Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth

by M C Scott

  We called him ‘the silent’ because he could walk across a bathhouse floor in sandals and make no echo, which was the hardest test we knew. On the mountainside, he was fast, quiet and easily our best tracker.

  Syrion was not as naturally silent, but his gymnast’s body made him supple and I would say that three quarters of subterfuge is in physical flexibility; the ability to mould oneself to the situation.

  I was neither silent nor particularly athletic. I had my cunning from my father, the horse-trader, and on to that I had grafted everything gleaned from six months with Pantera, which was enough. If I say it myself, we made a good team.

  The only mule path on the mountain spine ran high above the camps, almost at the roof-ridge of the range. We tracked the swath of ruined snow up beyond our camp until it turned hard right along the path.

  There, I gave a low, looping whistle that called Horgias and Syrion up to me.

  ‘It’s too easy,’ I said. ‘Lupus was right: if there’s going to be an ambush, they’ll be waiting for us along the mule path; there are plenty of places to hide. But there’s a goat path we could take that runs along the back edge of the peak; I found it while I was hunting earlier in the month. It’s narrower, and more dangerous, but there’s less chance of our being jumped and we can look over the top once every five hundred paces to be sure we’re still following the mules. Unless either of you has a better idea?’

  Neither had. In the thin, cold air, thinking was harder than it had been. The tents seemed like a hospitable refuge in comparison, the base camp an impossible luxury, beyond even dreams.

  I pushed on up towards the mountain head, ploughing through the fresh snow, seeking out stone or ice to step on where I could, that we might not leave our own trail. At the peak, we passed through a narrow crack in the rock that ran perpendicular to the line of the range. At its widest, it was the width of a man’s chest, so that we had to turn sideways, and edge our way along, and down, through the dim, frozen channel that the sun never reached, and then out again, into the same blinding snow light.

  From here, we had a view down on to the clouds and through their gaps to the dozens of small farmsteads dotted about the plain below. The edge here was closer to our path; less than the height of a man from where we shuffled along the goat track.

  I leaned in to the rock and began to pick my way along, and presently heard the quiet curses of the men behind as they saw the risk.

  Without turning my head, I said, ‘If you stay close to the rock, you’re less likely to fall.’

  Strained grunts were my reply. We each tilted in to the mountain and, like that, pressed north, holding every piece of rock that came to hand, heads down, tasting ice on the wind.

  Pantera had taught me to count as I walked, the better to estimate distance. Four hundred and ninety-eight treacherous, ice-laden steps later, I heard a man’s murmured voice, and a moment later saw a cloud of breath in the air.

  With my hand up, I halted, pointing. Horgias, who was closest, drew his knife, caught my eye, made a brief, simple mime, and passed me by, pressing close to keep himself clear of the edge.

  It was rumoured that Horgias had barbarian blood in him; how much and of what tribe none of us knew, but when he slid up that sheer mountain trail with his knife between his teeth he looked like nothing and no one I had ever seen. I was grateful that he was on our side.

  ‘He’ll kill them,’ Syrion said, from close in to my left.

  I said, ‘Not unless he wants to be flogged to death, he won’t,’ but even so, when Horgias came back, I looked first at his knife, for blood, and only when I found none did I back away into the shelter of a rocky outcrop and wait to hear his report.

  At the camp, Lupus had said this was a declaration of war and I had thought him snow-dazed, but up here it felt as if a boundary had been crossed, and civilization was on the farther side of it.

  Horgias crouched, to shelter better against the wind, and said, ‘There’s a full tent-unit of eight men watching the mule route, and an enemy encampment nested in the trees below. The mule tracks go on past.’

  ‘The prefect said we couldn’t combine our centuries to attack men of the other legion,’ Syrion said.

  ‘But I bet the men in the enemy camp know about the ambush,’ I said sourly. ‘If we were driven into it by men from up here, they might find it in themselves to take us prisoner. That wouldn’t be against the rules.’

