Carrhae (83 page)

So that was that, Spartacus would marry Rasha and Peroz would marry Roxanne.

‘And that only leaves the matter of Persis to be decided,’ said Orodes. ‘As one of the largest kingdoms in the empire its throne cannot remain empty.’ He looked at me. ‘I had thought of making it a gift for my retiring lord high general.’

The prospect filled me with horror. ‘I have a kingdom, my friend.’

‘You could rule them both,’ suggested Orodes.

‘Pacorus, King of Persis and Dura. It has a nice ring about it,’ smiled Gafarn.

‘You would be the first among equals,’ said Surena admiringly, ‘a fitting reward, lord, for Parthia’s greatest warlord.’

They all voiced their approval of his words but I held up my hands, my cheeks colouring with embarrassment.

‘Orodes, my friend, though I esteem your wisdom greatly I cannot accept your most generous offer. Dura is my home and I have spent too long away from it already. I have had but fleeting glimpses of my daughters growing up and now wish only to stay in the kingdom I have come to love.’

‘I understand,’ said Orodes, ‘though I have one last call on your service before you hang up your sword.’

‘I cannot imagine a time when Pacorus of Dura will ever hang up his sword,’ remarked Surena.

‘Nor I,’ added Nergal.

But in the days following, when Gallia, Diana and Praxima painted Rasha’s hands and feet with henna to bring her luck and good health during her married life and Agraci and Parthian laughed together, had drunken fights and afterwards, bloody and bruised, embraced and pledged oaths of friendship, ran camel races and revelled in each other’s company, I stood above the Palmyrene Gate, to gaze west into the desert. I looked beyond the black goat hair tents, and was gripped by a strong desire to remain at Dura. What was all the fighting and death for if not to be able to live in peace afterwards?

Rasha and Spartacus were married on a beautiful summer’s day, Shamash having cleared the sky of every cloud and provided a gentle breeze to ease our discomfort. I stood with my friends and watched the girl who had been like a daughter to me become the wife of Spartacus. Diana cried tears of joy for she had been the one who had carried him as an infant when we had fled the Silarus Valley following the death of his parents.

Alcaeus, his wiry hair now thinning and showing grey, smiled and shook my hand as the couple walked back to the city to attend the feast that had been prepared in their honour. He had been the one who had delivered the son of Spartacus all those years ago.

‘Do you remember that night?’ I asked him as we watched the newlyweds walk towards the city gates surrounded by a great throng of well-wishers.

‘Like it was yesterday. They would have been proud, Claudia and Spartacus. I wished they could have been here to see it.’

I sighed. ‘There are lots I would have liked to have been here to see today. We have lost too many.’

He slapped me on the back. ‘Come, we need to get some food in your stomach to stop you getting morose.’

If eating was a cure for depression then I must have been deliriously happy that night as the palace kitchens produced a seemingly endless supply of cooked eggs, chicken, goat, mutton and fish. Beer and wine flowed like floodwaters through a wadi and loosened everyone’s tongues to such an extent that by the time the servants lit the oil lamps hanging from the ceiling and walls of the banqueting hall I had to shout to make myself heard.

Despite his fearsome appearance and reputation Haytham made great efforts to be civil to both Gafarn and Diana. He knew their history, of course, and knew that Gafarn was a Bedouin who had been captured as a small child and raised as a slave in Hatra’s palace. The Agraci waged constant war on the Bedouin who inhabited the southern part of the Arabian Peninsular, and their mutual animosity was age old. A part of Haytham probably wished that his daughter was marrying the son of one of his lords, but as he informed me long ago she had seen a world beyond the black tents of the Agraci and longed for adventure.

At the wedding I had told the newlyweds that they could reside in Miriam’s mansion. She had given it back to the crown after she had gone to live with Aaron and Rachel. This solved the immediate problem of where they would live but offered no long-term solution.

‘Would the people accept an Agraci princess among them, or even an Agraci queen?’ Haytham was relaxed and happy as he sat on the palace terrace the day after the wedding, but his question was in the minds of all of us.

Gafarn rubbed his neatly cropped beard and glanced at Diana. ‘We all like Rasha, King Haytham, and she has been a guest at Hatra as you know.’

