Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (6 page)

‘He’ll tell us when he’s ready, but only if he thinks we need to know. Don’t think about that. Just sit there’ – Cadus nodded to the bed – ‘and do what he said; pretend you’re in the front row when we’re set against the Parthians and you want to stay alive. For a start, tell me anything you’ve been taught about the ways infantry might win against cavalry.’

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

WE HAD A
plan ready by dusk, and laid it out for Pantera on his return, using our daggers and boots to show the cataphracts in their chain mail with their ten-foot spear-swords and our belts to show the layout of the legions.

Whatever his earlier temper, Pantera had recovered his good humour and approved our plan, suggesting minor alterations that we might consider. He joked with us, which was a novel experience, and we laughed, all three together; and in that spirit, with the excitement of battle almost upon us, we left the inn the following morning and travelled on.

The following days passed in a haze as we crossed Armenia from east to west, leaving the old volcano to our right and Lake Van to our left and then traversing the Taurus Mountains.

Each day, the spring grew stronger, the grasses greener, the flowers brighter. And each day, we studied the topography as if we were the forward scouts for the legions with Vologases’ army a day behind, hunting us down. After a while, it began to feel true and Cadus and I searched out the places for lookouts, the open plains in these high, unfriendly mountains where a cohort, or three, or an entire legion, might hold a pass against
an
advance. We planned our anti-cavalry manoeuvres until we could recite them in our sleep. Only when we reached the western border where Armenia met Cappadocia – in effect, where Parthia met Rome – did we begin to relax.

That night, Pantera bought us wine, and we toasted our time together. I had lost my resentment, my envy, my bitterness. I was grateful to him for taking me out of a winter’s quarters where I would have spent half of the six months marching over the mountains and the other half digging encampments in waist-deep snow. I told him so, and that I was taking back to the Vth Macedonica all I had learned.

And that was when he set his beaker down and looped his hands round his knees and I remembered the inn on the eastern border, and the messenger, and Pantera’s temper.

‘What?’ I said.

Cadus answered for me, slowly, testing. ‘We’re not going back to the Fifth, are we? That was the message?’

‘That was the message.’ Pantera looked down at his thumbs. ‘It was signed by the emperor; there is nothing I can do to countermand it. If it makes you feel any better, they’re sending me to Britain, which, as you so rightly observed, is a swamp surrounded by sea and full of women who fight like harpies.’

‘Perhaps the emperor thinks you can save him money there as you did here.’ I looked down at the table as I spoke, and drew whorls with my fingertip in a puddle of spilled wine. I felt a kind of tugging grief in my chest and charged my voice to sound cheerful. ‘If you can do what you did in Parthia, they’ll make you a hero when you come back to Rome.’

‘If I come back,’ Pantera said. ‘The chances are never high. But even if I do, spies are never heroes. We do our work unseen, behind men’s backs.’

‘What of us?’ Cadus asked.

Pantera raised his head. He was too much a man of honour
not
to meet Cadus’ eyes, and mine. He said, ‘I am to leave you here and cross overland. You are to journey as swiftly as you may to Raphana where—’

‘Not the Twelfth?’ My hand splayed flat, loudly. The puddle of wine smeared across the table. I may have resented the Vth on principle, but I knew they were one of the most honoured legions in the empire and had some pride in that. The XIIth was quartered in Raphana with the IVth Scythians and both legions were universally despised.

I read the answer in Pantera’s eyes, and his regret, which did nothing to make me feel better.

‘I recommended you for promotion,’ he said. ‘It didn’t occur to me they’d move you. They need good men in the Twelfth to strengthen its heart, and you are both that. At least you are accorded your worth. You’ – he nodded to Cadus – ‘will become first centurion of the sixth cohort, with pay to match.’

First centurion
. It had a good ring to it. Of sixty centurions in a legion, only ten were first of their cohorts, paid twice as much as the rest. And you might think that the sixth cohort was a long way down the line, with only four below it, but in reality, the layout of battle meant that the sixth was the veteran cohort, manned by the best of men, who held the rear line in battle and never retreated. If the legion had such men. From what we had heard of the XIIth, its men were worth less than sheep, but even then, you would have to suppose that some must be better than the others.