  Horgias nodded, his lips drawn back in a smile that was a wolf’s snarl. ‘They want us all flogged. Why us?’

  ‘Lupus,’ Syrion said. ‘The other centurions hate him, even among the Fourth. He’s too distant. He doesn’t drink with them or whore with them. They don’t know who he is, and so they hate him.’

  ‘He loves war,’ I said, who had seen the ice melt from his eyes, and the fire behind it, and these two made sense to me now. I felt the truth in my marrow, and it warmed me. ‘He’s bored with camp life. The Fourth are making a huge mistake giving him a reason to fight them.’

  Syrion thought that through, in the serious way he did, and nodded. ‘Let’s go on a little way along the ridge,’ he said. ‘They know Lupus well enough to know he’s ruthless first and cautious second. They’ll want to keep enough men in their camp at the mountain’s end to hold us all off. A month’s pay says they won’t have left more than two other units in an ambush like this one.’

  ‘Done,’ Horgias said. ‘If the next two enemy camps have a unit in ambush above them, and the one after doesn’t, we’ll know you were right.’

  Syrion was right: there were only two more units waiting in ambush on the ridge, one above each of the next two blue camps.

  Sometime shortly after noon, therefore, we three turned round and made our way back along the goat path. The wind turned with us, and came from the west, pushing us to the mountain, gluing us to safe rock, away from the precipitous fall.

  It felt like a good omen, and I told Lupus of it when I returned. I had never spoken to him of omens before. In a day of strangeness, that was just another new thing. He liked it and told the men, so that by the time the light was failing they all knew that the gods were with us in our battle against the IVth.

  With our intelligence to guide him, Lupus had wrought a plan that was breathtaking in its beauty; elegant enough to be daring, but simple enough to work. We had used the remaining three hours until we were due to leave teasing it over, looking for gaps, and finding ways to plug them.

  It was the first time we had truly worked together as a century. By the time we left, we were all that much closer to each other, all learning to trust each other’s judgement, and all stirring to the first thrills of war. I, who had never killed before, nor even borne my sword in true action, found myself traipsing to the latrines eight, nine, ten times before we left, and still sick at the end of it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TO TAKE THREE men along the narrow goat path at the back of the mountain had been difficult, but not impossible. To take an entire century along there would have been impossible and we didn’t try.

  Lupus led the main party along the broad trail that linked all the century camps. The crushed snow was blue now in the late afternoon shadows, and freezing to ruts that made walking hard. He had us group into our tent-units and run at a jog-trot, with a distance of no more than twenty paces between each group.

  In full armour, carrying our supplies of food and water, our mattocks, our mess kit – everything – we could walk twenty miles a day, forty if we were forced to double time. That evening, we wore our armour, but no helmets; carried no shields, but only our swords and daggers, wound around with fleece. We wound more wool on our forearms to act as shields, and kept our heads warm with the felt caps we had made in the harshest of the weather. Travelling light like this, even in the dark, I had no doubt that we could march the eight miles to the enemy camp before midnight; certainly that was our goal.

  Syrion and I ran with Lupus at the head of the main group because we knew where t
he enemy units were waiting in ambush. Horgias, setting off earlier, had taken the other four men of our unit along the goat track, promising to reach the ambush places ahead of us.

  We reached the first of their camps around time for the evening meal. It was nestled in trees, lower down towards the snow line than I think was legal, but they’d been there for over two months and Silvanus had not made them move it.

  Their tents were set tight together in a square with branches across them to keep the snow off. A large fire was kept lit in the centre, and the men bunched around it, lightly armoured as we were, but with helmets on. They were still, silent, waiting. The fire’s light blinded them to movement in the shadows as we backed away thirty feet.

  There, I knelt in the snow beneath the first rank of trees and gave the call of the owl which was our signal for every man to halt where he stood. We waited a moment and heard Horgias call back, except that his call was not so much an owl as a man trying to sound like a wolf, and failing.

