The Wolves of the North

I

‘I did not think Polybius would run,’ Ballista said. The tall northerner spoke in Greek. He turned to look at the other four men.

They were leaning against the stern rail of the big Roman warship. Wrapped in dark cloaks, bulky with covered weapons, the spindrift whipping around them, they looked like gloomy harbingers of some as yet unspecified violence.

A blustery spring wind from the south-west was pushing a following sea under the ship, driving it on. The waters of Lake Maeotis rolled away, very green. A small Bosporan galley bobbed in their wake.

‘He never lacked courage,’ Maximus replied in the same language. Against the pain of the hangover from the previous night in Panticapaeum, the Hibernian bodyguard had screwed his eyes almost shut. Coupled with the scar where the end of his nose should have been, it gave him an extremely off-putting demeanour. ‘Certain, you could not fault him last year when the Goths came to Miletus and Didyma, and he did not disgrace himself in the Caucasus. After all that, a trip to ransom a few hostages from the Heruli should hold few fears.’

The little officer Castricius pushed his hood back from his thin, pointed face. ‘Going out on the sea of grass among the nomads might give any man pause. Like all Scythians, the Heruli are not as other men. Despite all their raids into the empire, there may be no one alive to ransom. Some say they sacrifice their prisoners, dress in their skins, use their skulls as drinking cups. Going among the Heruli should give any man pause for thought — even a man such as me, protected by a good daemon.’

‘They say they fuck donkeys too,’ Maximus said.

‘And they say the kings of your island fuck horses,’ Hippothous responded. The Greek secretary’s shaved head shone in the thin sunshine. ‘All nonsense. People place any strange thing they wish at the ends of the world.’

‘Well…’ Maximus looked vaguely embarrassed.

‘A serious man of culture’ — Hippothous talked over him — ‘one who really belongs among the pepaideumenoi, should welcome the prospect of travelling among the nomads. Do not forget that one of the seven sages, Anacharsis, was actually a Scythian.’

‘I thought he left the tent dwellers to live in Athens,’ Ballista said.

Maximus grinned.

Hippothous took no notice of either. ‘To a student of physiognomy, such as myself, it presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Herodotus tells of many fascinating peoples out there. The Budinians all have piercing grey eyes and bright-red hair. Then there are the Argippaei: bald from birth — men and women alike — with snub noses and large chins. For a physiognomist to see the soul behind such strange faces, that would be a triumph. But most extraordinary of all are the Heruli.’

‘Did you not just say people believe any nonsense about the ends of the earth?’ Castricius interrupted. ‘Herodotus also tells of men with goat feet, whole tribes of the one-eyed, and others who turn into wolves for a few days each year.’

Hippothous smiled urbanely. ‘You know your literature, Legate. Men misjudge you when they describe you as an ill-educated soldier, jumped up from the ranks. You have transcended your origins.’

Castricius’s thin lips were pressed tight in his small mouth.

‘Of course,’ the Greek continued, ‘most such things may be travellers’ tales and myths. Herodotus claimed only to report what others told him, he did not vouchsafe the truth of it. Yet it is universally acknowledged that he was correct to state that climate and style of life shape the character of a people. The sea of grass does not change. So neither do the nomads.’

The fifth man, who had neither spoken nor seemed to have been listening, turned inboard from the sea. He was a strikingly ugly older man; sparse tufts of hair on his great domed skull, a thin, peevish mouth. ‘If Polybius discovered the real reason we have been sent, he had reason to run.’ At Calgacus’s words, the others fell silent. Instinctively, they looked down the length of the warship. There was little privacy to be had on a trireme, especially one burdened with an extra thirty-five passengers on deck.

The trierarch and the helmsman were some paces away. The commander was talking earnestly to the latter. No one else was particularly near. If the men at the stern kept their voices down, they were unlikely to be overheard.

‘Apart from us and the two eunuchs, no one knows,’ Ballista said.

Calgacus snorted with derision. ‘Shite,’ he muttered, perfectly audibly.

Ballista sighed. Since his childhood among the Angles of northern Germania, Calgacus had always been there. When Ballista had been taken as a hostage into the Roman imperium, Calgacus had accompanied him. First as a slave then, after manumission, the old Caledonian had looked after him — always complaining, always there. Tolerant patronus that he was, Ballista would allow such latitude only to one other of his freedmen. That man spoke next.

‘The old bastard is right,’ Maximus said. ‘The whole boat knows. Eunuchs are like women. They love to gossip.’