Pantera’s gaze was turbulent, but Cadus met it squarely and I saw his chin go up. He was the fourth generation of his family to enter the legions: his great-grandfather had fought for Octavian when the Vth Macedonica had first been formed, and then for Antony. His grandfather had died in service as a centurion. His father had enlisted at eighteen and been raised to camp prefect before he retired. Cadus himself had joined a
year
younger, lying about his age, and been made centurion by the age of twenty-five. He was a man to polish mud and make it shine. I realized how much I would miss him. Both of them. In an act as unlikely as any that whole six months, I closed my eyes and prayed to join him at least in his cohort, if not his century.

I didn’t see Pantera’s face, but heard him speak from the darkness beyond my closed lids.

‘Demalion,’ he said, ‘will be scribe and clerk to one Aulus Aurelius Lupus, centurion of the first century, second cohort. I suggested also that he be the cohort’s courier, and that he be allowed to keep his horses.’ There was a gap. I had my eyes shut still. He said, ‘Demalion, I’m sorry.’

I was too numb to hear the care in his words, although I thought about it afterwards. At the time, all I could think was that the second cohort was a disaster; weakest of any legion. The new men were put there, the dispensable ones, left to die in the front line of battle, at no cost to anyone. If they survived, then they could move to a new cohort soon after. Small consolation, then, that I might be courier as well as scribe, allowed to keep my horse, to ride when others walked, a promotion that excused me from the outset from the duties every man hated: digging and filling the latrines, digging the ramparts at each new camp, setting and breaking the tents.

But still … the second cohort. The
second
. In the XIIth. I thought my heart would break.

I heard the slide of linen on skin and snapped open my eyes. Pantera had reached into his tunic. As he brought out his hand, he opened his palm to reveal a small scroll, like the manumission papers of a slave, only smaller. This he held out to me.

‘I’m giving the bay mare to you,’ he said. ‘She will make you a good courier if you are offered the position. Think about that. Nothing is set in stone, and with the Twelfth in
Syria
, well behind the battle lines, you can carve your own niche to fit what you want of it.’

I took the scroll and Pantera stood, as an officer dismissing his men; he had been that to us. ‘If you bear yourselves in service as well as you have with me, the Twelfth will lose its reputation for ill-luck long before Vologases decides to wage his war. And if you can drill the manoeuvres we have planned into your men until they can do it without thinking, you’ll come to love the feel of battle, and the men you fight with. Nothing is as bad as it seems.’

On his order, we retired to bed, and woke in the morning to find that he had gone without saying goodbye. I’m sure it was easier that way for all of us, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

I NAMED THE
bay mare Adiabena, after Monobasus, the fox-faced king whose mark was the blue tern.

In my bitterness at Pantera, I considered giving her to my elder brother, who had become the family’s horse-trader since a colt had reared backwards on my father and killed him, but I grew to love her faster than I had any other horse; and while foot soldiers, on the whole, despise those who fight on horseback, and I knew already that I could not afford to set myself apart from the men at whose side I must one day stand, I did not want to part with her yet.

I might not go back to the horse fields of Macedonia, for they would surely hunt me down there, but as far as I could tell there was nothing to stop me mounting my new mare and riding back east, away from Rome and all things Roman. I was comely, I knew that, and I had seen enough of the fat-cheeked, almond-eyed men of Hyrcania casting their gaze at me sideways to know I would have a welcome there, in the land between the leaden sea and the forest. And with my gold – the petty kings had been excessive in their generosity – I could easily have set myself up well as a horse-trader and continued the profession I loved.

I have no idea if Cadus considered the same, or if he simply read my mood, but from the moment Pantera left us he made sure I was so busy obeying orders that I had no time to plan my desertion.

He took us at a fast pace west to the breathtaking mountains of Melitene in Cappadocia. If ever a place was beautiful, it was there; a small town nested about by spring flowers that scattered the high mountains with hazy colour. Goats grazed there on impossible slopes, and the oxherds took their small, deer-like cattle high up to calve away from the hyenas on the plain, and to feed on the lichens and mosses and new sward that grew only in spring and gave the cheese a flavour of mint and citrus.

