Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘I don’t know,’ said one of the others. ‘It might be a good idea. Barbarians are naturally untrustworthy, and often as cunning as you can imagine.’ His voice summoned up the sun-drenched mountains and plains of the far west; the provinces of Further Spain or even Lusitania, where the Atlantic broke against the shore.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said the third. ‘OK, they are all untrustworthy bashtards. They have been lying since they could crawl. But the northern ones, like this bashtard, are thick, slow as you like. Your northerners are big, ferocious and stupid, while your easteners are small, sly and shit sheared of anything.’ The intermittent slurring showed that his first language was not Latin but Punic, from North Africa; the tongue spoken almost half a millennium ago by Hannibal, the great enemy of Rome.

  All the men on deck and the crew below fell silent as Marcus Clodius Ballista, Vir Egregius, Knight of Rome, and Dux Ripae, Commander of the Riverbanks, raised his arms to the heavens to begin the usual ritual at the start of a voyage. The water was calm here at the threshold of the sea, where the sheltered waters of Brundisium harbour met the Adriatic. With its outstretched oars at rest, the galley lay like a huge insect on the surface of the waters. In good Latin, which nevertheless had a twang of the forests and marshes of the far north, Ballista began to intone the traditional words:

  ‘Jupiter, king of the gods, hold your hands over this ship and all who sail in her. Neptune, god of the sea, hold your hands over this ship and all who sail in her. Tyche, spirit of the ship, hold your hands over us.’ He took a large, finely worked golden bowl from an attendant and, slowly, with due ceremony, poured three libations of wine into the sea, emptying it.

  Someone sneezed. Ballista held his outstretched pose. The sneeze had been unmistakable, undeniable. No one moved or spoke. Everyone knew that the worst omen for a sea journey, the clearest possible indication of the displeasure of the gods, was if someone sneezed during the rituals which marked the departure. Still Ballista held his pose. The ceremony should be over. An air of expectation and tension spread through the ship. Then, with a powerful flick of the wrist, Ballista sent the bowl flying through the air. There was a collective sigh as it splashed into the water. It glittered for a moment below the surface, and then was gone for ever.

  ‘Typical fucking barbarian,’ said the frumentarius from the Subura. ‘Always the big, stupid gesture. It cannot take away the omen, nothing can.’

  ‘That bowl would have bought a nice bit of land back home,’ said the North African.

  ‘He probably stole the thing in the first place,’ replied the Spaniard, reverting to their previous topic. ‘Sure, northern barbarians might be stupid, but treason comes as naturally to them as to any easterner.’

  Treason was the reason the frumentarii existed. The old saying of the emperor Domitian, that no one believed a plot against the emperor was real until he was assassinated, most certainly did not apply to them. Their thoughts were suffused with treason, plot and counter-plot; their ruthless combination of secrecy, efficiency and obsession guaranteed that they were hated.

  The captain of the warship, having asked Ballista’s permission, called for silence prior to getting underway, and the three frumentarii were left to their own thoughts. They each had much to think about. Which one of them had been set the task of reporting on the others? Or was there a fourth frumentarius among the men of the Dux Ripae, so deep undercover they had not spotted him?

  Demetrius sat at the feet of Ballista, whom in his native Greek he called kyrios, ‘master’. Yet again he thanked his own daemon for guiding his recent path. It would be hard to imagine a better kyrios. ‘A slave should not wait for his master’s hand,’ ran the old saying. Ballista had not raised his hand in the four years since the kyrios’s wife had purchased Demetrius as his new secretary, one among many wedding presents. Demetrius’s previous owners had had no such compunction about using their fists, or doing far worse.

  The kyrios had looked magnificent just now as he made his vows and threw the heavy golden bowl into the sea. It had been a gesture worthy of the Greek boy’s hero, Alexander the Great himself. It had been an impulsive gesture of generosity, piety and contempt for material wealth. He had given his own wealth to the gods for the good of them all, to avert the omen of the sneeze.

