The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Two

The snow had not yet begun to fall when the boar charged from the forest.

A shout went up; the men who rode in the company of Vardanes II, King of Kings of Parthia, supreme ruler of all land from the Euphrates to the Indus, were nothing if not swift to recognize danger.

But the beast moved faster than any man could do and, from the beginning, it had only one target: it charged as if directed by the gods, straight for the new young King of Kings himself, mounted in his gold and glory on a swift bay mare.

In an empire where men lived, died, ate, drank, bargained, loved and killed on horseback, the horse that bore the King of Kings was the best to be found in all his eighteen client kingdoms; fleet of foot, sharp of eye, with the small ears, wide nostrils and compact jawbone that were said by Xenophon to denote the finest of horses, her hide was the rich, deep bay of a bronze dish, and her mane and tail were black as ebony. She was trained to war and the hunt; to stillness in the midst of battle, the speed of a wolf in the forest.

Nevertheless, she was not fast enough to outrun a boar, and even if she had been, there was no obvious route to safety, for the King of Kings, beloved of the gods, was hemmed in on one side by the bleak forest whence came the boar, and on the other three sides by such a collection of courtiers and guards and body slaves as to make three more walls.

West, which is to say behind him, forty matched Nubian slaves walked naked in the chill sea air, carrying whole on a trestle a pavilion of kingfisher-coloured silk, made large enough to enable the King of Kings to ride his horse in through the entrance and partake of his midday meal without the inconvenience of dismounting.

He had just done exactly that; the kingfisher pavilion was even now being readied to carry back to the palace.

North, to the king’s left, between him and the just-thawed sea, thirty cooks and their under-cooks and pot-boys similarly tidied away the remains of the roast buck that had fallen to the King of Kings’ own bow some days previously and had been the central part of the royal feast.

East, where the mountains curved down to kiss the sea, were grouped those merchants, councillors and vassal kings who had been granted rare permission to join Vardanes II in his winter residence, and further honoured by the invitation to join him in his hunt.

Only seventeen of Parthia’s eighteen vassal kings were present; Tiridates of Armenia alone had not been invited. As uncle to the King of Kings, brother to the late king, Vologases of blessed memory, he was not perhaps yet sufficiently recovered from his mourning to enjoy the company of his nephew.

And besides, the Roman general Corbulo was camped with six legions on Armenia’s western borders. He might have been fully occupied in putting all thirty thousand men through winter fatigues that made war look like a day of rest, but a king could be excused for choosing to stay and defendhimself and his integrity, at least until the new King of Kings had concluded this war council and launched his own attack on the mewling, pale-skinned braggarts who so offended the integrity of his empire.

The war council had been conducted over the roast buck. A horde of mounted men to whom fighting was as necessary and integral as breathing did not take long to decide on a new war. When the King of Kings had suggested they make a late autumn attack on the Roman camps, long after the end of the fighting season had notionally ended, he had been roundly cheered by his vassals.

The seventeen client kings had fallen over themselves in the following discourse to promise horse-archers, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, infantry and, from the one who ruled the far eastern border with Mathura, elephants with which to grind Rome into the ground.

Weaving through their midst at his most effacing, and most efficient, Pantera had taken a dozen different commissions to source fresh mounts of sound stock at a good price for the coming battles. I, as his clerk, had written each one down. Against my better judgement, I found myself listening hard, making other, inner, notes of the tactics they proposed, and how much they knew of the strength of each legion.

They knew of the Vth, my legion, of their skill in battle, of how they had won Antium for Octavian, and then fought against Parthia for Tiberius; they were glad the Vth was not yet on their borders, although concerned that it was camped so close in Moesia. I may have loathed the Vth on principle when I was forced to march in its company, but here it was my legion; the men were my brothers. I caught myself smiling broadly once, or rather, Pantera caught me, and threw me a look that ensured I didn’t smile again for the rest of the meal.

It was a rowdy, enthusiastic council; each man was testing his standing with the new King of Kings, and none had yetgained ascendancy. With all to play for, and the king known to favour courage in the hunt above all else, the lesser kings had moved their mounts swiftly away from the pavilion and towards the forest when the horns summoned them to the hunt, the mind of each bent on the ways he might outshine his brothers.

Still, when the boar charged from the forest, none of them moved fast enough to stand in its way.

I was one of the many who had shouted a warning as the beast hurtled from the thick, scrubby forest. I jerked my horse round, thinking to throw it forward and take the body of men with me, and at least look as if I was doing something useful.

A calloused hand fell on my wrist, skin on skin, holding me still. Vilius Cadus shook his head, and jerked his chin sideways to where Pantera had lifted his bow from his saddle horn. The usual pall of envy and resentment began to poison my reason — yet again, Cadus had been privy to our business when I had not — but then I caught sight of Pantera’s bow for the first time, and was lost.

