Avenger of Rome (Gaius Valerius Verrens 3)

by Douglas Jackson

  Corbulo spun the weapon with a soldier’s practised hands so that the hilt was towards Valerius. The young Roman took it remembering the weight and the feel from his encounter with the snake. The sword’s energy ran through him like heat from a blazing fire. He tried two or three cuts and it was as if the blade had a life of its own. Still, he only had eyes for the horse, and when Corbulo spoke again it was with an old cavalryman’s pride and a glint in his eye.

  ‘I owe you my daughter’s life, tribune Gaius Valerius Verrens, not once, but many times. I hope you will accept this gift in part payment. She is an Akhal-Teke, from my own stables: the horse of kings.’

  Valerius stared at the astonishing animal whose forefathers had carried Alexander the Great from Athens to the shores of the Indus; freshly groomed she was a work of art in polished bronze, her coat of fine hairs gleaming in the sunlight. He approached the horse’s head and allowed her to take in his scent through wide nostrils which flared and snorted as he stroked her silken ears with his good hand. Only when he was sure she knew him did he look into the glistening dark eyes behind curling lashes and knew she was his for ever, and he hers.

  ‘They are by nature a desert breed,’ Corbulo continued. ‘But she has a touch of Karabakh in her; not enough to affect her speed or her stamina, but enough to accustom her to the mountains. They are hardy stock and need little water.’

  She was long and lean with an elegantly curving neck and a proud head. Her breast was narrow, shaped like a ship’s prow and made for cutting through the desert air when she was given her head to run free on the long, slim legs. ‘I will call you Khamsin, after the hot desert wind Hanno warned me about,’ Valerius thought, only he must have spoken aloud because Corbulo nodded. ‘Yes, Khamsin. A great name for a great horse.’

  ‘Why don’t you try her?’ The familiar soft voice was betrayed by an edge of suppressed emotion. How had he not noticed she was there? He turned and realized that Khamsin was not the most beautiful thing in the world. Today, that honour belonged to Domitia Longina Corbulo. She wore a long dress of virgin white, belted with gold, that left her shoulders bare beneath the walnut tresses that flowed left and right of her wide forehead and framed the oval of her face.

  ‘With your permission, lady?’ He handed over his helmet, bringing a gasp of surprise from one of the watchers.

  Domitia accepted the burden and nodded imperiously. As she watched, Valerius whispered encouragingly in the horse’s ear before using his left hand to help him vault into the saddle. The groom handed him the reins, and oblivious of all but Domitia’s gaze he walked the mare slowly to the gate. Beyond the trees lining the road lay the sandy ring of the governor’s personal circus and it took all Valerius’s patience to keep Khamsin to a walk. He was not the only impatient one. He could sense the controlled power surging below his loins and imagined the great heart thundering in her chest. She had a fine, high-stepping walk as befitted a mare whose sire a hundred generations earlier may have been brother to Bucephalus. His left hand was free to control the rein, but he wrapped the leather around the walnut fist of his right and used his thighs, knees and heels to command her. When he reached the circus he kicked her gently into a trot, feeling the free-moving muscles working sweetly beneath him as she danced across the packed sands. The warm breeze kissed his face and he laughed for the joy of it. Khamsin felt it too, pricking up her ears and shaking her head from side to side.

  ‘Very well,’ Valerius grinned. He reached to pat her neck and nudged her into a canter. The change was immediate and effortless, a surge in pace, and now she wasn’t just moving but flowing over the ground. Too soon, they reached the far end of the arena and he shifted in the saddle. Left knee forward, right knee back, and she pirouetted like a leaf falling from a tree. Not falling, dancing. A single fluid movement that left them facing the way they had come. Khamsin must have sensed his exhilaration because she whinnied with pleasure. There was no stopping it now. He dug his heels into her flanks, but truly she needed no encouragement. She moved straight to the gallop and suddenly they were speeding arrow-straight down the length of the arena. Valerius crouched low over her shoulders and saw the ground flying past in a blur below. He had never travelled at such a speed, but he felt no fear, only the astonishing sensation of the blood bubbling in his veins and thundering in his ears. She seemed to shift beneath him to ensure that he stayed fixed in the saddle and her movement was so smooth that he might have been in a carriage. He wanted it never to end, but here were Corbulo and his staff at the entrance, watching in astonished wonder. He saw Domitia’s face flash past, her eyes wide with delight and her mouth gaping, decorum forgotten as she clutched the fair girl who had replaced Suki. A ragged cheer broke out and for the first time he used the reins to gently coax her to a halt. He slipped from the saddle and stood by the horse’s head, whispering his thanks for her efforts. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed, but he could tell it was with excitement, not exertion, and she gave off the satisfied feeling of a job well done. He wished he had something to reward her for her efforts.

