A group off to one side caught Ballista’s eye. There were six of them. They were different – darker hair and beards, taller hats and baggier trousers, cleaner. They were not Suani. They were Persians – Zoroastrian priests. Of course, that explained the fire altar by the well. Ballista had been told by Mastabates that the chief of the Sassanid king’s fire-worshipping priests, none other than Shapur’s close confidant Kirder the Herbed, had led a mission of conversion to the Caucasus. Numerous fire altars had been founded throughout Albania, Iberia – across the whole region. Ballista looked hard. None of these men was Kirder. He had seen him once in Edessa. None of them was Hormizd, the Persian boy chance had briefly made Ballista’s slave. Ballista would not recognize any other Zoroastrian priests. The mobads in this village square looked annoyed. It made Ballista again wonder how strong diplomatic immunity would prove among the mountaineers of the Caucasus.
‘Marcus Clodius Ballista, Vir Ementissimus, welcome.’ The king spoke Latin well. ‘Your arrival is auspicious. The ceremonies are about to begin.’
A grey stallion was led out. Polemo got down from his throne. He fussed over the animal, breathing into its nose, playing with its ears. Once he had got its trust, he drove the knife deep into the base of its neck. He withdrew the blade. A thick, solid jet of blood, the diameter of a man’s bicep, gushed out. The blood splashed the sleeve of Polemo’s white tunic. The horse plunged, tried to rear. Polemo had to step back quickly. The stallion’s legs gave way. Thrashing, it did not want to die. But it had no choice. It died slowly in its own blood.
Polemo, brushing at his stained sleeve, reascended his throne. Behind their big beards, the Zoroastrian mobads looked even less happy. Ballista thought he knew why. He had seen this Persian ceremony carried out in Edessa, by none other than the King of Kings himself. It had taken place at dawn. Now it was mid-afternoon. The king of Suania had been waiting for the envoy from Rome. And there was the manner of it. In Edessa, the stallion had been pure white, and it had gone consenting to the god.
‘Bring out the impious,’ called Polemo, this time in Greek.
A man and a woman were manhandled into the middle by a dozen or more guards. Their hands were tied. They were young, good-looking, naked. They looked terrified. The girl tried to cover her breasts and delta. With her arms bound it was impossible to cover all of herself. The crowd regarded both with prurient interest.
‘Behold the impious adulterers,’ said Polemo. ‘If the white reeds are cut at dawn, at the time sacrifices are offered to Hecate, at the time the divine paean is chanted, at the beginning of the spring, the dark goddess will let there be no mistake.’
Ballista heard Mastabates mutter, ‘Fascinating, I always thought it an old wives’ tale.’
The naked girl crumpled to her knees, holding her bound wrists out to Polemo in supplication. She was crying. It did no good. She was hauled back to her feet. The king ignored her, carried on speaking.
‘Such is the nature of the reeds that if they are placed somewhere in the woman’s chamber and the adulterer enters, he will be robbed of his rational thoughts, and he will, drunk or sober, confess what he has wickedly done or intends to do. Such is the case here. They are condemned out of the man’s own mouth. By the sacred judgement of our ancestors we commit them to the Mouth of the Impious.’
The girl screamed. The man shouted, things that were obviously defiant insults in the local language. He was knocked to the ground. Two large sacks were produced. At the sight of them, both gave way. The girl collapsed again, sobbing hysterically. The man’s bladder failed. The crowd laughed as the urine ran down his legs.
The sacks appeared to be empty. Ballista was at a loss. In Rome, a parricide was sewn into a sack with a snake, dog, cock and monkey, then thrown in the Tiber. There were no animals to be seen here, and the Alontas river was both some way from the village square and, at the moment, too shallow to dispose of corpses with any guarantee of success.
The couple struggled madly, but the sacks were forced over their heads. They were held down while the sacks were sewn shut. The two bundles of coarse sacking were left to writhe on the ground for a time. Muffled yells came from inside. Both were kicked indiscriminately.
It took four strong men to lift and restrain each sack. They carried them towards the mouth of the well. It must be what Polemo had called the Mouth of the Impious. With no ceremony or delay, both were thrown in. The screams were cut off quickly, replaced by the sounds of heavy objects hitting water, then by silence.
