The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Twenty

I don’t remember the details of the ride back. The bay mare knew her way without my pushing her and I didn’t allow myself to believe that it was happening; it was only when I reached the camp, saw the state of the newly completed palisades, and spoke to the lead centurions of the IVth that it began to feel true.

Then they took me to Paetus and truth became a nightmare as he argued that defence was impossible and we were better to surrender to Vologases when he came, and depend on his better judgement, or his mercy, or his fear of Nero — all or any of these were suggested, and all were equally unlikely — to at least send the officers home alive.

I left him that first evening, heart-sick and desperate. I would have ridden back to the Lizard Pass had not night fallen and in any case what point when everyone left behind must be dead by now?

I was given a place to sleep in a tent with one of the centurions of the IVth. Crescens was his name, third centurion in the fifth cohort, not one we had come across on the Hawk mountain, for which I think both of us were glad.

We of Lupus’ century had a reputation amongst the IVththat made us out to be madmen and savages, or so I learned after the tense and fitful night which left both of us weary in the morning, and more inclined to speak.

‘He needs a backbone, that one,’ he said of his general, and nobody offered to flog him for it. ‘If anyone can shame him into making a stand, it will be you.’

He was cooking me a meal; I was not going to turn him down. And when two other centurions of the IVth came to beg me to speak again to Paetus, I did as they asked thinking that if he had me flogged to death for the temerity, at least I would join the dead, amongst whom I now counted Rufus and Syrion.

Four of us went into the general’s tent that day and the day after, and the day after that.

Slowly, we created for Paetus a plan, the first and most important part of which was the destruction of the bridge we had built across the foaming river, so that when Vologases marched here he might not have use of it to reach us.

Paetus agreed, as a weak man will do, not out of conviction or the need to see our plan through, but to keep us quiet. And he vacillated over every other thing that we suggested. I lost patience in the end, and told him that two men had already gone to Corbulo for help on Cadus’ order, and that we only need hold out a few days; four at most, and we would be safe.

I thought he might order me killed then, he was so angry, and that was when we realized that, truly, Paetus would have preferred to lose us all to Vologases than to lose his pride to Corbulo.

Without being dismissed, I walked out. Crescens caught my shoulder as I stepped out of the governor’s quarters.

‘Don’t do anything stupid. He can still have you flogged.’

‘I’m going to destroy the bridge.’

‘I know. He knows. He gave permission for it.’

‘Then help me do it. We can’t have long before they come.’

‘I’ll bring a unit. Any more and he’ll stop us.’

He ran, I give him that much; he was a centurion and he ran across the hard-packed earth that had been our parade ground so few days before, past the unfilled foundations whence the sacrifice had fled, and into the tent lines.

Returning, he brought eight men equipped with crowbars, hammers, axes and ropes. I chose not to learn their names — what point to come to know men when we must all soon be dead? — but led them at a run to the bridge.

It was not built for easy demolition. Two of Crescens’ men were engineers, part of the corps that had built it. They went across and back on their hands and knees, examining the intricate ties that held it. In other days I might have marvelled at their skill, to build a bridge fit to take two legions and all their carts, with no nails, but only wooden joints; now, I was impatient for it to be gone.

Coming back to us, they saluted me as if I were a centurion. They had heard, of course, of the carnage at Lizard Pass, and were ashamed to have been left out of it, even as they gave thanks, moment by moment, for the continuation of their lives.

The eldest, a man near to retirement, said, ‘We’ll need a man to go across to the other bank and hammer out the pegs or it won’t fall.’

‘I’ll do it.’

Nobody argued with me.

I took a pole axe and crossed over the bridge, blindly. In my mind, I saw Lupus, speared through the chest; Syrion, dying with an axe in his head, Rufus cut in two by a sword… in the worst moments, I saw Tears and Horgias ambushed, taken, tortured; dead.

The ties that fixed the bridge were great wooden pegs as thick as a man’s arm, hammered through the ends of the trunks and into the arch — three of them in all.

I swung the pole axe and felt it hit the first one with a noise like the crack of a tree in a storm. The peg moved barely at all. I swung again, and again, each time imagining a Parthian head beneath the axe, broken like a melon at each hammering impact. And again, and again; I slaughtered two units of them to get the first peg out. My arms were burning. My head was spinning. My ears rang from the sound. I began on the second peg.

Perhaps because I was thinking of the Parthians, I was slow to hear them coming. Or I wanted to die: in the time since, I have thought that might have been true. Whichever was the case, I didn’t know to be alarmed until I heard Crescens calling me, shouting my name over and over.

‘Demalion! Demalion of the Twelfth! Get back over here, they’re coming!’

We had no archers for cover; they had all given their lives at the pass, on the first day, or the second. The Parthians, of course, had archers of their own.