  Demetrius considered that there was much of Alexander about Ballista: the cleanshaven face; the golden hair pulled back, standing up like a lion’s mane and falling in curls on either side of the wide brow; the broad shoulders and straight, clean limbs. Of course Ballista was taller; Alexander had been famously short. And then there were the eyes. Alexander’s had been disconcertingly of different colours; Ballista’s were a deep, dark blue.

  Demetrius balled his fist, thumb between index and forefinger, to avert the evil eye, as the thought struck him that Ballista must be about thirty-two, the age at which Alexander had died.

  He watched uncomprehendingly as the ship got underway. Officers bellowed orders, a piper blew shrill notes, sailors pulled on mystifying patterns of ropes and from below came the grunts of the rowers, the splash of the oars and the sound of the hull gathering pace through the water. Nothing in the great historians of the immortal Greek past - Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon - had prepared the bookish young slave for the deafening noise of a galley.

  Demetrius looked up at his kyrios. Ballista’s hands were un-moving, seemingly clenched around the ends of the ivory arms of the folding curule chair, a Roman symbol of his high office. His face was still; he stared straight ahead, as if part of a painting. Demetrius half wondered if the kyrios was a bad sailor. Did he get seasick? Had he ever sailed further than the short crossing from the toe of Italy to Sicily? After a moment’s reflection, Demetrius dismissed such ideas of human frailty from his mind. He knew what oppressed his kyrios. It was none other than Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and her mischievous son Eros: Ballista was missing his wife.

  The marriage of Ballista and the kyria, Julia, had not started as a love match. It was an arrangement, like all of those of the elite. A family of senators at the top of the social pyramid yet short of money and influence gave their daughter to a rising military officer. Admittedly, he was of barbarian origins. But he was a Roman citizen, a member of the equestrian order, the rank just below the senators themselves. He had distinguished himself in campaigns on the Danube, among the islands in the distant Ocean and in North Africa, where he had won the Mural Crown for being the first man on to the walls of an enemy town. More importantly, he had been educated at the imperial court and was a favourite of the then emperor, Gallus. If he was a barbarian, at least he was the son of a king, who had come to Rome as a diplomatic hostage.

  With the marriage, Julia’s family gained present influence at court and, with luck, future wealth. Ballista gained respectability. From such a conventional opening, Demetrius had watched love grow. So deeply had the arrows of Eros struck the kyrios that he did not have sex with any of the maidservants, even when his wife was confined bearing their son; a thing often remarked in the servants’ quarters, especially given his barbarian origins, with all they implied about lust and lack of self-control.

  Demetrius would try and provide the companionship his kyrios so greatly needed, he would be at his side throughout the mission - a mission the very thought of which turned his stomach. How far would they have to travel towards the rising sun, across stormy seas and wild lands? And what horrors would await them at the edge of the known world? The young slave thanked his Greek god Zeus he was under the protection of a soldier of Rome like Ballista.

  What a pantomime, thought Ballista. An absolute bloody pantomime. So someone had sneezed. It was hardly surprising that, among the three hundred men on the ship, one would have a cold. If the gods had wanted to send an omen, there had to be a clearer way.

  Ballista very much doubted that those Greek philosophers he had heard about could be right that all the different gods known to all the different races of man were really all the same just with differ
ent names. Jupiter, the Roman king of the gods, seemed very different to Woden, the king of the gods of his childhood and youth among his own people, the Angles. Of course, there were similarities. They both liked dressing up in disguise. They both enjoyed screwing mortal girls. They were both nasty if you crossed them. But there were big differences. Jupiter liked screwing mortal boys, and that sort of thing did not go down at all well with Woden. Jupiter seemed rather less malevolent than Woden. The Romans believed that, if approached in the right way, with the right offerings, Jupiter might actually come and help you. It was highly unlikely that Woden would do the same. Even if you were one of his descendants - Woden-born, as Ballista himself was - probably the best you could hope from the Allfather was that he would leave you alone until your final battle. Then, if you fought like a hero, he might send forth his shield maidens to carry you to Valhallah. All of which left Ballista wondering why he had dedicated that golden bowl. With a heavy sigh, he decided to think about something else. Theology was not for him.

