The Wolves of the North

by Harry Sidebottom

  The third day was much tougher. Ballista’s feet were blistered. He took off his boots and bandaged them. The bandages slipped, chafed, soon did no good. Maximus was walking badly too. The only advantage in their slower pace was the time it gave them to find the trail; it was getting harder to follow as the rejuvenated grass sprang up.

  Twice – once to the north, once the south – they saw herds dotted and indistinct in the distance.

  The Steppe stretched on, pitiless in its enormity. But they knew they were getting closer to Lake Maeotis. The smell of it was in the air, and the streams they had to cross were much fuller, broadening out into real rivers. Each of the latter was somehow shocking in its sudden declivity, as it brought trees and wildfowl, and a reflection of the sky, things near forgotten and almost unimaginable in the previous hours of their absence.

  They cut thin branches to use as walking sticks.

  They walked all day. They had nothing left to eat, and did not stop to hunt. As the sun began its final descent – they moved like old men now – they heard the sea birds. Looking up, Ballista saw the overgrown earthworks, and ditches full of brambles and thin trees of some long-abandoned fortification. Beyond, there were reed beds, and beyond them the open water of some quiet inlet. There was the thatched roof of a lone cottage. Off to the right, eight horses grazed in a water meadow.

  Dogs hurtled out, three of them: vicious-looking, snarling, eyes popping.

  The horses stamped away to the far end of the meadow.

  Ballista and Maximus stood still, leaning on their walking sticks.

  The dogs circled.

  An elderly man clad in rags appeared out of the reeds, an eldritch figure with the low sun behind him. He whistled, and the dogs fell back a little. He put his right palm flat to his forehead.

  Ballista cleared his throat to speak.

  The old man spoke first. ‘He has taken the only boat. He made my son sail it.’ He used the language of Germania.

  Neither Ballista nor Maximus said anything.

  ‘He said you would come.’ The aged fisherman held his hands out placatingly. ‘It is not our fault. Do not blame us. He was armed; a man of violence. What could we do?’ He fell to his knees.

  ‘When?’ Ballista said.

  ‘Yesterday morning, just after first light.’

  Ballista felt as if something was broken inside him, something that had been keeping him upright.

  ‘How far are your neighbours?’ Maximus said.

  The old man pointed to the south-east. ‘Near Tanais.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘A long day’s walk.’

  ‘The other way?’

  ‘Further.’

  Ballista spoke. ‘The horses are ours.’

  ‘Yes, of course. He said you would want them. We have looked after them.’ The old man showed his teeth like a dog which fears a beating. ‘We had no choice.’

  ‘Get off your knees. Do you have any food we could have?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ The old fisherman scrambled up, started backing towards the cottage. ‘Fish stew, and bread, good bread.’

  ‘And chain up those dogs.’

  ‘Yes, right away, Atheling, right away.’

  The dogs winding around his legs, the old man went to the cottage.

  ‘When we have eaten, we can ride to Tanais,’ Maximus said. ‘Keep the water on our right. We should be there before morning. Good chance of hiring a boat there and then.’

  ‘No,’ Ballista said. ‘The wind has been set in the north. It would have been on his quarter. He would have reached Panticapaeum some time last night. If he did not stop, by now he could be across the Euxine. It is over.’

  ‘If the gods ever let me find him …’

  ‘Yes.’ Ballista felt unutterably weary; vaguely sick, but hungry. ‘Would you check the horses?’

  When Maximus was gone, Ballista stared at the dying sun, and tried not to think too much about anything.

  Appendices

  Historical Afterword

  TITLE

  The working title of this novel was The Nomad Sea, and it was referred to as such in the Historical Afterwords to previous novels in the series.

  HISTORY AND FICTION

  As in all but one of the Warrior of Rome novels, the surface story – here, Ballista’s mission to the Steppe – is fiction, while the background in all its forms is as historically plausible as I can make it.

  The Roman empire of the AD260s is a profoundly obscure and uncertain place, and the Pontic Steppe in antiquity seldom is anything else. Some trust can be put in the map of the Roman empire in AD263, but that of the Steppe is a contentious product of guesswork and inference.

