Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘Now we ride flat out again.’

  In complete silence the small group rode hard. Off to their left, the light of Romulus’s lantern bobbed across the plain towards the just distinguishable darker mass of the hills. Beaded across the wide plain were the lights of the Sassanids. Soon they altered course and surged after the lone Roman lantern. Ballista and his remaining twelve men rode north into the darkness to safety.

  Not one was looking back when the line of Sassanid lights converged on the solitary lantern making vainly for the hills.

  They were found by the patrol just after dawn; Turpio was working Cohors XX hard these days: the first patrols set out early, always in the dark. When Ballista and his party were found they were still a couple of miles from town, and in a bad way. Horses and men were completely exhausted. The flanks of the horses were covered in a white foam of sweat, their nostrils wide, mouths hanging open. The men were ashen-faced, almost insensible with fatigue. Apart from a servant more dead than alive who was slung over a packhorse, they were walking, stumbling along by their mounts. The Dux Ripae looked terrible, his face masked in dried blood, staggering, hanging on to the near-side pommel of his horse’s saddle.

  Before they reached Arete the Dux called a halt. He washed as much as he could of the blood from his face. He put on a hooded cloak borrowed from one of the troopers. He climbed back on to his horse and pulled the cloak up to hide his injuries. He rode into town with a straight back.

  After the battered cavalcade had passed through the Palmyrene Gate the telones looked at the boukolos with an air of smug vindication.

  ‘Calpurnia mutters ... There is truth in poetry, boy - looks like that old centurion knew a thing or two: the ides of March did not do our barbarian Dux any good.’

  ‘And knowing poetry didn’t do your fucking centurion much good either; he still had his bollocks cut off,’ replied the boukolos. ‘Now this is what I call an omen: first time our commander meets the Persians they nearly kill him. Bloody bad omen that.’

  From this first conversation discussions of the events at Castellum Arabum spread out across the town of Arete.

  An hour or so after their return, Ballista, Maximus and Demetrius were lying in the tepidarium of the private baths attached to the palace of the DuxRipae. The doctor had come and gone. He had put a couple of stitches in a gash on Maximus’s thigh and five or six in the scalp wound on the back of Ballista’s head. Demetrius had come through untouched.

  They were lying in silence, dog-tired, aching. Ballista’s head throbbed.

  ‘No one to blame but yourself ... your own fucking fault,’ Calgacus grumbled as he brought in some food and drink. Ballista noted that now the Caledonian felt firee to express his opinions before Maximus and Demetrius.

  ‘Those notices you keep posting up in the agora: “the Dux Ripae will be virtually on his own riding down to some fly-blown piece of shite in the middle of nowhere; why not send a message to the Sassanids so they can ambush him?” Never listen ... just like your bloody father.’

  ‘You are right,’ Ballista said tiredly. ‘There will not be any more notices, no more advance warning of what we are going to do.’

  ‘Surely it could just be chance, bad luck? Their patrol just happened to be there and we just happened to run into them. Surely there does not have to be a traitor?’ Demetrius’s tone could not be mistaken. He desperately wanted one of them to say he was right, it was unlikely to happen again.

  ‘No, I am afraid not,’ said Ballista. ‘They knew we were coming. That dust cloud in the south was the main force. It was intended to take us as we camped at the disused caravanserai. We were behind schedule. We were never meant to see the ones we ran into. They were just a screen to catch any of us who managed to escape the massacre.’

  ‘So,’ said Maximus, ‘you see the virtue in sloth - a good long meridiatio saved our lives.’

  Four hours after the Dux Ripae rode through the Palmyrene Gate the frumentarii were in their favourite bar in the south-east of the city.

  ‘Left him to die like a dog in the shand.’ The emotion was not counterfeit; the North African was packed full of anger.

  ‘Yes,’ said the one from the Subura. He kept his voice neutral. He was sorry for the Spaniard, Sertorius as he had dubbed him, but what else could the Dux Ripae have done - stop and get the whole party killed?

  ‘Like a dog ... hope the poor bashtard was dead before they got to him.’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated the one from the Subura. The North African’s Punic accent was becoming stronger, the volume louder and, although the bar was almost empty, the Roman did not want attention drawn to them.

