The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Fifteen

It was evening when we reached the forest on our return journey, and it was as unfriendly now as it had been in the morning; more so, as we soon discovered.

‘ Hsst! ’ Horgias reined his horse back and laid a hand on my bridle. ‘To the left, past the bole of the fallen tree. Something’s moving.’

‘A boar?’ I strained to look. Horgias is a wolf in the guise of a man; he can see in the dark better than any of us. With the moon barely risen, and starlight thin as slivers through the trees, I could perhaps have owned to seeing a shadow darker than the rest that moved faster than the wind-sway of the branches.

At my side, Tears murmured, ‘Not a boar.’ His sword scraped free of its sheath, scenting the air with lanolin and a faint tinge of iron. I would have said I was alert before, but I shifted into some new realm where my cheeks felt the lift of each leaf around me, my ears heard the shrews, the wood mice skittering beneath our horses’ feet, and my eyes — now — saw what Tears and Horgias had seen: not a boar, but a man. Men, in fact; at least three that I could count.

Syrion was our leader; all three of us turned to him. Wordless, he raised his hand and made a gesture: three fingers, then three again, then two splayed out and down. At that sign, seven of us dismounted and slid into the forest, leaving Sarapammon behind to lead the horses on.

Old Aquila, who could have run through this kind of manoeuvre in his sleep, saw what was happening and rode up past the fifteen mules from the train’s end to its head, bringing a dozen of his men with him.

His voice was loud enough to cross the Roman forum on a busy morning, never mind a forest at first fall of night, but its tone was conversational, as if we all still rode together and he had come up, with such noise, purely to pass the time.

‘Demalion, how much further? My old bones ache at the end of the day and I would soak them before tomorrow’s dawn.’

His patrician accent rang out like a piece of Rome transplanted, and Sarapammon, answering in my place and speaking Latin as Aquila had done, said, ‘Not long now. See those trees ahead, where they part and let in the moonlight? That’s the edge of the forest, where the mountain meets the fertile plain. We’ll be there in a hundred paces and then we can get some speed on, and head for the city. It’s dark enough now and the Parthians will never know we’ve-’

A spear passed within a hand’s breadth of my head, hurtling towards the voices. I felt the wind of its passing, and did not hear it strike flesh, but I didn’t have time to look round, to see if Sarapammon or Aquila had been hit, for in that moment I was fighting for my life.

Three of them came at me, four at first, but Tears took the farthest; I saw the slip of his blade in the moonlight as he attacked.

As for me, I had my gladius in one hand and a long-knife in the other, entirely against our proper dress, but Horgias had been teaching us and we had drilled in these woods on eachof our four previous forays and had learned the hard way that in the tight, dark crush between the trees a knife in the off hand was far safer than a shield.

I saw the pale flash of a man’s face, mouth stretched wide in a battle yell that I could not hear. I stabbed at it with my left, my dagger hand, and even as the Parthian jerked back from the feint I drove my right hand hard at where his neck should be, the blank space between pale flesh and the odd greasy shimmer of mail.

I felt the blade bite, but not deeply enough to kill, and wrenched it away and barrelled forward, using my shoulders, my hips, and hit muscle and bone and heard a man grunt and felt him lose his footing and fall and had time to splice a swift backhanded cut across his throat to finish.

A kill… a kill! The boy in me exulted, roaring, at that final step into manhood. The man I had been for years had no time for childish fantasies. A gout of hot and savoury blood sluiced into my open mouth. I spat it away, and spun to where another shape leered from the dark and I was already moving, spitting, swearing, dodging a sword blow from my right, and then wrenching sideways, and up again, spinning round a tree.

‘ Ha! ’

To this day I don’t know if the Parthian cried out or I did or someone else, but the noise called my head round and I saw a blur of star-gloamed metal and some god’s hand thrust me down so that I felt the kiss of its passing, but not the bite. It bit into the oak, a handspan deep, and pinned my hair with it. I wrenched free, ripping open my scalp, and tumbled away.

In Hyrcania, I had seen one of those axes kill a horse. It had been thrown as this one was, looping head over haft, and had ended neatly, in the solid bone of the colt’s forehead. The beast had gone down without so much as a twitch, and the entire watching army had applauded the skill of the throw.

The King of Kings, I remember, had given the axeman a replica of his weapon in solid gold, but the man himself had been more proud of his elevation to the king’s bodyguard, which had been, I understood, the point.

All that I remembered in a single moment, each image overlaid on the other, as I sought haven behind trees and struck out when I could and failed entirely to land a killing blow — any kind of blow — on the two Parthians in front of me, and felt my sword weigh heavy in my hand and knew that I was tiring, and that a tired man is dead.

