‘And Mithridates and his mother control Phraates, who controls his son, Orodes. So you see, Mithridates exerts a great influence over the empire still,’ said Dobbai as she sat with us on the palace terrace late one afternoon. The day had been stifling, but as the evening approached the heat had diminished and a light easterly breeze made the temperature pleasant. I watched travellers on the road from the east approaching Dura — people on foot, camels loaded with wares and mules pulling carts full of goods. I was always amazed at the volume of people on the road, but Egypt had an insatiable desire for silk and China had a seemingly never-ending supply of the material. And Parthia lay between seller and buyer and grew rich by dint of geography.
‘So, Mithridates has crawled back to his mother,’ said Dobbai, chewing the last morsels of meat from a rib.
‘It appears so,’ I replied.
‘A viper returns to its nest.’
Rasha stopped eating and looked up at Dobbai. ‘When we find a viper we kill it. They are poisonous, you know.’
‘You see, son of Hatra, how even a small child grasps the importance of ridding the world of Mithridates.’
I waved my hand at her. ‘I am not going to kill Mithridates.’
She grinned at Rasha. ‘Not yet.’
‘We should visit your parents, Pacorus,’ mused Gallia, bored of talk of Mithridates, ‘before I am too fat to fit in a saddle.’
‘You are right. I will organise it.’ And it was also an opportunity to get away from Dobbai’s incessant nagging.
‘Can I come?’ asked Rasha, smiling innocently at Gallia.
‘Of course, as long as your father agrees.’
He did, and so we set off seven days later. I left Godarz as my deputy and told Domitus to begin the process of recruiting new legionaries, both to replace the few who had been killed at Surkh and to establish a replacement cohort. I had been toying with the idea for a while of a formation that would act as a sort of permanent garrison at Dura but at the same time would also train new recruits and act as a pool of battle replacements. In this way the legion would always be at full strength because new legionaries could be ferried from the replacement cohort to the legion in the field. I had read that the Persians who had once ruled these lands had a royal guard called the Immortals, whose strength had always been maintained at ten thousand men. I wished the legion to be similar. Domitus thought the garrison cohort a good idea, but raised an eyebrow when I informed him about the Immortals.
‘Where are these Immortals now?’ were his only words on the matter.
I took Nergal and Praxima with me to Hatra, plus the Amazons, who had been disappointed that they had missed the battle against Narses. I left Domitus and the legion behind, taking only a score of my cataphracts along for the journey, who left their armour behind. Like me they carried only swords and bows, always our bows.
It was good to see Hatra again, its dozens of stone towers glistening in the sun, each one topped by a flag bearing my father’s banner. Vistaspa met us with an escort about a mile from the city, two hundred cataphracts in full armour and pennants flying from every kontus, and as we entered the city’s south gates Kogan’s soldiers lined the streets to the palace.
‘A most impressive reception, Vistaspa,’ I remarked, ‘though my father need not have troubled himself.’
‘The visit of another king is a serious occasion, majesty,’ he replied sternly. ‘Protocol must be observed.’ Same old Vistaspa, hard as granite.
My parents waited for us at the top of the palace steps, and I noticed for the first time that my mother had flecks of grey in her hair. She still looked regal and glamorous, her arms adorned with gold armlets and bracelets and a gold braid belt around her waist. My father was dressed in a white robe and looked stern. And standing next to them were Gafarn and Diana. My brother smiled at me, still the irrepressible Gafarn, though Diana looked very different from the plain-looking kitchen slave who I had known in Italy. Now she was dressed in a fine white dress, with gold rings upon her fingers and gold barrettes in her hair, which was now shoulder length. She wore make-up around her eyes and on her lips and exquisite gold earrings dangled from her ears. Her appearance befitted her status as a princess of the empire. And standing beside her, clutching her hand, was a small boy, the son of Spartacus. He was nearly three years old now, and I saw in him the strong jaw and intelligent face of his father, his hair as black as his mother’s had been.
After we had all embraced each other, Gallia and Diana sharing a long and tearful reunion, I knelt beside the boy.
‘This is your Uncle Pacorus, Spartacus,’ said Diana.
He bowed his head to me. ‘Hello, your majesty.’
I smiled at him. ‘Hello, Spartacus, I was a friend of your father.’
He smiled at me but I think the words meant little to him. All he had known was Hatra’s palace, a world far removed from the one lived in by his parents.
‘It is good that you tell him of his parents,’ I said as I walked beside Diana through the sprawling palace that was Hatra’s seat of power.
‘I have told him about Spartacus and Claudia but he does not really understand. Why would he? He is being raised as a prince in a far-off land.’
‘One day he will understand, I hope. I promised Cannicus that I would tell him.’
Diana stopped and looked at me. ‘That’s a name I have not heard in an age.’
‘Do you remember Castus and his Germans, Diana? All hair, beards and boasting. But they made good soldiers.’
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘I remember it all.’
‘I miss those days, Diana. When we were fugitives in a foreign land with a host of Romans after us. But how we gave them a good run for their money.’
She shook her head. ‘I think you remember some of those times, not all of them. Besides you should be looking forward, what with a baby on the way. Gallia looks very happy.’
‘She is, and so am I.’
My father’s frostiness towards me had disappeared and the next day we went to the training fields outside the city to shoot our bows. We all took part in a competition called the ‘five targets’ — five small packed straw circles mounted on poles that were spaced at one hundred-yard intervals. The rules were simple. Each participant rode up the course as fast as possible, shooting at each target as he passed it. The first target was angled towards the rider, the next two were positioned parallel to the rider as he passed them, but the final two were facing away from the rider, at right angles to the course. This meant that he had to turn in the saddle and fire over the hindquarters of his horse, firing backwards in effect, to hit the targets. Gallia insisted on taking part, as did Praxima, while the men folk numbered myself, my father, Vistaspa, Nergal and Gafarn. All Parthian males learn to shoot the bow before they ride, even before they can walk. They start out on ‘baby bows’, small affairs that have almost no strength in their strings. They then progress on to more powerful bows, and by the time they reach their teenage years they are shooting full-sized recurve bows made of wood and bone, the same weapons that Parthian warriors use in battle.
As we all took turns to run the course and shoot at the targets, my father sat on his horse beside Remus and told me the news of what was happening to the north of Hatra’s borders.
‘My scouts report that many Roman troops are marching into Armenia and Pontus. They mean to finish Mithridates once and for all.’