King of Kings wor-2

by Harry Sidebottom

  'Castricius, you old bastard,' Ballista roared. 'I thought you were dead in Arete or a slave in Persia.'

  The thin, lined face smiled wryly. 'It takes a lot to kill me.'

  'I would bloody say.' Ballista tipped his head back, eyes almost disappearing in laughter. 'A bugger who can survive the imperial mines can survive anything.'

  Demetrius winced. Tact was not always the strongest asset of his kyrios. It was far from sure that Centurion Castricius would want his legionaries or anyone else to know that, before he had joined the army, he had been found guilty of a crime serious enough to warrant being committed to the living hell of the mines. Demetrius himself had always had the greatest difficulty in reconciling himself to having been enslaved at all. It was somehow easier to pretend to have been born a slave. The young Greek knew he would not have wanted anyone to know if he had been in the mines. Not, of course, that the issue could ever have arisen. He would not have survived.

  Castricius just laughed. 'As I tell this rabble, the good daemon that watches over me never sleeps — keeps them on their toes. Let me present the boys.'

  'Yes, that would be good. And then, afterwards, you must tell me how you got out of Arete. You shall do so over a proper feast to celebrate. We will kill the fatted pig — or whatever it is the Christians say.'

  'The Christians to the lion,' said Castricius as he turned to lead the way.

  The inspection passed well. Silent, serried ranks of men. One thousand large, red, oval shields, on each the golden lion and eagle, the latter crowned by two winged personifications of victory. The symbols of Legio IIII Scythica were repeated on the scarlet vexillio on its crossbar above their heads. Hoplites, thought Demetrius, 'armoured men'. Possibly not quite the same styles of armour as one found on the pots and bas-reliefs of the ancients, but undoubtedly the spiritual descendants of the heroes of Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea: the embodiment of western freedom once again called on to defy the countless barbarian hordes from the east.

  The feast also started quite well. The official house of the cursus publicus was, if anything, more spartan at Caeciliana than it had been at Batnae. But at least the main room was warm; a fine fire burned at one end, and braziers placed here and there throughout kept the early evening chill away. The dining room was just big enough. The Dux Ripae had invited his three senior officers, the commanders of cavalry, infantry and the baggage train and the commanders of the individual units under them. There were thirteen dining. There should have been fourteen, but Gaius Acilius Glabrio had sent to announce that he was too busy to attend.

  First, they stood, sipping a glykismos. The sweet aperitif did little to take a certain stiff formality out of the air. The non-appearance of Acilius Glabrio made the three cavalry commanders uncomfortable. It was not really the place for the prefects of the Armenians, Saracens, Itureans or Arab and Armenian slingers to hold forth, good Romans though they all considered themselves, irrespective of the ethnicity of their men.

  Things did not improve immediately when they reclined at table. Hard-boiled eggs with salted catfish and spicy black pudding appeared. Then a light, very easy-to-drink white wine from Ascalon went round, Castricius got into his stride with the story of his escape from the fall of Arete, and things began to flow more easily.

  By the time the few remnants of the first course had been removed, all had had the chance to exclaim at the Odysseus-like cunning and fortitude of Castricius' escape: the arrows whistling out of the dark, the screams of horses and men, the fall — so he thought — of Ballista, the surge of Sassanid warriors, the flight through the chaos to the tunnels which brought water up from the river, Castricius' employment of the knowledge gained when he had surveyed those self-same tunnels to hide in a dead end in one of the furthest recesses — three, maybe four, days in the dark, licking moisture from the rock walls, at last hunger driving him above ground, into an empty world which smelled of wood smoke and something revoltingly like burnt pork: the moonlit shell of a sacked city.

  The main course was served. In accordance with prevailing medical opinion, as it was winter there were few vegetables, just a couple of cabbages — it was important to prevent the inner man from becoming damp and cold. There was a Homeric quantity of meat: beef, pork, mutton, and one of a pair of ostriches that the officers of Legio IIII Scythica had caught on the march down. There was a great deal of a strong red wine from Sidon — most doctors held that wine warmed the blood. Momentarily, the conversation became general, if not inspired: the ostrich was tough, the wings a bit better, the only good way to eat it was air-dried.