  He turned at the sound of running feet to find Domitia approaching with his polished iron helmet in her hands. For the first time he truly saw her for what she was. A girl, not a woman. A girl on the verge of womanhood, perhaps, but one still with the ability to become lost in childish glee. After the exhilaration of the race he was overwhelmed by his own emotions and if she had come three paces further he would have swung her into his arms. But she stopped, took a deep breath, and with a mischievous smile handed him first the helmet and then a shining red apple, her fingers brushing the leathery palm of his left hand as she placed it there.

  ‘I must congratulate you on your horsemanship, tribune, and my father on his choice of gift. Truly she is a wonderful horse.’

  He returned her smile, feeling like a boy again for the first time since he had left Rome for Britain to join the Twentieth. ‘The finest I have ever ridden, lady, and unless I am mistaken the choice of gift was not only your father’s.’ He accepted the fruit and Khamsin scented the apple and nuzzled his fingers until he handed it over. ‘A horse like Khamsin never forgets generosity,’ he added chivalrously, and more quietly, ‘and like Khamsin I will never forget this gift.’

  She heard the catch in his voice and a shadow fell over her eyes. ‘Is it always like this when a woman sends her man away to war?’

  His heart tripped at the phrase her man. ‘Seneca called it “this magnificent melancholy”. At the time I dismissed him as unduly sentimental because he was a fat old man who had never gone to war. But that wasn’t true. He had served on the Rhine frontier as a tribune.’

  ‘This magnificent melancholy.’ She ran the words over her tongue and liked them. ‘Yes, I can understand that. A mixture of feelings. Pride and sadness. Loss and …’ She couldn’t finish, but her eyes filled and again he felt that surge of need.

  ‘Tribune.’ There could be no doubt that Corbulo had seen what had passed between Valerius and his daughter, but the tone was almost kindly. ‘Your command awaits you. Work them hard and use them well. When you have fixed your defensive positions come to my headquarters tonight and we will see whether you can master Caesar’s Tower as well as you can master a horse.’

  He nodded and offered Domitia his hand.

  As they walked away, Serpentius ran up grinning. ‘Now that,’ he said with enormous understatement, ‘is a horse.’

  XXVII

  FOR A FRONTIER town, Zeugma, a sprawling community of mud brick and marble built across a low hill which sloped gently down to the Euphrates, was a surprisingly sophisticated place. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Hanno, who had proved a wellspring of knowledge and experience during the six-day march from Antioch, informed Valerius that the city was another creation of Alexander’s general Seleucus. It had been built more than three centuries earlier, and until it had been conquered by Pompey the Great it had been known, like Antioch’s port, by his name.

  ‘Now it is Zeugma, the place of
the bridge.’ The Syrian gestured towards the crossing, which was of a construction the Roman had never seen before. A bridge of perhaps twenty stone-built arches stretched two thirds of the way across the river and ended a hundred paces from the near bank. The gap between was filled by ten or twelve sturdy boats which carried a jointed wooden platform to complete the link to the bank. Hanno noticed his interest. ‘For two reasons,’ he said, holding up scarred fingers. ‘First, when the river floods the prefect in charge of the bridge will order the pontoons to be detached. If he is fortunate, they will swing back to the bank and he will recover them. If he is unfortunate, the river will wash them away. But he will only have lost part of the bridge and they are easily replaced, whereas if it was entirely of stone he would lose much more and it would be a major project to rebuild. Second, in time of war the pontoons can be removed and any invasion force from the east must find another place to cross.’

