The Blood of Rome

by Simon Scarrow

  ‘Optio, let’s get moving.’

  The optio nodded and then braced himself to call the orders loudly enough to be heard over the din of the mob outside the yard.

  ‘Shields up! . . . Advance!’

  At a steady, measured pace they marched towards the portico and then out into the street. Those closest fell back to give them space but were prevented from giving much ground by those behind, and the optio had to push and shove people aside before his patrol and the prisoners could make any progress. All around was a sea of angry shouting faces and waving fists. Some tried to thrust past the Praetorians to strike the prisoners, who were forced to keep their heads down and take the blows on their shoulders and the hands and arms tied across their necks. Some in the crowd had sticks and beat at the shields as the Romans edged by.

  ‘Don’t strike back!’ Cato shouted. ‘I’ll have any man who does flogged!’

  They pushed on, struggling through the crowd along the avenue, and now stones and dung were hurled at them as well. Macro swore out loud as a piece of shit struck him on the nose and he reached for his sword. Cato grabbed his arm.

  ‘No! Leave it!’

  His friend glared back and growled incoherently as he shook Cato’s hand off, and then kept his helmet lowered as they continued forward. Ahead, the crowd began to thin out as they reached the fringe of the screaming mob and then, to Cato’s relief, they emerged into the open and quickened their pace as they pulled away. The more ardent of the local people followed them, hurling insults and jeering as they threw the last of their soiled missiles after the Romans. Then, from the direction of the acropolis, he saw more Praetorians trotting towards them and recognised Centurion Ignatius at the head of his men.

  ‘Tribune? Sir?’

  ‘We’re here!’ Cato raised his hand. ‘Have your men keep the crowd away and then follow us back to the acropolis. But make sure no one gets hurt.’

  ‘Yes, sir! My lads can handle them easily enough.’

  ‘I meant make sure none of the locals get hurt.’

  ‘Oh . . . Yes, sir.’

  As Ignatius’s men formed a shield wall across the avenue, Cato and the others hurried on, relieved to have escaped from the enraged crowd. But Cato’s relief quickly faded and turned to anger as he glared at the Praetorians, bloodied and bruised and covered in filth. The tensions that were simmering in the streets of Artaxata had been dangerous enough already. Now he would have to find a way to punish these men that would satisfy the anger of their victims and help repair the damage they had caused.

  That evening, as the prisoners languished in a storeroom at the end of the stables, Cato was summoned to the palace to account for what had happened that afternoon. Rhadamistus sat on his throne, leaning slightly forward as he listened to Cato’s report. At his side, on a divan, lay Zenobia, playing with a cat as she glanced up occasionally and gave Cato a knowing smile. He did his best to ignore her, and when their eyes did meet fleetingly the familiar chill filled his heart. When Cato had finished, the king sat back and folded his arms.

  ‘What do you intend to do about these men of yours, Tribune?’

  ‘They will be punished, Majesty.’

  Rhadamistus cleared his throat. ‘I hear that seven of my subjects were killed, and another six were wounded. How many of your men were killed in the incident?’

  Cato shifted his weight on to his other foot. ‘None, Majesty. And those who were injured received only superficial wounds.’

  ‘None,’ Rhadamistus repeated with heavy emphasis.

  Cato shrugged. ‘My men are trained to fight. The civilians were not.’

  ‘Quite. My people are angered by what happened. And so am I. They want blood for blood. And so do I. We demand justice.’

  ‘There must be justice, Majesty. On that we agree. Justice tempered by consideration of the circumstances that gave rise to this unfortunate incident.’

  ‘As far as I am aware, and your own words confirm it, the circumstances were that your men entered the inn, got drunk, used the women there, refused to pay, and when confronted they drew their swords and butchered several of my subjects. Those are the circumstances, are they not?’

  Cato could only nod his assent.