  Then, as is the way, the hubbub died down to a respectful silence as the commanding officer began to talk. Ballista told the tale of the fall of Arete. He told it well, turning to Turpio and Castricius to confirm points of detail; it seemed to be relived before their eyes. The numbers of the Sassanids; the dust darkening the sky. The skill of their siege works; the towers, the great ram, the ramp and mines. The horrible ingenuity of the tortures inflicted on prisoners, the blinding and impaling. The fanaticism of their assaults; the thousands who died before they were thrown back. The god-given zealotry of Shapur, the King of Kings; his mission to conquer the world, to make all peoples worship the Bahram fires, the sacred fires of his god Mazda. Finally, when the dangers seemed overcome, the shattering betrayal by Theodotus the Christian.

  It was a subject that Demetrius preferred not to think about. As a slave standing at the foot of the couch of his kyrios, naturally he was not brought into the conversation. He envied the others their easy familiarity with Ballista. It was not just that they were free and he was a slave. There was a sense of a hard to define but evident relaxed comradeship between them. Possibly, he thought, it came from the largely unreflective nature of military life, and possibly it came from a sense of dangers shared.

  As Demetrius poured more drinks, his thoughts wandered to Hierapolis, the holy city through which they had passed a few days earlier. For once, there, the military itinerary had given him two days of rest. Pleasant images drifted into his mind: the beautiful Ionic temple with its golden doors, the exquisite, lingering aroma of incense inside, the eyes of the cult statue of the goddess following him around the sanctuary, the fire jewel on her brow lighting the gloom; sitting by the sacred lake with its bejewelled fish, which came when called, meeting the stranger Callistratus, walking back through the gardens to his house, the long afternoon behind the shuttered windows.

  'Demetrius, you are dreaming, boy.' The voice of his kyrios cut not unkindly into his consciousness. 'We all need more to drink.' The others cheered.

  'Absolutely arseholed, every one of them,' Calgacus whispered in his ear. 'Our revered leader the worst of the lot.'

  More drink in their hands, more drink inside them, half a dozen conversations flourished. Sandario was telling a long story about a young noble Tribune who found a camel on parade when he arrived at a lonely desert outpost. Again Demetrius' thoughts wandered back to Hierapolis, this time less pleasantly, to the hordes of Galli, the eunuch devotees that thronged the precincts. He was glad his visit had not coincided with the hideous ceremony when worshippers maddened by the goddess Atargatis seized their own manhood and, the obsidian knives glittering in the pitiless sun, publicly castrated themselves. Self-mutilated and shameless, they would run through the streets of the town until they chose into which house they would hurl their bloody, severed genitals. It was unspeakably barbaric. Demetrius wondered if these eastern provincials had less in common with Hellenes and Romans than with the Sassanid Persian enemy. In a war, how loyal would they prove to the imperium?

  'No, my dear Tribune, the men use the camel to ride to the nearest brothel.' Sandario's joke was hardly novel but, helped by the wine, it won a hearty burst of laughter. The officers were still grinning, the Tribune of the Saracens shaping to tell the story of the ass and the murderess, when Calgacus ushered one of the Equites Singulares into the room. The cavalryman spoke quietly to his unit commander. It seemed it
took a moment or two for the message to get through, but when it did Mucapor's bovine face darkened with anger.

  'How bloody dare he… outrageous… teeth before tail, every fucking time.' Mucapor slammed his cup down and rose, none too steadily, to his feet. He addressed Ballista. 'A bloody outrage… my men are cavalry, fuck all use if their horses are fucked.'

  'Whoa, whoa.' Ballista made soothing noises, exactly as he would to a horse. He smiled. 'Back up and try the fence again — I have no idea what you are talking about.'

  'Gaius Acilius Glabrio has just ordered some of my men's mounts turned out of the barn I have stabled them in so that those fucking carts which carry his possessions can be sheltered.'

  Ballista's smile was frozen for a moment. Then his face changed. 'Has he indeed.' The big northerner took a drink. The others were silent. There was expectation as well as alcohol in the intensity of their gaze. 'Calgacus, Demetrius, fetch torches.' Ballista smiled in the direction of Demetrius, although largely unseeing, his eyes glassy. 'We are going to form a comus.'