  ‘I will fix that bashtard barbarian ... write a report that will fix him, write such a report on him, the bashtard. I just wish I could be there when the princeps peregrinorum hands the report to the emperor - see the look on Valerian’s face when he hears how his barbarian boy has fucked up - the fucking bashtard.’

  ‘Are you sure that is a good idea?’

  ‘Godsh below it is ... fix that bashtard good and proper.’

  The Persian rug which curtained off the inner room was drawn back. Mamurra walked through and over to the table of the frumentarii. He leant down, bringing his great slab of a face close to them.

  ‘My condolences on the loss of your colleague.’ He spoke softly, and walked on without waiting for a reply. The two frumentarii looked at each other in some consternation. How long had the praefectus fabrum been there? What had he heard? And was there something in the way he had pronounced ‘colleague’ that implied more than the Spaniard being a fellow member of the staff of the Dux Ripae?

  Seven days after the events at Castellum Arabum Antigonus rode in on a donkey led by a peasant. He told the telones and boukolos to fuck off, made himself known to the centurion from Legio [III in charge at the Palmyrene Gate and, within half an hour, he was in the palace. Sitting in the private apartments of the Dux Ripae, food and drink to hand, he told his story.

  Yes, Antigonus had found the two troopers on point duty. The Sassanids had been questioning them, the poor bastards, as he rode past. Oddly, no one had pursued him. There was a line of Persian cavalry coming up from the south, a lot of them. Antigonus had turned his horse loose - excellent horse it was too - hidden most of his kit in a ravine and swum out to an island in the Euphrates. He told them proudly that he was a Batavian from the Rhine. The whole world knew that the Batavians were great swimmers. As everyone in the party of the Dux had taken the standard three days’ rations with them, he had sat on his island for two days. He had not seen a Persian after the first day. Then he had swum ashore, picked up as much of his kit as he could carry and walked south to Castellum Arabum. It had not been pretty. Eighteen heads were mounted over the gate and on the walls. The other two dromedarii might have escaped but, more likely, they had been taken for further questioning.

  ‘Anyway,’ Antigonus continued, ‘I found a peasant who, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to let me have his donkey and bring me home to Arete.’ In response to a sharp look from Ballista he hurried on. ‘No, no, he is fine. In fact, he is waiting in the first courtyard for the huge reward I said the Dux Ripae would pay him.’ Ballista nodded to Demetrius, who nodded back to say he would deal with it.

  ‘There is more. On my way back I came across Romulus, or what was left of him. Nasty - he had been mutilated, hopefully after he was dead.’

  The ever-changing stories spread out far beyond the city of Arete. Ten days after the reality had played out in darkness and fear by the Euphrates, a messenger prostrated himself in the magnificent throne room in the Persian capital of Cetisiphon and told a version of the story to Shapur, the Sassanid King of Kings. Twenty-six days after that, a messenger prostrated himself in the palace high on the Palatine Hill and told the first of several versions of the story that Valerian Imperator of the Romans would hear. Another three days elapsed before a messenger tracked down Gallienus, Valerian’s son and fellow Augustus, by the cold ba
nks of the Danube. By then, many more things had happened at the city of Arete and, for most there, the events at Castellum Arabum were a fading memory.

  From the walls of Arete, for a long time the only sign of the approach of the Sassanid horde was the thick black cloud looming up from the south. On the morning of the fourteenth of April, the day after the ides of the month - always an unlucky day - Ballista, accompanied by his senior officers, staff and familia, took his stand on the battlements above the Palmyrene Gate. There was the cloud downriver, coming up from the realms of Shapur. Dark and thick, it was still some way off, at least as far as the disused caravanserai, if not as far as Castellum Arabum. No one needed to ask what caused it. It was impossible to escape the thought of the tens of thousands of marching men, horses and other, terrifying beasts kicking up the dust, of the smoke writhing up oily from the innumerable fires consuming everything in the path of the horde from the east.

