by M C Scott
He had us run through our display in front of him, and what amazed me then – and still now – is that we could do it each time with the freshness of a new task; we never tired of finding ways to be faster, sharper, more effective.
If Paetus was impressed, he did not show it. Rather, he affected boredom and paid more attention to a distant carter loading late hay on to his donkey cart. The hounds running at his heels caught a rat or some such in the ditch by the road, but even had they not they would have been more interesting to Paetus than us, his men, putting our all into our display.
We came to stillness, sweating in the cool morning air. Lupus was furious, I could tell by the tilt of his chin and the triple pulse at his throat that only came when he was grinding his teeth. Outwardly, he was as bland as a statue, and in any case, we were not centre front: that place was reserved for Cadus and his century.
Corbulo would have spoken to us of our display, would have noted the good points, the good centuries, the good men, the parts that needed more work, and we would have trusted that he was right. Paetus did not so much as acknowledge what we had done, but launched at once into his reason for calling us.
‘Men! Winter is upon us and we have shown the enemy our mettle. Vologases, who is king of nothing’ – how I ached to show him the glories of Hyrcania as he said that – ‘has returned to his den to lick his wounds. We will see nothing of him until spring. I therefore offer to every man of you the opportunity to take three months’ leave. The roads are yet fit for travel; those who remain will march with me to new quarters at Rhandaea on the banks of the Murad Su, but the rest, those who choose freedom, may return to your homes, to your families, or remain here and enjoy a winter in the town, unhampered by your duties. If the numbers wishing to avail themselves of this opportunity grow too large, we shall draw lots for it. But first ask your centurions and they shall say who must march with us, and who can stay.’
He had been a consul in Rome, the highest order a man may hold who is not emperor. He had spoken before crowds many times, and knew the jinks and tricks of rhetoric that pull men to cheer him as he delivers ordinary news. He tried them all now, and stood before us with his arms raised as the last words rang off the palisades behind us – and was met by a fog of silence so thick, it might have smothered him there and then.
The smile crawled from his face. His arms came slowly down. He frowned at us, as a man who has woken into the wrong life, and does not know how to get back to all he holds dear, and then he turned on his heel and left us in our ranks, without so much as a salute of dismissal.
We held our silence until he was safely out of earshot, then Cadus stepped to the fore and turned. ‘Not a man of the first cohort shall leave this compound unless it is to war. The rest of you, decide for yourselves.’
Lupus did not have to say the same to us of the sixth cohort; he simply turned to face us and ran his eyes down our lines. ‘The man who wishes to leave us, raise his hand.’ It was thus understood that the leaving would be permanent, not three months’ unpaid idleness in the town, gaining unfortunate rashes and making children and drinking ourselves to poverty while Paetus lined his own pockets with the money that would have paid for our keep. If we left, then when we came back we would find ourselves in a new cohort, probably the second.
No hand was raised. The eighth cohort was the same, and rightly so, as the next most competent in the legion, and, oddly, the second; but the third, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth and tenth lost nearly half their men each.
The IVth legion went through the same process, to the same result, with the added insult that they had already lost their sixth cohort as bodyguard to some gilt shinings sent to Rome as victory spoils. The archers, I am told, lost not a man; they had their own code of honour, and it surpassed all but the best of ours.
Even so we were decimated by Paetus’ hand, for, by the end of that day, we had two legions of just over half strength, where a month before we had been three, as fully manned as any in the empire.
Lupus marched us back to our quarters and set us to packing for the march east.
‘Where’s Rhandaea?’ Rufus asked. ‘And why are we going there? What’s wrong with Melitene? We spent last winter here, and the town loves us.’
Rufus had a woman in town who was heavy with his first child and he had sworn to be with her when it came. Syrion, as ever, had a handful of different women all vying for the right to warm his bed. The rest of our unit, but for me, Tears and Horgias, all had whores or women they cared for in Melitene and were loath to leave.
