The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Eight

Raphana legionary camp, November, AD 57

‘Wake up! Get up, you idiots! Get out of bed! We’re under attack! Run! Run! Run! ’

I erupted out of the bunk, reaching for my dagger, my sword, my sandals before I had even woken. In the dark about me, seven other men did the same, shuffling swiftly in small circles, taking care not to bump into one another, not out of courtesy or fear of another man’s touch but because any untoward clumsiness made us slower and speed was everything.

In the past six months, I had learned to fasten sandals, belt and dagger faster than I would ever have believed possible. Whatever the heat, I slept in my tunic, after a time when I had been forced to fast-march naked into the mountains and back with my sword-belt chafing holes in my waist because I had dressed too slowly.

Now I was in full kit before the shouts that had woken us had faded away: tunic, sandals, and my godforsaken mail shirt, which might have taken one tenth of the time to clean compared to the ring-on-leather kind but took ten times aslong to get into; a fact I had not considered in the calm of the armourer’s shop in the spring.

My now battered gladius was strapped in place at my right side with a newly fashioned baldric across my shoulder attached to the tip of the sheath to hold it in place. I had found at the cost of a cracked rib what happened if it moved while I was negotiating a steep rock face. My dagger hung at my left side. At the door, I picked up my square-edged legionary shield, decorated now with the crossed thunderbolts of the XIIth legion, and a javelin.

This night, newly, I also picked up a stake of the same length as the javelin, with a fire-hardened tip and a flat iron plate nailed to the hub end, to keep the wood from splitting when it was hammered into the ground.

The stake was an integral part of the plan Cadus and I had developed back in Hyrcania at Pantera’s behest when he had told us to design a defence against cavalry.

Cadus’ men had demonstrated it before the camp prefect only four days before. His cohort was good and his century was easily the best in the legion. They would not have matched even the half-trained men of our old legion, the Vth Macedonica, but I was careful not to say that now: my new legion might have been universally despised, but the two people who could not criticize it on pain of ‘accidents’ that led to broken bones or worse were Cadus and me.

I wrenched open the door. Six men ran out. In the dark, I felt the seventh touch my arm.

‘Demalion? I can’t find my sword.’ That was Tears, the Cretan youth who had come to us too young, and wept for three months. We hadn’t called him Heraclides since the end of the first half-month. These days, he didn’t weep any more than anyone else did, but his voice was lighter, as if he had not yet found the ground with his feet.

‘Syrion will have it.’ Syrion was our flag-bearer, and Lupus’second in command, a quiet man, a font of steady strength. The rest of us respected him for the fortitude with which he bore a role that nobody wanted. The flag-bearer was the first focus of any enemy attack; even in our play-practice with the IVth, we had learned that. Syrion earned twice the basic pay, and was welcome to every silver piece of it.

I found Tears’ gladius in the safe place under Syrion’s bunk. We were last in the room. I dragged Tears with me even as he struggled to finish tying his belt. ‘Come on! Or we’ll be last out.’

‘But if we’re under attack, that won’t matter, will it? There won’t be a parade line.’

‘Idiot!’ I cuffed him, and kept pulling. ‘We’re not under attack. Nobody’s stupid enough to attack a legionary camp. Not even ours. This is a drill. I’ll lay a denarius on it.’

‘Done!’

Together, we ran into the parade ground. Exactly as I had feared, we were last out, but while I expected to stand in line under massed torches and have Lupus beat us in public for our tardiness, or the failure to polish our armour — he could find rust where no human eye could see it — or sandals tied awry, or any one of the thousand other things that a man might get wrong who had dressed in absolute dark… instead, we joined a heaving sea of running men, of the IVth as well as the XIIth, all streaming down the Via Praetoria and through the gate. Ahead, a horn blared five notes, sounding the call to defence of the camp.

‘It is an attack,’ Tears said, running. ‘Who’s insane enough to storm a legionary encampment?’

‘Vologases? Maybe he’s trying to take Syria for the Parthian empire while Corbulo is safe in Armenia.’

‘But it’s beyond the fighting season. Nobody fights after the rains start.’

‘Vologases does,’ I said grimly. I was still holding on toTears’ elbow, trying to see in the torch-studded dark so that I could find Syrion, or Horgias, Polydeuces — he was not the Rabbit then — Sarapammon, Rufus, Proclion, the remaining men in my unit. Attack or not, I knew the sting of Lupus’ vine stick too well to risk their being in place before us.

