3. Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  From dawn until an hour before sunset Quintus Sertorius watched Pompey's legions drawn up in battle formation, wondering as the day dragged on if Pompey would stay the course, or whether he would commence to march away. It was this latter alternative Sertorius wanted; the moment Pompey's back was turned, he would have found out soon enough that he had made a terrible blunder. As it was, either the kid was smart enough to know what he was doing, or else some lucky divinity stood by his shoulder and persuaded him to wait on for hour after hour in the frightful sun. Things were not going well for Sertorius, despite the many advantages he enjoyed the superior ability of his troops to endure the heat, plenty of water to drink and splash around, an intimate knowledge of the surrounding countryside. For one thing, he had heard nothing from Lucius Hirtuleius once he had reached Segovia beyond a curt note saying Metellus Pius was not there, but that he would wait for thirty days to see whether the old woman turned up before he proceeded as ordered to join Sertorius. For another, his scouts posted on the highest hills in the district had discerned no column of dust coming down the dry valley of the Sucro to indicate that Hirtuleius was on his way. And by far the biggest worry of all! Diana had disappeared. The little white fawn had been with him all the way from Osca, unperturbed by the scuffle and chaos of an army on the march, unperturbed too by the summer sun (which ought to have burned her, as she was albino, but never did one more sign of her divine origins). And then when he had located himself here by the Sucro, with Herennius and Perperna in good position near Valentia to soften Pompey up, Diana disappeared. One night he had gone to sleep in his command tent knowing the animal was curled up on its sheepskin rug beside his pallet, only to find when he awoke at dawn that it had vanished. At first he had not fretted about its absence. Beautifully trained, it never soiled the interior of any building with urine or droppings, so Sertorius had simply assumed that it had gone off to do its business. But while he broke his fast it also broke its fast, and during the summer it was always hungriest after the respite of darkness. Yet it did not come back to eat. That had been thirty three days ago. His alarm growing, Sertorius had quietly searched further and further afield without result, then finally had needed to ask other people if they had seen it. Immediately the news had spread it seemed like a fire in tinder dry scrub until the whole camp had scattered panic stricken to look for Diana; Sertorius had been driven to issue a harsh order that discipline must be maintained even if he disappeared. The creature meant so much, especially to the Spaniards. When day succeeded day without a sign of it, morale plummeted, the decline fueled by that stupid disaster at Valentia which Perperna had brought on when he refused to work with poor loyal Gaius Herennius. Sertorius knew well enough that the fault lay with Perperna, but his people were convinced the fault lay in Diana's disappearance. The white fawn was Sertorius's luck, and now his luck was gone. It was almost sunset when Sertorius committed his army to battle, secure in the knowledge that his troops were in much better condition to fight than Pompey's, obviously suffering from the long wait under the summer sun. Pompey himself was commanding his right with Lucius Afranius on the left and the center under some legate Sertorius suspected was new to Spain, as no one among his scouts could put a name to the face. Their encounter outside Lauro the previous year had given Sertorius a profound contempt for Pompey's generalship, so he elected to fight opposite Pompey himself, which left Perperna to deal with Afranius; his center belonged to Sertorius as well. Things went excellently for Sertorius from the beginning, and looked even better when Pompey was carried from the field just as the sun set, one thigh scoured to ribbons by a barbed spear. Behind him he left his big white Public Horse, dead by the same spear. Despite the valiant attempts of young Aulus Gabinius to rally it, Pompey's rudderless right began to retreat. Unfortunately Perperna was not doing nearly as well against Afranius, who punched a hole in his lines and reached Perperna's camp. Sertorius was forced to go to Perperna's rescue in person, and only contrived to eject Afranius from the camp after sustaining heavy losses. Darkness had fallen as the full moon rose, but the battle went on by moonlight and torchlight despite the dust; Sertorius was determined that he would not break off the engagement until he stood in a strong enough position to win on the morrow. Thus it was that when hostilities did cease, Sertorius had good cause to look forward to the next dawn. "I'll string the kid's carcass from a tree and leave it for the birds," he said, smiling nastily. Then, with an eager yet despairing look: "I don't suppose Diana has come back?" No, Diana had not come back. As soon as it was light enough to see, battle was joined again. Pompey was still in command, lying on a stretcher held at shoulder height by some of his tallest men. Formed anew during the night, his army was drawn together tightly and had obviously been ordered to minimize