My great-uncle Demetrios, the last conscript in our family, had such a bow, and had brought it back home when he had retired after the Thracian campaign.

I may not have wanted to be a legionary, but all my childhood I had yearned to hold and to shoot such a weapon. It was of Scythian type, a war bow as much as a hunting bow, small, deeply curved, with a full belly, richly decorated, and polished horn at the tips.

With unhurried speed, Pantera leaned back and reached for the quiver that hung from his hip.

Three arrows sang in the clean, cold air.

Soaring high across the iron sky, they held their own fine tune; a chord played so close together as to make almost a single note. There are men who will tell you they could nothave come from the same bow, but they had; with my own eyes I saw Pantera shoot them.

I did not shout now; nobody did. Even the King of Kings sat in measured silence, watching their flight. Afterwards, that was what the gathered kings remembered most clearly: that alone among the party, their king had not cried out.

The first arrow struck the boar behind its shoulder and sank deep, so that only the peacock flights stood blue-green against its steaming hide.

The beast barely slowed its charge, but then I had been taught that nobody had ever stopped a boar but with a ten-foot spear with a good broad blade and a crosspiece one third of the way down the haft — and a lot of luck.

The second arrow struck the beast in the eye and sank as deep as the first; the raven flights were lost against the black bristle, which meant that the heavy iron barbs had penetrated the bone of the beast’s skull, exactly as they were supposed to.

The boar grunted once, a sound so like a man disturbed in slumber that I nearly looked away to see who else had made the sound. But I did not, for Cadus’ hand tightened on my wrist, holding me steady.

Thus it was that he and I witnessed together the moment when its haunches ceased to power the boar towards the King of Kings and it toppled sideways to the turf.

‘Good shot! What a shot! Did you see that? Did you-’

All around, seventeen minor kings gave enthusiastic vent to their relief, none more so than Ranades IX, the bluff, broad-shouldered king of Hyrcania, in whose country they hunted, and under whose hospitality the King of Kings had so nearly met his end.

If Vardanes had died, Ranades would have been required at the very least to take his own life. He might also have had to hand over his kingdom first, thus ensuring the deaths ofall six of his sons. Such were the rules of sovereignty in the empire of Parthia.

The royal shouts ricocheted off the forest wall and rolled out across the sea. Shore birds fled, and a single raven rose from far back in the forest. As if at its command, the shouts of the kings halted, severed so suddenly, so completely, that the silence fell like a hammer.

I did not see the third arrow strike, but, forewarned, I turned to my right in time to see Vardanes II, King of Kings, by right of birth, war and parricide supreme ruler of Parthia and all her kingdoms, slide sideways on his magnificent bay mare.

There he hung, half dismounted, held by the trappings of gold about his thighs, with the third of Pantera’s arrows protruding from the mail shirt above his heart, its raven flights black against the bright silver of his chest, its barbed point bloody at his back, where it came out a hand’s breadth to one side of his spine.

‘ Run! ’ This time I did slew my horse sideways. ‘That mad fool has ruined us! Run for your- Oof! ’

That mad fool — Pantera — had slammed his elbow into my solar plexus, robbing me of breath, words and movement. From my other side, Vilius Cadus grabbed my mount’s reins, so that even when I could breathe again, I could not escape.

Cadus’ voice wove over my head, fine as a breath. ‘Demalion, be still. Smile. Particularly smile at the king of Hyrcania. Do this, and we will live. Fail and we will die in exactly the manner you fear most.’

‘And watch the kings,’ Pantera said, from my other side. ‘See who takes command. It may change what happens next.’

I knew what was going to happen next; it involved razor-knives and hot irons and hammers and pain made to last for days on end. I eased my free hand back, towards the dagger at my waist, trying to work out whether I had time to draw itand plunge it into my own neck before the men on either side could stop me.

Even as I did so, I found myself absorbed in the developing tableau ahead, where the seventeen client kings gathered about the bay mare, none knowing which amongst them had the authority to touch the sacred body of their supreme ruler.

Ranades IX, king of Hyrcania, settled the matter. Breaking free of the others, he pushed his own mount close to the king’s magnificent bay and, leaning in from his own saddle, took the King of Kings in his arms with the care of a man for his most beloved brother.

They were not brothers, in fact, not even distant cousins. Ranades of Hyrcania was a man in his full middle age with six importunate sons who might yet try to depose him, while the King of Kings was one such son among nine, who had succeeded in deposing his father, killed three of his brothers and set himself on the throne.

Nevertheless, the king of Hyrcania’s wide face was composed in lines of evident regret as he eased his supreme ruler free of the gold trappings that held him fast.

Holding the body across his arms as he might carry a child, or a woman, he stepped his horse neatly backwards; a man born to horsemanship. The other kings stepped with him in a ring of royal mourning, each man gluing his shoulder tight to the next, for now was not a time to stand out from the crowd.