‘Northwest.’ I hauled Tears with me. ‘The second cohort is supposed to gather northwest of the gate. The others will be there.’

‘But they’re not.’ He pulled me round, spinning on my heel. ‘They’re by the engineers’ workshop. Look.’

Our unit carried a lit torch and ran on the edge of the others; six men I knew now as well as I had ever known my brothers. We sprinted to catch up. ‘Syrion… I owe you.’ I clapped his arm. ‘Lupus would-’

‘He might still. He’s at the gate. Move!’

In the throng of an entire legion, amidst shouting, swearing, hammering men, we streamed out on to the hard-beaten earth beyond the gates. By instinct more than memory, we found the place where we had practised our defence against cavalry that one time with Cadus and set to hammering our sharpened stakes into the ground.

I was paired with Syrion: he held his stake, I pounded it with the butt end of my javelin, praying that I wouldn’t miss and smash his fingers; we had already seen one man out of our century injured that way in daylight when last we did this.

As then, we were hammering into the parade ground which had been marched on by five thousand men daily for more years than I cared to count. It was set like concrete. I raised and smashed, raised and smashed. My fingers ached from the concussion. I felt the wood give a little, and again.

‘Will it hold at that?’ Syrion asked. ‘If he kicks it?’

Lupus would kick it; even if we were attacked, he’d testit to see if he could find a reason to beat us. I felt the stake wobble.

‘It might hold to a kick,’ I said. ‘But if the cataphracts come, they’ll ride it down.’

I had seen Vologases’ armoured cavalry. This fact alone had raised my standing in the unit; they trusted my judgement and I, in turn, found some respect for them if for nobody else. Syrion nodded. I pounded again. The javelin slipped in the sweat of my hands. I jerked it aside. Syrion swore, viciously.

‘Your hand?’ I asked.

‘Missed.’ Amidst the din I heard him swallow. ‘Try again.’

I tried again. And again. And again until I felt it inch away from me, into the ground.

‘Enough. It’ll hold. Now yours.’

Another stake. Another frantic pounding, but this time I held it and Syrion battered it with his pilum. I braced my feet and held my arms rigid and prayed the same prayers for the safety of my fingers. Broken bones used to excuse a man from duties in this place; not now.

It had been different, we were told, before we came. Our arrival, with our wealth, or our obvious loathing of the legion, or the fact that Cadus had dropped from the heavens into such a senior position and might rob the other centurions of their easy promotions… whatever the reason, the XIIth had never worked so hard in living memory as they had these past six months. Only my unit did not hate me for it. Perhaps they could not afford to.

‘Done.’

I stepped back. Syrion gave the stake one last, baleful smack. We stood in front of it, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield. I felt Proclion press in on my left. He was largest of all of us, a bear of a man, from the south toe of Italy, where they have been Roman citizens for a dozen generations yet still speak Greek to spite their Latin masters.

Horgias fitted in to his left as his shield-man, then Rufus was left of him, and after him Polydeuces and then Sarapammon. Syrion held the century’s standard, which had the open hand of a god (some said it was the emperor, but I chose to think of it as Helios) at the top, and the badges of valour underneath. We had few of those, and none won since Caesar’s death.

Torches flared about us, bringing light to our hellish dark. Leontius, the aquilifer, who bore the legion’s Eagle, brought it now to the fore and stood beneath it in such a way that the shadow of the bird fell on to the front ranks. He wore a wolfskin as his bearer’s pride where others of his sort wore leopard or lion; that was done, we were all sure, to placate Lupus, for his name meant ‘wolf’ in Latin, although everyone on the camp spoke Greek unless forced to do otherwise by their officers, who themselves only did so to prove a point. A hundred paces to our left, the Eagle of the IVth Scythians caught the light of their many torches and spun it away to the dark.

By ragged starts, the sounds of hammering ceased. We stood in silence, bunched behind our shields, helmets aglow under the bouncing flames of the wool-and-pitch torches.

We were in the front and centre of the line; the place of dispensable men. I saw movement at my right and heard the trumpet’s blast. To give him credit, Munius Cattulinus might have been a sloppy clerk of clerks — in my role as clerk to the century I had had occasion to read his writing and it was as bad as I had feared — but he was an excellent signaller.

The trumpet called clear and fine; eight strong notes.

On the first note, we cast our javelins into the dark at an enemy we could not see and now knew did not exist, drew our swords and knelt.

On the second note, the rank behind us cast their javelins, drew their swords and knelt.

