Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  It was the kalends of December, the first of the month. Ballista waited in the quiet of the courtyard of the temple of Artemis. It struck him again where power lay in this town. In any city where democracy was more than a word the bouleuterion faced on to the agora, where the demos, the people, could keep an eye on the councillors. In Arete the council met in a closed building tucked away in the corner of a walled compound. It was a democracy guarded from its own citizens by armed men.

  Watching Anamu step out into the sunshine, Ballista experienced the strange certainty that he had done all this before. A sinner in Hades, he was condemned to repeat this unenviable task for eternity. He would wait in the courtyard, be greeted by Anamu and tell the councillors some hard truths, some things they did not want to hear, things that would make them hate him. Perhaps it was a fitting punishment for a man who had killed an emperor he had sworn to protect, for the killing of Maximinus Thrax.

  ‘Marcus Clodius Ballista, greetings.’ The down-turned corners of Anamu’s mouth moved. Probably it was intended as a smile.

  Inside the bouleuterion it was as before, some forty councillors arranged on the U-shaped tiers of seats. Only Anamu, Iarhai and Ogelos on the first tier, sitting far apart. There was a deep, expectant silence in the small room.

  Ballista began. ‘Councillors, if Arete is to survive, sacrifices must be made. The priests among you can tell you how to make things right with your gods.’ Taking their lead from Ogelos, those priests nodded their approval. The hirsute Christian smiled broadly. ‘I am here to tell you how we can make things right among men.’ Ballista paused and looked at his notes, written on a piece of papyrus. He thought he caught a look of disappointment, possibly shifting into contempt, on Anamu’s face. To Hades with that - the northerner needed clarity, not rhetorical effect.

  ‘You all know that I am stockpiling food - prices are fixed, only agents of the Dux Ripae can pay more. Again, you all know that the water supply has been taken over by the military: all water consumed is to come from the Euphrates; the cisterns are not to be drawn on.’ Ballista was softening them up, telling them things they knew, things to which they had no great objection.

  ‘Various things will be requisitioned: all boats on the river, all stocks of timber for building and a great deal of firewood. Also requisitioned will be large terracotta storage jars and metal cauldrons, all cowhides and all the chaff in the town.’ The northerner noticed that one or two of the councillors looked at each other surreptitiously and grinned. If they were still alive when the time came, they would see that the last few requisitions were anything but the odd whims of a barbarian.

  ‘Again, you know that everyone and everything entering and leaving the city is being searched.’ There was a quiet murmur from the back benches. ‘It causes delays. It is inconvenient. It is an invasion of privacy. But it is necessary. Indeed, we must go further. From today there will be a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Anyone on the streets at night will be arrested and may be killed. All meetings of ten or more people must obtain permission from the Dux Ripae. Anyone flouting this order, for whatever reason, will be arrested and may be killed.’ The murmuring was a touch louder but, so far, the councillors found little to which they could really object: if a few of the common people got killed in the streets at night so be it.

  ‘Some soldiers are billeted in private houses.’ The muttering ceased. Now he had their attention. Given as soldiers were to wanton destruction, theft, violence and rape, the billeting of troops was always deeply unpopular. ‘So that troops can reach their posts quickly, billeting will have to be extended. Buildings in the second blocks in from the western wall and the first blocks in from the other walls may be affected. A reasonable compensation will be paid to the owners of the buildings.’ There was silence. The councillors were the great property-owners. Providing they could keep the soldiers out of their own homes, they might do well out of this. ‘Also, the caravanserai near the Palmyrene Gate will be taken over by the military. Compensation will be paid to the city.’

  Sunlight was pouring into the room from the door behind Ballista. Motes of dust swirled in the golden air. Maximus and Romulus came in and stood behind him.

