The October Horse (24 page)

One day off to swim and gorge on fish, then the Ten Thousand moved on into terrible country, flat as a planed board, a wearisome trek across salt pans and brackish marshes interspersed with a few stretches of silphium. Of wells or oases there were none for four hundred miles; forty days of pitiless sun, freezing nights, of scorpions and spiders. No one in Cyrenaica had mentioned spiders, which came as a horrific shock. Italy, Greece, the Gauls, the Spains, Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor—that part of the globe Romans marched around, across, up, down, and sideways—lacked big spiders. With the result that a highly decorated primipilus centurion, veteran of almost as many battles as Caesar, would faint dead away at the sight of a big spider. Well, the spiders of Phazania, as this region was called, were not big. They were enormous, as large in the body as a child's palm, with disgustingly hairy legs that folded under them malignly when they rested.

“Oh, Jupiter!” Sextus cried, shaking one of the things out of his sagum before he folded it one morning. “I tell you straight, Marcus Cato, that had I known such creatures existed, I would gladly have suffered Titus Labienus! I only half believed my father when he said that he turned back within three days of reaching the Caspian Sea because of spiders, but now I know what he meant!”

“At least,” said Cato, who seemed unafraid, “their bite is merely painful because of the size of their nippers. They aren't poisonous like the scorpions.”

Secretly he was as frightened and revolted as anyone, but pride would not let him betray what he felt; if the Commander screamed and ran, what would the Ten Thousand think? If only there were woody plants to make fires at night for warmth! Who would ever have dreamed that a place so scorching during the day could grow so cold after the sun set? Suddenly, dramatically. One moment frying, the next shivering until the teeth chattered. But what tiny supplies of driftwood they combed from the beaches had to be saved for the cooking fires, silphium and meat.

The Psylli men had earned their keep. No matter how the ground was scoured for scorpions, scorpions there were. Many men were stung, but after the Psylli had trained the century medics on how to slice into the flesh and suck vigorously, few men needed to ride donkeys. One Psylli woman, small and frail, was not so lucky. Her scorpion sting killed her, but not quickly, not kindly.

The more difficult the going became, the more cheerful Cato became. How he managed to cover as much territory as he did in a day escaped Sextus; it seemed that he visited every small group, paused for a chat and a laugh, told them how wonderful they were. And they would swell, grin, pretend that they were having a merry holiday. Then plod on. Ten miles a day.

The water skins shrank; not two days into that forty-day stretch had elapsed before Cato introduced water rationing, even to the animals. But if an occasional cow or steer keeled over, it was slaughtered on the spot to become that night's meal for some of the men. The asses, it seemed as indefatigable as Cato, just kept walking; that the water skin element in their cargoes was losing weight helped them. Yet thirst is terrible. The days and nights both reverberated to the anguished moos of cattle, the maas of goats, the sad squealing of donkeys. Ten miles a day.

Occasionally storm clouds in the distance would torment them, looming ever blacker, drawing closer; once or twice, the grey slanted curtain of falling rain. But never near the Ten Thousand.

•      •      •

For Cato, in between the spurts of energy that pushed him to make his rounds of the men, the journey had become a kind of glory. Somewhere inside his core the desolate wastes his Stoic ethic had made of his Soul reached out to embrace the desolate wastes his body traversed. As if he floated on a sea of pain, yet the pain was purifying, even beautiful.

At noon, when the sun turned the landscape to vast shimmering mists, he sometimes fancied that he saw his brother Caepio walking toward him, red hair glowing like a halo of flames, his unmistakable face a shining beacon of love. Once it was Marcia he saw, and once another, different dark woman; a stranger who he knew in his heart was his mother, though she had died two months after his birth, and he had never seen a portrait of her. Servilia transformed into goodness. Livia Drusa. Mama, Mama.

His last vision occurred on the fortieth day out from Charax, heralded at dawn by Lucius Gratidius to say that the water skins had shrunk to nothing. It was Caepio again, but this time the beloved figure came so close that his outstretched arms almost touched Cato's.

“Do not despair, little brother. There is water.”

Someone shrieked. The vision popped out of existence in a sudden roar from ten thousand parched throats: WATER!

