The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Ten

The camp of the first century, first cohort of the IVth legion was last of the line, a good eight miles to our north along the mountain ridge. Between us and them were five of their camps and five of ours, the last of these inhabited by Cadus and his men, first century of the sixth cohort of the XIIth. Our advantage was that there was a lot of cover between us and them. Our disadvantages were that they knew we were coming.

When we had been sent up the mountains that first morning, tasked with finding spaces that were large enough to sustain an entire eighty men for three months, we had been lucky — Lupus would call it his skill — to find a source of water near our camp, and a stand of cedars not too far below it that gave us firewood.

We had set our tents in the niche between two north- south ridges, with a narrow pass to our east that led down to the plain. On a good day, a lookout could see the officers leaving to visit Raphana, or the couriers bringing news from General Corbulo’s campaign against the Parthians in the north.

We had news twice a month, at new and full moon, whenSilvanus, the camp prefect, came up to check who had been captured, who injured, who had died.

He said that Corbulo went amongst his men bareheaded and clad only in linen to keep their courage high as they wintered in snow far deeper, far colder than ours; that the men were forced to eat only the flesh of cattle to sustain themselves, which every man knows is not enough. He said a man had lost his nose to frostbite, and that another, throwing down his pile of firewood, found that his frozen hand had come off with it.

We chose not to believe these tales, although when Horgias got frostbite in his member when he fell asleep while pissing against the wall we were quick enough to bring him in and send Rufus out to take his place; nobody wanted to see what happened if parts of us started to fall off into the snow.

On the day we lost Polydeuces, therefore, the three of us who had been sent out to spy wrapped ourselves in doubled cloaks with the outer one of pale, undyed wool. We wrapped wool about our legs from the knee down, and wove horse hair around our sandals, to lessen the sound of the nails without compromising their grip. We carried pads of bake-hardened barley meal in our belt pouches, and dressed in minimal armour. We took our swords and daggers and I tell you now that we did cover them in the raw fleece, and bind it tight with leather thongs. Whatever happened later, it was not because we failed to prepare properly.

The three of us left as the others were marshalling for parade. I led; I had spent six months in the company of a spy and my unit thought me trained in all the ways of subterfuge. I did nothing to disabuse them of their idea, for I enjoyed the little I had learned, and thought myself somewhat skilled — but there was nothing I could teach Horgias.

We called him ‘the silent’ because he could walk across a bathhouse floor in sandals and make no echo, which wasthe hardest test we knew. On the mountainside, he was fast, quiet and easily our best tracker.

Syrion was not as naturally silent, but his gymnast’s body made him supple and I would say that three quarters of subterfuge is in physical flexibility; the ability to mould oneself to the situation.

I was neither silent nor particularly athletic. I had my cunning from my father, the horse-trader, and on to that I had grafted everything gleaned from six months with Pantera, which was enough. If I say it myself, we made a good team.

The only mule path on the mountain spine ran high above the camps, almost at the roof-ridge of the range. We tracked the swath of ruined snow up beyond our camp until it turned hard right along the path.

There, I gave a low, looping whistle that called Horgias and Syrion up to me.

‘It’s too easy,’ I said. ‘Lupus was right: if there’s going to be an ambush, they’ll be waiting for us along the mule path; there are plenty of places to hide. But there’s a goat path we could take that runs along the back edge of the peak; I found it while I was hunting earlier in the month. It’s narrower, and more dangerous, but there’s less chance of our being jumped and we can look over the top once every five hundred paces to be sure we’re still following the mules. Unless either of you has a better idea?’

Neither had. In the thin, cold air, thinking was harder than it had been. The tents seemed like a hospitable refuge in comparison, the base camp an impossible luxury, beyond even dreams.

I pushed on up towards the mountain head, ploughing through the fresh snow, seeking out stone or ice to step on where I could, that we might not leave our own trail. At thepeak, we passed through a narrow crack in the rock that ran perpendicular to the line of the range. At its widest, it was the width of a man’s chest, so that we had to turn sideways, and edge our way along, and down, through the dim, frozen channel that the sun never reached, and then out again, into the same blinding snow light.

