‘Are you saying there will be no war?’ I said, and heard in my voice a new hope; if peace broke out, who would have need of soldiers? Particularly those who would prefer to be herding horses. A cloud lifted that I had not known lay on me. I saw images of horse herds, and Macedonian mountains, and my mother welcoming home the unconquering hero.
Pantera threw me a bitter smile. ‘Don’t pack your bags yet. That’s not what I was saying. If you want my honest opinion, I think war is a certainty; Nero doesn’t have the self-control to keep his generals in check. But the fighting can perhaps be delayed if Vologases faces internal strife. To that end, I sincerely hope there is at least one king who’ll be trying to take his place before spring. That is what we have been working towards- What?’
I was shaking my head; he must have seen it from the corner of his eye.
‘Nobody’s going to turn on Vologases this year.’ I was scathing, which I had never dared before, but his tone had stung me. ‘There are no sons left with any ambition and Ranades, who has the power, won’t turn on him: the king of Hyrcania loves him like a brother and is loved in his turn. There’s nobody left except-’ I bit the edge of my thumb, thinking. ‘The fox-faced king? Monobasus of Adiabene? You think he’ll attack Vologases this winter?’
‘Very good.’ Pantera’s voice was heavy with irony. ‘The king of Adiabene is… intimate with Ranades’ second son, who has just seen a way by which he might make himself at the very least king of Hyrcania, if not King of Kings. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ranades found himself on the wrong end of an arrow in the hunt one day soon. And his replacement might find he had pressing business in Cstesiphon.’
‘Where?’
‘The Parthian capital. Where Vologases has his winterpalace,’ Cadus answered. He finished pulling on his trews and crossed the room to lay one ham-fisted hand on Pantera’s shoulder. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘You’re moody and you’re baiting the boy when he doesn’t deserve it. That’s not like you. Did the messenger say something you didn’t like?’
The messenger… a short man with a hard-driven horse had met us on the track in a section of forest and spoken to Pantera as they squeezed their horses in opposite directions past the same fallen tree trunk. If they had shared four words they were short ones. If written messages had passed between them… that wasn’t impossible, I thought; something small could have been transferred from palm to palm as they rode. I tried not to look shocked.
‘What will you do if Vologases brings his heavy cavalry against your legion?’ Pantera asked, rising. He sounded serious. He looked serious. ‘If Demalion can stop planning his escape for a moment and accept that the Fifth is his legion, then the two of you might wish to consider this: Vologases has five and a half thousand cataphracts; you have seen them. He has as many light cavalry, who are still more heavily armed than anything of Rome, plus the horse-archers. The legions of the east have legionaries and minimal cavalry. What would you do if you were set against him?’
Run, I thought, but did not say it. To my left, Cadus poked his tongue into the gap between his front teeth, as if exploring it helped him to think. ‘There are ways for men on foot to fight horses,’ he said warily. ‘Even the cataphracts.’
‘Think on them,’ Pantera said brusquely. ‘I’m going out.’ He pushed past us, out of the room and out of the inn.
We stood at the open window and watched him say something short to the guards and snatch the bay mare from the grooms. He mounted alone, neatly, hard, fast, with angerwritten on every line of his body. The mare tried to rear and he kicked her forward, cursing. He did not use her wrongly — I could not have forgiven him for that — but he let his rage be known and she left at a flat-eared gallop, heading out beyond the safe road to the unprotected forest.
It was the first and only time I saw Pantera lose his temper. I was only glad he had taken it away from us. I did not envy any bandits that thought him fair game, for he still had his bow, and I had no doubt that he would kill without thought any man who came against him.
Cadus and I stood together until the trees swallowed the sound of his passing, then Cadus turned away from the window, cracking his knuckles. His face was unreadable. In Pantera, that was usual; in Cadus it most assuredly was not. If I had not been certain that Cadus, at least, took only women to his bed, I would have thought myself caught in the heart of a lovers’ quarrel.
‘What do we do?’ I said, lost.
‘We sit here and work out the ways a legion of five thousand can stand against a mounted army of twice that number of cavalry and survive. When he’s in that mood, we need to have some good answers before he comes back.’
‘And then will he tell us what the messenger said?’
‘He’ll tell us when he’s ready, but only if he thinks we need to know. Don’t think about that. Just sit there’ — Cadus nodded to the bed — ‘and do what he said; pretend you’re in the front row when we’re set against the Parthians and you want to stay alive. For a start, tell me anything you’ve been taught about the ways infantry might win against cavalry.’
Chapter Five
We had a plan ready by dusk, and laid it out for Pantera on his return, using our daggers and boots to show the cataphracts in their chain mail with their ten-foot spear-swords and our belts to show the layout of the legions.
Whatever his earlier temper, Pantera had recovered his good humour and approved our plan, suggesting minor alterations that we might consider. He joked with us, which was a novel experience, and we laughed, all three together; and in that spirit, with the excitement of battle almost upon us, we left the inn the following morning and travelled on.
The following days passed in a haze as we crossed Armenia from east to west, leaving the old volcano to our right and Lake Van to our left and then traversing the Taurus Mountains.
Each day, the spring grew stronger, the grasses greener, the flowers brighter. And each day, we studied the topography as if we were the forward scouts for the legions with Vologases’ army a day behind, hunting us down. After a while, it began to feel true and Cadus and I searched out the places for lookouts, the open plains in these high, unfriendly mountains where a cohort, or three, or an entire legion, might hold a pass againstan advance. We planned our anti-cavalry manoeuvres until we could recite them in our sleep. Only when we reached the western border where Armenia met Cappadocia — in effect, where Parthia met Rome — did we begin to relax.
That night, Pantera bought us wine, and we toasted our time together. I had lost my resentment, my envy, my bitterness. I was grateful to him for taking me out of a winter’s quarters where I would have spent half of the six months marching over the mountains and the other half digging encampments in waist-deep snow. I told him so, and that I was taking back to the Vth Macedonica all I had learned.
And that was when he set his beaker down and looped his hands round his knees and I remembered the inn on the eastern border, and the messenger, and Pantera’s temper.
‘What?’ I said.
Cadus answered for me, slowly, testing. ‘We’re not going back to the Fifth, are we? That was the message?’
‘That was the message.’ Pantera looked down at his thumbs. ‘It was signed by the emperor; there is nothing I can do to countermand it. If it makes you feel any better, they’re sending me to Britain, which, as you so rightly observed, is a swamp surrounded by sea and full of women who fight like harpies.’
‘Perhaps the emperor thinks you can save him money there as you did here.’ I looked down at the table as I spoke, and drew whorls with my fingertip in a puddle of spilled wine. I felt a kind of tugging grief in my chest and charged my voice to sound cheerful. ‘If you can do what you did in Parthia, they’ll make you a hero when you come back to Rome.’