“On fire we swear it!” we exclaimed together, and stretched our right hands over the glowing coals of the brazier in the corner, set there to take the chill off the wet September air.
It was agreed that the weapons would be distributed from the tribunal on the parade ground that afternoon, and we set off to give the good news to our men. Just as we were about to leave, Facilis came in.
Arshak smiled at him. “I am pleased that you will still be with us, Flavius Facilis,” he said.
“You still hope you can get a white neckpiece for your other coat, do you?” Facilis growled back. That was, in fact, exactly the place Arshak had been fingering.
Arshak only smiled again, though his eyes glittered. “Remember that you followed us. We did not follow you. You chose our company. But now I must prepare my men to receive their weapons again.” He said it pointedly, to bait the centurion.
“What?” demanded Facilis, rising to the bait, looking at Priscus in alarm. “I thought, sir, that you’d agreed-”
“I hadn’t realized that the Sarmatians were counting on getting the weapons back as soon as they were this side of the Channel,” replied the legate impatiently. “If they were promised it, or even believed that they were promised it, it would damage the confidence they ought to have in their officers to make them wait. Besides, we need the weapons wagons for supplies.”
Facilis looked furiously at me. “We need the wagons for supplies?”he asked. “So this was your idea, Ariantes. I should have guessed.”
“Flavius Facilis,” I said, “you know we all wanted to have the weapons back now. We had to have them sometime. Since you must give, why not give gracefully?”
“I don’t give anything gracefully to you,” he answered, and, under his breath, added, “You slippery bastard. The others would have asked for what they wanted straight-out, and been straight-out refused.”
I shook my head and excused myself, and my brother commanders joined me. Just as we were mounting our horses, Lucius Javolenus Comittus ran out after us. “Hey! Wait a moment!” he shouted. When we paused, he trotted up grinning and out of breath.
“I’ve been talking to the two other, uh, liaison officers,” he told us, “and we’d be very pleased if you could join us for dinner this evening. There’s a very good tavern by the harbor…”
“It would please us better that you join us, instead,” said Arshak, smiling pleasantly. It was beneath his dignity to sit in Roman taverns by harbors, and Comittus had just plummeted in his opinion for suggesting it. “We can have a feast at the wagons, and you can meet the captains of our squadrons… the decurions, you’d call them, yes? I will have my men buy an ox to roast, and we will put up awnings against the rain.”
“Yes,” said Comittus, in pleased surprise. “Excellent! I’ll bring some good wine. What time do you want us?”
“Young idiot,” Arshak commented, when we were riding back to our wagons. “What do you suppose a ‘liaison officer’ does?”
“It’s obvious,” said Gatalas. “He brings good wine to dinner parties and sits in taverns.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a light yoke to bear,” Arshak observed. “He can sit in taverns, and I can forget about him. And we’ll get our weapons back!”
“You spoke to the legate like a prince, Arshak,” I said warmly. “So sweet-tongued and respectful that he began to doubt Facilis’ judgment.”
“I can fill my mouth with honey when I like,” agreed Arshak, grinning. “But it was that business you came up with that really tipped the balance. Where on earth did you learn that phrase-what was it? Above the bugget?”
“Over budget,” I corrected. “A budget is a list of how much money you expect to spend on something. The scribe I was lent in Bononia used the term a lot.”
“Scribes’ talk, money talk,” said Arshak, disdainfully. “And that legate listens to it! But I’m glad you learned it.”
It would be better to announce my status as a slave-owner myself, rather than have someone else report it to my fellows behind my back. “It is useful,” I agreed. “Natalis gave me the scribe as a gift. If we need to write letters to the Romans, or read any letters they write, to us or about us, we will be able to.”
The other two stared at me in shocked silence for a moment.
“Where is this slave now, then?” asked Gatalas at last.
“I sent him back to Bononia to say his good-byes. He should be here tomorrow afternoon.”
“Ariantes…” Arshak began-then shook his head. “I can see it will be useful. To all of us. I would not keep a foreign slave in my wagon-but I can see it will be very useful, so how can I speak against it? You’ve proved the use of it already. This afternoon”-he stood up in the stirrups, stretching his arm-“this afternoon I will hold my spear again! And that is worth a few soft words to a legate!”
The weapons were distributed from the tribunal under a steady drizzle. Priscus sat on a seat set up for him on the stone platform with a slave holding an awning over him, watching with his tribunes while we collected our things from the twenty wagons. The silk tails of our dragon standards hung down limply, dripping, and the horses tossed their heads unhappily as their hooves stuck in the churned-up mud. But for the men, it was a white day, a day of pure sun. The wagons had been loaded company by company, squadron by squadron, and they were unloaded in the same way. The orderly line of horsemen filed past, each collecting a sword, lance, bow case, and the oilskin-wrapped bundle that contained the armor for himself and his charger. Arshak’s men, first as ever, cantered off to the other end of the field to put the armor on as soon as they got it. Gatalas and his men armed closer to the tribunal; I was aware of them saddling and buckling as I waited with my men for our turn. The rasp of armor against armor, a sound that had once been as natural to me as breathing, sounded all over the field. I could see the Romans on the tribunal beginning to stare as the dragons of Sarmatian cavalry twisted into the glittering metal of their skin and came to life.
It was my own dragon’s turn. First of my company, as befits a prince, I collected my own oilskin bundle, bow case, spear, sword: all the heavy illusion of invulnerability. I hefted the bundle of armor unhappily. I felt a strange grief to see it again.
“Why put it on?” I asked Leimanos, who’d joined me, smiling over his own package of armor. “With this rain, it will just have to be taken off and dried and oiled thoroughly again tonight.”
Leimanos looked shocked. “We must put it on, my lord!” he said. “The other dragons have. Besides, it’s been in the wagons for a couple of months, and it will need drying and oiling anyway, as well as wearing, to keep it supple.”
I couldn’t shame my men by choosing to stay ingloriously disarmed beside the other commanders, and thus requiring them to do the same. I dismounted and began arming, and my hands remembered the old sequence of actions even though my mind was numb. Farna, my charger, a mare of the Parthian breed, stood patiently as I unsaddled her, only occasionally stamping her foot in protest at the rain. I tossed the armored blanket over her back and saddled her up again, clipping the blanket to the saddle and buckling it firmly across her chest and around her neck. Then came the chamfron, the horse’s head-guard with its delicate filigree bowls to protect her eyes, gold-chased bronze on scaled and painted leather. Next my own armor. I took off my coat and hung it on my saddle. First the leather trousers, heavily stitched with overlapping scales of gilded iron on the lower outside leg, but scaled more lightly farther up, and next to the horse. The three slashes on the left leg showed only on the inside, where the new piece of leather had been fitted in; the outside looked as polished, golden, and impenetrable as ever. Next the leather cuirass, scaled to give a double thickness overall. I pulled the wrist-guards over the backs of my hands, then picked up my coat, slung it over my shoulders, and pinned it: no reason to get the armor wetter than I needed to. I pulled on the helmet with the crest of crimson horsehair, hung the bow case on the left side of my saddle, slung my sword over my right shoulder, and mounted, slipping my spear into its holder by my right foot. Leimanos had armed more eagerly than I had and was finished already, but most of my men were still busy.