It was not built for easy demolition. Two of Crescens’ men were engineers, part of the corps that had built it. They went across and back on their hands and knees, examining the intricate ties that held it. In other days I might have marvelled at their skill, to build a bridge fit to take two legions and all their carts, with no nails, but only wooden joints; now, I was impatient for it to be gone.
Coming back to us, they saluted me as if I were a centurion. They had heard, of course, of the carnage at Lizard Pass, and were ashamed to have been left out of it, even as they gave thanks, moment by moment, for the continuation of their lives.
The eldest, a man near to retirement, said, ‘We’ll need a man to go across to the other bank and hammer out the pegs or it won’t fall.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Nobody argued with me.
I took a pole axe and crossed over the bridge, blindly. In my mind, I saw Lupus, speared through the chest; Syrion, dying with an axe in his head, Rufus cut in two by a sword… in the worst moments, I saw Tears and Horgias ambushed, taken, tortured; dead.
The ties that fixed the bridge were great wooden pegs as thick as a man’s arm, hammered through the ends of the trunks and into the arch — three of them in all.
I swung the pole axe and felt it hit the first one with a noise like the crack of a tree in a storm. The peg moved barely at all. I swung again, and again, each time imagining a Parthian head beneath the axe, broken like a melon at each hammering impact. And again, and again; I slaughtered two units of them to get the first peg out. My arms were burning. My head was spinning. My ears rang from the sound. I began on the second peg.
Perhaps because I was thinking of the Parthians, I was slow to hear them coming. Or I wanted to die: in the time since, I have thought that might have been true. Whichever was the case, I didn’t know to be alarmed until I heard Crescens calling me, shouting my name over and over.
‘Demalion! Demalion of the Twelfth! Get back over here, they’re coming!’
We had no archers for cover; they had all given their lives at the pass, on the first day, or the second. The Parthians, of course, had archers of their own.
As I hammered at the second peg, the men of the IVth threw their spears, their axes, their hammers, but the river was as wide as two trees laid end to end; few of the weapons reached the far side and even then they did no harm. I hit the third peg, and it was looser; it came free in three strokes. I shouted in triumph then, I think; certainly I felt the first of the logs begin to falter and to fall, and saw on the faces of Crescens and his men that I had succeeded in breaking the bridge. And that I was to die for it.
I spun, swinging the pole axe by the very end of its haft, and carried on spinning, so that I was turning like a child’s toy, with a hammer’s head of lethal iron describing a circle around me, eight feet out. In a battlefield, it might have worked for a moment or two, until a brave man blocked it with a shield and his fellows powered down its length to kill me. Here, a squadron of Parthian light cavalry made a circlearound me, and simply leaned on their saddles, and waited until I grew tired.
Seeing them gave me strength for perhaps four revolutions more than I might otherwise have managed, and that, in turn, gave me time to find the gap through which I might escape.
An older man with greyed moustaches on a liver chestnut mare was flanked on both sides by his sons, men who were mirrors to the old man, but twenty years younger. Between him and each of them was a gap.
I picked the one to my right, where I might come at his sword hand, but his son’s shield. Just before I had to give up my manic spinning, I lurched back, and then forward, and used the extra power to throw the hammer at the greybeard’s head. I hurtled after, too fast to see if I had killed him or his son, concerned only with drawing my own blade in time.
‘ Ha! ’ I reached the horses, and stabbed up, towards the unprotected belly. The mare skittered sideways. I scented open air, and saw the remains of the bridge, and the men on the far side, waiting with their arms outstretched, as if to draw me over to them.
I heard the rush of the river, and a voice that hollered my name and Black. A torrent of blackness with pain at its heart. I remember falling. I do not remember hitting the earth.
‘… doesn’t matter. We have no restitution, nothing to do but act as we are told.’
‘Or refuse.’
‘And then die, yes. All of us. To no good effect.’
Two voices argued back and forth across my head. They were Lupus and Cadus, and I thought I heard Syrion more distantly, speaking of the battle, and so I knew that I had died, only I did not expect death to carry so many small discomforts, or so great a mass of pain.
A gritty, unkempt sheepskin lay beneath my unclothed skin. I knew by its smell that it was badly cured and did not know how the gods could possibly be so lax. I smelled vomit, too, which was as bad.
I felt stones dig into my ribs where the sheepskin ended and the hard, cold ground began. I felt the wind on my back, the sear and ache of four-day-old wounds from the battle we had fought that I had not noticed at the time, and the far greater ache, the thunderous, thundering pain of a wound at the back of my head. My hair felt tight, pulled by clotted blood. I thought of baths, and wondered that the gods did not have them.
I tried to roll over, to ask.
‘Demalion! No!’
A dozen rough hands held me down. Cadus’ face loomed close to my own. ‘Don’t try to get up yet. You’re not fit.’
I struggled to make his face hold still. ‘How not fit?’ In my hampered state, I could not see how death was something for which a man had to prepare, other than stepping on to a battlefield. Or over a bridge. Memory came back to me in patches. I struggled to fit them to a whole.
Seeing it, Cadus said, ‘You’re in the Parthian lines. You are a prisoner, as we are.’
A long, sullen moment while I drank that in. Eventually, ‘How?’
They told me, each hindered by his own shame, and I struggled to fit these patches, too, to a whole image.
When I had, it was not so very different from my own capture, only that it had taken longer, and the encirclement had been more savage, so that some men had died — one was Rufus, who had hurled himself at their spear-fence, trying to break it — and some men had been badly injured: Syrion’s leg was broken and he was being carried on a litter provided by the Parthians. At least legionaries carried it.
But the rest were alive, who had expected to die, and nobody knew why unless we were to be crucified in a line facing the Roman camp across the river, which is exactly what we would have done to vanquished prisoners of an army that had dared to oppose us.
There seemed no point in mentioning that, when everybody knew. I sat with Cadus, who had a bruise the size of a goose egg on his temple and skin paled to a sweat-beaded green, but seemed otherwise unharmed.
‘Does Vologases know…’ I sought a way of saying what I needed, cautiously, in case we were overheard. ‘Does he know of Horgias and Tears?’
Lupus said. ‘None of us has told him.’ He had broken his collarbone on the left. His face was a dirty grey-white that became simply white whenever he moved. He moved now, to fetch me water, when he could have called one of the others to do it, and when he handed me the jug with his one good hand he would not meet my eye, only said, ‘You destroyed the bridge. That was well done.’
‘Was it?’ I drank, and felt cold trickle down to my stomach and was not sick. Lupus watched, still looking anywhere but at my face.
I set down the mug. ‘Lupus, there is no shame in this. You offered your lives to the gods and to the enemy. It’s not your fault that Vologases chose not to take them. Don’t let him shame you by it.’