Avenger of Rome

XXX

Each night now was colder than the one which had preceded it and Valerius shivered in the familiar pre-dawn gloom as he waited for the men of his patrol to form up.

For the mission, he wore the uniform of a lowly auxiliary cavalry prefect. There was no point in advertising himself as a senior Roman officer and inviting capture by some eagle-eyed Parthian scout, along with whatever horrors would inevitably follow. He had convinced the Tenth’s legate that it would be good experience for Tiberius to accompany a patrol and he watched as the young Roman swapped his plate armour for a coat of linked iron rings sewn on to a supple leather tunic, and his ornate polished helmet for the crude pot-shaped headgear favoured by the Thracians. Like all his comrades, over the ring-mail he wore a hooded cloak of fine linen which had once been white. The cloth would stop the iron mail becoming so hot during the long day in the sun that it would blister the skin of anyone who touched it. Tiberius couldn’t shoot the short bow with any accuracy, so he and Valerius carried the long spatha swords and the light oval shield of the auxiliary cavalry.

As ranking officer, Valerius was theoretically in charge of the thirty-man patrol. In reality he was happy to cede authority to Caladus, a wiry decurion with a greying beard and twenty years’ service in the saddle. His sleep-dulled mind sharpened with the passing minutes and he felt the tension grow as the men checked their equipment to the accompaniment of the usual murmur of subdued voices, the snicker of horses and the faint jingle of metal harness decorations. They had yet to meet any Parthian scouts, but other patrols had picked up traces of their presence: the unburied remains of a campfire in a narrow defile, horse tracks in the dust and scattered manure from more than one animal carelessly left in the lee of a hilltop where a man might watch for signs of the Roman column. It was only a matter of time.

As the men formed pairs, Caladus rode the line making a last inspection of their equipment. He drew up when he came to Valerius.

‘She’s a pretty little thing,’ he indicated Khamsin. ‘But she stands out like a signifer in a parade of vestal virgins. Better to take one of these ugly bastards.’ He pointed to the stocky, long-haired ponies the Thracian troopers rode. ‘They might not make as good eating, but you can ride them to Hades and back and they never complain.’

‘I’ll stay with what I have.’ Valerius slapped the horse’s shoulder. ‘She’s never let me down yet.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The decurion grinned wickedly. ‘But don’t come crying to me when you’re running for your life holding on to somebody else’s tail, with a hairy arse spouting shit into your face and the Parthians taking odds on who’s going to have your balls for a wedding present.’

‘You should have that man whipped for insubordination.’ Tiberius scowled at Caladus’s back as they left the security of the temporary camp. He had the usual high-born Roman’s contempt for the lowly paid auxiliaries who made up half the army. He also had the resilience of the young. The events of the previous day had not been mentioned again. ‘It would teach him to respect a Roman officer.’

‘And make him less willing to fight for me,’ Valerius pointed out. ‘Half of these men are Thracians, Tiberius, and half are Syrians. They understand that no Roman general, even Domitius Corbulo, values an auxiliary’s life at one tenth that of a Roman citizen. If they weren’t cavalry they would spend their entire service in some fly-blown desert fort where no legionary would ever set foot. They know the Parthians and they know this land. Out there we will depend on them, because in a crisis we don’t have the skills or the experience to survive. If anything happens, you could do much worse than stick closer to Caladus than a tick on a sheep’s back.’

They rode northeast, at an angle to the rising sun, so they would not be blinded as it climbed over the far horizon. For the past two days the column had marched across a great undulating plain of dry red earth and black rocks. The ground was cut by the occasional narrow riverbed where thin streams of filthy water crept sluggishly through shallow pools over porous rock and evil-looking, rainbow-hued mud. Caladus knew from experience that no matter how slowly they rode, the patrol would inevitably kick up a cloud of dust that would alert every Parthian within five miles. His solution, when they were far enough from the column, was to take the bulk of the patrol into any likely watercourse that appeared to lead approximately east, but to leave a single rider to spot for dust on the plain above. The tactic slowed their progress, but made them invisible to the enemy while ensuring that no Parthian could cross the plain undetected within a radius of ten miles.