Lupus swept his hand across his face. He was relaxed with us now, at least in private; we had fought for him and with him and behind him and alongside him so often that he was one of us. He had saved our lives and we had saved his, and we were owed his honesty.
‘Rhandaea lies on the Murad Su,’ Lupus said, and was answered by blank stares from us all. ‘It’s a river. It rises out of the Taurus Mountains and runs into the Euphrates. Paetus plans to set up camp on the north bank so that we are technically in Armenia.’
‘We can’t do that,’ Syrion said. ‘Corbulo promised Vologases that Rome wouldn’t cross the Euphrates if Parthia would keep to her own side. If we do this, we will break his promise.’
‘Which is exactly why Paetus wants us to do it.’ Lupus was taking apart his bedframe with a contained but brisk intensity. ‘He thinks the battle season is over, and that we’ll be safe in Armenian territory until spring, and that we’ll have an advantage when the fighting starts again after the rains have stopped. He thinks he’ll write clever letters to Nero, telling him how he faced down the enemy when Corbulo was hunkered safe in Syria. He thinks …’ Lupus swept a hand through his iron hair. ‘I don’t know what he thinks, but I know that he’s wrong.’
‘Vologases will attack before spring,’ I said, and I might have been looking at Lupus, at Syrion, at Horgias, but I was seeing a clearing in a forest in Hyrcania, with a group of vassal kings planning a winter campaign. ‘The Parthians don’t care if it’s winter. If they know we’re there, they’ll come and fight.’
‘Then we had better be ready for them,’ Lupus said grimly. ‘Be packed by dusk, and make sure your stakes are good and sharp and hardened in the fire. We might have need of them at long last.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MUD.
What I remember of Rhandaea on the northern bank of the Murad Su, before the ill omens and the chaos, before the sea of cataphracts and the light cavalry and the archers and the slaughter … before any of that, abiding and overwhelming, what I remember is mud.
We marched there from Melitene in the first rains of autumn, across ground that was no worse than damp before the leading ranks met it but had been churned to slurry by the time the last man of the first cohort had passed.
Two legions and two companies of archers later, the last five hundred men were wading knee high through sucking, suppurating glue, and the bullock carts got jammed so hard and so often that it was easier to raise them up on rails and have teams of sixteen men carry them, four to each corner.
Our clothes were wet, our tents were wet, the firewood was saturated beyond any hope of a flame; we slept in wet bedding and ate cold, uncooked food and our mail rusted on our backs and when we finally reached the south bank of the Murad Su, we found it a swollen, churning cataract far wider than its tame little brother, which had so efficiently protected the city at Tigranocerta.
And so we spent our first half-day there hacking at wet trees with rusted axes to build the bridge that might give us access to the location that Paetus, in his insanity, had chosen for our winter quarters.
In summer, I’ll grant you, it would have been acceptable; a wide, flat basin with a small town nearby for trade and girls, and, more important, with the river behind to hold us safe from the south and west and a good distance between us and the mountains to the north and the east so that even Vologases’ fast light cavalry could not have come at us without half a day’s warning.<
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Here, now, at the end of the battle season, we were faced by a flood plain laid slick with the first silverings of water. We gathered the bullock wagons on to the only high land and stood about them, trying to see places we could set our tents that might keep them dry for the six months Paetus intended us to stay here.
Our general, of course, did not sleep in a tent; our first duty, even before we dug ditches for the ramparts, pitched the tents or set the palisades, was to cut more timber for his living quarters, float it across the river and help the engineers to erect a house fit for a senator and his family.
Yes, his family. You will not believe me when I tell you that his wife was there, but it is true. His wife, Antonia, who had spent her life learning how to manipulate the socialites of Rome, was there with his son, less than six months old. They sat together that first afternoon in nothing grander than a bullock wagon, stunned to insensibility by cold and mud and unimagined hardship.
