Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (44 page)

‘Horgias—’ But he had turned and this time he did have his blade in his hand, and was slicing with it, fast and sharp and hard, so that the iron was a blur in the part-light above me. ‘Remember me!’

I heard a blade meet flesh and did not know whose it was.

Would you have stayed and lost the Eagle? I wanted to. Perhaps I should have done, but it shifted like a living thing against my breast and the fervour in Horgias’ voice ran onward through my ears.
Please go! For me …

His voice and his will pushed me down so that I loosed my hold on the rope until it slipped through my hands and I slid down fast and faster, skidding over the knots set every ten feet, losing skin with every foot until I hit the bottom, with the raw flesh of my palms bleeding.

But nobody had cut the rope while I was on it and nobody leaned over to hurl spears at me, or rocks or knives or the small lead pellets they used in their slings. Looking up all the while, I backed down the great rock stairway that had led to the foot of the cliff.

‘
Demalion!
’ I heard my name. You must believe that; I
heard
Horgias call my name, and I looked up at the cave in time to see the rope snake down towards me, cut clean through at its top end, so that none of the Hebrews could speedily follow me. Nor Horgias, who must still be alive.

Make sure you’re dead. Eleazir has ways of keeping a man alive …
Pantera’s words burned again in my head so that I prayed for a swift battle-death for Horgias.

And if I had heard him call me earlier, then he heard me now, for the prayer had only just gone to the gods when I heard his voice again, like the voice of a living god speaking aloud the names of the dead men who were waiting for him: Proclion first, and then Taurus, and then the oath to the Eagle. I saw him hook his knee over the cave’s lip and, slashing at the hands clawing him backwards, thrust himself off the edge.

Like the Eagle he had so loved, Horgias flew down from the heights of the cliff. A fierce, burning joy lit his face as he sailed towards me, and at the end a kind of peace I had not seen in any man.

‘
Demalion, don’t stay with me. Get the Eagle to Vespasian
.’ He said it in my head, not my ears; there was not time enough to speak aloud before he ended his flight on the hard rock of the Hebrew cliff-foot.

The crack of his landing spun me backwards. I turned to see him lying not five paces away on a flat shelf of rock with his eyes open to the blue, blue sky and peace still etched deep on his face.

I didn’t need to feel at his neck or his wrist for the hammer of his heartbeat to know he was dead, but my heart ruled my head and I had hope, even then. My seeking fingers rested on the great vein at his neck, waiting for a beat that did not come.

His skin was warm. His flesh was whole and solid. His smile had not yet faded, but the back of his head had cracked
open
like a hen’s egg and yellow fluid was leaking out and his life had leaked out with it.

I wanted Hypatia there, suddenly; she knew how to send a man cleanly to the lands of death. But she was long gone, and I was his friend.

Standing, I took a step back, and sent him to the gods, mine and his, in the only way I knew how.

‘
Given of the god
,

Given to the god
,

Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory
.

May you journey safely to your destination
.’

I spoke it aloud, why should I not, here, where the gods were all around? Shouts came from the cave mouth above. I ignored them and fumbled in my belt pouch for two of the silver coins that were left from the sale of the mares. Speaking the last words, I placed one on each of Horgias’ eyelids, weighing them shut.

Truly, I don’t know if the ferryman requires payment for his services, but in that moment all that mattered was that Horgias travel whole across the Styx to greet the men who waited for him on the other side.

I wept as I placed them, slow tears that might have unmanned me then, but that a stone lumbered down past my shoulder and, looking up, I saw Nicodemus lowering another rope down from the heights.

Even at this distance, the hatred on his face was as pure and undiluted as I have seen on any battlefield. It shocked me to sense, and as I stood Horgias’ shade touched me, whispering in my ears.
Go! The Eagle is all. Don’t let them take it a second time
.

I bent and kissed the cooling skin of his brow, tasting his sweat, and then turned and ran for the path that had brought
us
here, and on, and round and up to where the horses had been tethered.

