Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (7 page)

We reached Damascus just as the winter rains ceased and the streets were washed clean and the markets were alive in a chaos of colour and shouted Greek, and I felt at home for the first time in over half a year.

‘Damascus supplies the legions and Parthia equally,’ Cadus said. ‘Their armourers are unequalled in either empire.’ He knew his way about and led me on a fast route halfway across the city, past cross-legged men and high-browed women, past children who stared as us for our strangeness; we were not wearing armour, but we had bought some madder-dyed tunics in Melitene and so looked as if we had washed our clothes in blood before venturing on to the streets.

In an alley off an alley, a street so narrow it should not have been dignified by the name, Cadus pushed against a hanging piebald goatskin and we entered a dim space that smelled of honed weapons and oil and fire smoke, so that, momentarily, I was back in the legions, newly entered, buffing my helmet through the night for fear of a flogging after parade the next day.

My eyes sought light and, as we turned a corner, found it in three glowing braziers and a cascade of candles set in branched sticks around a room in which eight small boys sat cross-legged in a circle. The first two wound iron wire on to pegs, cut it, and swept the results on to a pile; the third made rings from the split loops; the last five looped those rings into others to make shining new mail such as I had seen on Vologases’ cataphracts. In the legions, everyone wore old mail, mostly with the rings stitched to leather shirts which were hot in summer and held the damp in winter and stank of old shoes by the second day of wearing.

‘If you’re going to be a courier, you should have a good mail shirt,’ Cadus said cheerfully.

I was sullen and moody, feeling like a conscript again, dreading the next day’s journey to the camp. I turned away, unwilling to join in his cheer. ‘I’m not going to be a courier. A clerk has to be with his centurion. I can’t be riding post across the country if I’m also taking notes and securing the men’s pay.’

‘Even so: all you have to do is throw the spare in a barrel of sand and trip over it twice a day. At least look at what’s on offer.’

Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.

He asked a question, wrapping it round with flattery; I could tell by the intonation. A nasal bleat came from the farthest, darkest corner of the room by way of reply, followed by the appearance of a man not much taller than the boys who worked so assiduously on the floor.

His back was bent. His face was long and yellowed with age. Beads of white matter gathered at the corners of his eyes, but he looked at me as if measuring my soul for the gods; I could feel the press of his stare down the flat of my ribs, my legs, my arms.

He nodded, gave another, more guttural bleat and turned back into the dimness of his demesne. I could see it more clearly now; shelves upon shelves of boxes, each marked with a carving on the fore, in the shape of a beast. His bleating dulled to a murmur, as of a man to his lover, or his horse, he reached into one marked with a stork.

‘He says you are beautiful as a god, but taller than he is used to.’ Cadus sounded amused. I was perhaps a hand’s width taller than him and he, in turn, had been a hand’s width taller than Pantera, although my memory by now had stretched the Leopard until he was the tallest of us all.

I think I blushed under the flattery. The armourer-boys watched open-mouthed as I stripped to my skin and then donned the layers the goat-man ordered, of linen, then padded wool, then a silk scarf to keep my neck from chafing.

And then he brought out not a mail shirt, such as I had imagined, but a leather shirt with strips of polished iron laid
across
and across, so that they overlapped like the ribs of a snake.

He held it out to me, grinning his gap-toothed grin, bleating encouragingly.

‘He says this is a new thing. He has only sold one other, and he thinks it will be suitable for a young god to wear in battle.’

‘Ask him who bought the other one.’

‘He says a centurion in the Fourth Scythians.’

‘Then you have this one,’ I said. ‘I can’t go into the Twelfth and wear something that even their centurions don’t have. It’ll be hard enough as it is.’

Cadus didn’t want it any more than I did, and for the same reasons. They argued back and forth, volubly. In the end, Cadus, grinning now, said, ‘He wants you to keep it in your pack, for when you are a centurion.’

I laughed aloud, and meant it. ‘Tell him I’ll come back for it if I am ever made centurion,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, a mail shirt would be welcome.’

They wrangled some more, but in the end the little armourer brought out for me a shirt of rings so fine that it rippled like sharkskin in the candlelight. I stretched my arms high above my head, and let it slide down about my ribs and shoulders, link on kissing link.

The fit was perfect. The armourer lifted a shield of polished silver, and after a moment’s embarrassment when I thought he was offering it to me to buy, and started to decline, I realized it was a reflector, like water in a bowl, and that I could see myself with the star-points of the candles all about, and the red glow of the braziers behind.

I stood longer than perhaps was polite, for I had seen myself painted in water, or on the back of my knife, but never like this, whole, sharply, all in the right proportion. I am not, and never will be, as beautiful as Tears, but I could see now
what
the slant-eyed Hyrcanian men had seen, what women whispered at behind their hands, what my mother had wept to lose when I packed Great-uncle Demetrios’ sword and took my father’s second best gelding and joined the lines of conscripts heading east for war.

Time has worn me now, but then I had black hair, buffed to a high shine by the red glow of the brazier, and a lean nose, well balanced, that might have done good service on a statue in the Acropolis. I had fine, evenly matched brows and a clean jaw, half the width of Cadus’, but not falling back to my throat as some men’s are. The dark, smudged mark on my right cheek that my mother called the Kiss of Apollo was not so visible in the dim light, but still served to draw the eye, to break what would have been too great a symmetry.

And beneath all that, I shimmered silver, as Vologases’ Parthians had done. In all, I was content, and more than content. I paid the gold that was asked for the shirt and did not think myself hard done by.

