Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth

by M C Scott

  The ram, for its part, had been dragged from the town to a place it did not know, amongst unfamiliar men who sharpened knives in its easy view; terrified, it fought its bonds fiercely. That could have been put to use if the priests and augurs had the sense to use its fighting spirit for our good, but these were small men with small minds and they were already drenched in fear at the size of Vologases’ army.

  So when they caught it up, and cut its bonds, there was a moment when neither the conscript nor the chief priest was fully holding it, and it lunged out with feet and horns, thrust the former to the ground and the latter into the priest’s ribs and, with a kick and a butt, was free to leap out, over the foundations, past the tent lines, through eight ranks of men and away to freedom.

  You could have heated the silence then, and beaten it flat to make a sword. Soon, though, the first mutterings rolled through, as men spelled out for each other the doom that was on us all. A failed sacrifice. Failed! We’re finished.

  The idiot priest made an effort to read something good in the beast’s escape, but he was wasting his breath; every man in the empire knows that a failed sacrifice is the clearest statement the gods ever give that the endeavour – whatever it is that the sacrifice was for – is doomed.

  So the IVth couldn’t build their quarter-stores on those foundations. And we were dead men if we tried to face Vologases’ army.

  I turned, and found Horgias beside me. ‘Let’s go,’ I said tightly. ‘There’s no good to be had in staying here.’

  Back at our own tent lines, we set to making our evening meal. For a while, I watched Horgias as he devoted himself again to the fire, laid the tinder and the wool and shaved peelings from a dry block around them.

  He borrowed my glow-coal and nursed the infant spark it gave him, feeding it small twigs that he had kept in the breast of his tunic and dried with his own body’s heat. In time, he had a youthful, boisterous blaze that sent thin smoke spiralling to the sky.

  He took wheat meal and water from his bag, spices, some dried rosemary, a little bead of lamb’s fat, rolled and rolled until it was hard as beeswax. Mixed, they made a mash that he squeezed between his hands until it made small, flat cakes.

  He oiled his mess tin and set the cakes to roast and it had the ritual feel of a last meal, shared amongst friends, amongst brothers, amongst men who knew their lives to be short, and yet still cherished each other’s company. If anything, I thought Horgias looked at peace, and was glad for him.

  I crouched beside him. ‘Do you think he waits for you?’ I meant Proclion, but did not have to say so.

  ‘I am sure of it. I dream him often, standing at the river’s edge, looking back at me as I live this half-life without him.’ Horgias flicked a glance at me sideways. ‘Don’t think I’m in a hurry to die. He’ll wait as long as it takes, and I will kill as many Parthians as I may before I join him.’

  I shook my head. ‘If you were going to die soon after him, you would have done so by now. There’s been enough opportunity.’ Not more than a skirmish or two as we left Tigranocerta, but sufficient for him to have thrown himself on an enemy spear if he had wanted to. ‘I just wanted to know where he was.’

  Other than my father, Proclion was the only man I knew well who had died, and I would have trusted him with my life in ways I would never have trusted my family. It was good to know he watched over Horgias.

  I took out my own pack and set about mixing beans and corn and dried mushrooms and garlic, taking the same care as had Horgias. As they did in battle, my senses became sharper, so that I heard Lupus’ footsteps long before I heard his voice and knew who came up behind me, and exactly when he drew breath to speak.

  ‘Tell me we’re not going to be stoking up the cook fires to build palisades through the night by their light.’ I stood, turning as I spoke.

  Gravely, he said, ‘You’re not going to be stoking the cook fires and building palisades through the night by their light.’

  Something was wrong with Lupus. He had never in his life made a joke, and his eyes were not laughing; quite the reverse.

  ‘What then?’ Horgias was holding his dagger ready to lift one of his meal cakes from the mess tin. He looked eager, ready to fight.

  ‘We are to sally out tonight, before dusk. Paetus will lead us. All except the first cohort of the Fourth, which is travelling to Arsamosata, with the care of the general’s wife and infant son as their only priority.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s sending the first cohort away?’