I lost my knife soon after that. I was beyond thinking or planning by then; I saw a shape move, and I stabbed for it, and felt the jar of iron on bull’s hide, and the tug as the blade bit, and there was a moment when I could have tried to hold on and been dragged with it, or let go.

I let go and rolled away from where it had been, round yet another dark, wide oak with scrub at its base, and rose with my gladius held point down, with two hands on the hilt, and stabbed down at the mass below me, where the Parthian had thrust against nothing and tripped.

My blade skidded on ring mail; I stumbled just as he had, and, falling, reached out with my left hand and found hair, a head, and grabbed it and wrenched back and by luck, not the least bit of judgement, my blade’s slide kept on sheering sideways up his back until it struck the back of his helmetless head. I had to let go then, and roll away, and came up weaponless, spitting out the old blood that still layered my mouth from the first dead man, and the bile of terror that had flooded over it.

The miser moon rationed its light so that I had to feel for my sword’s hilt in the near total dark. When I found it, I rammed the blade through the head of the man I had just hit. I have no idea if he was dead before that stroke, but he certainly was afterwards. So I was twice a man, and no moresure of living, for the forest was full of men and if only half of them were the enemy we were lucky: every man of our unit and of the VIth was fighting now, with a noise that rocked the trees.

I had to kneel to pull the blade out again, and stayed still afterwards. My heart was a bucking bull in my chest, my hands were slick with sweat, my face itched under drying blood. But for all that, I felt for the first time as I had the night we raided the camp of the IVth on the mountains; I felt alive, and glad to be so. If I had died in that moment, fairly, I truly think I would not have minded. And I would not have traded places with any man then, not for all the wealth of Parthia. I had heard of this, but had never felt it for myself; that this is what battle does for a man when he has trained for it.

Battle also brings him to kill his friends by accident, or almost.

I tugged my gladius free of the dead man’s skull and replaced my lost knife with one he had sheathed at his waist and sought to find Tears and the others of my unit. All around me were the steps and grunts of men lost in fighting, the stifled screams of the wounded, the bubbling exhalations of the dying. Following the loudest of the sounds, I came upon one who bore Parthian mail and was still living, lying on his belly trying to push himself up to his hands and knees. I caught his head and stabbed my new knife into his throat and turned my face away from the gout of gore, not to swallow yet more of an enemy’s life blood… and so saw a man’s shadow sliding to my right, and the sliver of moonlight that fell on him, and the flash of blue that was exactly the colour of Monobasus’ tern badge. Fast as a snake, I rose and took three silent steps across the clearing and slammed my dagger hand forward and ‘ Tears! ’

I couldn’t stop the blow, but I could open my hand and let the blade drop, so that all he suffered was a strike to his back, and even that was less of a killing blow than it should have been, for he had turned towards me as I hissed his name.

‘Demalion!’

He snatched my arm from the air, spinning me round. If I had been Parthian, the next move would have opened my throat as it lay exposed to his blade. He laid the edge of his hand across it to prove the point, but gently, with the humour that showed more often now, and always when we were fighting. After a moment, grinning, he let me rise, dusting me down. ‘What are you doing? I thought I’d lost you.’

I was shaking all over, terrified, and he was just staring at me with that half-savage grin on his face, still with no idea how close death had brushed him. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t even noticed that I’d hit him. ‘Why in the gods’ name are you wearing blue?’ I asked.

‘Is it blue?’ He lifted a silk scarf from his belt and held it out between his hands. In the unlight that held us, it could as easily have been green, or red, or black. ‘One of the Parthians was wearing it,’ he said. ‘I killed him with it when my blades were both gone. I thought better I should keep it than leave it behind.’

‘Get rid of it before it gets you killed.’ Even now, I was the more frightened of us, the more snappish, though it was he who had the bruise on his side that would take half a month to fade. ‘We need to find the others.’

‘There,’ Tears said, and jerked his head back east to where the path ran through the trees. ‘I was coming to find you before-’

A wolf’s howl split the night, cut off at its peak.

Together, we ran towards it. In a small clearing, Horgias, the Rabbit and Rufus stood in a triangle surrounded by a knot of Parthians. Axes and swords flickered back and forthand it was clear that this would have been a good time to have a shield.

Tears and I hurled ourselves at the nearest enemy, stabbing at faces, knees, wrists, anything that was not armoured. I didn’t keep count of the men I injured or killed, for we were still heavily outnumbered. I stabbed, I parried, I ducked. At some point, when I ducked, I found a dead Parthian’s shield near my feet and picked it up. The grip was of a cavalry shield and the weight was not what I was used to, but it felt like a gift from the gods, and it saved my life as an axe bit deep into the hide by the boss. I shoved it forward and ran, to be Tears’ shield-man, so that we might both be protected.

