Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  The third man, the talkative one whom the attendants had greeted as Maximus, was worse. He was dressed in similar fashion to the officer, but he was no soldier. He wore an old-fashioned gladius, a Spanish short sword, an ornate dagger and a mass of cheap gilt ornaments. His black hair was longer than the other man’s and he had a short but full beard. The scar where the tip of his nose had been showed white against the deep tan of his bird-like face. The barmen thought it looked like a cat’s arse. They had no intention of telling the man. His whole appearance pointed to his time in the arena and his current employment as a hired tough. But what was really worrying were his eyes. Light blue, wide open and slightly blank, they were the eyes of a man who could turn to extreme violence at a moment’s notice.

  ‘This one is on me.’ Mamurra raised his slab-sided face to catch the eye of one of the owners. The barman nodded and gestured to a girl to take drinks to the three men.

  ‘Jupiter, that barman is one ugly bastard,’ said Calgacus in an atrocious northern accent.

  ‘You see, my dear Praefectus,’ Maximus spoke to Mamurra, ‘Calgacus here is something of an expert on beauty. It all comes from his youth. You may find it hard to credit, but when he was young his beauty shone like the sun. Men and boys - even women and girls - they all wanted him. When he was enslaved, kings, princes and satraps showered him with gold hoping for his favours. They say that, in Athens, he caused a riot. You know what dedicated pederasts the Athenians are.’

  It was not so much hard to credit as completely impossible to believe. Mamurra regarded Calgacus closely; he had a weak chin, not concealed by a growth of stubble, a sour, thin mouth, a wrinkled forehead, short-cropped receding hair and, the most distinctive feature, a great dome of a skull rising up and out above the ears. It had taken Mamurra a moment or two to realize that Maximus had been joking. Neptune’s bollocks, this is going to be hard work, he thought. He was not a man who had an affinity with light, playful irony.

  A girl with small breasts and a bony behind arrived with their wine. As she set down the large mixing bowl Maximus ran his hand up her leg under her short tunic and over her arse. She simpered. Both were doing what they thought was expected of them.

  In the normal run of things, the praefectus fabrum, Mamurra, would not have been drinking with a couple of barbarian slaves, let alone paying for the drinks. But everyone dances when Dionysius demands. In the imperium power came from proximity to greater power. The DuxRipae had power because he had a commission direct from the emperors. These two slaves had power because they were close to the Dux Ripae. They had been with Ballista for years. It was fourteen years since the DuxRipae had purchased Maximus, and Calgacus had come to the imperium with him. If Mamurra’s own commission were to be a success, it was vital to find out everything he could about the new Dux. Anyway, he accepted that, given his own status, it would be hypocritical to stand on ceremony. It was not even as if Mamurra was the name he had been given at birth.

  He studied his two companions. Calgacus was drinking slowly, steadily, determinedly. Like an Archimedes screw pumping out the hold of a ship, he lowered the level of his cup. Maximus was also getting through his share, but he took sips or gulps as and when the waving, chopping hand gestures which illustrated his never-ending chatter allowed. Mamurra awaited his moment.

  ‘Strange that the Greek boy Demetrius turned down a drink. Do you think he is put out that Ballista bought that pretty Persian boy today? One bum boy fearing another bum boy in the house? Nothing is lower in a household than yesterday’s favourite.’ Mamurra watched Maximus’s normally mobile features still, his face become closed.

  ‘The tastes of the dominus do not run in that direction. In his tribe such people are killed; just like... in the Roman army.’ Maximus turned to look Mamurra full in the face.

  The praefectus fabrum held the bodyguard’s gaze for a moment or two then looked away. ‘I am sure that is the way it is.’ Mamurra noted the barman exchanging a significant look with the man ugly enough to be his brother who was in charge of the door.

  Mamurra decided to try another tack. His wine cup was decorated with a scene of a vigorous orgy. It was a crude copy of the ancient style of painted vases which now were so often collected by the rich as antiques, as conversation pieces. Like the whole decoration of the room, including the two ludicrously oversized fake Doric columns which flanked the door to the stairs, the drinking cups were intended to give the poor patrons of the bar an illusory sense of an elite lifestyle. Mamurra knew, because he had often been in the houses of the rich, sometimes even legitimately.