  ‘But we are at war now,’ Valerius pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ Hanno grinned, his white teeth shining in the dark face. ‘But we are the invading force. The pontoons will remain in place until we return, either in triumph or, may Mars preserve us, pursued, as the lion sees off the jackal, by King Vologases’ cataphracts, his armoured cavalry.’

  Valerius felt a shiver of unease as he looked down at the narrow structure and imagined a defeated army packed on to the narrow crossing with the Parthian army pressing it on every side. Arrows sheeting the sky. Carnage and chaos. Men fighting and dying. Bodies in the river and the sparkling grey-green waters running red with Roman blood. He shrugged off the unhappy thought.

  ‘I’m sure that will not happen, prefect. Everyone has complete confidence in the general. You said so yourself.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Syrian said. ‘But they will be many and we are so few. Thousands of cataphracts – armoured lords on great horses, swathed in iron so our arrows cannot kill them. Swarms of mounted archers who live, eat and sleep in the saddle. Horses are their currency and their passion. A Parthian would sacrifice his wife before he would sacrifice his horse.’ His eyes ranged over the legionary camps on the near and far banks, their scale almost equalled by the tented towns which had grown up since Corbulo had closed the busy crossing to civilian traffic. ‘Much will depend on the enemy’s mood. Sometimes, he is like the jackal. He prefers to bark rather than fight. But then he can be like the leopards which once roamed here. He will come fast and silent, and he will come for the throat. Beware of Vologases the leopard, tribune.’

  On Corbulo’s instructions Valerius had divided his cavalry between the east and west banks of the great river. Hanno’s Thracian Third Augusta was camped with two other thousand-strong alae and two of the smaller five-hundred-strong wings alongside the permanent fortress now occupied by the Fifteenth legion Apollinaris. The rest of the units had orders to range the eastern bank of the Euphrates and harry or destroy any enemy forces they found there. The Tenth Fretensis had already crossed, and the Fifteenth, minus the three cohorts who would have to hold the bridge in their absence, would cross tomorrow, along with the rest of the auxiliaries, cavalry and infantry. All around them the tent lines buzzed with activity as units and individual soldiers frantically made their last-minute preparations for the advance into enemy territory. The air was heavy with the scent of burning charcoal as the armourers of the Fifteenth sweated to repair swords and plate armour, the ceaseless clatter of hammer on anvil punctuating their efforts. Hundreds of carts had been requisitioned to carry the supplies essential to feed more than twenty thousand men and as many horses, mules and camels, in a land that would yield barely a tenth of what was needed to keep them alive. Now those carts must be checked to ensure their wheels were sound and the base and walls undamaged. A single axle break could mean a century going hungry. Valerius was surprised to see the legion’s carpenters dismantling the unit’s siege weapons ready for transportation. It seemed an extravagance for an expedition that was otherwise designed to travel light and had no plans to invade town or city.

  When Hanno left to join his men for the evening meal, Valerius stood for a while at the edge of the camp and contemplated the distant mountains on the other side of the river; just a dusty line on the far horizon that shimmered in the dry heat of the late afternoon. He found that the very land oppressed him. Once they had left the fertile strip by the sea they had marched fifteen miles a day over a bleak patchwork of dirty brown and scorched ochre, the monotony only broken by the occasional barren height where eagles and vultures soared, or some blessed river valley where they were able to water themselves and their horses in the cool of the stream. The experience had left him longing for the lush green plains, swampy moors and damp valleys of Britain, where he had once cursed the mud and the rain, or even the shady, ordered olive groves of the estate at Fidenae. After six days, they had found relief at Zeugma, where the Euphrates ran like a broad ribbon of grey and emerald through the sun-blasted rocks, spreading its bounty a mile and more to each side of the fast-flowing waters. Beyond the river lay a true wilderness where the midday sun burned hot enough to crack rocks and a man could ride for days on end before finding water. Yet Corbulo had not only taken his army all the way to Tigranocerta and Artaxata, but fought there and won. Won against incredible odds. Now he was going back, and Valerius would journey every last step with him.

