“As I said, Mena – disturbing.”
Appias
Li-ch’ien, province of Gansu, Chin
a.d. Prid. Id. Oct. 750 AUC
14 October, 4 BC
There is a trunk on the floor in front of me. As trunks go it is unremarkable, made from bamboo and banded with iron painted black and a lock on the lid that has never been fastened. I remove the lock, open the lid and there inside is proof, if you need it, that these tales of mine are not tall. I reach in and lift out the red wool sagum and bring it to my nose. It is holed here and there not by sword thrusts but by hungry insects, and yet still even now, after all these years, it smells of sweat and the hearth, of a thousand cook fires and thousands of miles marched. I lay it on the low table and lift my galea from the chest, the bronze heavy in my old hands. It fits well on my head, but you will have to take my word on it, for my skin these days is thin and tears easily. I place it instead on the sagum, return to the chest and remove the article I wish to see the most – a legionary’s best friend, dearer to him than even the comrade by his shoulder. Of course I am referring to the gladius. I pull it from the scabbard, my initials – ACM, Appias Cominius Maro – beaten into the steel blade near the wood guard. The handle of shaped bone feels smooth and still familiar in my hand after all these years. There are rust spots on the blade, but they are superficial. And the blade’s edge … it is pitted here and there where it has clashed against opponents’ blades, but it is as wickedly sharp as the day Rufinius returned it to me, for it has not been used in combat since.
These are the implements of my former life. I have taken this chest from storage in preparation for the visit from my good friend Protector-General Chen Tang. He is old now too, though in fine health, and will enjoy a stroll down Via Memory. Handling these items helps me to see. And what I can see now as clearly as if it happened only yesterday, is the moment Rufinius and Lucia turned their horse around and rode for the head of the column. Cornicens sounded and 5,000 legionaries shouldered their baggage poles and marched away into the cold mist, centurions and optiones shouting orders. But not before the entire legion broke into song … Barabbus left his wife with slave, and asked of them to please behave …
There is something beautiful about a marching Roman legion, the precision of it, the color and the spectacle of it. There is order and power to be seen in the even ranks and files. It is both ferocious and civilized – 5,000 men marching in step, 5,000 red sagae, 5,000 scuta held in left hand, 5,000 baggage poles over right shoulder …
In the order of the Roman legion can be seen a metaphor for peace and commerce and law and roads and currency and worship of the gods; all that invariably follows the slaughter and blood of a conquering Roman army like sunshine after a storm. But of course, there was nothing behind this legion – none of the benefits of Roman dominion. The legion that followed Rufinius Alexandricus was cut off from the body of Rome like an amputated limb.
I’ll admit to you that I wept as I watched these fine sons of Rome seemingly banished forever, marching into the fine chill mist that consumed them. I wept to see the departure of my friends and comrades and the small reminder of the home I had left and the woman I loved that I would never see again. I wept because I was lost, just as those 5,000 were lost. I wept for Rufinius who, though younger than I, had become like a father to the men. On his shoulders had come to rest all their hopes, whatever it was that they individually hoped for. What would become of him and Lucia, Dentianus, Libo, and Carbo? See? Even now, a whole lifetime later, I weep at the memory of how alone and uncertain I felt that day, the lump in my throat making it hard to swallow.
“Yes, Viridia, I will put the sword down. When I die, I wish to be buried as a legionary. Do not forget! As for these tears, I shed them for these same friends and comrades and, of course, for myself. There is no one else left. I am the last unless you count my friend and physician Apothecary Wu. And that, young thing, is the main sorrow of old age. It is not the realization of failing health or lost virility. Indeed, if you live long enough you will get to the point where the realization of your coming death is a welcome blessing. The number one sorrow of advanced age is that your only companions are the ghosts that inhabit your mind. And those ghosts never age, remaining ever as young as the day they passed from your sight. Whereas you, meanwhile, march on to suffer the indignities of old age on your own.”
Viridia tosses me a cloth to wipe my eyes and that is the fullest extent of her sympathy.
“Yes, Viridia, you are right. I do have you and so I am not alone, but I am emotional nonetheless because, as I have recounted to you many times, in my mind I can put myself on that grassy plain in the back of that wagon and I am left behind in a strange land, the air white with ice mist.”
Viridia remains unmoved and I think I know why. “I know you are jealous of Feiyan and you loathe it when I speak of her, but she was my only comfort in those early days and she has long passed to the Infinite Blue Sky. But let us not speak of that now. There is much still to write and my hour glass is almost run out.”
Glossary
Ahura Mazda – the one god of the Zoroastrian faith
Aquilas – eagles (aquila – sing.)
