Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (22 page)

Syrion, Rufus, Horgias, Tears and myself were left. In a tight knot, each cleaving to the other, we stepped back and back and back and at a certain point, when it was clear the Parthians really had departed, we turned and walked wearily together back to where we had left our camp in perfect order, never expecting to see it again.

It took longer than it might have done to kindle the fires, to gather water, to cook, to eat. When we were done, Cadus called us together in our centuries, to find who was left.

A good portion of the first century of the first cohort had held the centre; they really were a supremely effective fighting force. By contrast, only three men were left of the second cohort;
they
were the newest, the rawest, and while we had not left them in the front ranks – we valued our lives too much for that – they had borne the brunt of a light cavalry attack on our left flank, and then their centurions had failed to see the archers. Or had seen them and not been heard. Or their signallers had been too slow. Or they had not drilled often enough to raise their shields. All or any of these; what mattered was that the entire second cohort was gone, those who had not taken leave and stayed the winter out in the whore-baths of Melitene.

In between these two extremes, the rest of us were left speaking aloud the names of our dead, that they might know themselves gone, and so walk lightly away from this life. Nobody laid out the blankets and chose what to keep: there were too many dead, too many to remember and too few of us to take things from them. We chose instead to hold them all equally, and not single out one for more attention than the others.

We were tired as galley slaves, fit to drop, but Cadus did not yet let us go.

‘We are three hundred,’ he said, which we knew. ‘We can hold this pass, perhaps for another day. We will sell our lives dearly, and they know already that they cannot send the cataphracts against us. But Paetus must know what has happened, and I will send a man also to Corbulo. This may be against our governor’s wishes, but if I am dead there’s nothing he can do.’

It was a joke, of a sort; nobody laughed. We watched him, fearful of what was coming next. He held out his helmet and shook it; we all heard the rattle of lot-stones. ‘All those with mounts will come forward.’

I might have held back, but Syrion shoved me, and Horgias, and Lupus took Tears by his elbow and thrust him into the firelight. We and seven others stood there. Perhaps because of
our
history, certainly because of what Cadus had said about loving battle, I was the one who spoke up.

‘I don’t want—’

Cadus cut me off. ‘Nobody wants to leave. You all want to die beside your fellows. But these messages must be sent. Ten stones are here. Seven are white; those men stay. Two are black. Those men go to Corbulo; two of you, because the road is arduous, even were we not at war with Vologases. The last is black with a white line down the centre; that man goes to Paetus with news that the Parthians are a day’s march away, and we will be lucky to hold them beyond tomorrow’s noon. That man must ride fastest.’

His eyes were on me as he spoke, but it was a lottery, a drawing of chance with only the gods able to influence the outcome. He could not have known it beforehand.

Even so, none of us was surprised that I drew the black stone with the white line down it. The surprise was that Tears and Horgias drew the black, which took them south to Syria.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Three from the same unit? Only Syrion and Rufus are left.’

‘There are units with fewer men left than that,’ Lupus said, from behind us. ‘Yours will join with others. Afterwards, you may be the seeds of a new legion, with a new sixth cohort and a new first unit of the first century. Thus will you remember us.’

I knew that voice, the solid implacability of it. Dismissed, I turned on my heel and made for the tent.

Tears and I passed that night in the warmth of each other’s embrace, but we were too tired for more; we slept deep as the dead until dawn and left the camp with thick heads and tired hearts, and Syrion and Rufus stood at the tent lines to wave us on our separate ways.

For the rest of my life, I will remember them, and the peace that was in their eyes.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

I DON’T REMEMBER
the details of the ride back. The bay mare knew her way without my pushing her and I didn’t allow myself to believe that it was happening; it was only when I reached the camp, saw the state of the newly completed palisades, and spoke to the lead centurions of the IVth that it began to feel true.

Then they took me to Paetus and truth became a nightmare as he argued that defence was impossible and we were better to surrender to Vologases when he came, and depend on his better judgement, or his mercy, or his fear of Nero – all or any of these were suggested, and all were equally unlikely – to at least send the officers home alive.

