Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (24 page)

Fury lifted me outside myself. I grasped the man by his clothing, pushing his shoulders back and back against the palisade behind. In a whisper, driving each word into his eyes, his nose, his ears, I said, ‘Vologases gave her to Pantera in Hyrcania, after the Leopard shot the usurper. If you choose not to believe otherwise, don’t blame me if the King of Kings has your skin stripped from your naked body
this
night, leaving you living to make your apologies in the morning.’

I had never seen that, only heard of it fifth hand, but it was enough to give the man pause, and me time to hear hoofbeats behind, and turn my head just enough to catch a glimpse of the man behind me; not enough to be sure who it was, but enough to take a gamble and pray that I was right. ‘Or,’ I said, loudly, and dropped him, ‘you could ask your king, who stands behind me. He was present when the traitor died. He will confirm that Pantera made the fatal shot, and was richly rewarded for it.’

I turned as I spoke. Monobasus was still the fox-faced, narrow-eyed, duplicitous schemer I had first seen. And if rumour was correct, he had helped his third cousin on to the throne of Hyrcania the summer after we had been there, and might have helped him rebel against the King of Kings, although clearly Vologases did not believe that, or he would not have honoured him so greatly at our surrender.

He leaned on the pommel of his saddle. His beard reached halfway down his chest. His moustaches were half the length of his beard. Both were tending to greyness, salted through here and there with white. He smelled of garlic, and mustard, and wine.

Perhaps I should have fallen to my knees, as his men did beside me, but I had lost almost everything that day and was not inclined to throw away what dignity I had left.

I said, ‘Shall I describe for you the moment my lord Pantera shot two arrows at the charging boar, and then at the one who pretended to be king? His name, as I remember, was—’

‘It will not be necessary to name him.’ Monobasus smoothed his hand down his chin. Hate lit his eyes. I was beyond caring.

I said, ‘Then you will remember how the King of Kings gave to Pantera the bay mare that had been the traitor’s
mount.
He gave her to me and she stands before you now. You may check her brands if you doubt me.’

‘I don’t doubt you. I placed those brands myself. I bred her.’

‘Then—’

‘She is yours.’ He wrenched his own horse round with a savagery that would have earned him a beating from my father for ruining its mouth.

I called after him. ‘She has given me three sons. Would you take those? Or are they not also gifts of the King of Kings.’

Monobasus did not pause. I looked at his man, who stood, uncertain. ‘They have the brand of the leopard’s paw,’ I said loudly. ‘If you take them, be prepared to answer for it to the King of Kings.’

It wasn’t easy for a horse to move fast in the crowded wreckage of our camp; Monobasus was not so far away that he couldn’t hear, or answer.

Leave them,’ he called back. ‘Leave them all.’

All. Leave all the horses
. The king had spoken and must be obeyed and so, slowly, as if working through mud, sullen men nodded at the sour-mouthed boys who in turn thrust their unwilling way back through the lines to retie the halters they had so lately untied.

I stood a long while after they had gone, talking to my mare, stroking her, checking her limbs, her mouth, pulling imaginary tangles from her mane, and then doing the same for each of her sons, who were jittery from having been so roughly handled.

Presently, I returned to Cadus and Lupus, who stood where I had left them, watching the chaos. A thin cloud had drawn across the sky, cloaking the sun that Helios might not be forced to view our indignity. It left the air thinner, paler, so that men seemed ill who had been only stoic before. Cadus and Lupus, particularly, looked as if the sky had fallen on their heads.

‘What?’ I asked as I reached them. ‘I saved your horses for you. We march out now, and meet Corbulo, and go back to Syria and start again. It’s bad, but we’re alive. It could be a lot worse.’

‘It is a lot worse,’ Lupus said. ‘We are to march out under the yoke. Us and the Eagles, both. You are to fetch your horn. It has been saved for you. The King of Kings requires that you sound the marching orders.’

I wet my lips. I blew. A faint, ugly whimper squeezed from my horn, barely enough to reach the first rank. Never in my entire life have I failed to sound the horn, but never in my life have I been so disgraced as to march beneath the raised spears of the enemy: the sign of ultimate defeat.

