The Amber Road

VI

Olbia

‘Back in line!’

Ballista watched the ten sailors shuffle back to rejoin their colleagues. They were hot and tired, dragging their feet. There was not one of them who did not look mutinous.

‘Next,’ roared the optio Diocles.

There were just eight in this contubernium. Under their brows they looked pure hatred at Ballista — as well they might after what had happened in the bar down by the docks. Ballista gave no indication that he noticed. He shifted the weight of the mailcoat on his shoulders and studied the impromptu training ground. The old agora in the largely abandoned north of the upper town of Olbia was the only area of open, flat ground near the walls. On three sides were ruins: a collapsed row of shops, a fallen portico backed by the remains of two temples and a less easily identified jumble of buildings. On the fourth side stood a granary. It had been built recently, on the site of what might have been a gymnasium. Its construction had cannibalized the surrounding buildings. Thus passed the glory of the world. Nothing was permanent, not even the gods.

‘Javelins ready,’ Diocles ordered. Ten wooden posts, each six-foot high, had been hammered into the ground about thirty paces in front of the men.

‘Run and throw.’ The heavy, blunt training missiles arced away. Five found their mark; the other three fell not far off.

The troops were getting better. Ballista had had Diocles keep them at it all morning. There had been much room for improvement. The crew of the Ister patrol boat Fides were under military law. They were expected to be proficient in military drill. They were not. The fault lay with Regulus, their trierarch. Ballista had taken his measure straight away at the first parade, when Castricius had read out the imperial mandata putting them under Ballista’s command. Regulus was not young. He had the broken veins of a drinker and the disgruntled air of a man who considered that life had treated him harshly. Perhaps, many years before, when he had joined up, he had imagined ending his career as primus pilus of a legion. Instead, he was the centurion in charge of a small river galley. It was likely his own fault. Clearly he was one of those officers who curried favour with those under him, mistakenly believing laxness would lead to popularity. The Fides needed to be got out of the water, her hull scraped and her seams caulked to ready her to take the expedition up the Borysthenes. Ballista had sent Regulus, with one contubernium of ten and the helmsman, rowing master and ship’s carpenter, to see to it. The rest of the crew, twenty-eight oarsmen, had been assembled at first light in the agora.

To be fair, they had marched in step, formed line and doubled their line well enough. But when ordered to form a wedge, a square and a circle, it had ended in a shambles. Now, their weapon handling was proving little better. Obviously unused to the heavy wooden training weapons, they moved clumsily, finding the extra weight a burden. There was no point in even thinking about ordering them to perform the armatura; the complicated and demanding dance-like arms drill would be utterly beyond them.

‘Draw swords.’

There was a ragged scraping of wood on wood as even this was not performed as one.

‘Attack.’

With little enthusiasm, the eight men hacked desultorily at the posts.

‘The point, use the point,’ Diocles yelled. ‘You, cover yourself with your shield. Aim for the face, make the enemy flinch, make him fear you.’

Diocles was the only good thing. A big, tough, young Pannonian, given authority, freed from the negligent hand of Regulus, he might develop into a fine leader of men.

It was past noon. The spring sun was hot. The men were being treated like raw recruits, trained all day. It gave them another reason to resent Ballista. But they needed it. The passage up the Borysthenes was unlikely to pass without fighting. Ballista wondered if it would be advisable to put them on barley rations instead of wheat. Certainly their poor performance merited the punishment. Yet, while he had to instil discipline, it would not do to be too heavy-handed. They already had more than enough reason to hate him and the men with him. They needed discipline, but too draconian a hand might be counterproductive.

‘Back in line. Next.’

Ballista went over to Diocles, told him to carry on.

Ballista, accompanied by Castricius, Maximus and Tarchon, walked back towards the inhabited part of Olbia. Once, the broad street had been a grand thoroughfare, flanked by luxurious houses. Now it was a narrow track, hemmed in by overgrown rubble from the long-collapsed dwellings of the Olbian elite. Off to the left, through the voids, where once had been peristyle and ornamental garden, the view swooped down to the river. Lush spring grass waved on slopes and hillocks where terraces had collapsed. Among the wildflowers, lines of cut grey stone indicated the transient hopes of the past. There were shrubs and trees. Here and there — like primitive squatters in the wreck of some higher order — rough, new buildings showed. A line of potters’ kilns almost abutted the wall of the living town. Further out was a small foundry. The smoke from their industry was taken by a wind from the north-west out across the broad, islet-studded Hypanis. It further misted the low line of blue that marked the far bank some two or three miles distant.