‘Emperors are fools to trust their sort,’ Castricius put in. ‘Neither one thing nor the other, they are unnatural, monstrous — like crows. It is an ill omen just to meet one, let alone travel to the ends of the earth with a couple.’

‘Neither doves nor ravens,’ Maximus agreed.

‘Eunuchs or not,’ Calgacus said, ‘whether there are any hostages to ransom or not, you have fuck all hope of succeeding in the real mission. You will never persuade the Heruli to turn on their Gothic allies. They will take the emperor’s gold, little enough as it is, then slit our throats, turn our hides into cloaks, bowcases or some such shite, and no one in our great emperor Gallienus’s consilium will give a fuck.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Ballista said. ‘Felix and Rutilus will have a worse time in the north trying to get the Grethungi to attack their fellow Gothic tribes, and Sabinillus and Zeno not much better in the west getting the Carpi, Taifali and Gepidae to fight any of the Goths.’

‘Good,’ said Calgacus. ‘We can take comfort in them being as doomed as us. A whole range of men in imperial disfavour will have died serving the Res Publica. Of course, the donkey-fucking Heruli may not get the chance to kill us — we have to survive the Maeotae and the Urugundi Goths before we reach them.’

Suitably chastened, the five men relapsed into silence. Ballista judged that Calgacus might well be right, but there was no point in admitting it. Of all the daunting imperial mandata Ballista had received from Gallienus and his predecessors, these orders gave him the worst feeling.

The breeze was freshening, cresting the thick, green waves. The little Bosporan liburnian forged ahead, its double banks of oars flashing, spray flying. It turned to the south-east. The trireme followed, angling across the sea towards the low, dark land. Ballista looked out at the unprepossessing sight, dark thoughts in his head.

The trierarch, a short, stubby centurion with a beard, walked to the stern. ‘Almost there, Domini.’ He spoke in Latin to Ballista and Castricius, as the envoy and his deputy. ‘We will make Azara in a couple of hours.’ He smiled. ‘I give you joy of it. Apparently the locals call the place Conopion — Mosquito-town.’

When the ship slipped into one of the many channels of the Lesser Rhombites river, Hippothous was struck by the stillness. The wind was gone. Reeds and sedge pressed in on both sides. The water was black and heavy, glossy in the lowering sun. The creak and splash of the oars, the clicking and chattering of insects and birds, both seemed thin and insubstantial against the oppressive quiet of the delta.

The trireme rowed in the glassy trail of the liburnian, until both were manoeuvred to rest stern on against a dilapidated jetty at the foot of a low, overgrown rise. The Maeotae were waiting for them in arms. The isolated wooden look-outs they had passed jutting up out of the water obviously gave notice of the arrival of men as well as shoals of fish. These tribesmen belonged to a tribe of the Maeotae called the Tarpeites: fishermen on the coast, farmers inland, said to be brigands in both elements. There were a hundred or so of them, dirty, poorly armed, but obviously dangerous in their barbarian irrationality.

The marines on the trireme and the auxiliary soldiers escorting the embassy held themselves very still, weapons to hand. All told, there were about forty Roman fighting men.

The sun was going down, but it was warmer away from the open sea. Hippothous slapped at the insects settling on him and watched the Bosporan ship run out its boarding ladder and the navarchos disembark. The grandly titled commander of the fleets of the Great King of the Bosporus talked for some time with the tribesmen. There was an amount of gesticulating. The armed men on the Roman vessel grew bored, put up their weapons, leant on their shields and the gunwales, talked under their breath. Hippothous did not relax. He had not survived a lifetime of violence as bandit, Cilician chief and, for the last few years, accensus to Ballista, only by luck. The post of secretary usually did not involve much violence, but in the familia of Ballista it was almost the norm.

Finally, the talking ended. Some tribesmen trotted off into the trees which grew up the hill. The navarchos waved for those on the trireme to come ashore. The herald the imperial authorities had attached to the envoys at Panticapaeum went first down the gangplank. At the bottom, the praeco called out in a stentorian voice in Latin: ‘The Legatus extra ordinem Scythica Marcus Clodius Ballista, Vir Perfectissimus, and his deputy, Gaius Aurelius Castricius, Vir Perfectissimus.’

Both men had held high prefectures, which had ranked them each as Vir Ementissimus. Hippothous noted they had been demoted. The praeco had not done that on his own initiative. But Castricius had been Prefect of Cavalry under two pretenders, one of them, briefly, Ballista himself. And it was not Roman practice to send men of the highest ranks as diplomatic envoys to the barbarians, especially not on missions from which they may well not return.