Haytham held up a hand to Gafarn. ‘We all like Rasha, King Gafarn, your son most of all. But you know as well as I do that the people of your kingdom will not accept her as the wife of your heir, much less as their queen.’

‘I fear it is so,’ said Diana sadly.

‘They can stay at Dura then,’ I offered.

Haytham shook his head as a steward brought me Najya, the saker falcon that he had given me years ago, and she walked onto my arm.

‘I blame Pacorus for all this,’ he said.

Najya craned her neck as I stroked her under her beak. ‘Me. Why?’

Haytham winked at Gallia. ‘Before you came to this city the Agraci and Parthians were quite happy butchering each other, raiding each other’s lands and swearing oaths of vengeance so that our sons and their sons would carry on the blood-letting. But then you came and offered the hand of friendship, and against my better judgement I took it.’

He pointed at Malik sitting beside Jamal flanked by Byrd and Noora. ‘My son became your friend and served in your army. Your scout became my friend and now owns half of Syria and Egypt.’

‘An exaggeration,’ protested Byrd, grinning.

He held out a hand to Nergal and Praxima. ‘The friends of Pacorus rule their own kingdoms from the great marshlands in the south,’ he pointed at Surena, ‘to the high mountains in the north.’ He smiled at Orodes. ‘And some have become rulers of half the world.’

‘Pacorus turned me,’ continued Haytham, ‘from a warlord into a merchant and now my daughter has married a Parthian. I sometimes wonder if it is not Pacorus who in fact wields the greatest power. He has defeated Parthia’s internal enemies, laid low the Armenians and Romans and made peace with the Agraci.’

‘I have been most fortunate in the choice of my friends, lord,’ I replied.

‘And your sorceress,’ he insisted, ‘for though she has returned to the realm of the gods we must remember that she spent years in this very palace, weaving her magic.’

‘Pity she is no longer with us, she could have created a kingdom out of the desert for Spartacus and Rasha to rule,’ remarked Gafarn irreverently.

Haytham looked at Orodes. ‘If you conquer Syria then my daughter and her husband can rule it from the palace in Antioch.’

I looked at Gallia and shook my head. Everyone was becoming obsessed with Syria, forgetting that the Romans would not relinquish it without a fight.

That afternoon I went hunting with Haytham and Orodes, Rajya bringing down a brace of buzzards and Haytham’s own falcon bringing down three more. Orodes broached the subject of Agraci warriors joining his expedition into Syria and the king said that he himself would not go but Malik was free to partake if he so wished. The two of them clasped forearms on it but I said nothing.

Three days later, on a sunny morning, we said goodbye to our friends in the courtyard inside the Citadel. A company of cataphracts stood on parade and the route from the Citadel to the Palmyrene Gate was lined with legionaries to honour our guests’ departure. Grooms held the reins of horses as we all gathered at the top of the palace steps and said our goodbyes.

I can see their faces now – Haytham, Malik, Jamal, Byrd, Noora, Surena, Nergal, Praxima, Gafarn, Diana, Orodes, Axsen and Gallia – all full of life and happy that the great time of trial was over. Haytham and Malik left first, their black-clad bodyguard trotting after them as they rode through the gates of the Citadel and down the city’s main street to the sound of cheers and applause from the crowds that stood either side of the road.

Orodes and Axsen followed them, the dragon-skin armour of their bodyguard shimmering in the sun as they followed the high king and his pregnant wife back to Ctesiphon and its treasury full of Armenian gold. Surena embraced me and then Gallia, whose animosity towards him had finally died, and then rode form the Citadel with a score of his spearmen. At the gates he turned his horse, drew his sword and saluted me, or perhaps he was paying homage to the place where his dead wife had been one of the Amazons, before cantering into the city.

The six of us who remained, who had known each other since our time in Italy, stood in silence and looked at each other. There were few of us left now, the Companions who had escaped from the clutches of Crassus and made our home in Parthia, fewer than forty out of the one hundred and twenty that had taken ship from Italy.

I looked over to the granite memorial in the wall next to the gates that held the names of those Companions who had fallen and shivered. There was space enough for forty more names and I wondered whose would be the last to be carved in the stone.

