I came to the end of the rising ground, where we had set a cord across the route to mark a turning point. I spun the filly, careful of her mouth, turned to look at the last three targets — and saw Pantera leaning against the last, chewing on a stalk of grass that he must have picked up further down the hill.
‘That was well done,’ he said.
I felt myself flush. Of all the men I had not wanted to see me try and fail, Pantera was the first.
He raised one shoulder in a kind of apology. ‘It took me two years of practice,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hit one in thirty the first few times, and that was on a steady gelding.’
I glowered: I didn’t want his praise any more than I wanted his advice. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.
‘Vespasian is in Antioch,’ he said; just that. I frowned, not knowing the name.
‘The new governor of Syria.’ Pantera pushed himself upright. ‘The man who will be your new general, when you finally reinstate your legion. He has arrived here from Greece.’
‘He sailed? In this weather?’ I had thought he sounded stupid. This confirmed it.
Horgias was on a fine dark colt, the colour of burnt almonds. He brought him over, riding with his legs, his hands barely a feather’s weight touch on the reins.
‘He can’t have sailed in,’ he said. ‘The sea lanes won’t open for another month. He must have marched overland.’
Pantera inclined his head. ‘He did.’
‘He came overland from Greece?’ Not a complete idiot, then. Whatever route he took, that journey could not have been a good one, nor easily accomplished. ‘Why are you telling us this? He’s the second son of a tax collector wholets marketeers throw turnips at him. He’s finished before he starts.’
Pantera regarded me for a while, running his tongue round his teeth. ‘You may choose to believe that,’ he said at length. ‘But you are required to present yourselves to him in Antioch by the month’s end. I suggest you go in legionary uniform.’
In uniform, therefore, we presented ourselves to the centurion of the Xth who stood guard outside the door of the general’s quarters in Antioch five days later.
As she had predicted, Hypatia had left the night before us, heading overland for Alexandria. I had been surprisingly sorry to see her go. Pantera had accompanied us on the road to Antioch, with — of course — Mergus and Estaph, Moshe and Simeon as our outriders. I was coming to think of them as I might think of another man’s hounds; safe and dependable, if sometimes irritating.
Arriving, we were clean and sober and tired and wary of everyone and everything. We were angry, too, because the thing Pantera had omitted to mention was that he was also required to present himself to the new general, and he had gone in first.
And he had been in for an hour and had not yet come out.
A gong sounded from inside. The centurion unhitched his gaze from the horizon on which it had been resting and stared at Horgias and me as if we had recently crawled out of the sewers.
‘You were with the Twelfth at Beth Horon?’
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘And yet you lived?’
I sucked in a breath. Horgias leaned in to my shoulder and said, ‘By the gods’ gift we lived, that we might recover our Eagle and the honour of our legion.’ He left no room for question or comment.
The door opened. Pantera walked out, and did not favour us with his gaze. The centurion held us both a moment longer, then cracked a salute and let us in.
We stepped from the cool damp of a Syrian spring into the warmth of a hypocaust-heated room. The dry air was scented with smokes of sandalwood, rosemary and something else peppery that caught the back of my nose and made me sneeze, but not unpleasantly.
A slave took our riding cloaks and our swords and led us down a long corridor paved in marble, with friezes on the walls of other generals in other times; Gallus wasn’t there, nor Corbulo, and it occurred to me that perhaps all the men depicted in such detail on horseback or on foot, defeating Parthians, Syrians and Hebrews, had never truly existed, but were safely imaginary.
Closed double doors ten feet wide kept the new general safe. Another centurion guarded it, from the Vth. He didn’t ask if we had survived Beth Horon. He didn’t speak at all, but only nodded and rapped and let us through to the steward inside who hurried us on to stand before a plain wooden desk such as senators and procurators carry with them on long journeys, and behind it a plain wooden camp stool with a canvas seat and no back, and seated on that… a man who looked and smelled as if he had just walked in from a hard-fought campaign, or a difficult mountain crossing, which can often amount to the same thing.
There was no incense to be found in here, only the stained air of leather and sweat-sweetened iron and the subtle tones of wood smoke that cling to a man from morning to night when he lives with the legion.
Thus we came at last before Titus Flavius Vespasianus, propraetorian legate of the army of Judaea and governor of Syria, second son of a provincial tax collector and the man who had fallen asleep during Nero’s recital and lived to tellof it; the man who had left a trail of mud across the exquisite red and white mosaic of the floor.
Caesennius Paetus would never have done such a thing.
‘Welcome!’ A big, bluff man he was, with soldier’s hands, rough from years spent digging ramparts, or if not that, then something close. He wore mail over his tunic, rubbed gossamer-fine at the armpits and neck, with flecks of rust from a winter’s journey.
His face was a round ruin of wind and sun, red about the cheeks, even now, in the pleasant warmth of his study. His eyes were sharp, more like a wolf’s than a hound’s, so that they saw round the edges of a man, and knew the mettle of his soul. I found my own colour rising, remembering what I had thought of him.
He grinned. ‘Shall we get it over with? I am the younger son of a tax farmer, the mule-driver who got a governorship in Africa and came out of it broke, with vegetables hurtling about his ears. I served in Britain but got the south coast, where were only women hiding in stone forts, not the wild bear-warriors of the Eceni who cut the balls off their living prisoners and stuffed their throats with them before they died. It’s all true. Every word you have heard. Except’ — and he was not grinning now — ‘that they say I shall do to the legions of the east what Paetus did. That is not true at all.’
As he spoke, he came round the desk and leaned his hips against it with his palms flat on the oak behind him. His eyes were level with mine; grey eyes, red at the edges from the wind. They were not the eyes of a man who runs from his enemies.
‘I give you my word here and now, on the honour of my name, which matters to me if not to you, that I will never concede defeat to any man or any army. Not even to the King of Kings of Parthia. Especially not to him. You have seen Vologases, I understand?’
He was looking at Horgias, who said nothing, only slid his gaze sideways to me. And so I had to find my tongue from whatever place halfway down my throat it had lodged itself. ‘I have, lord,’ I said.
‘What did you think of him? No, I am forgetting myself. Sit, sit! And take some wine. Anodyces, if you would be so kind? Here. And here. And now, in comfort, what do you think of Vologases and his hold over his Parthian hordes?’
I’d had a few moments’ respite while the steward poured the wine and used them to sift through the truths and compare them to the slanderous rumours: that Vespasian was not bred of senate stock; that he was not corrupt, and so had failed to make a fortune in his time as a governor in Africa; that he had fought hard and well in Britain; that he was, in short, a man who actually stood a chance of leading the legions to victory against the Hebrews.
Of all that I had expected through the winter in Caesarea and in the three days’ hard ride to get here, this was not part of it.
The steward, Anodyces, had pressed a pewter cup into my hand with a slow deliberation that balanced his master’s staccato rapidity. I lifted it now. The wine was dry and sucked at my tongue. I held it in my mouth a moment before I answered the sane, straightforward question he had asked.