  ‘The nine hundred mercenaries of the three caravan protectors will be formed into three numeri, irregular units, of the Roman army. They will be joined by the same number of conscripted citizens. The troops will be paid by the military treasury. Their commanders will hold the rank and draw the salary of a praepositus.’ Iarhai grinned. The other two tried to look as if it were all a noble self-sacrifice, Ogelos rather more successfully than Anamu. It was a windfall: their private armies were to be doubled in size and paid for by the state.

  ‘There is a terrible need for manpower. All able-bodied male slaves - and we estimate that there are at least 2 ,500 of them in the town - will be requisitioned into labour gangs. They will not be nearly enough. Some 5,000 citizens will be pressed into labour gangs as well. Some occupations will be reserved. Blacksmiths, carpenters, fletchers and bowyers will be exempt from the labour gangs but will work exclusively for the military. The boule will draw up the necessary lists.’ The three caravan protectors betrayed nothing but, behind them, the other councillors exclaimed with barely suppressed anger. They were to have to organize the handing over of large numbers of their fellow citizens to slave-like labour.

  ‘These labour gangs will assist the troops in digging a moat in front of the western, desert wall, and building a glacis, an earthen ramp, in front of it. They will also help construct a counter-glacis behind the wall.’ Here goes, thought Ballista, unconsciously touching the hilt of his spatha.

  ‘To make room for the counter-glacis, the internal earthen ramp, the labour gangs will assist in demolishing all the buildings in the first blocks in from the western wall.’ For a moment there was a stunned silence, then men at the back began to shout in protest. Against the rising noise, Ballista pressed on.

  ‘The labour gangs will also help the troops to demolish all the tombs in the necropolis outside the walls. Their rubble will be used as the filling of the glacis.’

  Uproar. Almost all the councillors were on their feet, shouting: ‘The gods will desert us if we pull down their temples... You want us to enslave our own citizens, destroy our own homes, desecrate the graves of our fathers?’ The cries of sacrilege were echoing back off the walls.

  Here and there were isolated islands of calm. Iarhai was still seated, his face unreadable. Anamu and Ogelos were on their feet but after initial exclamations they were silent and thoughtful. The hairy Christian still sat, smiling his beatific smile. But all the other councillors were up and shouting. Some were jeering, waving their fists, incensed.

  Over the uproar Ballista shouted that, from now on, for ease of communication, his engagements would be posted up in the agora. No one seemed to be listening.

  He turned and, with Maximus and Romulus covering his back, walked out into the sunshine.

  X

  Ballista thought it best to let the dust settle after his meeting with the boule. Syrians were notorious for acting and speaking on the spur of the moment and there was no point in risking an exchange of harsh, ill-considered words. For the next two days he remained in the military quarter, planning the defence of the city with his high officers.

  Acilius Glabrio was smarting from losing 120 of his best legionaries to the new unit of artillerymen. And although they were not present, doubtless he was not pleased to think of Iarhai, Anamu and Ogelos, yet more barbarian upstarts in his view, being catapulted into command in the Roman army. He retreated into a patrician vagueness and studied unconcern. Yet the others worked hard. Turpio was keen to please, Mamurra his usual steady considered self and, as accensus, Demetrius seemed less distracted. Gradually, from their deliberations a plan began to form in Ballista’s mind - which sections of wall would be guarded by which units, where they would be billeted, how their supplies would reach them, where the few - so very few - reserves would be stationed.

 
; A lower level of military affairs also demanded his attention. A court-martial was convened to try the auxiliary from Cohors XX who had been accused of raping his landlord’s daughter. His defence was not strong: ‘Her father was home, we went outside, she was saying yes right up until her bare arse hit the mud.’ His centurion, however, provided an excellent character statement. More pertinently, two of the soldier’s contubernales swore that the girl had previously willingly had sex with the soldier.

  The panel was divided. Acilius Glabrio, the very incarnation of Republican virtue, was for the death penalty. Mamurra voted for leniency. Ultimately, the decision was Ballista’s. In the eyes of the law, the soldier was guilty. Quite probably his contubernales were lying for him. Ballista guiltily acquitted the soldier: he knew he could not afford to lose even one trained man, let alone alienate his colleagues.

