The Eagle of the Twelfth

II: Raphana, Syria, Summer, AD 61
Chapter Thirteen

We lost the first man of our unit during the siege at Tigranocerta, on the day I killed my first enemy and so became a man.

It happened in the summer after Corbulo became our commander, which was in turn three years after the first winter we spent in the Mountains of the Hawk, when I took the XIIth to heart, and ceased to dream of escape.

We were no longer the second cohort by then, we had become the sixth. Syrion was still our standard-bearer, with Proclion, that great bear of a man, as his signaller and me as watch officer, which gave me an increase in pay that I didn’t need and a standing that I relished every time I took the password.

I kept my role as courier for the cohort and that, too, gave me a freedom the others lacked. I was lucky that they didn’t resent me for it, but the events on the mountains had put us beyond petty squabbles and, in any case, I made sure to bring back gifts whenever I went away.

The ascending order of centurions meant that Lupus had nudged Cadus from his rank as centurion of the sixth and Cadus, in his turn, had leapfrogged three other officers tobecome primus pilus, first centurion of the first cohort, second only to the camp prefect among the ranks that counted.

In theory, the tribunes and legates stood higher than the prefect, but the fighting men knew that the officers came from Rome under sufferance and returned soon enough to their wives and comforts and politics while the prefect and the centurions stayed to fight with us and for us; they were the ones who risked their lives in the front lines in war and bartered with the local leaders in peacetime; they kept us as safe — and made us as rich — as they could, while not stinting on our share of the action.

It was a joy to see Cadus so elevated, but it was a sorrow also, for the pilus typically stayed in post only a year, from one battle season’s start to the next, before he was promoted to camp prefect with another legion, or perhaps to lead an auxiliary unit, or to be personal bodyguard to some provincial governor.

His duties kept him more in the commander’s office than on the field and we saw him rarely, so I took particular notice when he called me off the outer practice field one day after early weapons drill and asked me to deliver a sealed slate to Lupus.

It was a spring morning, I remember, not hot by the local Syrian standards, but warm enough for us to be out of wool and into linen. We were tired, but that was normal for the time of year; the lambing had started and, at the request of the local townsmen, our night watches were detailed explicitly to keep jackals at bay.

They gave us hides and mutton in return, and there were times when we could lie on the turf and get blood on our hands helping the ewes to give birth. I had experience with foaling mares and had found a new vocation so that I spent half my nights face down in the lambing fields and the otherhalf marching their perimeters, listening for the sounds of hot breath amidst the night calls of the insects.

I should have been exhausted, but the feel of new life kicking under my hands in the night, the salt-sweet smell of the lambing fluids, the violent green of spring, all made the days seem more true, so that the sound of a single bird, singing, and the suppressed excitement in Cadus’ eyes as he gave me the slate are etched with equal clarity on my memory.

I couldn’t run — legionaries do not run within the barracks unless they particularly want to be flogged — but I marched at double time to the inner practice ground, the one that runs from the infirmary on one side to the far wall on the other, where Lupus was putting the latest recruits through the unnerving hell of pole practice.

It’s hard to explain why slashing a weighted wooden sword at an oak post as thick as a man’s waist should be a frightening thing, but when you aren’t used to it the judder up your arm wrenches the muscles and sinews and there comes a time when you believe with absolute certainty that your shoulder is going to jump out of its socket at the next blow. Or the one after. Or the one after that.

And it is then, when you would give your left arm and your chances of life to be allowed to put down the sword and stagger to the water butts, that someone like Lupus will scream at you to hit harder, faster, because your life will depend on it one day.

Here, now, on this day, Lupus had them working in pairs, so that the entire century was spread out over the field. They were lined up, two men to each post, hitting alternately high and low, in opposing order; one man high and one low and heaven help you if you lose the rhythm and strike twice in the same place, because the tip is as likely then to catch your partner as the post and while it wouldn’t take off a limb, a sword made of oak, with lead in the hilt to increase theweight, is a hard thing to control and might easily break his fingers. Or if not then his next strike, in retaliation, will break yours.

