Fire in the East (13 page)

‘It must be because it is in the middle of nowhere,’ Mamurra quietly said to Ballista. The reception was over. They were outside again waiting for their horses.

‘What must?’

‘This, place.’ Mamurra waved his hand around. ‘Palmyra is as rich as Croesus. Has fuck all in the way of defences, and is held by a bunch of effeminates with fewer balls than their eunuchs or women. Its safety must lie in it being in the middle of nowhere. If you ask me, it is a good thing they are too scared to give us any troops.’

Ballista paused before speaking. ‘I think that is exactly the conclusion I would have come to if I had not spent so long talking to Iarhai. Now I am not so sure.’

Mamurra did not reply.

Ballista smiled. ‘Cohors XX was originally raised here, and still draws most of its recruits from here. They seem tough enough. Then again, there are larhai’s mercenaries. Some are recruited from among the tent-dwellers, the nomads of the desert, but the majority come from here or Arete. Both towns have a tradition of mercenary service - for the Romans and for others.’

The horses were led up. As they mounted, Ballista continued, ‘You and I expect warriors to look like warriors, a grizzled Roman or a hairy northern barbarian. Maybe in this case appearances are deceptive. Maybe not all easterners are cowards.’

‘I am sure that is the way it is.’ Mamurra was not sure. But he would not dismiss the idea out of hand. As was his measured way, he would mull it over.

In truth, Ballista’s thoughts had been ranging wide when Mamurra’s words had pulled him back. Ranging in many, many directions but always circling back to the refusal of the king of Palmyra, and before him the refusal of the king of Emesa, to supply troops. It was not that these Syrians were afraid to fight; they had fought three years before. It was that they did not want to fight. Why? Palmyra and Emesa depended for their wealth on trade passing between Rome and her eastern neighbour. They were poised between Rome and Persia. To refuse Ballista’s request was in effect to refuse the request of the Roman emperors. Had they decided to incline to Persia? And then there was the confidence with which they turned him down, almost as if there could be no reprisal by the Roman emperors, nor even any lingering ill will. Had the emperors covertly told them that they could refuse Ballista’s request? Did they all expect Ballista to fail?

 

The three
frumentarii
were in the sort of environment they liked, a backstreet bar. It was dark, dingy and secure. Their cover was in place. To anyone glancing in they looked like two scribes and a messenger having a few drinks, only a few, because their
dominus
had ordered yet another dawn departure. Tomorrow they would set out on the last leg of their long journey to Arete.

The
frumentarius
from the Subura placed three coins on the table. ‘What do you think?’

From the three
antoniniani
three not all that dissimilar profiles of men wearing radiate crowns stared fixedly off to their viewers’ right.

‘I think that the rise in prices is appalling. But, working on the theory that a girl charges about a soldier’s daily pay, you should still get a good-looking one for that,’ said the Spaniard.

The
frumentarii
all laughed.

‘No, Sertorius, you sad fuck, I wanted you to look at the heads on the coins, and think where we have been.’ The Roman picked up one of the coins. ‘Mariades, a rebel based in Antioch.’ Then the other two. ‘Iotapianus and Uranius Antoninus, two more rebels, both based in Emesa. And where have we been? Antioch then Emesa. Our barbarian Dux has taken us on a tour of the sites of recent revolutions. He is seeing if there are still embers of revolt.’

They drank in silence for a time.

‘Possibly we should go in the other direction. Arete to Palmyra to Emesa gives you the western end of the shilk road,’ said the North African.

‘So what, Hannibal?’ The Roman was as sharp as ever.

‘The revenues from taxing the shilk road could fund any sort of uprising.’

‘I am still not convinced that there is a silk road,’ said the one from Spain.

‘Oh, don’t start all that again, Sertorius. You really do come up with some ludicrous theories. The next thing you will do is claim that this barbarian is not up to something. And we all know he is, that he is plotting treason because, otherwise, the emperor would not have assigned all three of us to this case.’

Unseen behind the curtain, a fourth
frumentarius
watched and listened. He was pleased with what he heard. His three colleagues were perfect - an object lesson in the dangers of
frumentarii
working as a team: the rivalry, the hothouse atmosphere that forced the growth of ever larger, ever more ludicrous conspiracy theories. To give them credit, perhaps they were all playing a duplicitous game. If one of them came up with a conspiracy plausible enough to convince the emperors, he would not be so stupid as to wish to share the glory of its discovery, let alone the advancement and material benefits that would follow. In any case, they were still perfect in another way: the
Dux Ripae
almost certainly suspected there were
frumentarii
on his staff, and if he searched, he would find these three long before they found him.

The distance as the crow flies from Palmyra to Arete was a matter of some debate. Turpio thought it only about z2o miles; larhai considered it nearer 150. It mattered little. Both accepted that it was far further by road- and what a road. It made the previous journey from Emesa to Palmyra seem like a gentle ride in an ornamental Persian game park, one of those parks the Persians called a
paradise.
The first three days were not too bad, a Roman road running north-east, with a village to stop at every night. On the fourth day they turned due east and, from then on, they followed an unmade caravan track. It took them three days to come down from the mountains. Then they were in the desert.

Despite his years in north Africa, Ballista, like so many northerners, expected a desert to consist of miles of golden sand dunes, something like a larger version of the beaches of his childhood but without the sea. The desert here was nothing like that. There was sand, but the dominant feature was the multitude of rocks, sharp, hard rocks lurking to lame animals, and under the rocks were scorpions and snakes waiting to wound humans.

