Twice they climbed up to ten and eleven thousand feet, twice they stumbled downward, but the second pass was more welcome, for the bloodstained snow disappeared, became ordinary beautiful white snow, and on top of the second pass they looked across the distance to see Lake Thospitis dreaming exquisitely blue in the sun.
Weak at the knees, the army descended to what seemed the Elysian Fields, though the altitude still lay at five thousand feet and of harvest there was none, for no one lived to plough soil which remained frozen until summer, and froze again with the first breath of autumn wind. Of trees there were none, but grass grew; the horses fattened if the men didn’t, and at least there was wild asparagus again.
Lucullus pressed on, understanding that in two months he had not managed to get more than sixty miles north of Tigranocerta. Still, the worst was over; he could move faster now. Skirting the lake, he found a small village of nomads who had planted grain, and he took every ear of it to augment his shrinking supplies. Some few miles further on he found more grain, took that too, along with every sheep his army discovered. By this time the air didn’t feel as thin—not because it wasn’t as thin, but because everyone had grown used to the altitude.
The river which ran out of more snowcapped peaks to the north into the lake was a good one, fairly wide and placid, and it headed in the direction Lucullus wanted to go. The villagers, who spoke a distorted Median, had told him through his captive Median interpreter that there was only one more ridge of mountains left between him and the valley of the Araxes River, where Artaxata lay. Bad mountains? he asked. Not as bad as those from which this strange army had issued, was the reply.
Then as the Fimbriani left the river valley to climb into fairly rolling uplands, much happier at this terrain, a troop of cataphracts bore down on them. Since the Fimbriani felt like a good fight, they rolled the massive mailed men and horses into confusion without the help of the Galatians. After that it was the turn of the Galatians, who dealt capably with a second troop of cataphracts. And watched and waited for more.
More did not come. Within a day’s march they understood why. The land was quite flat, but as far as the eye could see in every direction it consisted of a new obstacle, something so weird and horrific they wondered what gods they had offended, to curse them with such a nightmare. And the bloodstains were back—not in snow this time, but smeared across the landscape.
What they looked at were rocks. Razor-edged rocks ten to fifty feet high, tumbled remorselessly without interruption on top of each other and against each other, leaning every way, no reason or logic or pattern to their distribution.
Silius and Cornificius sought an interview with the General.
“We can’t cross those rocks,” said Silius flatly.
“This army can cross anything, it’s already proved that,” Lucullus answered, very displeased at their protest.
“There’s no path,” said Silius.
“Then we will make one,” said Lucullus.
“Not through those rocks we won’t,” said Cornificius. “I know, because I had some of the men try. Whatever those rocks are made of is harder than our dolabrae.”
“Then we will simply climb over them,” said Lucullus.
He would not bend. The third month was drawing to a finish; he had to reach Artaxata. So his little army entered the lava field fractured by an inland sea in some remote past age. And shivered in fear because “those rocks” were daubed with blood-red lichen. It was painfully slow work, ants toiling across a plain of broken pots. Only men were not ants; “those rocks” cut, bruised, punished cruelly. Nor was there any way around them, for in every direction more snowy mountains reared on the horizon, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away, always hemming them into this terrible travail.
Clodius had decided somewhere just to the north of Lake Thospitis that he didn’t care what Lucullus said or did, he was going to travel with Silius. And when (learning from Sextilius that Clodius had deserted to fraternize with a centurion) the General ordered him back to the front of the march, Clodius refused.
“Tell my brother-in-law,” he said to the tribune dispatched to fetch him home, “that I am happy where I am. If he wants me up front, then he’ll have to clap me in irons.”
A reply which Lucullus deemed it wiser to ignore. In truth the staff was delighted to be rid of the whining, trouble-making Clodius. As yet no suspicion existed of Clodius’s part in the mutiny of the Cilician legions, and as the Fimbriani had confined their protest about “those rocks” to an official one delivered by their head centurions, no suspicion existed of a Fimbriani mutiny.
