Our unit carried a lit torch and ran on the edge of the others; six men I knew now as well as I had ever known my brothers. We sprinted to catch up. ‘Syrion… I owe you.’ I clapped his arm. ‘Lupus would-’
‘He might still. He’s at the gate. Move!’
In the throng of an entire legion, amidst shouting, swearing, hammering men, we streamed out on to the hard-beaten earth beyond the gates. By instinct more than memory, we found the place where we had practised our defence against cavalry that one time with Cadus and set to hammering our sharpened stakes into the ground.
I was paired with Syrion: he held his stake, I pounded it with the butt end of my javelin, praying that I wouldn’t miss and smash his fingers; we had already seen one man out of our century injured that way in daylight when last we did this.
As then, we were hammering into the parade ground which had been marched on by five thousand men daily for more years than I cared to count. It was set like concrete. I raised and smashed, raised and smashed. My fingers ached from the concussion. I felt the wood give a little, and again.
‘Will it hold at that?’ Syrion asked. ‘If he kicks it?’
Lupus would kick it; even if we were attacked, he’d testit to see if he could find a reason to beat us. I felt the stake wobble.
‘It might hold to a kick,’ I said. ‘But if the cataphracts come, they’ll ride it down.’
I had seen Vologases’ armoured cavalry. This fact alone had raised my standing in the unit; they trusted my judgement and I, in turn, found some respect for them if for nobody else. Syrion nodded. I pounded again. The javelin slipped in the sweat of my hands. I jerked it aside. Syrion swore, viciously.
‘Your hand?’ I asked.
‘Missed.’ Amidst the din I heard him swallow. ‘Try again.’
I tried again. And again. And again until I felt it inch away from me, into the ground.
‘Enough. It’ll hold. Now yours.’
Another stake. Another frantic pounding, but this time I held it and Syrion battered it with his pilum. I braced my feet and held my arms rigid and prayed the same prayers for the safety of my fingers. Broken bones used to excuse a man from duties in this place; not now.
It had been different, we were told, before we came. Our arrival, with our wealth, or our obvious loathing of the legion, or the fact that Cadus had dropped from the heavens into such a senior position and might rob the other centurions of their easy promotions… whatever the reason, the XIIth had never worked so hard in living memory as they had these past six months. Only my unit did not hate me for it. Perhaps they could not afford to.
‘Done.’
I stepped back. Syrion gave the stake one last, baleful smack. We stood in front of it, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield. I felt Proclion press in on my left. He was largest of all of us, a bear of a man, from the south toe of Italy, where they have been Roman citizens for a dozen generations yet still speak Greek to spite their Latin masters.
Horgias fitted in to his left as his shield-man, then Rufus was left of him, and after him Polydeuces and then Sarapammon. Syrion held the century’s standard, which had the open hand of a god (some said it was the emperor, but I chose to think of it as Helios) at the top, and the badges of valour underneath. We had few of those, and none won since Caesar’s death.
Torches flared about us, bringing light to our hellish dark. Leontius, the aquilifer, who bore the legion’s Eagle, brought it now to the fore and stood beneath it in such a way that the shadow of the bird fell on to the front ranks. He wore a wolfskin as his bearer’s pride where others of his sort wore leopard or lion; that was done, we were all sure, to placate Lupus, for his name meant ‘wolf’ in Latin, although everyone on the camp spoke Greek unless forced to do otherwise by their officers, who themselves only did so to prove a point. A hundred paces to our left, the Eagle of the IVth Scythians caught the light of their many torches and spun it away to the dark.
By ragged starts, the sounds of hammering ceased. We stood in silence, bunched behind our shields, helmets aglow under the bouncing flames of the wool-and-pitch torches.
We were in the front and centre of the line; the place of dispensable men. I saw movement at my right and heard the trumpet’s blast. To give him credit, Munius Cattulinus might have been a sloppy clerk of clerks — in my role as clerk to the century I had had occasion to read his writing and it was as bad as I had feared — but he was an excellent signaller.
The trumpet called clear and fine; eight strong notes.
On the first note, we cast our javelins into the dark at an enemy we could not see and now knew did not exist, drew our swords and knelt.
On the second note, the rank behind us cast their javelins, drew their swords and knelt.
On the third note, the third rank cast their javelins, which was the point when we discovered that not all of the second rank had knelt yet; some were still struggling to draw their swords. Men shouted curses in the dark. Others cursed back, louder, so that, by the time the fourth note of the horn sounded, half the men were not sure if it was for them, and of those who did know not all were ready to rise and step to the right.
The remaining four notes, which should have timed our four paces backwards, descended into progressively greater chaos. An officer shouted for order; Lupus, I think, but there’s a point when all angry men sound the same. As silence fell, we were a milling soup of disordered men, facing all directions but front.
Syrion held our eight-man unit together by force of will and a carrying voice. We had not stepped fully to our right, because there was no room to do so, and when we tried to pace back we were stopped after two paces by the men behind. So we stood where we were, shields locked in a wall, with two rows of stakes in front of us, half of which were not sound, knowing that if Vologases’ cavalry rode out of the dark and charged at us now, we were dead men.
By then, though, even the dullest amongst us had realized that the Parthians were not coming. I wished that they were; standing there in the dark with the horn’s blast dying in my ears, I thought it might be easier to face the fast-running anger of battle, the roar of death in my ears, the quick ending and release at last from this particular hell.
Instead Lupus came at us, but, this once, he was not first of the sixty centurions to rake along the lines; this time he walked two paces behind the two first centurions — and Flavius Silvanus, the camp prefect.
To us, it was as if the emperor himself walked out of the night. Nobody expected to see the tribunes or the governor, and even if they had turned out at the third watch of night they would not have been accorded any particular respect.
But the camp prefect was as close to a god as we had. Silvanus had been with the XIIth since his first commission and had risen through the centurion ranks, elbowing men out of his way, writing letters to Rome, doing favours for progressive Syrian governors until he reached the place where he led the legion in all but name. He had power of life and death over every one of us, and we knew it.
When he came to a halt and stood under the Eagle, we had to fight to keep our eyes forward, not to let them drift to him. When he raised his hand and the centurions began their walk down the line, we knew this was not the usual parade inspection, not even usual night manoeuvres; we just didn’t know what it was.
Lupus stalked with his own particular gait. I remembered to breathe as he came close; I had been slammed in the solar plexus by his vine rod often enough by then for the crime of holding my breath.
When I was with the Vth, I had not thought Cadus a particularly lenient centurion; there was not one man of the ten units under his command who had not felt the depth of his anger at one time or another, but he was always fair. He set standards and expected them to be kept and we knew it.