We put up a brisk pace over clear, dry ground, hard with thefirst frosts of winter, and we were dug in and camped with our latrines dug and as much comfort as we allowed ourselves by the time the sun poured its last benediction across us.
A deep indigo blue spread across the evening sky, wisping to lavender and lilac at its edges with spear points of cinnamon, bronze and amber. I sat warming my hands at the embers of our cook-fire, watching the colours change.
‘You’re not sleeping?’ Tears came to stand behind me; I felt the touch of his hand on my shoulder.
‘Later.’ I was going to sleep; I knew I would fight badly without, but it was hard to let go of the evening.
Tears came to sit on the log next to me, so that his warmth joined the warmth of the fire. His beauty made me ache sometimes, such perfection in a living man, and the thought that it must be marred, broken, deprived of life was too dreadful to contemplate.
He said, ‘Are you afraid?’
‘Not for myself.’ I had been looking at him and so in that moment it was true; but then the moment was gone and I shook my head, and I said, ‘Yes, of course I’m afraid. How could I not be? We’re going to fight without our Eagle against Vologases’ mounted cavalry. This is real fighting, not a skirmish in a forest.’ The fire leapt a little, sending sparks into the velvet night. It gave me the courage to speak on. ‘Even so, we do this for the best of reasons. If the gods honour courage, they will honour that. If they do not…’
‘They would not be true gods.’ He was mocking me, gently; Tears’ gods were of river and vine and their gift was the spark that quickens a seed, not the moment of martial valour that lifts a man beyond himself. Mine had been the same, once, until a night on the Hawk mountains had changed me. I was not unhappy with who I had become.
I said, ‘You could have taken the message to Corbulo. Nobody would have thought less of you for it.’
‘I would. I couldn’t live with myself if you died and I was not there to stop it, or had not already died trying to keep you alive.’
He said it so calmly, with such little fuss, that the words had sailed over me before their meaning struck my heart.
I shuddered then, I think; certainly my vision swam. In all the time we had lived together, eaten together, fought together, killed and been hurt, bound each other’s wounds, slept within each other’s reach… in all that time, Tears had never said aloud that he held me other than anyone else in our unit. I had not said it of him, either, but everyone knew.
I turned to him, away from the last light of the sun. I must have looked wretched, for he put out his arm and drew me in to lean against his shoulder.
Always, I had been the stronger, the one to look out for him. To have it so very different left me worse than I had been.
I couldn’t speak, and so he spoke for me, answering the question I could not ask. ‘I’m your shield-man. Why else do I live?’ His eyes sparked with a depth of humour I had rarely seen in him before, but I couldn’t join him. I was too thrown.
I said, ‘Only that keeps you here? Only duty?’ It hadn’t sounded like duty.
‘No.’ He was serious now. ‘Not only that.’
‘Why did I not know?’
‘You didn’t ask.’ He kissed my head, dry-lipped, fast. ‘And I didn’t tell you. I was afraid, I think. And unsure.’
‘Of me?’
‘And of myself. Of how to be. Even without all that passed on the mountain, I am not Horgias or Proclion, to lie easily with the first man who asks.’
‘I think you do them both an injustice.’
‘True. Better to say I am not Syrion, to take a different girl to bed for each day of the month, and begin at the start againwith the first at the next new moon and swear to her that the sun rises in her eyes alone.’
That was a gross calumny, but Tears was laughing as he said it, and so I eased free of his embrace and sat up, and saw him with fresh eyes. He was not a boy any more, broken on a mountain, but a man, with the heart of a warrior, and the quiet, easy laughter that had long ago replaced his fear.
‘We have only one night,’ I said, and my throat was so dry the words came out crushed to sand.
‘I know. And if we don’t sleep, we may not fight as well tomorrow.’
‘I think… we’ll fight well enough. We may fight better.’
I was lying, and he knew it. He raised one brow high, in perfect mockery of Lupus. ‘Show me then,’ he said, and, rising, took my hand and led me away from the tents to a place I had not seen before, that he must have found beforehand. It was quiet and dry and out of the wind, and we saw the last of the sun and its first faint rising and in between we let loose such passion as I had never dreamed of.
And I did face the morning more awake, more alive than I had ever been.
Chapter Nineteen
The last shreds of night held our backs. The Taurus Mountains held our two flanks. Spread out between them, we of the XIIth held a line as straight and true as any legion ever held.
Cadus held his first cohort in the centre. We, the sixth cohort, held the right flank. Syrion held the open palm of Jupiter to my right, and now, for the first time, he wore a muleskin draped about his shoulders, its head covering his helmet, its hooved feet crossed at his breast. He must have spent a hundred private hours curing it, softening it, polishing the hide until it gleamed a rich, deep oaken-brown. We adored him for that; the whole legion did. Our only regret was that the IVth had not seen it.
The enemy came towards us thick as mercury poured into a channel; a shimmering tide oozing from the furnace of the risen sun into the pass below us. I felt Syrion tighten his grip on the banner haft, we were that close, that closely knit. On my left, I felt Tears… I felt him breathe, I felt his heartbeat, I felt when he smiled, and when he did my soul sang in joy and glory and my only regret — I swear this to you now asthe perfect truth — my sole regret was that the night could not have lasted longer.
I did not crave another night, only that the one we had might have been stretched a little, giving us time to learn more of each other, and perhaps with more privacy than a hollow in the woods where we could hear that other men were trying to sleep as easily as they could hear that we were not.
It was Horgias I felt for most. I had had trouble meeting his eye over the morning cook-fires, until he came up and hit me a glancing blow across the top of my head and said, ‘That’s for waiting so long, idiot!’ which made the world right again. Which made it perfect, really.
And then Cadus had come to me as I was unpacking my horn, a sharp-edged Cadus, shining as if he, too, had spent the night bathing his soul.
He looked me up and down and it seemed he liked what he saw. ‘You’ve come a long way since Hyrcania,’ he said.
I nodded; what was there to say?
‘Do you love battle yet?’ he asked, and when I frowned at him, not understanding, he eyed me sideways and said, ‘Pantera said you would grow to love warfare, given time.’
‘He never said it to me.’
‘What point, when you hated him?’
‘I didn’t hate him. I was awed by him. I wanted to do what he could do, to be what he was.’ I would have said that I loved him, but this morning my heart would not let that be true.
Cadus grinned. ‘I know. And he knew. But you hated him too. If he’d said it, you’d have deserted there and then just to prove him wrong. Or got yourself killed for the same reason.’
‘So you ask now, when death is certain.’ I had rolled my shoulders and cracked my knuckles and looked about me at the camp; at our tents, left in rule-straight order as we left them every ordinary day, because today of all days we werenot going to abandon discipline; at the horse lines, where the bay mare waited, the one that had been given me in Hyrcania, and would likely be back with a Parthian master by nightfall. I did not begrudge them that; the Parthians are good to their horses and she had served me well. A part of me hoped that Vologases, King of Kings, might know her, and recognize her sons by their brands, and take them all into his army.