Perhaps there never would have been a Fimbriani mutiny had it not been for Mount Ararat. For fifty miles the army suffered the fragmented lava field, then emerged from it onto grass again. Bliss! Except that from east to west across their path loomed a mountain the like of which no one had ever seen. Eighteen thousand feet of solid snow, the most beautiful and terrible mountain in the world, with another cone, smaller yet no less horrifying, on its eastern flank.
The Fimbriani lay down their shields and spears and looked. And wept.
This time it was Clodius who led the deputation to the General, and Clodius was not about to be cowed.
“We absolutely refuse to march another step,” he said, Silius and Cornificius nodding behind him.
It was when Lucullus saw Bogitarus step into the tent that he knew himself beaten, for Bogitarus was the leader of his Galatian horsemen, a man whose loyalty he could not question.
“Are you of the same mind, Bogitarus?” Lucullus asked.
“I am, Lucius Licinius. My horses can’t cross a mountain like that, not after the rocks. Their feet are bruised to the hocks, they’ve cast shoes faster than my smiths can cope with, and I’m running out of steel. Not to mention that we’ve had no charcoal since we left Tigranocerta, so I have no charcoal left either. We would follow you into Hades, Lucius Licinius, but we will not follow you onto that mountain,” said Bogitarus.
“Thank you, Bogitarus,” said Lucullus. “Go. You Fimbriani can go too. I want to speak to Publius Clodius.”
“Does that mean we turn back?” asked Silius suspiciously.
“Not back, Marcus Silius, unless you want more rocks. We’ll turn west to the Arsanias, and find grain.”
Bogitarus had already gone; now the two Fimbriani centurions followed him, leaving Lucullus alone with Clodius.
“How much have you had to do with all this?” asked Lucullus.
Bright-eyed and gleeful, Clodius eyed the General up and down contemptuously. How worn he looked! Not hard to believe now that he was fifty. And the gaze had lost something, a cold fixity which had carried him through everything. What Clodius saw was a crust of weariness, and behind it a knowledge of defeat.
“What have I had to do with all this?’’ he asked, and laughed. “My dear Lucullus, I am its perpetrator! Do you really think any of those fellows have such foresight? Or the gall? All this is my doing, and nobody else’s.”
“The Cilician legions,” said Lucullus slowly.
“Them too. My doing.” Clodius bounced up and down on his toes. “You won’t want me after this, so I’ll go. By the time I get to Tarsus, my brother-in-law Rex ought to be there.”
“You’re going nowhere except back to mess with your Fimbriani minions,” said Lucullus, and smiled dourly. “I am your commander, and I hold a proconsular imperium to fight Mithridates and Tigranes. I do not give you leave to go, and without it you cannot go. You will remain with me until the sight of you makes me vomit.’”’
Not the answer Clodius wanted, or had expected. He threw Lucullus a furious glare, and stormed out.
*
The winds and snow began even as Lucullus turned west, for the campaigning season was over. He had used up his time of grace getting as far as Ararat, not more than two hundred miles from Tigranocerta as a bird would have flown. When he touched the course of the Arsanias, the biggest of the northern tributaries of the Euphrates
, he found the grain already harvested and the sparse populace fled to hide in their troglodyte houses dug out of tufa rock, together with every morsel of any kind of food. Defeated by his own troops Lucullus may have been, but adversity was something he had come to know well, and he was not about to stop here where Mithridates and Tigranes could find him all too easily when spring arrived.
He headed for Tigranocerta, where there were supplies and friends, but if the Fimbriani had expected to winter there, they were soon disillusioned. The city was quiet and seemed contented under the man he had left there to govern, Lucius Fannius. Having picked up grain and other foodstuffs, Lucullus marched south to besiege the city of Nisibis, situated on the river Mygdonius, and in drier, flatter country.
Nisibis fell on a black and rainy night in November, yielding much plunder as well as a wealth of good living. Ecstatic, the Fimbriani settled down with Clodius as their mascot, their good-luck charm, to spend a delightful winter beneath the snow line. And when Lucius Fannius materialized not a month later to inform his commander that Tigranocerta was once more in the hands of King Tigranes, the Fimbriani carried an ivy-decked Clodius shoulder-high around the Nisibis marketplace, attributing their good fortune to him; here they were safe, spared a siege at Tigranocerta.
