The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Nineteen

The last shreds of night held our backs. The Taurus Mountains held our two flanks. Spread out between them, we of the XIIth held a line as straight and true as any legion ever held.

Cadus held his first cohort in the centre. We, the sixth cohort, held the right flank. Syrion held the open palm of Jupiter to my right, and now, for the first time, he wore a muleskin draped about his shoulders, its head covering his helmet, its hooved feet crossed at his breast. He must have spent a hundred private hours curing it, softening it, polishing the hide until it gleamed a rich, deep oaken-brown. We adored him for that; the whole legion did. Our only regret was that the IVth had not seen it.

The enemy came towards us thick as mercury poured into a channel; a shimmering tide oozing from the furnace of the risen sun into the pass below us. I felt Syrion tighten his grip on the banner haft, we were that close, that closely knit. On my left, I felt Tears… I felt him breathe, I felt his heartbeat, I felt when he smiled, and when he did my soul sang in joy and glory and my only regret — I swear this to you now asthe perfect truth — my sole regret was that the night could not have lasted longer.

I did not crave another night, only that the one we had might have been stretched a little, giving us time to learn more of each other, and perhaps with more privacy than a hollow in the woods where we could hear that other men were trying to sleep as easily as they could hear that we were not.

It was Horgias I felt for most. I had had trouble meeting his eye over the morning cook-fires, until he came up and hit me a glancing blow across the top of my head and said, ‘That’s for waiting so long, idiot!’ which made the world right again. Which made it perfect, really.

And then Cadus had come to me as I was unpacking my horn, a sharp-edged Cadus, shining as if he, too, had spent the night bathing his soul.

He looked me up and down and it seemed he liked what he saw. ‘You’ve come a long way since Hyrcania,’ he said.

I nodded; what was there to say?

‘Do you love battle yet?’ he asked, and when I frowned at him, not understanding, he eyed me sideways and said, ‘Pantera said you would grow to love warfare, given time.’

‘He never said it to me.’

‘What point, when you hated him?’

‘I didn’t hate him. I was awed by him. I wanted to do what he could do, to be what he was.’ I would have said that I loved him, but this morning my heart would not let that be true.

Cadus grinned. ‘I know. And he knew. But you hated him too. If he’d said it, you’d have deserted there and then just to prove him wrong. Or got yourself killed for the same reason.’

‘So you ask now, when death is certain.’ I had rolled my shoulders and cracked my knuckles and looked about me at the camp; at our tents, left in rule-straight order as we left them every ordinary day, because today of all days we werenot going to abandon discipline; at the horse lines, where the bay mare waited, the one that had been given me in Hyrcania, and would likely be back with a Parthian master by nightfall. I did not begrudge them that; the Parthians are good to their horses and she had served me well. A part of me hoped that Vologases, King of Kings, might know her, and recognize her sons by their brands, and take them all into his army.

Last, I had looked at Tears, who was waiting, ready to march. His armour had caught the smoky sunlight, so that he had been a mirage, only half there, a ghost-form already, waiting for me to join him. At any other time, that would have been omen enough to cripple my courage, but this morning it had left me heartened that he would wait for me in the lands of the dead as Proclion waited for Horgias. Not long, now, until we were all united again.

‘Yes,’ I had said, when I looked back at Cadus again, and lifted my horn to settle on my shoulder. ‘I do love battle. I will love this one, until the moment it takes all love from me.’

‘If we can manage the manoeuvre with the stakes properly, that may be a lot further away than the Parthians think. Keep your horn ready, and watch Lupus for the signals. He’s a good centurion; he’ll do his best to keep you all alive.’

‘Sound.’

A single word. A single act. A single breath shuddered through my body into the horn, translated by the magic of brass into a peal of golden notes from the ten cohort horns that lanced through the morning and the thunder of the silver tide that was nearly on us.

On each note, three thousand men moved in flawless synchrony. The morning was shot with the spark of flying iron, with the reach and stamp as one legion and two companies of archers took one step to the side and four steps back and left their bedded stakes bare to the coming horses.

We felt the implosion of air as the shields came up and lay edge on edge together and we made our wall with our blades ready to force the gaps, and then they were on the stakes, the cataphracts, in their mirror-bright armour, and the men in their shimmering mail.

‘Throw!’

On Cadus’ command, we threw our spears in a withering rain of iron, that met the charge just as the charge met the stakes.

