by Andre Norton
"May as well rest, young one... I mean, sir." Rufus's voice was slurred with exhaustion.
Obedient, Quintus dropped once more, covering his face with his hands as he shut his smarting eyes.
After a moment, he was ashamed. Even a most junior tribune who owed his sword to place-seeking and fool luck should set the men a better example. Nearby knelt one of the signifers. The standard-bearer had grounded the butt of his Eagle in the mud, and the bronze bird high overhead looked as dispirited as the man who had borne it. At least that had not fallen or been or lost. Not yet. Not like so many of the others. Eagles of Rome's Legions had fallen into enemy hands. That was worse, even more than abandoning their wounded. For the Eagles, most who marched behind them believed, were the very spirit of the Legions as the genius loci was the spirit of a place.
Quintus raised his head, startled as he might be at a familiar scent or voice. Best not think of that part of the past unless he wanted to run mad and gibber like one of the Asiatics afflicted with the religious mania that passed among them for faith. Hard to believe it, but under the influences of their religions, they would cut at themselves or anyone else. He shuddered, and for once, hoped it was fever, not the beginnings of madness. He was a Roman. Prophecy and spirit voices were for lesser peoples.
At least the drums, these damned throbbing drums of The Surena's victorious Parthians were stilled. Quintus was no soldier, not in the way centurions like Rufus were—bred and wed to the Legions—but his few years as a tribune had taught him a little. The drums were a bad omen: All the omens had been bad since Marcus Licinius Crassus had marched his seven Legions, the auxilia, and his gods-be-damned haughty cavalry east of the Euphrates.
Wait for the cavalry, proconsul Crassus had said. Thousands of crack riders from Gaul, led by his son. Wait for them. Then, keep pace with the riders until your lungs ached and you nearly choked with the dust of the plains, and some of the older men were limping while you hoped their hearts didn't burst. Well, all those horsemen had been slaughtered, Publius Crassus with them; and the rest fled, avoiding the panic of the common rout.
Gods, he just wanted to lie down and die in his armor, his already-rusting armor. In the breathless days before his final treachery, that Arab dog Ariamnes had jeered at the Romans' pace. Fine for him: He went mounted, he and his six thousand men that he had promised would fight beside the Romans. He had fawned like the vilest client before the very men he betrayed. Traitors, all of them. Gods, Quintus threw back his head a little to try to see the sky. He wished he were back by the Tiber, on the land no longer his.
The panic of their retreat to the marshes was behind them, he could hear from the mincing voice of that prancing Lucilius.
"Seeing his son's head fly-bit on the spear was what did it. The proconsul gave one stare and screamed like a woman in childbirth," Lucilius reported. "Wept. Offered to fall on his sword, though his hand was shaking the way it does after a three-day drunk. I can't imagine how he could have held any sword steady long enough to fall on it."
Naturally, the young aristocrat had been in Crassus's tent—as Quintus had not—for a very select staff meeting the night Crassus had finally been forced to make any decision at all, let alone the one to abandon the wounded and retreat to Carrhae. Quintus should have known that Lucilius would have joined the other patricians, deciding arbitrarily whose lives would be spared and whose sacrificed.
Now, he was laughing as lightly as if he traded gossip in the baths at home. "I swear, he screamed and shook and nigh-on soiled himself."
Quintus had no love for Crassus, who had tossed the farm his own family had held for generations to a client about as casually as Quintus might toss a coin to a beggar. Still, that a general and a proconsul of Rome could abandon his men on a lost battlefield—best that grandfather had died before this day. The old man had died twice already, once with the loss of his lands, a second time when Quintus had held him for his last breath two years ago. This would have given him a third death.
Lucilius's eyes glinted with that gambler's fervor that had forced him out to Syria, one jump ahead of the creditors he had lived off since putting on the toga virilis. This flight too was a kind of gamble, one Lucilius was sure he would win even now. Why not? Hadn't his luck always come around before?
"So who leads?"
"Cassius. Pushing from behind."
Crassus had looked enough like a leader to keep heart in the men. Now, this staff officer stepped into his boots. Quintus had never trusted the lean, saturnine elder tribune, but at that moment he would have followed him as his own grandfather followed Marius to destruction. Cassius was a politician. He might be a tribune—the same rank that Quintus held, however inadequately—but the older man had survived the ambushes of Roman politics, and Quintus reckoned he might survive this, too. Another of Lucilius's friends, sleek even now after a rout and hours in a marsh, bared his teeth in a grin.
"Pro di," Lucilius added, "it was almost worth losing the battle to watch that Cassius slap old moneybags back into decency."
Even in the dark now, Quintus saw Legionaries making gestures to avert evil. Their eyes were wide as the eyes of stalled horses who smelled wildfire. Even Romans had to reckon with defeat, but to learn that their leader had lost his courage...
"Keep a decent tongue in your head!" Quintus hissed. Lucilius had powerful friends who could snatch the armor off Quintus's back and blight his last hopes of ever regaining his family's land—if the Parthians didn't stick them all full of thrice-damned arrows first.
"Our senex there. We'll all turn old and gray," the young aristocrat mocked. "If we live that long."