  The men around the fire were expecting some such. Hearing it, they jeered amongst themselves and, gathering their weapons, rushed up towards the place where Horgias had seen eight men lying in ambush.

  What they would have found there, if all had gone according to plan, was eight men bound and gagged, each one with the sign of the wolf carved on to the leather of his armour straps as a reminder of who had taken them.

  We didn’t stay to find out, but passed their camp at a dead run, and all were safely beyond it long before the main mass of the enemy returned carrying their newly freed comrades to the fire to warm away their frostbite.

  They didn’t send anybody after us. I don’t know what Horgias whispered in the ears of the fallen IVth as he tied the rawhide knots, but it was enough to frighten them into stillness, at least for the first part of the night.

  We continued on, running into the changing light. To our left, the sun slid down until it pierced itself on the mountain’s highest spikes, spilling bloody light down the snow and leaving a long purple bruise along the ridge.

  At the same time, the moon rose on our right, one day off full. It cast silver across the snow and ice, almost as bright as day, so that we could see our way as well as before.

  The first century of the IVth had come this same route on a night of no moon, when the clouds sat on the ground and spilled snow waist deep in places. My respect for them grew greater, not less, as we travelled along the same path, even when Horgias and Tears and the other men tied the third enemy unit and whooped their wolf call high above the mountain as they carried on ahead of us.

  Cadus was waiting for us on the path as we approached the last camp before our target, dressed in mountain clothes with none of the regalia of the parade ground, except that he carried his helmet under his arm, the plume crisping in the night air.

  Under the moon’s light, his hair seemed paler than I remembered it, strung through with silver, and his skin had the tight translucence we had shared in Hyrcania, when the cold pulled our flesh hard about our bones.

  Lupus ordered a halt in good order ten paces away and went forward to greet him. After three paces, he said, ‘Demalion. Follow,’ and walked on.

  ‘You brought all your men,’ Cadus said, as we approached. No greeting, no clashing salute, no officers’ exchange of gossip. ‘None left to guard your camp.’

  Lupus lifted one shoulder in a shrug. ‘We disabled three units on the way. Our entire century therefore faces seven units of the best men in the Fourth legion. I decided it was worth the risk.’

  ‘All or nothing.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to fail.’

  ‘No.’ Cadus ran his tongue round his teeth, thinking. They were of a height, he and Lupus, and both mountain-fit, but in all other respects they were as different as the moon from the sun. Cadus was a big, broad man, and given to laughter. He was not laughing now, while lean-faced Lupus, by his own standards, was vibrating with a kind of wild joy.

  Cadus said, ‘Do you need help?’

  ‘Of course. And of course I cannot accept any. They will have us all flogged if we break the rules. Centurions will not be exempted.’

  ‘That may be their aim,’ Cadus said slowly. His gaze was fixed on Lupus’ face. They stood a moment, each lost in the other’s thought. It came to me then that the only centurion of the two legions who did not hate Lupus was Cadus, and that I should have noticed that before now.

  At length, Lupus said, ‘They set ambushes above the first three enemy encampments, and I have no doubt that if we had not … disabled them they would have endeavoured to drive us down into the camps for the men there to take us prisoner. It could be, therefore, that we may drive some men of the Fourth in your direction. If they were to stumble into your camp, might you find it acceptable to take them prisoner?’

  Lupus’ eyes were wide with pretended innocence. In response, Cadus grinned in a way I’d come to know in Hyrcania.

  ‘I’ll set men in a chain along the route. If they run past us, we’ll take them.’ He clapped Lupus’ arm. ‘Good luck. Your men are good. If you make it, you’ll have broken the Fourth; they won’t try anything else in the last half-month before we go back to camp. Not at this end of the mountain, anyway.’