  At twilight a line of campfires could be seen burning no more than a couple of miles from the city. The Sassanid scouts were settling in for the night. Later, in the depth of the night, more fires flickered into life, stretching round in an arc along the hills to the west. After midnight a terrible orange glow lit the sky to the north-west as the Persian outriders reached the villages. By cock crow smudges of fire and smoke had appeared on the other side of the river to the east. Everyone within the walls of the town of Arete knew they were surrounded, cut off by land from help or flight. And yet, so far, they had not seen a single one of the warriors of Shapur.

  At dawn the Dux Ripae and his men were still at their post. Most had left to try and rest for an hour or two but, to Ballista, sleep seemed impossible on a night so obviously momentous. Wrapped in a sheepskin, he leant against one of the two pieces of artillery on the roof of the gatehouse, a huge twenty-pounder ballista. His eyes ached with fatigue as he peered out on to the western plain. He thought he saw movement but, unsure his tired eyes weren’t playing tricks on him in the grey light, he waited until one of the others shouted and pointed. There they were. About where the necropolis used to end, dark shapes were moving fast through the early morning mist. The small amorphous groups of mounted scouts, dividing, reuniting, crossing each other’s tracks, reminded Ballista of animals running before a forest fire, until the inappositeness of the image struck him. These animals were not fleeing anything, they were hunting, hunting for a means to attack the northerner himself and all those it was his duty to protect. They were wolves looking for a way into the sheepfold.

  The sun was well clear of the horizon and it was towards the end of the third hour of daylight when the vanguard of the Sassanid army finally came into view. Ballista could make out two long dark columns which seemed, like enormous snakes, to crawl towards him infinitesimally slowly across the face of the land. Above each hung a dense isolated cloud of dust. The base of a third cloud had not yet come into sight. The northerner could make out that the nearer column was composed of cavalry, the further of infantry. He thought back to his training in fieldcraft: this meant that the columns must be within about 1 ,300 paces. But, as he could not yet make out any individuals, they must still be more than 1,000 paces away. If he had not known of their advance toward him, the rays of sunlight flashing perpendicular off spear points and burnished armour would have told him.

  Time passed slowly as the columns continued to crawl towards the city. When they were about 700 paces away (the distance at which a man’s head can be made out as a round ball) they began to incline away to the north. Ballista moved to the parapet and called Bagoas to his side. By the time the columns reached the beginning of the wasteland where the furthest tower tombs had once stood, they were moving parallel to the western wall. The third column was now revealed as the baggage and siege train. The nearest column, the cavalry, was close enough for Ballista to be able to see the lighter-coloured spots of the men’s faces, their costumes and weapons, the bright trappings of their mounts, the banners above their heads: about 500 paces away, just out of artillery range.

  Speaking in Greek, Ballista asked Bagoas if he could identify the units of the Sassanid horde and their leaders.

  ‘Excellent, how very cultured our siege will be. We can begin with our very own View from the Wall.’ Although Acilius Glabrio had interrupted in Latin, he used the Greek word teichoskopia’ for the View from the Wall. To any educated person in the imperium, the word instantly summoned up the famous scene in the Hiad of Homer where Helen looked down from the walls of Troy and identified each of the bronze-armoured Achaeans come to tear her from her lover Paris and take her home to her rightful husband, the broad-shouldered Menelaus. ‘And who better than this delightful Persian boy to play the Queen of Sparta?’ Acilius Glabrio smiled at Ballista. ‘I do hope our Helen does not feel the need to criticize the manliness of her Paris.’

  Bagoas’s grasp of Latin might still be rudimentary, and Ballista had no idea if the boy knew anything of the Iliad, but it was obvious that he realized he was being mocked, that his masculinity was being questioned. The boy’s eyes were furious. Before he could do anything, Mamurra spoke to Acilius Glabrio.

  ‘That is enough, Tribune. This is not a time for dissension. We all know what happened to Troy. May the gods grant that these words of ill omen fall only on the man who utters them.’

  The young nobleman spun around looking dangerous. He brought his well-groomed face inches from that of the praefectus fabrum. Then he mastered himself. Clearly it was beneath one of the Acilii Glabriones to bandy words with sordid plebeians like Mamurra. ‘The men of my family have always had broad shoulders.’ With patrician disdain, he brushed an imaginary piece of dirt from his immaculate sleeve.

