Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (16 page)

I peered at him, against the sun’s high, knifing glare. ‘What?’ I asked.

This time, he did not smile. ‘Corbulo has sent to Nero asking for a new commander for Armenia and Cappadocia.’

‘Why? Corbulo is more than capable—’

‘Stop.’ Aquila’s hand came up. ‘Think.’ His hand fell. ‘And listen. Corbulo has requested aid in the protection of the east. He has kept the governorship of Syria. A new governor has been appointed for Cappadocia. He will be your general.’ His face said
I’m sorry
, but his voice could not, even here on a mountain in the company of hawks and mules and seven men who would have given their lives rather than speak aloud any treason they heard. A company of the VIth was behind him and even here the emperor might have ears and the reports of those ears might lead a man to his death; it had happened before.

So I said only, ‘Who is the new commander?’ and gave no voice to the disappointment that curdled my guts.

To my shame, the name he gave was not one that conjured any feeling in me: not fear, nor revulsion, nor horror at a man who carried ill-luck with him wherever he went. On that bright summer day at the height of the world, I heard Aquila say ‘Lucius Caesennius Paetus’, and I shrugged and said, ‘He who was consul in Rome last year?’ and at Aquila’s nod, ‘So … Corbulo is making sure he doesn’t hold too much power in the east. Is that it?’

‘I have no idea.’ Aquila’s lined face was a mask of moderation. ‘And if it were, I would not say. Paetus will join you before winter. So make the most of this siege and then meet him in Melitene, and spend your winter getting to know him. He will lead you in war next year. Now,’ he clapped my arm, ‘how long before we make the city?’

‘Half a day. We aim to reach the plain as night falls, so that we may cross in darkness, unseen by the enemy. Once there, all that will hold us back is the speed of the mules. If you can push them, we’ll see the city before midnight.’

‘Oh, I can push the mules.’ Aquila was himself again, bright as a polished blade. ‘I’ve waited four years to see Cadus; this day cannot pass too soon. Let your unit lead us back over the path while we hold the rear guard; they say the route winds more than the bull-maze of Crete and this is not time to find ourselves lost.’

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

IT WAS EVENING
when we reached the forest on our return journey, and it was as unfriendly now as it had been in the morning; more so, as we soon discovered.

‘
Hsst!
’ Horgias reined his horse back and laid a hand on my bridle. ‘To the left, past the bole of the fallen tree. Something’s moving.’

‘A boar?’ I strained to look. Horgias is a wolf in the guise of a man; he can see in the dark better than any of us. With the moon barely risen, and starlight thin as slivers through the trees, I could perhaps have owned to seeing a shadow darker than the rest that moved faster than the wind-sway of the branches.

At my side, Tears murmured, ‘Not a boar.’ His sword scraped free of its sheath, scenting the air with lanolin and a faint tinge of iron. I would have said I was alert before, but I shifted into some new realm where my cheeks felt the lift of each leaf around me, my ears heard the shrews, the wood mice skittering beneath our horses’ feet, and my eyes – now – saw what Tears and Horgias had seen: not a boar, but a man. Men, in fact; at least three that I could count.

Syrion was our leader; all three of us turned to him.
Wordless,
he raised his hand and made a gesture: three fingers, then three again, then two splayed out and down. At that sign, seven of us dismounted and slid into the forest, leaving Sarapammon behind to lead the horses on.

Old Aquila, who could have run through this kind of manoeuvre in his sleep, saw what was happening and rode up past the fifteen mules from the train’s end to its head, bringing a dozen of his men with him.

His voice was loud enough to cross the Roman forum on a busy morning, never mind a forest at first fall of night, but its tone was conversational, as if we all still rode together and he had come up, with such noise, purely to pass the time.

‘Demalion, how much further? My old bones ache at the end of the day and I would soak them before tomorrow’s dawn.’

His patrician accent rang out like a piece of Rome transplanted, and Sarapammon, answering in my place and speaking Latin as Aquila had done, said, ‘Not long now. See those trees ahead, where they part and let in the moonlight? That’s the edge of the forest, where the mountain meets the fertile plain. We’ll be there in a hundred paces and then we can get some speed on, and head for the city. It’s dark enough now and the Parthians will never know we’ve—’

A spear passed within a hand’s breadth of my head, hurtling towards the voices. I felt the wind of its passing, and did not hear it strike flesh, but I didn’t have time to look round, to see if Sarapammon or Aquila had been hit, for in that moment I was fighting for my life.