•      •      •

During the space of a short afternoon the countryside changed with all the drama and shock of a thunderclap. The water marked the boundary of this change, a small but running stream so recent that the plants along its perpendicular banks were still infantile. Only then did Cato realize that they had been under way for eighty days, that autumn was beginning to change into winter, that the rains were starting to fall. One of those taunting storms had dropped its liquid blessing inland at a place where the contours permitted it to run, gurgling and absolutely pure, all the way down to the sea. The cattle herd had shrunk to less than fifty beasts, the goat herd to about a hundred. Caepio had given his message just in time.

Humans and animals scattered along both banks of the rivulet for five miles to drink until sated, then, with stern warnings that no creature was to urinate or defecate anywhere near the stream, Cato allowed the Ten Thousand four days to fill the water skins, swim in the sea, fish, and sleep. He himself would have to find civilization and more food.

“The land of Phazania is behind us,” he said to Sextus as they stretched out in the sand after a dip.

We have become brown as nuts, Sextus thought, gazing up and down the endless beach at the clusters of men. Even Cato, so fair, is deeply tanned. I daresay that means I look like a Syrian. “What land are we entering now?” he asked.

“Tripolitana,” Cato said.

Why does he look so sad? Anyone would think that we have just walked out of the Elysian Fields, rather than out of Tartarus. Has he no idea that this water has come on the very last day before we started to die of thirst? That our food has run out too? Or did he conjure the water up out of his own will? Nothing about Cato surprises me anymore.

“Tripolitana,” he echoed. “Land of the three cities. Yet I know of no cities between Berenice and Hadrumetum.”

“The Greeks like things to sound familiar—look at all the towns named Berenice, Arsinoë, Apollonia, Heracleia. So I imagine that when they built three villages of a few houses here where the coast is more fertile, they called the land ”Three Cities.' Leptis Major, Oea and Sabrata, if Socrates and Nasamones are right. Odd, isn't it? The only Leptis I knew was Leptis Minor in our Africa Province."

Tripolitana wasn't a lush cornucopia of plenty like Campania or the Baetis River valley in Further Spain, but from that first stream onward the country began to look as if people might show their faces. Silphium still grew, but joined now by softer plants the Psylli pronounced edible. Occasional strange trees dotted the flatness, branches spread in planes like the layers in a slate ledge, sparsely leafed with yellow-green fernlike fronds; they reminded Cato of the two trees which used to be in Uncle Drusus's peristyle garden, trees said to have been brought back to Rome by Scipio Africanus. If so, then in spring or summer they must bear fabulous scarlet or yellow blossoms.

To Sextus Pompey, Cato appeared back to normal. “I think,” he said, “that it's high time I hopped on an ass and trotted ahead to see which way the locals would like to see ten thousand men and a handful of goats go. Not, I am sure, through the middle of their wheat fields or peach orchards. I will try to buy some food. Fish is a pleasant change, but we need to replenish our stock of animals and—how I hope!—find grain for bread.”

Astride an ass, Sextus thought, sitting ruthlessly on his laughter, Cato is ridiculous. His legs are so long that he looks as if he's paddling the thing, rather than riding it.

Ridiculous he may have appeared to Sextus, but when he came back four hours later the three men accompanying him were eyeing him in awed wonder. We have truly reached civilization, because they have heard of Marcus Porcius Cato.

“We have a route for when we move on,” he announced to Sextus, scissoring off his donkey with more ease than a man stepped over a low fence. “Here are Aristodemus, Phazanes and Phocias, who will serve as our agents in Leptis Major. Twenty miles away, Sextus, and I have been able to buy a flock of hogget sheep. Meat, I know, but at least a different kind. You and I are moving into Leptis itself, so pack your stuff.”

They passed through a village, Misurata, and so came to a town of twenty-thousand folk of Greek descent; Leptis Major or Magna. The harvest was all in, and it had been a good one. When Cato produced his silver coins, he bought enough wheat to put the men back on bread, and sufficient oil to moisten it.

“Only six hundred miles to Thapsus, another hundred up to Utica, and of those, but two hundred waterless ones between Sabrata and Lake Tritonis, the beginning of our Roman province.” Cato broke open a loaf of fresh, crusty bread. “At least having crossed Phazania, Sextus, I know how much water we will need on our last stretch of desert. We'll be able to load some of the asses with grain, unearth the mills and ovens from the wagons, and make bread whenever there is firewood. Isn't this a wonderful place? This once, I'm going to fill up on bread.”