The carnage as iron and flesh met sharp and solid oak was horrible to watch, made worse by the storm of spears before, and the hail of arrows that followed as our Pannonian archers shot from the flanks into the centre. Horses fell, churning the earth with their dying feet; their riders died, crushed under so much armour.

The whole Parthian front rank fell, but they jammed the stakes and the next ones jumped them; they had no chance to slow, and so they met the second rank of stakes, and then the next wave met the third and suddenly we were held safe by a wall twenty paces deep of dead and dying beasts.

The force of the Parthian charge was broken, at least for now. On the far side of the stakes, they tried to form up, to remake their line.

‘Archers, loose at will! Legion, step back!’ I heard Cadus, saw his arm flung high, and sounded the high, keening notes he required. A storm of arrows fell and under their cover we all stepped back and back until we stood on the higher ground, with new javelins passed to us from the ranks at the sides, who held the stores. There, we stood firm and waited while the living Parthians picked their way through the dead, all the time dying themselves under the blanket of our arrows.

Even so, they outnumbered us by thousands and did not seem to fear death. With the sun at their backs, they came ever closer until we could see the eyes of the horses behindtheir face-helms, which meant, in turn, their riders could see ours.

An axe spun at me. I ducked even before I knew what it was, and heard it kill behind me, felt the gap at my back, and felt it closed, as men stepped together where their fallen comrade had been.

An armoured horse breasted the mass of men. I saw blue silk, and the mark of the tern, and screamed at it, but it was not Monobasus, only one of his men, and Horgias pulled at his spear as it stabbed through and Tears thrust his shield up, catching the horse on the face so that it half reared and I stabbed up under its flanks at the only place where there was no armour, and it fell, and Syrion stamped on the head of its rider, and broke it, and buckled his helmet.

He grinned at me, and we joined our shields, and the dying horse thrashed its way to the afterlife ahead of us, making a new part of our defences.

The day became a storm of killing of which I remember only brief flashes, where time slowed, and the air crystallized around a certain threat, a particular sword blade or spear point, or axe. I remember the moment around noon when our archers had spent all but a few of their shafts and Vologases sent forward his own archers to shower us with death.

If Lupus hadn’t seen them, and hadn’t roared the command at me so that I heard it over the tumult of battle; if I hadn’t sounded the signal to raise shields, if we hadn’t drilled it so often that men even in the act of killing or dying lifted their left arms without thinking… if not all of those, the battle would have ended there and then, with the Parthians only left to strip the dead and give final grace to the wounded.

But he did see and I did hear and the men did respond and, from fighting side by side, we were suddenly sheltering under a roof of shield-tiles with only those of us on the front rank holding our shields to the fore, and like that we weathered thestorm until they ran out of arrows, or someone changed the command and the hail stopped, and we brought our shields back and the Parthians came forward again, who had drawn back for fear of dying under their own missiles.

The light cavalry came at us then, with horses unarmoured and men in short mail shirts who fought with axe and curved swords. They reaped us as if we were old standing corn, but slowly, and with losses of their own.

For each ten of our men killed we drew a pace back, and for each pace back, the pass narrowed and the incline steepened. The enemy cavalry had no room properly to move and so they sent the men in on foot with their spinning axes and their long-spears and we ordered our own archers to loose their last shafts on to them so that they, too, knew what it was to have to shelter from a killing rain; except that they had not drilled as we had, and more of them died.

As the day grew old, the fighting grew ever closer until we were battling hand to hand, face to face, knee to groin. The sun was behind us by then, shining in their faces. I remember seeing it glint on a Parthian shield boss and ducking, for fear of being blinded, and using that same shaft of light in my own right, raising my blade until the light bounced into the eyes of the screaming demon who came at me with his axe raised, but never saw the straight thrust into his mouth that killed him.

Dusk fell slowly, without our knowing, just that we had to strain harder to see the difference between mail and flesh, between skin and blood and bone. The sides of the pass became vast walls of unlight, and the blanket of night slowly drew across the Parthian forces, so that we no longer had any idea of how many were behind the battle line.

We had no one behind now to send for brands from the old camp fires; our line was one man deep, and not long.

A man fell in that line, away to my left. Lupus roared his command hoarsely now, and I sounded the horn and heard only one other match it, thinly, as we stepped back a pace, to keep our dwindling wall of shields intact.