Three of them came at me, four at first, but Tears took the farthest; I saw the slip of his blade in the moonlight as he attacked.

As for me, I had my gladius in one hand and a long-knife in the other, entirely against our proper dress, but Horgias had been teaching us and we had drilled in these woods on each
of
our four previous forays and had learned the hard way that in the tight, dark crush between the trees a knife in the off hand was far safer than a shield.

I saw the pale flash of a man’s face, mouth stretched wide in a battle yell that I could not hear. I stabbed at it with my left, my dagger hand, and even as the Parthian jerked back from the feint I drove my right hand hard at where his neck should be, the blank space between pale flesh and the odd greasy shimmer of mail.

I felt the blade bite, but not deeply enough to kill, and wrenched it away and barrelled forward, using my shoulders, my hips, and hit muscle and bone and heard a man grunt and felt him lose his footing and fall and had time to splice a swift backhanded cut across his throat to finish.

A kill … a
kill!
The boy in me exulted, roaring, at that final step into manhood. The man I had been for years had no time for childish fantasies. A gout of hot and savoury blood sluiced into my open mouth. I spat it away, and spun to where another shape leered from the dark and I was already moving, spitting, swearing, dodging a sword blow from my right, and then wrenching sideways, and up again, spinning round a tree.

‘
Ha!
’

To this day I don’t know if the Parthian cried out or I did or someone else, but the noise called my head round and I saw a blur of star-gloamed metal and some god’s hand thrust me down so that I felt the kiss of its passing, but not the bite. It bit into the oak, a handspan deep, and pinned my hair with it. I wrenched free, ripping open my scalp, and tumbled away.

In Hyrcania, I had seen one of those axes kill a horse. It had been thrown as this one was, looping head over haft, and had ended neatly, in the solid bone of the colt’s forehead. The beast had gone down without so much as a twitch, and the entire watching army had applauded the skill of the throw.

The King of Kings, I remember, had given the axeman a replica of his weapon in solid gold, but the man himself had been more proud of his elevation to the king’s bodyguard, which had been, I understood, the point.

All that I remembered in a single moment, each image overlaid on the other, as I sought haven behind trees and struck out when I could and failed entirely to land a killing blow – any kind of blow – on the two Parthians in front of me, and felt my sword weigh heavy in my hand and knew that I was tiring, and that a tired man is dead.

I lost my knife soon after that. I was beyond thinking or planning by then; I saw a shape move, and I stabbed for it, and felt the jar of iron on bull’s hide, and the tug as the blade bit, and there was a moment when I could have tried to hold on and been dragged with it, or let go.

I let go and rolled away from where it had been, round yet another dark, wide oak with scrub at its base, and rose with my gladius held point down, with two hands on the hilt, and stabbed down at the mass below me, where the Parthian had thrust against nothing and tripped.

My blade skidded on ring mail; I stumbled just as he had, and, falling, reached out with my left hand and found hair, a head, and grabbed it and wrenched back and by luck, not the least bit of judgement, my blade’s slide kept on sheering sideways up his back until it struck the back of his helmetless head. I had to let go then, and roll away, and came up weaponless, spitting out the old blood that still layered my mouth from the first dead man, and the bile of terror that had flooded over it.

The miser moon rationed its light so that I had to feel for my sword’s hilt in the near total dark. When I found it, I rammed the blade through the head of the man I had just hit. I have no idea if he was dead before that stroke, but he certainly was afterwards. So I was twice a man, and no more
sure
of living, for the forest was full of men and if only half of them were the enemy we were lucky: every man of our unit and of the VIth was fighting now, with a noise that rocked the trees.

I had to kneel to pull the blade out again, and stayed still afterwards. My heart was a bucking bull in my chest, my hands were slick with sweat, my face itched under drying blood. But for all that, I felt for the first time as I had the night we raided the camp of the IVth on the mountains; I felt
alive
, and glad to be so. If I had died in that moment, fairly, I truly think I would not have minded. And I would not have traded places with any man then, not for all the wealth of Parthia. I had heard of this, but had never felt it for myself; that this is what battle does for a man when he has trained for it.

