The Caspian Gates

by Harry Sidebottom

  In the middle of the meadow, Polemo, king of Suania, sat on a high throne. He was resplendent in white: cloak and turban, both shot through with golden thread, studded with jewels. There was a large crowd below him, the majority of the three hundred councillors of the synedrion, many leading warriors. The young woman saw her three surviving brothers, standing tall and straight. The youngest turned and smiled. The scar on his cheek added to his presence. There was a man – one who did what his heart told him; no remorse, no compunction. If he had not been her brother … if they had belonged to another dynasty, the Ptolemies, say, of ancient Egypt … he could have been the true partner of her greatness.

  The young woman was mounted. Half a dozen of her own armed retainers on horseback around her, she sat apart. She was a priestess herself, but of a different, darker goddess. There was no place in this ritual for any women, except those who served the moon goddess Selene. Certainly no place for one dedicated to the bitch goddess, triple-faced Hecate.

  The ox was taken from its traces. The crowd shifted to encircle the participants. Sat on her horse, the young woman had a good view of all, could easily see over the heads of the men. The old priestess raised her hands to the heavens, invoked Selene, daughter of the Titans, chariot driver, lover of Endymion. Two men stepped forward. Quick as a swallow, one stunned the ox with a blow from the back of an axe. The other slashed the razor-sharp edge of the sacred lance deep down one side of the beast’s neck. The ox threw its head up. Blood pumped on to the grass. The men jumped back. In its agony, the ox paddled around in a tight, stamping circle. Its windpipe severed, it blew pink, frothy arterial blood from its nostrils and mouth. The beast collapsed. The attendants moved in again. They finished it off, rolled it on to its side, slit its belly and – plunging their arms in – drew out the ropes of intestines for divination. The aged priestess bent over the steaming coils. She considered them quietly. Then she announced all was propitious.

  The next sacrifice still stood calmly. At this point, some of them began to fear, even to try and break free. Usually, however, the drugs kept them docile, as the goddess wished. The young woman knew all about drugs, every root and potion in Suania and beyond.

  Gently, the young slave was led to the middle. His garland of flowers had slipped a little, but he was not struggling. He looked at the body of the ox, at the blood soaking into the lush green turf, with what appeared to be mild curiosity. The crowd was hushed, expectant. Unlike the young woman, they did not notice the two horsemen ride out of the trees.

  The crone again raised her hands to the heavens, and began to call on the moon goddess in all her many names and sonorous titles.

  The young woman watched one of the horsemen pass his reins to his companion and dismount. Despite the warmth of the spring afternoon, he was wearing a voluminous fur cloak. He walked, with a strange lack of urgency, to behind where her three brothers stood.

  The old priestess finished. A man stood forward. The point of the sacred lance was still crimson. Now the victim seemed to become aware of his position. He raised his hands in a confused, placating gesture. It had no effect. The spear point took him in the stomach. He doubled up around it. His hands clawed at the shaft. He fell, screaming. The crowd leant forward, engrossed. In every dying twitch and gasp the will of the goddess was being revealed.

  The late arrival stood for a moment behind the three brothers. Only the young woman paid him any attention. He pushed back his cloak. The naked steel was in his hand. He steadied himself. Three short, quick steps. He rammed the wicked sword into the unprotected back. Another voice screaming in agony.

  The stabbed man fell to his knees. The tip of the blade protruded from his stomach. The murderer, hands empty, stepped back. Distracted by the writhing agony of another, those around were slow to understand. Only the youngest brother reacted. He spun around, drawing his sword. The killer took a step back, as if surprised. The youngest brother brought his blade up. The killer turned and started to run. He made just three or four steps before retribution found him. A wild, swinging blow. It caught him on the side of the head, half severing his jaw. Blood and teeth sprayed. He went down. The youngest brother was on him, blade chopping.

  ‘There!’ The young woman pointed. ‘The accomplice, do not let him escape. Kill him!’

  Her retinue of armed men booted their horses. The accomplice sawed his reins, dragged his horse’s head around. All too late. The others were all about him. He toppled to the ground in a red mist, already hacked beyond salvation.

