Caesar's Women

by Colleen McCullough

  His dream of conquering the Kingdom of the Parthians was over. To take fewer than four legions into absolutely flat country would be suicide, and Lucullus was not suicidal. Sighing, he rose to his feet, went to find Sextilius and Fannius, the most senior legates with him in Tigranocerta.

  "What will you do, then?" asked Sextilius, stunned.

  "I'll do what lies in my power with the forces I have," said Lucullus, the stiffness growing in every moment. "I'll go north after Tigranes and Mithridates. I'll force them to retreat ahead of me, pen them into Artaxata, and break them into little pieces."

  "It's too early in the year to go so far north," said Lucius Fannius, looking worried. "We won't be able to leave until—oh, Sextilis by the calendar. Then all we'll have is four months. They say there's no land under five thousand feet, and the growing season lasts a bare summer. Nor will we be able to take much with us in supplies—I believe the terrain is solid mountain. But you will go west of Lake Thospitis, of course."

  "No, I will go east of Lake Thospitis," Lucullus answered, now fully encased in his icy campaigning shell. "If four months is all we have, we can't afford to detour two hundred miles just because the going is a trifle easier."

  His legates looked upset, but neither argued. Long accustomed to that look on Lucullus's face, they didn't think any argument would sway him. "In the meantime what will you do?" asked Fannius.

  "Leave the Fimbriani here to wallow," said Lucullus with contempt. "They'll be pleased enough at that news!"

  Thus it was that early in the month of Sextilis the army of Lucullus finally left Tigranocerta, but not to march south into the heat. This new direction (as Clodius learned from Silius and Cornificius) did not precisely please the Fimbriani, who would have preferred to loiter in Tigranocerta pretending to be on garrison duty. But at least the weather would be bearable, and there wasn't a mountain in all of Asia could daunt a Fimbrianus! They had climbed them all, said Silius complacently. Besides which, four months meant a nice short campaign. They'd be back in snug Tigranocerta by winter.

  Lucullus himself led the march in stony silence, for he had discovered on a visit to Antioch that he was removed from his governorship of Cilicia; the province was to be given to Quintus Marcius Rex, senior consul of the year, and Rex was anxious to leave for the East during his consulship. With, Lucullus was outraged to hear, three brand-new legions accompanying him! Yet he, Lucullus, couldn't prise a legion out of Rome when his very life had depended on it!

  "All right for me," said Publius Clodius smugly. "Rex is my brother-in-law too, don't forget. I'm just like a cat—land on my feet every time! If you don't want me, Lucullus, I'll take myself off to join Rex in Tarsus."

  "Don't hurry!" snarled Lucullus. "What I failed to tell you is that Rex can't start for the East as early as he planned. The junior consul died, then the suffect consul died; Rex is glued to Rome until his consulship is over."

  "Oh!" said Clodius, and took himself off.

  Once the march began it had become impossible for Clodius to seek out Silius or Cornificius without being noticed; during this initial stage he lay low among the military tribunes, said and did nothing. He had a feeling that as time went on opportunity would arrive, for his bones said Lucullus had lost his luck. Nor was he alone in thinking this; the tribunes and even the legates were also beginning to mutter about Lucullus's bad luck.

  His guides had advised that he march up the Canirites, the branch of the Tigris which ran close to Tigranocerta and rose in the massif southeast of Lake Thospitis. But his guides were all Arabs from the lowlands; search as he would, Lucullus had found no one in the region of Tigranocerta who hailed from that massif southeast of Lake Thospitis. Which should have told him something about the country he was venturing into, but didn't because his spirit was so bruised by the failure of the Cilician legions that he wasn't capable of detachment. He did, however, retain enough coolness of mind to send some of his Galatian horsemen ahead. They returned within a market interval to inform him that the Canirites had a short course which ended in a sheer wall of alp no army could possibly cross, even on foot.

  "We did see one nomad shepherd," said the leader of the patrol, "and he suggested we march for the Lycus, the next big Tigris tributary south. Its course is long, and winds between the same mountain wall. He thinks its source is kinder, that we should be able to cross to some of the lower land around Lake Thospitis. And from there, he says, the going will be easier."

  Lucullus frowned direfully at the delay, and sent his Arabs packing. When he asked to see the shepherd with a view to making him the guide, his Galatians informed him sadly that the rascal had slipped away with his sheep and could not be found.

  "Very well, we march for the Lycus," said the General.

  "We've lost eighteen days," said Sextilius timidly.

  "I am aware of that."

  And so, having found the Lycus, the Fimbriani and the cavalry began to follow it into ever-increasing heights, an ever-decreasing valley. None of them had been with Pompey when he blazed a new route across the western Alps, but if one had been, he could have told the rest that Pompey's path was infant's work compared to this. And the army was climbing, struggling between great boulders thrown out by the river, now a roaring torrent impossible to ford, growing narrower, deeper, wilder.

  They rounded a corner and emerged onto a fairly grassy shoulder which sat like a park, not quite a bowl but at least offering some grazing for the horses, growing thin and hungry. But it couldn't cheer them, for its far end— it was apparently the watershed—was appalling. Nor would Lucullus permit them to tarry longer than three days; they had been over a month on their way, and were actually very little further north than Tigranocerta.

  The mountain on their right as they started out into this frightful wilderness was a sixteen-thousand-foot giant, and they were ten thousand feet up its side, gasping at the weight of their packs, wondering why their heads ached, why they could never seem to fill their chests with precious air. A new little stream was their only way out, and the walls rose on either side of it so sheer even snow could not find a foothold. Sometimes it took a whole day to negotiate less than a mile, scrambling up and over rocks, clinging to the edge of the boiling cataract they followed, trying desperately not to fall in to be bashed and mashed to pulp.

  No one saw the beauty; the going was too dreadful. And it never seemed to grow less dreadful as the days dragged on and the cataract never calmed, just widened and deepened. At night it was perishing, though full summer was here, and during the day they never felt the sun, so enormous were the mountain walls which hemmed them in. Nothing could be worse, nothing.

  Until they saw the bloodstained snow, just when the gorge they had been traversing started to widen a trifle, and the horses managed to nibble at a little grass. Less vertical now, if almost as tall, the mountains held sheets and rivers of snow in their crevices. Snow which looked exactly as snow did on a battlefield after the slaughter was over, brownish pink with blood.

  Clodius bolted for Cornificius, whose legion preceded the senior legion under Silius.

  "What does it mean?" cried Clodius, terrified.

  "It means we're going to certain death," said Cornificius.

  "Have you never seen it before?"

  "How could we have seen it before, when it's here as an omen for the lot of us?''

  "We must turn back!" shivered Clodius.

  "Too late for that," said Cornificius.

  So they struggled on, a little more easily now because the river had managed to carve two verges for itself, and the altitude was decreasing. But Lucullus announced they were too far east, so the army, still staring at the bloodstained snow all around them on the heights, turned to climb once more. Nowhere had they found evidence of life, though everyone had been ordered to capture any nomad who might appear. How could anyone live looking at bloodstained snow?

  Twice they climbed up to ten and eleven thousand feet, twice they stumbled downward, but the second pa
ss 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 ab
out 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.