Three dead men waited there, feasting-tables for a legion of fat flies. The blue roan filly was safe; with Horgias’ burnt-almond gelding and Pantera’s bay, she had moved into the shade of a rock and stood dozing, slack-hipped in the heat.

I looked around for Pantera and saw nothing but uneven rock, set about with potholes and scoured clean by sun and wind. I was set to cut the tethers when I caught sight of a particular mound of grey that was not exactly as it should have been. I reached it just as Pantera thrust himself to his feet.

He began to dust himself down and then stopped, his eyes searching my face. I wasn’t weeping by then, but the signs of it must have been clear. ‘Horgias?’ he asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Would you go back for him if Nicodemus had him alive?’

‘If necessary.’ He meant it. I could read the truth on his face. Strange that he was so easy to read now, when I had least need of it.

The Eagle burned against my chest. I busied myself loosing the tethers from the horses. ‘There’s no need. He heard what you said as well as I did. He cut the rope after I climbed down it and then threw himself from the cave mouth. He landed at my feet. I left him silver for the ferryman.’

‘And Nicodemus?’

‘He’s coming for us. We need to ride.’ I mounted, and took Horgias’ horse by the reins. ‘I have an Eagle to deliver to Vespasian.’

E
PILOGUE

Antioch, Syria, April,
AD
67

IN THE HIGH
blue sky, an eagle, soaring.

Beneath it, closer to the ground, a gilded Eagle, radiant in the careful sunlight, spills its own light across the two hundred men gathered beneath.

They are not a legion yet, but the beginnings of one: on each shield, the crossed thunderbolts of the XIIth Fulminata, the Thunderbolt legion; on the helm of the standard-bearer, a wolfskin; on the arms of the men, bands in gold that tell of valour in battle, and on their faces a pride that catches the spilled light of the Eagle and spins it back up to the podium.

From their throats, two hundred voices, offering anew their oath to the emperor, to their general, to their legion, the XIIth, brought back from the dead.

And on the podium, Vespasian, governor of Syria, legate of the eastern legions; a ruddy-faced, wind-blown general who knows the value of his men.

He hears their oath in silence and lets the wind lift the banners and the eagle cry its response from the heavens before he steps forward and raises his battle-honed voice.

‘Men of the Twelfth! In blood and battle were you lost, but never bested. In courage and care was your heart recovered, here to stand. Now do we salute those who died in your defence, and honour those who brought your Eagle to safety. For ever shall their names be known, and always with honour shall they be spoken.’

A brisk step sideways, a sharp cutting motion with his palm, and a sheet of purple silk billows down from the wall behind him.

Two hundred men gasp at what they see; they did not expect this. But they see and they read and soon two hundred swords batter two hundred shields, for how could they not?

H
ORGIAS.

L
UPUS.

S
YRION.

M
ACER.

P
ROCLION.

T
AURUS.

H
ERACLIDES
,
KNOWN AS
T
EARS
…

The names are chiselled indelibly into the wall of Antioch, Syria’s greatest city, the third greatest in all the empire after Rome and Alexandria. And above them all, an Eagle flies for ever, and the number of their legion:
XII
:
WITH HONOUR DID WE DIE FOR YOU.

I meet Pantera later, in the house that they have given us. He stands in the doorway, looking in at me.

‘Did you see it?’

‘I heard. It was a good speech.’

‘But you didn’t watch?’

‘No.’ I have a flask of wine in front of me. I have not drunk. I have not drunk at all since my return. I hold it out to him as he enters.

He shakes his head. ‘You could still join,’ he says. ‘He’d
make
you camp prefect even now, if you asked for it. Or primus pilus. Legate of the horse. Anything you wanted.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

He comes into the room and sits down opposite me. We are on the third floor. The view from the window looks out over green and brown hills, but if I close my eyes I could be in a tavern in Hyrcania, watching him fletch an arrow with which to kill an upstart king. I have his Parthian bow. He has not asked for it back.

I say, ‘I’ve given to the Twelfth all that I can. Vespasian will let me go if I ask it. He will sign my manumission himself.’

