Vespasian felt confident that Babak would cede to Radamistus’ terms and let him pass so that he could head north. Babak would remain in Tigranocerta until news of Radamistus’ treachery travelled down to him; then he would lead his army into the heart of Armenia and Tryphaena would have her war.
The negotiations seemed to be coming to some conclusion; Vespasian pulled on his bindings. ‘Untie me, Paelignus.’
‘You’ll be released soon enough.’
As the procurator finished speaking, Radamistus turned around and signalled to the guard holding Vespasian’s horse’s reins; he led the beast forward. However, he did not stop when he was level with his master, but, rather, carried on to Babak who signalled to one of his entourage to take the reins.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Vespasian demanded.
Babak signalled to his men on the bridge who began pulling back to let the Armenian army cross.
As he crossed the bridge with Babak at his side, Vespasian repeated the question.
‘It’s custom to conclude business with a surety in my country,’ Babak informed him. ‘And you are just such a thing. If Radamistus breaks his word and Rome sends her armies in to support him, then, until they are removed, you will spend the rest of your life in the darkest dungeon in Adiabene.’
‘But you know that he’ll break his word.’
‘Do I? He swore on Ahura Mazda; for him there is no more powerful a god.’
‘But he swore to you and he considers you to be too far below him in status to be able to hold him to his oath.’
Babak bridled at the implied insult. ‘Then it would seem that things are not going to go well for you as a hostage of Parthia.’
PART III
CHAPTER XII
‘What would you recommend that I do with him, Ananias?’
Vespasian knelt on the floor with his hands tied behind his back. The iron tang of blood filled his battered mouth; blood dripped onto the marble from a cut above his swollen, closed right eye. His tormentor, a massively muscled, bearded mute, wearing only a loincloth, stood before him, massaging his knuckles, raw from the beating he had just administered.
‘He seems to turn the other cheek.’
If it would not have hurt so much, Vespasian would have smiled at this description of the way he had dealt with the punishment that had been meted out to him. He looked up at the speaker; he was seated on a wooden throne with gold and silver inlays of strangely foreign animalistic design. In his early fifties, with a long grey beard, his hair wrapped in a white cloth headdress wound around his head, and with a black and white patterned mantle over his shoulders, he did not look as if he was the King of Adiabene. Yet he was; and more than that, as Vespasian now knew only too well, he was a Jewish convert. But it was not to the mainstream religion that the King adhered, but rather to the new cult promoted by Paulus’ rivals in Jerusalem.
‘King Izates, our master Yeshua,’ the man named Ananias replied, ‘did indeed preach that to be righteous we should turn the other cheek; but this man is not a Jew and Yeshua’s teachings apply only to Jews, not Gentile dogs like this faithless scum.’ Ananias consulted a scroll, his rheumy eyes squinting and his age-spotted hands shaking as they unfurled the parchment. ‘I have a record of much of what he said here, left by his disciple, Thomas, on his way to preach to the Jews and god-fearers of the East; and it is clear that the Righteous are only those who fear God, whether as full Jews or as god-fearers who adhere to much of the religion. This man, Vespasian, cannot be one of the Righteous.’
‘Very well, if you say so.’ King Izates studied Vespasian for a few moments before turning to a woman sitting on a lesser throne next to his own. ‘Tell me, with the heart of a woman, Symacho, my love: what would you do with this hostage to the honour of Radamistus, King of Armenia? Now that that Iberian liar has foresworn his oath of loyalty to my master, the Great King Vologases, the first of that name, and also now that Ummidius Quadratus, the Governor of Roman Syria, has sent a legion into Armenia, this man’s life should be forfeit.’ He pointed at Vespasian. ‘And yet Babak told him that he would only be cast into the deepest dungeon for the rest of his life should the treaty be broken.’
‘Then do that, my King.’ She looked at Vespasian and smiled. In the two months that he had been held hostage in Arbela, the royal capital of Adiabene, Vespasian had shared many meals with the royal couple and had found the ageing Queen’s company far more entertaining than that of her religion-obsessed husband or any of his twenty-four children from sundry wives. Izates showed all the tunnel-visioned fanaticism of a convert, always pontificating about his new religion and trying to apply it in all aspects of his rule, much to the obvious displeasure, Vespasian had noticed, of a fair number of his courtiers who clung, like Babak, to the old gods of Assyria. Symacho, on the other hand, did not flaunt her new beliefs and consequently was far more relaxed and convivial because of it. Vespasian almost forgave her for encouraging her husband to incarcerate him for the rest of his life; he would have preferred a quick death.
Another blow to the head stunned him momentarily; Izates had evidently ordered the beating to continue while he contemplated the issue from a religious angle.
This was a situation far removed from what he had encountered upon his arrival in Arbela; then he had been not exactly welcomed, but treated with a reasonable amount of courtesy.
‘I’m pleased that the Lord has sent you to me,’ Izates had said to him on the day of Vespasian’s arrival.
They were standing on the immense battlements that crowned the oval hill of four hundred and fifty by three hundred and fifty paces upon which Arbela stood and had been standing for over six thousand years. The hill rose steeply, one hundred feet on all sides, to an almost flat top so that it stood like a huge base waiting for a mighty column to be raised upon it by the gods; a column that would reach the heavens and prop up the sky.
For longer than memory Arbela had dominated the Assyrian plain that stretched out in all directions, irrigated and fertile, a farmland that had given power to the ancient Assyrian Kings before they had been subjugated by first the Medes and then the Persians and then by Alexander. His victory over Darius III at Guagamela, just eighty miles away, had heralded almost three hundred years of Hellenic rule during which time Adiabene had managed to become an autonomous kingdom. Now this city, one of the oldest on earth, was subject to Parthia and it was over Parthia that Vespasian had been gazing, only half-listening to his royal host who seemed to have very little conversation other than theological.
‘He has presented me with a way to solve a problem,’ Izates had carried on.
‘If I can be of service then I’d be only too pleased,’ Vespasian had replied absently. He had been led to think that his status was somewhat more than a hostage by the way that he had been greeted after his month-long journey south with the main force of Babak’s army. He had not been confined nor had he been guarded and the King had invited him on a tour of the battlements. Very soon he had bored Vespasian rigid with his talk of the Jewish god and rambling on about the prophet he had sent to save the Jews and those who feared their god by freeing them from the priests and all vestiges of human control on the most pure of religions — or something like that. Vespasian had not quite got to grips with the detail.