Nor did I later, when Cadus took me to other places, and we bought a helmet of the new design, raised about the ears and with iron there to stem a sword-blow, made in the factories of Gaul which are the best in the empire. We also bought two swords: a gladius and a longer cavalry blade, both well balanced for my reach; an oval cavalry shield, faced in bull’s hide and red silk; and a square scutum faced in leather for infantry work, for even then I was determined to serve on foot, alongside my fellow legionaries.

Late in the evening, after dinner and wine, we bought ourselves tunics and ten pounds of madder, that we might dye to blood red the entire cohort, possibly the entire legion, for I had started to believe that this wasn’t a disaster, that the XIIth was not so bad and that Cadus and I could singlehandedly turn it into something with a reputation as good as that of
the
Vth, which was now couched in memories of the same cherished flavour as the Macedonian horse meadows.

We were deluded, of course, and we knew it, but I think not even Cadus knew the depths of Hades we were about to plumb when we reached the camp at Raphana.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Raphana, in the plain of Abilene, south-east of Damascus

THE PERMANENT LEGIONARY
camp at Raphana stands half a mile from the town, in the eastern crook of a mountainous ridge known as the Mountains of the Hawk that shelters it from the savage westerly winds, but does nothing to shade it from the sun until late afternoon.

Like all permanent encampments, it was built on a square, with roads that passed north to south and east to west and crossed at right angles in the centre. It had a hospital, an armoury, a quartermaster’s stores, granaries, workshops for the engineers and stables for the horses. It had a parade ground within the walls and another around the outside. I knew the layout already, for each camp was the same wherever it was built, and a legionary comes to know every pace of interior and exterior as well as he knows his lovers’ faces.

We presented there in the late afternoon on the last day of April. The watch guards at the gate gave us the names of the men we must find and waved us through, eyeing our pack mules, our horses – the bay mare had been pampered in
Damascus
and looked especially fine – our madder-red tunics and in particular my shining shirt of mail.

I loved the feel of it too much to pack it on the mules, and in any case we had decided to present ourselves as fighting men, not as weaponless recruits. I wore my armour, my cavalry sword and my rounded shield, and Cadus wore his helmet with full transverse plume, a thing he had not done since the last legate’s demonstration over eighteen months before.

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion’s Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins. The legions’ respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.

At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched the Scythians’ sign of the goat and the Fulminata’s crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself.

The ache in my gut that had hit me when Pantera first named our destination returned and multiplied. The door ahead of us was closed only by a linen sheet with lead weights stitched haphazardly along the bottom; no bars, no guards, no sign that those inside took any particular care to protect the legions’ wealth stored in the cellars below.

I glanced at Cadus. His face was set fast and hard. He shrugged, and jerked his chin at the doorway and I tugged aside the linen so that he could pass through ahead of me,
wretchedly
aware that this was the last time I might come under his order.

The clerk of clerks was a short, bulbous man named Munius Cattulinus, whose only narrow parts were his lips and his eyes. He sat behind a desk that was far more solidly built than the hut – I will not dignify it with the name of an office – that was his domain. He was writing when we approached, and, as is normal for small men promoted beyond their capacity, he made us wait before he looked up.

‘You’re late.’ He spoke in Greek, with the caprine thickness of the locals. ‘We expected you on the ides of March.’

I bit my lip and stared at my feet. In Cadus, I felt the kind of rising anger I had seen in Pantera. But this was a legion; we could not simply mount our horses and ride away.

‘Then you underestimated by exactly one month and a half the time it would take us to travel.’ Cadus was Cattulinus’ superior. In the crispness of the words, the perfect Latin used where the clerk had spoken Greek, he made that plain. ‘We require lodgings. My clerk will need to be reassigned to his new commander.’

‘He already has been.’ A dry, acerbic voice came from our left, from the far corner, where the stairs descended to the cellar. A trapdoor stood open. I could not turn, for discipline said I must keep facing forward, but from the corner of my eye I saw the trapdoor lowered and heard a bolt slide and lock and knew that, if nothing else, our wealth would be locked safely away.

Steps echoed on the hollow floor. They walked around me, leading a lean shadow. I focused on the clerk’s hands, on the flesh that bunched on either side of the silver ring with the garnet set into it that dug into his right thumb; on the ink stain on the pad of his fourth finger, on the quill that dripped ink on to the newly written document. If it were mine, I would have thrown it away and begun again. Already, I knew
that
Munius Cattulinus, scribe and clerk to my new legion, would send it as it was.

The lean shadow stopped on the far side of the desk. Its owner moved himself deliberately into my field of view. ‘Aulus Aurelius Lupus, centurion of the first century, the second cohort.’ He placed his palms on the table and used them as props, to bring himself closer to me. ‘You, I understand, are my clerk, possibly my courier. Can you wield a sword on horseback?’

‘I can.’ My voice was as dry as his; drier. I looked up and, for a panicked moment, imagined myself desiccated to the point of the man opposite me; to see him was to think of summer dust, of plums gone to prunes too hard to eat, of toads caught out of water and drawn down to their hard, flat skins.

His face clung to his skull in a series of hollows, the opposite of the fleshy, almond-eyed Hyrcanian faces that I had grown used to. His hair was uniformly grey, not peppered like many men of his age, but as if he had once washed it in iron-water and the colour had set fast. His eyes were the same flat, iron hue and they searched me from my heels to my head.

‘Your name?’

‘Demalion.’

He ran his tongue round his teeth and I saw the purple tip of it slip between his lips, like a lizard’s. ‘Your tunic,’ he said, at length, ‘appears to be red. Why?’

Because we were going to set a fashion, and call ourselves the Bloody Legion
. With more courage, that’s what I would have said. But I read no humour in those grey eyes and my courage failed me.