But the other, thinner, horn kept sounding its long, rolling note, which was nothing at all like our three short, falling blasts that took us back.

‘That’s the retreat. The Parthian retreat. They’re going back!’ Someone shouted that from my left. I thought it was Sarapammon, but now I think it must have been Horgias. At the time, I barely dared lower my blade for fear of who would step in to take advantage of it, until I saw Syrion drop his head to rest his brow on his shield’s edge and heard Lupus say, in a tone of weary, half-joyed disbelief, ‘Demalion, sound the battle’s end.’

We were three hundred, who had been three thousand. Our unit alone was reduced to five men: Sarapammon and the Rabbit were gone, lost somewhere down the pass. I had seen neither of them die, but Rufus had seen both, and convinced the rest of us that they were dead beyond all hope of rescue or recovery, and we must not venture out to find them.

Syrion, Rufus, Horgias, Tears and myself were left. In a tight knot, each cleaving to the other, we stepped back and back and back and at a certain point, when it was clear the Parthians really had departed, we turned and walked wearily together back to where we had left our camp in perfect order, never expecting to see it again.

It took longer than it might have done to kindle the fires, to gather water, to cook, to eat. When we were done, Cadus called us together in our centuries, to find who was left.

A good portion of the first century of the first cohort had held the centre; they really were a supremely effective fighting force. By contrast, only three men were left of the second cohort; they were the newest, the rawest, and while we had not left them in the front ranks — we valued our lives too much for that — they had borne the brunt of a light cavalry attack on our left flank, and then their centurions had failed to see the archers. Or had seen them and not been heard. Or their signallers had been too slow. Or they had not drilled often enough to raise their shields. All or any of these; what mattered was that the entire second cohort was gone, those who had not taken leave and stayed the winter out in the whore-baths of Melitene.

In between these two extremes, the rest of us were left speaking aloud the names of our dead, that they might know themselves gone, and so walk lightly away from this life. Nobody laid out the blankets and chose what to keep: there were too many dead, too many to remember and too few of us to take things from them. We chose instead to hold them all equally, and not single out one for more attention than the others.

We were tired as galley slaves, fit to drop, but Cadus did not yet let us go.

‘We are three hundred,’ he said, which we knew. ‘We can hold this pass, perhaps for another day. We will sell our lives dearly, and they know already that they cannot send the cataphracts against us. But Paetus must know what has happened, and I will send a man also to Corbulo. This may be against our governor’s wishes, but if I am dead there’s nothing he can do.’

It was a joke, of a sort; nobody laughed. We watched him, fearful of what was coming next. He held out his helmet and shook it; we all heard the rattle of lot-stones. ‘All those with mounts will come forward.’

I might have held back, but Syrion shoved me, and Horgias, and Lupus took Tears by his elbow and thrust him into the firelight. We and seven others stood there. Perhaps because ofour history, certainly because of what Cadus had said about loving battle, I was the one who spoke up.

‘I don’t want-’

Cadus cut me off. ‘Nobody wants to leave. You all want to die beside your fellows. But these messages must be sent. Ten stones are here. Seven are white; those men stay. Two are black. Those men go to Corbulo; two of you, because the road is arduous, even were we not at war with Vologases. The last is black with a white line down the centre; that man goes to Paetus with news that the Parthians are a day’s march away, and we will be lucky to hold them beyond tomorrow’s noon. That man must ride fastest.’

His eyes were on me as he spoke, but it was a lottery, a drawing of chance with only the gods able to influence the outcome. He could not have known it beforehand.

Even so, none of us was surprised that I drew the black stone with the white line down it. The surprise was that Tears and Horgias drew the black, which took them south to Syria.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Three from the same unit? Only Syrion and Rufus are left.’

‘There are units with fewer men left than that,’ Lupus said, from behind us. ‘Yours will join with others. Afterwards, you may be the seeds of a new legion, with a new sixth cohort and a new first unit of the first century. Thus will you remember us.’

I knew that voice, the solid implacability of it. Dismissed, I turned on my heel and made for the tent.

Tears and I passed that night in the warmth of each other’s embrace, but we were too tired for more; we slept deep as the dead until dawn and left the camp with thick heads and tired hearts, and Syrion and Rufus stood at the tent lines to wave us on our separate ways.

For the rest of my life, I will remember them, and the peace that was in their eyes.