As I hammered at the second peg, the men of the IVth threw their spears, their axes, their hammers, but the river was as wide as two trees laid end to end; few of the weapons reached the far side and even then they did no harm. I hit the third peg, and it was looser; it came free in three strokes. I shouted in triumph then, I think; certainly I felt the first of the logs begin to falter and to fall, and saw on the faces of Crescens and his men that I had succeeded in breaking the bridge. And that I was to die for it.

I spun, swinging the pole axe by the very end of its haft, and carried on spinning, so that I was turning like a child’s toy, with a hammer’s head of lethal iron describing a circle around me, eight feet out. In a battlefield, it might have worked for a moment or two, until a brave man blocked it with a shield and his fellows powered down its length to kill me. Here, a squadron of Parthian light cavalry made a circlearound me, and simply leaned on their saddles, and waited until I grew tired.

Seeing them gave me strength for perhaps four revolutions more than I might otherwise have managed, and that, in turn, gave me time to find the gap through which I might escape.

An older man with greyed moustaches on a liver chestnut mare was flanked on both sides by his sons, men who were mirrors to the old man, but twenty years younger. Between him and each of them was a gap.

I picked the one to my right, where I might come at his sword hand, but his son’s shield. Just before I had to give up my manic spinning, I lurched back, and then forward, and used the extra power to throw the hammer at the greybeard’s head. I hurtled after, too fast to see if I had killed him or his son, concerned only with drawing my own blade in time.

‘ Ha! ’ I reached the horses, and stabbed up, towards the unprotected belly. The mare skittered sideways. I scented open air, and saw the remains of the bridge, and the men on the far side, waiting with their arms outstretched, as if to draw me over to them.

I heard the rush of the river, and a voice that hollered my name and Black. A torrent of blackness with pain at its heart. I remember falling. I do not remember hitting the earth.

‘… doesn’t matter. We have no restitution, nothing to do but act as we are told.’

‘Or refuse.’

‘And then die, yes. All of us. To no good effect.’

Two voices argued back and forth across my head. They were Lupus and Cadus, and I thought I heard Syrion more distantly, speaking of the battle, and so I knew that I had died, only I did not expect death to carry so many small discomforts, or so great a mass of pain.

A gritty, unkempt sheepskin lay beneath my unclothed skin. I knew by its smell that it was badly cured and did not know how the gods could possibly be so lax. I smelled vomit, too, which was as bad.

I felt stones dig into my ribs where the sheepskin ended and the hard, cold ground began. I felt the wind on my back, the sear and ache of four-day-old wounds from the battle we had fought that I had not noticed at the time, and the far greater ache, the thunderous, thundering pain of a wound at the back of my head. My hair felt tight, pulled by clotted blood. I thought of baths, and wondered that the gods did not have them.

I tried to roll over, to ask.

‘Demalion! No!’

A dozen rough hands held me down. Cadus’ face loomed close to my own. ‘Don’t try to get up yet. You’re not fit.’

I struggled to make his face hold still. ‘How not fit?’ In my hampered state, I could not see how death was something for which a man had to prepare, other than stepping on to a battlefield. Or over a bridge. Memory came back to me in patches. I struggled to fit them to a whole.

Seeing it, Cadus said, ‘You’re in the Parthian lines. You are a prisoner, as we are.’

A long, sullen moment while I drank that in. Eventually, ‘How?’

They told me, each hindered by his own shame, and I struggled to fit these patches, too, to a whole image.

When I had, it was not so very different from my own capture, only that it had taken longer, and the encirclement had been more savage, so that some men had died — one was Rufus, who had hurled himself at their spear-fence, trying to break it — and some men had been badly injured: Syrion’s leg was broken and he was being carried on a litter provided by the Parthians. At least legionaries carried it.

But the rest were alive, who had expected to die, and nobody knew why unless we were to be crucified in a line facing the Roman camp across the river, which is exactly what we would have done to vanquished prisoners of an army that had dared to oppose us.

There seemed no point in mentioning that, when everybody knew. I sat with Cadus, who had a bruise the size of a goose egg on his temple and skin paled to a sweat-beaded green, but seemed otherwise unharmed.

‘Does Vologases know…’ I sought a way of saying what I needed, cautiously, in case we were overheard. ‘Does he know of Horgias and Tears?’

Lupus said. ‘None of us has told him.’ He had broken his collarbone on the left. His face was a dirty grey-white that became simply white whenever he moved. He moved now, to fetch me water, when he could have called one of the others to do it, and when he handed me the jug with his one good hand he would not meet my eye, only said, ‘You destroyed the bridge. That was well done.’