  He turned his thoughts to his mission. It was reasonably straightforward. By the standards of the Roman imperial bureaucracy, it was very straightforward. He had been appointed the new Dux Ripae, commander of all the Roman forces on the banks of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris and all the land in between. The title was rather grander on paper than in reality. Three years ago, the Sassanid Persians, the new and aggressive empire to the east, had attacked Rome’s eastern territories. Burning with religious fervour, hordes of their horsemen had swept up the riverbanks through Mesopotamia and on into Syria. Before returning laden with plundered treasures, driving their captives before them, they had watered their horses by the Mediterranean sea. Thus, now there were next to no Roman forces for the new Dux Ripae to command.

  The specifics of Ballista’s instructions, his mandata, perforce revealed the feeble state of Roman power in the east. He was commanded to proceed to the city of Arete, in the Province of ‘Hollow Syria’ (Coele Syria), atthe easternmost reaches of the imperium. There he was to ready the city to withstand siege by the Sassanids, a siege which was expected to fall the following year. There were only two units of regular Roman troops at his command, a detachment, a vexillatio, of legionary heavy infantry from Legio IIII Scythica of about one thousand men, and an auxiliary cohors of both mounted and foot bowmen, again of about a thousand men. He had been instructed to raise what local levies he could in Arete and to ask the client kings of the nearby cities of Emesa and Palmyra for troops, although, of course, not to the detriment of their own defence. He was to hold Arete until he was relieved by an imperial field army commanded by the emperor Valerian himself. To facilitate the arrival of the field army, he had been further instructed to look to the defence of the main port of Syria, Seleuceia in Pieria, and the provincial capital, Antioch. In the absence of the governor of Coele Syria, the Dux Ripae was to have the full powers of a governor. When the governor was present, the Dux was bound to defer to him.

  Ballista found himself grimly smiling at the absurdities of his instructions, absurdities typical of military missions planned by politicians. The potential for confusion between himself and the governor of Coele Syria was immense. And how could he, with the completely inadequate forces allotted him and whatever local peasants he could conscript, while under siege by a huge Persian army in Arete, also defend at least two other cities?

  He had been honoured to be summoned to the presence of the emperors Valerian and Gallienus. The imperial father and son had spoken most kindly to him. He admired both men. Valerian had signed Ballista’s mandata and invested him with the office of Dux Ripae with his own hand. But it could not be said that the mission was anything other than ill conceived and under resourced: too little time, and too few men in too vast an area. In more emotive terms, it looked much like a death sentence.

  In the last, rushed three weeks before leaving Italy, Ballista had found out what he could about the distant city of Arete. It was on the western bank of the Euphrates, some fifty miles below the confluence of the Euphrates and the Chaboras. It was said that its walls were well founded and that, on three sides, sheer cliffs made it impregnable. Apart from a couple of insignificant watch towers, it was the last outpost of the imperium Romanum. Arete was the first place a Sassanid Persian army advancing up the Euphrates would reach. It would bear the full force of an attack.

  Such history of the city as Ballista had been able to discover did not inspire much confidence. Originally founded by one of the successors of Alexander the Great, it had fallen first to the Parthians, then to the Romans then, only two years ago, to the Sassanid Persians, who had overthrown the Parthians. As soon as the main Persian army had withdrawn to their heartlands in the south-east, the locals, with help from some Roman units, had risen up and massacred the garrison the Sassanids had left behind. Its walls and cliffs notwithstanding, clearly the city had its weaknesses. Ballista could find what they were when he was on the ground, when he reached Syria. The commander of the auxiliary cohors stationed at Arete had instructions to meet him at the port of Seleuceia in Pieria.