‘Harder! Harder! Strike at it, for the gods’ sake! It’s a Parthian, not your grandmother! I swear if you don’t put some effort into- What? ’

He had always hated being interrupted. I gave him Cadus’ slate without a word on the basis that he could read the crow’s head seal on the front as easily as I could and even Lupus ceased his screaming for General Corbulo.

‘Don’t stop!’

It was a credit to their fear of him that the men continued hacking at the posts as if their lives depended on it while Lupus broke the seal and turned the slate over in its wooden bed. The words written on it were few, and, without craning to look, hard to see clearly. From the angle I had, I read… INSPECTION… LEGION… HONOUR…

Lupus grew very still. Presently, his gaze flicked sideways and settled on me blankly. I watched for the moment when he recognized me, and saw the ghost-edge of his smile. I think that, by then, he had begun to modify it, just for me, to see how finely he could pare it and I still recognize it.

The moment passed and he snapped his eyes wide, a sure sign of impending urgency. ‘Your unit in parade dress within the watch. The entire cohort on the parade ground by the following watch, ready to practise the drill against cavalry. General Corbulo is coming to observe. He has been made governor of Syria. He is our new commander.’

Corbulo: a name to conjure with, a name to follow into battle, wherever he led; a name to have a man marching to the gates of Rome, crying Imperator! until the crowds and the idiot senate and the corrupt wax-brains of the Praetorian Guard and every other man with voting powers in the city came tounderstand what we already knew: that this man should be our emperor, that Rome would thrive under his rule, in place of the fool who presently held the throne.

Corbulo, who stood before us that bright, brisk spring afternoon and watched as our centurions bawled us through our paces, and then as Cadus took charge and marched us through the display that we had been practising, if we were honest, for the last four years, just for this moment.

Proclion and the other signallers blew for the thousandth time, and, for the thousandth time, all of us hurled our javelins, row by row, and placed our spikes and stepped back and did it as if we were one living breathing body, one mind, one heart, one soul, and that held in Cadus’ cupped hands.

And then we stood waiting, panting, sweating, watching, and by his very presence our general held us in check, so that when he raised his arms we shouted his name until our throats hurt but we did not hail him as emperor, which would have started us along the inevitable road to civil war.

Had he unleashed us, so much would have been different afterwards, but at the time all we knew was that this man was Caesar come to life and walking among us; a man more at home in the legions, amongst the sweat and iron, the hard march and the killing at the end of it — and perhaps the dying — than he was in the senate amid the lethal politics of petty men who couldn’t hold a line in battle if their lives depended on it.

He was not a large man, nowhere near as big as Proclion, or even Sarapammon. When he tucked his helmet under his arm, he showed how he was balding across his crown; he had skin that had chapped in winter and not healed, a largeish nose and pale blue eyes that looked as if someone had cut buttons from the sky and sewn them on to his soul.

He wore bare iron plate on his chest, none of the gilded nonsense that Octavian wore when he named himselfAugustus and stole the name of Caesar. His sword was a legionary gladius, far from the usual dress sword of a governor or a legate, but we knew it had seen action, had killed, and saved men’s lives; that it was a real sword, carried by a real soldier.

He did not draw it as he stood before us, mounted on an upturned flour crate, but as he lowered his arms his hand settled on its hilt as if it belonged there, and might at any moment spring to life.

That was when we came closest to hailing him Imperator. Even I could feel the word boiling in my throat, I felt it reverberate in the breaths of Tears to my left, Syrion to my right, I heard it rumble in the undertones of the rows fore and aft as we bellowed his name loud enough to wake the gods, to lift the skies, to call the heroes back to earth to see that one of them walked living amongst us.

‘Corbulo! Corbulo! Corbulo! ’

In time we grew tired, of course. At the cresting of the wave, our general raised his right hand with the palm out flat and the sound of his name died away, soft as the ocean’s rage before Poseidon.

He spoke into the silence after, and I swear that every man of the XIIth heard him, though we were lined twenty deep in our centuries, sweating in our helmets, listening to the rush of our own blood pounding.

‘Men of the Twelfth. When I first came here to lead the legions against the Parthian menace, I had heard the Twelfth was a poor legion, that it barely earned its name the Thunderbolt; that it was, rather, Thunderstruck.’