The quintessential Stoic, thought Sextus, has feet of bread. But he's right. Tripolitana is a wonderful place.

Though the season for grapes and peaches had finished, the locals dried them, which meant raisins to munch by the handful, and leathery slices of peach to suck on. Celery, onions, cabbage and lettuce abounded in the wild, seeded from domestic gardens.

Women and children as well as men, the Tripolitanans wore tight trousers of densely woven wool and leather leggings over closed-toe boots as protection against snakes, scorpions and those massive spiders, known as tetragnathi. Almost all were engaged in agriculture— wheat, olives, fruit, wine—but kept sheep and cattle on common land deemed too poor for the plough. In Leptis there were businessmen and merchants, plus the inevitable contingent of Roman agents nosing to make a quick sestertius, but the feeling was of rustication, not of commerce.

Inland lay a low plateau that was the commencement of three thousand miles of desert stretching both east and west as well as farther to the south than anybody knew. The Garamantes roamed it on camels, herding their goats and sheep, living in tents to exclude not the rain—there was none—but the sand. A high wind blasted its grains with a force that could kill by suffocation.

A great deal more confident now that eight hundred miles lay behind them, the Ten Thousand left Leptis in high spirits.

•      •      •

The two-hundred-mile expanse of salt pans took only nineteen days to cross; though lack of firewood prevented the baking of bread, Cato had acquired as many sheep as cattle to vary the all-meat diet in a better way. No more goats! If I never see another goat again as long as I live, vowed Cato, I will count myself well satisfied. A sentiment his men echoed, especially Lucius Gratidius, upon whom had devolved the goats.

Lake Tritonis formed the unofficial boundary of the Roman African province—a disappointment, as its waters were bitter with natron, a substance akin to salt. Because an inferior sort of murex populated the sea just east of it, a factory for the manufacture of purple-dye sat on its shore alongside a stinking tower of empty shells and the rotting remains of the creatures that had lived inside them. The purple dye was extracted from a small tube in the murex body, which meant a lot of leftovers.

However, the lake marked the beginning of a properly surveyed and paved Roman road. Laughing and chattering, the Ten Thousand hustled past the festering factory as fast as they could, prancing all over the road. Where there was a road, was also Rome.

Outside Thapsus, Athenodorus Cordylion collapsed and died, so suddenly that Cato, elsewhere, didn't reach him in time to say goodbye. Weeping, Cato saw to the building of a driftwood pyre, offered libations to Zeus and a coin to Charon the ferryman, then took up his staff and set off again ahead of his men. So few left from the old days. Catulus, Bibulus, Ahenobarbus, and now dear Athenodorus Cordylion. How many more days do I have? If Caesar ends in ruling the world, I trust not many.

The march ended in a vast camp on the outskirts of Utica, always the capital of the Roman province. Another Carthage had been built adjacent to the site of the home of Hannibal, Hamilcar and Hasdrubal, but Scipio Aemilianus had razed that home so thoroughly that the new Carthage never rivaled Utica, possessed of an equally magnificent harbor.

A terrible wrench to part from the Ten Thousand, who mourned losing their beloved Commander; never organized into legions, the fifteen cohorts and extra noncombatants Cato had brought would be broken up and inserted into existing legions to plump them out. Still, that incredible march endowed every last participant in it with a luminousness akin to godhead in the eyes of their fellow Roman soldiers.

The only one Cato took with him and Sextus Pompey was Lucius Gratidius, who, if Cato had his way, would train civilians. On his last evening before he entered the governor's palace in Utica and re-entered a world he hadn't known for well over five months, Cato sat to write to Socrates, the dioiketes of Arsinoë.

•      •      •

I had the forethought, my dear Socrates, to find a few men whose natural double step measured exactly five feet, and I then deputed them to pace out our entire journey from Arsinoë to Utica. Averaging their tallies resulted in a figure of 1,403 miles. Given that we dallied for three days at Philaenorum, a day at Charax, and four days outside Leptis Major—a total of one nundinum—we actually walked for 116 days. If you remember, we left Arsinoë three days before the Nones of January. We have arrived in Utica on the Nones of May. I had thought until I sat to work all this out on my abacus that we traveled at the rate of ten miles per day, but it turns out we covered twelve miles per day. All save sixty-seven of my men survived the trip, though we also lost a Psylli woman to a scorpion bite.