The caravan crept from well to well. It averaged probably little more than ten miles a day. Every day was the same as the last. In the saddle before sunrise, then man and beast sweating in the heat of the day. Every -mile or two a halt would have to be called as an animal went lame or lost its load. The silence was broken only by the footfall of the animals, the creak of leather and the occasional mechanical curse from the men.

The seemingly endless repetition of the days put Demetrius in mind of Sisyphus, punished in the underworld by having to roll a huge stone up a sharp incline every day only to see it bounce back down again. Ballista thought of Skoll the wolf who chases the tail of the sun. Maximus worried a lot about snakes.

On the sixth day a range of steep hills appeared in the distance ahead. They were almost there: Arete could be seen clearly from the crest of the hills. Ballista set off at a fast canter, ahead of the column. Maximus, Demetrius and a newly appointed standard-bearer, a Palmyrene who on joining the Roman army had taken the ludicrously Roman name of Romulus, spurred after him. The draco he held snapped and whistled in the air.

Ballista sat on his pale horse on the summit and looked down at the city of Arete. It was about a mile away, and 300 feet below him. From this vantage point he could see into the city and make out its chief features. His first appraisal was quite encouraging.

On the far side, to the east, at the bottom of what appeared a steep cliff, the Euphrates. It justified its reputation as one of the great rivers, one of the limes imperii, the limits of the empire. It was enormous, as big as the Rhine or the Danube. Like them, it did not run in just one course. There were several islands in it, a largish one quite near the town. Yet so broad was the Euphrates that there was no realistic chance of the enemy crossing it without amassing a huge number of boats or building a bridge. Either way would take time, could not be hidden and could be opposed.

To the north and south the city was bounded by ravines. The engineer in Ballista imagined the waters from the winter rains gouging them out from the weaknesses in the rock over millennia. The southern ravine was the shorter. It ran close to the walls, rising to the level of the plain some 300 yards beyond the town. There was a bit more of a gap between the walls and the lip of the northern ravine, although of only a few yards. This ravine split in two, one spur curling around the western wall of the town, the other disappearing off towards the hills to the north-west. For the majority of their course both ravines were at least Zoo yards across - just within the range of effective artillery fire.

The obvious line of attack was from the west. From the foot of the hills a flat dun-coloured plain ran to the city walls. Apart from scattered rocks, it had no natural features whatsoever.

Ballista studied the scene with a professional eye. From this distance the walls looked fine; tall, and in good condition. He could see five rectangular towers projecting from the southern and eastern walls, three in the northern, and no fewer than fourteen in the western. The walls facing the plain and the Euphrates boasted fortified gates, each with its own flanking towers. A group of men with donkeys was approaching the main gate, probably peasants bringing in produce from the villages to the north-west. Using them as a measure, Ballista estimated that the wall facing the plain was almost a thousand yards long. That meant an average distance between the projecting towers of about sixty-six yards. Although the towers towards the northern end clustered closer together, undermining the average, a careful look indicated that no two towers were as far as a hundred yards apart. This was all good. The projecting towers allowed defenders to aim missiles along as well as away from the walls. Most of the gap between the towers was within effective javelin range; all was within effective bowshot. An attacker approaching the wall would thus face missiles coming from three directions. The builders of the walls of Arete had concentrated their resources (towers took time and cost money) on what appeared to be the right place.

The only obvious problem was the necropolis. Tomb after tomb - at least five hundred of them, he roughly calculated, probably more, stretching out about half a mile from the western wall, halfway to the hills. And they were like the ones at Palmyra: tall, square stone-built towers. Each one provided cover from missiles fired from the walls of the town. Each one was a potential artillery platform for attackers. Together, they were a huge, ready-to-hand source of materials to build siege works. They were going to make his life very difficult, in more ways than one.

Ballista shifted his attention to inside the walls. Beyond the desert gate the main street of Arete ran straight, other streets opening off it at set intervals at exact ninety-degree angles. The arrangement of neat rectangular blocks covered the town, breaking down only in the south-east corner, where there was a jumble of twisting lanes. In the north-west corner Ballista could see an open area, probably the
campus martius,
the army parade ground that Turpio had mentioned.

Ballista scanned the town again, this time for what was not there: no theatre, no circus, no obvious
agora
and, above all, no citadel.

His appraisal was mixed. The open area and the neat Hippodamian plan of regular town blocks would facilitate the assembly and movement of defending troops. But if the enemy breached the walls, there was no second line of defence, nor any suitable buildings from which to improvise one, and the regularity of the city’s layout would then help the attackers. So many men were going to die in Arete the following spring.

‘The
kyrios
is thinking!’ Demetrius’s furious stage whisper cut into Ballista’s thoughts. He turned in the saddle. Maximus and Romulus looked impassively through and beyond their commander. Demetrius had turned his horse across the path.

‘Let her through, Demetrius.’

Bathshiba smiled at the Greek boy, who was obviously trying not to glower back. She drew her horse alongside the northerner’s.

‘So, you are thinking, is it worth it?’ she asked.

‘In a sense. But I imagine not in whatever sense you mean.’

‘Is it worth it for a famous Roman general and northern warrior such as yourself to travel all this way to defend a fly-blown dump like this? That is what I mean. And a fly-blown dump full of luxurious, decadent Syrian effeminates.’

‘My people tell a story - obviously in the few moments when we are not painting ourselves blue, getting drunk or killing each other - that one evening a strange man appeared before Asgard, the home of the gods, and offered to build a wall around it if the gods let him have Freyja, the beautiful goddess.’