  The young woman looked over at her youngest brother. He was standing over the assassin. Sword dripping, covered in gore; he was panting. No longer the least of four boys sat at a teacher’s feet, she thought. Now her youngest brother was a man. He had come a long way in the last two years – they both had. Sealed and countersealed in blood, she said to herself. The oracle drifted back into her mind. The ox is wreathed; the end is near, the sacrificer to hand.

  PART TWO

  The Kindly Sea

  (Ephesus to Phasis, Spring–Summer AD262)

  To Phasis, where for ships is the furthermost run.

  –Unknown tragedian, from Strabo 11.2.16

  XIV

  The problem of leave-taking, for a man with an imagination like Ballista’s, was that each instance might turn out to be final. Standing on the quayside at Ephesus, he was waiting to say farewell. Offhand, he could not number the times he had endured such scenes. Rome, less than two years after he had married Julia, ordered north to summon Valerian, the journey that had ended at the battle of Spoletium and with a new dynasty on the throne. Rome again, Isangrim just three, when Ballista was sent east to defend Arete. One after another, the recollections jostled. The gaol in Emesa, when, leaving Julia terrified, Isangrim and Dernhelm crying, he had been hauled off to the malignant Quietus in the temple of Elagabalus. The memories went back to childhood; back beyond the awful day the imperium had reached out, in the form of the garlic-reeking centurion, and taken him from his native people, from the hall of his father and the embrace of his mother.

  To dispel the clouds of unhappy memories, to take his mind from what was to come, Ballista thought about his trip to the commercial agora a couple of days earlier.

  In almost every town through which he passed in the imperium, once he had enough money, Ballista visited the slave market. They were all much the same: the dejected human flotsam, the tools with voices watched over by cold-eyed men with cunning, brutal faces.

  The slave market at Ephesus was situated in the north-east corner of the Tetragonos agora. Beyond the wooden livestock pens were the stone cells of the human goods. Ballista had been there before, four or five years earlier, when he had been in Ephesus as a deputy to the governor of Asia, tasked with the revolting duty of persecuting the misguided Christians. On that occasion, there had been no one that interested him. This time it had been different.

  ‘Are there any Angles here?’ Ballista always asked the question in his native language, always the same question. On half a dozen occasions over the years there had been a response. The first two of his people he had purchased Ballista had freed, given them money and sent them north. They had never got there. Either they had taken his funds and decided to start a new life somewhere else, or something had happened. Since then, Ballista had kept the Angles he discovered as freedmen on his wife’s estate in Sicily. There were fourteen of them now, men, women and children, living in and around Tauromenium.

  ‘Are there any Angles here?’ Ballista had repeated the question. Usually there was no answer; blank incomprehension on faces pinched with misery. Ballista started to turn to go. Then came a small voice. ‘Here, over here.’

  The youth spoke the language of northern Germania, but the accent was wrong. Ballista looked down at him. He had reddish hair, freckles, a black eye. ‘You are not an Angle.’

  ‘No, I am from the Frisii, but my friend here is one of your people.’

  Sitting silently, his knees drawn up to his chin,
was a youth of extraordinary beauty: blond hair, blue eyes, fine cheekbones, on one of which was an open cut. His gaze was fixed over Ballista’s head. He betrayed no awareness of what was around him.

  ‘What is your name, boy?’ Ballista spoke gently. The boy shivered slightly, but did not respond.

  ‘He is called Wulfstan,’ said the Frisian. ‘He has … had a bad time.’

  The slave dealer sidled up. ‘How much for the two,’ Ballista snapped. The dealer named a price. Ballista snorted and offered him half. The man spread his hands and started to whine about feeding his family. Not trusting himself to bargain, Ballista indicated for Hippothous to pay him what he asked.

  The coins in his hands, the dealer had been joviality itself. ‘A fine choice, Kyrios, a fine choice. These two will …’ Given a sharp look from Ballista, the dealer did not name the obvious way the youths might serve a new master. ‘I am sure they will prove a good purchase,’ he ended lamely.