In this heaven lay the headquarters of the VIth legion, the Ferrata, named Iron-clad, for they were the first to use the scale armour down the arm that protects a man from the Parthian spear-sword.

The VIth was a hard legion of hard men: they had fought under Caesar, then Antony, and if they had been better used at Actium, then surely Octavian, who became Augustus, would not have won. Afterwards, the new emperor sent them east, because he was afraid of them, and they had faced the Parthians ever since. Tiberius used them when he was still a young man, and they won back two stolen Eagles from Vologases’ predecessor by their displays of skill at arms.

In their camp, we met one known face: Gaius Tertius Aquila, third son of an equestrian family who had volunteered as a centurion and then chosen not to move beyond that rank. He had led the sixth cohort in the Vth when we had been part of it; now, it seemed, he held a like post in the VIth. He was tall, stately-looking, with a true Roman nose and pale grey eyes. His hair was nearly white, for he was long past the age when men retired from the legions.

We met him at the stables, where he was testing out a new
horse
, sent for his use, a blue roan gelding with a small white stripe on its nose.

‘Demalion!’ He clapped my shoulder. ‘Sent by the gods. I think this beast is lame, but I’m just not certain. Tell me, am I right?’ And to the groom, ‘Trot him out again.’

We stood in a streak of warm sunlight, for the gods blessed Melitene with an earlier spring than the land around it. The blue roan trotted back and forth, back and forth, with an honesty that showed on its face. And it nodded on the right.

‘Hold him,’ I said to the groom, and felt the foot and the leg leading to it.

‘He’s got the foul matter in his foot,’ I said. ‘It makes it hot and causes the leg to swell and sets him lame, but if someone with a sharp knife can dig the point where it comes out—’ Aquila’s own knife was there, in front of me. I took it and dug the small pitted point on the horse’s sole and, in due course, he jerked a little and the knife’s tip broke through into the cavity where the foul-smelling black fluid dwelt. It oozed out, stinking, and I swept it away with a hank of straw that the groom had brought for the purpose.

‘Keep him on clean straw and stand him in a clean-flowing river for an hour, three times a day, and he’ll be fine in nine days,’ I said. ‘He’s a good, honest horse apart from that. He’ll see you well into your retirement.’

Aquila was not my officer now, so I could say these things with impunity, although in honesty he had never been a vicious kind of officer, and we had liked what little we saw of him.

He grinned now, and clapped me again on the back as if my father had known his in the baths of Rome, and then he took us on a tour of the camp nested beneath the snow-flanked hills and we saw for ourselves the changes General Corbulo had wrought.

Finding the men grown soft in their ease, he had sent one
third
of each century into retirement, drafted in new men from the surrounding provinces (Syrians in the VIth! The older legionaries hated that), and set them to work in a way men had not done since Marius’ time.

Discipline was fierce: in the short while we were there, I saw men flogged at the post who would before have been made only to dig the latrines; and men who deserted and might once have got away with a flogging, at least the first time, were stoned to death by the remainder of their unit.

We left in two days, with gifts of food to see us on our way. Aquila came to stand at my bridle as I mounted.

‘Are you going to Oescus?’

‘To the Fifth?’ I leaned forward and took the reins from his hand. ‘There’s no need.’

‘What about your armour? Your sword? The quartermaster is holding them for you.’

‘Let him give them to a new recruit. We have gold from our … recent trip.’ Aquila had been party to our going, but I don’t think he knew much about what we had done, and certainly he didn’t know how much gold we had been given. ‘Damascus is famed for its armouries,’ I added. ‘We’ll buy something new there.’

‘I see.’ He held my eye a moment, almost sadly, and I jerked Adiabena’s head away, thinking that he wanted me to go back and say goodbye to the men I had left, as if they meant anything at all to me.

I kicked the bay mare out of the gate and we left Melitene in a hurry, and did not slow until we were a day’s ride away, after which we moved at a more comfortable pace, not exactly dawdling, but not hurrying either.