  Lupus half turned, and then wheeled back again. ‘It may be that I have read this wrongly, and that they do wish to destroy our camp. If your men would make themselves ready to block their passing, I would be grateful. I’ll send Demalion back to you if it seems such a thing is likely. That does not, I believe, contravene the rules as we were given them.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Cadus agreed, which might have been true by the letter of our temporary law, but was decidedly not true to its spirit. ‘But we shall keep this conversation between us three. And Demalion, if he comes, will be returning for treatment of a wound, not to bring news of an attack.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Lupus looked at me; they both did.

  ‘Agreed,’ I said, and followed Lupus back to our lines, grinning like a fool.

  We smelled the mules before we saw them; a ripe, warm scent of old hay and urine and steaming dung that left me aching to go in amongst them and run my hands under their manes to heat my fingers, as I had done as a child on the coldest days of herd-watch. I thought I knew about cold, then.

  With their smell like a wall before us, we inched round the last corner to the final enemy camp on our bellies, with our faces pressed to the ice.

  It was as well we were already down, for the camp built by the first century of the first cohort of the IVth legion was not like all the others, a huddle of tents with an earth rampart about, set in a vestige of shelter.

  Here, at the northernmost end of the Hawk range, the men had made the mountains their ally, setting their camp with its back in a natural corner, so that the northern and western flanks were solid rock with peaks that stretched up to scrape the stars.

  On the southern and eastern sides, the Blues had not grubbed in the frozen ground to throw up an earth rampart as we had done, but had built walls of stone, setting each one against the others without mortar, but solidly, so that it would have taken far more than one night to pull them down.

  The only gate faced southeast, on a scree slope so that any attackers must come uphill with uncertain footing and face an opening scarcely wide enough for two to go through; a nightmare to assault, and easily guarded from the inside.

  The mule stockade was fenced with logs set lengthways and kept in place by posts hammered into the ground. It stood at the southwestern edge of the camp. If there were men inside, we could not see them. In fact, we could see no men at all; as far as we could tell, all the remaining seven units of their century remained in the main compound, hidden behind the wall’s height, huddled in their tents – unless they had also spent the past two months building themselves proper barrack rooms; nothing seemed impossible.

  Whatever it was, they had built themselves a camp to match the legionary fortress down below. And we had placed ourselves at war with them.


  I lay face down in the snow and felt no cold. Blood hammered in my ears at the promise of action. I turned my cheek sideways and saw Lupus at my side.

  ‘We could climb over the wall,’ I said, ‘if Horgias has remembered what you said and gives us the diversion we need.’

  ‘He’s remembered,’ Lupus said. ‘Look.’

  I looked, and saw what Lupus had seen and bit my lip to keep silent, for Horgias had stripped to the waist and was wearing trews in the Parthian style that made him look even more the barbarian.

  Blue-skinned with cold, he was sliding like a snake down the edge of the rock that was one wall of the stockade. I watched as he paused beneath the stacked lumber that kept the mules safe, saw him delay a moment, working in the shelter made by his naked form, then rise and throw what he had made.

  He had made fire from the fire-pot at his belt and the wads of pitched straw we had woven in the afternoon, so that it might take the flame and hold it, and spread it in the mules’ fodder.

  In the stockade, a man shouted once: an order. I heard the sing of swords from their sheaths, many swords, and the dull ache in the air that comes from a mass of men moving to one purpose. Forgetting myself, I gripped Lupus’ arm, and he did not prise my fingers free, but murmured, ‘Steady, there … steady,’ as if I were a startled horse. I had never heard his voice so mild. He said, ‘If Tears and the others—’

  ‘There!’ I pointed to where Tears had appeared high on the stockade wall – a half-naked Tears, just like Horgias, except that he did not look like a barbarian; he was Apollo himself come amongst us. I had not seen how much he had grown in our time in the mountains, but saw it now, for he must have scaled the sheer rock that guarded the back of the camp and the mules’ stockade, and jumped down from there to run along the wall of stacked logs, and hurl his own fire deep inside.