But the centurion turned his head and glared, and Lucilius's voice softened to a whisper and a too-hectic laugh. Many of the men had not drunk all day. Despite Rufus's oaths, Quintus knew some of them were stealthily lapping up the thick water. There would be fever in the marsh before dawn.
Behind him, some of the younger tribunes diced. Fortunes could rise and fall on the throw of the dice, even in the Legions. That was one of the ways Lucilius had gotten himself into trouble. Quintus had never had any money to play. Callous to play now, he thought—not that it mattered. Still, if one of Crassus's staff happened by, the gamers would regret it in the short time they probably had left.
But they were undoubtedly privileged, as usual. Cassius and his troops were likelier to stay with the proconsul, enjoying whatever comforts he had been able to wrest from the wreck of his armies. Rufus's deep rumble set about disposing the men as comfortably as might be until dawn, when they must break free of the swamp or die. Quintus heard himself repeat orders—to his surprise, he spoke the right ones—as if in a waking dream that differed totally from the memories he had brushed against.
"Why don't they come after us?" a young Legionary whispered in the darkness, then fell silent when someone chuckled.
"Why should they? Got us pinned here, haven't they? They can just wait and pick us off, unless they get bored and want to go hunting. They'll wait till dawn for anything. Or offer us terms. But that's a hope I wouldn't count on, son. However, they just might want some new slaves to push around."
Mumbles about the guards just sneaking off into the swamp rose. Rufus's eye swept round, and the men were silent. Quintus too had heard those voices in the ranks, careless around a green tribune as they dared not be around the wily old veteran. Only hours ago, he had heard them as he stood sweating in the square, too hot to feel as hungry or thirsty as they all had been kept for days. Some men had collapsed from the heat, from the lack of proper food, water, and rest, which had not been enough to keep the Legions marching at their best-known pace, let alone the cavalry pace Crassus had been goaded into ordering. He had heard their mutters of hope when, looking out, no one saw any of the deadly Parthian cataphracts.
And then The Surena had signaled. At his command, the drums and bronze bells throbbed, all over the battlefield. The Parthian prince was tall, handsome for a barbarian, much as Quintus hated to
admit it. His eyes were huge, painted against the sun, which could blind you here, where even in May the sunlight burned. A dancing boy's trick, but no one said that after seeing the killing light in those eyes—and feeling the sun's glare themselves.
Sunlight blazed off the gleaming arms of The Surena's deadly riders and shimmered from thin, brilliant banners that floated in the still air like tongues of fire. Helmets and breastplates caught fire as the light glinted off the armor of the Parthian horse archers. Some of the men were Parthians. Others, though, were unlike their prince. They were rather small and yellow and bowed of leg. Their eyes seemed hidden in slanted folds, and they smiled at the Romans as a glutton gloats, facing his feast table.
"The Seres," Quintus had heard. They had made the steel that the Romans knew they were about to taste. And the banners?
"What would that stuff cost in Rome?" some fool with a patrician accent breathed.
"More than you want to pay... sir," rasped a centurion before the drums and bells drowned out his words.
To their eternal credit, none of the Legionaries had broken. They stood firm in the hollow square, twelve cohorts on each side, Crassus, his pet cavalry, and the baggage in the center. Quintus got a glimpse of the proconsul. He was sweating—they all were—and the whites of his eyes were showing. Even as he watched, Cassius flung down his hands in a gesture of disgust.
"That doesn't look good," muttered the man next to Quintus. "Probably told him that the cavalry should be divided up. We should be spread out, not penned up like this."
Hard to tell when the battle started. At first, it had seemed promising. The Surena's cataphracts raced forward, to be stopped by the deep Roman formation. The arrows fell like deadly rain against the Roman testudo. It held, of course: Like a strongly shelled tortoise, they would wait for the archers' quivers to empty.
The Legions had settled in to wait for the archers to run out of arrows. When such flights grew sparser, the Romans cheered. Rufus had started swearing then, in between shouting the orders that let the buccinatores horns bray before those trumpeters screamed and died, shot by men who aimed at the glinting metal of their horns. When they fell, he had shouted, reforming his men, cursing and begging them to fight and die like Romans. Ultimately, the drums had drowned out his voice and hopes. You couldn't tell the sweat on his face from the tears.
The drums sounded again as the Romans fled, a hateful mercy, as the Parthians slaughtered the wounded Crassus had ordered must be left behind. Quintus wondered if he would ever forget those screams and cries for aid—or for their mothers.
How long since Quintus had been able to cast his helmet down, bury his face in flowing water, and drink his fill? He could not remember. His canteen held the water and vinegar mixture that now stank of leather, and precious little of it. Water trickled in the swamp near Carrhae. Thirsty, he had always seemed thirsty since they left the Euphrates for the desert that was so different from his home near the Tiber.
One or two of the men had already escaped into memories and tumbled forward like men asleep. Rufus had slain another who refused to move, who curled up like a newborn, whimpering deep in his throat.
"Better than just leaving him, sir," he muttered, then spat, cursing how the desert got into his throat.
