The Caspian Gates

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘Of course, Dominus.’

  And when he returned he would both inspect the garrison and conduct a lustrum of the expedition.

  The Spanish prefect looked far from happy at this.

  Felix smiled. ‘Have no fears, Prefect, I am fully aware of the difficulties faced by commanders of far-flung forces in these difficult times.’

  The prefect did not appear mollified. ‘Dominus, it is the lustrum.’

  ‘No, no,’ Felix said. ‘I will, of course, reimburse you the price of the sacrificial beasts – only those our traditions require: a boar, a ram and a bull. You will be put to no expense.’

  ‘Dominus.’ Clearly the prefect was still unhappy. Ballista had no idea where the problem lay, but he suspected it was not about money.

  ‘Make sure the attendants with them have propitious names – and that there are plenty of musicians, all soldiers, or suitably martial instruments.’

  As soon as the Vir Clarissimus had sipped the last of his conditum, they made a start. A local guide led them first to the temple of the Phasian goddess on the headland. Here, they were shown two anchors – one iron, one stone – both said to be from the Argo. Next, they were led across the heavily wooded Plain of Circe. Walking the sun-dappled path overhung by a profusion of elms and willows, they all felt a pleasurable frisson of horror. Just as they had been led to expect, from the uppermost branches hung any number of untreated ox-hides, each containing its corpse.

  The guide laughed like a conjurer who had completed his trick. ‘It is an abomination to us to cremate or bury a man. But do not think us barbarians, do not think we do not honour our mother the Earth – we give her the bodies of women.’

  ‘Everywhere custom is king.’ Felix sonorously quoted the famous line of Herodotus. This was the sort of exoticism hoped for at the edge of the world.

  Ballista reflected that the Sassanid Persians, as Zoroastrians, exposed their dead too; men and women.

  A brisk walk, the path damp underfoot, and they came to the palace of Aeetes. They stepped through the broad gates in the columned walls. There in the shady courtyard, the guide pointed out the bronze bulls crafted by the god Hephaistos and the four miraculous springs. The former no longer moved – indeed, they were now all bronze – and fire no longer belched from their mouths, and the channels of the latter no longer ran with milk, wine, unguent and water, but Felix seemed most impressed. Apart from a prurient interest in the bedroom of Medea – Ballista caught Maximus sniffing the sheets – the rest was less arresting; less opulent than many a senator’s villa on the Bay of Naples.

  A walkway of wooden boards led them down to the river. They passed the temple of Hecate. ‘Think,’ the guide urged them. ‘The priestess Medea trod on that very threshold.’ Felix nodded, struck by the worn stone. Ballista was less convinced they would have decorated temples or palaces with Corinthian columns in the age of heroes before the Trojan war.

  A suitably Stygian ferry conveyed them across the river. They crossed the Plain of Ares, the water again squelching under their boots, until they came to the sacred grove of oaks and the vine-tangled temple of Phrixus. ‘Nothing to fear now, ha, ha,’ the guide prattled. ‘The terrible draco, the serpent’s teeth which bring forth the armed men from the soil, all vanquished by your predecessor Jason from the west. Of course, his life would have ended here if not for the love of the princess Medea.’

  They studied for a time a particularly venerable oak, on which, the guide assured them, the golden fleece had hung. Felix declared it time to return. He resolutely declined invitations to view the polis, its emporion or anything else modern. The primitive ferry rowed them back to the vicus and the fort.

  There were two units stationed at Phasis, the Vexillatio Fasiana and the Equites Singulares. Both were notionally composed of select soldiers drawn from other units from across the province of Cappadocia. In reality, they were little more than a local militia. Even on the small campus martius their inadequate numbers were evident: perhaps three hundred in all. The prefect hurried to inform the Vir Clarissimus and his comites that another hundred men, fifty from each, were upriver in the fort of Sarapanis.

  Felix was at his most gracious – he was certain that the detachment was as well turned out as the soldiers in front of him; a most creditable sight in a difficult age; sharp in their movements, resolute in their demeanour; it spoke most highly of their officers. As the prefect and his under officers relaxed, Felix mentioned the lustrum.

