‘Rhandaea lies on the Murad Su,’ Lupus said, and was answered by blank stares from us all. ‘It’s a river. It rises out of the Taurus Mountains and runs into the Euphrates. Paetus plans to set up camp on the north bank so that we are technically in Armenia.’
‘We can’t do that,’ Syrion said. ‘Corbulo promised Vologases that Rome wouldn’t cross the Euphrates if Parthia would keep to her own side. If we do this, we will break his promise.’
‘Which is exactly why Paetus wants us to do it.’ Lupus was taking apart his bedframe with a contained but brisk intensity. ‘He thinks the battle season is over, and that we’ll be safe in Armenian territory until spring, and that we’ll have an advantage when the fighting starts again after the rains have stopped. He thinks he’ll write clever letters to Nero, telling him how he faced down the enemy when Corbulo was hunkered safe in Syria. He thinks…’ Lupus swept a hand through his iron hair. ‘I don’t know what he thinks, but I know that he’s wrong.’
‘Vologases will attack before spring,’ I said, and I might have been looking at Lupus, at Syrion, at Horgias, but I wasseeing a clearing in a forest in Hyrcania, with a group of vassal kings planning a winter campaign. ‘The Parthians don’t care if it’s winter. If they know we’re there, they’ll come and fight.’
‘Then we had better be ready for them,’ Lupus said grimly. ‘Be packed by dusk, and make sure your stakes are good and sharp and hardened in the fire. We might have need of them at long last.’
Chapter Seventeen
Mud.
What I remember of Rhandaea on the northern bank of the Murad Su, before the ill omens and the chaos, before the sea of cataphracts and the light cavalry and the archers and the slaughter… before any of that, abiding and overwhelming, what I remember is mud.
We marched there from Melitene in the first rains of autumn, across ground that was no worse than damp before the leading ranks met it but had been churned to slurry by the time the last man of the first cohort had passed.
Two legions and two companies of archers later, the last five hundred men were wading knee high through sucking, suppurating glue, and the bullock carts got jammed so hard and so often that it was easier to raise them up on rails and have teams of sixteen men carry them, four to each corner.
Our clothes were wet, our tents were wet, the firewood was saturated beyond any hope of a flame; we slept in wet bedding and ate cold, uncooked food and our mail rusted on our backs and when we finally reached the south bank of the Murad Su, we found it a swollen, churning cataract far widerthan its tame little brother, which had so efficiently protected the city at Tigranocerta.
And so we spent our first half-day there hacking at wet trees with rusted axes to build the bridge that might give us access to the location that Paetus, in his insanity, had chosen for our winter quarters.
In summer, I’ll grant you, it would have been acceptable; a wide, flat basin with a small town nearby for trade and girls, and, more important, with the river behind to hold us safe from the south and west and a good distance between us and the mountains to the north and the east so that even Vologases’ fast light cavalry could not have come at us without half a day’s warning.
Here, now, at the end of the battle season, we were faced by a flood plain laid slick with the first silverings of water. We gathered the bullock wagons on to the only high land and stood about them, trying to see places we could set our tents that might keep them dry for the six months Paetus intended us to stay here.
Our general, of course, did not sleep in a tent; our first duty, even before we dug ditches for the ramparts, pitched the tents or set the palisades, was to cut more timber for his living quarters, float it across the river and help the engineers to erect a house fit for a senator and his family.
Yes, his family. You will not believe me when I tell you that his wife was there, but it is true. His wife, Antonia, who had spent her life learning how to manipulate the socialites of Rome, was there with his son, less than six months old. They sat together that first afternoon in nothing grander than a bullock wagon, stunned to insensibility by cold and mud and unimagined hardship.
We lost three days building quarters for them; three days in which our tents were pitched in a handspan of water, and we were not making dry our grain for the winter, or exploringthe land, except for a few scouts — Horgias was one — who were sent out to check the most likely routes Vologases would take when he came.
When, not if — for we were certain that the King of Kings knew we were here; how could he not when we had marched two legions across the Euphrates? And we knew we were not yet ready to face him.
We finished the ramparts in the second half of the month. I remember stopping at the end of the last ditch some time in the late morning and glancing up at the wide winter moon that hung white as a slug in the sky.
I jammed my mattock into the mud at my feet, spat away a mouthful of dirt and took a long drink of gritty water from the skin at my belt.
Blood smeared where my hands had been and, looking down, I saw that the blisters on both palms had burst, and long, deep cracks ran from each.
The pain was old and hot, and I had not so much forgotten it as lost it in the greater discomfort of the day. I risked a glance down at my feet and was glad they were lost in the mud for they made my hands look pretty by comparison. I was walking on soles turned to waterlogged sponge and dreaded the morning when I woke to find the skin peeled completely away, leaving raw flesh and bone beneath.
The sounds of iron hacking at soil slowed around me, and stopped. At our feet, the raw earth was open deep enough to swallow a man, and wide enough for me to lie inside with head and feet tight to each wall. Above the ditches, on the inner side, earth ramparts rose eight feet above the ground.
Syrion gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘The river’ll have to rise higher than a man to top that.’
‘And even if it does,’ said Rufus, ‘the egress channels will carry everything away. It’ll have to flood in here higher than our knees to reach the tents.’
‘Higher than your knees, maybe,’ Sarapammon said. ‘That’s barely past the ankles for the rest of us.’
That wasn’t true, or not all of it, but it didn’t matter; we were in jovial mood again, with the prospect of drier nights and a fire that might light and hold. I can’t begin to tell you the relief of that; winters on the Hawk mountains might have hardened us to cold and endurance, but we had never before gone without fire and cooked food and the last half-month had worn us down.
Now, we had a watertight quarter-stores packed with enough food to last us the winter, and a sheltered paddock for the horses with stalls to one side and even they had begun to fill out on good fodder so that their ribs did not stare so through their coats and their eyes were bright once again.
A thread of smoke rose from just beyond the horse paddocks. I smelled the scent of applewood amidst the oak, and the first savoury rush of cooking, and my mouth flooded with spit just as my stomach griped, and I turned and ‘Vologases is coming! The King of Kings! Parthia’s army!’
That was Horgias, riding my bay mare’s youngest son, who had been born chestnut and was turning a fine rose grey as he aged. I gave him as a gift after Proclion’s death, and wished I had given him sooner, only that he was not broken before that, and in truth I had considered giving him to Cadus.
Horgias had seemed grateful at the time, in so far as he ever seemed to enjoy anything these days. He had promised to take best care of him, and treat him as I might have done myself. Just now, he was riding him harder than I had ever seen a man drive a horse.
He hauled to a bloody halt by the standards and flung himself out of the saddle, calling the camp alarm.