‘Drink,’ said Lupus tightly, ‘and wait until your head is better. Then we can talk of who is shamed, and what might come of it.’
We languished half a day during which I drank a great deal of water, and ate sparingly, and began slowly to feel less ill.
Our guards did not address us, but they did not mistreat us either. We did not speak much amongst ourselves; men awaiting crucifixion find little to say.
Near dusk, a mounted officer approached. His face was compressed, top to bottom, his cheeks wide, his eyes small. He wore Vologases’ sign of the silver elephant on a blue ground, but he also wore a badge of a bear’s head in black and white that I had not seen before.
He dismounted and saluted Cadus, Lupus and myself. In sing-song Greek he said, ‘Please to accompany me. The King of Kings will speak to you.’
Vologases’ tent was larger than any I had ever seen, of silk so thick, so deeply hued, it was as if night itself lay on the tent poles. We were invited to enter the first of its many rooms, offered seating on benches padded with horse hide, and given peach wine to drink out of golden goblets. We ate dates and olives and small pieces of smoked ham that came apart in our mouths and spilled the taste of meat and spices freely.
‘If they had given me this when first I woke,’ I murmured to Lupus, ‘I would have believed myself dead far longer.’
A horn answered for him, or perhaps a flute, for the notes were high and breathy, and rippled faster than I could have blown. At its summoning, we stood, turned, walked through a lifted tent flap.
Showered by sound, preceded by officers in silk and silver, with the sign of the elephant on its blue ground carried by each man, we came into the presence of Vologases, the King of Kings.
I knelt, because I had done so once before, because Pantera had done so, because it was natural to do so.
A half-breath behind, uncertainly, Lupus and Cadus knelt with me. We did not press our brows to the floor, but we did bow our heads to him, and then raise them again to look on his face, which was not, I am sure, how a prisoner was supposed to behave.
He sat on a seat of oak, marvellously worked, inlaid withgilt and silver, and lapis lazuli, and amber. He wore blue silk with silver and a filet of gold round the battle helm that held his head. His beard was longer than I remembered, and carried white through it, like frost on rock, but his eyes were the same: sharp, light and lively.
They roamed over us now, back and forth.
‘You, and you.’ He pointed with a silvered blade. I saw something viscous run from it, and for a moment thought it blood, until I saw the fruit in his other hand, filling his palm, something green-skinned that I had never seen before. ‘You have knelt to us before.’ His eyes were on me, not Cadus.
‘With Pantera, lord,’ I said. ‘The man known as the Leopard. In Hyrcania. After the death of… the traitor.’
His son, who had not been named then and was as likely unnamed now. I watched a ghosted grief pass over Vologases’ face.
‘Indeed. We gave your companion a horse. A bay mare.’
There were men of my acquaintance who thought I had lied, that she had not been given as a gift by the King of Kings. I was glad, suddenly, that Lupus was behind me. ‘Pantera gave her to me, lord, when he was summoned to Britain. I have her still. She is in the camp across the river.’
‘Then you must return to her and keep her safe from harm. We are told there is a ford across the river.’
I could have denied it, but what point? ‘Yes, lord. Although the river has swollen somewhat since we last crossed it. We had built a bridge.’
‘Which you destroyed yesterday. We watched you. Our archers begged to be allowed to use you for their practice. They said a dozen men could have hit you three times each before you fell.’
‘I’m sure they could have done, lord.’
‘And you knew they were there?’
‘My lord always has archers. In the past, he has always used them.’
This time he had not; and he had taken men prisoner, whom he could have slain. I could not ask why. He showed no inclination to explain, but only observed me, thoughtfully, tapping his knife on the gilded arm of his throne.
At length he said, ‘You will ford the river tomorrow. Take from my army what men and horses you need to get you across safely. But they will return to our side of the river, and you alone will step on to the far bank. You will go to your commander, Paetus’ — he weighed the name with the same kind of acerbic loathing as did Lupus — ‘and you will tell him the terms of your surrender. When he has heard them, you will bring his acceptance back to us. Is that clear?’
‘Most clear, lord.’
I didn’t ask the terms of our surrender, and in truth I didn’t want to know any sooner than I must, but Vologases said, in dismissal, ‘Your General Corbulo gave me his solemn word that not a single Roman legionary would cross to the east of the Euphrates. In crossing the Murad Su, in camping on its northern bank, which faces eastward, your Paetus has broken the oath of a better man. He shall pay for it. His men, however, need not.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Lord, they are taking everything, everything. We can’t let them do it.’
So said Crescens of the IVth, first to speak after me in the commanders’ meeting that Paetus had called on my return to hear the Parthians’ demands.
Paetus stared him down. ‘You misunderstand. They are not taking everything. We may keep the Eagles, and so retain the honour of the legions.’
‘Honour?’ Crescens’ voice cracked. ‘After a surrender! Lord, you cannot mean-’
‘Centurion Crescens, you forget yourself!’ Paetus seemed to have aged overnight. His shoulders fell round a concave chest; his hair, I swear, was whiter; his hands were skin and bone with no strength in the sinews. He held them together, blanching his knuckles, as if he they might betray him did he only let them go.
‘I mean that I am not prepared to see the men of my command crucified before my eyes when by my actions I can prevent it. Corbulo may arrive, but not in time to save the lives of First Centurion Cadus and his men. They are my priority.’
He turned to me and I found his gaze surprisingly sharp. This was a man who had survived two Caesars, who had kept in good odour with Nero when so many others had fallen from grace and paid for it with their lives. He was not a soldier, but he was a politician. ‘As I understand it,’ he said, ‘we will be allowed to keep the standards. Is that true?’
‘Yes, lord; all of them. We must march away leaving everything else behind, the food, the wine, the armour, the weapons, the horses… But first we must build them a bridge, to replace the one that was destroyed.’
‘If we keep the standards, we have not fully surrendered.’ Paetus’ gaze had grown distant, seeing himself back in Rome, speaking to the emperor, setting the record straight, so that he, Paetus, came out of it shining.
He dragged his grey eyes back to mine. ‘You destroyed the bridge?’
‘I did, lord. At your order.’
‘And with my help,’ Crescens said. For a man of the IVth, he was remarkably decent.
Paetus’ smile was thin as a lizard’s. ‘Then by my order and with your help, he shall replace it as the Parthians have requested.’ He stepped in front of me. ‘Clearly you will have to ford the river once more in order to give our agreement to the terms of surrender. But I wish you to return here afterwards, unless it is impossible to do so.’
Unless Vologases has had your head struck from your shoulders, is what he meant.
I swam back across the river, aided by a rope that the Parthians had already strung across. I delivered our acceptance. My head was not struck off.
As I was heading for the river again, the narrow-eyed general of the Parthians came up to me and caught my arm, turning me back to face him.
He had laid his hand on his heart and stared into myeyes. ‘Amongst our people,’ he said, ‘that is, amongst the Parthian tribes from which comes the King of Kings, it is an unthinkable dishonour to take back a gift once it is given. His magnificence wishes you to remember that, in the time that is to come.’