  ‘All is ready, Dominus.’ The prefect looked as if he were about to be thrown into the arena.

  ‘What is it? Are the animals not ready?’

  ‘No, Dominus, they are all here.’

  ‘Then what? Trouble finding musicians or men with the right sort of name?’

  ‘It is the ram, Dominus.’

  ‘Providing its entrails show the favour of Mars, it will not matter if it is not too good-looking a beast outwardly.’

  The Spanish officer took a deep breath. ‘Dominus, I do not want you to think that we have in any way deserted the traditions of Rome, or her religious rites, which have given her imperium without end. Although stationed in a far-off place, we are soldiers of Rome. We renew our sacramentum every year. We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.’

  ‘What is it?’ Felix said, not unkindly.

  ‘The majority of our men are drawn from the local population; have been as far back as our muster rolls go. It is against the customs of Colchis to sacrifice rams. It is the same in Iberia and Albania, throughout the region of the Caucasus. Tacitus mentioned it.’

  Felix considered this seriously. ‘Our expedition has been dogged by misfortune – Gothic pirates, storms – we have lost time and men. The gods have not been well disposed towards us. A new beginning is necessary. A lustrum is the time-honoured way for Romans to supplicate the gods in such a case. To alter the ritual might offend the natural gods of Rome. While I have no wish to offend our subjects, we have our mandata – Rome must come first. Let the lustrum be performed.’

  To brazen tunes, the bull, the boar and the contentious ram were brought out and led around the members of the expedition. Three circuits from their violent end.

  Ballista thought about the elderly senator Felix. He was no more hidebound than most of his order. He had been faced with a difficult choice. He had made his decision. It was not the one Ballista would have made. But Ballista, unlike Felix, was far from convinced the natural gods of Rome existed, or any gods at all.

  XXI

  On the fifth day, the kalends of June, the expedition had divided. Felix sailed for the north-eastern shores of the Black Sea to pursue his diplomacy with the two kings of Abasgia and their clients the longbeards and the lice-eaters. As the Armata had already returned straightaway to Byzantium bound then for the west, the consular had been obliged to charter a merchant vessel. The best the put-upon prefect at Phasis could provide was a small liburnian as escort.

  Hippothous noticed that, as soon as the self-appointed embodiment of old Roman values and virtue had left, the spirits of the others lifted. As a Hellene, Hippothous could understand. A little conspicuous western antique mos maiorum and virtus could go a long way, but there was something inherently wearing in constantly, if silently, being made aware that you fell somewhat short of the ideal.

  The remainder of the expedition was to travel together up the river Phasis as far as a fort called Sarapanis, said to be set in a range of hills on the border between Colchis and Iberia at the very limit of navigation. This involved embarking themselves and their baggage on several native boats. Hippothous was most unimpressed with these so-called camarae. Long and narrow, they were dirty and uncomfortable. There was no cover; far from having a cabin, they were actually undecked. Each had benches for thirty rowers. The camarae were so cramped that, although the expedition now totalled just eighteen persons, they had to distribute themselves and their possessions across five of these squalid craft. And there was something more d
istinctly unsettling about these camarae. Clinker-built, they had a prow and steering oars at either end. To Hippothous’s eye, they looked like nothing so much as small versions of the longboats of the Goths and Borani – hardly an auspicious thing.

  At first, the river Phasis was very broad, wonderfully calm – like smoked glass – after the Kindly Sea. On either bank, beyond a thick screen of reeds, was low, marshy primeval forest. Everything was very green, very flat. The air was humid, misty. At clearer moments, the Caucasus loomed on the left.

  The river meandered in great sweeps, little archipelagos of sodden, uninhabitable islands in the bends. Nothing but the splash of the oars, the water singing down the sides of the boats, and the endless croaking of innumerable frogs. However, not all was peace. A constant impediment, if not actual danger, was the great lashed-together rafts of logs the natives floated down to sell in the city for shipbuilding. Again and again, the camarae hurriedly had to pull to the banks to avoid collisions with the unwieldy masses of timber. It was, Hippothous thought sourly, the only time their oarsmen displayed the merest hint of energy or alacrity.

