Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth

by M C Scott

  None of which was the point; the point was that, although we did have some money, nobody would take it from us. ‘Cadus and I have gold from when we were in Hyrcania,’ I said. ‘It was left in the vault at Raphana, which is an easy enough ride from here. When we’ve settled in, one of us will go and get it.’

  ‘Don’t.’ Syrion grabbed for my hand. The effort left him gasping, with his eyes flared wide. ‘That’s your retirement, Fox. Don’t give it away to men who don’t need it.’

  I ignored him. ‘We’ll buy good weapons, at least. And armour for those who need it from the armourer in Damascus.’ We had it planned; with Paetus gone, Cadus was the most senior officer. He couldn’t leave the camp, but he had given Lupus and me permission to ride to Raphana as soon as the dust of our arriving had settled.

  I said, ‘We’ll get you that new strip mail armour. You’ll look like a god. The enemy will never dare assault you then, not even by the half-dozen.’

  Eight of the Parthians had taken him down, so they said, and he had killed three of them. One of those who had survived had used an axe on his left leg and left it splintered so that he would have died had not Vologases ordered the battle’s end just as the axemen were going to kill him.

  Lupus and Cadus had carried Syrion from the field and he had not walked since. On the march back, the bone-setters said he might heal well enough to march again if the bone didn’t go bad. They had pulled the leg straight at the cost of much blood and splinted it with rosemary on either side to keep it sweet. Even so, those of us who cared for him were ordered to lift the covers and sniff daily around the wound. They said the fruitiness and stench of old meat we had scented from the start were both signs of wellness, and that it was the smell of mouse droppings we should fear.

  It had been hard to imagine the scent of mouse droppings when we were on the march, but mice and rats had clearly taken over the barracks as soon as the VIth had marched out. We had sent some of the younger men to buy as many cats as they could find. They had not yet returned.

  I smelled something now, growing stronger as Syrion sat up to drink. I moved to lift the linen sheet that covered him.

  ‘Don’t.’ He caught my hand.

  ‘I need to smell …’

  ‘You don’t. Trust me; you don’t.’

  For the first time since we’d marched under the yoke, his eyes were the perfect blue-grey that I remembered from our first days in the Hawk mountains, when the sky had been the same colour and it had seemed as if we saw through him to the spirits of the place.

  He said, ‘Is there armour to be found anywhere in the camp?’

  ‘There are six mail shirts in the quartermaster’s stores. I found them when I did the inventory.’

  ‘Would I be permitted to wear one, do you think? For only a short time. And a sword?’

  ‘Syrion, why—’

  ‘Because you’re my friend and I can ask these things of you. Would you get them?’

  I backed away from the certainty in his gaze, and all the things there that I didn’t want to read. The stores were a dozen paces from the infirmary. I was there and back in a hundred heartbeats. I picked up a whetstone for the sword from the box by the door as I left; already a part of me knew what he planned.

  There were tunics and sandals, and it took the time perhaps to turn a single marched circuit of the parade ground for me to dress him and sling the gladius at his hip. I settled the sandal on one foot but not the other; it was too swollen to take the thongs, and the flesh was green-tinged that had yesterday been reddish-purple. The smell of mice was no greater than the smell of sweat and leaked urine, but it was there.

  He whetted the blade while I fixed the single sandal, and then he used my shoulder to stand.

  ‘Where?’ I asked, and did not dare say more. To be what he needed, I had to pretend not to know what he planned, even to myself.

  ‘I haven’t seen this place. Is there a high tower, from which I could view the sunset? Or a hill, perhaps?’

  ‘The officers’ quarters are in a tower. It’s three storeys high. They’re all in a meeting in the governor’s residence half a mile away.’

  ‘Perfect.’ His lips were a reddish-blue; he pulled them into a kind of smile. ‘Can you take me, do you think, without attracting undue attention?’

  I doubted that, but wasn’t going to say so. Instead, I offered a shoulder for him to lean on, and sent prayers to Helios and the gods of death that we might pass across the camp unhindered by well-wishers or naysayers or anyone who might delay us.

