Gods & Emperors (Legionary 5)

by Gordon Doherty

  ‘Mithras! Is that not a sight to stir any man’s heart?’ he whispered into the languid air, unable to suppress a grin.

  He caught sight of Emperor Valens’ purple standard, approaching amidst the moving masses.

  ‘Domine,’ he called out, ‘the road is clear!’

  The explorator’s cry echoed across the front and was met with a mighty cheer from the XI Claudia and all around them.

  ‘Just an hour more and we’ll be at the emperor’s manor,’ Agilo added.

  Thank you, Mithras, Pavo thought. Agilo’s regular shouts had served as a slow, steady heartbeat for the journey to Melanthias.

  They had set off from Constantinople yesterday and every man moved with a spring in his step. But soon after the capital had fallen from view behind them, the unusually hot summer sun had begun to take its toll, the excited murmurs replaced by panting and coughing and the frequent guzzling of water. Today it was reaching that stage in the march where any soldier, veteran or recruit, began to feel his spear shaft grate on his palm and his shield strap chew into his left shoulder. Unfortunately for the Claudia, Pavo thought, marching near the front meant each of them was obliged to wear their heavy mail shirt, which did little to ease the discomfort. Worse, marching behind the two palace legions and the mounted vanguard guaranteed a constant stream of dust and unfortunate bodily aromas from those in front, he mused, his nose wrinkling as he caught a whiff of horse and long-unwashed crotch. Ride swiftly, explorator, he affirmed, seeing Agilo once again speed off over a grassy rise on the western horizon to re-join his scouting cadre, the sooner we get to Melanthias, the better.

  But despite the gruelling nature of the trek, they had marched well, Pavo thought – even the rawest recruits. The three Claudia cohorts, nose to tail, had kept time with the emperor’s army to perfection: Zosimus heading the First Cohort, Pavo the second and Quadratus the third. A quick glance over his shoulder filled him with pride: ruby-red shields in tight formation, banners held high. He could not help but imagine Gallus’ reaction at seeing his beloved legion in full pomp after the recent devastations. Nor could he help but yearn for Dexion to be here also.

  He thought again of that cursed piece of paper. Narco holds the truth. What truth? He had thought it over a thousand times. All it had offered was a recurring headache, an immovable mental image of that staring eye emblem on the paper. He snorted, knowing full well he’d take to thinking it over again tonight. Anything, anything that might help find Gallus and his brother. They will return. The legion will be complete, he mouthed.

  A short while later, they came to a grassy rise. Pavo realised that something was missing: Agilo and his riders had not returned from beyond that incline to give their latest shout. He glanced to his side and saw Sura had marched forward to his position.

  ‘I’ve been counting,’ Sura said in a muted voice. ‘Almost exactly eighteen hundred paces between his every shout.’

  ‘What’re we at now?’ Pavo asked.

  ‘Two thousand,’ Sura replied darkly.

  Almost as if in reply, a sharp rumble of hooves sounded and Agilo appeared, bursting over the brow of the rise with his fellow scouts to draw up before the Gentiles riders. But there was no joyous call. More, the scouts’ faces were creased in vexation, hands shooting out, pointing before they bolted back over the rise to take a closer look at whatever had alarmed them so.

  ‘Right, sharpen up,’ Zosimus growled, sensing the sudden air of menace.

  Pavo’s hand tightened on his spear and his other arm moved, ready to swing his shield down from his shoulder if needed. His heartrate quickened.

  Just then, a rider amongst the Gentiles blew into a buccina. Three blasts.

  Enemy near, Pavo mouthed. ‘Form a broad front,’ he said aloud, waving to the standard bearers who swished their banners to affect the order.

  ‘We’re on,’ Quadratus grunted. The iron and ruby legion then jogged forward to take their place on the left of a now broader armoured front alongside the flanks – four abreast.

  Pavo and Sura barged together, shoulder-to-shoulder with the others, shields clacking together to form a wall, betraying just baleful eyes, shark-finned helms and lethal spear points. They edged up the rise like this, mouths dry, until they reached the crest and the land beyond was revealed. Pavo gawped down onto the broad, green and gold flatland below, a breath of hot wind furrowing his hair.