The Parthians were fewer now, but fighting like cornered rats. I stepped back out of the fray and raised my head and gave the call of the wolf twice, which is what Horgias had been trying to do, I think; it was the call to summon the XIIth and was particular to our cohort and our century. We needed them, and, more than that, we needed them to find Proclion, for our giant bear-man was not with Horgias and that spelled danger.

Sarapammon must have heard the urgency in the call; I heard his voice at the head of a troop, running, and Aquila’s patrician voice urging them on.

Thinking we were saved, I let down my guard, and only Tears’ speed saved me from the spear that came for my face. He slashed down on the haft with his gladius and the spearhead missed me and skidded instead past my shoulder.

Seeing a gap, I slid my blade up the spear haft to the man at the end of it. He backed away and I might have followed him and been caught behind enemy lines — a fatal mistake and one only made by the very green or the very wild — but that I heard Horgias cry out again behind me, a high, desperate keening that said he had found Proclion and the finding was not good.

I gave one last thrust with the shield and backed away, fast, then spun to my right where I found Horgias and Proclion fighting for their lives against six Parthian cavalrymen, each armed with two curved swords.

Something snapped in me then, some deep final cord that had kept me civilized. Bellowing like a madman, I ran at them, wielding my stolen shield as a club to break their noses, their faces, their heads. I reached Proclion and put my shoulder against his elbow, for he was that much taller than me, and became his shield-man and he, great bear of a man that he was, grinned down at me, as if we were on a routine training run.

‘Never thought I’d hear that kind of noise from you, fox-cub. Shall we kill them, you and I?’

I was dazzled by his praise, for Proclion was a born fighter who had killed his man long before he entered the legions. Moonstruck and battle mad, I threw him a matching grin and took a breath and let out the animal scream building inside and we sprang forward to meet the Parthians.

We were a whirlwind, reaping death around us. We were gods, fighting mortals who stood no chance. We were welded together, two men with one mind, and that mind bent on murder. I remember one slice that cleaved the mail on my shoulder and would have killed me but for the skill of the Damascan armourer, and I remember the return backhanded strike of mine that cut the wrist of my assailant half off and left him bleeding to death — but the rest is a blur of hot blood and savagery that came to rest only when five of the six Parthians were dead; and Tears and Horgias were still alive and Sarapammon had come with thirty men who now surrounded us so that the last of our assailants had no choice but to surrender, or die on his own sword.

So we thought, all of us. We lowered our blades and drew breath and I felt Tears move up behind me and was about toturn to see if he was truly all right when the Parthian threw himself at us.

My shield floated up of its own accord and took his first blow but he was doubly armed and the second was hissing straight at my head. Tears blocked it, I think, but I never saw and never asked for the Parthian had rolled away from both blocks as if we had poured him full of power and in that roll he struck both blades, lightning-fast, at Proclion.

‘No!’ Horgias was on him even as the second blade struck, pounding his own blades into the Parthian’s neck, his head, his throat, his groin. The enemy went down in a heap of macerated flesh, but too late to save our man.

‘Proclion!’ I fell to the turf at his side. He was our giant, our great bear of a brother, and he was not simply wounded: his life blood was spilling from a gaping flap in his belly and a second, sliced cut on his thigh, which might have unmanned him, but in fact had cut the vessel that pumped the blood to his leg, so that it pumped instead over me as I knelt at his side.

‘Proclion?’ I lifted his hand and felt the ridges where the sword had worn into them. His fingers dwarfed mine. He gave a squeeze and squinted to focus on my face.

‘We’ll get help,’ I said. ‘We’ll bind your leg and-’

He gave the faintest shake of his head and forced a smile. ‘You fought well, fox-cub. I’ll wait for you where the warriors go. Don’t grieve for me. You can have…’ He coughed and stopped and his gaze lifted over my shoulder to where Syrion stood. ‘Give the fox-cub the horn. Tell Lupus I said he was worth it.’

It cost him a breath to say that much, his gift to me — to us all — and then his eyes slid off me to Horgias who was kneeling at his other side, in the grip of such grief as I could only imagine, and did not wish to, for by then I knew thatto see Tears dead would have destroyed me, and we were not yet as close as they two had been, nor might ever be after the damage done on Hawk mountain.

There were no words then, just the waiting and the numb beginnings of grief. The men of the VIth walked softly around us, stripping the dead Parthians, binding them up and setting boughs about them for a fire. It’s not the Parthian way, but Aquila planned, he said, to signal to those left alive the magnitude of their defeat. They killed the prisoners.

As they worked, we who were Proclion’s brothers stood vigil for the only man we had lost, at a cost of thirty of theirs, not knowing what to say, or what to do, except that we must not look away while he passed from us.

