Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  The party did not last long after that. Turpio with Felix and Castricius, the centurions under his command, were the next to leave, followed in rapid succession by the caravan protectors and the councillors.

  As soon as he had said farewell to the last of his guests, the eunuch Otes - ‘Most enjoyable, Kyrios, a great success’ - Ballista, Demetrius at his heels, retired to his private quarters. Maximus and Calgacus were waiting.

  ‘Did you get the things I asked for?’

  ‘Yes, Dominus,’ replied Maximus.

  ‘And bloody expensive they were too,’ added Calgacus.

  On the bed were spread two sets of clothing. Gaudy red, blue, yellow and purple tunics, trousers and caps, striped, hemmed and embroidered in contrasting colours in the local style.

  ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Ballista and Maximus began to strip off their normal clothes and pull on the eastern garments.

  ‘Kyrios, this is madness,’ said Demetrius. ‘What good can it do?’

  Ballista, having removed the two ornaments from his belt, the mural crown and the gilded bird of prey, was looking down, concentrating on attaching a new decoration which spelt out FELIX, good luck. ‘There is a danger that junior officers tell their superiors what they think they want to hear: “the men are in good spirits, full of fight.” Imagine what the King of Kings is told. I am no Shapur, but it is always more pleasant to bring good news than bad.’ Ballista scooped his long hair up under the Syrian cap.

  ‘Please, Kyrios, think of the dangers - if not to yourself, then to the rest of us if something should happen.’

  Ballista was wondering if he should remove the amber healing stone from the scabbard of his sword. He decided against it. ‘Stop worrying, boy. There is no better way of testing the morale of the men. At their posts, unsupervised, they talk intimately of their hopes and fears.’ The northerner patted Demetrius on the shoulder. ‘It will be fine. I have done this sort of thing before.’

  ‘No one seems all that concerned about me,’ said Maximus.

  ‘You are expendable,’ said Calgacus.

  Ballista hung a combined bow case and quiver over his shoulder, draped a wolfskin around himself and looked at himself in the mirror that Calgacus held out. Then he looked at his bodyguard. ‘Maximus, rub some soot on your nose. Apart from that gleaming white cat’s arse, no one could recognize us. We look like a couple of the most villainous mercenaries employed by the caravan protectors.’

  A quiet word with the guards, then the two men slipped out of the northern door of the palace. They turned left and walked down through the military quarter towards the desert wall. At the campus martius they were challenged by a picket of legionaries from the century of Antoninus Posterior stationed there: Libertas. They gave the password - principatus - and went on their way.

  They climbed up to the battlements at the north-west angle of the wall by the temple of Bel. Having been challenged again - Libertas-Principatus - they stood by the parapet for a time looking out over the ravine to the north and the great plain to the west. In the distance the myriad fires of the Sassanid camp cast a ruddy glow in the sky. A low hum of noise drifted across the desert. A Persian horse neighed and, near at hand, a Roman one answered.

  Along the wall torches guttered. From somewhere in the town came the ringing of a hammer as a blacksmith worked late, closing up the rivets of a sword or the sprung rings of a mail coat. Up on the tower above, a sentry called Antiochus talked lengthily and monotonously of his recent divorce: his wife had always been a shrew, vicious tongue on her, and gods below did she talk, worse than being married to your own stepmother.

  Ballista leant close to his bodyguard. ‘I think that you did enough last night to pay back your debt and claim your freedom.’

  ‘No. It has to be the same. Last night, sure those three may have soon killed you, but I cannot be certain. When you saved me there was no room for doubt; on my back, weapon knocked out of my hand, one more second and I was dead. Certain, it has to be the same.’

  ‘Some religions hold pride to be a terrible sin, I believe.’

  ‘More fool them.’

  Ballista and Maximus drifted south along the wall walk. Here and there as they passed in and out of the pools of torchlight, they were challenged by sentries, lean-cheeked men in war-worn tunics: Libertas- Principatus, Libertas-Principatus.

  At the fourth tower they came to the sentries were playing dice. They were legionaries from IIII Scythica. Their oval shields, red with blue victories and a golden lion, were piled near by. Ballista and Maximus stayed in the shadows watching the firelight play on the men’s faces, listening to their talk.

