Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (9 page)

Lupus stalked with his own particular gait. I remembered to breathe as he came close; I had been slammed in the solar plexus by his vine rod often enough by then for the crime of holding my breath.

When I was with the Vth, I had not thought Cadus a particularly lenient centurion; there was not one man of the ten units under his command who had not felt the depth of his anger at one time or another, but he was always fair. He set standards and expected them to be kept and we knew it.

With Lupus, I found what it was to live under a man who changed his mind with the wind, so that it was possible I could be thrashed for not holding my breath the day after he had left me vomiting in the dirt for holding it.

I breathed in. The night was cold. I felt the air chill my forehead, felt my lungs bunch against it. I saw Lupus on the edge of my vision.

In six months, I had learned the skill of seeing sideways while looking forward. His orderly held his torch for him, a stooped man from Emona named Minicius. By its light I
studied
his dry-parchment face – and learned nothing. He could hold an expression of weary distaste through his own crucifixion, I thought, it was so moulded to his form.

He was nearly past when his eyes caught mine. Only for a fraction of a heartbeat, and I am sure without his intending it, but it was there, that human touch that lets soul meet soul, from which no man can hide.

And what I saw was more terrifying than anything I had yet seen: worse by far than his particular loathing of me, or his counterfeit rage; worse even than the moment of cold calculation before he changed his mind again so that what was right yesterday was wrong today. I knew all of those, and how he showed them, and none was present now: what I read in his eyes was terror.

Lupus was deeply afraid.

Knowing that, my own fear threatened to suck me away. I felt Syrion’s shoulder forced against mine, as if by power of will and the friction of his tunic he could keep me standing. ‘Careful …’ He eased the word out under his breath, taking a risk even with that.

I leaned my own weight back against him by way of thanks, and the moment passed, but not my fright. I breathed in the cold night and in the time it took I saw us decimated, even Lupus drawing lots from the bag, fearing to pick the one black stone in every ten and the death by attrition that must follow. Or being marched to the sea and made to swim until we drowned; I had a particular fear of deep water that my journeys had never undone. Or …

The horn sounded a single note, high and long, the song of the moon. It caught my thoughts and carried them out into the black sky. Careful not to make a sound, I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. Beside me, I felt Syrion do the same.

Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his
voice
every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry.

‘Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles.’ Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent.

‘If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead.’

His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual.

His voice rocked us. ‘To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa.

‘Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear’ – did I hear a note of distaste there? – ‘red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue.

‘You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand.

‘You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.’

C
HAPTER
N
INE

AT THE MOUTH
of the stockade, crushed tracks sworled amid the night’s fall of virgin snow; a stamp of sandal-prints and hoof-prints and the thick-edged blur of a heavy object, dragged without care.

Behind me, the tents of our century sagged under the new snow, and snow covered the earth rampart we had thrown up around them. Ahead, the stockade we had built to hold the mules had been dismantled piece by careful, silent piece, the stones piled neatly, as if by men at drill practice. And the mules were gone, all twelve of them: one for each of the ten tent-units, plus two for Lupus. Gone, too, was the firewood we had stacked to one side under the frozen oxhide.

I stood still for a moment, stealing the last vestiges of fire-warmth from the depths of my cloak, taking in the magnitude of the disaster.

Somewhere, a songbird hurled notes into the clear and empty sky. For nine days the clouds had hung over us, pressing down on our heads and our moods, but they had emptied all their snow during the night, leaving the sky such a startling blue as to make my eyes ache even when I looked down to the
churned
mess at my feet in an effort to discover who it was we must attack to regain what was lost.

‘First century, first cohort of the Fourth. They left their mark on the gatepost. Unless that’s a ruse to make us go the wrong way when we go to get our mules back.’

I wrenched round. Lupus stood behind me, wrapped in a black goat-hair cloak. He wore no helmet, only a heavy felt cap that covered his lead-iron hair and extended down beyond his ears so that he looked even more as if someone had lifted off his head and replaced it with a skull for a joke.

Nobody thought Lupus was a joke, but we were less afraid of him than we had been. He didn’t push us any less hard, nor was he less particular on parade; we still had to present arms in the morning, and march for the duration of the first watch, but the perverse fury that had made breathing a sin one day and forgetting to breathe punishable the next had frozen away in the savage cold.

We were the sharper for it, and had a kind of fragile pride in our new capacity; at the very least, Rufus didn’t play the fool on morning parade, risking a flogging to pull faces at the back of Lupus’ head as he passed, or cocking his leg like a dog marking territory where he had been.

The IVth legion was our enemy now, and Lupus was on our side. But they were stronger than us. The first century of any legion was first in the line of march and full of good men of long standing. Even the IVth had a few good men, and many of them were in its first century.

I saw no point in dwelling on that; in war, too, you cannot always choose your enemy.

‘They’ve taken the firewood.’ I said. ‘If we don’t get it back soon, they’ll slaughter the mules and build fires to smoke the meat so they don’t have to hunt for the rest of the month.’

Lupus stared north, to where they had gone. ‘Who was on watch?’

Of course he would ask that.

I said, ‘Polydeuces. He was on guard duty last night. He’s gone, so they must have taken him too. If Prefect Silvanus finds out, he’ll be flogged.’