  PLACES

  Kingdom of Bosporus

  The standard work (in German) on this fascinating kingdom centred in the eastern Crimea (Greek in origin, heavily influenced by the Sarmatians, and a client of Rome, but one that at times in the third century AD is found providing shipping for the Gothic raids into Roman provinces) is V. F. Gajdukevĭ, Das Bosporanische Reich (Berlin and Amsterdam, 1971). For this period, two useful works in English are N. A. Frolova, The Coinage of the Kingdom of Bosporus AD242–341/2 (Oxford, 1983); and M. Mielczarek, The Army of the Bosporan Kingdom (Łódź, 1999). Not being able to read Russian is a constant limitation in researching the kingdom.

  A reconstruction of Bosporan history in the third century AD mainly has to be based on the coinage of the monarchs which can be dated. Rhescuporis V minted AD242–76, with gaps between AD258–60 and AD268–74. Coins also survive for other kings: Pharsanes AD253; Teiranes AD266 and AD275–8; and Sauromates AD275.

  For the novel, I have reconstructed things as follows:

  Pharsanes, Teiranes and Sauromates were sons of Rhescuporis (possibly with different mothers, who may have been from different tribes – Kings of Bosporus married women from various local tribes: see Lucian’s Toxaris, which may be an ancient work of historical fiction, but was intended to be plausible to its original audience). In AD251, after the defeat of Rome by the Goths at Abritus, the emperor Gallus withdrew the annual Roman subsidy which the King of Bosporus mainly used to pay his troops and bribe surrounding tribes not to attack (interestingly, the lack of Roman coins in the eastern Crimea suggests it was paid in bullion, which was not the normal Roman practice). In AD253 the Goths attacked the Kingdom of Bosporus. Rhescuporis elevated Pharsanes to be joint king, but the latter was killed in battle. Rhescuporis was then forced to let his subjects ‘connive’ with the northern tribes by providing vessels for the northerners’ first seaborne descent on Roman territory, which ended in defeat for the northerners at Pityus on the Black Sea.

  Renewed war with the barbarians brought chaos in AD258–60. Rhescuporis, with tribal help bought with money from the pretenders Macrianus and Quietus (AD260–1), regained his throne and a little measure of stability in AD261. As Rhescuporis had recognized Macrianus and Quietus, relations between him and the emperor Gallienus may have remained strained for some years: Bosporan coins featuring two emperors begin in AD261, but continue well after the fall of the Macriani, until AD264.

  It must be stressed that the above is a background story necessary for this and the next novel, The Amber Road. While it is inspired by the coins, other sources and wider events in the empire, as a historian, I have no faith in it whatsoever.

  The Kingdom of Bosporus fell under the military sphere of the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus. However, in this novel, the auxiliaries with Ballista have been sent by the governor of Moesia Inferior, because they have come with imperial functionaries from Byzantium, which, while part of Bithynia-Pontus, was defended by the former.

  Panticapaeum

  Most of the ancient city is buried under the modern town of Kerch on the eastern Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. For introductions to the archaeology (in English), see G. R. Tsetskhladze in T. H. Nielsen (ed.), Yet More Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis (Stuttgart, 1997), 44–9; and V. P. Tolstikov in D. V. Grammenos a
nd E. K. Petropoulos (eds.), Ancient Greek Colonies in the Black Sea, volume II (Thessaloníki, 2003), 707–8.

  Tanais

  The ancient city of Tanais lay to the west of modern-day Rostov on Don, where the Don met the Sea of Azov. On this town, see B. BÖttger in G. R. Tsetskhladze (ed.), New Studies on the Black Sea Littoral (Oxford, 1996), 41–50; and T. M. Arsenyeva in Grammenos and Petropoulos, op. cit. above under Panticapaeum, 1047–102. Both stress the complete abandonment of the settlement for a century or so after its sack by the Heruli/ Goths. I have given it a little more life.