  Rhadamistus sighed. ‘I understand that you want to defend your men, Tribune. But if I allow them to be spared, then you and I may win your men’s approval, but that will outrage my people. However, if I condemn your men then I will win my people’s approval, while your soldiers will be angered.’ He shook his head. ‘It is a problem. But the truth is that in a year’s time I will still need the loyalty of my people, while you and your men will almost certainly have left Armenia. I have more to gain by executing these soldiers than if I do not. Don’t you agree?’

  The question was rhetorical and Cato did not consider it deserved a reply. Instead he posed a question of his own, and delivered it in a tone tinged with contempt: ‘Don’t you think that you have murdered enough of my men already?’

  There was a sudden awful tension in the chamber. Zenobia’s hands stilled as she stopped stroking the cat and stared at Cato. The king clenched his jaw, but Cato saw no anger in his expression at first, then he recovered from his shock and rose swiftly to his feet in order to tower over the Roman officer.

  ‘How dare you speak to me in such a manner?’

  Cato did not flinch. ‘Do you deny it?’

  ‘I am the king of Armenia! I will not be spoken to in such a way by a mere Roman officer. You will go on your knees and beg for my forgiveness.’ Rhadamistus stabbed his finger towards the floor directly in front of the dais. ‘Kneel!’

  ‘I will not kneel to you,’ Cato said deliberately.

  The king’s bodyguards on either side of the dais began to edge forward.

  ‘Then you will pay for it with your head.’

  ‘Before you even consider harming me, you might want to remember that there are nearly a thousand of my men just outside your palace. If you kill me, then I assure you they will kill you and all your followers. It would be better that you sat down and listened to me . . . Majesty.’

  The two men glared at each other, and then the king resumed his seat, his face drained of blood as he gritted his teeth. Cato took a moment to steady his nerves and continued to speak calmly.

  ‘I will see to it that the family of the innkeeper is compensated for his death and for the damage to his property. The soldiers responsible will be flogged and their ringleader will receive twice as many blows as the others. The punishment will be carried out in the great market for all to see that justice has been done.’

  ‘Roman justice, you mean,’ said Zenobia.

  ‘It is the only justice my men and I will answer to.’

  ‘And if His Majesty refuses, and insists on his justice? What then?’

  Cato did not answer, and as Rhadamistus stirred he feared that the queen was on the cusp of making the confrontation even more dangerous.

  Before anyone could speak again there was the sound of running feet and Narses raced into the room, breathless and agitated.

  ‘Majesty!’

  ‘How dare you interrupt us?’ Rhadamistus roared. ‘You dog! I’ll—’

  Narses was anxious enough to speak on. ‘It’s the nobles, Majesty. They have come. All of them. And their followers.’

  At once the king’s expression changed and he grinned in triumph. ‘I knew it! I knew those cowards would bend the knee and come crawling to me to ask for mercy. Where are they?’

  Narses glanced at Cato and his nerve began to fail him. ‘Majesty . . . They are approaching the city even now.’

  ‘Then we must meet them. Send for my cavalry commander. Tribune, have your men called to arms.’ Rhadamistus clapped his hands together in delight and turned to Zenobia. ‘There! It is all just as I said it would be.’

  But the queen already sensed the truth as she scrutinised Narses’ anxious face.

  ‘You fool,’ she muttered. ‘They’re not coming to surrender to you.’


  Rhadamistus looked surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  But Zenobia had turned her attention to Narses. ‘Tell him. Tell His Majesty.’

  Cato saw Narses swallow before he dared speak again. ‘Majesty, they are coming. At the head of a host. I fear they have come to destroy you.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  From the highest tower of the palace there was a fine view over the capital and beyond to the rolling landscape that surrounded Artaxata. Away to the west, some five miles distant, there was a great haze of dust. Before it advanced a line of horsemen, and every so often the afternoon sun glinted off a helmet as the nobles’ army advanced. The leader of the patrol which had spotted the enemy early that morning had been sent for, and now he emerged from the stairs to be questioned by his superiors.

  ‘How many men do they have, Majesty?’ asked Cato.

