‘Can it be done?’ He cursed the fear in his own voice. Not fear for his life, but fear that he would fail.
‘I believe so,’ the engineer said. ‘With the gods’ aid.’
Valerius heard the unspoken ‘and if the commander can hold his nerve’.
‘Then it will be done.’ The words emerged as a snarl and Petronius flinched at the violence in them.
It was the numbers, Valerius thought. The numbers made it impossible. Perhaps if he sent half of his regiments back it could be done. But that would leave him with too few men to achieve what Corbulo demanded.
‘Is there any reason why Vologases shouldn’t do what we are doing?’
Petronius hesitated before answering. ‘No, but… it is unlikely. He already has the alternative of continuing along the Tigris to outflank us in the west. It would cost him a week and General Corbulo has placed a token force there to block him, but it could be done.’
Valerius looked at the sky as the first riders began to pass him. ‘It will be dark in an hour.’ The engineer nodded. ‘Order them to dismount and wrap their horses’ hooves to deaden any sound.’
He was still on the plateau when Hanno rode up twenty minutes later. The Syrian’s exhausted eyes mirrored Valerius’s thoughts. ‘It is impossible,’ he said quietly.
Yes, it was impossible, but it had to be done.
Because if Valerius failed, Corbulo’s army was doomed.
XXXVIII
Rome
They came for Annius Vinicianus in the ghost hour before dawn, when the spirit is at its lowest and the mind dulled. He had been proud of the way he’d held out against their repeated questioning and threats. There had been no violence so far, and though he was a Roman citizen who would soon take his seat in the Senate, that had surprised him. He was no fool; he knew of the horrors Nero had visited on his enemies. That he had been treated so gently he put down to the fact that he had commanded a legion before he was thirty, and, more so, to being the son-in-law of the illustrious Corbulo.
How he wished he had listened to his father-in-law. Who could have predicted a little drunken tittle-tattle among old friends would lead to a damp cell and an uncertain future?
Without warning the door smashed back and he huddled against the wall as six jailers burst in wielding clubs and screaming at him to get to his feet. Helpless and bewildered, he was dragged bodily through a series of tunnels, but his legs told him that he was descending with every step. The deeper they went, the darker his thoughts; he had imagined this moment, had steeled himself for it. In his imagination he had conducted himself with dignity. Now, he felt only a hopeless terror that manifested itself in a weakness in his bladder and a head bursting with panic. His nostrils filled with the thick stink of decay and putrefaction until it blocked his throat like something solid. Far above him the palaces were filled with light and perfume; down here the slime and filth of ages coated the walls, glinting green in the eerie glow of the torchlight. Somewhere ahead a man screamed, a shriek of mortal agony that froze his blood and anchored his feet to the ground. It was as if a signal had been given. His guards turned on him and he went down screaming under a hail of punches and kicks. A blow from a nailed sandal dazed him and he felt himself picked up and carried until they reached some kind of wooden door that creaked when they opened it. Inside, stairs descended ever more steeply into the hill, like the passage to the Underworld. His stunned mind registered the rattle of chains and he felt his tunic being ripped away. When he opened his eyes he was fettered to a wall by the arms in a wide room lit only by the low red glow of a brazier. In front of the brazier a table was arrayed with a butcher’s selection of blades, hooks and irons that turned his bowels to liquid.
The guards left him without a word and his mind fought the horror of what was to come.
It was a few moments before he noticed the eyes. They glowed an unearthly red, like the eyes of a rat reflected in the light of a street torch, and they belonged to someone, some… thing hiding in the darkness on the far side of the brazier. As he watched, the eyes came closer and he saw that they belonged to a hairless, flesh-covered skeleton that rattled something across the bars that held it captive. The creature stared at him with the intensity of an executioner and for the first time Annius Vinicianus knew the true meaning of fear. Without taking its eyes from him, the filth-covered beast began to rub the human thigh bone it held on the stone floor of its cage, sharpening the end to a fine point. Annius felt each unhurried scrape of the bone like a nail across the inside of his skull.