‘We are caught between Scylla and Charon,’ Tarchon said in heavily accented, mangled Greek. ‘If we are not teaching these sailor-fuckers to fight, they will be as women on our voyaging, and the tribes of the riverbanks will be killing us.’

‘Charybdis,’ said Castricius.

Tarchon ignored the interruption. ‘But if we are teaching them, they will be turning on us in some unfrequented place. We are forging a sword of Diogenes.’

‘Damocles,’ corrected Castricius.

‘Names are unimportant to a man with a sword hanging over his head,’ Tarchon concluded with gravity.

‘They lack the balls,’ said Maximus.

‘The Suanian has a point,’ said Castricius. ‘There are more than forty of them and just the four of us; it might give them encouragement. But Roman disciplina will bring them to heel.’

‘I do not give a shite. There was a time in Hibernia — I was young then, still known as Muirtagh, Muirtagh of the Long Road — we were outnumbered by five, no ten to one …’

Ballista’s attention wandered as Maximus launched into a lengthy epic with much hewing and smiting, many severed heads rolling and frequent digressions for scenes of violent sexual congress, their consensual nature not always evident.

They came to the gate. A cart was blocking it. A small herd of six head of cattle and its driver were waiting. On the instant Ballista turned away from the gate, looked all around for danger. Nothing. He turned, scanned every potential hiding place again. Even Maximus was silent. They were all looking. Still nothing.

Ballista studied the gate again. The cart was carrying furs. With the officiousness of his kind, a telones was checking every bundle — fox, beaver, wolf; each had a different customs duty.

Stepping off the path, Ballista climbed a low, grassy bank, which probably once had been the front wall of a house. He smiled at his reaction. It was a very old trick: get a cart to shed a wheel, break an axle, get wedged — anything to cause an obstruction which prevented a gate being closed — and from concealment men could storm into a town. Several examples from the ‘Defence of Fortified Positions’ of Aeneas Tacticus hovered at the edges of his memory. It had to be ten years or so since he had last read that book. He had been on his way to the Euphrates to defend the city of Arete from a Persian attack. He smiled again, ruefully. That had not turned out well. Despite all his efforts and all his theoretical and practical experience, the town had fallen. It was odd that of the very few who escaped death or enslavement, three were standing in this ruined street half a world away — Castricius, Maximus and himself. With that thought came another, far less welcome. Calgacus had survived the sack of that city, had survived so much else. But Hippothous had killed him, had left those who loved the old Caledonian to grieve, had left Maximus and Ballista himself, had left Rebecca and the young boy Simon. Ballista had written to Rebecca. It had been a long letter, difficult to write. But one day he would return to his house in Tauromenium on Sicily where they lived, and that would be much harder. He would give them their freedom, make sure they lived comfortably as freedwoman and freedman, but he doubted that would be much consolation.

The wind had shifted to the north. It was blowing the smoke of the kilns and furnace over the wall of the lower town, over the docks. Ballista ran his gaze over the wall from the water up to the gate. The wall was too low. It had no towers. He knew that, on the inside, houses were built up against it. The houses meant there were few accesses to the wall walk for the defenders, but they would aid an attacker jumping down into the town. The gate itself was too wide, and it had no projections to enfilade those approaching. A single felled tree — and there were several suitable growing close by — would be sufficient to smash it, if the men wielding it were determined, were prepared to take casualties.

This wall was the weak point of Olbia. The rest was good. The town formed an inverted triangle pointing south. The weak northern wall was its top. On its eastern side was the river; on its western a deep ravine. The citadel, at the tip of the triangle, was a fine strongpoint. It boasted massive stone walls built by the Roman army. They were studded with towers, each showing ports for artillery. It was true the walls had not been kept in good repair. Pocked with weeds, in places they were most shoddily patched with barely mortared, uncut stones. Yet nature aided their strength. On the river side, a cliff dropped nearly sheer down to the water. Opposite, the ravine was not so daunting. Indeed, it was planted with vines. There were even three wineries on narrow, cut terraces. But it was still not inconsiderably steep, and the cover the vines might give to an attacker ended in thirty paces of bare rock to the base of the wall. On the north side of the acropolis a deep moat separated it from the rest of the town. Unlike the main body of the city, the citadel was eminently defensible. Ballista wondered how it had fallen to the Goths some thirty years earlier. He would ask the strategos Galerius Montanus at the meal.

