Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth

by M C Scott

  In Macedonia, where I had grown to adulthood, we had used goose feathers for the lighter arrows and swan for the bear-hunters, but nobody had asked me what I thought and I had not volunteered the information. Rather, I had been stunned that Pantera had bothered to tell me anything useful at all; for the past six months he had told me precisely what I needed to know to get through each day and no more.

  Cadus always seemed at least three steps ahead of me, but he was my centurion, and while he had never once used that to hold me to silence, I was too young to ask anything, too deeply imbued with a legionary discipline that did not allow a man to question his superiors, too in awe of his battle majesty: I was nineteen years old, a conscript with two years’ training behind me, and I had not yet drawn blood.

  My lack of a kill, more than anything, was what I read in the flat stares of the Hyrcanian men. In this land – in all of Parthia, as far as I could tell – the boys killed a man or a boar or they died trying. Those who lived became men in that single act and were given women and horses to prove it. If a man was mounted, it was because he had taken at least one life in battle or in the hunt; and everyone rode.

  I despised myself for my weakness. I may have dreamed all my youth of life as a horse-trader like my father; I may have railed against my conscription and loathed the legions on principle, but even so, every morning in this place I cursed my lack of valour and every night, when I slept, my traitorous mind brought me dreams drenched in the blood of our enemies as my comrades in the Vth launched themselves into battle, taking risks, winning glory, rising in the ranks, killing the enemy and so becoming men … all without my being there.

  The fact that it was winter, when the weather forced a kind of peace on both sides, and that my comrades were currently enduring endless forced marches over the mountains in western Armenia because their general had deemed them unfit for battle, did nothing to hamper my fantasies.

  The Parthian merchants were staring at me still. I shook my head clear of imagined gore and continued on through the market, past the reeking stalls of dried and smoked fish, past bushels of shelled nuts that smelled of autumn and threatened more memories, past pickled eggs in stone jars and skinless seabirds packed in salt-barrels.

  Near the shoreline, I found the stall marked with the red-stained ewe’s hide where waited a bundle with my name on it that I had orders to open on the spot.

  Inside, I found a tunic made of fine undyed lamb’s wool, and trousers the same, and boots that might have been made of bearskin and a belt that certainly was, and a silver brooch the size of a duck’s egg to pin the woollen cloak that was wrapped around the bundle.

  All of this was my gift from the new, young, extravagant King of Kings, that a horse-trader’s scribe might attend a day’s hunting in the royal party without offending the royal proprieties. I should have been grateful, but I had had enough of Hyrcania and was churlish enough to disdain it as no more than my due.

  When I returned to the tavern – in Macedonia it would have been counted less than a shack and free men would not have deigned to enter – neither Pantera nor Centurion Cadus was present.

  They did not return that day, but both were there when I woke the next morning. Cadus lay on his back on the straw pallet, sleeping with the peace of a man who knows that the legionary watch-horns have no power to rouse him.

  Pantera, as always, was awake. He sat near the window, fletching the last of his arrows by a thin, grey light that bled in past the shutters.

  Pantera the Leopard, trader and friend of traders; Pantera the Roman spy who claimed to have come from the emperor himself, and had letters enough to persuade a legionary commander in Oescus to give him two men; Pantera, who had picked me from four thousand others because, alone of my century, possibly of my cohort, perhaps of my legion, I could read and write Latin as well as Greek.

  Out of habit, I cursed my mother’s father, who had paid for the tutor, believing that all his grandsons should be literate. For good measure, I cursed my father, and my father’s father and all the way back up the line to the misbegotten son of a she-ass who had sold the great Bucephalos to Alexander and thus guaranteed that his descendants would be horse-traders for ever more.

  Because that was the other thing that had sealed my fate: Pantera might conceivably have been able to find another scribe in one of the legions who could write Greek and Latin with equal ease, but there was none who also had a lifelong eye for a horse, and could ride as well as he could march; better, in my case.