On the second effort, I managed a thin, stringy sound. It resembled the signal to march not at all, but the men behind, in their mercy, accepted it as such. I heard the centurions shout their orders, the clash of sandals that should have been matched by the clash of arms and armour, and was instead met by the odd, dull sound of three and a half thousand men coming to attention in only their linen tunics.

Ahead of us, two lines of Parthians used my horn as their own signal and raised their spears, holding them up and out, angled steeply so that they met in the middle of the line, forming a roofed channel under which we must pass.

The spears made long, knifing shadows that fell across us in spliced angles, like the bars of a gigantic cage. I stepped in, and in, and in, following Paetus, until I was completely within their shade, until I was surrounded by the laughter, by the jeers, by the spits and thrown stones.

I marched with Cadus on one side and Lupus on the other and I swear to you now that not one of us flinched, however we were struck. But in our souls, we knew we would have been better dead.

Two days later, we met Corbulo, who was of the same opinion. He sent us, the remnants of the IVth and the XIIth, to Syria with orders to rebuild our legions, while he took the ‘fighting arm’ of his army, the IIIrd, the VIth and the Xth, up to Cappadocia to overwinter in our beautiful camp at Melitene, there to meet Vologases in the spring, and bring him to heel. Tears and Horgias joined us again before the two forces split. It was the only bright light in our darkness.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
WO

THE WOUNDED DIED
like flies on the march back south to Syria. To our continued shame, we left their bodies where they lay, for Paetus would not let us stop to build pyres for them. A centurion – often it seemed to be Lupus or Cadus – spoke the words of death that their spirits might go freely to the other life and we marched on by, hating ourselves more with each passing day.

Antioch, first city of Syria, loomed like a death sentence at the end of our march. The seat of Corbulo’s power, it was acclaimed as the third great city of the empire, behind only Rome and Alexandria, and Corbulo had stamped his ordered, military mark on every part of it, from the pin-neat barracks to the governor’s Spartan mansion to the markets, where neither thieves nor beggars plied their trade and every sale was decent, and the whorehouses, where the boys, girls and women were licensed by the governor’s office.

We reached the city walls half a month after we had left the camp at Rhandaea and it seemed our fame – our notoriety – had preceded us, for the people of the city shut their doors to us as we marched in and not a soul gave greeting until we halted outside the governor’s mansion.

The steward could not pretend to be indisposed, but he took his time in opening the door and when he walked out on to the steps above us we saw that he had dressed himself in a torn tunic and thrown dust on both shoulders to show himself in mourning at our presence.

He was a tall, lean man with a bald pate and a patrician nose and he had the power to summon men from the locked and shuttered buildings of Antioch.

At his command, they gave us the barracks that had lately been occupied by the VIth; they gave us food and water for ourselves, our mules, and our mounts; they gave us weapons to replace the ones we had been forced to leave behind – second-rate weapons, that we would not have deigned to buy in the days when we had money – all of this they gave us at the governor’s express order.

But Corbulo had not demanded that the people of Antioch make us welcome, and the lack of a single smiling face threw into painful relief all the other towns and cities we had camped in or near in the days of our ascendance, where we had been cheered, garlanded, wined and dined as men who came with silver to spare, anxious to find new ways to be parted from it.

Here, we of the IVth and XIIth found ourselves in echoing barracks, eight to a room and half of those rooms empty, so that the parade ground did not so much rock to our entrance as titter, and it was clear that at night we would be cold for lack of men around us.

Only the sick bay was full. As soon as I had seen to the horses, I went in to sit with Syrion; beautiful, elegant Syrion who was thinner than a starving street cur and lay for ever in a fever with skin blotched irregularly red and white and beads of sour sweat growing fat on his forehead. On the route down we had stopped for the night near a village and I had bought some rags of the kind they used for swaddling children and
had
boiled them in citrus juice to get rid of the smell of goat that had infested everything in that place. Whenever I could thereafter, I had used them to wipe Syrion dry.