  There was no enemy army to be seen. To the left of the Via Egnatia was a long, narrow lagoon fringed with shingle, woods and tracts of meadow, its gentle, teal waters and the calm sounds of nature all around at odds with the thousands of panting, armed men on the hillside. Not a soul spoke. His thundering heart slowed and for a moment, all he could think of was kicking Agilo really hard in the groin. He and Sura shared a confused look, then both saw it at the same time. There, on the lagoon’s eastern shore, amidst a shimmering fig grove lay something broken: toppled stonework and jutting shards of timber. A glint of iron caught Pavo’s eye and for a moment, the battle angst returned, until he saw that it was merely the sun reflecting off of mangled, fallen iron gates. Now he realised he was looking upon a ruined perimeter wall, breached in three places, ladders still resting against the outside of other parts. Painted white, the dark stains of blood and smoke stood out starkly. Within the broken walls, part-masked by trees, a husk of a manor stood. The roof had caved in. Gentle wisps of grey smoke still rose from the gutted ruin.

  ‘Melanthias,’ Quadratus said stonily.

  Pavo looked along the wall of shields lining the rise. Emperor Valens had ridden forward. Agilo was explaining something to him. The emperor nodded in silence, then his head bowed as he took in the news. Whatever the rider had told him had been crushing.

  ‘We thought it best to opt for caution, but you can stand down. It seems there is no danger,’ another explorator called out, riding his mount at a trot along the front. ‘The Goths who did this are gone.’

  A short while later, the battle line reformed as a column, then proceeded in an awkward silence downhill and into the estate grounds, crunching along the shingle shore of the lagoon. Pavo saw that the fig trees had been stripped of their fruits, and the wide, flat meadows north of the estate bore the tell-tale divots of raiding hooves. As they approached the wrecked manor grounds, he saw the scarred walls up close. Weak smoke continued to rise from some sections where crossbeams still smouldered. A sentry’s corpse was doubled over a section of broken parapet, a Gothic spear wedged in the man’s back, his arms dangling and blood staining the wall where he was draped. Pavo recognised the emblem of a scarab and Hercules on the man’s fallen shield: the additional legion Valens had shipped in from Egypt. A legion slain to a man, he realised, now seeing the many other scale-clad corpses lying part-hidden in the grass or prone atop the ruined walls, buzzing flies and busy carrion birds marking out some of the cadavers. As he passed toppled sections of wall, he glimpsed the desolation inside: bloody, grey limbs poking from the collapsed section of the manor at the heart of the grounds, and a number of other bodies strewn around the gardens. The decapitated corpse of a slave boy lay, one arm outstretched towards the broken gates as if he had been moments from escaping his killers. As the column marched across to the pasture just east of this grim scene, Pavo watched Valens ride over to enter his razed home and walk his mount into the ruined grounds. Two candidati flanked him as always when he slipped from his saddle and stooped to one knee by a shattered, blackened sarcophagus in the centre of the gardens. Pavo saw the emperor’s head loll and his shoulders shudder.

  ‘They desecrated the grave of his only son,’ a voice said.

  Pavo looked up to see Agilo the explorator had ridden close. ‘What kind of man plunders bones from the ground?’

  ‘Men did not do this,’ Agilo spat, then pointed to the hoof prints in the ground. ‘It was the Greuthingi riders, as savage as the Huns.’

  The Batavians went about organising the collection and burial of the dead while the rest of the legions set t
o work marking out the perimeter of a camp by Melanthias’ grounds. When night had fallen, the legions cooked and ate around their fires in near-silence.

  ‘My father-in-law worked as a horse trainer in there,’ one of Quadratus’ lot grumbled.

  ‘My older brother was in the Egyptian legion,’ Trupo said, his face drawn.

  ‘The Greuthingi will pay,’ Zosimus said, spitting a scrap of tough mutton into the fire.

  ‘But they are riders – swift and lethal,’ Rectus mused. ‘They’ll be sly enough to keep the horizon between us and them.’

