Calgacus said nothing.
‘I have no doubt that the new governor, Piso Frugi, will want to see you. Especially as I understand that your patronus, Marcus Clodius Ballista, led the emperor Valerian into a Persian trap and the barbarian has now justly been declared an enemy of the Roman people.’
The centurion smirked. ‘Oh yes, the noble Piso Frugi will want to question you – although probably not until you have spent a few days in the cells under the palace.’
Calgacus remained silent.
‘Now give up your weapons.’ The centurion was thoroughly enjoying the moment.
Calgacus looked at Maximus and shook his head. Slowly, the Caledonian unsheathed first his sword then his dagger and threw them down in the dust at his feet. The others followed his lead.
At a signal from the centurion, soldiers came forward and efficiently searched the unarmed men. Calgacus winced as his wounded arm was wrenched. Their mounts, Pale Horse among them, were led away.
‘All in all, a good morning’s work,’ the centurion said to his second-in-command.
‘Just so, Dominus,’ replied the optio. ‘Three freedmen of a hostis arrested, four deserters apprehended and, to come, the gratitude of a member of the Boule whose son we will return.’
‘Take them away.’
The high country north of Edessa going up to the Euphrates and Samosata all looks much the same. But Ballista knew where he was as soon as he saw the lone pike standing stark on the horizon.
They had been riding hard all day. Two or three times, Persian patrols had closed to investigate. They had veered away, no explanation necessary, when they saw the golden ornaments on the bridle of the Sassanid officer’s horse. No easterner in his right mind would interfere with a man going about the business of the King of Kings.
Now, the sun was low. Elongated shadows stretched out as they rode up to the crest. Tired and sore, Ballista composed himself in preparation for what he was about to see. It was not chance that the Sassanids had led them this way. Ballista halted his mount and looked up.
Turpio was just recognizable. Birds had pecked out his eyes; some of the flesh on his face was gone. Being impaled on the pike had prevented the scavengers of the earth reaching his head. What remained was barely corrupt. Although it seemed an age, it had only been five days. Ballista looked at his friend.
Don’t cry
Over the happy dead
But weep for those who dread
To die.
The Persian officer broke into Ballista’s thoughts. ‘It was the will of Mazda.’ Garshasp was also looking up at the grisly thing on the pike. ‘I saw him die. Your friend died well.’
‘He never lacked courage. Once, at Arete, he came this close’ – Ballista snapped his fingers – ‘to killing your king. As you say, the will of the gods.’
‘When I was commanded to bring you this way,’ Garshasp continued, ‘I was told you were not to bury him. I am sorry.’
‘Thank you. I would have done, even though the burial rites of Romans like him are not those of my people. We often burn our dead warriors.’
Garshasp grunted. ‘Let us move on. It would be best to camp beyond the battlefield.’
Even in shadow, the valley of tears was a horrible sight. The tidal wave of war had swept its debris across its length. Everywhere were strewn discarded, hacked shields, bent and broken swords, the snapped shafts of arrows and, everywhere, the corpses of men and beasts. Here they lay in ones and twos. There, to the right, leading to the isolated hill rising from the floor of the valley, a thick carpet of them, where the Sassanid cavalry had broken Legio VI Gallicana. Another hideous pile on the slopes, where those too wounded to walk had been killed after the surrender.
The horses, unnerved by the scent of death, placed their hooves nervously amidst the carnage. A vulture, too gorged to fly, waddled off a bloated corpse. Some of the dead were more decayed than others. Ballista half remembered Turpio telling him it was all to do with climate and diet; damp westerners rot more quickly than desiccated men from the east.
They rode on after the sun had gone down. Garshasp was evidently as keen as the others to put some distance between them and the dead. Eventually, he called a halt.
Their new status as envoys had brought temporary eastern servants for Ballista and Cledonius. The two Roman officers sat on the ground and watched their horses being groomed and their tents erected. The sharp north wind made the latter tricky; sudden gusts flicked leather sheets aside, coiled guy ropes around limbs.