  With a sinking heart, Demetrius went to do as he was told. It was seldom that anything good came of the Greek tradition that, at the end of a party, drunken revellers formed a torch-lit procession through the streets. The comus was nothing but trouble.

  Ballista led them through the dark streets. Their progress was slow and noisy. One or two missed their step, even staggered a bit. Demetrius thought that they would be fortunate not to injure each other with the burning torches. In a strange mixing of cultures, they began to sing a marching song from the legions of Rome, one as old as Julius Caesar: Home we bring our bald whoremonger Romans, lock your wives away. All the bags of gold you sent him Went his Gallic whores to pay. By the time they reached the barn they were being trailed by a crowd of the curious, civilians and soldiers alike. Ballista roared at a small group of soldiers to open the gates. They stopped staring incredulously and obeyed. The gates swung back, and there, polished wood softly gleaming, were Acilius Glabrio's wagons. Ballista asked one of the soldiers if they were unloaded. The man stammered that he thought so.

  'Haul them out, boys.' Ballista's voice carried well. 'Haul them out and push them together in the middle of the agora.'

  Demetrius could feel the way that this was going. It was not well. The wagons, their shafts up in the air, were crammed up tight together in the centre of the open space. Ballista stepped forward from the gaggle of the comus. He called for oil. While he waited, he swung his burning torch through the air. The oil arrived. Ballista tossed his torch to Maximus, who had appeared from nowhere. Ballista sloshed the oil over the nearest wagon and threw the empty amphora into another, where it shattered into a hundred shards. He gestured to Maximus, who handed him back the torch.

  'No one in this army disobeys orders.' Ballista swung back the torch and threw it overarm. It whooshed through the air towards the oil-soaked wagon. It landed, and instantly, with a crump, fire broke out. A cheer went up and the torches of the others were arcing through the air. The first thick, black coils of smoke went up into the clear night sky.

  Demetrius sensed a movement in the crowd at the edge of the agora. Ballista and the officers around him were oblivious to it, passing a wineskin from hand to hand. Demetrius saw Gaius Acilius Glabrio, his face immobile, like that on a portrait bust in the atrium of a great house, watch his wagons catch and begin to burn.

  Demetrius turned back to the crowd around Ballista. They had not noticed Acilius Glabrio. Ballista was laughing at something Aurelian was saying. There was much about his kyrios that reminded Demetrius of his boyhood hero Alexander the Great. There was the courage, the openness, the impulsive generosity, but there was also the darker side, the dangerous, often drink-fuelled, violence, seldom far from the surface. Today Ballista was not the good Alexander who had put the first torch into his own wagons to lighten the baggage train in distant Bactria. Instead he was the drunken Alexander torching the palace of the Persian kings at Persepolis at the suggestion of a whore.

  Demetrius looked back at Gaius Acilius Glabrio. The young patrician was staring at Ballista with open loathing. Whether or not he was the young eupatrid who had set assassins on Ballista, there could be no doubt that Acilius Glabrio hated the big northerner. After a time, without a word, the nobleman turned and left.

  Nothing good could come of this, thought Demetrius, nothing good at all.

  IX

  The army saw its first Persians at the Balissu River. There were three of them on the far bank. They sat on their horses, quietly watching the Roman army approach.

  These were the first Persians that Gaius Acilius Glabrio had seen. Gods below, he had been waiting for this moment. Ever since that humiliating day in Caeciliana he had been waiting to see the Persians. Cold steel would show that bastard Ballista the difference between barbarian filth like him and a Roman patrician, the difference between mindless, brittle ferocity and virtus, the true, enduring courage of a Roman. What was it the Spartans had said in the old days? If you think your sword is too short, take a step closer.

  And how long he had waited. First, seventeen interminable days training around Caeciliana, seventeen days of pointless drill and manoeuvres, the barbarian Dux Ripae fussing and fretting like an old woman. It was as if the northern barbarian were more interested in collecting boats and pack animals for the baggage than in fighting. It seemed that he was reluctant to march out and face the enemy. The young patrician had been only too aware of the sniggers and smiles behind his own back, of sordid plebs, barbarians even, laughing at a member of the Acilii Glabriones. In response, he had just trained his cavalrymen all the harder.