  I chose not to think about that; like Macedonian mornings, some things were best remembered through a haze. I drew in a breath and tasted ice on the air and threw back the bed-hides, so that I might not be tempted to stay long in the warm.

  ‘You can open the window,’ I said. ‘It can’t get any colder in here than it already is.’

  ‘It may even be warmer outside,’ said Pantera. ‘They say spring throws itself on a man fast here, like a woman in drink, and you can never tell when the sun will outweigh the chill.’ He threw open the shutters and leaned on the sill to finish his work. His tone was mildly pensive. ‘Have you found the women forward here?’

  Surprised, I laughed aloud. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Fathers give their girl children in marriage to their friends the day after their first bleeding, and if a woman looks askance at another man she’ll find herself spreadeagled on a cartwheel and that cart pushed into the sea.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. It must be the women of other nations who are forward.’

  The new light showed Pantera dressed in a tunic of the same fine-woven lamb’s wool as the one I had collected from the market, except that it was black, so that the silver brooch – his was the size of a child’s fist and bore amber at its centre – was shown off more brightly.

  I watched him tie off the last of the arrows; a raven’s wing flight on one of the heavy bear-killing shafts. He lifted it and it vanished and I, still sleepy, was transported temporarily to childhood, mouth agape, a little worried, a little charmed by his sleight of hand, until he stood and his good black cloak flew a little with the movement and I saw that the entire quiver hung from his hip and he had not performed magic at all. The peacock flights outnumbered the raven by two to one. In my disappointment, I counted them, and tried to think what the quarry might be.

  Pantera had no thought for me. He had turned to look east, towards the place where the lowering sky pressed down on the leaden sea. The flat, crushed sun cast him in sulphur and citron, gilding his hair to the rich red-gold of the Gauls, and the peacock flights at his hip became as living jewels, ablaze with ice and fire in their hearts. By a trick of the light, his hands were a god’s hands, and his face, caught on the three-quarter turn, held a like divinity.

  It was more than a morning in Macedonia, that look; it caught me deeper, and twisted harder, so that I caught my breath.

  Hearing it, Pantera turned fully round, one brow raised. This once, his features were clear, his gaze steady over a mouth that could hold a thousand expressions and currently held none, and in that moment it seemed to me that I saw the true man for the first time in half a year of looking; and that Pantera was taut as his own strung bow.

  I looked away, down, at my hands, at my feet, at Cadus, rising muzzily to waking. When I looked back again, Pantera had stepped away from the light and was the Leopard again, lost in the lazy shadows that clung to the room’s margins; a man neither big nor small, with hair the colour of the brown bears in the forest, and eyes the brown-green of a river I had swum in as a child. Like that, he could have walked into a crowd and men would barely have noticed he was among them. I had seen him do exactly that.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked. His voice did not sound tight. I thought I had imagined the tension, perhaps had wanted it to be there.

  ‘As much as I ever am.’ I stood at the window and let the freezing air knife into my lungs, let it pare away whatever impossible longing might have taken root.

  I made myself read the la
nd, as I had been taught. To the north, layers of cloud lay draped across the horizon in a way I had come to know these past six months.

  ‘Besides snow,’ I asked, ‘what should I be ready for?’

  ‘For a hunt such as you have never known.’ Pantera’s smile was bright. ‘Whatever happens, do exactly what Cadus tells you. His job is to keep you both alive.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SNOW HAD not yet begun to fall when the boar charged from the forest.

  A shout went up; the men who rode in the company of Vardanes II, King of Kings of Parthia, supreme ruler of all land from the Euphrates to the Indus, were nothing if not swift to recognize danger.

  But the beast moved faster than any man could do and, from the beginning, it had only one target: it charged as if directed by the gods, straight for the new young King of Kings himself, mounted in his gold and glory on a swift bay mare.