its losses by not incurring any risks just the sort of enemy Sertorius detested most. And then a little after sunrise a fresh face and a fresh army strolled onto the battlefield: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, marching out of the west and through Perperna's ranks as if they did not exist. For the second time in less than a day Perperna's camp fell. Metellus Pius pressed on toward the camp of Sertorius. Time to go. As he and Perperna beat a hasty retreat, Sertorius was heard to wail desolately, "If that wretched old woman had not arrived, I would have kicked the kid all the way back to Rome!" The retreat ended in the foothills to the west of Saetabis. Here order began once more to emerge from disorder as Sertorius, trying to ignore Perperna, counted his losses perhaps four thousand men all told and put the men (mostly Perperna's) from badly mauled cohorts among cohorts in need of a few extra men. It had been Perperna's intention to make a formal protest about this, to complain loudly that Sertorius was deliberately undermining his authority, but one look at the set face with the maimed orbit decided him to leave well enough alone. For the time being. Here too Sertorius finally got the news that Lucius and Gaius Hirtuleius had been killed at Segovia, together with the entire Spanish army. A crushing blow, and one Sertorius had never expected. Not when the enemy had been the old woman from the Further province! And how cunning, to march so circuitously that his real intentions had never even been suspected, to hustle himself past Miaccum and Sertobriga in the distance pretending to be Hirtuleius, to march then by the light of the moon and raise no dust to give his presence away as he came down the Sucro! My Spaniards are right, he thought. When Diana disappeared I lost my luck. Fortune no longer favors me. If Fortune ever did. The kid and the old woman, he was informed, had evidently decided there was no point in continuing to march southward; after they had cleaned up the field and looted hapless Saetabis of all its food, their armies had turned into the north. Well, that was good thinking. Sextilis was upon them and they had a long way to go before the kid could insert himself into winter camp. Only what did the old woman intend to do? Was he going back to Further Spain, or was he marching all the way north with the kid? Aware of an awful lassitude he did not know how to shake off, Quintus Sertorius decided his wounds were now licked sufficiently to heal; he would follow the old woman and the kid as they headed north, do what damage he could without risking another outright confrontation. His camp was dismembered and his army moving out, its guerrilla units in the lead, when two little children of the area came to him shyly, their bare feet even browner than their naked bodies, nostrils and ears pierced by shining balls of gold. In between them, a precious strand of family rope around its neck, was a dirt encrusted brown fawn. The tears sprang unbidden to Quintus Sertorius's remaining eye how nice, how kind! They had heard of the loss of his beautiful goddess given white fawn, and come to offer him their own pet as a replacement. He squatted down to their level, his face turned away so that they only saw its good side, would not be frightened by its bad side. To his great surprise, the creature they led began to leap and struggle at his advent; animals never shied away from Quintus Sertorius! "Did you bring me your pet?" he asked gently. "Thank you, thank you! But I can't take it, you know. I'm off to fight the Romans, and I'd much rather you kept it safe with you." "But it's y
ours," said the girl child. "Mine? Oh no! Mine was white." "It's white," she said, spat on her hand, and rubbed the juice into its coat. "See?" At this moment the fawn managed to pull its neck free of the rope and launched itself at Sertorius. Tears pouring down the right side of his face the good side he took it into his arms, hugged it, kissed it, could not let it go. "Diana! My Diana! Diana, Diana!" When the children had been sent off with their precious bit of family rope put into a big bag of gold carried by a slave under instructions to deliver everything to their parents, Quintus Sertorius bathed his fawn in the nearby spring and looked it over, crooning and clucking. Whatever the reason for its original disappearance might have been, it had clearly not prospered in the wild. Some large cat had attacked it, for it bore the deep and half healed marks of vicious claws on both sides of its rump, as if it had been pounced on from behind and dragged down. How it had managed to escape only the Goddess knew or had contrived at. Its poor little trotters were worn and bloodied, its ears shredded along their edges, its muzzle torn. The children had found it when they took the family sheep out to graze, and it had come straight up to them, put its nose in the girl child's grimy hands and sighed in shivering relief. "Well, Diana," said Sertorius as he put it into a box upon the tray of a wagon, "I hope you've learned that the wilds are for the wild. Did you smell a stag, was that it? Or did the camp dogs bait you? In future, my girl, you'll travel like this. I can't bear the thought of losing you again." Word had flown swifter than birds on the wing; Diana was back! And so was Quintus Sertorius's luck.