‘Under the tyrant, humanity’s former blessing of friendship had withered and died, and in its place sprung up flattery and adulation, and, worse even than hatred, the false semblance of love. It was you, Caesar, who brought friendship back from exile. You have friends because you know how to be one.’ The consul’s words rolled out, sonorous with sincerity, seemingly never-ending.
Enthroned in lonely eminence, Postumus’s thoughts ran their own course on loyalty and betrayal. His gaze tracked down to his German bodyguards at the doors of the basilica. Heart and courage. Arkil and his Angles would keep to their oath. Yet it had been a timely act of treachery by one of their own that had put them in Postumus’s power.
VI
Olbia
‘Back in line!’
Ballista watched the ten sailors shuffle back to rejoin their colleagues. They were hot and tired, dragging their feet. There was not one of them who did not look mutinous.
‘Next,’ roared the optio Diocles.
There were just eight in this contubernium. Under their brows they looked pure hatred at Ballista — as well they might after what had happened in the bar down by the docks. Ballista gave no indication that he noticed. He shifted the weight of the mailcoat on his shoulders and studied the impromptu training ground. The old agora in the largely abandoned north of the upper town of Olbia was the only area of open, flat ground near the walls. On three sides were ruins: a collapsed row of shops, a fallen portico backed by the remains of two temples and a less easily identified jumble of buildings. On the fourth side stood a granary. It had been built recently, on the site of what might have been a gymnasium. Its construction had cannibalized the surrounding buildings. Thus passed the glory of the world. Nothing was permanent, not even the gods.
‘Javelins ready,’ Diocles ordered. Ten wooden posts, each six-foot high, had been hammered into the ground about thirty paces in front of the men.
‘Run and throw.’ The heavy, blunt training missiles arced away. Five found their mark; the other three fell not far off.
The troops were getting better. Ballista had had Diocles keep them at it all morning. There had been much room for improvement. The crew of the Ister patrol boat Fides were under military law. They were expected to be proficient in military drill. They were not. The fault lay with Regulus, their trierarch. Ballista had taken his measure straight away at the first parade, when Castricius had read out the imperial mandata putting them under Ballista’s command. Regulus was not young. He had the broken veins of a drinker and the disgruntled air of a man who considered that life had treated him harshly. Perhaps, many years before, when he had joined up, he had imagined ending his career as primus pilus of a legion. Instead, he was the centurion in charge of a small river galley. It was likely his own fault. Clearly he was one of those officers who curried favour with those under him, mistakenly believing laxness would lead to popularity. The Fides needed to be got out of the water, her hull scraped and her seams caulked to ready her to take the expedition up the Borysthenes. Ballista had sent Regulus, with one contubernium of ten and the helmsman, rowing master and ship’s carpenter, to see to it. The rest of the crew, twenty-eight oarsmen, had been assembled at first light in the agora.
To be fair, they had marched in step, formed line and doubled their line well enough. But when ordered to form a wedge, a square and a circle, it had ended in a shambles. Now, their weapon handling was proving little better. Obviously unused to the heavy wooden training weapons, they moved clumsily, finding the extra weight a burden. There was no point in even thinking about ordering them to perform the armatura; the complicated and demanding dance-like arms drill would be utterly beyond them.
‘Draw swords.’
There was a ragged scraping of wood on wood as even this was not performed as one.
‘Attack.’
With little enthusiasm, the eight men hacked desultorily at the posts.
‘The point, use the point,’ Diocles yelled. ‘You, cover yourself with your shield. Aim for the face, make the enemy flinch, make him fear you.’
Diocles was the only good thing. A big, tough, young Pannonian, given authority, freed from the negligent hand of Regulus, he might develop into a fine leader of men.
It was past noon. The spring sun was hot. The men were being treated like raw recruits, trained all day. It gave them another reason to resent Ballista. But they needed it. The passage up the Borysthenes was unlikely to pass without fighting. Ballista wondered if it would be advisable to put them on barley rations instead of wheat. Certainly their poor performance merited the punishment. Yet, while he had to instil discipline, it would not do to be too heavy-handed. They already had more than enough reason to hate him and the men with him. They needed discipline, but too draconian a hand might be counterproductive.
‘Back in line. Next.’
Ballista went over to Diocles, told him to carry on.
Ballista, accompanied by Castricius, Maximus and Tarchon, walked back towards the inhabited part of Olbia. Once, the broad street had been a grand thoroughfare, flanked by luxurious houses. Now it was a narrow track, hemmed in by overgrown rubble from the long-collapsed dwellings of the Olbian elite. Off to the left, through the voids, where once had been peristyle and ornamental garden, the view swooped down to the river. Lush spring grass waved on slopes and hillocks where terraces had collapsed. Among the wildflowers, lines of cut grey stone indicated the transient hopes of the past. There were shrubs and trees. Here and there — like primitive squatters in the wreck of some higher order — rough, new buildings showed. A line of potters’ kilns almost abutted the wall of the living town. Further out was a small foundry. The smoke from their industry was taken by a wind from the north-west out across the broad, islet-studded Hypanis. It further misted the low line of blue that marked the far bank some two or three miles distant.
‘We are caught between Scylla and Charon,’ Tarchon said in heavily accented, mangled Greek. ‘If we are not teaching these sailor-fuckers to fight, they will be as women on our voyaging, and the tribes of the riverbanks will be killing us.’
‘Charybdis,’ said Castricius.
Tarchon ignored the interruption. ‘But if we are teaching them, they will be turning on us in some unfrequented place. We are forging a sword of Diogenes.’
‘Damocles,’ corrected Castricius.
‘Names are unimportant to a man with a sword hanging over his head,’ Tarchon concluded with gravity.
‘They lack the balls,’ said Maximus.
‘The Suanian has a point,’ said Castricius. ‘There are more than forty of them and just the four of us; it might give them encouragement. But Roman disciplina will bring them to heel.’
‘I do not give a shite. There was a time in Hibernia — I was young then, still known as Muirtagh, Muirtagh of the Long Road — we were outnumbered by five, no ten to one …’