The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Eighteen

This close to death, time passed faster than it had ever done and it seemed I had barely risen before I was lying down again, this time face down beneath a stand of cedars high above a mountain pass a dozen miles from our camp.

Tears lay on my right and Horgias on my left and we watched in dreadful silence as four spears split the early light and four men of the IVth lost their lives in a trap as perfectly planned and executed as any I had seen.

The shouts that followed were Roman and Parthian mixed, but more Parthian, and louder, for while a half-century of the IVth had been sent out to scout the enemy’s position they had been met by at least twice that many Parthians, and the speed and ferocity of the enemy attack had heightened their advantage so their numbers seemed greater.

The slaughter was fast and efficient and from our eyrie, a hundred feet up, it had the dance-like elegance of a mummery made for our entertainment, with pale faces raised and dark mouths opened in muted shouts and barely any blood spilled, except at the end, when the centurion of the IVth — first centurion of the eighth cohort, I think, but I hadn’t looked closely at the men we were following — was decapitated bya Parthian warrior who rose high in his saddle and used his sword with both hands. That blood was a fountain; it soared and fell and stained the rock and the hard winter’s earth beneath.

Horgias rose then, drawing both blades. Tears caught his arm, holding him back. ‘Don’t. We have to get back. Cadus needs to know what’s happened.’

Our orders had been clear: our role was to observe and report, nothing more. On no account — none, on pain of execution — were we to participate in any action.

Cadus had been categorical when he had called us out of the parade lines. ‘We need to know what’s happening. It serves nothing if you give your lives and the rest of us are taken unawares. Ride a long way behind and don’t let the men of the Fourth see you. If one of them is taken and questioned, they can’t give away what they don’t know.’

That had been in the morning’s cold, with the unrisen sun spinning gold filigree along the horizon, layering it on the night’s hoar frost. We had ridden out of the camp double-cloaked, with our horses’ feet bound for silence, and our spears wrapped to keep them from shining as they had when we crossed the bridge; what had been an omen yesterday was treachery in the making today.

We carried no stakes, and knives instead of shields; Horgias was slowly turning us all into barbarians. But good barbarians; we had tracked a half-century of the IVth and they never knew we were there. And now the Parthians did not know we had watched their slaughter.

‘Let’s go.’ I touched Tears on the arm, and, with Horgias at my other side, we wormed backwards down a long, shallow incline, to the river at its foot where our horses were hobbled.

They knew better than to greet us with noise, but the bay mare blew a steaming breath into the nook of my neck. She liked it, I think, when we bound her feet. Whatever thehazards of walking — and they were manifold, and worse at the canter — she enjoyed the delicacy that was asked of her.

And so, quietly, led by Horgias, we stole out of the hollow. At a safe distance, we stopped to strip the horses’ feet that we might gallop the twelve miles back across the plain to the camp where Cadus waited to greet us. He was not alone.

‘All dead?’ Paetus asked me; I had been the notional leader.

‘All,’ I said. ‘And stripped of their armour. We would have gone to their aid but-’

‘But I had ordered against it.’ Cadus stepped up to my side. ‘Without these three there to observe, the centurion and half his men would just have been lost and we would have known nothing of it.’

I said, ‘The good news is that the Parthians were not yet near the Lizard Pass. They won’t reach it until tomorrow, longer if they stay and celebrate their victory.’

‘Vologases knows we’re here,’ Horgias said. ‘He has no need to hurry.’

‘How?’ Paetus glared at us, as if all three of us had just confessed to treachery. ‘How does he know we are here?’

‘We killed one of his scouts on our way out,’ I said. ‘But where there is one, there will have been others. They couldn’t miss two legions. And the smoke of your cooking fire would tell them soon enough.’

We of the XIIth had no fires: we ate cold food night and morning. But Paetus had refused to forgo his fire, even here, with the enemy a day’s ride away; less.

The look he gave me was poisonous, but what could he do? I stared at the ground and said nothing, and in the end Paetus turned away. To Cadus, he said, ‘Have my commanders meet in my tent immediately.’ And he was gone.

We waited again, while our officers tried to talk sense into a senseless general. To pass the time I checked the bay mare’sfeet for stones, and groomed her and gave her some hard feed, for I had a feeling we might be moving fast, and while I marched she was made to run alongside the supply wagons like a cart hound.