I left him that first evening, heart-sick and desperate. I would have ridden back to the Lizard Pass had not night fallen and in any case what point when everyone left behind must be dead by now?

I was given a place to sleep in a tent with one of the centurions of the IVth. Crescens was his name, third centurion in the fifth cohort, not one we had come across on the Hawk mountain, for which I think both of us were glad.

We of Lupus’ century had a reputation amongst the IVth
that
made us out to be madmen and savages, or so I learned after the tense and fitful night which left both of us weary in the morning, and more inclined to speak.

‘He needs a backbone, that one,’ he said of his general, and nobody offered to flog him for it. ‘If anyone can shame him into making a stand, it will be you.’

He was cooking me a meal; I was not going to turn him down. And when two other centurions of the IVth came to beg me to speak again to Paetus, I did as they asked thinking that if he had me flogged to death for the temerity, at least I would join the dead, amongst whom I now counted Rufus and Syrion.

Four of us went into the general’s tent that day and the day after, and the day after that.

Slowly, we created for Paetus a plan, the first and most important part of which was the destruction of the bridge we had built across the foaming river, so that when Vologases marched here he might not have use of it to reach us.

Paetus agreed, as a weak man will do, not out of conviction or the need to see our plan through, but to keep us quiet. And he vacillated over every other thing that we suggested. I lost patience in the end, and told him that two men had already gone to Corbulo for help on Cadus’ order, and that we only need hold out a few days; four at most, and we would be safe.

I thought he might order me killed then, he was so angry, and that was when we realized that, truly, Paetus would have preferred to lose us all to Vologases than to lose his pride to Corbulo.

Without being dismissed, I walked out. Crescens caught my shoulder as I stepped out of the governor’s quarters.

‘Don’t do anything stupid. He can still have you flogged.’

‘I’m going to destroy the bridge.’

‘I know. He knows. He gave permission for it.’

‘Then help me do it. We can’t have long before they come.’

‘I’ll bring a unit. Any more and he’ll stop us.’

He ran, I give him that much; he was a centurion and he ran across the hard-packed earth that had been our parade ground so few days before, past the unfilled foundations whence the sacrifice had fled, and into the tent lines.

Returning, he brought eight men equipped with crowbars, hammers, axes and ropes. I chose not to learn their names – what point to come to know men when we must all soon be dead? – but led them at a run to the bridge.

It was not built for easy demolition. Two of Crescens’ men were engineers, part of the corps that had built it. They went across and back on their hands and knees, examining the intricate ties that held it. In other days I might have marvelled at their skill, to build a bridge fit to take two legions and all their carts, with no nails, but only wooden joints; now, I was impatient for it to be gone.

Coming back to us, they saluted me as if I were a centurion. They had heard, of course, of the carnage at Lizard Pass, and were ashamed to have been left out of it, even as they gave thanks, moment by moment, for the continuation of their lives.

The eldest, a man near to retirement, said, ‘We’ll need a man to go across to the other bank and hammer out the pegs or it won’t fall.’

‘I’ll do it.’

Nobody argued with me.

I took a pole axe and crossed over the bridge, blindly. In my mind, I saw Lupus, speared through the chest; Syrion, dying with an axe in his head, Rufus cut in two by a sword … in the worst moments, I saw Tears and Horgias ambushed, taken, tortured; dead.

The ties that fixed the bridge were great wooden pegs as thick as a man’s arm, hammered through the ends of the trunks and into the arch – three of them in all.

I swung the pole axe and felt it hit the first one with a noise like the crack of a tree in a storm. The peg moved barely at all. I swung again, and again, each time imagining a Parthian head beneath the axe, broken like a melon at each hammering impact. And again, and again; I slaughtered two units of them to get the first peg out. My arms were burning. My head was spinning. My ears rang from the sound. I began on the second peg.

Perhaps because I was thinking of the Parthians, I was slow to hear them coming. Or I wanted to die: in the time since, I have thought that might have been true. Whichever was the case, I didn’t know to be alarmed until I heard Crescens calling me, shouting my name over and over.