Finally, an armed guard told the telones to let the cart enter. The crack of a whip and it and the cattle were moving. Ballista and the others followed, watching their step to avoid the green, flat cow-pats which fouled the street. Inside, the buildings were close together. More kilns and granaries were wedged up against wineries, cattle shelters, small workshops, stores and houses. Near the gate was a shop which, inexplicably, appeared to sell nothing but tiny, carved-bone pins. The smells of cooking mingled with excrement, spices and packed humanity and animals. The streets were dirty. From what Zeno had said, presumably the agoranomos Dadag had much else on his mind.

They crossed the wooden bridge over the moat and walked under the arch of the citadel gate. Armed guards, fully equipped Sarmatian-style — pointed metal helmets, scale armour, bows and long swords — stood around in numbers.

The house of Galerius Montanus was just inside the acropolis gate to the right. Like all Greek houses, it showed a forbidding blank face to the world. They told the porter they were expected, and waited in the street. Maximus began to tell the old joke about the young prefect and the camel. He had changed it into something he had witnessed himself in Mauretania.

‘Health and great joy,’ Montanus greeted his guests.

‘Health and great joy,’ they all replied with formality.

They followed Montanus along a dark corridor which dog-legged and suddenly opened into a sunny courtyard ringed by Ionic columns. In the centre was a small pool with a water feature and ornamental fish. Couches were set for a meal in a room which opened off the far side. There was a mosaic underfoot — a straightforward geometric pattern in black and white — and sweet-smelling plants in strategically placed pots. It was quiet — just the splash of water — and immaculately well kept. All very simple, yet an oasis of urbanity amid the desuetude of the town.

Montanus introduced them to his other guests: Callistratus, son of Callistratus, the first archon; Dadag, the agoranomos; another member of the Boule called Saitaphernes; and the deputy strategos, Bion. This was a small town. Its society was limited, and — despite the outlandish names of some of the citizens — it was clearly one where provincial Hellenic ways were maintained. There were no freedmen or — women waiting to greet them.

When everyone had shaken hands and said, ‘Health and great joy,’ to everyone else, some several times, Montanus led them to their couches. Nine diners was a traditionally auspicious number.

Ballista was guided to the place of honour to the left of the host. A boy moused up with a pitcher and bowl. With downcast eyes, he washed Ballista’s hands then removed the military man’s boots; finally, placed a garland of flowers on his head. Ballista unbuckled his sword belt and settled himself down on his left elbow. In his youth, no one would have borne weapons into the dining room. Now it was quite normal, apparently especially at the imperial court among the protectores of Gallienus.

Montanus made a libation, calling on Zeus the Saviour, Apollo Prostates, Achilles Pontarches and Hecate the dark goddess to hold their hands over the city in this the two hundred and eighteenth year of its Roman era.

Ballista noticed Montanus neatly tipped the wine offered to the gods not on to his mosaic floor but into the flowerbed. It saved any mess, and presumably the deities did not care where it landed.

Tables were placed close to hand and the slaves brought out the first course. The inevitable eggs were soft-boiled with a sauce of pine kernels. There was a salad of lettuce and rocket. The main dish of the course was grilled carp.

An older male slave mixed and poured out a tawny wine.

‘A Lesbian,’ said Montanus.

‘The wine or him?’ Maximus laughed.

Montanus looked disapproving — although Ballista was uncertain whether this was a result of the implication of oral sex or at the temerity of a freedman speaking out.

‘He does not look like a cocksucker’ — Castricius addressed Maximus — ‘and being a Lesbian is no worse than being a Phoenician, and I am sure you have been down on more than a few women in your time.’

This was not playing well with the Olbians. Montanus looked more than ever like the bust of some stern old Roman from the days of the free Republic — Cato the Censor, or whoever, returned to upbraid modern frivolity and loose ways.

