Eight of the Parthians had taken him down, so they said, and he had killed three of them. One of those who had survived had used an axe on his left leg and left it splintered so that he would have died had not Vologases ordered the battle’s end just as the axemen were going to kill him.
Lupus and Cadus had carried Syrion from the field and he had not walked since. On the march back, the bone-setters said he might heal well enough to march again if the bone didn’t go bad. They had pulled the leg straight at the cost of much blood and splinted it with rosemary on either side to keep it sweet. Even so, those of us who cared for him were ordered to lift the covers and sniff daily around the wound. They said the fruitiness and stench of old meat we had scented from the start were both signs of wellness, and that it was the smell of mouse droppings we should fear.
It had been hard to imagine the scent of mouse droppings when we were on the march, but mice and rats had clearly taken over the barracks as soon as the VIth had marched out. We had sent some of the younger men to buy as many cats as they could find. They had not yet returned.
I smelled something now, growing stronger as Syrion sat up to drink. I moved to lift the linen sheet that covered him.
‘Don’t.’ He caught my hand.
‘I need to smell…’
‘You don’t. Trust me; you don’t.’
For the first time since we’d marched under the yoke, his eyes were the perfect blue-grey that I remembered from our first days in the Hawk mountains, when the sky had been thesame colour and it had seemed as if we saw through him to the spirits of the place.
He said, ‘Is there armour to be found anywhere in the camp?’
‘There are six mail shirts in the quartermaster’s stores. I found them when I did the inventory.’
‘Would I be permitted to wear one, do you think? For only a short time. And a sword?’
‘Syrion, why-’
‘Because you’re my friend and I can ask these things of you. Would you get them?’
I backed away from the certainty in his gaze, and all the things there that I didn’t want to read. The stores were a dozen paces from the infirmary. I was there and back in a hundred heartbeats. I picked up a whetstone for the sword from the box by the door as I left; already a part of me knew what he planned.
There were tunics and sandals, and it took the time perhaps to turn a single marched circuit of the parade ground for me to dress him and sling the gladius at his hip. I settled the sandal on one foot but not the other; it was too swollen to take the thongs, and the flesh was green-tinged that had yesterday been reddish-purple. The smell of mice was no greater than the smell of sweat and leaked urine, but it was there.
He whetted the blade while I fixed the single sandal, and then he used my shoulder to stand.
‘Where?’ I asked, and did not dare say more. To be what he needed, I had to pretend not to know what he planned, even to myself.
‘I haven’t seen this place. Is there a high tower, from which I could view the sunset? Or a hill, perhaps?’
‘The officers’ quarters are in a tower. It’s three storeys high. They’re all in a meeting in the governor’s residence half a mile away.’
‘Perfect.’ His lips were a reddish-blue; he pulled them into a kind of smile. ‘Can you take me, do you think, without attracting undue attention?’
I doubted that, but wasn’t going to say so. Instead, I offered a shoulder for him to lean on, and sent prayers to Helios and the gods of death that we might pass across the camp unhindered by well-wishers or naysayers or anyone who might delay us.
The gods answered my plea; they always do, I have found, if the request is not impossible, and is asked with sufficient passion.
In a haze of thanks and grief, therefore, I brought Syrion unhampered to the three-storeyed tower that some former governor had built for his legions in Antioch. I opened the unlocked door, and half carried him up three flights of stone steps and then a half-flight that took us on to the roof with its low three-foot wall and the small sheltered standing box made of oak, in which the night watch might light a brazier and shelter from the elements and against which Syrion was able to lean, that he might stand facing west and see what was there.
It was worth having come for; all of it. Above the noise and murmur of the camp, we were held in our own silence. We were above, too, the many-layered stench of a city in the afternoon when the middens have ripened all day and leak their odour as an old carcass leaks blood. Here, we were bathed only in the scent of dusk that is the same everywhere: of dew falling, and the air growing cold.
And from the horizon, Helios’ dying rays blessed us with a range and purity of colour the like of which I had never seen. Reds fired the core, scarlet, vermilion and deep, deep crimson, the colour of perfect blood, but it was the sky around that touched us; a haze of old blue and purple, of peach and apricot and amber so close and so vibrant that we could havereached out to grasp the threads and woven them into a cloak to keep a man safe for life. Or to see him into the afterlife.
I heard Syrion gasp a little, like a man who has found love late in life, and knows not how to ride it, and then he saw my face, and the pain that was on it, and smiled.
‘I choose this. You know that.’
‘I do.’
‘And everyone else must know it too. Tell them I chose the swift death of a legionary, of a soldier, not the slow death of a sick man in a bed. And that I love the Twelfth and will not set my shade to harm it.’
I tried to speak, tried to say that none of us feared his shade, or thought he would trouble us, even if he had not died in battle. But my throat had closed and the words were a croak, and my vision blurred as Syrion lifted his new-whetted blade — so sharp that the sun itself split on the blade, and spun away in a thousand dancing motes of light — and raised the hem of the mail shirt so that he might angle the blade up beneath it, and rest the point just below his breastbone.
‘Do you want me to…’ Now, at the end, I had speech.
Syrion shook his head. His face was a mask of pain, but his smile was still true and certain. ‘I’ve planned this for half a month. I can do it.’
And he did. He settled both hands on the hilt, took a breath and gave a small, sharp jerk in and up, hard, and pitched himself forward to fall on to his knees and then on to his face, so that the last fall pushed the blade on up through his heart and out of his back, to tent the chain mail away from his body.
It was good. It was fast, but not immediate. I knelt in the tide of blood that spilled from his mouth and nose, and gently took his shoulder and rolled him on to his side.
His eyes were open, and still aware as I spoke the invocation to the gods.
‘ Given of the god,
Given to the god,
Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.
May you journey safely to your destination.’
We burned him on a pyre of Syrian wood; that much the local men gave us, ungrudging, when they knew what had happened.
Every whole and living man of the XIIth — all two hundred and eighteen of us — turned out to see him turn to smoke and rise to the night sky. The fire lasted a day and a night, so high did we pile it. When I go, I want it to be like that.
Lupus found me later that evening, sitting as near as I could to the blistering heat. He didn’t lay a hand on my shoulder, or take my arm, or any of the things men did in sorrow, but there was a catch in his voice when he spoke. ‘We’ll miss him.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’ll need to be replaced. Him and all the others. There are barely enough men left of the Twelfth to make three centuries. We discussed this in the commanders’ meeting all day and we have a dilemma: we could put the bulk of your number into the first cohort, but then only two or three of you would be centurions when there are at least fifteen who are fit. Alternatively, we could spread you throughout the legion, with those fifteen each leading their own centuries. But that would mean that you would all be serving alongside new men.’