‘You have met our Egyptian, I see.’
He flinched at the unexpected voice from the doorway. Offonius Tigellinus, a short sword naked in his hand, walked unhurriedly into the centre of the room and took his place by the hot coals. Annius sensed someone else in the stair, but the Praetorian prefect waved a languid hand and they were left alone with the baleful creature in the cage. Tigellinus allowed the silence to stretch until the thin membrane inside the younger man’s head that is the dividing line between insanity and madness was near breaking point.
‘They caught him in Alexandria,’ the Praetorian said presently. ‘Some sort of merchant. Children and young girls had been disappearing and they eventually traced them to his door. It must have been quite distressing. All that meat hanging on hooks, dried and salted as if it was in some butcher’s storehouse. He had a special liking for fresh liver, I believe. Astonishing that they didn’t kill him there and then. The Emperor was visiting Egypt at the time and decided to keep him as a pet. And an entertainment.’
Annius’s eyes were locked on the red craters that held him as a snake holds a mouse. He choked back the bile that filled his throat at the thought of the horrors that had occurred inside these walls, the screams of the victims unheard beneath thousands of tons of rock and marble.
‘I am innocent of any crime.’ He despised himself for the fear that was so apparent in his voice.
Tigellinus shook his head sadly, not because it was not true, but because the young man chained before him could be so naive. ‘Everyone who comes here is innocent at first.’ As he spoke, he stepped closer and his voice seemed to caress Annius’s flesh. ‘One name can spare you this.’
Annius stared at him. One name? What name? He drew himself up as well as he could in his chains. ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ he cried. ‘I am innocent of any crime. I demand to be tried by a court of my peers.’
‘Very well.’ Tigellinus sighed wearily. Two men appeared from the doorway. Annius Vinicianus had never seen eyes so empty. ‘Begin.’
After three hours Annius had delivered up to Tigellinus every name his pain-swamped brain could think of. As well as those with whom he’d discussed the possibility of removing Nero, he had implicated most of his family and friends, his father’s acquaintances in the Senate, many of the officers in his legion, and all the slaves on the family estate. It seemed even the honoured dead were among his co-conspirators. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, but whatever horrors were inflicted upon him he never spoke the name Tigellinus prayed to hear. Tigellinus was an experienced inquisitor, but more so a seasoned survivor. The clerks were here to record the list of the newly guilty. He knew he could not utter the name himself, because Nero would hear of it and that would weaken his position.
But if he could only get this young fool to say the name once of his own volition the last stone would be in place. The danger to the Empire would be nullified. The Emperor would be saved from his own weakness.
It was time.
‘Take him down.’ The torturers lifted Annius Vinicianus from the hook that held his chains and laid him on the filth-covered floor. ‘Is he alive?’ Tigellinus already knew the answer to his question, but he stooped, gripping the point on the young man’s arm where the shattered ends of two bones protruded from the flesh, and forced them together. Annius let out a shriek of mortal agony and his eyes flickered open. Tigellinus waited until they had focused on him before kneeling and putting his mouth to wha
t remained of an ear. ‘One name, Annius, and it will all be over. One name.’ He frowned with annoyance at the incomprehension he read in the haggard face. ‘One name, Annius,’ he repeated. ‘ The name that is dearest to you.’
Every minute of Annius’s torment had been accompanied by the rattle of the naked thigh bone across the bars of the Egyptian’s cage. The inhuman red eyes had taken in every cut and every touch of the iron, the ears every scream and howl. Saliva drooled from his thin lips and the flat nose twitched at the scent of cooking meat. As the victim had been lowered from the wall the cannibal’s excitement had grown beyond containment and he began to howl like a dog.
For the Egyptian knew what was coming.
‘Very well, have done with him,’ Tigellinus said.
Annius felt himself being lifted. As his head lolled towards the cage the bright red eyes entered his vision and he remembered.
‘No!’ From somewhere he found his voice.
The cannibal had not been fed for a week and the howl was replaced by an animal shriek as he saw the living flesh being brought to him.
