‘And Corbulo?’
Tigellinus reached into the document case he always carried and retrieved a dispatch which had arrived by fast courier earlier in the day. He watched with satisfaction as Nero absorbed the details, his face growing paler and his hands beginning to shake. ‘I was keeping it for a more appropriate time, when I hoped to verify the detail. However, the broad outline seems indisputable.’
‘He is acting against my specific orders.’
‘I am sure he has his reasons, Caesar, but…’
‘No!’ The word emerged as a groan. ‘His imperium gives him power within the boundaries of the Empire. This is an invasion of a sovereign state. A direct violation of my command to act defensively and in concert with the governor of Judaea. He has exceeded his authority and usurped his Emperor’s. No. He is acting as if he is Emperor. You say you have an agent in place?’
Tigellinus nodded.
The broad nostrils flared and the pale eyes took on a reptilian look that sent a shiver through Tigellinus. Then something strange happened. The face seemed to collapse in upon itself, and tears streamed down the pink cheeks. ‘Not Corbulo.’
‘Yes.’ Tigellinus found he could barely breathe. ‘He has deceived and betrayed his Emperor.’
Nero looked up. ‘Not betrayed. Not yet. I must have more before I condemn Rome’s greatest general. I must have evidence of treason.’
Tigellinus bit back a scream of frustration. The final piece had been in place only for the game to be snatched away from him.
But Nero would have his evidence.
No matter what it cost.
XXX
Each night now was colder than the one which had preceded it and Valerius shivered in the familiar pre-dawn gloom as he waited for the men of his patrol to form up.
For the mission, he wore the uniform of a lowly auxiliary cavalry prefect. There was no point in advertising himself as a senior Roman officer and inviting capture by some eagle-eyed Parthian scout, along with whatever horrors would inevitably follow. He had convinced the Tenth’s legate that it would be good experience for Tiberius to accompany a patrol and he watched as the young Roman swapped his plate armour for a coat of linked iron rings sewn on to a supple leather tunic, and his ornate polished helmet for the crude pot-shaped headgear favoured by the Thracians. Like all his comrades, over the ring-mail he wore a hooded cloak of fine linen which had once been white. The cloth would stop the iron mail becoming so hot during the long day in the sun that it would blister the skin of anyone who touched it. Tiberius couldn’t shoot the short bow with any accuracy, so he and Valerius carried the long spatha swords and the light oval shield of the auxiliary cavalry.
As ranking officer, Valerius was theoretically in charge of the thirty-man patrol. In reality he was happy to cede authority to Caladus, a wiry decurion with a greying beard and twenty years’ service in the saddle. His sleep-dulled mind sharpened with the passing minutes and he felt the tension grow as the men checked their equipment to the accompaniment of the usual murmur of subdued voices, the snicker of horses and the faint jingle of metal harness decorations. They had yet to meet any Parthian scouts, but other patrols had picked up traces of their presence: the unburied remains of a campfire in a narrow defile, horse tracks in the dust and scattered manure from more than one animal carelessly left in the lee of a hilltop where a man might watch for signs of the Roman column. It was only a matter of time.
As the men formed pairs, Caladus rode the line making a last inspection of their equipment. He drew up when he came to Valerius.
‘She’s a pretty little thing,’ he indicated Khamsin. ‘But she stands out like a signifer in a parade of vestal virgins. Better to take one of these ugly bastards.’ He pointed to the stocky, long-haired ponies the Thracian troopers rode. ‘They might not make as good eating, but you can ride them to Hades and back and they never complain.’
‘I’ll stay with what I have.’ Valerius slapped the horse’s shoulder. ‘She’s never let me down yet.’
‘Suit yourself.’ The decurion grinned wickedly. ‘But don’t come crying to me when you’re running for your life holding on to somebody else’s tail, with a hairy arse spouting shit into your face and the Parthians taking odds on who’s going to have your balls for a wedding present.’