  Nothing was ever quite as it seemed with the Romans. Certain questions ran through Ballista’s mind. How did the emperors know that the Sassanids would invade the following spring? And that they would take the Euphrates route rather than one of those to the north? If the military intelligence was sound, why was there no sign that an imperial field army was being mobilized? Closer to home, why had Ballista been chosen as Dux Ripae? He did have a certain reputation as a siege commander - five years ago he had been with Gallus in the north at the successful defence of the city of Novae against the Goths; before that he had taken various native settlements both in the far west and in the Atlas mountains - but he had never been to the east. Why had the emperors not sent either of their most experienced siege engineers? Both Bonitus and Celsus knew the east well.

  If only he had been allowed to bring Julia with him. As she had been born into an old senatorial family, the labyrinth of politics at the Roman imperial court, so impenetrable to Ballista, were second nature to her. She could have cut to the heart of the ever-shifting patterns of patronage and intrigue, could have blown away the fog of unknowing that surrounded her husband.

  Thinking of Julia brought a pang of longing, acute and physical - her tumbling ebony hair, eyes so dark as to appear black, the swell of her breasts, the flare of her hips. Ballista felt alone. He would miss her physically. But, more, he would miss her companionship, that and the heart-melting prattle of their infant son.

  Ballista had asked permission for them to accompany him. Refusing the request, Valerian had pointed to the manifest dangers of the mission. But all knew there was another reason for the refusal: the emperors’ need to hold hostages to ensure the good behaviour of their military commanders. Too many generals of the last generation had gone into revolt.

  Ballista knew that he would feel lonely, despite being surrounded by people. He had a staff of fifteen men: four scribes, six messengers, two heralds, two haruspices, to read the omens, and Mamurra, his praefectus fabrum, chief engineer. In accordance with Roman law, he had chosen them from central lists of officially approved members of these professions, but he knew none of them, not even Mamurra, personally. It was in the natural course of things that some of these men would be frumentarii.

  As well as his official staff, he had some of his own household with him - Calgacus, his body servant, Maximus, his bodyguard, and Demetrius, his secretary. That he had appointed the young Greek youth who now sat at his feet to run his headquarters, to be his accensus, would be resented by all the official staff, but he needed someone he felt he could trust. In Roman terms, they were part of his familia but, to Ballista, they seemed a poor substitute for his real family.

  Something unusual about the motion of the ship caught Ballista’s attention. Its familiar smells - pine from the pitch used to seal the hull, mutton fat from the tallow used to waterproof the leather oar sockets, and stale and fresh human sweat - r
eminded him of his youth on the wild northern ocean. This trireme Concordia, with its 180 rowers on three levels, its two masts, its two huge steering oars, 20 deck crew and some 70 marines, was an altogether more sophisticated vessel than any longboat from his youth. It was a racehorse to their pack animal. Yet, like a racehorse, it was bred for one thing, and that was speed and manoeuvrability in smooth seas. If the sea turned rough, Ballista knew he would be safer in a primitive northern longboat.

  The wind had backed in a southerly direction and was picking up. Already the sea was rising into ugly, choppy cross-waves which were catching the beam of the trireme, making it difficult for the rowers to clear their oars and giving the vessel the beginnings of an uncomfortable lurch. On the horizon to the south, dark stormclouds were building. Ballista now realized that the captain and helmsman had been deep in conversation for some time. As he looked at them, they came to a decision. They exchanged a final few words, both nodded, and the captain walked the few feet back to Ballista.

  ‘The weather is turning, Dominus.’

  ‘What do you recommend?’ replied Ballista.

  ‘As our course was to sail due east to rise Cape Acroceraunia and then coast south to Corcyra, as the gods would have it we are roughly midway between Italy and Greece. As we cannot hope to run for shelter, if the storm comes, we must run before it.’

  ‘Take what actions you think fit.’

  ‘Yes, Dominus. Could I ask that you order your staff to move away from the masts?’

  As Demetrius scrabbled across the deck to pass the order, the captain again briefly conferred with the helmsman, then issued a volley of commands. The deckhands and marines, having herded the staff to the side rails, efficiently lowered the mainyard by some four or five feet on the mast. Ballista approved. The ship would need to catch enough wind to give her steerage way, but too much would make her hard to control.