  Estimating the size of any enemy force was always a fraught issue, Cato knew. Inexperienced men often vastly overstated the number, and then there was the question of how much of the total force they could see. In hilly landscape, or dusty conditions, judging the size of a marching column was difficult even for experienced eyes. The horse-archer officer standing before him looked very young and his beard scarcely amounted to more than a few tufts of dark hair. He thought for a moment before he responded to his king.

  ‘He says four, maybe five thousand in all. No more than a thousand of those are mounted,’ Rhadamistus translated.

  ‘All the same, it’s impressive that they managed to gather so many people willing to take up arms,’ Cato mused as he shaded his eyes and stared towards the dust cloud as he considered the soldier’s report. The rebel nobles had gathered together barely enough men to match the forces at the king’s disposal, and Cato had little doubt that Rhadamistus’s men and the two cohorts were of better quality than the forces facing them.

  ‘No siege weapons, I take it?’ he asked the king.

  ‘He says not.’

  Cato frowned. He had to admire the courage of the Armenian nobles in taking on their king with the odds against them. Or were they acting out of desperation rather than courage? After all, most of them were condemned men and their choices were limited. They could wait in their estates or fortified towns to be destroyed one by one, or they could flee Armenia and throw themselves on the mercy of the rulers of neighbouring kingdoms, like Parthia. Instead they had chosen to take the fight to Rhadamistus in the hope that they could crush his army and force him to flee once again, if they could not hunt him down and kill him first. Cato could easily follow the train of thought that had led them to this course of action, desperate as it was.

  ‘They would be foolish to attack the capital without siege weapons, Majesty. I cannot believe they would throw merely themselves at the city’s walls. That would be little better than suicide.’

  ‘I agree.’ Rhadamistus stroked his chin. ‘Then what is their intention, do you think? To offer battle outside the city?’

  ‘Or to surround the city, encircle it with fieldworks and try to starve us into submission.’ Cato considered the river flowing around the capital. While it provided Artaxata with water and drainage, the swiftness of the current and the patches of shallows and rocks rendered it impossible to navigate. There would be no chance of relief or resupply from that quarter and so a prolonged siege might well succeed. After all, Caesar had managed to contain a greater force at Alesia, and fight off an even bigger army sent to relieve the Gauls.

  ‘Then we must not give them the opportunity,’ Rhadamistus decided. ‘We must march out to meet them, and crush them decisively. That will put an end to any thought of rebellion or challenge to my rule. And it will serve your emperor’s ends as much as my own, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Majesty.’

  ‘Then we must decide when to strike.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘It will be dark before they reach the city. It would not be wise to risk attacking under the cover of night.’

  Cato nodded with feeling. While a raid or other small-scale operation was possible in darkness, a battle was an action on an altogether greater scale and required clear oversight of unfolding events. Even with well-trained and disciplined men with experience of night-fighting, it was a risky endeavour that resulted in disaster far more often than it delivered success.

  ‘We should bring in the men and horses from the marching camp, Majesty.’

  ‘Abandon the camp? And let those traitors take it?’

  ‘We could defend it, but that may just cost us the lives of the men sent to hold the camp. Even if we hold it, what use will it serve? If we use it for the artillery then the enemy will simply move back out of range before standing their ground. I say we abandon it. It’s too far from the city wall to present any threat. It’s not worth fighting for. Better we concentrate our forces for the battle, Majesty. If we want the best chance of victory.’

  ‘You think there is any doubt about the outcome?’ Rhadamistus laughed. ‘Tribune, I expected more from you.’ His amusement faded. ‘After the way you stood up to me in my audience chamber, I thought you fearless. Maybe I was mistaken.’

  Cato refused to respond to the jibe. But there was something to be won from the arrival of the rebel army. ‘Your people have a new matter to distract them, Majesty. Their attention will shift to the threat posed by the rebel army that threatens to sack Artaxata. They will look to those who defend them. Now is not the time to punish my soldiers. You have my word that they will be disciplined as severely as the regulations permit, but there is no need for their fate to come between us any more.’