‘You should have that man whipped for insubordination.’ Tiberius scowled at Caladus’s back as they left the security of the temporary camp. He had the usual high-born Roman’s contempt for the lowly paid auxiliaries who made up half the army. He also had the resilience of the young. The events of the previous day had not been mentioned again. ‘It would teach him to respect a Roman officer.’
‘And make him less willing to fight for me,’ Valerius pointed out. ‘Half of these men are Thracians, Tiberius, and half are Syrians. They understand that no Roman general, even Domitius Corbulo, values an auxiliary’s life at one tenth that of a Roman citizen. If they weren’t cavalry they would spend their entire service in some fly-blown desert fort where no legionary would ever set foot. They know the Parthians and they know this land. Out there we will depend on them, because in a crisis we don’t have the skills or the experience to survive. If anything happens, you could do much worse than stick closer to Caladus than a tick on a sheep’s back.’
They rode northeast, at an angle to the rising sun, so they would not be blinded as it climbed over the far horizon. For the past two days the column had marched across a great undulating plain of dry red earth and black rocks. The ground was cut by the occasional narrow riverbed where thin streams of filthy water crept sluggishly through shallow pools over porous rock and evil-looking, rainbow-hued mud. Caladus knew from experience that no matter how slowly they rode, the patrol would inevitably kick up a cloud of dust that would alert every Parthian within five miles. His solution, when they were far enough from the column, was to take the bulk of the patrol into any likely watercourse that appeared to lead approximately east, but to leave a single rider to spot for dust on the plain above. The tactic slowed their progress, but made them invisible to the enemy while ensuring that no Parthian could cross the plain undetected within a radius of ten miles.
It was dull work, but it had allowed Valerius the opportunity to get to know, after a fashion, the men who served under him. The bulk were Thracians, horse warriors seduced from their native plains to serve the Empire on the promise of citizenship and a grant of land if they survived twenty-five years of brutal service. Tiberius Draco, the soldier riding at his side, was a veteran with three wooden teeth and a scar running diagonally across his lower face from the left side of his top lip to the right side of his jaw. In mumbled dog Latin Draco recited how he had been given the choice of enlistment or slavery when a patrol arrived at his farm on the Black Sea coast demanding payment of taxes. The young auxiliary on Valerius’s left was more forthcoming. Like Hanno, the Third Thracian commander, Hassan was Syrian-born. White teeth shining like pearls through his black beard, the son of a Damascus trading family cheerfully told Valerius he had travelled to Rome and marvelled at the wonders he saw there. All he had desired since was to win Roman citizenship and return to make his fortune. He laughed off the dangers of his profession. ‘If I had stayed in Damascus counting my father’s profits I would have died of boredom by now. Here, at least, I am honoured for my skills and my loyalty.’
Valerius remembered the young auxiliaries who had fought and died for him in Britain. Bela, the cavalry commander who had taken a spear point in the belly defending the fleeing refugees of Colonia, but who had stayed in the saddle and fought to the last as the city burned. And Matykas who had sacrificed himself and his troop to give the last remnant of Valerius’s defeated force time to retreat to the Temple of Claudius. Warriors. Soldiers. Men who had died for a Rome he had once believed in and would gladly have died for himself. A Rome worthy of the men who fought for it. But did that Rome still exist? He was no republican, but in the years since he had returned, scarred and changed, from Britain, he had ex
perienced a different Rome — Nero’s Rome — and been repelled by the perfumed stink of degeneracy, degradation and corruption. He had come to realize that in the new Rome, the Emperor did not rule for his people, or for the Empire, but for himself and the small circle of self-serving acolytes who surrounded him. When he thought of Nero, he was reminded of a wriggling maggot growing fat on the putrefying flesh of a decomposing corpse. The pursuit of power and profit and advancement drove the new Rome. Fear and doubt and envy ruled it.
Tiberius rode up beside him and he put the treasonous notion back where it belonged. Right or wrong, Nero had been born to rule.
‘I thought it would be more exciting,’ the young tribune complained. ‘This country is less appealing than the desert which almost killed me. All we’ve done is skulk like criminals along these open sewers as if we feared the Parthians.’