  He flinched at the old familiar pain in the bones of a hand that lay among the burned-out ruins of a town two thousand miles away – a pain he knew would never leave him – and walked towards the walls of the city and his nightly lesson from the general.

  Surprisingly, what had begun as a trial had quickly become a pleasure. Valerius amazed himself by becoming proficient at the governor’s version of Caesar, though the game was mind-numbingly complex and he was certain he would never become as skilled as his tutor. His proximity to Corbulo inspired jealousy and he was forced to ignore the stares of his fellow officers of the general’s staff who believed him a spy or worse. In time he understood that suspicion of an outsider was too entrenched to break. If they didn’t quite hate him, they resented and feared his presence in equal measure.

  Corbulo had set up his headquarters in a villa overlooking the river, owned by the leader of the ordo, Zeugma’s council of a hundred leading citizens. The man had been only too happy to give up his home, one of the finest in the city, to his old friend the governor.

  Valerius found him hunched over the mass of reports his officers and their agents brought him every day. From here he dictated the orders for tomorrow’s movements: miles to be covered, rations to be replenished, waterholes’ positions and the forces that would be needed to secure them. His voice rose in irritation at the news of a shortage of mules – this in a land where every second animal was a mule – when it was too late to requisition more from Damascus or Antioch. He ordered that every transport animal in Zeugma and for ten miles around be rounded up, but it still meant the legionaries would have to carry an extra two days’ rations on their backs.

  Valerius passed the time studying the mosaic floor, which depicted a marine scene featuring a heavily bearded man with lobster claws for horns looking soulfully at a woman with long dark hair and wings growing from her forehead.

  ‘Enough. Leave us and order some food and drink.’ He looked up as Corbulo dismissed his clerks and rubbed his hands across his eyes. Despite his concentration on military problems the general had observed Valerius’s interest in his surroundings. ‘It is a depiction of Oceanus, the Greek god of the rivers, and his wife Tethys. Nikolos, who owns this house, is very proud of it. A little rustic and not quite the quality you would find in a villa at home, but pleasing enough in its own way.’

  Valerius nodded his agreement. It wasn’t the standard of the mosaic or even the subject that caught his attention. It was the glowing pink figure of Eros, the god of love, who sat cheerfully in the top corner riding a dolphin across a sea of Aegean blue, and reminded him of the day on the galley when he had stood with Domitia with the
dolphins playing beneath their feet.

  A servant entered with a jug of wine and food on two individual platters. Valerius watched as the Syrian broke off a piece of bread on one of the plates and dipped it into the spiced goat stew, then stood back before swallowing it. Corbulo nodded. When the man left the room, the governor noticed Valerius’s puzzlement.

  ‘My aides insist that my food is tasted.’ He smiled. ‘After the incident with the snake, it seems they fear I might suffer the same fate as Germanicus, he who might have partaken of the wrong type of mushroom.’

  Valerius picked up the wine jug and poured two cups. Very deliberately, he lifted one of the cups and put it to his lips. Corbulo laughed. ‘Your sacrifice does you credit, but the wine was tested earlier.’ He beckoned Valerius across the room to where Caesar’s Tower had been set up with the pieces exactly as they’d left them on the previous evening.

  ‘You see where you went wrong?’

  Valerius nodded. ‘I allowed you to dominate my flanks and I did not have the strength to hold you back. The vertical movements weakened me at the moment I needed to be strong. I think I should have reinforced from the centre, but even then I suspect you would have prevented me. I still do not think in the third dimension.’

  ‘Good. You have made another step forward.’ Corbulo began moving the pieces back to their starting positions. ‘I think this game is beyond recovery, but we will begin another.’ He settled down on a chair on one side of the board and waved Valerius to the other. The evenings always started this way, with the game taking up the commander’s attention, but Valerius had noticed a subtle change as they had gradually become more relaxed in each other’s company. The breakthrough had come on the third night, when they had played in the governor’s pavilion beneath a stony outcrop midway between the Orontes and the Euphrates.