Ballista took a long pull at his drink. He was tempted to dismiss the censoriousness as backwoods prudishness. But had his familia been irrevocably coarsened by all the years in the army, or by the last two years among extraordinary barbarians? What did the Olbians think of them? Castricius would be none too unsettling, unless, as now, he was speaking in the language of the barracks, and provided they did not know that in his youth he had been condemned to the mines. But the rest of them were a different story: a Hibernian ex-slave with the end of his nose missing, a tribesman from the High Caucasus who mangled both Greek and Latin, often in the same sentence, and himself, a big northern barbarian with a veneer of civilization. Then — in one of those instantaneous flashes of insight — he knew that all that was only a minor part of the unease they created. How many men had they killed between them? Killing changes a man. It does something to the eyes. It was not always the same thing. Ballista had seen killers with eyes like cats in the sun, others with eyes like flat pebbles under water. He had no idea what his own eyes betrayed.

‘The wine is good, both hot and dry on the palate.’ Ballista spoke merely to move the talk on to less uncomfortable ground.

Montanus inclined his head at the compliment. ‘You may not be familiar with the fish. It is only found in our northern rivers.’

Ballista laughed. ‘And in the rivers further north of my youth.’

Montanus looked vaguely put out, more at Ballista’s origins than any lack of tact on his own part.

‘I read somewhere that carp are neither male nor female.’ Castricius now spoke smoothly, in formal Attic Greek, no longer the rough soldier but the man of paideia.

‘Indeed.’ Montanus recovered enough to sketch a smile. ‘They become so when in captivity. My own fish tanks are on the other side of the river.’

Conversation for a time became general on the subject of fish: the catching and keeping of, those good to eat, those less so, and the positively harmful varieties.

Bion, the young deputy strategos, cleared his throat. ‘May I be so bold as to ask our honoured guest to tell us of his victories over the Persians? An opportunity to hear how you made the Persian king flee the field at the battle of Soli is not to be passed up.’

Ballista had no wish to talk about Soli, or the subsequent fight at Sebaste. He remembered little of them. It had been a bad time. He had been near out of his mind, believing his wife and sons dead.

‘There was not much to them.’ Ballista said no more.

The somewhat strained silence was broken by Callistratus. ‘I wonder if we could prevail on you to put aside your becoming modesty and tell us instead how you saved Miletus from the Goths. It is a subject dear to our hearts. Miletus was mother city to Olbia, and many of us have connections there. I myself have the honour of being guest-friend of Macarius, the stephanephor of that great polis.’

That was a happier time, and Ballista acceded to the request. Apart from the Goths’ lack of skill at siege works and the undoubted courage of those serving under him — Macarius notable among them — Ballista put it down to managing to cause panic among the attackers. The unexpected will often bring this about, and two stratagems had worked at Miletus: hidden stakes which the Gothic ships ran on to in the two harbours, and two hastily constructed siege engines unexpectedly raining down inflammable missiles. It was a carefully edited account, which omitted the underhand — if not treacherous — killing of the Tervingi leader Tharuaro.

The uncomfortable memory of his Loki-like trick made Ballista’s final words less diplomatic than they might have been. ‘Looking at the defences coming here, I was wondering how Olbia fell to the Goths.’

The brusque change of subject, on to what obviously was a delicate topic, seemed to instil a certain embarrassment among the Olbians. First Montanus, then Callistratus sought to remove their fathers from any blame. Both had been away. They had been campaigning across the estuary on Hylaea. Most of the fighting men of Olbia had been with them, the fathers of Dadag and Saitaphernes among them. The grandfather of Bion had been in Athens. A band of Goths had sacked the sanctuary of Hecate. It had been a cunning ruse to draw the militia out of the city. Olbia had been retaken almost at once.

To everyone’s relief, the servants brought in the main course.

‘Spring lamb, roast in the Parthian style,’ Montanus announced. ‘My grandfather served in the eastern wars of the divine Septimius Severus.’

As host, Montanus clearly thought it right he should hold centre stage, and guide the conversation back to where it reflected his family in a better light. Ballista was happy enough for it to be so. In this vein, he asked how they had become landowners and councillors in Olbia.

‘My grandfather was a centurion with the XI Claudia. He was posted here after the Parthian wars. When those with the eagles were allowed to marry, he took to wife a woman of good local family.’

As Montanus’s family history unrolled, Ballista enjoyed the lamb. It was in a pepper and onion sauce with damsons. There were peas in cumin, too, one of his favourites.

The peace of the afternoon was broken by noises from the other side of the courtyard. A man in armour burst from the passageway. He sought out Montanus.

‘Strategos, the barbarians are in the old town!’