‘The punishment of the impious, those who have defiled the sacred nature of the hearth, have betrayed the hospitality of god and man, is not over.’ Polemo’s tone suggested he was rather pleased with the idea. ‘From the Mouth of the Impious, the river will bear them underground to Lake Maeotis. In thirty days they will emerge there, crawling with maggots and, as ever, the vultures will come from nowhere, tear the corpses to pieces, and devour them.’
All the synedrion and the rest shook back their cloaks and coats, gave evidence that they thought this a fine thing.
‘Marcus Clodius Ballista, approach the throne.’
Ballista did as he was bidden, stepping across the blood-slick turf around the carcass of the stallion and between the fire altar and the Mouth of the Impious. In front of the king of the Suani he bowed and blew a kiss from his fingertips. If Polemo had been expecting full proskynesis, he would be disappointed. Ballista had no intention of grovelling in the dirt at the feet of this grubby, upcountry potentate.
‘Kyrios, I bring you greetings from autokrator Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus Sebastos.’ It was no effort for Ballista to translate the emperor’s titles into Greek, for centuries the language of diplomacy employed by all powers in the east. ‘And a letter from his own hand, for your eyes only.’
Ballista handed the gold-encased roll of purple papyrus to the prince Saurmag, who gave it to his father. A half-memory flashed through Ballista’s mind – was it from Herodotus? – a man sent with a message that read ‘Kill the bearer of this letter,’ something like that. Had he been sent into a sort of unofficial exile, or to a remote place to be killed? The king did not read the letter but tucked the roll into his belt. Suddenly Ballista was very aware of the eyes of the daughter on him. It was only to be expected – he had killed Pythonissa’s husband, unpicked the promising threads of her young life.
‘Kyrios, the sebastos sends you gifts.’ Ballista told Hippothous to unwrap the ornamenta consularia. Mastabates gave him a sharp glance. Ballista was reversing the order in which he had been told to present the first lot of gifts. Hippothous held forth the gleaming white toga with the broad purple stripe, the special, many-laced boots only a Roman senator might wear, then the twelve fasces, the rods symbolizing the power to beat, the axes they wrapped the power to kill.
‘The ornaments of a Roman consul; tokens of the emperor’s affection.’
Polemo grunted a less than fulsome appreciation. Ballista indicated the other gifts be presented. This time, as the covers came off, the king of the Suani leant forward. He had caught the gleam of precious metal. The extensive dinner service – wine jugs, coolers, plates, serving bowls, all in gold and silver – was spread out on cloths on the ground. Polemo’s hawk-like face broke into the uncomplicated smile of an acquisitive child. He had some of the choicer pieces passed up to him. He turned them in his hands, admiring their cunningly worked designs.
Sometimes, Ballista thought, the Romans are blinkered like a chariot horse that only sees its own lane. Just because consular rank, the right to be addressed as Vir Clarissimus, was close to the greatest felicity imaginable among them, it never crossed their minds it might mean something less to anyone else; that it might have fallen as something of an anticlimax after the gold and silver. Ballista had been right: precious metals were the way to the affections, if such was the right term, of this avaricious kinglet dressed in his grubby tunic high in the Caucasian mountains.
Polemo continued to peer closely at the meta
lwork, running the tips of his fingers over the embossed figures. Allfather only knew what message, if any, he was reading in those images of eastern barbarians looking a bit like the Persian mobads on their knees in front of suitably naked, heroic westerners.
‘We are pleased with the tribute sent by the basileus of the Romans,’ said Polemo.
Ballista bowed, not taking issue with the expression tribute.
‘You will stay the night here in the royal residence. At the feast, you will tell us of your plans to rebuild our fortifications at the Caspian Gates.’
As Ballista thanked the king in Attic Greek, he was sure the girl Pythonissa was smiling.