  As the Frisian helped the other youth to his feet, Ballista turned and looked where Wulfstan had been gazing. There, high above the agora, was the mountain, great slabs of limestone thrusting through the greenery. It was nothing like the far northern homelands of the Angles. But it was wild and free.

  Dwelling on one’s virtues, in this case philanthropia, had been an excellent diversion. Ballista was brought back to immediate circumstances by the arrival on the quayside of those who had come to see him off.

  A dignified procession was emerging from the harbour gate; despite the earthquake, somehow its triple arches still stood. At the front, preceded by his lictors bearing the fasces, was Maximillianus, the governor of Asia. The lictors, their rods and axes symbolic of the proconsul’s right to dispense punishment, both corporal and capital, were stepping carefully across the shattered marble paving. Close behind Maximillianus came the scribe to the demos Publius Vedius Antoninus, the asiarch Gaius Valerius Festus, and Flavius Damianus. The political and social hierarchy in the city were here to see Ballista go. While he had not saved Ephesus from the Goths, he was the hero of the defence of Miletus and Didyma. Whatever his personal history or merits, he was a man with mandata signed by the emperor. Respect had to be shown to such men.

  Maximillianus made a formal speech, redolent of gravity and hard duty, with much invoking of the gods. The three leading notables did likewise.

  After Ballista had replied in similar measured terms, his friend Corvus stepped forward and embraced him. The eirenarch said little, just wished him a safe journey. Unsurprisingly, as an Epicurean, Corvus made no mention of the divine.

  Julia led the boys to him. She was tall, stately in the stola of a Roman matron. Things had not been completely good between them for many months. He did not know why. But it was a marriage of more than a decade, better than many. At times, when forced to be apart, he realized the degree to which he relied on her.

  She kissed him, on the lips but very chaste. She wished him a good journey and a safe return. Succinctly, she outlined the latest arrangements for her taking the boys and the majority of the familia back to Tauromenium: a letter of recommendation for the ship’s captain had arrived from one of her family friends; the vessel would coast up to Corfu and cross to southern Italy, rather than sail directly from Greece to Sicily. She told him she loved him. And that was that.

  Julia’s practicality, her very unfeminine lack of fuss, was one of the things that had drawn Ballista to his wife as he had got to know her after their wedding. But that had been when everything was good; now, he had half hoped for a more overt display of affection.

  Ballista got down on one knee as Isangrim and Dernhelm came to him. He put an arm around each of his sons, kissed them. From the folds of his travelling cloak he produced a wooden toy, a horse, for Dernhelm. The boy squealed with pleasure. Time and distance were vague concepts to a three-year-old.

  It was not the same for Isangrim. The boy was ten. He knew the Caucasus were at the far end of the world, knew he would not see his father for at least a year. The boy was trying to be brave.

  Ballista hugged him, whispered in his ear. They both had to be strong, for each other, for Isangrim’s mother and his brother.

  ‘I wish I was old enough to come with you and Maximus and Calgacus,’ said Isangrim.

  ‘Next time you will be.’

  Ballista turned to Maximus, who handed him a package. Ballista passed it to Isangrim. The boy unwrapped the coverings. It was a gladius: a man’s sword, but short enough for Isangrim.

  The boy thanked his father with an odd formality. Then he thought for a moment, before unbuckling the miniature sword on his hip. He held it out to his father. ‘You can use it as a dagger.’

  It had been the boy’s treasured possession since Ballista had given it to him – was it four years before? – on his return to Antioch after his first trip to Ephesus.

  Ballista thanked him, keeping a tight rein on his emotions. The boy would do well. If things had been different, if they had lived in Germania, he would have soon grown into a fine northern leader of men. Ballista could see his eldest son seated on the chief’s throne in the hall, taking the golden rings from his arm, awarding them to the leading warriors of his comitatus.

  It was time to go. A last kiss for each of his sons, and Ballista walked up the boarding ladder. Hippothous passed him a cup of wine. Ballista intoned a prayer to Artemis of the Ephesians; to Zeus, Protector of Strangers; to Poseidon, Lord of the Seas; to Apollo, God of Embarkation. He tipped the libation into the water. Nothing untoward happened: no one sneezed, no other things of ill omen. He gave the cup back to Hippothous, and gave the order to get under way.