‘No.’ Somewhere in his incomprehensible terror part of Annius Vinicianus’s brain fought for survival. A name. His torturer wanted a name. What had Tigellinus said? The name that is dearest to you.
The name that is dearest to you.
He couldn’t think for fear. He had already soiled himself and now he did so again as he heard the rattle of the barred door being opened and saw the thigh bone pushed out to touch his flesh.
The name that is dearest to you?
The name that is dearest to you?
The name that is dearest to you…!
‘Corbulo!’ His scream was so piercing that even the cannibal recoiled from it. ‘Corbulo! Corbulo! Corbulo!’ The litany only ended when Tigellinus put a finger to his smashed lips. The Praetorian commander beckoned the clerks closer.
His voice was almost gentle. ‘What was the name?’
‘Corbulo,’ Annius sobbed, the awfulness of his betrayal only just dawning. ‘Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, general of the east.’
Tigellinus kept his face solemn. ‘Very well. Keep him safe for the Emperor, and remember, Annius Vinicianus: the Egyptian will always be waiting for you here.’
Left alone with only the whimpering cannibal for a companion, Tigellinus allowed himself a smile of pure triumph.
The game was won.
XXXIX
Tiberius winced as another Parthian arrow thudded into his shield with the sound of an axe biting into a tree trunk. It could only be a matter of time before one found a gap in his defences and he would join the growing number who crawled to the rear groaning in agony and coughing up blood. Two hours, and already the legion was bleeding to death.
Corbulo had deployed the Tenth Fretensis in a double line of cohorts, each eight men deep and with a front of sixty, which stretched across the valley. Behind them, ready to be rotated into the line, waited the seven full cohorts of the Fifteenth, plus the auxiliary spearmen, slingers and archers who had marched alongside them. He had spaced his forces at intervals to allow room between them for his cavalry to launch counter-attacks. It was a tactic that had worked since the time of Caesar and Pompey and he had used it to hurt the Parthians at Tigranocerta. He was gambling that Vologases would be wary of those cavalry who now raised a constant dust cloud in the valley at the rear of the Roman line. What the Parthian King of Kings did not know was that the dust was being created by a single ala of five hundred men, barely enough to provide patrols, scouts and couriers for Corbulo’s force.
Tiberius had watched the auxiliary mountain troops from Noricum scale the precipitous valley walls to take their positions on the heights above. With them went a unit of signallers, and the hillmen’s job was to protect them and ensure Corbulo’s dispositions stayed secret from Vologases while the Parthian movements would be communicated to the Roman general by flag. It would give him a small advantage, but advantages were few and far between.
‘Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.’ The man crouched behind the next shield muttered his profane mantra to the rhythm of arrows which fell like hailstones on a drum. ‘Just come a dozen yards closer and I’ll stick this pilum so far up your arse…’
But Tiberius knew they wouldn’t come close, because they didn’t have to.
Instead, massed ranks of mounted archers charged to within bow-shot of the Roman line to loose their arrows before withdrawing like surf from a beach and disappearing into their own dust, only to be replaced by the next wave of howling barbarians. Again and again they came, flaying Corbulo’s snarling, impotent legionaries with clouds of missiles from a seemingly never-ending supply. In the front rank of the left-hand cohort, Tiberius’s suffocating world was reduced to the rear panels of his curved shield, the only thing that was keeping him alive, and the sweating contorted face of his neighbour, packed close enough to share the stink of their combined fear that vied with the reek of voided bowels from someone nearby. Behind him, Tiberius could feel the presence of the man in the next rank whose aching arm held aloft the shield that covered them both from the aerial threat. His belly ached and his throat was filled with dust; heat, thirst and hunger were his constant companions. All around, above the constant rattle of falling arrows, he could hear the cries of the wounded and the dying to the accompaniment of the continuous thunder of the Parthian drummers urging the next wave forward. Cocooned within the claustrophobic protection of the shields he fought a rising tide of anger. The composite bows of wood, bone and sinew outranged any javelin and the general had ordered his auxiliary archers to hoard their precious arrows until they were needed most. It meant the Parthian bowmen could do their work unhindered and unthreatened. He imagined he could hear them laughing and prayed for the moment Corbulo would let loose his spearmen. A quick dash and a single volley of the heavily weighted pila would teach them to laugh at Rome. But Tiberius had seen what happened when a man broke ranks. Through a gap between the shields he had watched as a legionary tormented beyond reason had dropped his shield and run into the arrow-flayed no-man’s-land screaming for a proper fight. In the time it had taken to draw his sword a hundred Parthian arrows had transformed him into a human porcupine. No, he must listen for the trumpet call that would signal Corbulo’s next order. And endure.