  Another legal case occupied him. Julius Antiochus, soldier of the vexillatio of Legio IIII Scythica, of the century of Alexander, and Aurelia Amimma, daughter of Abbouis, resident of Arete, were getting divorced. No love was lost; money was involved; the written documents were ambiguous; the witnesses diametrically opposed. There was no obvious way to determine the truth. Ballista found in favour of the soldier. Ballista knew his decision was expedient rather than just. The imperium had corrupted him; Justice had once more been banished to a prison island.

  On the third morning after his meeting with the boule, Ballista considered that enough time had elapsed. The councillors should have settled down by now. Volatile as all Syrians were, it was possible they might even have come round to Ballista’s way of thinking. Yes, he was destroying their homes, desecrating their tombs and temples, dismantling their liberties, but it was all in the cause of a higher freedom - the higher freedom of being subject to the Roman emperor and not the Persian king. Ballista smiled at the irony. Pliny the Younger had best expressed the Roman concept of libertas: You command us to be free, so we will be.

  Ballista sent off messengers to Iarhai, Ogelos and Anamu inviting them to dine that evening with him and his three high officers. Bathshiba, of course, was invited too. Remembering the Roman superstition against an even number at table, Ballista sent off another messenger to invite Callinicus the Sophist as well. The northerner asked Calgacus to tell the cook to produce something special, preferably featuring smoked eels. The aged Hibernian looked as if he had never in his very long life heard such an outrageous request and it prompted a fresh stream of muttering: ‘Oh, aye, what a great Roman you are... what next ... fucking peacock brains and dormice rolled in honey.’

  Calling Maximus and Demetrius to accompany him, Ballista announced that they were going to the agora. Ostensibly they were going to check that the edicts on food prices were being obeyed but, in reality, the northerner just wanted to get out of the palace, to get away from the scene of his dubious legal decision-making. His judgements were preying on his mind. There was much he admired about the Romans - their siege engines and fortifications, their discipline and logistics, their hypocausts and baths, their racehorses and women - but he found their libertas illusory. He had had to ask imperial permission to live where he did, to marry the woman he had married. In fact his whole life since crossing into the empire seemed to him marked by subservience and sordid compromise rather than distinguished by freedom.

  His sour, cynical mood began to lift as they walked into the north-east corner of the agora. He had always liked marketplaces: the noises, the smells - the badly concealed avarice. Crowds of men circulated slowly. Half humanity seemed to be represented. Most wore typically eastern dress, but there were also Indians in turbans, Scythians in high, pointed hats, Armenians in folded-down hats, Greeks in short tunics, the long, loose robes of the tent-dwellers and, here and there, the occasional Roman toga or the skins and furs of a tribesman from the Caucasus.

  There seemed a surfeit of the necessities of life - plenty of grain, mainly wheat, some barley; lots of wine and olive oil for sale in skins or amphorae, and any number of glossy black olives. At least in his presence, Ballista’s edicts on prices appeared to be being observed. There was no sign they had driven goods off the market. As the northerner and his two companions moved along the northern side of the agora the striped awnings became brighter, smarter, and the foods shaded by them moved from Mediterranean essentials to life’s little luxuries - fruit and vegetables, pine kernels and fish sauce and, most prized of all, the spices: pepper and saffron.

  Before they reached the porticos of the western side of the agora the luxuries had ceased to be edible. Here were sweet-smelling stalls with sandal- and cedarwood. Too expensive for building materials or firewood, these could be considered exempt from Ballista’s edict on the requisitioning of wood. Here men sold ivory, monkeys, parrots. Maximus paused to examine some fancy leather-work. Ballista thought he saw a camelskin being quietly hidden at the rear of the shop. He was going to ask Demetrius to make a note but the boy was staring intently over at the far end of the agora, once more distracted. Many of the things that men and women most desired were here: perfumes, gold, silver, opals, chalcedonies and, above all, shimmering and unbelievably soft, the silk from the Seres at the far edge of the world.