  The gods answered my plea; they always do, I have found, if the request is not impossible, and is asked with sufficient passion.

  In a haze of thanks and grief, therefore, I brought Syrion unhampered to the three-storeyed tower that some former governor had built for his legions in Antioch. I opened the unlocked door, and half carried him up three flights of stone steps and then a half-flight that took us on to the roof with its low three-foot wall and the small sheltered standing box made of oak, in which the night watch might light a brazier and shelter from the elements and against which Syrion was able to lean, that he might stand facing west and see what was there.

  It was worth having come for; all of it. Above the noise and murmur of the camp, we were held in our own silence. We were above, too, the many-layered stench of a city in the afternoon when the middens have ripened all day and leak their odour as an old carcass leaks blood. Here, we were bathed only in the scent of dusk that is the same everywhere: of dew falling, and the air growing cold.

  And from the horizon, Helios’ dying rays blessed us with a range and purity of colour the like of which I had never seen. Reds fired the core, scarlet, vermilion and deep, deep crimson, the colour of perfect blood, but it was the sky around that touched us; a haze of old blue and purple, of peach and apricot and amber so close and so vibrant that we could have reached out to grasp the threads and woven them into a cloak to keep a man safe for life. Or to see him into the afterlife.

  I heard Syrion gasp a little, like a man who has found love late in life, and knows not how to ride it, and then he saw my face, and the pain that was on it, and smiled.

  ‘I choose this. You know that.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And everyone else must know it too. Tell them I chose the swift death of a legionary, of a soldier, not the slow death of a sick man in a bed. And that I love the Twelfth and will not set my shade to harm it.’

  I tried to speak, tried to say that none of us feared his shade, or thought he would trouble us, even if he had not died in battle. But my throat had closed and the words were a croak, and my vision blurred as Syrion lifted his new-whetted blade – so sharp that the sun itself split on the blade, and spun away in a thousand dancing motes of light – and raised the hem of the mail shirt so that he might angle the blade up beneath it, and rest the point just below his breastbone.

  ‘Do you want me to …’ Now, at the end, I had speech.

  Syrion shook his head. His face was a mask of pain, but his smile was still true and certain. ‘I’ve planned this for half a month. I can do it.’

  And he did. He settled both hands on the hilt, took a breath and gave a small, sharp jerk in and up, hard, and pitched himself forward to fall on to his knees and then on to his face, so that the last fall pushed the blade on up through his heart and out of his back, to tent the chain mail away from his body.

  It was good. It was fast, but not immediate. I knelt in the tide of blood that spilled from his mouth and nose, and gently took his shoulder and rolled him on to his side.

  His eyes were open, and still aware as I spoke the invocation to the gods.

  ‘Given of the god,

  Given to the god,

  Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.

  May you journey safely to your destination.’

  We burned him on a pyre of Syrian wood; that much the local men gave us, ungrudging, when they knew what had happened.

  Every whole and livin
g man of the XIIth – all two hundred and eighteen of us – turned out to see him turn to smoke and rise to the night sky. The fire lasted a day and a night, so high did we pile it. When I go, I want it to be like that.

  Lupus found me later that evening, sitting as near as I could to the blistering heat. He didn’t lay a hand on my shoulder, or take my arm, or any of the things men did in sorrow, but there was a catch in his voice when he spoke. ‘We’ll miss him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’ll need to be replaced. Him and all the others. There are barely enough men left of the Twelfth to make three centuries. We discussed this in the commanders’ meeting all day and we have a dilemma: we could put the bulk of your number into the first cohort, but then only two or three of you would be centurions when there are at least fifteen who are fit. Alternatively, we could spread you throughout the legion, with those fifteen each leading their own centuries. But that would mean that you would all be serving alongside new men.’

  He was watching me, waiting for some reaction. I was watching the hot, red heart of Syrion’s pyre, and not thinking at all of what might be ahead, only what was behind.