In April, with winter nearing its end and the prospect of a new campaign against Tigranes some comfort, Lucullus learned that he had been stripped of everything save an empty title, commander in the war against the two kings. The knights had used the Plebeian Assembly to take away his last provinces, Bithynia and Pontus, and then deprived him of all four of his legions. The Fimbriani were to go home at last, and Manius Acilius Glabrio, the new governor of Bithynia-Pontus, was to have the Cilician troops. The commander in the war against the two kings had no army with which to continue his fight. All he had was his imperium.
Whereupon Lucullus resolved to keep the news of their fully honorable discharge from the Fimbriani. What they didn’t know couldn’t bother them. But of course the Fimbriani knew they were free to go home; Clodius had intercepted the official letters and discovered their contents before they reached Lucullus. Hard on the heels of the letter from Rome came letters from Pontus informing him that King Mithridates had invaded. Glabrio wouldn’t inherit the Cilician legions after all; they had been annihilated at Zela.
When orders went out to march for Pontus, Clodius came to see Lucullus. “The army refuses to move out of Nisibis,” he announced.
“The army will march for Pontus, Publius Clodius, to rescue those of its compatriots left alive,” said Lucullus.
“Ah, but it isn’t your army to command anymore!” crowed the jubilant Clodius. “The Fimbriani have finished their service under the eagles, they’re free to go home as soon as you produce their discharge papers. Which you’ll do right here in Nisibis. That way, you can’t cheat them when the spoils of Nisibis are divided.”
At which moment Lucullus understood everything. His breath hissed, he bared his teeth and advanced on Clodius with murder in his eyes. Clodius dodged behind a table, and made sure he was closer to the door than Lucullus.
“Don’t you lay a finger on me!” he shouted. “Touch me and they’ll lynch you!”
Lucullus stopped. “Do they love you so much?” he asked, hardly able to believe that even ignoramuses like Silius and the rest of the Fimbriani centurions could be so gullible.
“They love me to death. I am the Soldiers’ Friend.”
“You’re a trollop, Clodius, you’d sell yourself to the lowest scum on the face of this globe if that meant you’d be loved,” said Lucullus, his contempt naked.
Why exactly it occurred to him at that moment, and in the midst of so much anger, Clodius never afterward understood. But it popped into his head, and he said it gleefully, spitefully: “I’m a trollop? Not as big a trollop as your wife, Lucullus! My darling little sister Clodilla, whom I love as much as I hate you! But she is a trollop, Lucullus. I think that’s why I love her so desperately. Thought you had her first, didn’t you, all of fifteen years old when she married you? Lucullus the pederast, despoiler of the little girls and little boys! Thought you got to Clodilla first, eh? Well, you didn’t!” screamed Clodius, so carried away that foam gathered at the corners of his mouth.
Lucullus was grey. “What do you mean?” he whispered.
“I mean that I had her first, high and mighty Lucius Licinius Lucullus! I had her first, and long before you! I had Clodia first too. We used to sleep together, but we did more than just sleep! We played a lot, Lucullus, and the play grew greater as I grew greater! I had them both, I had them hundreds of times, I paddled my fingers inside them and then I paddled something else inside them! I sucked on them, I nibbled at them, I did things you can’t imagine with them! And guess what?” he asked, laughing. “Clodilla deems you a poor substitute for her little brother!”
There was a chair beside the table separating Clodius from Clodilla’s husband; Lucullus seemed suddenly to lose all the life in him and fell against it, into it. He gagged audibly.
“I dismiss you from my service, Soldiers’ Friend, because the time has come to vomit. I curse you! Go to Rex in Cilicia!”
*
After a tearful parting from Silius and Cornificius, Clodius went. Of course the Fimbriani centurions loaded their Friend down with gifts, some of them very precious, all useful. He jogged off on the back of an exquisite small horse, his retinue of servants equally well mounted, and with several dozen mules bearing the booty. Thinking himself headed in a direction minus danger, he declined Silius’s offer of an escort.