  Finally, on the fifteenth day of February they had marched out. It was the day of the festival of the Lupercalia in Rome. Had he been in Rome, Gaius Acilius Glabrio would have been running with the other lupercali, everyone of them drawn from a leading family. He would have run naked except for a girdle cut from the skin of a freshly sacrificed goat, run through the streets striking out at passers-by with the goatskin thong. But he was not in Rome. He was hundreds of miles away on the Euphrates, desperate to meet the enemy, to prove himself in the terror of battle. They had marched out — and nothing had happened.

  For fourteen days the army had crawled southward, the great Euphrates rolling along next to them. The army had been ordered by the timorous Dux Ripae into a ridiculous defensive formation, as if scared of meeting the Sassanid reptiles in open combat, and progress had been painfully slow. They had only marched in the mornings. By midday they would have halted and started to dig trenches and construct a fortified camp. At the well-fortified city of Soura, it had taken the army two days to cross the stone bridge to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Two short days' march after that they had halted for three whole days at Leontopolis. And in all that time they had not seen a single Persian.

  A few miles south-east of Leontopolis, the Balissu river ran into the Euphrates from the east. The Balissu was a small, insignificant watercourse, probably dry in the summer, but it was here that the first Persians showed themselves.

  Acilius Glabrio, riding in the van of the army, as was only proper for a man of his status, peered intently at the three Persians on the other side of the stream. He could see them clearly. They were less than a hundred paces away. They sat on their horses placidly and watched the advancing Romans. They wore loose, brightly coloured, patterned tunics, baggy trousers, bushy beards and long hair. One wore a cap, the other two tied their black hair back with a band. They were slender men, dark-skinned. It was true what he had often been told: their eyebrows joined, and their eyes were like those of goats.

  When the Romans had almost reached the Balissu, were little more than twenty paces away, the Persians languidly wheeled their horses and rode off. They saw no others for the rest of the day. The army forded the small stream and laboriously constructed its fortifications for the night.

  At dawn the next day, as the Roman army, with Acilius Glabrio well to the fore, marched out of
its camp, the Persians were back — or Persians who looked just the same as the ones of the previous day. For the rest of that day and the two that followed, as the army marched down in easy stages to Basileia, the Sassanid scouts hung about. Two or three at a time, never more than five or six, now always keeping well beyond bowshot, sometimes in the path of the army, sometimes off to the left flank. When the army was safely quartered for two days in the great fortress town of Basileia, the Persians could still be glimpsed here and there outside the walls, now down on the narrow ground by the river, sometimes up on the cliffs. Their constant presence incensed Acilius Glabrio. How he wanted to get at them. What he would do to them when he did. Their hanging about at a distance reinforced everything that he had ever learned about easterners — born cowards, they were simply too scared to come to close quarters. He began to worry that they would just melt away back to Persia, that the army would relieve Circesium without a blow struck, that he would never have a chance to strike at the reptiles. It was still quite dark as the army marched out of Basileia. Gaius Acilius Glabrio stretched and yawned until his jaw cracked. He was tired. He settled back into his saddle, the creak of leather and wood lost in the general sound of the slowly moving cavalry. He was very tired. The barbarian Dux had summoned the consilium to meet four hours before dawn. By lamplight, the officers had been treated to the usual injunctions: hold the formation; keep the men closed up; above all, no one was to break ranks or to charge without express permission. As for what else they had been told, Acilius Glabrio wondered which of the officers were so stupid that they could not have seen for themselves that the road south of Basileia ran through a narrow gap between the Euphrates on the right and high cliffs on the left. Apparently, not far south, the road forded a watercourse, which ran from the hills into the Euphrates. The locals called it the canal of Semiramis. There had been reports of dust clouds to the south. The barbarian Dux had said it might signify that the Sassanids intended to make a stand there. Nonsense, thought Acilius Glabrio. The cowardly little easterners did not intend to make a stand there or anywhere else. The chance would be a fine thing. As for Semiramis, every ditch, wall and hillock out here was credited to the ancient Assyrian queen.