  Dully, I said, ‘Will we have new recruits? Or men seconded from other legions?’

  ‘Some of each. Corbulo gave a number of relevant orders before we parted and this was among them: one third new conscripts; two thirds from other legions.’

  ‘Two thirds?’ That jerked me into the present. ‘But they’ll hate us,’ I said. ‘The men from the other legions. Nobody will volunteer to come to a legion that’s just surrendered to Parthia and walked its Eagle under the yoke. They’ll come to us as punishment from legions that want to be rid of them and they’ll loathe the ground we walk on.’

  Lupus stared into the fire. He ran his tongue over his teeth, found a gap, explored it. ‘Syrion did well to leave when he did,’ he said quietly. He turned back to me, ‘Building the Twelfth again will be a nightmare that will make the past six months seem joyous in retrospect. But the only alternative is to let it die: to destroy the Eagle and join other legions where each of us will be one man amongst thousands and despised for ever. I will not let this happen. I will build this legion back up man by man with my own bare hands if I have to, but I would like to believe that I will have help.’ He raised his brow in a way that was so familiar, so real, so raw, I could have wept. ‘Knowing what we face, Demalion, will you help me? Will you be the core of the new sixth cohort? Or would you rather we took all the veterans into the first, and let the new men fill the rest?’

  It was kind of him to ask, but I was bone weary in mind and soul as much as in body; too tired to think, too tired to make decisions that might mould my fate for the rest of my life. Other men made decisions and I acted on them; that was how my life ran. I had no wish to change it here and now.

  Then, I said, ‘The sixth is our home.’ Which was true.

  Lupus nodded. ‘That’s what I told Cadus and Crescens. The sixth is your home and you should remain there. I have proposed that Tears become the signaller; it’s time he grew into himself. Horgias, of course, should bear the standard, although that will not stop him scouting when we have need of it. Each of them will need a new shield-man, but that can be arranged.’

  He was watching me again, waiting for something, and I had nothing to give. For a fleeting moment, I had thought I was about to be given the standard of the sixth as mine to carry, and felt a stab of disappointment even as I rejoiced at Horgias’ good fortune. But I felt nothing cleanly, or with any power: too many men had died, and too few were left to care who held the god’s hand above their heads.

  I felt Lupus’ gaze resting on me, steadily. I saluted, stone-faced. ‘Tears shall have the horn tonight,’ I said. ‘Unless you would prefer it sooner?’

  His mouth twitched towards a smile and I thought perhaps I had been overly wooden. And he could fuck himself, frankly, because I didn’t care what he thought any more.

  He was still smiling. I turned on my heel, ready to leave the fire and walk back to our cheerless, half-empty barracks.

  Lupus stepped in front, blocking me. ‘Tonight will be perfectly adequate,’ he said. ‘And if you present yourself to the quartermaster immediately thereafter, you can requisition a staff. Usually, we would have a new one made for you, but under the circumstances …’ His voice drifted off.

  I stared at him. ‘What staff?’

  ‘The vinewood staff of your new office. Did you think Tears and Horgias would vault over you so easily? You who broke the bridge across the river in the face of the Parthian archers?’

  I hated that bridge. I dreamed of it nightly. ‘I should have left it where it was,’ I said stiffly. ‘Then we wouldn’t have had to lose a day rebuilding it.’

  ‘Even so …’ Lupus waited with the patience of a parent until I joined the facts to make a whole. Centurions held vine staffs. Only centurions. And they outranked both signallers and standard-bearers.

  ‘I am to be centurion?’ I asked, at last. ‘Of what? Of whom?’

  ‘The first century of the sixth cohort of the Twelfth legion. Of course, you should have held the standard for some time before it, to know what it is to have the entire cohort move to your signal, but that can’t be helped. You’ll have to work doubly hard to keep control of the men who join you, for all the reasons we have already discussed, but I’m sure that, given the right leadership, they can be knocked into shape. And when they have been, the Twelfth will be whole again. Not what it was, but whole.’

