“How can you possibly know that? You are too young to know anything.”
“You must learn to stop talking about the difference in our ages. Even your own philosophers know that it is not how long you look but what you see that discovers truth, and despite my youth, I have seen much. No, don’t bother to ask, just trust a stranger a little while longer.
“Let me tell what I know. I know when politics drew their real father away for days, sometimes months at a time, little Marcus and Publius turned to you and never found you lacking. I know that before you departed, Crassus hadn’t a clue what amounts resided in all his treasuries, because he trusted you to guard each balance down to the last sestercius. I know that the arrival of Lucius Curio stung like the crack of the lorum.”
“Who is telling you these things? Is dominus revealing such intimacies to you?”
“I am a spy, am I not? Let me share one last discovery. I know you are practicing a woman’s handwriting.”
“That was nothing,” I said offhandedly, glancing at the tablets.
“More than this, I know that when Chanina, one of the servant girls who cleans the Regia, takes the refuse to be burned, she sometimes finds crumpled letters; once in a while, after she has been through your quarters, she will discover two notes almost identical in every detail. A letter, copied, then the original and the copy, both discarded, neither sent. Most unusual.”
“I know her. A sweet child. Why would I not have her arrested the minute I return?
“Why not arrest me? Sympathy? Empathy? Caution, perhaps?”
“Melyaket, what game are you playing at?”
“I could ask the same of you,” he said, nodding toward the folded tablets in my lap.
“None that is of your concern.” I slid the wooden frames back inside my satchel. “Tell me how you come to know these things.”
“By looking in your eyes. I see a man who is far from home, a man more worried for the safety of those dear to him than for his own fate.”
“What sane man would not want to protect those he loves?”
Melyaket laughed. “Many men. Men like Orodes and many who follow Crassus. Men who are not like us.”
“Not Crassus himself?”
“Marcus Crassus is beset by demons.”
That this man, hardly more than a boy, should pluck such private truths about my master and me seemingly from the air suddenly made me angry. “I know who I am,” I said, “and what I am doing here; but you, I see no reason to trust a man who betrays first his own people and then the enemy who subverts him.”
“I would never betray my people,” he said, his sensibilities pricked. “You think those schemers in Seleucia and Ctesiphon are my people? Parthia is even less an empire than the one your Roman masters have stitched together with their swords and politics. The 200 families who live on a mountainside village out there at the desert’s edge are my people,” he said, pointing east. “They know nothing of Parthia. Yet this war will come even to them.
“Now, Alexandros, do this. Take one insignificant Sinjar and sprinkle ten thousand of these about the wastes and valleys of a land so vast it rivals whatever part of the world Rome lays claim to. That is Parthia-a kingdom of cook fires separated by hundreds of miles of nothing.”
“Then Parthia is doomed. You have seen the army of Crassus.”
“It is unstoppable, invincible.”
“Is that what you tell your king?”
“No, as a matter of fact, that is what I tell a man called Salar. Yes, Alexandros, I am a spy. You will not believe me, and that is acceptable, but in spite of that truth, here is another: I am not here for Orodes, or Crassus, or any man. I am here for almost the same reason as you.”
“I am here because I am a slave and I have no choice but to be where my master drags me.”
“You are here to try to prevent this war.”
“You have an odd notion of the power granted to slaves. Tell me, spy, if what you say were true, how do our reasons differ?”
“You want to stop the war. I know it is too late for that. Crassus is here. He is not going home. But the sooner he is gone the better.”
“Then why not assassinate him?” I asked him, testing. I felt the sheath of my knife pressing against my hip.
“Because I’m not a fool. Rome is an eagle with many heads. And I like this old bird.”
I relaxed. “So you spy on us while deceiving my master.”
“I will hurt neither of you. I swear it. As for my other duties, what is it that Cassius Longinus thinks I can tell the men in Hatra? They know your numbers; they know your intentions. I have been watching you, Alexandros, even before your master invented his little deception. And what I have seen is a good man, a decent man in a hard circumstance. My surprise came when I beheld yet another. I saw Marcus Crassus through your eyes, Alexandros; the way you care for him, chide him, protect him. A man with reason to hate does not do this. I have seen how he is with you as well. He respects you, seeks your opinion, even your companionship. You should hear how he speaks of you. There is a bond there beyond master and servant.” He pointed at me, a kind accuser. “You have made a place for him in your heart, and a man like you could not do that for anyone who did not deserve such an honor.”
“You are impudent,” I said, but my voice cracked.
“How it must hurt to see him falter. He is a great man, but I can see that once he was greater still. A man such as this deserves an old age with dignity and honor, a graceful decline with grandchildren and great-grandchildren at his feet. Let us find a way to help him rediscover what it is he does not realize he has lost.”
“What do you want?”
“Me? I want to go home to my people, to my village. But for the time being, fate has brought the two of us together, here, now. It is up to us what we do next. I must gain your trust, I know that. Here is a coin that may buy it: you are right not to trust King Abgarus. Osrhoene fears everyone-Armenia to the north, Rome to the west, Parthia to the south and east. Abgarus will bend toward whoever he thinks has advantage, and whoever blinds his eye with the brightest glint of gold. Did you see how richly he was dressed and how his horse was caparisoned? Gifts from Orodes. Crassus trusts you. He will be more likely to believe that I am here for your cause if he hears it from you, not me.”
“You are here for our cause?”
“You asked what I want, Alexandros. I want the one thing that will cost the least amount of lives in the days ahead. Your army is invincible. I want it far from Sinjar. I want to help your master win this war.”
•••
After more weeks of drilling and marching and training, at the start of Aprilis, Crassus assembled the army. He explained to his legates and centurions that the main settlements most likely to welcome our advance were not to be found along the main river but were spread along the length of a gentler tributary several days’ march east. Our mission was to garrison these towns, destroy any resistance met along the way and create a base of operations from which we could learn more about the land and the people. Cassius asked once again why not fight on to the capital. Dominus agreed with his quaestor that it could easily be done-so feeble was the resistance he expected to encounter, it would take only a matter of weeks before the war was over and the spoils were oppressing the ox carts. But he had made a promise he would not break. “I will not enter Ctesiphon,” he told his commanders, “without my son at my side. And Publius will not reach Antioch before November.”