  In an empire where men lived, died, ate, drank, bargained, loved and killed on horseback, the horse that bore the King of Kings was the best to be found in all his eighteen client kingdoms; fleet of foot, sharp of eye, with the small ears, wide nostrils and compact jawbone that were said by Xenophon to denote the finest of horses, her hide was the rich, deep bay of a bronze dish, and her mane and tail were black as ebony. She was trained to war and the hunt; to stillness in the midst of battle, the speed of a wolf in the forest.

  Nevertheless, she was not fast enough to outrun a boar, and even if she had been, there was no obvious route to safety, for the King of Kings, beloved of the gods, was hemmed in on one side by the bleak forest whence came the boar, and on the other three sides by such a collection of courtiers and guards and body slaves as to make three more walls.

  West, which is to say behind him, forty matched Nubian slaves walked naked in the chill sea air, carrying whole on a trestle a pavilion of kingfisher-coloured silk, made large enough to enable the King of Kings to ride his horse in through the entrance and partake of his midday meal without the inconvenience of dismounting.

  He had just done exactly that; the kingfisher pavilion was even now being readied to carry back to the palace.

  North, to the king’s left, between him and the just-thawed sea, thirty cooks and their under-cooks and pot-boys similarly tidied away the remains of the roast buck that had fallen to the King of Kings’ own bow some days previously and had been the central part of the royal feast.

  East, where the mountains curved down to kiss the sea, were grouped those merchants, councillors and vassal kings who had been granted rare permission to join Vardanes II in his winter residence, and further honoured by the invitation to join him in his hunt.

  Only seventeen of Parthia’s eighteen vassal kings were present; Tiridates of Armenia alone had not been invited. As uncle to the King of Kings, brother to the late king, Vologases of blessed memory, he was not perhaps yet sufficiently recovered from his mourning to enjoy the company of his nephew.

  And besides, the Roman general Corbulo was camped with six legions on Armenia’s western borders. He might have been fully occupied in putting all thirty thousand men through winter fatigues that made war look like a day of rest, but a king could be excused for choosing to stay and defend himself and his integrity, at least until the new King of Kings had concluded this war council and launched his own attack on the mewling, pale-skinned braggarts who so offended the integrity of his empire.

  The war council had been conducted over the roast buck. A horde of mounted men to whom fighting was as necessary and integral as breathing did not take long to decide on a new war. When the King of Kings had suggested they make a late autumn attack on the Roman camps, long after the end of the fighting season had notionally ended, he had been roundly cheered by his vassals.

  The seventeen client kings had fallen over themselves in the following discourse to promise horse-archers, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, infantry and, from the one who ruled the far eastern border with Mathura, elephants with which to grind Rome into the ground.

  Weaving through their midst at his most effacing, and most efficient, Pantera had taken a dozen different commissions to source fresh mounts of sound stock at a good price for the coming battles. I, as his clerk, had written each one down. Against my better judgement, I found myself listening hard, making other, inner, notes of the tactics they proposed, and how much they knew of the strength of each legion.

  They knew of the Vth, my legion, of their skill in battle, of how they had won Antium for Octavian, and then fought against Parthia for Tiberius; they were glad the Vth was not yet on their borders, although concerned that it was camped so close in Moesia. I may have loathed the Vth on principle when I was forced to march in its company, but here it was my legion; the men were my brothers. I caught myself smiling broadly once, or rather, Pantera caught me, and threw me a look that ensured I didn’t smile again for the rest of the meal.

  It was a rowdy, enthusiastic council; each man was testing his standing with the new King of Kings, and none had yet gained ascendancy. With all to play for, and the king known to favour courage in the hunt above all else, the lesser kings had moved their mounts swiftly away from the pavilion and towards the forest when the horns summoned them to the hunt, the mind of each bent on the ways he might outshine his brothers.

  Still, when the boar charged from the forest, none of them moved fast enough to stand in its way.

  I was one of the many who had shouted a warning as the beast hurtled from the thick, scrubby forest. I jerked my horse round, thinking to throw it forward and take the body of men with me, and at least look as if I was doing something useful.