XXIII
Riding the last few miles to the Caspian Gates, Ballista felt the world close in around them. The valley twisted and turned. Its grey walls reared up impossibly high; jagged, naked rock – no birds, no animals, not even an ibex or mountain goat. Above, the sky seemed no more than a pale ribbon. Wraiths of mist often pursued one another up there. When they caught each other, they coalesced into a fog which cut off the heavens, oozed down the fissures and threatened to engulf the travellers. At the bottom, the track was little wider than an ox cart; the river filled the rest of the space. The Alontas tumbled and roared over the boulders in its shallow bed. Its surface was just a handspan below the level of the road. When the rains were heavy, when the snow melted fast on the peaks, obviously the Alontas would rise, fill the pass and sweep away almost everything in its way. Given this, the ever–present likelihood of rockfalls, and the character of the neighbouring peoples, the pass struck Ballista as a particularly dangerous place.
‘Cumania,’ the Suani prince Azo said. The gorge turned to the right here. The path was on the inside of the curve, hard up against the eastern wall. The river thundered along, trying to undermine the opposite rocks. Up above the waters, away to Ballista’s left, there were stone walls, slate roofs: a small fort perched on an outcrop forty or fifty feet over the Alontas.
‘The Gates,’ Azo said.
Ballista looked north around the bend: the river, the track, fallen boulders, the walls of the ravine. He looked harder, and there, in the torrent, the stumps of three stone piers – all that remained of the famous Caspian Gates.
‘Much work for you to do.’
The words of the Suani were borne out as the day wore on. While the prince sat on a sheepskin rug, drinking and talking with his warriors, Ballista and his familia scrambled and splashed about. The water was shockingly cold, the rocks slippery. Inspecting the fort, Ballista discovered that some of its roof timbers were rotten; parts of its walls needed replacing. Apart from raw stone and water, there were no building materials to hand.
‘My sister,’ Azo said. A mounted group was approaching. ‘She likes to hunt. Our brother has a hunting lodge beyond the Gates in the hills to the north.’ A slight look of distaste passed across the speaker’s face. ‘Saurmag often goes among the Alani barbarians.’ Ballista got the impression that neither barbarians nor brother pleased Azo.
Pythonissa headed the cavalcade that clattered up from the direction of Dikaiosyne. She was dressed for the chase, armed like a man. She rode astride. Perhaps for a woman’s respectability, there were two eunuchs in her train. The other twenty or so riders were warriors.
Azo and Ballista bowed where they stood in the road, blew a kiss. Pythonissa pulled up her mount a few paces short. She tossed the reins to one of the eunuchs, and jumped down. She bowed and blew a kiss back. She spoke to her brother in Greek about coverts and game, wild boar and deer, about nothing of any importance.
Ballista watched her. She reminded him of Bathshiba in Arete. Pythonissa was taller, her skin paler, her hair blond. She looked nothing like Bathshiba. But the wild Amazonian quality was the same.
The girl turned to Ballista. She stood unexpectedly close. He was terribly aware of what he had done to her life, no matter how indirectly. He framed a polite, neutral question. ‘What quarry are you after?’
She continued to regard him wordlessly. Her eyes were grey-blue.
‘You and your men are well armed,’ he continued. ‘Equipped to deal with big game.’
The girl spoke. ‘It is a mistake to decide in advance. Hunting is a lesson in the philosophic life. You sight the thing you have sought for a long time, then you lose it. The hunter learns to deal with extreme emotions: elation, despair, boredom.’ She delivered this in a mock-earnest tone. Then she became very serious. ‘I wanted to speak to the man who killed my husband.’
‘I am sorry it had to happen.’
‘Tell me how you killed him.’
‘I had set a trap for the King of Kings. Your husband rode at Shapur’s side. The wrong man died.’
‘An artillery bolt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he die well?’
‘He rode out that morning as a man. Thousands mourned him, tried to revenge him.’
‘His father, old Hamazasp, would have you dead.’
Ballista smiled. ‘I know it.’
She nodded, stepped back. When she spoke again it was to her brother as well. ‘I will be gone some time. I will see you on the way back.’
‘Not me,’ said Azo. ‘As soon as the Roman tells me what things he needs, I am leaving this desolate place.’
‘So be it.’ She got into the saddle unassisted, easily. She led her men off down the track, around the turning in the gorge. She did not look back. They watched her go off to the north, beyond the Gates.
