Was he going to tell the men? Rufus had calculated that some ten thousand yet survived. Some might die still of wounds or fever. Even so, there ought to be enough for one last, bloody fight. And such a battle would take out the Parthians who now watched them. Quintus thought he could die content if he could wash out the contempt in The Surena's eyes with blood.
Voices began to rise from around the tent. The Surena barely raised a long eyebrow.
Cassius leaned forward, slamming his fists on the table before the proconsul. Poorly balanced, it went over, spilling the wine—thick and unwatered—into the trodden muck. The winey mud looked like the ground outside Carrhae once 20,000 Romans had fallen.
"I say we accept the terms. The Senate's far away. Caesar's far away. We have no choice."
"And I say, I'll see you all in Hades first!" Crassus screamed. "Traitor and son of a traitor and a whore!"
"By all the gods, I won't take that from a coward!" the staff officer shouted back. "You and your son have destroyed us all."
With surprising strength, Crassus pushed the younger man aside and strode out of the tent. His staff followed, then split up in several directions. Some, Quintus knew, would disappear, not to return.
The others surrounded the proconsul, shouting, waving their fists. One or two made as if to draw swords and rush at the Parthians. But The Surena shook his head, and they fell back.
Up ahead, the proconsul flinched at last from the anger of his staff.
"We have to have a chance!" A wail, in accented Latin, from one of the auxiliaries. Someone threw a punch, and a scuffle ensued as the auxiliaries fought among themselves. The scuffle ended when half their number fled into the marsh.
"God send they sink," muttered Rufus.
Pleas and imprecations. Quintus flinched as a centurion, a quiet man whom he had never known well, simply opened his tunic to show his general his old scars, gotten in a lifetime of service. He would not beg: He simply wanted a chance to live out what was left of his life.
Crassus's eyes looked over at Vargontius, the officer The Surena had approved, appealing for some stroke of magic. Silently, the veteran turned his back.
Quintus heard scuffling, the snicks and hisses of weapons drawn, and over the tumult, Rufus's voice shouting, "I'll gut any of you who lifts a finger. Hold! You, gods rot you, don't let that Eagle fall in the mud."
Such pockets of discipline like that were rare. Thanks to Lucilius and his friends, news of the proposed terms had swept the Legions like blazing naphtha. If Crassus did not accept, he was a dead man.
And if he did accept?
Quintus knew what his grandfather would have said. He should have fallen on his sword before he ever saw this day.
The proconsul looked about desperately for a distraction.
"You!" he snarled at the guide who had led them from Carrhae's walls by night and into the marsh. "You led us astray. You sold yourself!"
It was as bad as ever Quintus had thought. A trick, entirely a trick: The guide had been as much in the Parthian pay as the yellow-skinned barbarians who had fired arrow after arrow at the Romans as they stood in the sun, unable to rest, unable to drink, and after a time unable to do aught but die. How could anyone ever have suspected otherwise, even for an instant? What Asiatics would ever help the Romans? Romans were for battening off of, then betraying them—even as the easterners might do to one of their own. He knew that well. He might have said as much, but who would have listened to him, a mere equestrian, when patricians, from Crassus's now-dead son down to the merest aristocratic time-server, leaned on his shoulder, ready to tell him what he wanted to hear?
The guide cringed, reeled under a blow from a ringed fist that sent blood spurting from mouth and nose. Then, drawing himself up, he spat.
Abruptly, Rufus appeared between the guide and the mob that had once been members of Rome's proudest Legions. Beside him was the signifer, Eagle proudly aloft. It seemed to glint with a light all its own. Even as Quintus watched, that light intensified—and then, as a man drew his dagger with a scream of rage against the traitor guide, the light blazed out.
When the red streaks and black splotches faded from Quintus's field of vision, he saw a man down on the ground, nursing a burnt hand. And the guide lay face down in the water, the smell of burnt flesh and singed, wet plants rank about him.
Odd. You would have thought the guide's body would have made a louder splash as it fell. He floated, face down. Quintus could imagine the staring eyes, the blood, trailing from the treacherous mouth. They were all treacherous here, all the easterners.
"No loss," someone muttered. "The Harpies spit on his liver."
Quintus stumbled forward, dimly aware that earth ought to be sprinkled on the dead man, a coin placed in his mouth.
"Let him rot," came a vengeful whisper.
That was more impiety. He would pay for it: They all would.
Crassus gestured. Out. That way. The Surena took his place with his men at the head of a ragged and very dispirited file that prepared to escape the marsh with even less honor than it had used to enter it.
And following the Parthians, the luster of its metal tarnished, was the Eagle of Quintus's Legion.
3
The sun was rising far over Asia when the remnants of Crassus's great army finally came to The Surena's camp. Save for a small group, the Parthians had ridden away, "to prepare a welcome," someone had said bleakly. "Morituri te ... We who are about to die..."
"Quiet there!" a centurion shouted before one of the Parthians could enforce silence. All told, it was a small group of guards. Possibly, the Romans could have broken free. But the Parthians had bows, and the Romans' will to fight was gone with their leader's. The Surena had promised a truce; a truce they would have.
Quintus forced himself not to stagger into the great square outside the prince's tent. From the corner of his eye, he saw the signifer raise his battered Eagle proudly, as if its presence alone could turn the camp into a Roman conquest.
Remember, you are a Roman, he told himself as he put foot ahead of foot. It was an effort not to shake or weave, and his kit felt as if he carried all Rome upon his back. Crassus and some of the other, most senior officers had been given horses and Quintus saw sidelong smiles at how poorly they sat them, tired as they were and as unused to the breeds of Parthia and Persia. (Lucilius, Quintus noticed, had somehow acquired a horse too and rode with a grace that made the other tribune, worn as he was, want to pull him out of the saddle.) Their world was ending, but Lucilius managed to look almost jaunty ahorse.
Remember you are a Roman.
Tramp, tramp, tramp. The Parthians were watching... long sidelong glances and sly smiles were as much of their faces as you could see under their helms.
Tramp, tramp, tramp. Remember you are mortal. Remembering that was all too easy, even though Crassus had probably dreamed of returning in triumph to Rome, throwing down his colleague Caesar (who would never have permitted such a defeat as this), and becoming a Sulla who never, never resigned his power. Of the great army that had marched from Armenia—28,000 Legionaries, 3,000 Asian mounted auxiliaries, and 100 Gaulish cavalry—perhaps 10,000 Romans survived.
As captives, no matter what sort of gloss was put on it.
Outside the camp, bland-faced guards requested they stack their arms. There were more guards than Romans.
"Where's the yoke?" muttered Rufus, marching with his men. Quintus was willing to wager the pay he'd never see now that most of the men had hidden daggers or even a gladius somewhere about them. He had sanctioned enough of a departure from the ranks that hale men bore along those who were wounded or nigh dropping from exhaustion or fever.