  The Steppe

  Our bit of the Steppe – north-east of the Black Sea, north of the Caucasus and west of the Caspian and the Volga river – lies at the edge of the focus of two monumental works of scholarship. It is at the western end of C. I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton and Oxford, 2009), and the eastern of R. Batty, Rome and the Nomads: The Pontic-Danubian Realm in Antiquity (Oxford, 2007) areas of study. Useful introductions to the Steppe can be found in E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus (Cambridge, 1913); and R. Rolle, The World of the Scythians (Eng. tr., London, 1989).

  PEOPLES

  Nomads

  The essential comparative work on pastoral nomadism is A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (2nd edn, Wisconsin and London, 1994).

  On nomadic warfare, see P. B. Golden, ‘War and Warfare in the Pre-Cinggisid Western Steppes of Eurasia’, in N. di Cosmo (ed.), Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800) (Leiden, Boston, and Köln, 2002), 107–72; also useful for its concision and illustrations is A. Karasulas, Mounted Archers of the Steppe 600BC–AD1300 (Oxford, 2004).

  Heruli

  The Heruli (also spelt as Eruli, and several other variations) are deeply obscure. There are various problems with our literary sources. They are all written long after the third century. They all work within the classical ethnographic tradition, which on the one hand makes all nomads the same and on the other allows for considerable invention of detail. Our main source, Procopius, is extremely hostile to the Heruli. Archaeology is not much help. Nomads leave few archaeological traces. Contrary to modern popular ideas, it is often impossible to match archaeological artefacts to ancient peoples or political groups (i.e. we are often unable to tell if an artefact from the right time and place belonged to the Heruli, Alani, Sarmatians or Goths).

  The most influential modern study, A. Ellegärd, ‘Who were the Eruli?’, Scandia 53 (1987), 5–34, takes a very reductionist line. To my mind better is M. Scukin, M. Kazanski and O. Sharov, Dès les Goths aux Huns: Le Nord de la Mer Noire au Bas-empire et à l’époque des Grandes Migrations (Oxford, 2006), 31–6. The reconstruction of the history and social and political structure of the Heruli in this novel largely follows the latter, and runs as follows.

  The Heruli originated in Scandinavia, in modern Norway or Sweden. In the early third century AD, the tribe divided. One part moved to the North Sea coast somewhere east of the Rhine. The other migrated – as a tribe, accompanied by at least part of one subordinate tribe, the Eutes – to the Steppe north-east of the Sea of Azov. Here they subjected local tribes (some of the Sarmatians and others) and took on local culture (including nomadism and cranial deformation).

  The Heruli elite was the ‘clan’ of the Rosomoni, who tried to mark themselves off from the rest by attempting to monopolize various (to us) weird cultural practices (e.g. cranial deformation, red tattoos, bestiality, sharing their wives and voluntary immolation). Below them were the ordinary Heruli, descendants of those of lesser status who had migrated from the Baltic, and locals incorporated on ‘good terms’. At the bottom were the ‘slaves’, locals incorporated on poor terms and people captured in raids. The novel’s assumption of quite a lot of upward social mobility via prowess in war comes from Procopius on Heruli slaves, and a famous individual with the Huns recorded by fifth-century diplomat and historian Priscus.

  Politically, the Heruli are seen as rudely egalitarian by Procopius. Picking up on a suggestion by H. Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1988), 87–8, I have pictured Naulobates attempting to install a charismatic kingship, partly based on his monopolization of the flow-through of trade from the Urals and the Volga.

  A central theme of this novel is culture shock. For the preconceptions of those travelling from the imperium, I have employed Pseudo-Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places; Herodotus; Strabo; and Lucian, Toxaris. For men brought up in classical cultures, I believe, this is historically plausible: their thinking about the Steppe was shaped by reading just such books as these. For the realities they find, I have assumed Procopius’s ethnography of the Heruli is historically true – of course, this is a naïve and improbable assumption. I have then proceeded to import to the Heruli various things attested for other nomads: cannabis use from the Scythians and wife sharing from the Agathyrsi, both found in Herodotus, and scapulimancy and cranial deformation from the Huns.

  Other Nomadic Tribes

  Not all nomadic tribes are as under-studied as the Heruli.