  Rhadamistus thought a moment and nodded his agreement. ‘Very well. I will put the matter aside, for the present. Who knows? With luck maybe those men will die in the battle as heroes, and save me the trouble of having them executed, eh?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Cato responded flatly. ‘That would be a solution.’

  ‘Good!’ Rhadamistus clapped his hands together. ‘Then we must prepare for battle! Ready your Praetorians and slingers. Tomorrow, at dawn, you will march at the head of your men, and I will ride at the head of mine, and together we will crush those dogs. By nightfall, there will be many more heads decorating the walls of my capital!’ the king concluded with a look of cruel satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, Majesty,’ Cato responded simply, even as he offered a prayer to the gods that the heads would not be those of himself and his men.

  Even before the first glimmer of dawn crept over the mountains to the east, the walls of the city were crowded with civilians keen to get the best vantage point to witness the spectacle of the coming battle. Behind the city gates, and along the length of the avenue beyond, the infantry and cavalry of the king’s army formed up and waited for Rhadamistus to emerge from the palace and lead his men out of the city. On the tower of the gatehouse, Cato and Macro looked to the west, where the rebel army was already extended in a line, just over a mile away. Their main strength was a large block of infantry armed with a motley selection of weapons and armour, as far as Cato could make out as he strained his eyes to pick out the detail. On each wing was a body of cavalry, about five hundred strong, horse-archers for the most part, but small groups were armed with lances and wore the scale armour of cataphracts.

  ‘I reckon there’s no more than four thousand of ’em, if that.’ Macro shook his head. ‘And they look more like a village militia than trained soldiers. Got to hand it to them, they have balls to challenge our lot like this.’

  ‘There’s also the men in the camp,’ Cato cautioned.

  ‘That lot?’ Macro chuckled. ‘How in Hades do the rebels think that’s going to help them? They’d be better off deploying them in the main battle line.’

  They switched their gaze to the marching camp, which had been overrun during the night. A handful of the king’s horse-archers, who had remained too long, had been surprised as the rebels rushed out of the darkness through the open gates and killed several of the Iberians before the others fled. Now the enemy had invested the camp
with a modest force of archers who stood on the ramparts ready to harass any of Rhadamistus’s men who ventured out of the city and passed by them. Some of them were keeping watch on the city while the others rested on some of the large piles of feed that had been abandoned when the king had ordered his cavalry to fall back behind the walls of Artaxata. On careful inspection Cato doubted there were more than a hundred archers there. Barely enough to be a nuisance. They would be easily dealt with once the main rebel force was defeated, or even if they were foolhardy enough to attempt to intervene in the battle.

  ‘All the same,’ Macro continued, ‘I’d prefer they were dealt with before we took on the main rebel force.’

  Cato nodded. But there were other considerations: the time it would take to eliminate the men in the camp, and the disproportionate losses that would have to be taken in any assault on the fortification. ‘I don’t like the idea of leaving them there, but they can be dealt with after we’ve defeated the others, if they don’t surrender first.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Macro regarded the archers for a moment longer before turning his attention back to the distant rebel army. ‘Either way, I can’t see them coming out of this on top.’

  Even allowing for the small force in the camp, Macro’s assessment was correct, Cato decided. The rebels barely matched the king’s army in number, had less than half the cavalry fielded by Rhadamistus, and had a large proportion of poorly equipped men whose morale might not even endure beyond the first charge by either side. Cato felt pity for them as they stood waiting for Rhadamistus and his army to approach. It was not difficult to imagine the desperate courage of men determined not to be ruled by a king who had already proved himself unfit to reign over Armenia and whose return could not be endured. In truth, his sympathies lay with the rebels and he would rather have been fighting with his men at their side than for the murderous tyrant terrorising the people of Artaxata. But Rome had chosen the side of the tyrant and Cato must do the bidding of the emperor, and the sour taste of bad conscience stuck in his throat.