  ‘Canis,’ a player groaned as his four dice landed in the ‘dog’, the worst throw possible.

  ‘You have always been unlucky.’

  ‘Bollocks. I am saving all my luck for tomorrow, fuck knows we will need it.’

  ‘Bollocks to you. Tomorrow will be a walk in a paradise. We have whipped them before and we will whip them again.’

  ‘So you say. There aren’t that many of us left. Most of the men on this wall are just fucking civilians playing at soldiers. I tell you, if the reptiles push it home tomorrow, we are fucked.’

  ‘Crap. The big barbarian bastard has got us through so far. He’ll see us right again tomorrow. If he says we can hold this wall, are you going to argue with him?’

  Ballista grinned at Maximus in the shadows.

  ‘I would rather argue with him than that fucking Hibernian bodyguard of his.’

  Maximus’s teeth flashed white in the shadows.

  ‘You have got a point. You wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. Ugly bastard, isn’t he?’

  Ballista took Maximus by the arm and led him down the stairs.

  By the time they had reached the Palmyrene Gate the night was creeping on and they had heard enough. The regular soldiers seemed solid enough; moaning furiously, their contempt was evenly divided between the enemy and the conscripts on their own side. The much-derided conscripts, especially those new to the desert wall, were either very quiet or boastfully loud - just as was to be expected from those who had not yet looked closely into the face of battle.

  Ballista decided to return to the palace. They needed their sleep. Tomorrow was another day.

  Demetrius finished dressing. Fussily he retied his writing block and stylus to his belt, getting them to hang just so. He looked at himself in his mirror. Despite the distortion in the polished metal, he could see that he looked awful. There was a network of fine blue veins under his eyes. He felt awful too. For the first half of the night he had remained fully dressed, pacing about. He had told himself that he would be unable to sleep until Ballista and Maximus returned from their foolish theatrical errand. When, some time after midnight, they had returned, in high spirits, laughing, teasing each other, Demetrius had gone to bed. He had still been unable to sleep. Stripped of his concerns for the others, he had had to face his fears for himself.

  There was no escape from the thought that in the morning the Persians would come again. Demetrius had not been much reassured by Ballista’s performance at the dinner. He knew his kyrios well: the big, bluff northerner was not good at lying. There had been a hollowness to his claims that the hearts of the Persians would not be in it. When that fat eunuch had asked if it was true that if they survived tomorrow they would be safe, what was it that Ballista had replied? Something like it being broadly true. The kyrios was not good at dissembling. But there again, privately, the kyrios was a worrier. It was part of what made him such a good soldier, the obsessive care for detail that made him such an excellent siege engineer. But this time surely he was right to be worried. This would be the Persians’ last throw. Shapur and his nobles would have whipped their warriors into a lather of fanaticism and hatred. They would want to eat the defenders’ hearts raw.

  Although he did not want to, Demetrius kept remembering that first Persian assault. The fierce dark bearded men swarming up the ladders, long swords in the
ir hands, murder in their hearts. And tomorrow it would happen again: thousand after thousand easterners over the parapets, laying about them with those terrible swords, cutting down those who stood in their way: an orgy of blood and suffering.

  Needless to say, at gallinicium, when the cocks start crowing but in peacetime men are still fast asleep, that time well before dawn when the entourage of the Dux Ripae had been ordered to assemble, Calgacus had had to wake Demetrius from a troubled sleep, a sleep in which he endlessly chased an aged dream-diviner through the narrow, filthy back alleys of the town. Tantalizingly, the man had remained out of reach, while from behind had come the sounds of the pursuing Sassanids, the screams of men and women, the crackle of burning buildings.

  ‘There is no time to lose,’ the old Caledonian had said, not unkindly. ‘They are all breakfasting in the great dining room. Everything will be all right. They are feeling good.’