We embraced our friends and watched them depart the Citadel and then Gallia walked to the stables to fetch Epona for her morning training session with the Amazons. I walked up the steps and turned to observe a scene that was played out every morning of every day. Legionaries patrolled the walls, sentries at the gates directed visitors to report to the guardroom and squires and stable hands carried out their mundane duties. The commander of the parade of cataphracts drew his sword and saluted me as he gave the order for his men to be dismissed. A breeze blew across the courtyard and ruffled the pennants on the end of each
kontus
. I caught a brief glimpse of a red griffin against a white background and then turned and walked back into the palace.

After he had returned to Ctesiphon Orodes sent a steady stream of couriers to Dura requesting that I send forces into Syria to throw the Romans off balance and prevent them from rebuilding their legions and launching a fresh invasion of Parthia. I wrote back informing him that I had excellent intelligence via Byrd’s network of informers that not only were the Romans not preparing a fresh invasion of Parthia, but that there were hardly any Roman troops left in Syria. Around ten thousand legionaries, many wounded and without weapons, had escaped in the aftermath of Carrhae and now waited behind their walls for a Parthian invasion of Syria.

After a few weeks of Orodes’ continual pestering I gave up and summoned Spandarat to the palace to inform him that I was authorising him and his lords to raid Syria. He was delighted and within a week had amassed nearly ten thousand horse archers, who promptly rode across Dura’s northern frontier and spent three weeks plundering anything in their path and destroying property. I had warned Byrd of the impending invasion and he had alerted all his agents and allies in Syria, who took themselves off to Antioch and Damascus along with all their possessions.

Once the Romans realised that the great Parthian assault was nothing more than a band, albeit large, of plunderers, they despatched parties of horsemen to chase away Spandarat and his fellow robbers. They achieved this without much difficulty but Spandarat returned to Dura delighted with himself, boasting of bringing back wagons loaded with statues, marble and jewels that he had plundered. It was all very unedifying but I comforted myself with the thought that at least I had satisfied Orodes’ wishes.

Life at Dura went on as before. The caravans transported goods from the east and the west and paid their tolls, the farmers worked the land and paid their lords their rents who in turn paid tribute to the crown, the treasury filled and the army drilled and prepared for the day that the Romans returned. Phriapatius was made lord high general of the empire at a grand ceremony at Ctesiphon where he met Roxanne for the first time. If he had any misgivings about his future daughter-in-law he did not make them known and treated her with great respect and affection. He could afford to be magnanimous as his family’s star was in the ascendant. He himself held the highest military position within the empire and his youngest son was the king of neighbouring Sakastan. And so he and Peroz returned to Puta, his father’s capital, where the former prostitute Roxanne became a Parthian queen.

The gathering at Ctesiphon was a happy occasion where I renewed my friendship with Khosrou and Musa. They were both old and grey now though Khosrou had lost none of his ruthlessness and delighted in telling me that he had sent the head of Attai to Orodes as a gift.

‘I did not see it above the gates when I arrived,’ he complained.

‘It probably rotted in the sun,’ I said.

‘Just like the bodies of all the other nomads,’ grinned Musa.

He linked arms with Gallia and began to lead her away. ‘It is very remiss of Pacorus to keep you all to himself, my dear. Come with me and let me show you my bodyguard. They collect the scalps of the enemy and tie them to their lances. They will be diminished next to your beauty, of course.’

Gallia smiled girlishly at him. ‘You flatter me, lord.’

Khosrou shook his head. ‘He never changes. Queen Sholeh keeps him in check, rules him and his kingdom like a rod or iron.’

‘I trust your wife, Queen Tara, is well, lord?’

Tara hardly ever left Merv, his capital. I had met her once, at Hatra when my father had assembled the other kings who were fighting Mithridates. Like Khosrou she had a hard countenance but was actually a thoughtful and charming woman.

‘She’s well but has little time for the conversations of kings. But what about you, Pacorus, will you lead this great expedition west that Orodes is planning?’

My heart sank. ‘I hope not.’

My reply surprised him. ‘You are Parthia’s greatest warlord, the slayer of Narses, Mithridates, the Armenians and the Romans. It will be expected that you will lead the army that extends the empire to the shores of the Mediterranean.’

‘Is that what Orodes has told you?’ I asked with alarm.