We lost three days building quarters for them; three days in which our tents were pitched in a handspan of water, and we were not making dry our grain for the winter, or exploring the land, except for a few scouts – Horgias was one – who were sent out to check the most likely routes Vologases would take when he came.
When, not if – for we were certain that the King of Kings knew we were here; how could he not when we had marched two legions across the Euphrates? And we knew we were not yet ready to face him.
We finished the ramparts in the second half of the month. I remember stopping at the end of the last ditch some time in the late morning and glancing up at the wide winter moon that hung white as a slug in the sky.
I jammed my mattock into the mud at my feet, spat away a mouthful of dirt and took a long drink of gritty water from the skin at my belt.
Blood smeared where my hands had been and, looking down, I saw that the blisters on both palms had burst, and long, deep cracks ran from each.
The pain was old and hot, and I had not so much forgotten it as lost it in the greater discomfort of the day. I risked a glance down at my feet and was glad they were lost in the mud for they made my hands look pretty by comparison. I was walking on soles turned to waterlogged sponge and dreaded the morning when I woke to find the skin peeled completely away, leaving raw flesh and bone beneath.
The sounds of iron hacking at soil slowed around me, and stopped. At our feet, the raw earth was open deep enough to swallow a man, and wide enough for me to lie inside with head and feet tight to each wall. Above the ditches, on the inner side, earth ramparts rose eight feet above the ground.
Syrion gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘The river’ll have to rise higher than a man to top that.’
‘And even if it does,’ said Rufus, ‘the egress channels will carry everything away. It’ll have to flood in here higher than our knees to reach the tents.’
‘Higher than your knees, maybe,’ Sarapammon said. ‘That’s barely past the ankles for the rest of us.’
That wasn’t true, or not all of it, but it didn’t matter; we were in jovial mood again, with the prospect of drier nights and a fire that might light and hold. I can’t begin to tell you the relief of that; winters on the Hawk mountains might have hardened us to cold and endurance, but we had never before gone without fire and cooked food and the last half-month had worn us down.
Now, we had a watertight quarter-stores packed with enough food to last us the winter, and a sheltered paddock for the horses with stalls to one side and even they had begun to fill out on good fodder so that their ribs did not stare so through their coats and their eyes were bright once again.
A thread of smoke rose from just beyond the horse paddocks. I smelled the scent of applewood amidst the oak, and the first savoury rush of cooking, and my mouth flooded with spit just as my stomach griped, and I turned and—
‘Vologases is coming! The King of Kings! Parthia’s army!’
That was Horgias, riding my bay mare’s youngest son, who had been born chestnut and was turning a fine rose grey as he aged. I gave him as a gift after Proclion’s death, and wished I had given him sooner, only that he was not broken before that, and in truth I had considered giving him to Cadus.
Horgias had seemed grateful at the time, in so far as he ever seemed to enjoy anything these days. He had promised to take best care of him, and treat him as I might have done myself. Just now, he was riding him harder than I had ever seen a man drive a horse.
He hauled to a bloody halt by the standards and flung himself out of the saddle, calling the camp alarm.
We were already running; us and the rest of the legion. We got close enough to see the sweat running down man and horse, so that both were slick, and steaming, and near to broken in wind.
Horgias was wilder than he had ever been; unshaved and unwashed, his hair bound back by a leather thong, he could have been a barbarian come amongst us, except that he wore the red tunic of our cohort and the mule’s tail was painted on the scabbard of his gladius, and in any case everybody in both legions knew Horgias by name and sight by now.
Everybody except Paetus, obviously. He emerged from his newly built house and stood on the top step, softly pink as from a hot bath, with his hair wet and his face half shaved, holding a towel in one hand and a pomegranate – a pomegranate! – in the other.
‘Who is this man?’
Cadus was there, one step ahead of trouble. ‘He’s a scout, lord. He was sent to watch the Taurus Mountains, whence any attack is most likely to come. It would appear one is coming, and he has seen it?’