Aquilifer – eagle bearer
Atrium Vestae – residence of the Virgins of Vesta
Cataphract – heavily armored mounted cavalry
Centurion – officer in command of a “century” of eighty legionaries
Century – eighty men (unless it’s a century within the First Cohort, in which case it’s 160 men)
Chang’an – capital of Han Chinese Empire
Chanyu – Xiongnu king
Circus Maximus – an arena in Rome famous for chariot racing
Cunnus – cunt (cunni – plu.; cunnos – accusative – plu.)
Cohort – 480 legionaries under the command of a centurion (the First Cohort typically had 800 men)
Consul – highest elected political figure (usually two elected for a term of one year)
Contubernium – a row of eight legionaries who messed, tented and fought together
Cohort – a formation of 480 legionaries
Cornicen – “bugler”. Conveyed orders to the legionaries
Cornu – a horn (wind instrument) typically made of brass
Culi – arseholes
Decanus – elected by the men of the contubernium as their “sergeant”
Denarius – a silver coin (denarii – plu.)
Dignitas – a man’s sense of his own worth
Domina – mistress
Dominus – master
Domūs – home
Dorsula – embroidered woolen blanket
Excrementum – shit
Exta – viscera
First Cohort – a double-strength cohort of 800 men regarded as the army’s elite shock troops
Focale – scarf (worn by legionaries to prevent chafing on the neck from armor)
Forum Romanum – Roman Forum, where the government sits
Futuo (vb.) – I fuck
Galea – helmet (galeae – plu.)
Gladius – sword (gladii – plu.)
Graecia – Roman name for Greece
Greek nut – almond
Hades – the underworld
Hanyu – language of the Han Chinese
Insula – apartment building (in Rome)
Legate – senior officer the rank of General
Legion – a unit in the Roman army numbering anywhere between 4,500 and 5,200 men
Marmor lunensis – a type of marble
Mentula – penis
Mortarium – mortar
Nu – crossbow (Han)
Nunánrén – crossbowmen (Han)
Optio – the centurion’s executive officer (optiones – plu.)
Palatium – one of the seven hills of Rome
Pahlawānīg – Parthian native language (also Pahlavi)
Pistillum – pestle
Pilum – javelin (pila – plu.)
Popa – mallet wielder
Praefactus – a senior officer
Praefatio – the summary of the (religious) rites to follow
Praetor – government official or army commander
Praetorium – the senior commander’s tent
Primor – sir
Primus Pilus (also more familiar primipilus) – “First File” – the army’s leading centurion and commander of the elite First Cohort
Proconsul – provincial governor
Pugio – dagger
Rudus – practice sword (rudes – plu.)
Sagum – cloak (saga – plu.)
Scuta – shields (scutum – sing.)
Sestertii – small silver coin worth a quarter of a denarius (sestertius – sing.)
Spāhbed – commander-in-chief (Parthian)
Spatha – Roman cavalryman’s sword, longer than a gladius and round tipped
Speculatores – mounted scouts
Subura – a slum in the city of Rome
Tesserarius – senior non-commissioned officer (tesserarii – plu.)
Triarii – most experienced legionaries
Tribune – a young man of senatorial rank assigned to command a portion of the army
Turshuuluud – mounted scouts (Xiongnu)
Victima – the animal to be sacrificed
Victimari – the person who brings the bull to be sacrificed
Viridis – green
Zhenjiu – acupuncture (Han)
Acknowledgments
I would like to credit the excellent non-fiction work by Stephen Dando-Collins, The Legions of Rome, for various technical elements used concerning legions and legionaries (their formation and “kit” and so forth). I hope Mr. Dando-Collins sees that his knowledge has been put to good effect.
My good friend Mike “Panda” Pandolfo was a great help in the writing of this book, challenging me and my facts often and vociferously. Mike is a fairly recently retired USAF Lieutenant Colonel, who flew in EC-130s in the Vietnam war, was a back seater in Phantoms afterward, and has been involved in almost every US conflict since in some way or other. He came on board after the first Vin Cooper novel, The Death Trust, was published, nitpicking his way through the book’s factual blunders. I was so impressed, I hired him.
Luckily for me, Panda is even more nerd-like on the subject of Ancient Rome than he is on the US military. And if I ever want to write a book about the American Civil War, he says he can help there too (his great, great, granddaddy fought with the 62nd Georgia Cavalry).
Thanks, Panda. You’re the best.
David
Author’s Note
Two of my “desert island” books are Livy’s Second Punic War and Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul. My bookcase has two entire shelves crammed with Penguin black spine works from a range of writers from antiquity. Back in the day, I was an enormous fan of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Also, like others from countless generations, I’ve wandered around Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean gobsmacked by the feats of Roman architecture and engineering that remain. While I’m fascinated and captivated by Ancient Rome, I am far from being an historian and certainly no scholar on the subject. You should, therefore, read this book through that filter. In short, if you are a pedant, I am attempting to head you off at the pass. While I researched to get many aspects of the period (the late Roman Republic) right, I readily acknowledge some choices made for the sake of the story will be a burr in the saddle for some folks.
