CHAPTER XVI
‘YOU’VE GOT TO be joking with me.’ Magnus stared in horror at the saddled camel, kneeling, waiting to be mounted; a grinning camel-wrangler held its bridle.
‘How else do you plan to travel across the desert?’ Vespasian asked, sizing up the beast that he was supposed to ride; it eyed him back with a haughty look, chewing methodically.
‘We had horses when we crossed from Syria.’
‘That’s further north and it wasn’t such a long journey. Mehbazu tells me that horses only stand a chance of making it across to Judaea in winter.’
‘Mehbazu should know; he’s made the journey at least a dozen times,’ Gobryas said. ‘It can take up to fifteen days to make the crossing once you’ve taken the ferry over the Euphrates.’
They were on the west bank of the Tigris having taken one of Gobryas’ boats across at dawn. The caravan had been ready, waiting for them along with the eighty royal camel archers that Vologases had promised. Mehbazu, the caravan leader, had greeted Vespasian with a degree of awe as the man to whom the Great King of Parthia had shown such honour in providing him with men from his personal guard.
The seven other merchants travelling in the caravan had touched their foreheads and bowed to Vespasian as a man in high favour with their monarch, and so it was with a fervent desire not to make a fool of himself in public that he approached the waiting mount that seemed to have the entire fly population on this side of the Tigris feasting in its nostrils.
A loud, bestial bellow announced Hormus’ successful mounting as his camel rose, hind legs first, almost unseating its novice rider. Hormus’ camel-wrangler then mounted his own beast, showed him how to hold his legs to one side of the neck and then demonstrated how to use the goad to persuade the animal to move.
Vespasian and Magnus watched the lesson, which Hormus seemed to digest well.
‘His confidence has returned now that he feels you’ve forgiven him for our arrest,’ Magnus observed as Hormus managed to make his mount turn to the left.
Vespasian raised an eyebrow at Magnus. ‘But I did warn him that he would end up like Bagoas if he ever again jeopardised my safety with his desire to interfere with young lads’ bottoms.’
‘That should keep his mind focused and his cock in his loincloth.’
The lesson came to an end, Vespasian and Magnus looked at each other and shrugged and then, with differing degrees of confidence, climbed onto the saddles perched atop their camels’ humps.
Vespasian feared for his neck as his body was violently jerked by his camel rising to all four feet. The merchants and the eighty royal camel archers waited patiently as Vespasian, Magnus and Hormus practised starting, steering and stopping their novel mounts until they felt confident enough to embark on the five-hundred-mile journey to the Roman frontier.
‘May Ahura Mazda watch over you, Vespasian,’ Gobryas said in farewell.
Vespasian looked down from his high perch. ‘Thank you, my friend. And thank you for my life.’
‘It was given in payment of a debt; we are now equal.’
With a smile and a nod, Vespasian acknowledged the truth of the statement and urged his beast forward, giving a last wave to his saviour.
‘What did the Great King have to say?’ Magnus asked, drawing his mount level with Vespasian as behind them, with much bellowing, roaring and snorting, the hundred or so heavily laden pack camels were urged to their feet and into motion by their handlers.
‘Oh, he just proved what a good mind-reader he is,’ Vespasian replied, trying to settle into the rhythm of his camel’s gait.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He told me that if I had been one of his subjects, he would have me executed or mutilated for having treasonous intent.’
‘And have you?’
‘Not directly, Magnus, but Vologases taught me two things yesterday: first, that a ruler must be able to show mercy, otherwise his punishments mean nothing. And second, that nothing should ever be taken at face value, especially when you’re dealing with the motivation of an enemy; always ask yourself the question “why?”.’
‘Like: why am I on this camel?’
Vespasian laughed. ‘No, that was not what I meant. The real question in this case is: why did you let yourself be persuaded into mounting the camel?’
The riders had appeared from the south, shimmering wraiths in the heat haze, and had shadowed the caravan for the last few hours. Every time the officer commanding the camel archers sent out a patrol to investigate them, the riders fled; once the patrol had been recalled they would return and take up station again, always two or three miles distant. Like the caravan, they were mounted on camels, but unlike the caravan they were not hampered by heavily laden beasts of burden.
Vespasian gazed south, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun that burned down on the wasted land. ‘I can still only count twenty or so; they’d be foolish to try and take on four times their number.’ He looked back down the caravan; it was a quarter of a mile long. It comprised almost one hundred camels, loaded either with goods or water-skins, strung together in groups of five, each led by a mounted slave. Mehbazu and the seven merchants to whom the camels and goods belonged rode, along with Vespasian, Magnus and Hormus, at the head, while to either side it was guarded by Vologases’ archers. It was not a large force but a formidable one in this parched desert that could barely support life and certainly could not support a large body of men and beasts, unless they brought their own water and knew the locations of the very few wells and oases that were scattered about this unwanted buffer zone between the Parthian and the Roman Empires. Nobody lived here except the riders. ‘So the gods alone know what they think they’re doing.’
‘Fucking Arabs!’ Magnus opined, trying to adjust his position on his camel’s saddle; he had not been comfortable for eleven days now.
‘Nabataeans,’ Vespasian corrected.
‘You told me that they were called Nabataean Arabs.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Well, I ain’t going to waste my breath saying all that, so, fucking Arabs.’
‘Have it your own way.’ Vespasian pushed his white linen headdress away from his eyes and looked back out at the riders. ‘I’d still like to know what they want.’
‘Perhaps they want to trade?’ Vahumisa, one of the merchants, suggested hopefully; as Gobryas’ representative in the caravan its success was a matter of acute financial interest to him.
‘Then why don’t they just come close and ask us?’
‘Perhaps they don’t like the idea of coming so close to eighty archers,’ Magnus said, his head going back and forth out of time to his beast’s lumbering gait; he had not got the knack of riding camels and it was not looking hopeful that he ever would, even with the splint off his now mended arm.
‘That’s a fair point, I suppose. What do you think, Mehbazu?’
Mehbazu looked south to the riders and shook his head as if they were of little import. ‘They want what everyone wants: money. They’re just trying to work out the best way of extracting some from us.’
‘Will they?’
‘Inevitably; the Nabataeans are notorious thieves, blackmailers, extortionists and murderers. Somehow they’ll leave here richer and there’s nothing we can do about it.’
Vespasian decided not to concern himself any more about the Nabataeans until they posed a less distant threat; instead he turned his mind back to the question that had occupied him for the last eleven days since leaving Ctesiphon: how would he get Pallas to protect him from Agrippina? Could he even guarantee that Pallas could still be in a position to protect him from Agrippina? A lot would have changed in politics during his absence and Pallas may well now be out of favour with the Empress. What he did know was that just before he had left for the East, Pallas had managed to secure his younger brother Felix the procuratorship of Judaea. Marcus Antonius Felix had been Antonia’s steward for her considerable property in Alexandria; she had freed him in her will and he had remained in the city after her death, looking after her affairs for her son, Claudius. It had been Felix who had helped Vespasian and Magnus steal Alexander the Great’s breastplate from his mummified corpse in his mausoleum. If anyone knew the current situation back in Rome it would be Felix, the one-time slave who now ruled a Roman province. Vespasian decided that once they crossed the border, in a couple of days, he would head straight for Caesarea, the administrative capital of Judaea. There he could consult with Felix; indeed, if he found him still in position as procurator that in itself would tell him much about Pallas’ standing back in Rome.