  In the southern porticos, to Ballista’s distaste, was the slave market. There, all manner of ‘tools with voices’ were on display. There were slaves to farm your land, keep your accounts, dress your wife’s hair, sing you songs, pour your drinks and suck your dick. But Ballista studied the merchandise closely; there was one type of slave he always looked to purchase. Having inspected all that was on offer, the northerner returned to the middle of the slave pens and called out a short simple question in his native tongue.

  ‘Are there any Angles here?’

  There was not a face that did not turn to gaze at the huge barbarian warlord shouting unintelligibly in his outlandish tongue but, to Ballista’s immense relief, no one answered.

  They moved past the livestock market to the eastern portico, the cheap end of the agora where the rag-pickers, low-denomination money lenders, magicians, wonder workers and others who traded on human misery and weakness touted for trade. Both Ballista’s companions were looking intently back over their shoulders at the alley where the prostitutes stood. It was to be expected of Maximus, but Demetrius was a surprise - Ballista had always thought the young Greek’s interests lay elsewhere.

  Allfather, but he could do with a woman himself. In one sense it would be so good, so easy. But in another sense it would be neither. There was Julia, his vows to her, the way he had been brought up.

  Ballista thought bitterly of the way some Romans, like Tacitus in his Germania, held the marital fidelity of the Germans up as a mirror to condemn the contemporary Roman lack of morality. But traditional rustic fidelity was all very well when you lived in a village; it was not designed for those hundreds of miles, weeks of travel, away from their woman. Yet Ballista knew that his aversion to infidelity stemmed from more than just his love for Julia, more than the way he had been brought up. Just as some men carried a lucky amulet into battle, so he carried his fidelity to Julia. Somehow he had developed a superstitious dread that, if he had another woman, his luck would desert him and the next sword thrust or arrow would not wound but kill, not scrape down his ribs but punch through them into his heart.

  Thinking now of his companions, Ballista said, ‘For the sake of thoroughness, perhaps we should check what is on sale in the alley? Would you two like to do it?’

  Demetrius’s refusal was immediate. He looked indignant but also slightly shifty. Why was the boy acting so strangely?

  ‘I think I am qualified to do it on my own,’ said Maximus.

  ‘Oh yes, I believe you are. But, remember, you are just looking at the goods, not sampling them.’ Ballista grinned. ‘We will be over there in the middle of the agora, learning virtue from the statues set up to the good citizens of Arete.’

  The first statue Ballista and Demetrius came to stood on a high plinth. ‘Agegos son of Anamu son of
Agegos,’ read Ballista. ‘It must be the father of our Anamu - a bit better-looking.’ The statue was in eastern dress and, unlike Anamu, he had a good head of hair. It stood up in tight curls all around his head. He sported a full short beard like his son but also boasted a luxurious moustache, teased out and waxed into points. His face was round, slightly fleshy. ‘Yes, better-looking than his son, although that is not hard.’

  ‘For his piety and love of the city’ - Ballista read out the rest of the inscription - ‘for his complete virtue and courage, always providing safety for the merchants and caravans, for his generous expenditure to these ends from his own resources. In that he saved the recently arrived caravan from the nomads and from the great dangers that surrounded it, the same caravan set up three statues, one in the agora of Arete, where he is strategos, one in the city of Spasinou Charax, and one on the island of Thilouana, where he is satrap (governor). Your geography is better than mine’ - Ballista looked at his accensus - ‘Spasinou Charax is where?’

  ‘At the head of the Persian Gulf,’ Demetrius replied.

  ‘And the island of Thilouana is?’

  ‘In the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Arabia. In Greek we call it Tylos.’