We watched his last struggle, saw his skin turn white and then grey and then a queer translucent blue, heard him speak Horgias’ name, and the tenderness that was in it, and saw Horgias cease to weep at last, after the final shudder, and rise with Proclion’s bloody blade in his hand.

He turned to look at all of us, and his eyes were not human, nor seeing us, I think. He said, ‘Wherever they are, I will kill them. You will not stop me.’

I would have let him go, let him run into the night to hunt down every Parthian he could find, until he died himself, but Syrion had more experience of this and he had Aquila behind him, watching.

He stood in front of Horgias and gently pushed his blade down and said, ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can kill them all. Tonight, we are sworn to deliver the mule train to the city. It’s what he died for. You can’t dishonour him by failing in that. Besides, we must take his body back to the priests. We can’t leave him out here for the wolves, nor throw him on the fire with the rest.’

That was what turned it — tending to Proclion’s body. Horgias would not have stayed with us just to keep the muletrain safe, but it mattered — just — to honour the mortal remains of the one he had loved.

I watched the inner battle and saw the one side win, and by how little, and said to him, ‘We’ll lift him on to his horse. You lead it, it’ll follow you best,’ and it was settled, as much as it could be.

We returned in sombre mood, and saw no more of Monobasus’ men on the way back, so that we were all denied the vengeance we craved.

Once in the city, we left Aquila giving a full briefing to Cadus and Lupus while his men bedded down in a house that had once belonged to a merchant and had more rooms than our barracks back at Raphana. We gave our report as swiftly as we might and then excused ourselves and took Proclion to the temple of Jupiter where we gave him into the care of the priests.

Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring as priests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.

We soon sickened of the noise and the smell, and took Proclion’s horse, his helmet, his sword, almost all that could be carried, and retired with them to our own quarters, a barracks room that had once been a selling hall for corn. There, when we had lit the brazier and broached the ale, I saw a thing happen that I had heard about, but not witnessed, and certainly never been party to.

Syrion set Horgias on a bench with a jug of ale all his own, and bannocks saved from the morning’s bake, then laid out Proclion’s cloak on the ground nearby and set down all of those things that we had brought back from the temple.

Rufus went back to Proclion’s bed and brought out thosefew possessions he had not taken with him: the battered copper mess tin that he carried on march, the one he used daily, not the polished one he kept for parade; the whetstone for his blades in a slick leather pouch; the pack of javelins and the pointed stake we all carried in our kit, to be ready at any moment for the cataphracts; his spare shield; spare thongs for his sandals… all were laid on the cloak for our inspection. All were things we, too, used daily, so that we had no real need for spares.

Even so, Syrion reached out first and took Proclion’s shield, replacing it with his own, so that the same number of things lay on the cloak. ‘It’s better than mine,’ he said. ‘He had thicker bull’s hide on his.’

I saw no difference, but did not say so, and Horgias, set apart from us all, gave a nod, as if his permission had been asked and granted.

Others chose in a kind of order: Rufus took the javelin and left his own on the cloak, saying that his was bent at the end and would not fly true; the Rabbit took Proclion’s wooden stake, for the same reason; Sarapammon found that he needed to replace the thongs on his sandals, and did so, unlacing them with thick fingers, lacing them afresh with the new leather, tying the old neatly and setting it on the cloak.

I took his mess tin, and went to fetch mine from the store under my bed, saying it was wearing thin on the base, which was as true as Syrion’s shield being thin, or Rufus’ javelin bent, which is to say not true at all. In truth, we would all have been content with what we had, but this way each of us carried a piece of the man now gone, that we might remember him each time we ate, or walked, or marched into battle.

It was done without ceremony or displays of grief or any kind of comment to acknowledge that this man was gone, never to return, but it was our wake for him, and more fitting than any wailing of priests or mumbled prayers.

We slept poorly that night, listening to Horgias, who lay awake in the dark and would not weep, and in the morning, dull-eyed, we came before Cadus, who had us present arms and give a show for Aquila before he announced to the entire legion that we were leaving; that, faced by our intransigence, Vologases had agreed to lift the siege of Tigranocerta, in return for which Corbulo had agreed to grant kingship to Vologases’ brother until such time as he could send an embassy to Nero and request that ownership be passed to Parthia.

There are those who said this was tantamount to surrender, but they had not been there and seen the pointlessness of the fight. Corbulo was a general who saw the greater scale of things and if he thought this was one battle not worth fighting we were happy to go along with him — all except Horgias, who nursed a terrifying hatred of the Parthians and would have happily attacked Vologases’ entire army single-handedly.

He had no chance of that for our orders were to march west, to beautiful Melitene, which lay just over the border in Cappadocia, and there to settle into winter quarters and await the arrival in spring of our new commander, Lucius Caesennius Paetus.