Ranades IX, of course, already stood out; the murder had taken place on his land, in his kingdom, by a man invited to his court: Pantera.

I felt the moment when seventeen kings turned their attention our way. I kept still only because Cadus held me, but Cadus himself was cursing under his breath, invoking gods and their progeny with a vicious invective that two years in his legion had yet to teach me.

Pantera was not cursing. Pantera, in fact, was leaningforward on his saddle, watching the kings with a kind of weary patience, as if he had better things to do, more interesting places to be. Two or three of the men opposite recognized the look and began to shout suggestions about how his death might be made as deeply interesting — and lengthy — as possible. Under Ranades’ stare, they fell silent.

‘Let the Nubians come forward.’ Gilded by a new authority, Ranades’ voice lifted over the shouts of his peers.

The forty Nubians hurried to his bidding, although for the first few yards they carried with them the kingfisher pavilion. Enough of them had died for letting it dip below waist level for the rest to have carried it into living fire and died holding it, had they been so ordered.

Ranades took a patient breath. He had grey eyes, the colour of iron, restless as the ocean, with not a shade of doubt in them that I could see.

‘Set down the pavilion. Bring only the trestle. Our lord must be carried to the palace. You may not touch him. There must be furs, somewhere, on which he can lie?’

He looked around, his gaze already glancing over the other kings as over lesser men, and it became apparent that they had missed their first opportunity, and that, did they not act swiftly, all authority would leak from the dead man to this one, living, who was giving all the orders when the others gave none.

Three of the younger men, contemporaries of the dead king, caught each other’s eyes and, as one, stepped their horses smoothly back out of the royal group.

They had features sharp as foxes beneath their beards, and were clearly related. Their eyes had the same vulpine slant, but their cheekbones were neither as high nor as distinct as those in Hyrcania, where men from the king downwards had cheekbones jutting sharp as bridges beneath their eyes from which the rest of their face hung as an afterthought.

They wheeled their mounts, these fox-faced men with their black beards and hate-filled eyes, and pushed them at me, at Cadus, and at Pantera, the trader-archer who had slaughtered the King of Kings, and so signed his own death warrant.

Yet who still carried his bow, and had at his hip a quiver full of arrows, several of them fletched in black.

As one who lives a whole life between heartbeats, I saw him nock one, and draw his bow to its fullest.

‘Which of you first?’ Pantera asked, and smiled.

The three bearded men hauled their horses to a mouth-destroying halt.

‘Do you dare — ’ asked the first. The blue tern on his horse’s brow-harness marked him as Monobasus, king of Adiabene, a province to the south and west of Hyrcania.

Pantera arched one brow. ‘I have killed a usurper, a traitor to the King of Kings, a pretender to the throne that was not rightfully his. Do you wish that I had not? Be careful what you say. There are many others present and they are all listening with interest.’

It was his calm that held them in the first moments. I had heard that voice before, and it set the small hairs upright down the length of my spine. I was relieved that Pantera was not speaking to me.

Covertly, I looked at him. In the spirit of wild detachment that had taken hold of me, I wanted more than anything else to know if Pantera’s heart was beating as hard as my own.

It could not be, I concluded, because Pantera was holding a Scythian war bow at full draw with the arrow perfectly steady. But the knuckles of both his hands were green-white in the cold light and I saw a ribbon of sweat slide down the line of his jugular vein, to vanish beneath the folds of the lamb’s wool cloak. He may not have been strung tight as I had imagined in the morning, but he was nowhere near as calm as he made himself seem.

‘The King of Kings is dead,’ said the king of Adiabene hoarsely.

‘The King of Kings can never die,’ Pantera said with careful patience. ‘And in this case, he certainly has not done so. My lord? It may be timely now for you to reclaim your throne.’

He cast his voice over his shoulder, north, to the ever-moving sea, and there, from amongst the huddle of cooks and pot-boys and serving-men, a figure stepped forward.

He was taller than any of the servants, and, now that he removed the cap that had hidden it, his stone-grey hair was full and flourished to his shoulders; the hair of a man who has fed well through his life, who has never had his head shaved to show his servitude. His bearing was tall and vigorous and as he walked through them the slaves and servants fell to their knees and pressed their brows to the turf.

Very shortly afterwards, the seventeen client kings slid down from their horses and did likewise. King Ranades IX of Hyrcania was not first, but he was most assuredly not last. He dropped the body he had been holding as a man might drop a dead snake, and his brow touched the turf and stayed there while the man they had believed to be dead these past eight months walked past to mount the bay mare.

Thus it was that Vologases, King of Kings, lord of all life, supreme ruler of the Parthian empire, may the gods for ever venerate his name, returned to reclaim the throne from the son who had done his best to usurp it.