On the third note, the third rank cast their javelins, which was the point when we discovered that not all of the second rank had knelt yet; some were still struggling to draw their swords. Men shouted curses in the dark. Others cursed back, louder, so that, by the time the fourth note of the horn sounded, half the men were not sure if it was for them, and of those who did know not all were ready to rise and step to the right.

The remaining four notes, which should have timed our four paces backwards, descended into progressively greater chaos. An officer shouted for order; Lupus, I think, but there’s a point when all angry men sound the same. As silence fell, we were a milling soup of disordered men, facing all directions but front.

Syrion held our eight-man unit together by force of will and a carrying voice. We had not stepped fully to our right, because there was no room to do so, and when we tried to pace back we were stopped after two paces by the men behind. So we stood where we were, shields locked in a wall, with two rows of stakes in front of us, half of which were not sound, knowing that if Vologases’ cavalry rode out of the dark and charged at us now, we were dead men.

By then, though, even the dullest amongst us had realized that the Parthians were not coming. I wished that they were; standing there in the dark with the horn’s blast dying in my ears, I thought it might be easier to face the fast-running anger of battle, the roar of death in my ears, the quick ending and release at last from this particular hell.

Instead Lupus came at us, but, this once, he was not first of the sixty centurions to rake along the lines; this time he walked two paces behind the two first centurions — and Flavius Silvanus, the camp prefect.

To us, it was as if the emperor himself walked out of the night. Nobody expected to see the tribunes or the governor, and even if they had turned out at the third watch of night they would not have been accorded any particular respect.

But the camp prefect was as close to a god as we had. Silvanus had been with the XIIth since his first commission and had risen through the centurion ranks, elbowing men out of his way, writing letters to Rome, doing favours for progressive Syrian governors until he reached the place where he led the legion in all but name. He had power of life and death over every one of us, and we knew it.

When he came to a halt and stood under the Eagle, we had to fight to keep our eyes forward, not to let them drift to him. When he raised his hand and the centurions began their walk down the line, we knew this was not the usual parade inspection, not even usual night manoeuvres; we just didn’t know what it was.

Lupus stalked with his own particular gait. I remembered to breathe as he came close; I had been slammed in the solar plexus by his vine rod often enough by then for the crime of holding my breath.

When I was with the Vth, I had not thought Cadus a particularly lenient centurion; there was not one man of the ten units under his command who had not felt the depth of his anger at one time or another, but he was always fair. He set standards and expected them to be kept and we knew it.

With Lupus, I found what it was to live under a man who changed his mind with the wind, so that it was possible I could be thrashed for not holding my breath the day after he had left me vomiting in the dirt for holding it.

I breathed in. The night was cold. I felt the air chill my forehead, felt my lungs bunch against it. I saw Lupus on the edge of my vision.

In six months, I had learned the skill of seeing sideways while looking forward. His orderly held his torch for him, a stooped man from Emona named Minicius. By its light Istudied his dry-parchment face — and learned nothing. He could hold an expression of weary distaste through his own crucifixion, I thought, it was so moulded to his form.

He was nearly past when his eyes caught mine. Only for a fraction of a heartbeat, and I am sure without his intending it, but it was there, that human touch that lets soul meet soul, from which no man can hide.

And what I saw was more terrifying than anything I had yet seen: worse by far than his particular loathing of me, or his counterfeit rage; worse even than the moment of cold calculation before he changed his mind again so that what was right yesterday was wrong today. I knew all of those, and how he showed them, and none was present now: what I read in his eyes was terror.

Lupus was deeply afraid.

Knowing that, my own fear threatened to suck me away. I felt Syrion’s shoulder forced against mine, as if by power of will and the friction of his tunic he could keep me standing. ‘Careful…’ He eased the word out under his breath, taking a risk even with that.

I leaned my own weight back against him by way of thanks, and the moment passed, but not my fright. I breathed in the cold night and in the time it took I saw us decimated, even Lupus drawing lots from the bag, fearing to pick the one black stone in every ten and the death by attrition that must follow. Or being marched to the sea and made to swim until we drowned; I had a particular fear of deep water that my journeys had never undone. Or…

The horn sounded a single note, high and long, the song of the moon. It caught my thoughts and carried them out into the black sky. Careful not to make a sound, I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. Beside me, I felt Syrion do the same.

Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard hisvoice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry.

‘Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles.’ Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent.

‘If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead.’

His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual.

His voice rocked us. ‘To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa.

‘Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear’ — did I hear a note of distaste there? — ‘red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue.

‘You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand.

‘You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.’