‘Shit.’ Tiberius winced at the sting of splinters on his cheek as the barbed point of an arrow punched through three layers of seasoned ash to stop less than an inch from his nose. He struggled to control an involuntary loosening in his guts and exchanged a shamefaced grin with the legionary at his side. His neighbour grinned back, but in the same instant the grin became a teeth-baring grimace and an animal groan escaped from his throat. Tiberius looked down and saw that the legionary’s sandalled foot had been pinned to the ground by an arrow, with only the flight and a few inches of shaft showing above the shattered bone and spurting scarlet. Careful to keep the shield level, he reached across with his right hand to try to pull the foot free and allow the soldier to stagger or crawl back to where the medical orderlies struggled to deal with a steady stream of casualties. The barbed Parthian arrows were almost impossible to remove without proper surgical tools and any attempt was likely to leave a gaping hole that would condemn the man to a slow death.
‘No,’ the legionary rasped through gritted teeth. ‘Here I am and here I’ll stay. Just let the bastards come.’
But the bastards would not come. Not until the Roman line was a shattered, reeling shadow of what it was now. Only when Corbulo’s proud legions had been humbled would Vologases loose his champions, the armoured cataphracts led by men like Sasan, invulnerable to arrow, sling and spear and wielding the twelve-foot lance that could smash through a shield to pin a legionary like a cockroach. They would scythe through the thinned ranks the way he had once seen a runaway cart smash through a market crowd, leaving broken bodies in their wake for the Parthian infantry, the poorly armed dregs of Vologases’ army, to finish off. Then the way would be open to Tig
ranocerta and Artaxata and the King of Kings would sit upon his brother’s throne and dare Rome to evict him.
But Corbulo had not come here to lose, just as Tiberius had not come here only to fight and die.
Night must arrive soon, and with it respite, and somewhere out there in the darkness was Valerius with the Roman cavalry. Thoughts of Valerius made him ponder the nature of friendship. For a few blessed moments he allowed his mind to wander. Tiberius Claudius Crescens was a young man whose upbringing had made friendship difficult, if not impossible. Discipline had been beaten into him from the beginning and with discipline came responsibility. He was a personable child and people warmed to him, but whenever he became close to the men of his father’s command, or the bastard children who swarmed the village outside the fort, something always seemed to happen. He would see a rusty sword which must be reported. A boy’s mother might have stolen an egg or another woman’s ragged blanket. He called it honesty. They called it betrayal. Gradually they had learned not to trust him, and eventually to avoid him entirely. Even his brother had not been his friend, for he had been engineered to exhibit the same qualities. Eventually he had doubted that he would ever know the true meaning of friendship. Yet when he had met Valerius he had felt an unexpected warmth for another human being that surprised him. It was not only admiration for the scarred tribune’s fighting qualities and the battle honours he had won. From the first, Valerius had treated him with respect and an affection that was almost brotherly. He remembered the epic fight on the ship and the contest of minds that was as intense as that of the swords. Somehow there was a bond between them that transcended mere acquaintance. He knew he didn’t lack courage, far from it, but sometimes the battlefield could be a lonely place and he wished more than anything that Valerius could be here by his side. A weary sigh escaped him. What would tomorrow bring? For the moment, he was beyond caring. All he knew as the great drums thundered, the arrows fell and the men died, was that he must endure. And survive.
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