From here, we had a view down on to the clouds and through their gaps to the dozens of small farmsteads dotted about the plain below. The edge here was closer to our path; less than the height of a man from where we shuffled along the goat track.

I leaned in to the rock and began to pick my way along, and presently heard the quiet curses of the men behind as they saw the risk.

Without turning my head, I said, ‘If you stay close to the rock, you’re less likely to fall.’

Strained grunts were my reply. We each tilted in to the mountain and, like that, pressed north, holding every piece of rock that came to hand, heads down, tasting ice on the wind.

Pantera had taught me to count as I walked, the better to estimate distance. Four hundred and ninety-eight treacherous, ice-laden steps later, I heard a man’s murmured voice, and a moment later saw a cloud of breath in the air.

With my hand up, I halted, pointing. Horgias, who was closest, drew his knife, caught my eye, made a brief, simple mime, and passed me by, pressing close to keep himself clear of the edge.

It was rumoured that Horgias had barbarian blood in him; how much and of what tribe none of us knew, but when he slid up that sheer mountain trail with his knife between his teeth he looked like nothing and no one I had ever seen. I was grateful that he was on our side.

‘He’ll kill them,’ Syrion said, from close in to my left.

I said, ‘Not unless he wants to be flogged to death, he won’t,’but even so, when Horgias came back, I looked first at his knife, for blood, and only when I found none did I back away into the shelter of a rocky outcrop and wait to hear his report.

At the camp, Lupus had said this was a declaration of war and I had thought him snow-dazed, but up here it felt as if a boundary had been crossed, and civilization was on the farther side of it.

Horgias crouched, to shelter better against the wind, and said, ‘There’s a full tent-unit of eight men watching the mule route, and an enemy encampment nested in the trees below. The mule tracks go on past.’

‘The prefect said we couldn’t combine our centuries to attack men of the other legion,’ Syrion said.

‘But I bet the men in the enemy camp know about the ambush,’ I said sourly. ‘If we were driven into it by men from up here, they might find it in themselves to take us prisoner. That wouldn’t be against the rules.’

Horgias nodded, his lips drawn back in a smile that was a wolf’s snarl. ‘They want us all flogged. Why us?’

‘Lupus,’ Syrion said. ‘The other centurions hate him, even among the Fourth. He’s too distant. He doesn’t drink with them or whore with them. They don’t know who he is, and so they hate him.’

‘He loves war,’ I said, who had seen the ice melt from his eyes, and the fire behind it, and these two made sense to me now. I felt the truth in my marrow, and it warmed me. ‘He’s bored with camp life. The Fourth are making a huge mistake giving him a reason to fight them.’

Syrion thought that through, in the serious way he did, and nodded. ‘Let’s go on a little way along the ridge,’ he said. ‘They know Lupus well enough to know he’s ruthless first and cautious second. They’ll want to keep enough men in their camp at the mountain’s end to hold us all off. A month’spay says they won’t have left more than two other units in an ambush like this one.’

‘Done,’ Horgias said. ‘If the next two enemy camps have a unit in ambush above them, and the one after doesn’t, we’ll know you were right.’

Syrion was right: there were only two more units waiting in ambush on the ridge, one above each of the next two blue camps.

Sometime shortly after noon, therefore, we three turned round and made our way back along the goat path. The wind turned with us, and came from the west, pushing us to the mountain, gluing us to safe rock, away from the precipitous fall.

It felt like a good omen, and I told Lupus of it when I returned. I had never spoken to him of omens before. In a day of strangeness, that was just another new thing. He liked it and told the men, so that by the time the light was failing they all knew that the gods were with us in our battle against the IVth.

With our intelligence to guide him, Lupus had wrought a plan that was breathtaking in its beauty; elegant enough to be daring, but simple enough to work. We had used the remaining three hours until we were due to leave teasing it over, looking for gaps, and finding ways to plug them.

It was the first time we had truly worked together as a century. By the time we left, we were all that much closer to each other, all learning to trust each other’s judgement, and all stirring to the first thrills of war. I, who had never killed before, nor even borne my sword in true action, found myself traipsing to the latrines eight, nine, ten times before we left, and still sick at the end of it.