It was dull work, but it had allowed Valerius the opportunity to get to know, after a fashion, the men who served under him. The bulk were Thracians, horse warriors seduced from their native plains to serve the Empire on the promise of citizenship and a grant of land if they survived twenty-five years of brutal service. Tiberius Draco, the soldier riding at his side, was a veteran with three wooden teeth and a scar running diagonally across his lower face from the left side of his top lip to the right side of his jaw. In mumbled dog Latin Draco recited how he had been given the choice of enlistment or slavery when a patrol arrived at his farm on the Black Sea coast demanding payment of taxes. The young auxiliary on Valerius’s left was more forthcoming. Like Hanno, the Third Thracian commander, Hassan was Syrian-born. White teeth shining like pearls through his black beard, the son of a Damascus trading family cheerfully told Valerius he had travelled to Rome and marvelled at the wonders he saw there. All he had desired since was to win Roman citizenship and return to make his fortune. He laughed off the dangers of his profession. ‘If I had stayed in Damascus counting my father’s profits I would have died of boredom by now. Here, at least, I am honoured for my skills and my loyalty.’

Valerius remembered the young auxiliaries who had fought and died for him in Britain. Bela, the cavalry commander who had taken a spear point in the belly defending the fleeing refugees of Colonia, but who had stayed in the saddle and fought to the last as the city burned. And Matykas who had sacrificed himself and his troop to give the last remnant of Valerius’s defeated force time to retreat to the Temple of Claudius. Warriors. Soldiers. Men who had died for a Rome he had once believed in and would gladly have died for himself. A Rome worthy of the men who fought for it. But did that Rome still exist? He was no republican, but in the years since he had returned, scarred and changed, from Britain, he had experienced a different Rome — Nero’s Rome — and been repelled by the perfumed stink of degeneracy, degradation and corruption. He had come to realize that in the new Rome, the Emperor did not rule for his people, or for the Empire, but for himself and the small circle of self-serving acolytes who surrounded him. When he thought of Nero, he was reminded of a wriggling maggot growing fat on the putrefying flesh of a decomposing corpse. The pursuit of power and profit and advancement drove the new Rome. Fear and doubt and envy ruled it.

Tiberius rode up beside him and he put the treasonous notion back where it belonged. Right or wrong, Nero had been born to rule.

‘I thought it would be more exciting,’ the young tribune complained. ‘This country is less appealing than the desert which almost killed me. All we’ve done is skulk like criminals along these open sewers as if we feared the Parthians.’

‘You may be a warrior, Tiberius,’ Valerius smiled, ‘but you have a great deal to learn about war. War is five parts waiting, three parts marching, one part watching and the final part equally divided between fighting and dying. A soldier learns not to be in too much of a hurry to reach that final part. And you would be right to fear the Parthians. Have you read Herodotus?’

The young man shook his head. ‘My father believed that books weakened a man’s will to fight. That they made him spend too much time thinking when he should be exercising in arms.’

Valerius bit back the automatic response this folly deserved and said instead, ‘Herodotus writes that when Xerxes the Great passed this way to fight the Greeks he brought with him an army of Persians, Medes, Assyrians, Cissians, Arians, Caspians, Indians, Utians, Arabians, Babylonians, Mycans and Ethiopians.’

‘This Xerxes was a Parthian?’

‘A Persian, but of the Parthian line. My point is that his army was so great that it covered the land like a great black stain and wherever it went it left behind only devastation and grief. So great that no one, not even the king, knew how great. At a place called Doriscus Xerxes decided to count the warriors under his command. He ordered ten thousand men to form tight together and a circle was drawn around them, which was then fenced. The circle was filled again, and again, until none was left uncounted. It’s said they filled the circle one hundred and seventy times. They swept everything before them.’

‘Yet the Greeks defeated the Persians?’

‘Yes, but the Greeks had Alexander.’

‘And we have General Corbulo.’

Valerius nodded.

‘Does the general fear the Parthians?’

‘No, but he respects them.’

‘Then I will respect them, too.’

Ahead of them, Caladus called a halt. ‘This is far enough if we’re to return before dark. No excitement today.’

He led them up the bank of the gully and back on to the featureless plain.