‘I won’t turn away from you, First Spear, not unless they chase me away. I’ll watch you and your men die, and I’ll take your story back to the legion. I will find my own path to glory, when the time is right. And I will see you again. In Hades.’
1
February AD 185
‘You’re confident that’s our landfall, Navarchus?’
The hard-faced offquestion with a look of disbelief and a curt nod, his voice harsh from years of barking commands at his crew before his promotion from ship’s trierarchus to commander of the fleet.
‘Yes, Procurator. Completely confident.’
The equestrian official turned back to the soldier standing alongside him, his grey-flecked hair ruffled by the wind as he raised a hand and pointed out over the ship’s bow.
‘As I said, there it is, Legatus. Seleucia.’
Legatus Gaius Rutilius Scaurus stared out over the warship’s prow as it sliced through the ocean under the urging of the massive vessel’s banked oars, looking past the massive bolt thrower that dominated the vessel’s bow, raising a hand to shield his grey eyes from the winter sun’s glare. A line of mountains was just visible on the eastern horizon, seemingly rising from the sea to block their course, their bases almost invisible in the sea’s haze.
‘The gateway to the east. Well done, Cassius Ravilla, you and your men have performed your task admirably, given the circumstances.’
The fleet’s navarchus turned his bearded frown from procurator to legatus for a moment, then shook his head and walked slowly away from the two men, his face taking on the look of a man hunting for someone on whom to exercise his considerable irritation. The vessel’s trierarchus and his centurion turned and walked away towards the Victoria’s stern with the look of men earnestly discussing the finer points of ship handling, prompting a knowing smile from Scaurus.
‘He’s still not the happiest of men, is he?’
Ravilla shook his head, the wind ruffling his thick black hair.
‘He swears that if he’d not made sure we made a decent sacrifice to Neptune every time we made land safely, we’d all have been at the bottom of the ocean a month ago. Apparently the weather at this end of the Middle Sea hasn’t been this quiet in the winter closed season for all the years he’s served in the navy.’
Scaurus grinned at the grizzled sailor’s back as he stooped to berate one of the flagship’s oarsmen for some small infringement.
‘Has he considered that he might simply be terrifying the waves into submission?’
He looked back over the vessel’s stern at the line of ships following in their wake at precise four-hundred-pace intervals.
‘After all, he seems to have your fleet’s trierarchi drilled to within an inch of their collective lives.’
The procurator shook his head ruefully.
‘I know. I sometimes wonder which one of us is really in command of the fleet.’
His answer was a hollow laugh.
‘Welcome to my world. Have you ever seen your man there and my first spear talking to each other? They’re like two fighting dogs sniffing each other’s backsides and trying to work out which of them would win if it came to blows. And trust me, when Julius decides that my cohorts are to do a thing in a certain way, that’s the way in which that thing will be done, with no ifs or buts. I’m allowed the luxury of determining our strategy, and after that …’
‘You’re in the hands of the professionals?’
‘Exactly.’
Ravilla looked at him in silence for a moment.
‘You said cohorts, legatus, rather than legion. And while my father told me at great length never to pry into another man’s business when I was a child …’
He left the question hanging in the crisp sea air rather than asking it directly.
‘You’d like to know exactly how it is that a man wearing the same thin stripe as the one on your tunic ends up in command of one of the emperor’s legions.’
Ravilla shrugged.
‘You’ll admit that it is something of a curiosity? Of course I’ve heard the stories of how Marcus Aurelius sometimes gave command of his legions to legion first spears who’d been promoted to the equestrian class during the German War, but I thought that such egalitarianism had been quietly forgotten once Commodus had made peace with the tribes after his father’s death. The status quo has been restored, and to command a legion anywhere other than Egypt, a man must once again be of the senatorial class, if not already actually in possession of his father’s ring and death mask. And suddenly here you are, quite obviously an equestrian like me, and yet blessed with a legion!’
Scaurus smiled tightly.
‘And you’d like to know the secret. How does a man make that impossible leap to fame and fortune without first putting a thick stripe on his tunic?’
‘Of course.’
The legatus shook his head.
‘First you’d have to provide a man close to the throne a service that would show him how valuable you could be to him in the future. Like giving him the opportunity to take the place of the emperor’s most trusted adviser, that kind of thing.’
Ravilla raised his eyebrows.
‘You were part of that?’
Scaurus shrugged in his turn.
‘It’s not something I’ll readily admit to having participated in, but let’s say, just for the sake of the discussion, that I was.’
‘Then the man who replaced the Praetorian Prefect must owe you a huge debt.’
‘And you think that’s it? The gift of a legion as the reward for the chance to take ultimate power?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
The legatus shook his head.
‘Who could be more dangerous than a man ruthless enough to engineer the death of the man he seeks to supplant? Why would he leave anyone who was part of the act alive to tell the story?’
Ravilla nodded slowly.
‘I take your point. Unless he wanted more from the men in question?’
‘Indeed. It seems that our particular capabilities were too valuable to be discarded, once we’d served our initial purposes. See my tribune there?’
The procurator frowned at the change in conversational focus, glancing down the ship’s length at the tall, well-muscled figure of a military tribune clad in a shining bronze breast plate and bearing his usual two swords, one an infantry gladius with a magnificent eagle’s head pommel. Alongside him stood an older soldier wearing the scaled armour and cross-crested helmet of a legion centurion; the two officers engaged in the routine inspection of the centurion’s men.
‘Yes. He seems a good enough man, if a little … taciturn. The centurion with him though, now there’s a dangerous man.’
‘Cotta? He’s sudden death with any weapon you could mention, but the tribune?’
Scaurus grinned at Ravilla.
‘Tribune Corvus could take Cotta to pieces, literally, in the span of a dozen heartbeats. His men call him “Two Knives”, because he fights in the style of an old-fashioned dimachaerus. He was taught by a champion gladiator of some fame, a big man who, like Corvus there, always fought with two swords. You might have seen the man’s recent and rather spectacular comeback appearance in the Flavian arena?’
‘You don’t mean …’
Ravilla whispered the gladiator’s name in an awed tone, and when Scaurus nodded in reply, his face took on a fresh expression of amazement. The legatus smiled at his colleague’s genuine astonishment.