Cledonius sent away the youth who would have seen to Ballista’s dressings. By the guttering torchlight, Cledonius did it himself. The ab Admissionibus had been kept by Valerian’s side and had thus been spared some of the hardship of the march. Now, his long, thin face was close to the northerner; his hands worked deftly. They talked together softly in Latin.
‘Ballista, it is – what? – over twenty years since you came into the imperium as a hostage for the good behaviour of your father’s tribe – not that it has always curbed the inherent ferocity of you Angles. Anyway, you have spent more than half your life, not just in the imperium, but connected to the imperial court, and at times you are as naive as the day you emerged out of your damp northern forests.’ Cledonius smiled affectionately. ‘Of course Valerian knows that Macrianus loathes us – although I would say rather more you than me. I have never punched one of his sons in the balls.’
‘So Valerian wants our embassy to fail?’
Cledonius shook his head in mock-wonder at Ballista’s obtuseness. ‘That is the general idea. Thanks to you, Valerian knows he was betrayed by Macrianus. But only a few know it. And those now within the imperium might find it hard to be believed. So Valerian has created a public spectacle where the lame one must break his oath to value the safety of the emperor above everything. At the very least, such despicable lack of loyalty and flagrant disregard of the gods will give a very poor start to Macrianus’s campaign if he intends to elevate his odious sons to the throne. At best, it gives Gallienus in the west a just cause for war: revenge on the oath-breaker who betrayed his father, Valerian.’
Ballista thought for a moment. ‘Why has Shapur agreed to the embassy?’
‘Harder to say.’ Cledonius shrugged. ‘The King of Kings has not chosen to confide in me. But it seems he is equally well served by our success or failure.’
Now it was Ballista’s turn to shrug. Immediately, he wished he had not. It hurt. ‘Explain.’
Cledonius waited for a servant, who had come to tell them that their tents were ready, to move out of earshot. ‘If, as expected, Macrianus rejects the demand to ransom Valerian, then Shapur has an excellent cause for the war to carry on. But on the other side of the coin, if, by some divine intervention, we get Macrianus to give up what is demanded, then Shapur gets a huge amount of gold and silver and certain other things which make his glory all the greater and, I feel sure, Mazda will guide him to another good and just reason for the fighting to continue.’
‘Either way, we end up back on our bellies before the Sassanid throne.’ Ballista sounded depressed. ‘And then …’
‘There is a lot of talk around Shapur of using the expertise of the Roman prisoners: building towns, dams, bridges, fortifications. As a trained siege engineer, you might end up doing that. It might not be too bad.’
Having agreed, in the most half-hearted way, Ballista said goodnight to Cledonius and went to his tent. The northerner was very tired.
It was long into the night, possibly around the end of the third watch, when Ballista woke with a feeling of profound dread. The wind had risen. He could hear nothing over its howling and snapping around the tent. It was not the noise that scared him, though, it was the smell: the thick, lanolin smell of waxed canvas.
Although he knew what he would see, a tiny part of Ballista hoped he was wrong. He forced himself to look. He was not mistaken. The faint glow of the torches outside illuminated the figure. It was standing, the tip of its hood touching
the roof of the tent. As every time before, it was waiting.
Ballista got a double bridle on his fear. ‘Speak,’ he commanded.
The figure spoke, a deep, grating sound: ‘I will see you again at Aquileia.’
‘I will see you then,’ Ballista replied.
The figure did not move. Under the hood, its eyes glittered. It hissed another word: ‘Oath-breaker,’ then turned and left.
Ballista did not call out for the guards. There was no point. On no previous occasion had anyone else seen the daemon of the emperor Maximinus Thrax.
Twenty-two years before, Ballista had sworn the military oath to Maximinus Thrax. By Jupiter Optimus Maximus and all the gods, I swear to carry out the emperor’s commands, never desert the standards or shirk death, to value the safety of the emperor above everything. Ballista had not kept the sacramentum. Instead, at the siege of Aquileia, he had killed Maximinus Thrax, plunging a stylus into his throat. The other conspirators had beheaded the emperor, desecrated his body. Denying him burial, they had condemned his daemon to walk the earth for eternity.