This last, he directed to Horgias. I was next to him by then, acting as his groom, giving water to man and beast.
Horgias saluted first to Cadus, and then to Paetus, as he must. And then he gave his report there, in the open, in a voice that bounced from one rampart to the next, and never mind that Paetus was trying to invite him inside to give it in private.
‘Vologases, the King of Kings, rides at the head of his army. He has with him, I would estimate, ten thousand cataphracts, fifteen thousand light cavalry, five thousand infantry. They go slowly, held back by the pace of their marching men. In two days’ time, they will traverse the Taurus Mountains south and east of here. There is a place we could stop them. At a fast march, we could be there in half a day. A legion, perhaps, could hold them, allowing the rest to finish the defences here.’
He spoke into a hollow silence. We sucked his words in and drained them dry of meaning and still we did not fully comprehend the size of the army that came at us. Paetus understood least of all. His gaze flickered from Cadus to Horgias and back as if he suspected both of some kind of conspiracy to unman him.
At length, Cadus said, ‘Perhaps the senior centurions could meet with your excellency to discuss our strategy?’ and Paetus was persuaded inside.
Horgias was dismissed without a second glance. We led him away to find food and water and wine, and Syrion and the Rabbit stayed back in case there was anything we needed to hear.
Horgias said, ‘I’m sorry about your colt.’
Beneath the filth of four days living wild, his face was unreadable. He had never been an easy man to befriend, but since Proclion’s death he had become a blank slate with nothing to see, nothing to know, except on those few occasions when we faced the enemy, when he became a lethal, screaming demon. The rest of the time he didn’t talk much; the horse was his exception, he spoke about that.
I shrugged. ‘He’s fine. His tendons are whole; you didn’t break him. In a while, when he’s had fodder and water, I’ll stand him in the river and let him cool off properly. For now, we’ll light a fire and cook you something to eat.’
We reached our camp, the rows of tents with ours at the head of our cohort. We had firewood under a goatskin awning, and a fire pit that we had dug while he was away. I crouched and began to gather the tinder, and small twigs to start the fire. Horgias crouched with me, and caught my hand.
‘Let me,’ he said quietly. ‘I haven’t lit a fire in four days
. I miss it.’
Even if it hadn’t been Horgias, I wouldn’t have argued with that; a man needs to light fires to keep his soul warm, or so my father taught me.
I let the twigs fall at the side of the pit, set down the bunch of fleece that I planned would hold the flame and set my fingers to my belt, where I kept the glow from the last fire in a pot.
‘Have you fire to light it? If not, I can—’
A horn split the air from the far side of the camp. Three notes, rising, and two falling; it was the call to witness a sacrifice, which all men must attend who do not wish to call ill luck on themselves.
It came from the lines of the IVth legion. Horgias cursed softly, viciously, and tilted his head to look up at me. What could I say? ‘We’re going to war. Best not to offend the gods, even for the lousy Fourth.’
‘Right.’ He set his fire-making things down with careful precision and rose and together we ambled over at our leisure, drinking in the late sun, the scent of smoke, the sound of corn cakes frying.
In time, we came to a trench dug twenty paces in front of the tent lines of the IVth; the foundation for their quarter-stores. They had decided to build them in stone, an affectation they brought from the Hawk mountains. We didn’t share it, but we failed entirely to talk them out of it, and it was, I think, a way for us each to show our differences, lest any man begin to think we were one unit.
Whatever the reason, they had dug foundations and someone had been into the town and bought a dark-fleeced shearling ram for the sacrifice. It was a fine, stout animal, with yellow eyes set with the vertical slit that makes them seem like demons, when in fact they are as terrified as any beast can be. Certainly this one was not being held with the calmness that is due an offering given to the gods. The young conscript who held it had evidently never done so before; in the time it took for us to fall into ordered lines he kept losing his grip and reclutching in a way designed to induce panic in any creature’s breast.