‘Demalion! Demalion of the Twelfth! Get back over here, they’re coming!’

We had no archers for cover; they had all given their lives at the pass, on the first day, or the second. The Parthians, of course, had archers of their own.

As I hammered at the second peg, the men of the IVth threw their spears, their axes, their hammers, but the river was as wide as two trees laid end to end; few of the weapons reached the far side and even then they did no harm. I hit the third peg, and it was looser; it came free in three strokes. I shouted in triumph then, I think; certainly I felt the first of the logs begin to falter and to fall, and saw on the faces of Crescens and his men that I had succeeded in breaking the bridge. And that I was to die for it.

I spun, swinging the pole axe by the very end of its haft, and carried on spinning, so that I was turning like a child’s toy, with a hammer’s head of lethal iron describing a circle around me, eight feet out. In a battlefield, it might have worked for a moment or two, until a brave man blocked it with a shield and his fellows powered down its length to kill me. Here, a squadron of Parthian light cavalry made a circle
around
me, and simply leaned on their saddles, and waited until I grew tired.

Seeing them gave me strength for perhaps four revolutions more than I might otherwise have managed, and that, in turn, gave me time to find the gap through which I might escape.

An older man with greyed moustaches on a liver chestnut mare was flanked on both sides by his sons, men who were mirrors to the old man, but twenty years younger. Between him and each of them was a gap.

I picked the one to my right, where I might come at his sword hand, but his son’s shield. Just before I had to give up my manic spinning, I lurched back, and then forward, and used the extra power to throw the hammer at the greybeard’s head. I hurtled after, too fast to see if I had killed him or his son, concerned only with drawing my own blade in time.

‘
Ha!
’ I reached the horses, and stabbed up, towards the unprotected belly. The mare skittered sideways. I scented open air, and saw the remains of the bridge, and the men on the far side, waiting with their arms outstretched, as if to draw me over to them.

I heard the rush of the river, and a voice that hollered my name and—

Black. A torrent of blackness with pain at its heart. I remember falling. I do not remember hitting the earth.

‘… doesn’t matter. We have no restitution, nothing to do but act as we are told.’

‘Or refuse.’

‘And then die, yes. All of us. To no good effect.’

Two voices argued back and forth across my head. They were Lupus and Cadus, and I thought I heard Syrion more distantly, speaking of the battle, and so I knew that I had died, only I did not expect death to carry so many small discomforts, or so great a mass of pain.

A gritty, unkempt sheepskin lay beneath my unclothed skin. I knew by its smell that it was badly cured and did not know how the gods could possibly be so lax. I smelled vomit, too, which was as bad.

I felt stones dig into my ribs where the sheepskin ended and the hard, cold ground began. I felt the wind on my back, the sear and ache of four-day-old wounds from the battle we had fought that I had not noticed at the time, and the far greater ache, the thunderous, thundering pain of a wound at the back of my head. My hair felt tight, pulled by clotted blood. I thought of baths, and wondered that the gods did not have them.

I tried to roll over, to ask.

‘Demalion! No!’

A dozen rough hands held me down. Cadus’ face loomed close to my own. ‘Don’t try to get up yet. You’re not fit.’

I struggled to make his face hold still. ‘How not fit?’ In my hampered state, I could not see how death was something for which a man had to prepare, other than stepping on to a battlefield. Or over a bridge. Memory came back to me in patches. I struggled to fit them to a whole.

Seeing it, Cadus said, ‘You’re in the Parthian lines. You are a prisoner, as we are.’

A long, sullen moment while I drank that in. Eventually, ‘How?’

They told me, each hindered by his own shame, and I struggled to fit these patches, too, to a whole image.

When I had, it was not so very different from my own capture, only that it had taken longer, and the encirclement had been more savage, so that some men had died – one was Rufus, who had hurled himself at their spear-fence, trying to break it – and some men had been badly injured: Syrion’s leg was broken and he was being carried on a litter provided by the Parthians. At least legionaries carried it.