  ‘But the palisades aren’t finished. They aren’t even begun. Is he completely mad?’

  Syrion, Horgias and I spoke all together. Lupus affected a deafness which left him immune to the treachery spoken around him; then, in a voice so sharp, it would have cut through wood, he said, ‘Our governor’ – he spat the word – ‘is of the belief that he was given command of men to fight for him, not wooden walls; that Vologases’ army will be sleeping in their tents, so why should we not do the same? He would meet the Parthians at the Lizard Pass in the Taurus Mountains. He believes we can hold them there.’

  ‘So we will hold the Parthians until Corbulo can get here?’ I said. ‘That, at least, makes sense.’ After a fashion, it did; we had crossed the mountains through that pass twice in the summer, going out, and coming in. We knew it as well as we knew anywhere here.

  Lupus shut his eyes. ‘I have suggested,’ he said faintly, ‘that a message should be sent to General Corbulo requesting his aid. Cadus and the camp prefect added their voices. Paetus, however, is of the opinion that we will not need any man’s help to defeat the King of Kings.’

  Nobody spoke then; there were limits to what we could say and not be flogged for it, and in any case Lupus was distressed enough. The reason was obvious: Paetus was afraid of Corbulo’s genius. To get himself into a crisis and then cry for help? It would ruin his political career.

  To me, Lupus said, ‘It might be that you could send a message to your old commander, wishing him well before you march out to die?’

  ‘Aquila? But he’ll send any message straight to Corbulo!’

  ‘Who might choose to send us help. Or not. But at least he will know what has happened. I am sending a similar message to Hygienus, a centurion of the Tenth, and Cadus will write to a man he knows in the Third. We have need of a courier to deliver the messages. Would you—’

  ‘No.’ I faced him square on. ‘I fight with my unit. Anyway, you can’t send me away. I’m the signaller.’ I fixed his gaze with mine. ‘There are couriers enough in the other legion.’

  He nodded, not surprised. ‘Tears?’ Tears had become our second courier, on the strength of my bay mare’s second foal.

  ‘The same,’ Tears said. ‘I’ll stay. We fight together, all of us.’ There were still only seven of us; they had not made up our unit after Proclion’s death. It made us weaker in the battle lines, but at the same time it made us stronger of spirit.

  ‘Right.’ Lupus nodded, rising. ‘You understand that I had to ask. We’ll find another courier. He won’t be as well mounted, but there are staging posts in Syria; he can find new horses on the way.’

  He was turning away when Syrion said, ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘As soon as the tents are packed. Eat first. I said I would have none of my men march on an empty stomach. But be ready to move out by the next watch. He would have us march double time through the night if we have to.’

  There are those in Rome who will tell you that the second of the day’s ill omens occurred as we marched out of the camp; that our javelins caught the late afternoon light and shone, all in a streaming ribbon as we marched, so that we had silver in front and behind, and flashes of gold among us.

  The naysayers will tell you that this reflected Parthian greatness, for it was known that the cataphracts loved their spears above all other weapons and the gods were saying that spears would be our death. But for us it felt like a benediction, a spark of light in the dark road ahead, a sign that
the gods had not abandoned us so completely after all.

  We marched faster for it, and long into the night, pitching our tents by the light of the falling moon, as it hung vast and gold on the westerly horizon, throwing shadows all about.

  The light kept the watch sentries alert, while the rest of us slept with the stupor of men who will store sleep against famine later, and begrudge every moment of waking.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THIS CLOSE TO death, time passed faster than it had ever done and it seemed I had barely risen before I was lying down again, this time face down beneath a stand of cedars high above a mountain pass a dozen miles from our camp.

  Tears lay on my right and Horgias on my left and we watched in dreadful silence as four spears split the early light and four men of the IVth lost their lives in a trap as perfectly planned and executed as any I had seen.