Memories flowed on, trickling like the water in the swamp. In the desert, Quintus had dreamed of moisture. Now, he had far too much. Sweat trickled under his filthy tunic. If the night got cold, he could expect fever, and that was probably the best death he could expect. Maybe he could rest...
The underofficers had hoped to camp their men by the little Ballisur stream for a night, but even that mercy had been denied them by Crassus's son Publius and his Gaulish riders. Press on at the wretched cavalry's pace, press on, without food or water to sustain a mule, let alone Rome's mules, the men of the Legions. It was a gift from Mars that more men had not fallen out, never to rise.
Or perhaps the gift from Mars was embodied in Rufus, whose curses, made more foul and more frightening by the unwonted quiet of his voice, flowed as filthy as the water in the marsh by the walled city—the city they must reach if they hoped to save their lives and the old soldier was to get the wooden sword he joked, in his rare good moods, about looking forward to. Everyone had always played along, though a good First Spear was likelier to get a castra to command than the reward of a freed gladiator. Best not think of them either. Life as a slave might be the best fate any of them could face.
Quintus shut his eyes. Life as a gladiator was no mercy while Crassus ruled. Young though Quintus was, he could still remember how brutally the proconsul had put down the gladiators' revolt. The roads had been lined with crosses, and the air smelled like death. Crassus could be ruthless when surrounded by an invincible army. Still, Spartacus... the gladiator turned renegade had been the bogey of Quintus's childhood, just as The Surena, no doubt, would haunt the rest of his life, however brief it was.
But nothing, he thought, nothing could have been worse than what had befallen his family—his father killed, his family driven from the comfortable farm that had been theirs since the Tarquins were expelled, and with only him, the only grandson who survived life in a Roman insula with its fevers and fires, to try to win it back.
"What's that?"
He started. Requests for orders. Plans. He took it on his own initiative to order that those men who had extra food share with those who had none. Rufus caught his eye and nodded, bleak comfort where he had never expected to find it.
Bowing and saluting and waiting on the family's shrewd patron: He remembered that too. The gifts that meant a week of scant food. The snubs that meant setbacks; the rebukes that almost put paid to his hopes of a place following the Eagles. Jupiter Optimus Maximus knew he did not wish to follow the Eagles. He was a farmer, not a fighter. But they had snatched his farm, and there would be nothing at all for his family unless he earned it back.
If he shut his eyes and forced himself not to hear the prayers and imprecations of his centurion, the marsh sounds made him almost happy. He remembered the light upon the Tiber, the way it shone through the leaves of the twisted olive trees and heated the vines before harvest. He remembered how every clod of earth felt as he ran to his favorite places in the gnarled roots of trees by the river, when the heat hummed and the sun burned almost white. There, he would fling himself down and sleep or watch the blue haze fill the river valley as the afternoon drowsed away.
Voices murmured in the marshes outside the accursed walls of Carrhae. Treachery lay in their whispers. Had the city not been there, perhaps Crassus might have summoned the courage to let them die like Romans, but with a way of escape, the old thief had craft, if not honor.
"Buys his Legions like cupbearers..." muttered Rufus, too furious to be prudent. "And pours them out like vinegar before that... that... Persian with his catamite eyes." Persian, Parthian—Rufus would hardly care. The Surena wore kohl beneath his eyes to cut the glare. Who knew, if they had a chance, how many else might do so if it helped them fight in this land? Maybe, they could make do with mud. Enough of that lying around here.
"He's going to get himself killed talking like that," Lucilius whispered to one of his ten dearest friends.
"Small loss. But hush, you'll wake our graybeard."
The other patrician officer meant Quintus, he knew. And he knew enough to control himself. Don't antagonize anyone, least of all a patrician, even ones as worthless as those two. It was not safe.
A hand on his shoulder brought him back to the stinks of marsh and frightened men. Pain in his ribs, right over the earlier bum, jolted him to full alertness.
The centurion, with at least thirty more years on him to weaken back, ears, and eyes, heard the rustle in the marshes about the time that the guards stirred. Quintus nodded that he had heard it too, glad he had not started, much less cried out. The you'll do in Rufus's eyes, squinting even now as if unused to the comfort of darkness, was praise enough.
A moment later, both he and Qui
ntus had risen to their knees, hands snatching at the well-worn hilts of the gladius that each of them carried. Their swords drawn, the guards that Rufus and Quintus had posted when they entered the marshes were coming in. Without orders and with...
With Parthians under escort. But judging from the assurance of their walk, these were not prisoners.
Quintus hunkered down in the wet and the mud. Despite the chill that had long since crept into his bones, he went suddenly hot, ashamed that the Parthians looked upon Romans defeated yet still alive.
They walked like princes. Or executioners. Their harness held a somber glitter that the marshes reflected, a gleam like rotten wood. One of them turned to rake his eyes across the marsh.
Quintus had seen that one last on horseback, with a long banner like a tongue of flame overhead and the sun glinting on the heavy scales of his armor and his horse's trappings. Then, too, his eyes, the pits darkened against the ferocious desert glare, had stared at his enemies, who had fallen and failed.
Once again. The Surena had come to view the vanquished.
All that was missing was the sound of the drums and bronze bells.