  Calgacus was not wrong. As Demetrius entered the dining room, where the lamps still burnt at this early hour, he was greeted with a wave of laughter. Ballista, Maximus, the centurion Castricius, the standard-bearer Pudens, the two remaining messengers, the one remaining scribe and ten of the equites singulares were crammed together eating fried eggs and bacon. Ballista called Demetrius over, shook his hand, had Maximus slide along to make him a space. If anything, Ballista and Maximus were in even higher spirits than they had been when they returned the previous night. They were laughing and joking with the other men. Yet Demetrius, the unwanted plate of food in front of him, wedged between the two men from the north, thought that he detected an underlying tension, a fragility to the humour. Maximus was teasing the Dux for drinking just water. Ballista said that he wanted to keep a clear head - a state he assured everyone that his bodyguard had never known; tonight he would drink until he sang maudlin songs, told them all he loved them as brothers, and passed out.

  Breakfast finished, they trooped into the main courtyard of the palace to arm. They were quieter now; low conversations, short bursts of laughter. One after another men disappeared to the latrines. From the living quarters emerged Calgacus and Bagoas, carrying the parade armour of the Dux Ripae, unworn until now.

  ‘If you are going to defeat the Sassanid King of Kings you should look like a real Roman general,’ said Calgacus.

  Ballista would have preferred his old war-worn mail shirt, but he did not argue. Calgacus always had a desire to send him off well turned out, a desire that Ballista all too often frustrated. He stood, arms outstretched, as Calgacus and Maximus buckled him into the breast and back plates of the muscled cuirass, fitted the ornate shoulder guards and the fringe of heavy leather straps designed to give protection to manhood and thighs. Ballista put on his sword belt then let Calgacus pin a new black cloak over his shoulders. Over the cloak Calgacus draped the wolfskin from the previous night against the chill of the early morning and handed Ballista his helmet. Ballista noted that the wolfskin had been cleaned, the helmet polished.

  ‘If you don’t defeat Shapur, sure you will turn up well dressed in Valhalla,’ Maximus said in Ballista’s native tongue.

  ‘I hope that this is not the end of the long road for us, brother,’ Ballista replied in the same language.

  They set off from the main gate of the palace, silent now. In the darkness, torches flaring in the chill southerly breeze, they walked down through the military quarter, across the campus martius and to the northern end of the desert wall. As they climbed the steps by the temple of Bel to the north-west tower a sentry challenged them: Isangrim, the outlandish word correctly pronounced. Ballista gave the Latin response, Patria, fatherland or home.

  Ballista greeted the men out on the battlements, a mixture of soldiers from Cohors XX and local conscripts, shaking each one by the hand. Then he climbed half up on to the artillery piece. He took off his helmet and his hair streamed away. The leather of his moulded cuirass gleamed in the torchlight. He addressed the men.

  ‘Commilitiones, fellow soldiers, the time has come. Today is the final throw.’ He paused. He had their full attention. ‘The Persians are many. We are few. But their numbers will be nothing but an encumbrance. Our sword arms will have all the room they need.’ There were rueful smiles in the torchlight. ‘Their numbers do not signify. They are the effeminate slaves of an eastern despot. We are soldiers. We are free men. They fight for their master. We fight for our freedom, our libertas. We have whipped them before. We will whip them again.’ Some of the soldiers drew their swords and began quietly to rap them against their shields.

  ‘If we win today the noble emperors Valerian and Gallienus will declare this day a day of thanksgiving, a sacred day to be celebrated as long as the eternal city of Rome stands. The noble emperors will open the sacred imperial treasury. They will shower us in gold.’ The soldiers laughed as one with Ballista. The elder emperor was not renowned for being open-handed. Ballista waited a moment, then, altering the tone of his voice, went on.

  ‘Today is the last day of our suffering. If we win today we have won our safety with our own swords. If we win today we will have earned our fame, which will be remembered down the centuries. We will be remembered with the men who beat Hannibal at Zama, the men who beat the barbarian hordes of the Cimbri and Teutones on the plains of northern Italy, the men who beat the Asiatic multitudes of Mithridates the Great, humbled his oriental pride, and drove him to exile and a squalid suicide. If we win today we will be remembered from this day to the ending of the world.’