  ‘I think I could do with a fuck,’ he said. ‘If either of you want a girl, be my guest.’

  ‘That is awful kind of you, my dear Praefectus.We have been at sea a long time and, as I am sure an educated man like yourself knows, there is no sex to be had at sea. The sailors say that it brings the worst sort of luck. I wonder if that includes sex with yourself. If so, it’s a wonder we made port at all, what with Calgacus here strumming like Priapus in the women’s quarters.’ Maximus looked around the room. ‘There! Over there! A vision! A vision of beauty!’

  ‘What, the fat girl?’ Calgacus asked, following the direction of his gaze.

  ‘Warmth in the winter, shade in the summer.’ Maximus beamed and went off to strike a deal.

  Now let’s see if we can get anything out of this miserable old Caledonian bastard, thought Mamurra.

  ‘How do you put up with it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just his way.’

  ‘I have noticed sometimes he even talks that way to the Dux. How does he get away with that?’

  There was a lengthy pause as Calgacus further lowered the level of his drink. ‘On account of saving his life,’ he said finally.

  ‘When did Maximus save his life?’

  Another long pause. ‘No, the dominus saved Maximus’s life. Creates a bond.’

  Beginning to despair, Mamurra refilled Calgacus’s cup. ‘Why is the Dux named after a siege engine?’

  ‘Maybe he got the name Ballista because he has always had an interest in siege engines.’

  This is sodding hopeless, thought Mamurra. ‘He must be a good dominus to serve.’

  The old slave drank and seemed to mull this over. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, he seems an easy master. No special demands.’ Mamurra was nothing if not persistent.

  ‘Boiled eggs,’ said Calgacus.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Soft-boiled eggs. Very fussy about them. Have to be just so.’

  Ballista sat on some stone steps which ran down to the water from the dock. For the first time since Brundisium he felt happy. He had just written a letter to Julia and included a short note for her to read to their son. He had sent a crapulous-looking Calgacus off to the other imperial trireme to ask if the procurator would be kind enough to deliver it. Even if they had already left Rome for the villa in Sicily, which was not likely, it should soon reach them. The autumn sunshine was warm on his face, and it sparkled on the vivid blue sea.

  He picked up his copy of How to Defend a City under Siege by Aeneas Tacticus and scrolled through the papyrus roll to find his place. ‘Announce a monetary reward for anyone denouncing a conspirator against the city ... the reward offered should be advertised openly in the agora or at an altar or shrine.’ Ballista had read the script before. Its main thrust was the need to be on constant guard against traitors within. When Aeneas wrote, the Mediterranean had been a mosaic of warring city states, each one well stocked with potential revolutionaries. One should never discount the possibility of treachery, but times had changed. Issues were simpler now; unless there were a civil war, it was the imperium Romanian against those outside. The main danger Ballista would face at Arete would be regular Persian siege works - artillery, rams, ramps and mines. This was the sort of practical siege engineering that the big northerner understood.

  His bodyguard was approaching, shepherding the newly acquired Persian slave along the dock. Ballista thanked
Maximus and gave him leave; under the bodyguard’s tan there was an unhealthy pallor, he was sweating much more than the sun merited and his eyes peered out from behind lids almost screwed shut. Maximus gave a slight nod and left. As if by magic, Demetrius appeared, his stylus and writing block ready.

  Ballista studied the Persian boy. He was tall, nearly as tall as the northerner himself, with curly black hair and beard. His dark eyes were suspicious, and he had an unmistakable air of hostility. ‘Sit,’ he said in Greek. ‘Bagoas is a slave name?’ The Persian boy nodded.

  ‘Show respect! Yes, Kyrios!’ snapped Demetrius.

  ‘Yes, Kyrios,’ said the Persian in heavily accented Greek.

  ‘What was your name before you were enslaved?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Hormizd.’

  Ballista suspected he was lying. ‘Do you want to be called Hormizd again?’

