“After Arausio, even? He caused all those men…he caused your brother to die,” Lucius said, but I could see that he was beginning to waver.
“I’d like nothing more than to see him eaten by worms. But Quintus Caepio was a consul of Rome, not some ruffian to be eliminated in the night,” I said, shaking my head.
“I have no knowledge of the man or the events that you speak of,” Apollonius said quietly, carefully selecting each of his words as he placed a forefinger to his lips, “but the death of one more man will not bring any of them back.”
“Perhaps you are right.” Lucius exhaled. “Doesn’t feel like justice for Maximus.”
“Justice will be served, Lucius. The gods will serve justice.”
For the first time, I saw doubt in Lucius’ eyes. “Do you really still believe that?” he asked.
We all glanced at the entrance as several other tribunes entered, laughing among themselves.
“Do what you must,” Lucius said before turning to leave. I never questioned whether he would be discreet. I knew that, although he adored and worshipped Marius, he was my friend. And that mattered more than anything.
“Bring me a scroll, Apollonius,” I said.
I began to write a letter. I addressed it to the former consul, Quintus Caepio. I told him in plain words that he was going to be killed if he remained in Rome. That he would be killed in the night before he even made it to court for his pending trial. He would not be allowed to give his false testimony and restore his honor. He would die, and perhaps his family alongside him. I reminded him that I wished to see him dead, but that honor bade me to warn him. I told him that he must leave Rome immediately, and never return. If he chose his pride, if he chose to save face, he would certainly lose his life. I asked him, finally, to do this for his wife and son. Although he deserved this fate for the catastrophe at Arausio, they did not.
I sealed the letter with hot wax and the stamp of my father’s signet ring. I might have been crucified if the letter was found, but I knew honor demanded it. Maybe I was just soft or stupid, or maybe I had some hope left, after all. It was becoming difficult to tell. Arausio had blurred the lines.
11
Scroll XI
Ides of February 651 ab urbe condita
The worst part about being on campaign was when you ran out of friends to talk to, wine to drink, or tasks to attend to. The Cimbri were terrifying in their way, but nothing was more disturbing than silence.
Each day I continued to visit the prisoner for linguistic training, and I sparred with Lucius when I could. But inevitably there were times when everyone else was preoccupied with various tasks, and mine were completed.
I tried to make myself useful and busy in any way I could. I was tasked with overseeing the training of the new recruits in the Seventh Legion, and I found myself approaching the mules during their leisure and asking for a weapons check or gear inspection. As soon as everything was accounted for, I would be on my way, looking for something else with which I could bide my time. I had always resented officers doing this sort of useless assessing, but remaining still no longer felt natural.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stave off silence entirely. Going to bed was the worst. The visions that visited me in my sleep were excruciating enough, but the worst part was the tossing, turning, sweating. In those dark moments, I thought most often of Arrea. Did she miss me the way I missed her? Did she reach out to find me in bed beside her, as I searched for her? Did she long for my touch? Did she feel empty and listless and confused without hearing my voice?
I never knew the answers. Perhaps she had replaced me with a friendly neighbor in Nursia. She had every right to do so; after all, I had been married to another. But it was Arrea that I loved. Not my “wife,” as the prophetess had incorrectly suggested.
Life in the Colors was fulfilling, most of the time. The camaraderie was deep and meaningful, more so than anything I’ve experienced in civilian life or politics. But the affection of a lover is different as well. Whether I was brave or cowardly, strong or weak, competent or foolish…regardless of my conduct or my performance, Arrea would still love me. Life was much colder without her, even without the winter winds of the north.
And the thought of her with another man sent me spiraling. The feeling crept up, swept around, and seeped into my head. My stomach swirled until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I did all that I could to remove her from my mind.
And I was relieved when Arrea would leave my thoughts for a while, but my mind would generally drift to darker things in her absence. War. I thought of war and all that came with it.
When the silence crept in, and I tried to close my eye at night, I swear on the Black Stone, I could hear it. The pitiful screams of the wounded and the dying. The clash of iron that refused to stop no matter how much you begged, and begged, and begged. Not a moment to collect your thoughts, to recollect your training.
Then I could feel it, even as I lay underneath my linen sheets. The earth trembling, hundreds of thousands marching to claim my life, the very soil beneath my feet crying out against the injustice. I could feel the blood of a foe splattered across my face like an errant sneeze, feel the last breath leave the lungs of someone I had called a brother. My feet were tangled in a web of viscera belonging to the butchered soldiers beneath me.
I could taste the salt of tears and the snot that pours freely as you cry holding a friend in mutual grieving. The mist of blood that, once it touches the tongue, does not go away no matter how much you scrub, and wash, and clean.
I could smell the battlefield. Putrid trash mixed with rancid meat and a whore’s perfume; that’s what the dead smell like. Feces, blood, burned flesh, and decay. The stench is so powerful, it clings to every hair in your nostrils and doesn’t go away entirely for weeks. Perhaps it still hasn’t. I don’t remember what the world smelled like before death.