When the envoys had clattered down to the shore with their entourage and eleven-man escort, an individual slightly less grubby than the majority stepped out of the horde of Tarpeites.

‘Pericles, son of Alcibiades,’ he announced himself in heavily accented Greek. ‘Come, I take you to the palace of the king.’

Hippothous did not let himself smile.

Led by Ballista, they followed the barbarian with the ludicrously Hellenic name and patronymic up the path. It was dark under the beech trees, the path narrow. An ideal place for an ambush, Hippothous thought. Surreptitiously, he loosened his sword in its scabbard.

When they emerged from the tree line it was not yet full dark. A sward ran uphill. It was crowned with a rough palisade pierced by a gate with a rustic-looking tower.

‘The palace of the king,’ Hippothous said.

‘Golden Mycenae itself, the strong-founded citadel,’ Castricius replied.

The two men smiled, momentarily united in contempt for this place, if in nothing else except their propensity to violence.

‘You can quote Homer.’ Hippothous managed to sound surprised.

‘When I was in Albania last year, it was a bad time. There were… few people to talk to, nothing else to read. I have developed a liking for epic poetry,’ Castricius ended defiantly.

The hall of the King of the Tarpeites was wooden and thatched. Inside, it was dark, lit by smoking torches. There was a distinct smell of close humanity and smoked fish.

The monarch of all he surveyed sat on a crude wooden imitation of a Roman magistrate’s ivory throne. The imperial bureaucracy had provided the envoys with an interpreter from the Bosporus. It was claimed he could speak eight barbarian languages. His expertise proved unnecessary here. The king spoke Greek, the language of diplomacy throughout the east, if in an uncouth way. He and Ballista exchanged what passed for pleasantries. After a less than dignified interval, the king asked for a present. Expecting it, Ballista handed him a spatha with an inlaid hilt and fine sword belt. The king examined the gift with ill-concealed avarice. Seeming satisfied, he called for a feast.

Hippothous was placed some way down the hall, with Tarpeites on either side. The one on his left launched into an extended discourse on fishing in execrable Greek. There was no better place in the world for fish than Lake Maeotis. Bream; anchovy by the tens of thousand; given the name of the Rhombites, there were turbot of course; and the finest of all, sturgeon. And it was here that the tunny spawned in the spring. Their migration was interesting.

Despite it all, Hippothous was not unhappy. The last eight months had been hard. Last September, the familia had left the Caucasus in a hurry. They had travelled hard down from the mountains to Phasis on the Euxine. There they had chartered a ship to take them to the Kingdom of the Bosporus. As it was late in the season, the owner had charged an outrageous sum of money.

Wintering at Panticapaeum had not been a pleasure. The sights of the town were soon exhausted: the sword with which long ago the Celtic bodyguard had despatched Mithridates the Great, the famous bronze jar split by the cold, the decrepit palace of the kings, echoing of its past glories, the fire-scorched temple of Apollo on the Acropolis, the equally run-down temples of Demeter, Dionysus and Cybele. There had been nothing that passed for an intellectual life in that degenerate outpost of Hellenism, a polis where the citizens dressed like Sarmatian tribesmen and as often as not answered to barbaric names.

Come midwinter, Hippothous had never seen snow like it. A wall of cloud had come down from the north-west. The air had been clogged with big flakes like feathers. It had lasted for days, settled everywhere, drifting deep enough to smother a dog or a child. When the snow stopped, it got colder; the sky a clear, unearthly yellow; all frighteningly still. Then the sea froze. At first just by the shore, but soon it stretched as far as the eye could see; a vast white plain, with here and there jumbles of blocks forced up by the pressure. In February, Hippothous had joined Ballista, driving in a carriage across the straits to Phanagoria, the town on the Asian side. Well wrapped, they had watched men dig out fish trapped in the ice. They used a special pronged instrument like a trident. All their winters had to be as bad. Some of the sturgeon they hauled out had been nearly the size of dolphins.

Being quartered in one of the few houses that still had a working hypocaust had been a saviour. Without the hot air circulating under the floor, Hippothous was convinced he would have died of cold.

‘After streaming through the Bosporus, the great shoals follow the sun around the Euxine. By Trapezus, they have enough size to be just worth catching.’

Hippothous knew they did not have to be here. The ancients had vastly overestimated the size of Maeotis. They could have sailed from Panticapaeum to the mouth of the Tanais in a long day, especially with the wind set from the south-east. But in Panticapaeum both the king and his navarchos had insisted, almost pleaded, they break their journey twice; first here with the Tarpeites, and then with the Psessoi. Long ago, the kings of the Bosporus had ruled these tribes of Maeotae with a secure grasp, their control guaranteed by the might of Rome. Now Rhescuporis V, descendant of Heracles, of the line of Poseidon through his son Eumolpos, hoped the rare sight of a single imperial trireme and a handful of regular soldiers in company with one of his very few remaining little liburnians might give his claims to local hegemony just a mite of credibility.