  ‘The Thervingi warbands too,’ Sura agreed. ‘They might move on foot, but they’re fast enough.’

  ‘Then how do we catch an invisible army?’ Cornix said.

  Pavo stood, tossing the remnant of his thin stew into the earth. ‘We eat, we sleep, and we pray that Mithras brings us hope at dawn.’

  When he retired to his bed, he fell into a fitful half-slumber. Images of Gallus, of Dexion came and went, and the same phrase repeated in his head, over and over.

  Narco holds the truth.

  Finally, exhaustion drew him into a deeper sleep…and a darker place.

  The crone’s face was long and weary as once more she pointed Pavo to the farmhouse. It happened again as it had done so many times before: within moments he was inside, flames engulfing the walls, licking at Pavo from every direction as he scrambled back from the shadow-man. The wolf lay wounded by his side, howling weakly, the dead white eagle close by too. He drew back until he felt a wall of flames behind him and realised he could retreat no further.

  ‘I have nothing to fear from you,’ he snarled at the shadow-man.

  ‘Oh, but you do,’ the shadow man replied in a sibilant voice.

  A spike of fiery trepidation lanced Pavo’s heart, but he fought against it. ‘You plague my dreams, you show me false scenes of death and destruction, yet you are powerless… you are nothing.’

  ‘Nothing… or everything?’ the shadow man replied.

  The figure’s hands rose up and looped around the edges of the hood, then drew it back and lowered it. Pavo gawped, seeing something he could not comprehend. A dark, heavy brow, an aquiline nose… was he looking upon himself?

  He shot up to sitting with a gasp for air. ‘What the?’ he panted, shaking his head then palming at his eyes. The wicked dream slipped away and he sat up in his bed, seeing the dim orange of dawn outside the goatskin tent.

  He looked across to the slumbering form of Sura on the far side. As a centurion, his days of sharing a contubernium tent with seven others were over; instead of a line of bodies belching, farting and snoring he now had a small wooden table, a crate of scrolls and a wax writing tablet to take notes for the daily reports. Beside this, his armour and weapons rested on a small wooden stool.

  He stretched, rose and stretched again, throwing on his tunic and lifting his cup. Outside, few had risen, sweet woodsmoke permeated the air from the one or two morning campfires, and the dawn sun bathed the silk-like surface of the lagoon, the fields and orchards and the sea of tents in a soft light. Even the ruined manor looked slightly less cadaver-like. The grounds had been cleared of bodies, but the tumbled stone still bore the stains of slaughter. He hobbled over to the water barrel, scooped up a cupful and drank deeply, then issued a short prayer to Mithras that today would not be as bleak as yesterday. When he went to draw another cup, he stopped, seeing the surface of the water ripple sharply. The ground tremored, then he heard hooves, racing into the camp, right for his back.

  He swung round, dropping his cup, just as a rider on a huge roan stallion slowed to a canter and stopped right before him, the white-bodied horse rearing up and whinnying as its brown fetlocks thrashed, hooves a hand’s-width from Pavo’s face. He staggered back, Sura stumbled from the tent, bleary-eyed, Quadratus and Zosimus lurched from their nearby tents, eyes barely open and Quadratus having neglected to put on a stitch of clothing.

  ‘Morning, ladies,’ the rider bellowed with a buccina-like cry through a tunnel of a mouth, sitting bolt upright on the saddle. ‘Did you miss your dawn roll call, or do I need to damn well give it for you?’

  Pavo blinked the last scraps of sleep from his mind and beheld the rider: a man in his mid-forties, bald, with what hair he possessed shaved to nothing more than a ring of grey shadow above the ears. His right eye was bulging and painfully bloodshot and the other was masked by a frayed black leather eyepatch. His pox-scarred face was fixed in a lop-sided grimace, anchored that way by a row of yellowing bottom teeth. Was it a grimace, or was it an evil smile? Pavo wasn’t sure. The man wore a simple grey cloak over a dark red tunic and well-worn riding boots. A scout? Pavo wondered.