I did it again now, leaning forward, stroking across his skin. Presently, he opened one yellowed eye in thanks and I lifted the beaker that stood in a dampened sand box at my side.

‘Would you like some water? It’s colder than snow. Well, almost.’

‘As cold as our welcome?’ His smile was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. ‘I saw it from the litter. The whole city hates us.’

‘The city doesn’t know us. But once we have money, the people will—’

‘Where are we going to get money from? We walked our Eagles under the enemy yoke. We’re all down to single pay.’ That was true; Corbulo himself had given the order: every man in the legion, whatever his rank, down to single pay. Paetus alone was exempt, but then Paetus was in Caesarea, desperately trying to find a boat that would take him back to Rome in winter seas so he could give his side of things to Nero before Corbulo’s messengers ruined his life.

None of which was the point; the point was that, although we did have some money, nobody would take it from us. ‘Cadus and I have gold from when we were in Hyrcania,’ I said. ‘It was left in the vault at Raphana, which is an easy enough ride from here. When we’ve settled in, one of us will go and get it.’

‘Don’t.’ Syrion grabbed for my hand. The effort left him gasping, with his eyes flared wide. ‘That’s your retirement, Fox. Don’t give it away to men who don’t need it.’

I ignored him. ‘We’ll buy good weapons, at least. And armour for those who need it from the armourer in Damascus.’ We had it planned; with Paetus gone, Cadus was the most
senior
officer. He couldn’t leave the camp, but he had given Lupus and me permission to ride to Raphana as soon as the dust of our arriving had settled.

I said, ‘We’ll get you that new strip mail armour. You’ll look like a god. The enemy will never dare assault you then, not even by the half-dozen.’

Eight of the Parthians had taken him down, so they said, and he had killed three of them. One of those who had survived had used an axe on his left leg and left it splintered so that he would have died had not Vologases ordered the battle’s end just as the axemen were going to kill him.

Lupus and Cadus had carried Syrion from the field and he had not walked since. On the march back, the bone-setters said he might heal well enough to march again if the bone didn’t go bad. They had pulled the leg straight at the cost of much blood and splinted it with rosemary on either side to keep it sweet. Even so, those of us who cared for him were ordered to lift the covers and sniff daily around the wound. They said the fruitiness and stench of old meat we had scented from the start were both signs of wellness, and that it was the smell of mouse droppings we should fear.

It had been hard to imagine the scent of mouse droppings when we were on the march, but mice and rats had clearly taken over the barracks as soon as the VIth had marched out. We had sent some of the younger men to buy as many cats as they could find. They had not yet returned.

I smelled something now, growing stronger as Syrion sat up to drink. I moved to lift the linen sheet that covered him.

‘Don’t.’ He caught my hand.

‘I need to smell …’

‘You don’t. Trust me; you don’t.’

For the first time since we’d marched under the yoke, his eyes were the perfect blue-grey that I remembered from our first days in the Hawk mountains, when the sky had been the
same
colour and it had seemed as if we saw through him to the spirits of the place.

He said, ‘Is there armour to be found anywhere in the camp?’

‘There are six mail shirts in the quartermaster’s stores. I found them when I did the inventory.’

‘Would I be permitted to wear one, do you think? For only a short time. And a sword?’

‘Syrion, why—’

‘Because you’re my friend and I can ask these things of you. Would you get them?’

I backed away from the certainty in his gaze, and all the things there that I didn’t want to read. The stores were a dozen paces from the infirmary. I was there and back in a hundred heartbeats. I picked up a whetstone for the sword from the box by the door as I left; already a part of me knew what he planned.

There were tunics and sandals, and it took the time perhaps to turn a single marched circuit of the parade ground for me to dress him and sling the gladius at his hip. I settled the sandal on one foot but not the other; it was too swollen to take the thongs, and the flesh was green-tinged that had yesterday been reddish-purple. The smell of mice was no greater than the smell of sweat and leaked urine, but it was there.

He whetted the blade while I fixed the single sandal, and then he used my shoulder to stand.

‘Where?’ I asked, and did not dare say more. To be what he needed, I had to pretend not to know what he planned, even to myself.