Ballista decided that his first impression of Azo may not have done the young prince full justice. Certainly the Suani had a fine self-regard and a wariness close to hostility. Yet these, Ballista thought, might be the products of being brought up in a royal court, even one – possibly especially one – as obscure as that of Suania. At least Azo was capable, did what he said he would. After Pythonissa had left, Ballista had presented Azo with a lengthy list of the materials and men he needed: timber, cut stone, bricks, slates, sand, lime, rope, chains, nails, a forge; stonemasons, carpenters and a blacksmith, all with their tools, and as many labourers as could be gathered. Azo had summoned his secretary, told him to note it all down, and ridden south. Ballista had been impressed when the first deliveries began the very next day.
The fort of Cumania was the initial priority. A garrison in the pass had to have somewhere to live, and the gorge was narrow enough for arrows from the fort to dominate the track on the other side of the river. On its own it could not totally prevent people from using the track, but it could make it unpleasant and dangerous.
Cumania was a small, dark hold; roughly circular, no more than fifteen paces in diameter, four storeys high. There was a walkway around the roof. Luckily, the repairs needed were not too extensive. Only part of the roof needed replacing, and a few patches of the walls. Ballista had regular Roman crenellations added. In these he set three refinements – projections from the battlements, each with a protected hole opening on to the void below. The central of these was directly over the only entrance to the fort. The southern was fitted with pulleys, chains and buckets to raise fresh water coming from upstream. The northern had the opposite intention, being designed as a latrine from which the waste would be washed away downstream.
The fort was set on a crag in the western wall of the ravine. It was inaccessible from the heights far above. The sole door, a solid affair of iron-bound oak – Ballista tested it, replaced both frame and hinges – faced the river. It opened on to the second floor and could only be reached by a flight of stone steps which exposed the right, unshielded side of anyone ascending and rose straight from the water. The defenders now could drop missiles on the steps, while remaining in perfect safety directly overhead. The arrow slits were on the second floor and above, had stout wooded shutters and were not nearly wide enough to admit a man. With mines, ramps, siege towers and rams all equally out of the question, and with no artillery among the peoples of the mountains or the northern steppes, Ballista thought a handful of men could h
old Cumania for ever. The only ways the fort could fall were starvation or treachery. He set about provisioning the place.
The actual ‘gates’ which would seal the pass demanded more thought. First, the easiest, part was to design a gate to block the road. This was to be of dressed stone, and bound into the natural rock. It would have a fighting platform above. It would look like almost any Roman gate anywhere. But detached buttresses would be built to the south in front of the main load-bearing sides of the gate. When the Alontas was in flood, hopefully these would catch some of the boulders and tree trunks carried downstream. If that worked, and the waters poured through the open gates, the structure might not be battered down and swept away.
Extending the gates across the river was the crucial problem. Ballista decided to employ the three existing stubs of piers as breakwaters. Like the buttresses on either side of the track, they might take the force of debris when the river was in full spate. He ordered three concrete pillars erected behind them. On these he planned to put a simple wooden walkway, with a palisade facing just north. Either end of the defences would be supported by the natural rock and his new stone gate. There was to be a wide clearance between the surface of the water and the walkway, to allow the river to rise several feet. To block this when the river was lower, to stop nomads creeping under the walkway, he designed a series of metal portcullises which could be raised and lowered.
Work on the ‘gates’ got under way slowly. Partly it was due to materials. There was no suitable sand or lime for the concrete in the whole of Suania. After a few days, a little was found in a royal store, just about enough for the new pillars in the river. Everything else would have to rely on local mortar. Again, the cut stone arrived slowly, in small quantities. But the sluggishness of the early stages of building was much more down to the workers. Azo had sent plenty of them, skilled and unskilled. The problem was not one of numbers but attitude. They were proud mountaineers, warriors. There was not one among these Suani, even if he had no shoes and wore a rag on his back, who did not regard such building work as far beneath him. They were worse than the Greeks and Romans; at least they reserved their contempt for labouring for money at the whim of another, rather than at the whole concept of hard, physical work.
The Caspian Gates Page 24