‘Demalion?’ Lupus was grey-white, tinged red at the edges of his temples.

‘What news?’

He shook his head and strode on past. ‘Find Tears and Horgias. Bring them to the tent lines. You all need to hear it at once.’

Tears and Horgias weren’t far; each was tending to his horse. At the tents, we met the other four of our unit and the rest of our century and arranged ourselves as if on parade. Here, now, it mattered to us that we were sharp and well drilled; it gave us a sense of our own professionalism.

‘Governor Paetus…’ Lupus closed his eyes that we might not read the rage in them. ‘Governor Paetus has informed us that he will return to our camp at Rhandaea with the Fourth legion, there to build the palisades and set up defences sufficient to deter the enemy. He will take with him the Eagles, and keep them safe, so that if a legion is lost it can be re-formed, and its honour may live on.’

There was a moment’s silence as we all wrestled with the impossibility of what we had heard. The IVth leaving. And the Eagles going with them so that if a legion — our legion, there was no other one — was ‘lost’, which is to say annihilated, destroyed to the last man…

And that’s when our discipline broke apart.

‘ What? ’

‘He can’t-’

‘How can we fight without the Eagle?’

And out of the clamour, my voice, rising, ‘Lord, we can’t fight without the Eagle. It’s impossible.’

Lupus stared us down. ‘You think yourselves so weak? Soin need of aid that you cannot fight alone? I would say rather, how can we carry the Eagle to certain defeat? If it is taken to safety, then the legion still lives. Even if we all die, it will be re-formed. If, out of our own weakness, we keep it here, and it is taken by the Parthians, the Twelfth itself is lost. We will have the two companies of archers with us, which should help to hold the pass.’

‘But why are we staying? I don’t understand. What’s the point?’

Lupus held up his hand before another storm of questions could arise.

‘Paetus has had word from Corbulo that help is on its way. We have to delay the Parthians until that help can arrive. To that end, we, the Bloody Twelfth, with our cavalry and our Pannonian archers, will hold Lizard Pass for as long as we may, to buy that time. We know that the Parthians are not inclined to sit protracted sieges, that they will have poor supplies with them and no way of gaining any now that winter is at hand. We, on the other hand, have sufficient supplies at Rhandaea to feed two legions for six months.’

And only one legion left to eat its way through them, for we will be dead.

We each thought it, none of us said it; you could taste the words on the air. We will be dead. And without our Eagle.

‘Quite so.’ Lupus gave his half-smile, and today it was almost paternal. ‘But we shall fight under the standards of our own cohorts. Those no man can take from us, save by our deaths, and I promise you we shall sell our lives dearly, and with honour. Cadus asked for this, and it was granted. The Twelfth shall be known as the legion that held back the Parthian cataphracts while others marched to safety.’

‘Like Leonidas’ Spartans at Thermopylae?’ Syrion said drily. We were not Spartans, and Paetus was assuredly not a king. Laughter rose from the ranks, crisp as winter leaves, but real; after all the battles in which death was possible, but not certain, there was an odd freedom that came from the certainty of this one.

‘Exactly like.’ Lupus matched our tone. ‘You have until the next watch to prepare. Whatever you do, in the gods’ name, don’t let the priests attempt another sacrifice.’

We broke camp together and set off in our opposite directions: we of the XIIth and our allies marched east, towards the rising sun, combat and honour; the IVth went west, to the setting sun, to ignominy and a wealth of digging. We sang as we marched. They did not.

Our horses were the happier too, and their number was increased by an old war-scarred gelding that carried Paetus’ colours who broke ranks and cantered back to us, to join the fighting. We greeted him as a valued friend, and let him stay, and sent the colours back on a younger beast, though not one of my bay mare’s colts; those all stayed with us.

The men of letters in Rome who have never ventured beyond the shores of Italy nor ever held a blade in anger will tell you that this was our third bad omen; that after the failed sacrifice and the way the sun caught our spears as we followed Paetus out of the winter camp, the retreat of the colours was the seal on our doom.

But we who marched east believed that the faulty sacrifice belonged to the IVth legion, that the flashing spears were for our victory and that an old war horse choosing to join us was the best omen we had seen all day, and that was with each of us scouring the skies for crows caught in groups of auspicious number, for circling hawks, or vultures. We saw none of those, but we set the aged war horse to our fore, ridden by one of the centurions, and chose to forget that our Eagle had left us.