  Just then, the roll call buccinae sounded all across the camp. The man shrugged. ‘Ah well, seems you beat me to it.’ He cast his bulging eye around the bewildered officers of the Claudia, hitched himself in the saddle then picked on Pavo. ‘I’ve ridden all the way from the West. I believe Emperor Valens has a job for me?’

  ‘Er,’ Pavo stammered, ‘the scout riders’ stables are at the south of the camp-’

  ‘Scout rider?’ the man said, leaning down a little from the saddle, his face screwing up even more as if inspecting an horrifically infected wound. ‘Balls to that. I didn’t ride all the way from my villa in Latium to be a bloody scout rider!’ The notion that seemed to have irked him so greatly then suddenly tickled him, as he rocked back on the saddle and laughed uproariously. ‘Scout rider, now that would be quite something. Would take me back to my earliest years in the ranks…’

  Pavo blinked. All the way from my villa in Latium. It stirred a memory, but not a clear one. He glanced past the man in search of an escort of any sort. None – surely someone of low importance then?

  ‘You’re wondering where my riders are?’ he said with another blast of that war horn voice. ‘Well five of them are dead – lying up in the Rhodope Mountain path where some bastard Goths ambushed us. The other three bolted for their lives, gutless fuc-’

  The buccinae wailed once more for roll call, drowning out the end of his sentence, but only just.

  ‘So I rode the rest of the way alone,’ the agitated rider continued. ‘After I chased off the four who ambushed us,’ he clenched those yellow teeth together in a grin and pointed proudly at a freshly scabbed line on his face like a boy showing his mother something he had made. ‘Anyway, Emperor Valens?’

  Pavo turned and pointed to the principia area at the heart of the camp, where the emperor planned, held court, slept and dined.

  The fellow winked his thanks to Pavo, hitched himself again then nodded to the others curtly before heeling his horse into a walk, stopping only to glare askance at the naked Quadratus, pointing a finger at his genitals. ‘My, it appears to be a brisk dawn today.’

  Quadratus’ face fell agape as the rider trotted off to the camp principia. Libo, just emerging from his contubernium tent, could not contain a snigger, and Quadratus’ reaction was immediate: ‘Latrines – two weeks,’ he growled, cupping his genitals protectively and storming back inside his tent.

  By mid-morning, Emperor Valens had summoned his consistorium of Traianus, Victor and Saturninus, and gathered the chief officers from each legion: tribuni in the main, along with the senior centurions of the Claudia. These forty or so men stood in the principia’s planning tent in a circle around a table with the campaign map pinned out upon it. A tense debate was in full sway, and Pavo’s eyes switched one way then the other as the key men argued their cases.

  ‘This army cannot march headlong into the north as things stand,’ Valens insisted. ‘The march here was safe enough, but you have all witnessed the devastation of my manor. The lands north of this point will only be more treacherous, for they are still riddled with Fritigern’s roaming warbands. Were we to advance the column through such a swarm then we would be subject to ambush and outmanoeuvring. We don’t know where they are, and it would be folly to move blind through their midst.’

  ‘We should s
plit the campaign army,’ Traianus pressed. ‘Give me fifteen thousand men and I will sweep southern Thracia of these Thervingi warbands, Domine. Have the other half march up the Via Pontica and sweep northern Thracia.’

  Valens sighed in frustration. ‘You rely too heavily on tactics that have won clashes for you in the past. No two battles are the same. I have told you before, the army I have assembled here is precious. It has taken many months of planning to draw it together and I cannot risk splitting it in two. Should one half of my forces fall into some Gothic trap…’ he shook his head. ‘The only way we can be sure of besting Fritigern’s horde is if we can meet them as one force. While they roam like jackal packs, we must tread carefully.’

  ‘Then let us once again consider Kabyle?’ Victor asked, just as he had done back in Constantinople. ‘We know Fritigern is there with just a few thousand warriors. A swift march might take them by surprise, despite the stout defences there.’

  ‘Might?’ Valens shot back immediately. ‘I cannot risk this army on such a foggy premise. Chance is not a strategy. Were we to march that far north unscathed then encompass that stoutly-walled town, we would be asking for Fritigern’s widespread forces to converge and in turn encircle us. No, Kabyle is a bait I will not be biting on.’