Battle also brings him to kill his friends by accident, or almost.

I tugged my gladius free of the dead man’s skull and replaced my lost knife with one he had sheathed at his waist and sought to find Tears and the others of my unit. All around me were the steps and grunts of men lost in fighting, the stifled screams of the wounded, the bubbling exhalations of the dying. Following the loudest of the sounds, I came upon one who bore Parthian mail and was still living, lying on his belly trying to push himself up to his hands and knees. I caught his head and stabbed my new knife into his throat and turned my face away from the gout of gore, not to swallow yet more of an enemy’s life blood … and so saw a man’s shadow sliding to my right, and the sliver of moonlight that fell on him, and the flash of blue that was exactly the colour of Monobasus’ tern badge. Fast as a snake, I rose and took three silent steps across the clearing and slammed my dagger hand forward and—

‘
Tears!
’

I couldn’t stop the blow, but I could open my hand and let the blade drop, so that all he suffered was a strike to his back, and even that was less of a killing blow than it should have been, for he had turned towards me as I hissed his name.

‘Demalion!’

He snatched my arm from the air, spinning me round. If I had been Parthian, the next move would have opened my throat as it lay exposed to his blade. He laid the edge of his hand across it to prove the point, but gently, with the humour that showed more often now, and always when we were fighting. After a moment, grinning, he let me rise, dusting me down. ‘What are you doing? I thought I’d lost you.’

I was shaking all over, terrified, and he was just staring at me with that half-savage grin on his face, still with no idea how close death had brushed him. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t even noticed that I’d hit him. ‘Why in the gods’ name are you wearing blue?’ I asked.

‘Is it blue?’ He lifted a silk scarf from his belt and held it out between his hands. In the unlight that held us, it could as easily have been green, or red, or black. ‘One of the Parthians was wearing it,’ he said. ‘I killed him with it when my blades were both gone. I thought better I should keep it than leave it behind.’

‘Get rid of it before it gets you killed.’ Even now, I was the more frightened of us, the more snappish, though it was he who had the bruise on his side that would take half a month to fade. ‘We need to find the others.’

‘There,’ Tears said, and jerked his head back east to where the path ran through the trees. ‘I was coming to find you before—’

A wolf’s howl split the night, cut off at its peak.

Together, we ran towards it. In a small clearing, Horgias, the Rabbit and Rufus stood in a triangle surrounded by a knot of Parthians. Axes and swords flickered back and forth
and
it was clear that this would have been a good time to have a shield.

Tears and I hurled ourselves at the nearest enemy, stabbing at faces, knees, wrists, anything that was not armoured. I didn’t keep count of the men I injured or killed, for we were still heavily outnumbered. I stabbed, I parried, I ducked. At some point, when I ducked, I found a dead Parthian’s shield near my feet and picked it up. The grip was of a cavalry shield and the weight was not what I was used to, but it felt like a gift from the gods, and it saved my life as an axe bit deep into the hide by the boss. I shoved it forward and ran, to be Tears’ shield-man, so that we might both be protected.

The Parthians were fewer now, but fighting like cornered rats. I stepped back out of the fray and raised my head and gave the call of the wolf twice, which is what Horgias had been trying to do, I think; it was the call to summon the XIIth and was particular to our cohort and our century. We needed them, and, more than that, we needed them to find Proclion, for our giant bear-man was not with Horgias and that spelled danger.

Sarapammon must have heard the urgency in the call; I heard his voice at the head of a troop, running, and Aquila’s patrician voice urging them on.

Thinking we were saved, I let down my guard, and only Tears’ speed saved me from the spear that came for my face. He slashed down on the haft with his gladius and the spearhead missed me and skidded instead past my shoulder.

Seeing a gap, I slid my blade up the spear haft to the man at the end of it. He backed away and I might have followed him and been caught behind enemy lines – a fatal mistake and one only made by the very green or the very wild – but that I heard Horgias cry out again behind me, a high, desperate keening that said he had found Proclion and the finding was not good.