  The shouts that followed were Roman and Parthian mixed, but more Parthian, and louder, for while a half-century of the IVth had been sent out to scout the enemy’s position they had been met by at least twice that many Parthians, and the speed and ferocity of the enemy attack had heightened their advantage so their numbers seemed greater.

  The slaughter was fast and efficient and from our eyrie, a hundred feet up, it had the dance-like elegance of a mummery made for our entertainment, with pale faces raised and dark mouths opened in muted shouts and barely any blood spilled, except at the end, when the centurion of the IVth – first centurion of the eighth cohort, I think, but I hadn’t looked closely at the men we were following – was decapitated by a Parthian warrior who rose high in his saddle and used his sword with both hands. That blood was a fountain; it soared and fell and stained the rock and the hard winter’s earth beneath.

  Horgias rose then, drawing both blades. Tears caught his arm, holding him back. ‘Don’t. We have to get back. Cadus needs to know what’s happened.’

  Our orders had been clear: our role was to observe and report, nothing more. On no account – none, on pain of execution – were we to participate in any action.

  Cadus had been categorical when he had called us out of the parade lines. ‘We need to know what’s happening. It serves nothing if you give your lives and the rest of us are taken unawares. Ride a long way behind and don’t let the men of the Fourth see you. If one of them is taken and questioned, they can’t give away what they don’t know.’

  That had been in the morning’s cold, with the unrisen sun spinning gold filigree along the horizon, layering it on the night’s hoar frost. We had ridden out of the camp double-cloaked, with our horses’ feet bound for silence, and our spears wrapped to keep them from shining as they had when we crossed the bridge; what had been an omen yesterday was treachery in the making today.

  We carried no stakes, and knives instead of shields; Horgias was slowly turning us all into barbarians. But good barbarians; we had tracked a half-century of the IVth and they never knew we were there. And now the Parthians did not know we had watched their slaughter.

  ‘Let’s go.’ I touched Tears on the arm, and, with Horgias at my other side, we wormed backwards down a long, shallow incline, to the river at its foot where our horses were hobbled.

  They knew better than to greet us with noise, but the bay mare blew a steaming breath into the nook of my neck. She liked it, I think, when we bound her feet. Whatever the hazards of walking – and they were manifold, and worse at the canter – she enjoyed the delicacy that was asked of her.

  And so, quietly, led by Horgias, we stole out of the hollow. At a safe distance, we stopped to strip the horses’ feet that we might gallop the twelve miles back across the plain to the camp where Cadus waited to greet us. He was not alone.

  ‘All dead?’ Paetus asked me; I had been the notional leader.

  ‘All,’ I said. ‘And stripped of their armour. We would have gone to their aid but—’

  ‘But I had ordered against it.’ Cadus stepped up to my side. ‘Without these three there to observe, the centurion and half his men would just have been lost and we would have known nothing of it.’

  I said, ‘The good news is that the Parthians were not yet near the Lizard Pass. They won’t reach it until tomorrow, longer if they stay and celebrate their victory.’

  ‘Vologases knows we’re here,’ Horgias said. ‘He has no need to hurry.’

  ‘How?’ Paetus glared at us, as if all three of us had just confessed to treachery. ‘How does he know we are here?’

  ‘We killed one of his scouts on our way out,’ I said. ‘But where there is one, there will have been others. They couldn’t miss two legions. And the smoke of your cooking fire would tell them soon enough.’

  We of the XIIth had no fires: we ate cold food night and morning. But Paetus had refused to forgo his fire, even here, with the enemy a day’s ride away; less.

  The look he gave me was poisonous, but what could he do? I stared at the ground and said nothing, and in the end Paetus turned away. To Cadus, he said, ‘Have my commanders meet in my tent immediately.’ And he was gone.

  We waited again, while our officers tried to talk sense into a senseless general. To pass the time I checked the bay mare’s feet for stones, and groomed her and gave her some hard feed, for I had a feeling we might be moving fast, and while I marched she was made to run alongside the supply wagons like a cart hound.

  ‘Demalion?’ Lupus was grey-white, tinged red at the edges of his temples.