  By the end of the second day, another problem materialized. The silt carried down by the river created an ever-changing pattern of shallows and mud banks. A man in the prow of the lead boat probed the riverbed with a long pole. The helmsman was faced with continual choices as the channels of the river divided again and again. Not all his choices were good. Although the camarae drew little water, they ran aground with increasing frequency. Here, the double-ended form of the boats came into its own. Quite often, the rowers merely reversed their position, the helmsman scurried to the other end of the boat, and the oars pulled her off. If that did not suffice, things became considerably more fraught. The crew had to go overboard and, standing waist or even neck deep in the turbid water, manhandle the boat free. This they were most reluctant to do. Like most of the great watercourses, the Phasis bred man-murdering monsters. The travellers were told these looked like catfish but were larger, blacker and stronger; as man-eating as any in existence, as deadly as the horrors that were hauled from the Danube with teams of horses or oxen.

  Each time the men came back over the side, muddy but unmolested, the Colchians would laugh, clap, break into song. One solemnly assured Hippothous that their continued good fortune was owed to all on board heeding local wisdom. Before setting out, Hippothous and the others had been enjoined to empty all their water skins and the like. To carry alien water on the Phasis was to bring the very worst luck.

  Whether it should have been credited to the absence of foreign water, or to the kindly hand of a deity, none of the dark monsters made an appearance. But with the searching for a channel, the logs and the groundings, the perceived idleness of the natives, progress was very slow.

  Dawn on the fourth day, and the river narrowed and the forest thinned. Signs of habitation increased: fields, orchards, isolated log huts. Small, near-naked children tended flocks. They waved as they brought their charges to water at the riverbank. To the north, the Caucasus seemed only a little closer. But to the south, the hills advanced near, rising in steep, timber-covered slopes.

  The things that did not change were the dampness, the lushness and the interminable noise of the frogs: brekeke-kex, ko-ax, ko-ax. They preyed on everyone’s nerves. Brekeke-kex. None more so than Maximus – what he would not do for some fucking peace. Sat in the stern of one of the stinking camarae, Hippothous told Maximus every fable of Aesop featuring frogs that he could recall. It was like soothing a child. The barbarian enjoyed the ones where the frogs suffered and died an unpleasant death. His favourite was the one where the frogs, tired of their democratic existence, asked Zeus for a king. The god sent them a log. Unimpressed with its inactivity, they petitioned for a new monarch. So Zeus sent them a water snake, which ate them.

  ‘And the moral is?’ Hippothous asked.

  ‘Be very afraid of snakes.’

  ‘No.’ Sometimes Hippothous wondered if the barbarian was mocking him. ‘It is better to be ruled by an indolent emperor than an active one who is malevolent.’

  ‘Or,’ Calgacus suddenly spoke, ‘the obvious truth that all change is likely to make things infinitely fucking worse.’ Hippothous was not sure he had ever met anyone more gloomy than Ballista’s old Caledonian freedman.

  They slept that night in a town with the happy name of Rhodopolis. There were indeed roses. The polis was set in a fertile plain. Once, maybe in the days of Hellenic freedom before Rome crossed the Adriatic and her greed impelled her to the ends of the earth, Rhodopolis had been a fine place: temples, agora, Bouleuterion; everything a Hellenic polis should have. But it was much decayed, and bore the signs of both violence and neglect. Possibly, Hippothous thought, in this case Rome was not to blame. Rhodopolis had been sited with a view only to wealth and not defence.

  On the fifth day, the hills crowded close on both sides. The stream was narrow and fast, the going slow. At the time when two thirds of the day had gone, the time when exhausted labourers pray for the dark to hurry, the camarae fought their way around the last corner, and gratefully moored at Sarapanis.

  Sarapanis was a neat, small village of tiled houses, a touch run down. It clustered at the foot of a steep, conical hill. At the top was the fort. Its garrison proved to consist of only sixty men. But the walls were sound and they had two pieces of artillery. The whole – fort and village – was almost entirely encircled by the confluence of the Phasis and another river. To make good the fort’s lack of a natural spring, an underground tunnel had been dug down to one of the rivers. It was an eminently defensible site, dominating the crossing from Colchis to Iberia. It was easy to see why the garrison of locals had been replaced with Roman regulars. It was a pity there were not more of them. Freed from the noble shadow of Felix, Ballista slipped easily into the role of senior Roman army commander: touring, inspecting, questioning, speaking words of encouragement. At such times, Hippothous thought, the northerner had an air of competent authority.