‘Do you want that? Truly?’

‘I don’t know.’ I have water in my beaker. I dip my finger in it and draw a picture of a running horse; a thing I have not done since childhood. It is a child’s drawing, not at all lively. I smear it away with the heel of my hand.

I say, ‘Hypatia could tell me what I want. She sees into men’s souls better than they do themselves.’

‘You can see as well as anyone. You just need to accept what you see. You were born a horse-trader, but it’s not who you are now.’

‘No?’ I do look up then. Pantera is regarding me quizzically, his head on his arm and his arm propped against the wall just inside the door. He kicks the door shut with his heel, and it shudders on the door jamb.

‘What will you do?’ I ask.

‘What I am ordered to do. As ever.’ And then, because I am still looking at him, ‘I am ordered to Rome.’

‘By the emperor?’ I cannot keep the disdain from my voice.

Pantera shakes his head. ‘By the spymaster who serves the empire,’ he says, and I am reminded of the sick colour of his face, relaying the news of Corbulo’s death.
Not Nero. The man who should have taken his place
. And then, at another time,
Who does he remind you of?

Corbulo
.

Thoughtfully, I draw another picture. We both look at it. I say, ‘Vespasian has asked me to be part of his personal bodyguard. That way, if I don’t want to be part of the new Twelfth, I can still be with the force that takes back Jerusalem.’

‘He knows the value of a good man when he sees one. Like good horses, they are few enough, and to be cherished.’ Pantera stands. Neither of us is good at saying goodbye. He says, ‘I’m leaving in the morning. I’ve left the Berber colt in your care. You’ll need a good mount while your roan filly becomes a brood mare.’

I blink at him. ‘When will you come back to claim him?’

He is looking down at the Eagle I have drawn in water on the oak table. ‘If I come back,’ he says, ‘it won’t be to claim him. Or the bow.’

He leaves me, then. I sit a while longer, before I smooth out the drawing and stand.

I drink the water, and a little of the wine, and then I go to tell my general that I will be honoured to serve in his bodyguard for as long as he has need of me.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

I am indebted to Rose Mary Sheldon for her excellent work,
Rome’s Wars in Parthia, Blood in the Sand
which was published bare months before I began the research for this book.

Barbara Levick’s
Vespasian
is a decade older, but still one of the best biographies of one of Rome’s best emperors, and I have drawn on it extensively for details of his early life, with Suetonius as back-up at all times.

Josephus and Tacitus, as ever, provided the primary detail for the movements of the XIIth and its near destruction, while my bible for military accuracy has been Bishop and Coulston’s
Roman Military Equipment
, which has done much to shape my beliefs of what was (and wasn’t) standard in the first century.

I was particularly struck by the assertion that representational evidence for
lorica segmentata
is ‘virtually nonexistent with a few possible (and debatable) exceptions before the second century AD’ (second edition paperback, page 255). My mid-first-century legionaries, therefore, only rarely wear the armour we have come to associate with later centuries.

Brigadier Allan Mallinson was kind enough to direct
me
towards memoirs of modern wars that, to him, best encapsulated the bonding of battle. Of the three that he recommended,
Quartered Safe Out Here
by George MacDonald Fraser was easily the most moving and the most informative. The scene in which my characters share out the property of their dead comrade, Proclion, is adapted directly from this book in the belief that such actions must have been common to all armies in all eras.

I have taken minor liberties with Vespasian’s known movements in the spring of 67, which was necessary for a rounded narrative.

I am ever in debt to my friends and colleagues of the Historical Writers’ Association for their thoughts, conversations, debates and arguments over accuracy and detail. It’s a joy and a wonder to have a community to call on; thank you.

My agent, Jane Judd, made everything possible, while my editors, Selina Walker and Bill Scott-Kerr, continue to be founts of sanity, support and strength, while my partner, Faith Tilleray, is the light that brightens every day. Nancy Webber is my constant, much-lauded copy editor and Vivien Garrett has cleared the way to a smooth production.