We put up a brisk pace over clear, dry ground, hard with thefirst frosts of winter, and we were dug in and camped with our latrines dug and as much comfort as we allowed ourselves by the time the sun poured its last benediction across us.

A deep indigo blue spread across the evening sky, wisping to lavender and lilac at its edges with spear points of cinnamon, bronze and amber. I sat warming my hands at the embers of our cook-fire, watching the colours change.

‘You’re not sleeping?’ Tears came to stand behind me; I felt the touch of his hand on my shoulder.

‘Later.’ I was going to sleep; I knew I would fight badly without, but it was hard to let go of the evening.

Tears came to sit on the log next to me, so that his warmth joined the warmth of the fire. His beauty made me ache sometimes, such perfection in a living man, and the thought that it must be marred, broken, deprived of life was too dreadful to contemplate.

He said, ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Not for myself.’ I had been looking at him and so in that moment it was true; but then the moment was gone and I shook my head, and I said, ‘Yes, of course I’m afraid. How could I not be? We’re going to fight without our Eagle against Vologases’ mounted cavalry. This is real fighting, not a skirmish in a forest.’ The fire leapt a little, sending sparks into the velvet night. It gave me the courage to speak on. ‘Even so, we do this for the best of reasons. If the gods honour courage, they will honour that. If they do not…’

‘They would not be true gods.’ He was mocking me, gently; Tears’ gods were of river and vine and their gift was the spark that quickens a seed, not the moment of martial valour that lifts a man beyond himself. Mine had been the same, once, until a night on the Hawk mountains had changed me. I was not unhappy with who I had become.

I said, ‘You could have taken the message to Corbulo. Nobody would have thought less of you for it.’

‘I would. I couldn’t live with myself if you died and I was not there to stop it, or had not already died trying to keep you alive.’

He said it so calmly, with such little fuss, that the words had sailed over me before their meaning struck my heart.

I shuddered then, I think; certainly my vision swam. In all the time we had lived together, eaten together, fought together, killed and been hurt, bound each other’s wounds, slept within each other’s reach… in all that time, Tears had never said aloud that he held me other than anyone else in our unit. I had not said it of him, either, but everyone knew.

I turned to him, away from the last light of the sun. I must have looked wretched, for he put out his arm and drew me in to lean against his shoulder.

Always, I had been the stronger, the one to look out for him. To have it so very different left me worse than I had been.

I couldn’t speak, and so he spoke for me, answering the question I could not ask. ‘I’m your shield-man. Why else do I live?’ His eyes sparked with a depth of humour I had rarely seen in him before, but I couldn’t join him. I was too thrown.

I said, ‘Only that keeps you here? Only duty?’ It hadn’t sounded like duty.

‘No.’ He was serious now. ‘Not only that.’

‘Why did I not know?’

‘You didn’t ask.’ He kissed my head, dry-lipped, fast. ‘And I didn’t tell you. I was afraid, I think. And unsure.’

‘Of me?’

‘And of myself. Of how to be. Even without all that passed on the mountain, I am not Horgias or Proclion, to lie easily with the first man who asks.’

‘I think you do them both an injustice.’

‘True. Better to say I am not Syrion, to take a different girl to bed for each day of the month, and begin at the start againwith the first at the next new moon and swear to her that the sun rises in her eyes alone.’

That was a gross calumny, but Tears was laughing as he said it, and so I eased free of his embrace and sat up, and saw him with fresh eyes. He was not a boy any more, broken on a mountain, but a man, with the heart of a warrior, and the quiet, easy laughter that had long ago replaced his fear.

‘We have only one night,’ I said, and my throat was so dry the words came out crushed to sand.

‘I know. And if we don’t sleep, we may not fight as well tomorrow.’

‘I think… we’ll fight well enough. We may fight better.’

I was lying, and he knew it. He raised one brow high, in perfect mockery of Lupus. ‘Show me then,’ he said, and, rising, took my hand and led me away from the tents to a place I had not seen before, that he must have found beforehand. It was quiet and dry and out of the wind, and we saw the last of the sun and its first faint rising and in between we let loose such passion as I had never dreamed of.

And I did face the morning more awake, more alive than I had ever been.