In Alexandria, Hippothous had once heard a philosopher from the Museum lecturing on power and force. His argument was that they were distinct. Force consumed itself with the deployment of armed men. On the other hand, power was the result of the complex, possibly intangible, calculations the subordinate made concerning the consequences of disobeying instructions. As such, power might last for ever. Sat in this fish-reeking hall, Hippothous knew the philosopher was wrong. With the legions tasting defeat at barbarian hands — the emperor Decius cut down by the Goths, Valerian a prisoner of the Persians — or trapped in endless civil wars, Rome’s power was wearing threadbare, the edges of its imperium fraying loose.

‘Now, when they pass by Sinope, they are altogether riper for catching and salting.’

Hippothous liked fish as much as the next man. The black, salty fish roe he was spooning on his bread — he did not think it had a Greek name — might be poor man’s food, but it was good. However, this verbal tracking of tunny from watery cradle to grave was becoming intolerable. He looked around for distraction.

Practising the science of physiognomy did more than assuage boredom. If you got it right, it told you the true nature of those around you, gave you access to their souls. Ultimately, it allowed you to guard against the vices of the bad before you had to experience them. Hippothous let his gaze slide over the body servant Calgacus and the bodyguard Maximus, one too ugly, the other too scarred for clear results; maybe one day he would try to analyse them. The locals were too encased in filth. He suppressed a shudder at the sight of the two eunuchs.

He settled on Castricius. Hippothous had studied the little officer before but, then, his perceptions had been blunted by a raging hangover. Confronted by a grave issue, the Persians discussed it once sober, a second time drunk. Hippothous would revisit the soul of Castricius.

The little officer was seated opposite. He was talking to a young Tarpeites warrior who would have been attractive if he had not been so disgustingly dirty. Their conversation was animated. Hippothous could observe Castricius with little fear of detection. He no longer cared if his voluble and fish-obsessed neighbour thought him rude.

Hippothous stared at Castricius, emptied his mind, let his training take over. There were good aspects to the man: his protruding lower lip pointed to tenderness, and a love of well being. But the bad far outweighed the good. There was his sharp little nose, thin at the tip. It indicated a great anger. Then there was the short, angular chin, a sure sign of boldness, badness and killing, even entering into evil. Castricius had unexpectedly beautiful eyes. Nothing redeeming about that. Eyes were the gateway to the soul, and beautiful eyes concealed what was there, gave proof of treachery. All the evidence scientifically weighed, Hippothous was as convinced as before that Castricius was a bad man, a bad and very dangerous man.

A burst of loud, unseemly laughter from the head of the hall. It was the king. He was leaning across, roaring at Ballista, patting his leg. The king was drunk. Hippothous considered it unlikely Ballista was having a better time than himself. The big northerner’s face was set in an inscrutable mask of polite attention. In the three years he had served Ballista, despite repeated study, Hippothous had yet to reach a definitive conclusion. All the signs had to be considered, and they led to different, mutually incompatible results. The Hellenized barbarian was a complicated subject. His eyes were heavy-lidded, sloping towards the corners. The master physiognomist Polemon judged that this revealed a man contemplating evil. Yet the eyes were dark blue, almost bluish black, and they shone, sometimes like the rays of the sun. Such belonged to a man of compassion and caution, the latter maybe going as far as cowardice and fear.

The king was still laughing. Hippothous watched Ballista sigh and look down at his food. Certainly the big man had reason for melancholy. Ripped from his original home in Germania, he was now also banished from Rome and from Sicily, from his wife and sons — for whom he showed a striking tenderness. Anyone could see this mission was a dangerous fool’s errand — the sort landed on the very expendable. And there was the curse. The previous year in the Caucasus, Ballista had taken as a lover a princess of the royal house of Suania, a priestess of the bitch goddess Hecate. It had not ended well. As they left, Pythonissa — a modern Medea — had called up from the underworld the most terrible curse on Ballista:

Kill his wife. Kill his sons. Kill all his family, all those he loves. But do not kill him. Let him live — in poverty, in impotence, loneliness and fear. Let him wander the face of the earth, through strange towns, among strange peoples, always in exile, homeless and hated.

Hippothous thought Ballista might well cast his eyes down and sigh.