Then I could see it, as clear as day before me, the battlefield stretched out for miles every time I closed my eye. I could see what I, myself, had wrought. The things that had previously belonged to the world, to the living, which I stole and destroyed. Analyzing the dead, it was as if every slain enemy were a man I personally killed, every fallen comrade a man I was responsible for.
And so I experienced that profound sense of guilt that only a soldier knows, each and every night when laid down and when I ran out of pointless chores to distract myself with.
Often times, I would get up in the middle of the night and dress myself, and move to the slave quarters, where I would wake Apollonius. One time in particular, on the ides of February, I believe, he shot up like a dozing mule on guard duty.
“Yes? What’s wrong?” he asked, his eyes wide and shining with fear.
“Will you have a little wine with me?”
“Eh, what time is it?” He looked around with sleepy eyes, straining to see if the sun had peaked out of the darkness yet.
“Third hour. I can’t sleep,” I replied. The slaves around us shuffled in rebellion against the disruption, but Apollonius nodded dutifully and followed me.
I grabbed a jug of wine and a cup or two, and proceeded out into the freezing, still air.
Apollonius hadn’t spent a day outside of Greece in the first fifty years of his life, and was unused to the cold. He had the snivels constantly.
“Here.” I extended to him the warmest cloak I was issued. When he refused, as he always did, I insisted, “No, take it. I was raised in the cold. It’s what suits me. And I need you at full strength.” Eventually, he accepted, and, as always, he was much more cheerful once wrapped in something warm.
He followed me through the maze of tents where mules slept that I was far more accustomed to than the tribunes’ quarters. We walked up the guard tower to the sentry post, where the mules posted there stirred to attention.
“At ease. How goes your shift?”
“Frightfully cold, sir. And we’re awfully tired,” one answered.
“Nothing stirring
, and no problems, sir,” the more senior of the two responded, shaking his head at the other for such a response.
“Go on to bed, then, soldiers,” I said. They looked at me, and then back and forth to one another. Their eyes shined with excitement at the idea of gaining a bit of sleep, but they seemed reluctant, as if it were a test.
“Sir, we can’t allow that. We must stay by our post.”
“You just received an order from a military tribune of the Roman Republic,” I said, and they scurried off, pausing only to salute. “Have a seat.” I gestured to Apollonius.
He clutched the cloak around him and shivered as he sat. “Winter quarters wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t have to be winter,” he said with a smile. I nodded but didn’t reply. “You seem troubled, Quintus.” I did not hear him at first, pleased only that he called me by my name. I poured us both some wine and sat beside him.
“I am. And I cannot sleep.”
“Perhaps you can tell me what’s caused this insomnia?” he said, considering his words carefully.
“Let us speak in Greek,” I said. Latin may have been my native tongue, but I preferred Greek regardless. The language flourishes in such a way that allows the speaker to illuminate himself more accurately. “I am troubled by many things, Apollonius of Athens.”
“Such as?” He spoke more freely now.
“War. Being away from my home. Away from the woman I love. Remembering the men who have died in my care.” I finished my cup and refilled it quickly.
“The only men who praise war are those who have never experienced it,” he said.
“Those who have never heard the screams of the dying, smelled the rotting corpses, tasted the blood, heard the clash of iron, seen the limp and bloated bodies,” I said, looking away from him.
“Yes,” he said, no further words of wisdom at the ready.
I turned to him for the first time. “I do not know if I can do it anymore, Apollonius.”
Then he spoke in a strange manner. “Praise be to the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
“Who said that? I’ve not heard him.” I thought he spoke of a philosopher. My learned slave knew much more about the wise thinkers than I.
“It is from the Tanach, a Hebrew text. I’ve translated it many times,” he said.
“Ah”—I nodded—“words about your one god, then?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And you think he will fight for me?” I finished my cup of wine.
Apollonius stood and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“You are a good man, Quintus. I believe that he will protect you. And I will pray that it be so.”
“But I am not worried about dying,” I replied.
“What do you fear, then?”
“It’s hard to articulate. Especially in Greek,” I said with a smile, which he mirrored.
We talked for several more hours, until the light crept up over the Gallic pines. I sent away each guard shift team that arrived. I drank so much wine I can’t recall the remainder of the conversation. Drink was all that could calm my ambling mind at that time.
Apollonius comforted me with the words of philosophers and his Hebrew scriptures. I listened intently, but I wasn’t then ready to accept them.
“I believe it’s time for you to reconvene at the consul’s tent, correct?” Apollonius asked as the sun had fully appeared and I had begun to sober up.
“You are right. A long day is ahead of me,” I said with a hopeless chuckle. “I won’t be requiring your services for the rest of the day, Apollonius. So go and make up for the sleep I have cost you,” I said, patting him on the shoulder and handing him the empty jug of wine for him to return to the slave quarters.
“If you have need of me, please…wake me,” he said.
“You’ve already rendered the only service I needed right now. Go on.” I gestured toward the barracks.
As the next watch arrived, I stepped down from the tower and onto Marius’s praetorium, more dehydrated and dilapidated now than tired.