Ballista had only told four people about the daemon: his wife Julia, bodyguard Maximus, body servant Calgacus and Turpio – and Turpio was dead. Julia, brought up by an Epicurean father, had tried to comfort her husband by rationalizing it. Maximinus only appeared when Ballista was tired, under great stress. It was just a figment of his overheated imagination. Ballista sniffed the air – waxed canvas. He did not think bad dreams left a smell.
It had been four years since the last apparition, the night Arete fell. Never before had the daemon said ‘Oath-breaker’. He was a long way from Aquileia, but Ballista knew the daemon’s words foretold something bad.
Demetrius sat on the hard-packed earth floor, his back against the rough stone wall. It was almost completely dark. There was just one tiny slit of a window, high up. It had admitted little light during the day and, when the sun went down, next to none.
After their arrest, the four Dalmatian troopers had been marched off straight away to the military cantonment. Ballista’s three freedmen had been kept waiting at the gate until well past midday. When Maximus asked for food, the centurion had hit him hard across the back with his vine stick.
At long last, they had been ordered to their feet. Under heavy guard, they were led through the squared-off streets to the bridge over the Euphrates which gave the twin towns of Apamea on the eastern bank and Zeugma on the west a reason to exist.
At the bridgehead, the party had been brought to a halt. The approaches, narrowed anyway by bales of merchandise, were completely blocked by a mass of men, camels, mules and horses. Amid a fearful noise, the crush had surged up to the barrier, where a lone telones backed by some club-wielding members of the watch attempted to extract the custom dues rightly owed to both the imperium and the city. Demetrius wondered whether it had always been like that or if refugees from the east had made things worse.
When the Moorish auxiliaries laid about them, trying to force a way through, initially it had merely exacerbated the situation. Men had cursed, mules brayed, horses lashed out, and some camels had sunk to their knees, roaring. The centurion snapped an order. Swords were unsheathed. The men, if not the animals, in the crush scrambled to get out of the way.
Having told the telones and the civic watch to go fuck themselves, the soldiers had marched the prisoners across the pontoon bridge. The river was busy with boats and barges coming downstream from Samosata. Half a dozen big barges, piled high with produce, were moored, waiting for a gap to be opened in the pontoon so they could continue on south.
There had been another pause at a military checkpoint on the western bridgehead. It had been quieter there. The slop, slop sound of screws raising water from the river floated up. To one side, Demetrius noticed a massive iron chain coiled with vines and ivy growing through the unrusted links, the remains of the original bridge constructed by the god Dionysus on his way to the east to conquer India.
The formalities conducted, they moved on through what had until recently been a rich residential area. The majority of the houses showed signs of having been burnt. Only some had been repaired, and those hastily. After that, the land rising, they passed a theatre and crossed an agora, which brought them to the foot of the citadel. The path up was stepped and ran between dwellings that clung to the vertiginous slope. The tall terraced houses seemed to be built on top of each other and the path between them like the bottom of a ravine.
They entered through a gate in a low, rough wall and climbed on up through an orchard of fruit trees. At length, out of breath, they reached the summit. To their left was the great temple of the Tyche of Zeugma; a statue of the seated goddess could be glimpsed through the open doors. The guards turned them sharply to the right, towards the palace complex. From there they were taken to a side entrance, frogmarched down a flight of steps, along a corridor and unceremoniously pushed into a cell. The door slammed behind them, and they heard bolts being pushed home.
Demetrius had slumped to the floor. From there he watched Maximus and Calgacus carefully inspecting every inch of the gloomy, bare cell. They tried the door, stood on each other’s shoulders to check the narrow window, tapped the walls, scraped at the floor. Eventually, frustrated, they hunkered down next to the young Greek. The older men talked in low voices. If they could get out, they would need horses, or they could try to make it to one of the barges waiting at the bridge, hide themselves among the produce, or maybe overpower the boatmen and take their place.
At some point in the afternoon, they heard the bolts drawn back, and the door swung open. Watchful guards covered them with drawn swords as a tray of food was put on the floor. The door was shut again.