  The question wrongfooted the youth. ‘Er ... no ... Kyrios.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It would bring shame on my family.’

  ‘How were you enslaved?’

  Again there was a pause while the Persian considered his answer. ‘I was captured by ... some Arab ... bandits, Kyrios.’

  Another shifty answer, thought Ballista, his eyes following the flight of a seagull away towards the north.

  The boy seemed to relax a little.

  ‘I will tell you why I purchased you.’ Instantly, the boy tensed. He feared the worst. He seemed ready to run or even to fight. ‘I want you to teach me Persian. I want to learn both the language and the customs of the Persians.’

  ‘Most upper-class Persians speak a little Greek, Kyrios,’ said the boy, sounding relieved.

  Ballista ignored him. ‘Carry out your duties well and you will be treated well. Try and run and I will kill you!’ He shifted in his seat. ‘How did the Persians under the Sassanid house overthrow the Parthians? Why do they so frequently unleash their horsemen on the imperium Romanum ? How have they so frequently defeated the Romans?’

  ‘The god Mazda willed it’ came the instant reply.

  If the first stratagem to bring down the walls fails you must try another. Ballista continued. ‘Tell me the story of the Sassanid house. I want to know the ancestors of King Shapur and the stories of their deeds.’

  ‘There are many stories of the origins of the house.’

  ‘Tell me those that you believe.’ The boy was wary, but Ballista hoped that pride would lead him to start talking.

  The boy collected his thoughts. ‘Long ago, when the lord Sasan travelled through the lands, he came to the palace of King Papak. Papak was a seer, and he could tell that the descendants of Sasan were destined by Mazda to lead the Persians to greatness. Papak had no daughter or female relative to offer Sasan, so he offered him his wife. He preferred the lasting glory of the Sassanid Persians to his own shame. The son born to Sasan was Ardashir, the King of Kings, who thirty years ago overthrew the Parthians. The son of Ardashir is Shapur, the King of Kings, the King of Aryans and Non-Aryans, who by the will of Mazda smites the Romans.’ The youth glared defiantly at Ballista.

  ‘And Shapur wants back all the lands which were once ruled by the Persians in ancient times before Alexander the Great took their empire? So he would take from the Romans Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Greece?’

  ‘No ... well, yes.’

  ‘Which? No or yes?’

  ‘Yes in the sense that they are ancestral lands that must be reclaimed, but no in the sense that they are not all that he will take from the Romans.’ The boy’s eyes shone with zeal.

  ‘Then what other lands would he have?’ Ballista suspected the worst.

  ‘The King of Kings Shapur in his perfect humility accepts that he is just the instrument of the god Mazda. He understands that it is the destiny of his house to bring the sacred fires of Mazda to the whole world, to make all peoples worship Mazda, to make all the world Aryan!’

  So there it was. Ballista’s transient feeling of happiness had evaporated. The Persians had no need for temporal niceties such as just cause. There was no hope of compromise, or delay. Seemingly, there was no hope of an end: it was a religious war. For a moment Ballista saw the world as the Persian boy saw it: the armies of the righteous, their numbers those of the stars in the sky, sweeping west to cleanse the world. And all that was standing in their path was Ballista himself and the isolated city of Arete.

  III

  It had taken time for the drink to die out of Maximus. As soon as Ballista had given him leave he had bought bread, cheese, olives, water and a small piece of honeycomb from the main marketplace and gone in search of a quiet place to sit. He found a deserted garden and chose a spot where both possible points of entry were in view. After checking the shrubbery for snakes, of which he had a particular horror, he settled down with the one book he owned: Petronius’s novel The Satyricon. Maximus had tried other books since Ballista had taught him to read Latin in Africa some years ago, but none spoke to him like this one. It showed the Romans as they really were: lustful, drunken, greedy, duplicitous and violent - men much like himself.