The general was outside the tent when I arrived, shirtless and on the ground, exercising.
“Forty-one, forty-two,” Equus counted beside him, still sweating from the push-ups he had recently completed. Each time the general seemed like he might have nothing left, he pushed out three or four more repetitions.
Once the number was too high to keep track of, Marius bounced to his toes. He wiped the sweat from his head, appearing normal in every other way. Not many men his age could have thrived under such effort, but he did. He had been in pain since the death of Maximus, but he had refocused his mind on the task at hand.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” I asked, at attention.
“I did, but not like this. You look like you barely slept.” Marius stepped within a few inches from my face and analyzed me.
“Barely, sir.”
“You wreak of wine.”
“I drank my fill last night, but I’m sober and ready for orders now, Consul.”
He deliberated a moment before responding. “We all have nights like that.” He stepped away from me, to my relief. He grabbed a towel and dried his flesh. “I wanted to let you know what’s coming.” He waved for me to follow him into the praetorium.
“Thank you for your trust in me, sir,” I said as he leaned against the desk.
“You need to know because, as soon as we attack, you’ll need to leave quickly on your mission,” he said, the defined muscles of his hairy chest still rising and falling from the exertion.
“Attack, sir?” I asked, still a bit groggy.
“Yes. That’s right.” He turned and gestured to a map on the desk behind him. “We’re going to obliterate those Tectosage bastards. The annals of history will forget they ever existed,” Marius said, lifting his head high. Now that he had sent out orders for Quintus Caepio to be killed, he was content. He wanted all our enemies in Gaul to feel his wrath.
“The Tectosages, sir?”
“The Tectosages. You reported that they were the insurgents in Massilia, correct?” he replied, irritated at my surprise.
“Yes, but they could have been rebels. We have no intelligence that the entire tribe is against us.”
He shrugged. “I don’t really care, to be honest. If those fools ended up making it to the Massilia courts, and poured honey in their ears, this will force the Massiliots’ hand. They will either be for us, or against us. They’ve been an ally of Rome for generations, and it is their allegiance I’m most concerned about.”
“Understood, sir,” I replied. His logic was sound, but the thought of battle brought back all the nightmares I had tried in vain to forget.
“You will lead our left wing of cavalry. You and Tribune Hirtulius,” he said, accepting some water from Volsenio.
“Lead the left?” I said, finally unable to hide my exasperation. I had been a lowly mule a few years before, and now the consul wanted me to lead an entire flank?
“The cavalry, yes. A few thousand head of horse, no more. Sulla will take the right. And we will slaughter them, no doubt,” he said, taking his water gratefully, his heavy breathing finally slowing.
“Understood, sir.”
“Dismissed.” He saluted and turned before I could do the same. I departed, suddenly wishing I still had Apollonius to talk with.
12
Scroll XII
Five days before the kalends of March 651 ab urbe condita
When word arrived of our marching against them, the Tectosages sallied forth to meet us. They had no hope of victory that I could tell, as their Cimbri and Teutone allies were on the far side of the Alps, but we were there before them. They could not wait. And so they arrayed themselves atop a hill before their villages in the valley.
I led from the front of the left wing, Lucius alongside me.
“How is she doing?” Lucius gestured to the horse beneath me.
“Sura’s much calmer than I am,” I said, directing my gaze to
the chanting enemy in the distance.
“We’ll be fine. I’ve sacrificed twenty-one pigeons this morning.”
“Is that the correct number?” I said, jesting. Lucius was always precise about such sacrificial measures.
“It is, according to the camp priests,” he said, but he held out his left palm, which was wrapped in a cloth soaked with scarlet, “but I spent some of my own blood as an added measure.”
The Tectosage war chief stood at the front of his forces, his back to us. I could not understand the Gallic that traveled over the bitter morning winds to greet us, but there was fire and venom in the chieftain’s words. His warriors chanted a response each time he paused.
The centurions of the center blew their whistles, and our forces snapped to a halt. I wheeled Sura around to look at our horseman. There were 2,189 in number, if my records are correct. Thanks to Apollonius’s diligent note-taking and record keeping, I’m certain they are.
“Who has fought in a battle before?” I asked. A few hands shot up. I strained my eye to count them. The number was few. “Let me ask a different way. How many of you have never seen battle before?”
They fidgeted, embarrassed, until a few brave horsemen raised their hands, followed by most of the rest.
Lucius and I exchanged a glance.
“That’s alright. You have prepared for this moment. You must forget now all you have expected of warfare. You have only two tasks: to kill or maim the enemy in front of you, and to protect the man beside you. We require nothing more. And not a man among us shall die this day. Tribune Hirtuleius here has ensured that by the sacrifice of twenty-one pigeons.”
The men chuckled nervously, as did Lucius. It was important to laugh before battle. It reminded a man who he really is. Centurion Scrofa once taught me that.
I forced a smile, but knowing what lay ahead, I couldn’t bring myself to laugh with the rest.
The Noise of War Page 12