There was some stale bread, a few handfuls of raisins and a big pitcher of water. Demetrius and Maximus fell on it. Calgacus used some of his share of the water to wash his wounded arm. When everything had gone, they were still hungry.
When the light faded, Maximus and Calgacus both fell fast asleep. There was no furniture, so they slept on the floor, their heads on their arms.
Demetrius could not sleep. It was not his hunger. Desperate though it was, the prison-stench of unwashed bodies, shit and fear took the edge off it, made him feel nauseous. He envied the calm, natural fatalism of his companions. Gods below, they had travelled so far, come through so much – and for it to come to this. Confined in this filthy cell – if he still lived, could Ballista himself be worse off? And the centurion had said that Ballista was now declared a hostis. Falsely accused of having led the old emperor Valerian into the trap that had cost his freedom, Demetrius’s kyrios was now an outlaw to be killed on sight by any Roman citizen. The true traitor, that scheming bastard Macrianus the Lame, had seized the moment and was now the master of the eastern provinces of the imperium. Was there no such thing as divine justice? Did the gods even exist?
Demetrius lay down in the darkness. To steady himself, he turned to philosophy and the teachings of the Stoic masters. Everything that lies outside the inner man is an irrelevance. The things over which we have no choice – illness, bereavement, exile and imprisonment, death itself – all are irrelevant. Throw them aside. When enslaved, Diogenes was a free man. The King of Persia on his gilded throne may be a slave. Iron bars and stone walls cannot make a prison. A little comforted, he fell asleep.
A while later, a gentle pressure behind his left ear brought Demetrius awake. He jerked up. A hand clamped over his mouth. A faint light came from the open door. A figure stood there.
‘Come.’ The figure spoke in Greek with a heavy eastern accent. ‘You come now.’
Maximus removed his hand.
‘It could be a trap,’ Demetrius whispered.
‘Then we will swap one for another.’ Maximus grinned.
The figure went in front of them along the corridor and up the steps. He stopped, looked about and led them out. Quickly and quietly, they moved through a maze of alleys until they emerged on the far side of the citadel to that th
rough which they had come in.
The figure stopped again to look and listen, then waved them to follow him down into the orchard. The slope was steep, the soil underfoot crumbling and dry. Slithering and sliding, they went down, grabbing tree trunks to slow their momentum. The pale light of the young moon shone through the branches.
They came to a low wall. Demetrius realized that it must be the one that encircled the citadel. Without a word, the figure climbed it like a lizard. He dropped out of sight down the other side. Maximus and Calgacus followed, the latter protecting his wounded arm as he did so. Now that he was alone, a wave of panic threatened to overwhelm Demetrius. He started to climb. The wall was made of irregular stones. There was no mortar. Even so, Demetrius found it difficult. He grazed his knees, felt a fingernail tear. Lying on the top, he looked down. There was a drop, something over a man’s height, on to the roof of the first of the terraced houses. Nervously, he swung himself over, hung for a moment and let go. He landed awkwardly. Hands steadied him.
The figure put a finger to his lips then gestured for them to follow. In single file, Calgacus, then Demetrius, Maximus bringing up the rear, they set off.
At first they went to the right. They were sheltered there, between the wall and the gentle pitch of the roof. Demetrius walked carefully, one hand on the wall, watching where he put his feet, afraid a tile would shift or give way.
They turned left into a ridged dip where the roofs of two houses came together. At the end was another drop, a bit deeper this time. One by one, they turned round, lay down flat, pushed their legs out, wriggled backwards, hung by their hands for a second and let go. The landing site was the apex of a roof.
The figure indicated they were again to go to the right. Demetrius felt his heart shrink. The pitch of this roof was steeper, and it ran down to the black, square opening of an atrium. Slip here, and there was nothing to stop you sliding all the way down, over the edge and out into emptiness; a fall of two storeys to a shattering impact on a concrete impluvium. Demetrius imagined his smashed body lying there, his blood staining black the waters of the shallow raintank.
Warrior of Rome III Page 6