as he could march; better, in my case.

I chose not to think about that; like Macedonian mornings, some things were best remembered through a haze. I drew in a breath and tasted ice on the air and threw back the bed-hides, so that I might not be tempted to stay long in the warm.

‘You can open the window,’ I said. ‘It can’t get any colder in here than it already is.’

‘It may even be warmer outside,’ said Pantera. ‘They say spring throws itself on a man fast here, like a woman in drink, and you can never tell when the sun will outweigh the chill.’ He threw open the shutters and leaned on the sill to finish his work. His tone was mildly pensive. ‘Have you found the women forward here?’

Surprised, I laughed aloud. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Fathers give their girl children in marriage to their friends the day after their first bleeding, and if a woman looks askance at another man she’ll find herself spreadeagled on a cartwheel and that cart pushed into the sea.’