  The next day, Maximus felt full of life. Just after dawn the captain had announced that, as he could see the peak of Mount Tenos, the day was well omened for voyaging. Ballista had carried out the correct ritual, and the Concordia had slipped her moorings. Maximus was now standing on the epotis, or ear timber, just behind the ram of the ship, enjoying a perfect view ahead over the azure sea. What a nice irony: here was he, a slave, enjoying the sun and spray in the best seat on the ship, while behind and below him 180 freemen, technically soldiers of Rome, many of them volunteers, sat on hard benches in the airless semi-dark rowing this great ship. Let the poor bastards get splinters in their arses, he thought.

  Slavery sat lightly on Maximus. Others took it hard - young Demetrius for one. The Greek boy had looked down in the mouth ever since it had been announced that they would stop at Delos. Maybe it had to do with how you came to be a slave. Some were born slaves. Some were abandoned on dunghills as babies and taken in by slave dealers. Some were so poor they sold themselves into slavery. Some were enslaved for crimes; others captured by pirates or bandits. Outside the imperium, many had been enslaved by the mighty armies of Rome - fewer now that Roman armies seemed to have acquired the habit of losing. And then there were those who had come into the condition like Maximus himself.

  Back when he had been a freeman, he had been known by the name Muirtagh. His last memory of freedom was of laughing with some other warriors. They had tied a peasant to a tree, on the off chance that he had perhaps a hidden pot of gold, and were passing a skin of beer from hand to hand. His first memory of servitude was of lying in the back of a cart. His hands were tightly bound behind his back and, with each jolt of the unsprung wagon, the pain in his head grew worse. He had no memory of anything between the two. It was as if someone had taken his papyrus roll of The Satyricon, ripped out several sheets and then glued the torn ends together again, or maybe better had torn several pages from one of those new bound books. The story just jumped from one scene to another.

  Another warrior whose life had been spared for slavery, Cormac, had been in the cart too. Apparently, they had raided a neighbouring tribe of some cattle and some of its warriors had caught up with them. There was a running battle and Muirtagh had been hit in the head by a slingshot and dropped like a stone. Now they were being taken down to the coast to be sold to Roman slave traders.

  Cormac had not been sold. A minor wound to his leg had turned bad, and he had died. Muirtagh had. His first owner thought Maximus was a suitable name for a potential recruit to the arena, so he was called Muirtagh no longer. Maximus was shipped to Gaul and sold to a lanista, the trainer of a travelling group of gladiators. At first he had fought with the cruel caestus, the metal-spiked glove of a boxer. But there had been an incident: Maximus and a retiarius, a net and trident fighter, in the troupe had fallen out over money. To recoup the loss incurred by the crippling of
the retiarius, Maximus had been sold to another troupe, where he had fought with the oblong shield and short sword of a murmillo.

  Maximus had been fighting in the great stone amphitheatre of Arelate when Ballista first saw him. The Angle had paid well over the odds for him, and for good reason. Back then, on his way to the far west, Ballista would need two things: someone to watch his back and someone to teach him Celtic.

  Maximus was not obsessed with winning his freedom as other slaves were. The Romans were uncommon generous with manumission - but only because freeing lots of slaves was the carrot that worked with the stick of crucifixion to keep them from acts of desperation, from mass flight or revolt. At an individual level, it was a way for the Roman elite to show their largesse. Freeing large numbers of slaves fuelled the demand for new ones. Freedom, for Maximus, was all bound up with expectations and obligations. Maximus was not too fussed about a roof over his head, and certainly not bothered whether the roof was his own. He wanted his belly full, of booze as well as food; he wanted a string of willing girls, although, at times, reluctance had its attractions; and he enjoyed a fight. He was good at violence, and he knew it. If he had stayed at home and had managed to stay alive, he would have gained these things in the retinue of a local Hibernian king. Here, serving as Ballista’s bodyguard, he got all of them, with wine as well as beer, and a greater range of women. And then, there was no question of freedom until he had paid off his obligation to Ballista. It often played through his mind: his hobnails slipping on the marble floor (never wear those bastards again), his sword knocked out of reach as he fell (always have a wrist loop of leather on the pommel), the fierce brown face, the sword arm lifted for the killing blow, and the cut with which Ballista had severed that arm.