  On the Sarmatians, see: T. Sulimirski, The Sarmatians (London, 1970); I. Lebedynsky, Les Sarmates: Amazones et Lanciers Cuirassés entre Oural et Danube VIIe Siècle av. J.-C -VIie Siècle apr. J.-C. (Saint-Germain-du-Puy, 2002); and R. Brzezinski and M. Mielczarek, The Sarmatians 600BC–AD450 (Oxford, 2002).

  On the Alani (who, most probably, were a Sarmatian people), see: B. S. Bachrach, A History of the Alans in the West: From their first appearance in the sources of classical antiquity through the early middle ages (Minneapolis, 1973); V. Kouznetsov and I. Lebedynsky, Les Alains: Cavaliers des Steppes, Seigneurs du Caucase (Paris, 1997).

  Goths: Migration and Ethnogenesis

  Quite deliberately, I have included two types of migration in this novel. The Heruli moved as a tribe, with their women and children and dependants – a Völkerwanderung, as scholars tend to call it. In the case of the Urugundi, a small war band of warriors moved and then incorporated others to expand to a tribe, which is one type of tribal formation often referred to as ethnogenesis. Neither case necessarily happened that way.

  For a robust defence of the whole idea of migration, often summarily dismissed by scholars (e.g. Ellegärd, op. cit. above under Heruli), see P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe (London, 2009).

  INDIVIDUALS

  Naulobates

  A leader of the Heruli called Naulobates is recorded in the time of Gallienus by the Byzantine chronicler Syncellus (p. 717). Unlike some scholars, I have decided he was not the same as the Herul Andonnoballus recorded by the sixth-century historian Petrus Patricius (fr. 171, 172) in the reign of Claudius II.

  The messianic Naulobates of this novel owes something to two real men – a lot to Baron von Ungern-Sternberg of the Russian Civil War from J. Palmer, The Bloody White Baron (London, 2008), and a little to P. Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare (London, 2004).

  Biomasos

  The interpreter Biomasos might be the son or grandson of Aspourgos, son of Biomasos, an interpreter of Sarmatian from the Kingdom of Bosporus, whose tombstone (IG XVI 1636) shows that he died accompanying an embassy to Rome, probably in the late second/ early third century AD. My thanks to Rachel Mairs of Brown University for bringing him to my attention.

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Freedom

  This is the second main theme of this novel. The best book I have read on the subject in antiquity remains C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, 1950). The debate was widened in a review of Wirszubski by A. Momigliano in Journal of Roman Studies 41 (1951), 146–53.

  Murder, Mutilation and Pollution

  The killer’s modus operandi of cutting off the extremities of his victims, tying them on a string and packing them under their armpits, li
cking up and spitting out their blood three times and wiping the blade that killed them on their heads, derives from a description in Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica IV 467–84; with additions from the Suda E 928; Aeschylus, Choephoroi 439; and Sophocles, Electra 445. There is a useful modern discussion in R. Bardel, ‘Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and Maschalismos’, in S. Tougher (ed.), Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (London and Swansea, 2002), 51–70.

  For forensic matters, I drew on the wonderful D. Starr, The Killer of Little Shepherds: The Case of the French Ripper and the Birth of Forensic Science (London, New York, Sydney and Toronto, 2011). A medical friend, Andy Peniket, told me how to remove human eyeballs.

  For classical concepts of blood guilt, I relied on R. Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983).

  Blood River

  That Calgacus gives the name Blood River to the battle around the laager by the river in Chapter XX is no surprise. It is modelled on the battle of that name between the Boer Voortrekkers and the Zulus, as recounted in O. Ransford, The Great Trek (London, 1972).

  Poetry

  When Anglo-Saxon poetry comes into characters’ minds – The Wanderer in Wulfstan’s in chapters VI and XVI; the same poem in Ballista’s in chapter XXII, and Beowulf in chapters XI and XIX – as ever, in these novels, it is the splendid translations of Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Anglo-Saxon World (Woodbridge, 1982). When Ballista thinks of Beowulf in chapter XIX, he reinstates the original wyrd for the modern English fate.

  The Homeric verse recited by Ballista in chapter XVIII is from Richard Lattimore’s unrivalled modern-verse translation of the Iliad (Chicago and London, 1951).