Rufus went back to Proclion’s bed and brought out thosefew possessions he had not taken with him: the battered copper mess tin that he carried on march, the one he used daily, not the polished one he kept for parade; the whetstone for his blades in a slick leather pouch; the pack of javelins and the pointed stake we all carried in our kit, to be ready at any moment for the cataphracts; his spare shield; spare thongs for his sandals… all were laid on the cloak for our inspection. All were things we, too, used daily, so that we had no real need for spares.
Even so, Syrion reached out first and took Proclion’s shield, replacing it with his own, so that the same number of things lay on the cloak. ‘It’s better than mine,’ he said. ‘He had thicker bull’s hide on his.’
I saw no difference, but did not say so, and Horgias, set apart from us all, gave a nod, as if his permission had been asked and granted.
Others chose in a kind of order: Rufus took the javelin and left his own on the cloak, saying that his was bent at the end and would not fly true; the Rabbit took Proclion’s wooden stake, for the same reason; Sarapammon found that he needed to replace the thongs on his sandals, and did so, unlacing them with thick fingers, lacing them afresh with the new leather, tying the old neatly and setting it on the cloak.
I took his mess tin, and went to fetch mine from the store under my bed, saying it was wearing thin on the base, which was as true as Syrion’s shield being thin, or Rufus’ javelin bent, which is to say not true at all. In truth, we would all have been content with what we had, but this way each of us carried a piece of the man now gone, that we might remember him each time we ate, or walked, or marched into battle.
It was done without ceremony or displays of grief or any kind of comment to acknowledge that this man was gone, never to return, but it was our wake for him, and more fitting than any wailing of priests or mumbled prayers.
We slept poorly that night, listening to Horgias, who lay awake in the dark and would not weep, and in the morning, dull-eyed, we came before Cadus, who had us present arms and give a show for Aquila before he announced to the entire legion that we were leaving; that, faced by our intransigence, Vologases had agreed to lift the siege of Tigranocerta, in return for which Corbulo had agreed to grant kingship to Vologases’ brother until such time as he could send an embassy to Nero and request that ownership be passed to Parthia.
There are those who said this was tantamount to surrender, but they had not been there and seen the pointlessness of the fight. Corbulo was a general who saw the greater scale of things and if he thought this was one battle not worth fighting we were happy to go along with him — all except Horgias, who nursed a terrifying hatred of the Parthians and would have happily attacked Vologases’ entire army single-handedly.
He had no chance of that for our orders were to march west, to beautiful Melitene, which lay just over the border in Cappadocia, and there to settle into winter quarters and await the arrival in spring of our new commander, Lucius Caesennius Paetus.
Chapter Sixteen
Rhandaea, Armenia, on the northern bank of the Murad Su, AD 62
Imagine Melitene, land of plenty, under snow and ice and high blue skies; imagine it in spring, with the meltwater running off the mountains and the herds going up to the high pastures to graze and their milk scented with mint and citrus; imagine it in high summer, limpid in the day’s heat, with the hawks circling high above and the mares full fat with foal, swatting flies with their tails.
Imagine that a man enters this idyll who does not know that he has come to paradise, who brings with him such ill luck as to make the statue of Fortune fall on her face at his passing and set the crows circling in murderous groups, eleven at a time, number of ill augur. Imagine such a man causing the minted milk to sour, and the men to sour with it, even before he gives the word to prosecute an unwinnable war, against the orders of his betters; or at least against Corbulo’s explicit command.
Such a man was our new general and while you will have heard of the statue that fell on its face and the other ill omens — theybecame common enough currency in Rome soon after — you may not know that he disobeyed orders when he began his war.
I can tell you and I know it to be true because, although I had been promoted from watch officer to signaller, with Tears as my shield-man, I was still first courier for the XIIth. In that role, I had been present when General Corbulo had gathered his legates together and set the scene for the new autumn campaign.
Vologases, he said, had been rebuffed by Nero. We all knew that the emperor had made a grave mistake, but nobody said so. I will testify to that at my life’s end, if need be: no man present said openly that Nero was wrong to thus provoke the King of Kings. No treason was spoken. The commanders merely accepted it as fact and went on to discuss how Vologases might be managed now that he was angry and had set his armies towards Syria.
I sat quietly and listened — a clerk is invisible at such times, and I was clerk and courier, and so doubly unseen — while they debated strategy and decided that we must hold our side of the Euphrates, and drive Vologases back; that Armenia must be kept neutral until all six legions could march on Tigranocerta and take it back, for we had been in there, and knew how readily it was defended by even a few hardy men, how large were its stocks of food, how infinite its water supply.
I heard the generals agree it, and plan for the ways to keep Vologases in check, if only the north might also be held steady. I heard it said of Paetus, our new governor of Cappadocia — he was not present, having claimed a head cold when invited — that he was inclined to prideful rashness, and might wish for more glory, faster; that, indeed, he had been heard to say that Armenia should suffer for its treachery, and be reduced from a client kingdom to a province, sooner rather than later.
I could have attested to the truth of this last if they had asked me, for Paetus had said exactly that in my presence, but I was not asked, and so held to my clerk’s invisibility until I was needed, which came soon after.
I saw the scorn written on Corbulo’s face, and saw him turn to me, and see me, and set me to take his dictation. In his words, I wrote to Paetus, my own commander, telling him not make enemies of Vologases or his subjects, and on no account to cross the Euphrates or its tributaries into any of the lands east of that river, but instead to hold fast and still and keep his men at peak fitness, as they had been when he had taken charge of them.
The black-dyed wax ran on to seal the scroll, letting loose a summer’s breeze of bees and honey. Over it, Corbulo stamped his mark of the war raven with its sharp beak and bright eye and the ruffle of feathers at its shoulders. All this was given into my care and the following day I set out to deliver it to Melitene, to the land of high mountains and cleaner air than you can begin to imagine.
The journey back took me ten days, but the land was still at peace when I placed the crow-sealed orders personally in the hand of our governor and general, Caesennius Paetus, although the statue had fallen long before then and the crows had circled and we had drunk sour milk and knew that he brought ill luck on all of us.
You can well imagine that only Horgias was happy when, in direct defiance of Corbulo’s command, we were ordered to march out of our camp across the Taurus Mountains to assault eastern Armenia and its people for the ‘crime’ of failing to be Roman citizens.
We — the XIIth, the IVth and the two companies of Pannonian archers Paetus had brought with him — crushed undefended towns and villages who had dutifully paid their taxes to Rome in the past and might do so in the future. We slaughtered anyone who might conceivably have held any affection for Parthia, and so ensured that, whatever they had felt before, their families hated us, and loved our enemy.