‘You may be a warrior, Tiberius,’ Valerius smiled, ‘but you have a great deal to learn about war. War is five parts waiting, three parts marching, one part watching and the final part equally divided between fighting and dying. A soldier learns not to be in too much of a hurry to reach that final part. And you would be right to fear the Parthians. Have you read Herodotus?’
The young man shook his head. ‘My father believed that books weakened a man’s will to fight. That they made him spend too much time thinking when he should be exercising in arms.’
Valerius bit back the automatic response this folly deserved and said instead, ‘Herodotus writes that when Xerxes the Great passed this way to fight the Greeks he brought with him an army of Persians, Medes, Assyrians, Cissians, Arians, Caspians, Indians, Utians, Arabians, Babylonians, Mycans and Ethiopians.’
‘This Xerxes was a Parthian?’
‘A Persian, but of the Parthian line. My point is that his army was so great that it covered the land like a great black stain and wherever it went it left behind only devastation and grief. So great that no one, not even the king, knew how great. At a place called Doriscus Xerxes decided to count the warriors under his command. He ordered ten thousand men to form tight together and a circle was drawn around them, which was then fenced. The circle was filled again, and again, until none was left uncounted. It’s said they filled the circle one hundred and seventy times. They swept everything before them.’
‘Yet the Greeks defeated the Persians?’
‘Yes, but the Greeks had Alexander.’
‘And we have General Corbulo.’
Valerius nodded.
‘Does the general fear the Parthians?’
‘No, but he respects them.’
‘Then I will respect them, too.’
Ahead of them, Caladus called a halt. ‘This is far enough if we’re to return before dark. No excitement today.’
He led them up the bank of the gully and back on to the featureless plain.
XXXI
The patrol had ridden less than a mile after they emerged from the gully when they discovered that Caladus didn’t have a monopoly on invisibility.
A desperate shout from the flank guard was choked off instantly by the arrow that skewered his throat. Parthian cavalry swarmed from a stream bed two hundred paces away and broke left and right in a movement that threatened to encircle the auxiliaries. Caladus roared at his men to form up and without looking to see who followed kicked his horse into a charge. Valerius was slower to react, and as the Thracian decurion passed to his front Caladus shouted a warning. ‘Get out of here. I haven’t enough men to protect you. Ride for it.’
For answer, Valerius nudged Khamsin so she spun on her hooves after the auxiliary commander. Within four strides they were flank to flank and Caladus turned to check who was with him.
‘Fool,’ he said, but his face split into a savage grin and the wild light of battle shone bright in his eyes.
Valerius matched his grin. ‘We fight together and we die together.’
‘Fuck dying.’ Caladus broke off to shout orders to his men. ‘They’ll be a mix of archers and spearmen. You and the boy take the spearmen. That way you’ll have a chance.’ Valerius looked up and for the first time was able to study the enemy horsemen. He saw immediately that Caladus was right. They might be outnumbered, but at least half of the force opposing them carried ten-foot-long, narrow-pointed spears which were only of use at close range. ‘Their archers will want to take as many of us with the first volley as they can, and then trade us shot for shot. We have to make it difficult for them. They’re here for information and plunder. They don’t like dying for nothing. The answer is to kill them. Kill them! ’ the Thracian screamed. ‘Kill every last one of the gutless bastards!’