All went well until he crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma, his destination Cilicia Pedia and then Tarsus. But between him and Cilicia Pedia’s flat and fertile river plains lay the Amanus Mountains, a piddling coastal range after the massifs Clodius had recently struggled across; he regarded them with contempt. Until a band of Arab brigands waylaid him down a dry gulch and filched all his gifts, his bags of money, his exquisite small horses. Clodius finished his journey alone and on the back of a mule, though the Arabs (who thought him terrifically funny) had given him enough coins to complete his journey to Tarsus.
Where he found his brother-in-law Rex had not yet arrived! Clodius usurped a suite in the governor’s palace and sat down to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus—and now Arabs. The Arabs would pay too.
It was the end of Quinctilis before Quintus Marcius Rex and his three new legions arrived in Tarsus. He had traveled with Glabrio to the Hellespont, then elected to march down through Anatolia rather than sail a coast notorious for pirates. In Lycaonia, he was able to tell an avid Clodius, he had received a plea of help from none other than Lucullus, who had managed to get the Fimbriani moving after the Soldiers’ Friend departed, and set off for Pontus. At Talaura, well on his way, Lucullus was attacked by a son-in-law of Tigranes named Mithradates, and learned that the two kings were rapidly bearing down on him.
“And would you believe he had the temerity to send to me for help?” asked Rex.
“He’s your brother-in-law too,” said Clodius mischievously.
“He’s persona non grata in Rome, so naturally I refused. He had also sent to Glabrio for help, I believe, but I imagine he was refused in that quarter as well. The last I heard, he was in retreat and intending to return to Nisibis.”
“He never got there,” said Clodius, better informed about the end of Lucullus’s march than about events in Talaura. “When he reached the crossing at Samosata, the Fimbriani baulked. The last we’ve heard in Tarsus is that he’s now marching for Cappadocia, and from there he intends to go to Pergamum.”
Of course Clodius had discovered from reading Lucullus’s mail that Pompey the Great was the recipient of an unlimited imperium to clear the pirates from the Middle Sea, so he left the subject of Lucullus and proceeded to the subject of Pompey.
“And what do you have to do to help the obnoxious Pompeius Magnus sweep up his pirates?” he asked.
Quintus
Marcius Rex sniffed. “Nothing, it appears. Cilician waters are under the command of our mutual brother-in-law Celer’s brother, your cousin Nepos, barely old enough to be in the Senate. I am to govern my province and keep out of the way.”
“Hoity-toity!” gasped Clodius, seeing more mischief.
“Absolutely,” said Rex stiffly.
“I haven’t seen Nepos in Tarsus.”
“You will. In time. The fleets are ready for him. Cilicia is the ultimate destination of Pompeius’s campaign, it seems.”
“Then I think,” said Clodius, “that we ought to do a little good work in Cilician waters before Nepos gets here, don’t you?”
“How?” asked Claudia’s husband, who knew Clodius, but still lived in ignorance of Clodius’s ability to wreak havoc. What flaws he saw in Clodius, Rex dismissed as youthful folly.
“I could take out a neat little fleet and go to war on the pirates in your name,” said Clodius.
“Well…”
“Oh, go on!”
“I can’t see any harm in it,” said Rex, wavering.
“Let me, please!”
“All right then. But don’t annoy anyone except pirates!”
“I won’t, I promise I won’t,” said Clodius, who was seeing in his mind’s eye enough pirate booty to replace what he had lost to those wretched Arab brigands in the Amanus.
*
Within a market interval of eight days, Clodius the admiral set sail at the head of a flotilla rather than a fleet, some ten well-manned and properly decked biremes which neither Rex nor Clodius thought Metellus Nepos would miss when he turned up in Tarsus.
What Clodius didn’t take into account was the fact that Pompey’s broom had been sweeping so energetically that the waters off Cyprus and Cilicia Tracheia (which was the rugged western end of that province, wherein so many pirates had their land bases) swarmed with refugee pirate fleets of far larger size than ten biremes. He hadn’t been at sea for five days when one such fleet hove in sight, surrounded his flotilla, and captured it. Together with Publius Clodius, a very short-lived admiral.
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