  Ballista pointed to the enemy and indicated to Bagoas to start talking.

  ‘First ride some of the non-Aryan people subject to my lord Shapur. See the fur cloaks and long hanging sleeves of the Georgians, then the half-naked Arabs, the turbaned Indians and the wild nomadic Sakas. From all the corners of the world, when the King of Kings calls, they obey.’ The boy shone with pride. ‘And there ... there are the noble Aryan warriors, the warriors of Mazda, the armoured knights, the clibanarii.’

  All the men on the gate tower fell silent as they regarded the serried ranks of the Sassanid heavy cavalry, the elite of Shapur’s army. Five deep, the column seemed to stretch for miles across the plain. As far as could be seen were armoured men on armoured horses. Some looked like living statues, horse and man clad in iron scales, iron masks covering any humanity. The mounts of others were armoured in red leather or green-blue horn. Many wore gaudy surcoats and caparisoned their horses similarly - green, yellow, scarlet and blue. Often man and beast wore abstract heraldic symbols - crescents, circles and bars - which proclaimed their clan. Above their heads their banners writhed and snapped - wolves, serpents, fierce beasts or abstract designs invoking Mazda.

  ‘Can you tell who leads each contingent from their banners?’ Ballista had had this moment in mind when he purchased the Persian youth.

  ‘Of course,’ Bagoas replied. ‘In the van of the clibanarii ride the lords from the houses of Suren and Karen.’

  ‘I thought that those were great noble houses under the previous regime. I assumed they would have fallen with the Parthian dynasty.’

  ‘They came to see the holiness of Mazda.’ Bagoas beamed. ‘The King of Kings Shapur in his infinite kindness restored their lands and titles to them. The path of righteousness is open to all.’

  ‘And the horsemen behind them?’

  ‘Are the truly blessed. They are the children of the house of Sasan - Prince Valash the joy of Shapur, Prince Sasan the hunter, Dinak Queen of Mesene, Ardashir King of Adiabene.’ Pride radiated from the boy. ‘And look ... there, next in the array, the guards. First the Immortals, at their head Peroz of the Long Sword. Then the Jan-avasper, those who sacrifice themselves. And see ... see who leads them - none other than Mariades, the rightful emperor of Rome.’ The boy laughed, careless of the effect his words were h
aving, the punishments they might bring. ‘The path of righteousness is open to all, even to Romans.’

  Out of the swirling dust kicked up by many thousand horses, enormous grey shapes loomed. One, two, three ... Ballista counted ten of them. Bagoas literally jumped for joy, clapping his hands. ‘The earth-shaking elephants of Shapur. Who could think to stand against such beasts?’

  Ballista had seen elephants fight in the arena but had never himself faced them in battle. Certainly they looked terrifying, not altogether of this world. They had to be at least ten foot high at the shoulder, and the turrets on their backs added yet more height. Each turret was packed with armed fighting men. At the bidding of an Indian who sat astride behind their ears, the elephants moved their great heads from side to side. Their huge tusks, sheathed in metal, dipped and swung from side to side.

  ‘Frightening, but inefficient.’ The experience in Turpio’s voice was reassuring. ‘Hamstring them, or madden them with missiles. Kill their drivers, their mahouts, and they will run amok. They are as likely to trample their own side as us.’

  The Sassanid army had halted and turned to face the city. A trumpet rang out, clear across the plain.

  From the left a small group of five unarmed horsemen appeared, moving at an easy canter. In their midst an enormous rectangular banner embroidered in yellow, red and violet and embedded with jewels that flashed as they caught the sunlight hung from a tall crossbar. The banner was topped by a golden ball, and bright strips of material streamed out behind it.

  ‘The Drafsh-i-Kavyan, the royal battle flag of the house of Sasan.’ Bagoas almost whispered. ‘It was made before the dawn of time. Carried by five of the holiest of mobads, priests, it goes before the King of Kings into battle.’

  A lone horseman appeared from the left. He rode a magnificent white horse. His clothes were purple and on his head was a golden domed crown. White and purple streamers floated out behind him.