  ‘What news?’

  He shook his head and strode on past. ‘Find Tears and Horgias. Bring them to the tent lines. You all need to hear it at once.’

  Tears and Horgias weren’t far; each was tending to his horse. At the tents, we met the other four of our unit and the rest of our century and arranged ourselves as if on parade. Here, now, it mattered to us that we were sharp and well drilled; it gave us a sense of our own professionalism.

  ‘Governor Paetus …’ Lupus closed his eyes that we might not read the rage in them. ‘Governor Paetus has informed us that he will return to our camp at Rhandaea with the Fourth legion, there to build the palisades and set up defences sufficient to deter the enemy. He will take with him the Eagles, and keep them safe, so that if a legion is lost it can be re-formed, and its honour may live on.’

  There was a moment’s silence as we all wrestled with the impossibility of what we had heard. The IVth leaving. And the Eagles going with them so that if a legion – our legion, there was no other one – was ‘lost’, which is to say annihilated, destroyed to the last man …

  And that’s when our discipline broke apart.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He can’t—’

  ‘How can we fight without the Eagle?’

  And out of the clamour, my voice, rising, ‘Lord, we can’t fight without the Eagle. It’s impossible.’

  Lupus stared us down. ‘You think yourselves so weak? So in need of aid that you cannot fight alone? I would say rather, how can we carry the Eagle to certain defeat? If it is taken to safety, then the legion still lives. Even if we all die, it will be re-formed. If, out of our own weakness, we keep it here, and it is taken by the Parthians, the Twelfth itself is lost. We will have the two companies of archers with us, which should help to hold the pass.’

  ‘But why are we staying? I don’t understand. What’s the point?’

  Lupus held up his hand before another storm of questions could arise.

  ‘Paetus has had word from Corbulo that help is on its way. We have to delay the Parthians until that help can arrive. To that end, we, the Bloody Twelfth, with our cavalry and our Pannonian archers, will hold Lizard Pass for as long as we may, to buy that time. We know that the Parthians are not inclined to sit protracted sieges, that they will have poor supplies with them and no way of gaining any now that winter is at hand. We, on the other hand, have sufficient supplies at Rhandaea to feed two legions for six months.’

  And only one legion left to eat its way through them, for we will be dead.

  We each thoug
ht it, none of us said it; you could taste the words on the air. We will be dead. And without our Eagle.

  ‘Quite so.’ Lupus gave his half-smile, and today it was almost paternal. ‘But we shall fight under the standards of our own cohorts. Those no man can take from us, save by our deaths, and I promise you we shall sell our lives dearly, and with honour. Cadus asked for this, and it was granted. The Twelfth shall be known as the legion that held back the Parthian cataphracts while others marched to safety.’

  ‘Like Leonidas’ Spartans at Thermopylae?’ Syrion said drily. We were not Spartans, and Paetus was assuredly not a king. Laughter rose from the ranks, crisp as winter leaves, but real; after all the battles in which death was possible, but not certain, there was an odd freedom that came from the certainty of this one.

  ‘Exactly like.’ Lupus matched our tone. ‘You have until the next watch to prepare. Whatever you do, in the gods’ name, don’t let the priests attempt another sacrifice.’

  We broke camp together and set off in our opposite directions: we of the XIIth and our allies marched east, towards the rising sun, combat and honour; the IVth went west, to the setting sun, to ignominy and a wealth of digging. We sang as we marched. They did not.

  Our horses were the happier too, and their number was increased by an old war-scarred gelding that carried Paetus’ colours who broke ranks and cantered back to us, to join the fighting. We greeted him as a valued friend, and let him stay, and sent the colours back on a younger beast, though not one of my bay mare’s colts; those all stayed with us.

  The men of letters in Rome who have never ventured beyond the shores of Italy nor ever held a blade in anger will tell you that this was our third bad omen; that after the failed sacrifice and the way the sun caught our spears as we followed Paetus out of the winter camp, the retreat of the colours was the seal on our doom.