He paused. We did not laugh. We, too, had heard that. Some of us had believed it.

‘And so I chose the legions I knew I could count on to face the King of Kings: the Third, the Sixth, the Tenth. I sent them to the Armenian mountains to harden them and fashion theminto warriors again, after life in the east had turned them into goatherds and merchants, soft men with no heart for war.’

We shuffled in our places, we who had spent our nights up to our elbows inside lambing ewes, marching guard on the herds. But he was smiling, and his pale-sky eyes were friendly as he spoke.

‘Even so, I sent some of the best men amongst you with orders to make you, too, into soldiers, and they have worked on you these four years, while the other legions have met the enemy and held him in check. And they have not worked in vain. I have witnessed today as smooth, as perfect a display as any general might hope for from his men. I have read the reports of how you conducted yourselves on the mountain each winter, how your skills improved, each legion against the other, how you have earned for yourselves the titles of the Bloody Legion, and the Ice-hard Men.’

We of the XIIth, dressed in our madder tunics, glowed, and then glowered. The IVth glowered and then glowed. I never cease to find it strange how readily a single word can call forth a dozen memories. In that moment of reminding, I heard Tears scream, saw him defiled beneath the centurion, saw the centurion falling down the mountainside, stood before his monument, which spoke of his bravery and not of his calumny, stood before the tribunal of inquiry later, and told my lies and was commended for them.

On top of these were layered three more years’ worth of memories in the mountains, none of them as vivid, nor as enraging. Sometimes, we had lost to the IVth, other times we had won. But never again had a man of ours been taken prisoner, or a man of either legion died.

Corbulo waited for the almost-silence to become absolute, as he was used to. He was smiling still, knowing the depth of what he had done, and what it said of us.

‘You are those men, blooded and ice-hard. It speaks well ofyou and those who have fashioned you, as iron on an anvil. And so now I have come to give you what you crave most: the chance to prove yourselves not against each other but against our enemy, against Vologases, King of Kings, against Parthia.’

His voice rose to the baritone shout he needed to soar over the roar of our approval. The lambing pens were forgotten, the petty feuds, the deaths, the injuries — almost the injuries: I did not forget, nor forgive, what had been done to Tears — but the rest was swept away in a joy I had never imagined would be mine and even now cannot begin to describe: we were good enough, strong enough, respected enough by a man we adored; we were going to war!

We were children whose every wish has just been granted; we were men who had not dared hope for this. If we had lovers who must be left behind, we did not care. If we had lovers who might be by our sides we hugged them in our euphoria, for this was better than love, this promise of action.

I kissed Tears and was met and held and kissed in return; not the first kiss by any means, but it was the first when I read only joy in his eyes. The shadow that had clung to him since the Mountains of the Hawk had cleared. I could have wept for happiness.

In time, we settled, hungry for details, and drank them in as they were given.

‘As you know, our emperor in his wisdom has named Tigranes king of Armenia. As you know also, Tiridates, brother to Vologases, King of Kings, lays claim to that same throne. King Tigranes, in his wisdom,’ that word had a sting in its tail; we laughed and he was pleased, ‘has seen fit to invade certain cities of Adiabene that border Armenia, and has thus drawn on himself the ire of the Parthians.’

If I closed my eyes, I could see Monobasus, the fox-faced king of Adiabene, purple with rage at the invasion of hislands. I saw him kneeling before the King of Kings, begging his aid. I saw the shimmer-shine of the Parthian cataphracts as they massed and lowered their lances… I let my eyes spring open.

I was not in the front row, but I swear his eyes were on me as Corbulo said, ‘Vologases, the King of Kings, is no fool. He has made peace with Hyrcania, and has sent his Parthians to attack Armenia. King Tigranes has withdrawn to Tigranocerta, his capital, which is a walled city, readily defensible. You will march now to his aid, and help him to hold it. A full wing of Pannonian archers shall accompany you, leaving your fellow legions, the Third, Sixth and Tenth, to cross the Euphrates and threaten Vologases from the south, thus splitting his forces. Vologases shall not take Tigranocerta. He shall not endanger Syria. Between us, we shall leash him and hold him back. You march in the morning.’