  At Sarapanis, the expedition was to divide again. Rutilus and Castricius were to travel together as far as Harmozica, the capital of Iberia, to the court of King Hamazasp, the king whose son Ballista had killed. Whenever Hamazasp was mentioned, Hippothous noted, Ballista’s face became hard, closed in: most likely guilt, possibly with an edge of fear. From Hamazasp’s palace at Harmozica, Castricius would journey on to Albania to deal with King Cosis. The latest report placed Cosis at Tzour on the Caspian coast. Undoubtedly, the Albanian king was there keeping an eye on and ingratiating himself with the Sassanid prince Narseh, who was finishing off rebels among the Mardi and the Cadusii just to the south.

  As their contubernium was to end, Ballista – subtly, if not indeed unconsciously asserting his primacy – decided that a feast was in order. Hippothous was instructed to produce money from their travelling funds, and soldiers were dispatched to procure the good things necessary. Ballista demanded these include his favourite suckling pig and black pudding, and amphorae of local wine – dozens of amphorae of local wine.

  Hippothous came back to life reluctantly. His one servant, Narcissus, was talking to him. Hippothous wished he would stop. The slave continued talking. Hippothous opened his eyes. His head hurt. Narcissus passed him a cup of water. Hippothous sat up and drank it, held it out for more.

  The local wine had not come in amphorae but goatskins. It had tasted of goatskins. Hippothous’s mouth still tasted of goatskins. However, he did not feel quite as bad as he had expected. Probably he was still drunk. It meant the full horror of the hangover would overwhelm him later.

  ‘Kyrios, the eunuch Mastabates is to talk to you all in an hour.’

  In the small headquarters, Ballista, Rutilus and most of the others were waiting. They all looked crapulous. Castricius had not appeared yet.

  ‘You do not look well, Accensus,’ said Maximus.

  Hippothous did not reply.

  ‘I feel fine.’ Maximus pulled down the neck of his tunic. ‘You shoul
d get one of these amethysts. Sure, they are the finest preventative of the effects of over-indulgence. Drink all you want, stay sober, feel good.’

  Hippothous noticed that, as well as the gemstone on a thong, the freedman wore a fine golden necklace, Sassanid work. And where did you steal that? he wondered.

  ‘Cabbage.’ said Rutilus. ‘Fried is best, but boiled will do. Or eat almonds before you start drinking.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Ballista. ‘Old wives’ tales. None of them works, amulets and gemstones least of all. Drink milk first, lines the stomach.’

  ‘Olive oil, if you are not a barbarian,’ said Rutilus.

  Castricius entered to laughter from the rest. The little man looked half-dead.

  ‘Now we are all here,’ said Mastabates. ‘Before we go our separate ways, I was ordered to remind you all of what information our noble Augustus Gallienus, long may he reign, has received of the three Caucasian kings whose fortifications you will repair and whose allegiance you must secure.’ The young eunuch paused, seemed to swell slightly with pride. ‘I do not think it indiscreet to mention that this order was given to me personally by the Praetorian Prefect Lucius Calpurnius Piso Censorinus. He assured me the information was as accurate as could be found, having been gathered from previous diplomacy, from merchants, and from specially instructed frumentarii.’

  ‘First, Polemo the king of Suania. He is a man who cares little for either Rome or Persia. He is dominated by two passions – survival, a tricky proposition for a monarch of his race, and the acquisition of as much wealth as Croesus. Polemo’s spirit is dominated by avarice. He taxes heavily those crossing the passes in his territories, and his mountains are said to produce much gold and many gems. Yet none of it is enough to satisfy him. So, he takes gifts from both the imperium and Persia, while keeping faith with neither. Frequently, his men raid the lowlands, as far as the client cities of Rome on the Black Sea coast. Pityous, Sebastopolis, Cygnus – all have suffered. Of course, he always denies responsibility; his warriors act without his permission – which, given his subjects, often may be true.’