  All the men cheered. The din of swords beaten on shields was deafening. The chant rang out: ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.’ It was picked up and, like a great wave, it rolled down the wall walks and towers of the embattled town.

  When they left the tower it was the time of morning that the light of torches first turns a pale yellow then fades to nothing. They walked south the length of the wall. At every tower Ballista made a version of his speech. Always the listeners cheered; sometimes they chanted ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta’; sometimes they tipped their heads back and howled like wolves. By the time they had walked north again and taken their accustomed places high on the Palmyrene Gate the sun was hot on their backs.

  ‘Dominus.’ Two troopers of Cohors XX stood to attention. Between them stood a man in Persian dress. ‘Marcus Antoninus Danymus and Marcus Antoninus Themarsas of the turma of Antiochus, Dominus. This here is a deserter. Came up to the north wall last night. Says his name is Khur. Says he can tell you all you want to know about the Persian plan of attack.’

  At the sound of his name the Persian showed his teeth like a dog expecting a beating. The man’s colourful clothes were grimed in dust. His loose long-sleeved tunic was unbelted. The belt must have been removed when he was searched and disarmed. Under the dirt his face was pale.

  Ballista gestured him forward. The Persian came close, then prostrated himself. He bowed his forehead to the floor then got up to his knees, his arms out in supplication.

  Demetrius watched the man with distaste as Ballista spoke to him in Persian. Before he replied the Sassanid prostrated himself again, covering his hands with his long sleeves. It was disgusting how these orientals abased themselves.

  The man got to his knees again and lunged up at Ballista. The knife shone in the Persian’s hand as he thrust it to stab below the northerner’s cuirass. Quicker than Demetrius could follow, Ballista stepped forward and inside the blow. Seizing the Persian’s arm with both hands, Ballista brought his knee up. There was a loud crack as the arm broke. The man screamed. The trooper called Danymus leapt forward and drove his sword between the shoulder blades of the Persian. The easterner fell forward. In a few seconds he had choked his life out.

  ‘That was unnecessary, soldier,’ Ballista said.

  ‘Sorry, Dominus. thought...’ Danymus’s voice trailed away.

  ‘I take it he was searched?’

  ‘Yes, Dominus.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘I do not know, Dominus.’

  ‘Not by you?’

>   ‘No, Dominus.’ Danymus dropped his eyes to where the blade of his sword was dripping blood on the floor. He was sweating heavily. His crestfallen manner was at odds with the jaunty ornaments on his military belt: a sunburst, a flower, a fish, a man carrying a lamb and a swastika. It struck Demetrius that the Persian’s killer was the only one present with a drawn blade.

  ‘Very well. Take the corpse away.’

  Danymus sheathed his weapon and the two troopers, taking a leg each, dragged the Persian towards the stairs. The man’s face scraped along the floor. He left a trail of blood.

  ‘Pick that fucking corpse up. Someone could hurt themselves if they slipped in that blood,’ Castricius roared.

  Ballista and Maximus looked questioningly at one another. If he had been disarmed when he deserted, someone must have given the Persian the knife. There was no time to investigate that now. They could search for the culprit tomorrow, if they were still alive. Almost imperceptibly, Ballista shrugged and then turned to look up and down the wall.

  Unable to take in the sudden eruption of extreme violence followed by the equally abrupt return to something like normality, Demetrius watched as his kyrios took off his helmet. As Ballista handed it over, Demetrius realized that his own hands were shaking. The big northerner smiled a tight smile and said that he ought to show the boys that he was still alive. Demetrius became aware of the oppressive silence on the battlements, the sort of silence that precedes a thunderstorm. He watched Ballista climb up on to the frame of the nearest artillery piece and raise his arms above his head. Turning slowly so that all could see him, he waved. The southerly wind caught his sweat-flattened hair. The polished cuirass gleamed in the sunshine. There was a strange noise like a thousand men exhaling at once. Nearby a voice shouted, ‘Flavius, Flavius.’ Along the wall walk soldiers laughed and took up the chant: ‘Flavius, Flavius,’ ‘Blondie, Blondie.’

  ‘So that is what they really call me,’ Ballista said as he climbed down.