  A calloused hand fell on my wrist, skin on skin, holding me still. Vilius Cadus shook his head, and jerked his chin sideways to where Pantera had lifted his bow from his saddle horn. The usual pall of envy and resentment began to poison my reason – yet again, Cadus had been privy to our business when I had not – but then I caught sight of Pantera’s bow for the first time, and was lost.

  My great-uncle Demetrios, the last conscript in our family, had such a bow, and had brought it back home when he had retired after the Thracian campaign.

  I may not have wanted to be a legionary, but all my childhood I had yearned to hold and to shoot such a weapon. It was of Scythian type, a war bow as much as a hunting bow, small, deeply curved, with a full belly, richly decorated, and polished horn at the tips.

  With unhurried speed, Pantera leaned back and reached for the quiver that hung from his hip.

  Three arrows sang in the clean, cold air.

  Soaring high across the iron sky, they held their own fine tune; a chord played so close together as to make almost a single note. There are men who will tell you they could not have come from the same bow, but they had; with my own eyes I saw Pantera shoot them.

  I did not shout now; nobody did. Even the King of Kings sat in measured silence, watching their flight. Afterwards, that was what the gathered kings remembered most clearly: that alone among the party, their king had not cried out.

  The first arrow struck the boar behind its shoulder and sank deep, so that only the peacock flights stood blue-green against its steaming hide.

  The beast barely slowed its charge, but then I had been taught that nobody had ever stopped a boar but with a ten-foot spear with a good broad blade and a crosspiece one third of the way down the haft – and a lot of luck.

  The second arrow struck the beast in the eye and sank as deep as the first; the raven flights were lost against the black bristle, which meant that the heavy iron barbs had penetrated the bone of the beast’s skull, exactly as they were supposed to.

  The boar grunted once, a sound so like a man disturbed in slumber that I nearly looked away to see who else had made the sound. But I did not, for Cadus’ hand tightened on my wrist, holding me steady.

  Thus it was that he and I witnessed together the moment when its haunches ceased to power the boar towards the King of Kings and it toppled sideways to the turf.

  ‘Good s
hot! What a shot! Did you see that? Did you—’

  All around, seventeen minor kings gave enthusiastic vent to their relief, none more so than Ranades IX, the bluff, broad-shouldered king of Hyrcania, in whose country they hunted, and under whose hospitality the King of Kings had so nearly met his end.

  If Vardanes had died, Ranades would have been required at the very least to take his own life. He might also have had to hand over his kingdom first, thus ensuring the deaths of all six of his sons. Such were the rules of sovereignty in the empire of Parthia.

  The royal shouts ricocheted off the forest wall and rolled out across the sea. Shore birds fled, and a single raven rose from far back in the forest. As if at its command, the shouts of the kings halted, severed so suddenly, so completely, that the silence fell like a hammer.

  I did not see the third arrow strike, but, forewarned, I turned to my right in time to see Vardanes II, King of Kings, by right of birth, war and parricide supreme ruler of Parthia and all her kingdoms, slide sideways on his magnificent bay mare.

  There he hung, half dismounted, held by the trappings of gold about his thighs, with the third of Pantera’s arrows protruding from the mail shirt above his heart, its raven flights black against the bright silver of his chest, its barbed point bloody at his back, where it came out a hand’s breadth to one side of his spine.

  ‘Run!’ This time I did slew my horse sideways. ‘That mad fool has ruined us! Run for your— Oof!’

  That mad fool – Pantera – had slammed his elbow into my solar plexus, robbing me of breath, words and movement. From my other side, Vilius Cadus grabbed my mount’s reins, so that even when I could breathe again, I could not escape.

  Cadus’ voice wove over my head, fine as a breath. ‘Demalion, be still. Smile. Particularly smile at the king of Hyrcania. Do this, and we will live. Fail and we will die in exactly the manner you fear most.’