  The boarding ladder was pulled up, the mooring ropes slipped. At the rowing master’s word, the oarsmen readied themselves. The blades dipped as one, bit the surface, and the liburnian eased away from the dock.

  Slowly, the little, two-banked galley made its course out of the long harbour of Ephesus. Ballista stood in the stern and waved. Slowly, the mountain slid past to the right, the plain to the left. Slowly, the figures on the dock diminished: the tall, black-haired woman and the two blond boys.

  When they were at sea, the dock itself was no more than a smudge below the white bowl of the theatre, no figures to be seen. Ballista turned his back. He looked north-west for Mount Korakion, the first landmark.

  He was concerned for the safety of Julia and the boys. Any sea journey had its dangers. But he was not too worried. The Goths were long gone back to the Black Sea. They were reported to have passed through the Bosphorus some twenty days earlier. The squadron of Venerianus had arrived in the Aegean. It was resting close by on Chios, preparing to sweep north in the wake of the Goths. As for the danger of ordinary opportunistic piracy, Ballista had hired four veterans as bodyguards for his familia. These tough, grizzled men, added to the able-bodied of the crew, should give any fishermen or traders with an eye to kidnap and ransom serious pause for thought. There was nothing that could be done about storms, but it was eight days before the kalends of May, well within the outer limits of the sailing season, and the ship on which Julia and the boys would travel was sound, its captain vouched for.

  Ballista was not excessively worried, but he would rest easier once he had news that they had made it back to Sicily. The island was far from either barbarian menace or likely Roman civil war. Surely there could be nowhere safer than the villa at Tauromenium, surrounded by their own slaves, freedmen and tenants. He wished he could have shipped Pale Horse with them. The gelding deserved a quiet retirement on the sunlit pastures of Sicily, but he would be well cared for on the estate of Corvus outside Ephesus. Ballista hoped to collect him on the way back.

  Even after such a parting, even given the nature of the mission, Ballista felt the small spark of anticipation that came with the start of a journey. He had Maximus and Calgacus with him, as well as Hippothous. The two Greek slaves he had bought in Priene, Agathon and Polybius would act as body servants, along with the two northern boys, Bauto the Frisian and W
ulfstan the Angle, when the latter was more recovered. Hippothous had bought his own slave in Ephesus.

  The liburnian would run up to Chios, past Lesbos; plough against the current of the Hellespont, cross the Propontis and come to the Bosphorus and Byzantium. There, they would meet Rutilus, Castricius and the aged noble Felix. There, four eunuch slaves of the emperor would join them to act as interpreters. And there, a trireme would be waiting to carry all of them to the far end of the Black Sea. A line of iambic poetry came into Ballista’s thoughts.

  To Phasis, where for ships is the furthermost run.

  It was not hard to see why these four men were commanded to the edge of the inhabited world. For once, Ballista had not needed Julia to explain the underlying politics. He had been briefly a pretender to the throne. Two of the others were his close associates in that short-lived usurpation. The fourth was the most prominent and vocal champion of senatorial independence and tradition, the self-styled embodiment of mos maiorum. All four had something of a military reputation. All four were an irritation, possibly even a potential source of unrest. Rather than execute them, they were being got out of the way. In legal terms, they were office holders. They might even do some good. But in real terms, they were heading for exile.

  Many years before, as a hostage at the imperial court, Ballista had been instructed to study philosophy. Several of the treatises had been on the theme of exile. One had stuck in his mind. It was a speech by a man called Favorinus of Arelate. Like all philosophical tracts on the subject, it had argued that exile was not bad at all. The heart of the text was an extended image from the gymnasium. The exile was an athlete, alone on the dry sand, stripped naked to his very soul. His opponents were four: love of fatherland, of family and friends, of wealth and honour, and of liberty. They did not keep to the rules; all jumped forward and wrestled the exile at once.