‘Aquila!’ I was truly pleased to see him. ‘I thought you’d have a farm in Iberia by now, with your life passing in a haze of fruitful olive trees and grazing goats.’
‘And I thought you dead of a Parthian axe, or else driven to distraction in the bowels of the Twelfth. A year from now, you will be right. I trust that I will still be wrong.’
Grinning, I took the arm he gave and gripped it. His face was lined deep as oak bark by the Syrian winters, his hair the colour of the snowy rock about us, without any shade of grey. Even so, his eyes were still sharp enough to cut a man.
I said, ‘The Parthian axemen all fell in the war against Hyrcania and the Twelfth is… a brave legion. Worth fighting for.’
He rolled his tongue around his teeth and had the grace not to raise his brows. Instead, his gaze slid past to the men behind me: Syrion, Tears, Proclion, Horgias, Rufus, Sarapammon, the Rabbit. We were a unit in more than name, now, a union of hearts and minds and souls; where one went, we all went; what one felt, we all felt. A seasoned officer must have been able to read that. Aquila squinted at me, creasing his eyes against the sun. ‘Have you killed yet?’
I must have glowered and he let it pass with a shrug, and another question. ‘What’s Monobasus done to assault Tigranocerta?’
‘Nothing of note. He has archers and some cataphracts, but mostly light cavalry and a century or two of foot soldiers. None of them is suited for a siege. He’s waiting for Vologases to come with the heavy cavalry and the engines.’
‘Then he’ll wait until the sky falls. We’ — by that he meant the VIth — ‘have the King of Kings fully occupied in the south. He risks losing all of Parthia if he moves. He won’t do that for a walled city and a king he despises. The battle season will be over in another three months. You can go to your winter quarters then.’
A lift in his voice gave me a first clue as to why this man had come on escort duty, when he could have left it to someone half his age and a tenth of his rank. I felt my heart trip a beat, although whether it was for joy or grief I wasn’t sure.
‘We’re not going back to Raphana?’ I asked.
His smile was open, hiding nothing. ‘Not Raphana. You are to winter in Melitene, in Cappadocia, where we last met.’
Melitene of the beautiful mountains, of the cold-clean air, and rivers like diamonds. I let myself linger a little in the memory, but not for long. On its own, this was news enough to bring Aquila here, a man with the authority to order Cadus to new winter quarters, and the heart to do it gently. But I knew him better than he thought, certainly well enough tosee the shadow in his smile, and know there was more to come.
I peered at him, against the sun’s high, knifing glare. ‘What?’ I asked.
This time, he did not smile. ‘Corbulo has sent to Nero asking for a new commander for Armenia and Cappadocia.’
‘Why? Corbulo is more than capable-’
‘Stop.’ Aquila’s hand came up. ‘Think.’ His hand fell. ‘And listen. Corbulo has requested aid in the protection of the east. He has kept the governorship of Syria. A new governor has been appointed for Cappadocia. He will be your general.’ His face said I’m sorry, but his voice could not, even here on a mountain in the company of hawks and mules and seven men who would have given their lives rather than speak aloud any treason they heard. A company of the VIth was behind him and even here the emperor might have ears and the reports of those ears might lead a man to his death; it had happened before.
So I said only, ‘Who is the new commander?’ and gave no voice to the disappointment that curdled my guts.
To my shame, the name he gave was not one that conjured any feeling in me: not fear, nor revulsion, nor horror at a man who carried ill-luck with him wherever he went. On that bright summer day at the height of the world, I heard Aquila say ‘Lucius Caesennius Paetus’, and I shrugged and said, ‘He who was consul in Rome last year?’ and at Aquila’s nod, ‘So… Corbulo is making sure he doesn’t hold too much power in the east. Is that it?’
‘I have no idea.’ Aquila’s lined face was a mask of moderation. ‘And if it were, I would not say. Paetus will join you before winter. So make the most of this siege and then meet him in Melitene, and spend your winter getting to know him. He will lead you in war next year. Now,’ he clapped my arm, ‘how long before we make the city?’
‘Half a day. We aim to reach the plain as night falls, so that we may cross in darkness, unseen by the enemy. Once there, all that will hold us back is the speed of the mules. If you can push them, we’ll see the city before midnight.’
‘Oh, I can push the mules.’ Aquila was himself again, bright as a polished blade. ‘I’ve waited four years to see Cadus; this day cannot pass too soon. Let your unit lead us back over the path while we hold the rear guard; they say the route winds more than the bull-maze of Crete and this is not time to find ourselves lost.’
Chapter Fifteen
It was evening when we reached the forest on our return journey, and it was as unfriendly now as it had been in the morning; more so, as we soon discovered.
‘ Hsst! ’ Horgias reined his horse back and laid a hand on my bridle. ‘To the left, past the bole of the fallen tree. Something’s moving.’
‘A boar?’ I strained to look. Horgias is a wolf in the guise of a man; he can see in the dark better than any of us. With the moon barely risen, and starlight thin as slivers through the trees, I could perhaps have owned to seeing a shadow darker than the rest that moved faster than the wind-sway of the branches.
At my side, Tears murmured, ‘Not a boar.’ His sword scraped free of its sheath, scenting the air with lanolin and a faint tinge of iron. I would have said I was alert before, but I shifted into some new realm where my cheeks felt the lift of each leaf around me, my ears heard the shrews, the wood mice skittering beneath our horses’ feet, and my eyes — now — saw what Tears and Horgias had seen: not a boar, but a man. Men, in fact; at least three that I could count.
Syrion was our leader; all three of us turned to him. Wordless, he raised his hand and made a gesture: three fingers, then three again, then two splayed out and down. At that sign, seven of us dismounted and slid into the forest, leaving Sarapammon behind to lead the horses on.
Old Aquila, who could have run through this kind of manoeuvre in his sleep, saw what was happening and rode up past the fifteen mules from the train’s end to its head, bringing a dozen of his men with him.
His voice was loud enough to cross the Roman forum on a busy morning, never mind a forest at first fall of night, but its tone was conversational, as if we all still rode together and he had come up, with such noise, purely to pass the time.
‘Demalion, how much further? My old bones ache at the end of the day and I would soak them before tomorrow’s dawn.’
His patrician accent rang out like a piece of Rome transplanted, and Sarapammon, answering in my place and speaking Latin as Aquila had done, said, ‘Not long now. See those trees ahead, where they part and let in the moonlight? That’s the edge of the forest, where the mountain meets the fertile plain. We’ll be there in a hundred paces and then we can get some speed on, and head for the city. It’s dark enough now and the Parthians will never know we’ve-’
A spear passed within a hand’s breadth of my head, hurtling towards the voices. I felt the wind of its passing, and did not hear it strike flesh, but I didn’t have time to look round, to see if Sarapammon or Aquila had been hit, for in that moment I was fighting for my life.
Three of them came at me, four at first, but Tears took the farthest; I saw the slip of his blade in the moonlight as he attacked.
As for me, I had my gladius in one hand and a long-knife in the other, entirely against our proper dress, but Horgias had been teaching us and we had drilled in these woods on eachof our four previous forays and had learned the hard way that in the tight, dark crush between the trees a knife in the off hand was far safer than a shield.