‘Was it?’ I drank, and felt cold trickle down to my stomach and was not sick. Lupus watched, still looking anywhere but at my face.

I set down the mug. ‘Lupus, there is no shame in this. You offered your lives to the gods and to the enemy. It’s not your fault that Vologases chose not to take them. Don’t let him shame you by it.’

‘Drink,’ said Lupus tightly, ‘and wait until your head is better. Then we can talk of who is shamed, and what might come of it.’

We languished half a day during which I drank a great deal of water, and ate sparingly, and began slowly to feel less ill.

Our guards did not address us, but they did not mistreat us either. We did not speak much amongst ourselves; men awaiting crucifixion find little to say.

Near dusk, a mounted officer approached. His face was compressed, top to bottom, his cheeks wide, his eyes small. He wore Vologases’ sign of the silver elephant on a blue ground, but he also wore a badge of a bear’s head in black and white that I had not seen before.

He dismounted and saluted Cadus, Lupus and myself. In sing-song Greek he said, ‘Please to accompany me. The King of Kings will speak to you.’

Vologases’ tent was larger than any I had ever seen, of silk so thick, so deeply hued, it was as if night itself lay on the tent poles. We were invited to enter the first of its many rooms, offered seating on benches padded with horse hide, and given peach wine to drink out of golden goblets. We ate dates and olives and small pieces of smoked ham that came apart in our mouths and spilled the taste of meat and spices freely.

‘If they had given me this when first I woke,’ I murmured to Lupus, ‘I would have believed myself dead far longer.’

A horn answered for him, or perhaps a flute, for the notes were high and breathy, and rippled faster than I could have blown. At its summoning, we stood, turned, walked through a lifted tent flap.

Showered by sound, preceded by officers in silk and silver, with the sign of the elephant on its blue ground carried by each man, we came into the presence of Vologases, the King of Kings.

I knelt, because I had done so once before, because Pantera had done so, because it was natural to do so.

A half-breath behind, uncertainly, Lupus and Cadus knelt with me. We did not press our brows to the floor, but we did bow our heads to him, and then raise them again to look on his face, which was not, I am sure, how a prisoner was supposed to behave.

He sat on a seat of oak, marvellously worked, inlaid withgilt and silver, and lapis lazuli, and amber. He wore blue silk with silver and a filet of gold round the battle helm that held his head. His beard was longer than I remembered, and carried white through it, like frost on rock, but his eyes were the same: sharp, light and lively.

They roamed over us now, back and forth.

‘You, and you.’ He pointed with a silvered blade. I saw something viscous run from it, and for a moment thought it blood, until I saw the fruit in his other hand, filling his palm, something green-skinned that I had never seen before. ‘You have knelt to us before.’ His eyes were on me, not Cadus.

‘With Pantera, lord,’ I said. ‘The man known as the Leopard. In Hyrcania. After the death of… the traitor.’

His son, who had not been named then and was as likely unnamed now. I watched a ghosted grief pass over Vologases’ face.

‘Indeed. We gave your companion a horse. A bay mare.’

There were men of my acquaintance who thought I had lied, that she had not been given as a gift by the King of Kings. I was glad, suddenly, that Lupus was behind me. ‘Pantera gave her to me, lord, when he was summoned to Britain. I have her still. She is in the camp across the river.’

‘Then you must return to her and keep her safe from harm. We are told there is a ford across the river.’

I could have denied it, but what point? ‘Yes, lord. Although the river has swollen somewhat since we last crossed it. We had built a bridge.’

‘Which you destroyed yesterday. We watched you. Our archers begged to be allowed to use you for their practice. They said a dozen men could have hit you three times each before you fell.’

‘I’m sure they could have done, lord.’

‘And you knew they were there?’

‘My lord always has archers. In the past, he has always used them.’

This time he had not; and he had taken men prisoner, whom he could have slain. I could not ask why. He showed no inclination to explain, but only observed me, thoughtfully, tapping his knife on the gilded arm of his throne.

At length he said, ‘You will ford the river tomorrow. Take from my army what men and horses you need to get you across safely. But they will return to our side of the river, and you alone will step on to the far bank. You will go to your commander, Paetus’ — he weighed the name with the same kind of acerbic loathing as did Lupus — ‘and you will tell him the terms of your surrender. When he has heard them, you will bring his acceptance back to us. Is that clear?’

‘Most clear, lord.’

I didn’t ask the terms of our surrender, and in truth I didn’t want to know any sooner than I must, but Vologases said, in dismissal, ‘Your General Corbulo gave me his solemn word that not a single Roman legionary would cross to the east of the Euphrates. In crossing the Murad Su, in camping on its northern bank, which faces eastward, your Paetus has broken the oath of a better man. He shall pay for it. His men, however, need not.’