The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Seven

Raphana, in the plain of Abilene, south-east of Damascus

The permanent legionary camp at Raphana stands half a mile from the town, in the eastern crook of a mountainous ridge known as the Mountains of the Hawk that shelters it from the savage westerly winds, but does nothing to shade it from the sun until late afternoon.

Like all permanent encampments, it was built on a square, with roads that passed north to south and east to west and crossed at right angles in the centre. It had a hospital, an armoury, a quartermaster’s stores, granaries, workshops for the engineers and stables for the horses. It had a parade ground within the walls and another around the outside. I knew the layout already, for each camp was the same wherever it was built, and a legionary comes to know every pace of interior and exterior as well as he knows his lovers’ faces.

We presented there in the late afternoon on the last day of April. The watch guards at the gate gave us the names of the men we must find and waved us through, eyeing our pack mules, our horses — the bay mare had been pampered inDamascus and looked especially fine — our madder-red tunics and in particular my shining shirt of mail.

I loved the feel of it too much to pack it on the mules, and in any case we had decided to present ourselves as fighting men, not as weaponless recruits. I wore my armour, my cavalry sword and my rounded shield, and Cadus wore his helmet with full transverse plume, a thing he had not done since the last legate’s demonstration over eighteen months before.

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion’s Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins. The legions’ respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.

At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched the Scythians’ sign of the goat and the Fulminata’s crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself.

The ache in my gut that had hit me when Pantera first named our destination returned and multiplied. The door ahead of us was closed only by a linen sheet with lead weights stitched haphazardly along the bottom; no bars, no guards, no sign that those inside took any particular care to protect the legions’ wealth stored in the cellars below.

I glanced at Cadus. His face was set fast and hard. He shrugged, and jerked his chin at the doorway and I tugged aside the linen so that he could pass through ahead of me, wretchedly aware that this was the last time I might come under his order.

The clerk of clerks was a short, bulbous man named Munius Cattulinus, whose only narrow parts were his lips and his eyes. He sat behind a desk that was far more solidly built than the hut — I will not dignify it with the name of an office — that was his domain. He was writing when we approached, and, as is normal for small men promoted beyond their capacity, he made us wait before he looked up.

‘You’re late.’ He spoke in Greek, with the caprine thickness of the locals. ‘We expected you on the ides of March.’

I bit my lip and stared at my feet. In Cadus, I felt the kind of rising anger I had seen in Pantera. But this was a legion; we could not simply mount our horses and ride away.

‘Then you underestimated by exactly one month and a half the time it would take us to travel.’ Cadus was Cattulinus’ superior. In the crispness of the words, the perfect Latin used where the clerk had spoken Greek, he made that plain. ‘We require lodgings. My clerk will need to be reassigned to his new commander.’

‘He already has been.’ A dry, acerbic voice came from our left, from the far corner, where the stairs descended to the cellar. A trapdoor stood open. I could not turn, for discipline said I must keep facing forward, but from the corner of my eye I saw the trapdoor lowered and heard a bolt slide and lock and knew that, if nothing else, our wealth would be locked safely away.

Steps echoed on the hollow floor. They walked around me, leading a lean shadow. I focused on the clerk’s hands, on the flesh that bunched on either side of the silver ring with the garnet set into it that dug into his right thumb; on the ink stain on the pad of his fourth finger, on the quill that dripped ink on to the newly written document. If it were mine, I would have thrown it away and begun again. Already, I knewthat Munius Cattulinus, scribe and clerk to my new legion, would send it as it was.

The lean shadow stopped on the far side of the desk. Its owner moved himself deliberately into my field of view. ‘Aulus Aurelius Lupus, centurion of the first century, the second cohort.’ He placed his palms on the table and used them as props, to bring himself closer to me. ‘You, I understand, are my clerk, possibly my courier. Can you wield a sword on horseback?’

‘I can.’ My voice was as dry as his; drier. I looked up and, for a panicked moment, imagined myself desiccated to the point of the man opposite me; to see him was to think of summer dust, of plums gone to prunes too hard to eat, of toads caught out of water and drawn down to their hard, flat skins.

His face clung to his skull in a series of hollows, the opposite of the fleshy, almond-eyed Hyrcanian faces that I had grown used to. His hair was uniformly grey, not peppered like many men of his age, but as if he had once washed it in iron-water and the colour had set fast. His eyes were the same flat, iron hue and they searched me from my heels to my head.

‘Your name?’

‘Demalion.’

He ran his tongue round his teeth and I saw the purple tip of it slip between his lips, like a lizard’s. ‘Your tunic,’ he said, at length, ‘appears to be red. Why?’

Because we were going to set a fashion, and call ourselves the Bloody Legion. With more courage, that’s what I would have said. But I read no humour in those grey eyes and my courage failed me.

‘It’s dyed with madder,’ I said.

One wire-drawn eyebrow arced up. His flat eyes grew harder, and flatter. ‘Then undye it. The men of my centurywear wool in winter, linen in summer. Not dyed. Your armour also is not… standard.’

‘It’s all I have.’ Truth lent desperation to my voice, so that he could hear it. Cadus and I were not completely stupid; we had bought other tunics, but already the shining mail shirt was my love and I had bought nothing to replace it. In the legions, men wear what they have, and are glad of it. I saw his eye go to the helmet I held under my arm, to the new design that men coveted, even in Rome. I said, ‘I have a good horse and two mules and will care for them myself.’

Lupus gave no answer, but walked past me to the door. I did not turn. From the threshold, he said, ‘You are billeted with the first unit, first century, second cohort, behind the workshop at the northern quarter. They, too, are late; they arrived three days ago. Ask for Syrion; he will assign your bunk and your stables. Your men’ — his voice clipped Cadus — ‘have quarters east of them. The Fourth Scythians have the southern side of the camp. Isodorus is your second in command unless or until you appoint another. He will, I am sure, find you a groom.’

So began our trip through Hades at the hands of the XIIth legion.