Language. I set out on this writing journey using Latin terms for many everyday items and persons, along with double and triple barrelled names (praenomen, nomen, cognomen) for all the protagonists. The result was unreadable for anyone who wasn’t an aficionado. So I had to rewrite it, taking a less authentic path, some might say. One word recurs throughout the story that needs some explaining: “primor”. I used it as a stand in for “sir”, but it translates more accurately to words like “head”, “uppermost”, “most distinguished” and so forth. I used primor because there didn’t seem to be a translation that felt right. “Dominus” is the actual translation of sir, apparently. It was rendered as “sieur” in French, which became “sir” in English. But in a military context, “dominus” seemed less than suitable because it also means “lord”. This was purely a creative choice on my part. Apologies to the purists among you.
Swearing. The legionaries in this story swear like, well, troopers, which of course they were. My experience is that, when groups of men get together, profanity is used in place of nouns, adjectives, verbs et cetera. I am pretty sure that Crassus’s men wouldn’t have censored their language and so I’ve taken the brakes off in this department. Please be assured that the swearing is not there to offend. (I once read a letter between two WWI diggers. It was fuck this and fuck that, fucking here and there . . . Up until that moment I had only read letters from the period that were positively genteel, especially given the horror these men were forced to endure. This made me realise that so much of what I’d read – letters home to loved ones, mostly – had been self sanitised and censored by the writer, probably because there was a chance that a woman might read them (even if they weren’t addressed to the fairer sex). Interestingly, though, it seems the word “fuck”, which we can use in myriad ways and tones, didn’t really have an equivalent form back in 50 BC. Of course, Latin of the day had something similar – “futuo”, to have vaginal sex – but this doesn’t appear to have been used with quite the dexterity of its modern equivalent. It seems one of the biggest insults you could throw at someone back then was to liken him or her to a woman’s clitoris.
While researching this book, I was often amazed at how little academics agree about various aspects of Roman life. Yes, while there’s a lot we do know, far more is contested, unanswered or still just plain mystery. Take the legions Crassus lost at Carrhae. The ones annihilated at Teutoburg due to Varus’s ineptitude are well documented, but on the names of the ones that perished in that disastrous battle against Selenas and his Parthians, the history books are silent. (I do hope no one turns up with the answer on this because I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to unearth it without the least success.)
This is the first book in a trilogy about a legion of Roman soldiers that ends up fighting in China. The question possibly uppermost in your mind might therefore be: did this actually happen? If you go online you’ll read plenty of speculation about it, most notably touched off by Pliny the Elder who wrote that 10,000 Roman legionaries captured by the Parthians were sent to “Margiana” (somewhere in the southeast of Turkmenistan) to defend the border there. And then a Chinese writer Bau Gau claimed some of these soldiers found their way into the army of Xiongnu King Zhizhi and ultimately fought against the Han in 36 BC, displaying a “fish-scale” formation on the battlefield of interlocked shields. That sounded a lot like the “testudo” formation used by Roman legions and the legend (some would say myth) grew from there.
So did this actually happen? You won’t find many reputable scholars prepared to back the notion. An historian by the name of Homer H. Dubs suggested back in 1941 that the Romans captured at Carrhae were transferred to the eastern Parthian border where they indeed fought against the Han (though no proof was forthcoming). All roads then led to the small Chinese town of “Li-ch’ien” (also written as Liqian and several other ways, all of which look a lot like “Legion” to my mind; but which apparently mean “Alexandria” in Han Chinese), the inhabitants of which claim to be descendants of this lost Roman legion. But DNA testing of the local population has shown that “a Roman mercenary origin could not be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation, and the current Liqian population is more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han” [Zhou, Ruixia; An, Lizhe et al.“Testing the hypothesis of an ancient Roman soldier origin of the Liqian people in northwest China: a Y-chromosome perspective”, Journal of Human Genetics, June 2007].
If you hunger for books about Rome and her legion
s, I hope this one hasn’t disappointed. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it, and, lucky you, there are two more to come!
David
About David Rollins
With the release of Field of Mars, David Rollins is the author of ten international best selling novels, six of which feature Special Agent Vin Cooper, OSI. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia. Want more? Visit davidrollins.net.
Also by David Rollins
The Zero Option
The Death Trust: A Vin Cooper Novel 1
A Knife Edge: A Vin Cooper Novel 2
Hard Rain: A Vin Cooper Novel 3
Ghost Watch: A Vin Cooper Novel 4
War Lord: A Vin Cooper Novel 5
Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel 6
Rogue Element: A Tom Wilkes Novel 1
Sword of Allah: A Tom Wilkes Novel 2
First published by Momentum in 2015
This edition published in 2015 by Momentum
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
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Field of Mars (The Complete Novel)
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