In a confusion of dust raised by thundering hooves, Valerius hauled his sword clear of its scabbard and called out to Tiberius. A voice answered from his right and together they swerved towards a group of Parthians streaming across the flank who had been surprised by the speed of the Roman counter-attack. An arrow flicked off his pot-helmet with a metallic clatter and he instinctively hunched over Khamsin’s neck to make himself a smaller target. The next pair of shafts lodged in the ash shield fixed to his walnut fist. He glanced to his left and there was Hassan, grinning through his beard, with the short recurved bow strung and an arrow nocked and ready to fly. More blows on the shield before something slammed him high in the chest with enough force to knock him backwards. He almost fell, but the little mare adjusted her stride beneath him and he managed to stay in the saddle. He waited for the pain to come. The shock of the blow had numbed his body, but the arrow must have bitten deep, the needle point buried in the flesh of his breast. But when he dared to look down he saw the wooden shaft dangling from the ringed mail beneath his cloak. The point had penetrated the iron, but the heavy leather tunic beneath had saved him from serious injury. A man cried out to his god and Khamsin swerved to avoid the fallen body beneath her hooves, but Valerius concentrated on the half-dozen galloping figures ahead of him, picking out a spearman in a bright green tunic. He heard the ziiipp of an arrow as Hassan fired from his side and a horse in the centre of the Parthian line reared up screaming with a shaft buried to the feathers in its chest. Why weren’t the Parthian archers aiming for the horses? He remembered Hanno’s words at the bridge. A Parthian would sacrifice his wife before he would sacrifice his horse. Caladus had said they were here for plunder. Of course, they would want to capture the Roman mounts if they could. Valerius felt the battle madness fill him. He had no thought of victory or defeat. All he wanted to do was kill. If the spearmen charged, they might blunt the Roman attack, but they seemed reluctant to move, preferring to allow the archers to do the work for them. In a few strides it would be too late. Now, at last, they were moving. A sharp cry from his left and he glanced aside in time to see Tiberius’s look of astonishment as he was thrown clean over his mount’s shoulder as the beast went down in a welter of dust and flailing hooves. His mind registered the fact, but they were gone in an instant, and his focus stayed fixed on the rider he had picked out. In that odd symmetry of battle the Parthian also seemed to have chosen Valerius as his prey. He was accompanied by a second horseman and together their spears came down so that they were lined up on the Roman’s chest, wicked needle points gleaming in the dying light of the sun. Small details. Dark, glaring eyes and snarling mouths. A flash of gold on the right-hand rider’s wrist. The decorative scarlet plume on a horse’s forehead. Without conscious thought Valerius’s mind calculated speed and distance, the angle of attack, which had forced them slightly to their left. Less than twenty strides now. He saw the second man drop back a little. Two spears, one to Valerius’s right flank, the other to his left. The first to draw his shield and open up his defences. The second to skewer him. No amount of mail and leather would stop a point with the weight of man and horse behind it. He knew he was dead, but pride would not let him turn away. He was a soldier. This was how soldiers died. He screamed out loud, anticipating the moment. Counted the heartbeats. The second horse faltering, its rider catapulted from the saddle b
y an arrow that pierced his screaming mouth with such power that only the feathers were left visible. The merciless eyes of the first, unaware he was now alone, the spear held two-handed and angled across his body. Valerius took the point on his shield and forced it past his head, feeling the breath of the iron across his cheek. Safe inside the point, the long blade of Corbulo’s sword was already slashing upwards in a backhand cut that raked the spearman’s iron-clad chest before taking him below the chin in a terrible blow that split his face from bearded jaw to the rim of his iron helm, carving through bone and teeth and gristle and splitting his eye socket in two. Valerius had a momentary vision of horror and felt the splash of hot blood and then he was past, seeking out the archers who hadn’t joined the charge.
But the archers were no longer there. He hauled Khamsin round and had a moment of breathless clarity. Hassan and the Thracians who had accompanied him were circling, seeking targets, but never staying still long enough to be targets themselves. Within the dust cloud of the battle, riders of both sides darted in and out of the fray. Valerius noticed a horse standing over a still figure with its head bowed and he remembered Tiberius’s sickening fall. He started towards the little tableau, but the horse was a roan, and Tiberius had been riding a grey. Desperately, he searched the dust for his friend. A gust of dry wind cleared the murk for a second and at last he found him. Tiberius crouched behind his dead mount, with a shield in one hand and the jagged remnant of a sword in the other. The shield had been pierced by a dozen arrows, the points three inches through the layers of ash, and the body of the grey was thick with others. Parthians hovered like vultures to his front and flanks looking for the killer shot. Even as Valerius watched, Tiberius staggered and almost fell with an arrow through his right leg. But he was alive. For the moment.
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