  ‘What about you?’ I was near to panic, who had not felt it at all in the face of the Parthians. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘On Corbulo’s orders, I will be camp prefect.’

  Camp prefect. A station a man could hold until he was in his seventh decade, could he but hold his head high and his shield straight. Lupus had wanted that post all his legionary life and now, having got it, he spoke the words as if they were poison in his mouth.

  Still, it was his, and if he was prefect, then someone else was not. ‘What of Cadus?’ I asked.

  ‘After this year’s campaigns against the Parthian light and heavy horse, General Corbulo reached the conclusion that each legion needs more cavalry of its own. Cadus is to be legate of a cavalry wing, in command of six hundred horse, plus whatever auxiliaries we can muster at any given time.’

  I smiled at that, for the first time in months. ‘He’ll be good at that,’ I said. ‘In Hyrcania, he showed himself a natural horseman. And the Parthians taught us much of how they can be used in warfare.’

  Lupus inclined his head. ‘That had been noted. Although he would have been an excellent camp prefect.’ He laid a hand on my arm, which was as shocking as anything else. ‘I know you’ll miss him, but this is the best we could do under the circumstances. I hoped you’d understand.’

  I did understand. I understood that good men were dead, and that I was not one of them. I understood that I had just gained a promotion I had once not wanted and later had not dared to hope for. I understood that the years ahead might well be a hell of our own making, and that I had just agreed to do everything I could to rebuild the XIIth.

  When Lupus left me and Tears came to take his place, I understood, in a wave of feeling, that I had Tears, too, and he was to stay at my side.

  But, new soldier that I was, I understood at last what Cadus had been trying to tell me all along: that life and love and rank were not enough. To be whole in myself, I needed honour, and I had lost it, and could see no way to get it back.

  BETH HORON, JUDAEA,

  NOVEMBER, AD 66

  IN THE REIGN OF THE

  EMPEROR NERO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FOUR SHAMEFUL YEARS passed before the gods and a rabble of Hebrew revolutionaries granted us the chance to win our honour back.

  In that time, exactly as Lupus had said, the XIIth was made up to strength by a mixture of conscripts and postings from other legions, with a small handful of young men who had actually volunteer
ed. These last, oddly, were the hardest to handle, having dreamed of martial valour all their young lives and then found themselves in a legion that was universally despised.

  That didn’t make the rest easy. The bulk of our new intake were veterans of over ten years’ standing culled from the VIth, VIIth and Xth legions. Greeks, Syrians and Germans for the most part, they were big men who bore big grudges and knew they had been sent to us only because their former legions wanted to be rid of them.

  Every man of them had come to us loathing the XIIth for its reputation and four years in camp being reminded daily of our shame had soured them to a gut-blackening hatred. I kept control because I used my vine rod hard and early on the most obvious troublemakers, because I flogged men for the least infringement of an order and twice had men tied to cartwheels and left outside the gates for two days and two nights.

  I found in myself a level of brutality I had not dreamed of, and was not proud of, but even so, every marched step was taken grudgingly, every salute was wooden, with a perfect blankness in the eyes that hid the hate we all knew was there. I could drill them to a mechanical perfection, but it felt as if I pushed each man with my mind, and it was as exhausting as anything I had ever done.

  They were united in their loathing of us, so that by the end of the first year we had two legions: the new men who made friendships amongst themselves, and we who were the veterans, to whom they never spoke a word unless they must.

  Tears and Horgias had the worst time of it, for each of them had been allocated one of the new intake as his shield-man and didn’t know from moment to moment if he was going to be shielded or stabbed in the gut.

  Horgias was paired with a bull of a man, rightly named Taurus; a volunteer from Herculaneum with skills as an engineer who had been sent to us as his first posting and who, I thought, might one day become another Proclion if he could only get over his sullen ill temper. Tears was likewise protected, if that’s the word for it, by Macer, a hard-bitten Athenian who had been sent to us from the VIIth and resented every breath taken in the company of the XIIth.