And if he’s flogged, he’ll die
. I did not say that; there was a limit to my courage, and in any case it was obvious. Out of the ten units in our century, the men in ours had weathered the cold best, except for Polydeuces, who had taken the chill to his lungs in the first night’s watch and was soon coughing up lumps of matter thick enough to mould into bricks.

I thought I saw streaks of blood in it one night, as we crouched round our fire in a circle tight enough for each man to draw in the outbreath of the one opposite. He had tried to hide it with a hank of the straw that he kept up his sleeves to sweep it away, but I saw what he threw on the flames.

In the blistering snow light of morning, I watched Lupus purse his lips a moment, and braced myself to hear him say that it was Polydeuces’ own fault that he’d been captured – which it probably was – and that he’d flog him himself when the order came.

I was dizzy with cold and the sharp, knifing air that stole men’s sanity. I thought of all the small things Polydeuces had done for me: carrying wood when I had bruised my hand trying to take a stone from a mule’s foot; grinding corn when it was my turn but I was out hunting; cooking that same day, because I had caught nothing; grinding a new edge on my dagger when I destroyed it hacking at the frozen rawhide that held a broken tent peg.

He was a friend now, as much as Cadus had been, or my brothers back in Macedonia, in a childhood that seemed
ever
more a dream of someone I once knew in passing. It came to me that when Lupus spoke I might hit him, and that if I did so I would almost certainly die before Polydeuces.

I was braced for violence when I caught Lupus’ gaze. The flat, iron grey was not flat any more, but alive with what in any other man I might have named joy.

‘Silvanus won’t come up the mountain until the full moon,’ he said crisply. ‘That gives us two days to rectify our loss. Summon the others. We’ll get Polydeuces back. Whether we choose to take the mules back is another question. The longer they eat the enemy’s fodder, the less you have to collect and carry up the mountain.’

The prefect had arranged for fodder to be left for us just below the snow line. Gathering it had become one of the most hated chores of our winter in the snow. At that moment, though, feeding the mules was not top of my concerns.

‘Are we all going?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘The entire century?’ Horror must have been written on my face for Lupus looked at me a moment, and his wire-fine brow rose a little higher. I saw his lip curl.

‘That depends on what we learn over the course of today,’ he said. ‘Four units may suffice. It would be unfortunate if this were merely a diversion to pull us out of camp and we were to return and find we had lost everything for the sake of a dozen mules and a sick legionary.’

Not madness, then, but boldness, and forethought. I breathed in the cold air and felt less dizzy. I relaxed my hands, which had been ready for murder, at my sides.

Lupus continued as if I had not moved. ‘On the other hand, however much we despise the Fourth, they are not weak men. If we go undermanned, we’ll set ourselves at a disadvantage from the start. Intelligence is everything. We’ll go at dusk when we’re not so visible, and in the meantime you, Syrion
and
Horgias will spy ahead, find out what’s in our way and where the ambushes are.’

He tilted his head, looking at me. Fire still burned in the heart of his eyes, and the quirk of his lip was deeper now. ‘There will be ambushes,’ he said. ‘They will be expecting you and they will endeavour to capture you. I think we can consider this a declaration of war. Tell the rest that the morning parade and inspection will go ahead as normal.’

I was walking back through the snow to the tents when I realized that the curl of his lip had been the beginning of a smile.

‘He smiled? Are you sure? Was he foaming at the mouth? Were his eyes rolled back in his head and showing white all across?’

It was Rufus who asked, our wiry, red-haired locksmith who swore he had Gaulish parentage, and it wasn’t his fault he was barely tall enough to top the probationer’s measuring stick and was half Proclion’s width when any self-respecting Gaul would have been twice that size.

He was guarding our tents, and using the time to clean his armour against Lupus’ next inspection; up here, where we could tickle the soles of the gods’ feet did we but stretch our arms above our heads, the water had all frozen out of the air and we saw little rust, but the other side of the coin was that leather cracked easily, with the result that we all reeked of the sheep oil we used to keep it supple, and polished iron was soon coated in a fine film of grease and dirt.

Clad in a spare cloak over his own, with a felt cap hugging his ears, Rufus was seated on a log, warming his lanolin in a bronze mess cup over a fire made entirely of twigs. I crouched at it a moment, and held my hands out to the tiny, stabbing flames. I couldn’t feel the heat through my gloves, except as a lessening of cold.

‘First four units at least to go with Lupus,’ I said. ‘But not until nightfall. There’s parade inspection first for everyone except three of us who are to spy on the Fourth. Where are the others?’

‘Digging.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder towards the area we had set aside for the latrines. ‘Blow the horn; they’ll come fast enough.’

My lips were too cold for that. I cupped my hands to my mouth and gave vent to the long, yelping sound, not unlike a wolf, with which we called each other. The men I shared a tent with ran to me like hounds to the huntsman.

Syrion led; in older times, he would have been an Olympian, running, wrestling, throwing at the games, and feted afterwards for the sculpted muscles of his frame. He had pale hair, the colour of cut wood, with flecks of bronze through it that spoke of more authentic Gaulish blood somewhere in his lineage than did Rufus’ flaring red. Most of all, he was manifestly honest: he had a kind, open face that knew nothing of guile; what he said, he meant, and if you did not like it, still you could trust it.