At long, long last Clemens and Narses clambered up the bank, tugging on their armour. Valens and Iudex were free to go down and bathe.
As he lay in the stream, Valens looked at his naked body. His hands and forearms were tanned a deep mahogany, the rest of him was very white. The journey was changing him. He was thinner, and the muscles in his legs more defined.
When he got up, he decided that they had been in the saddle long enough today. After the dangers and privations of the last few days, he was unsure that the men would go on if he ordered them.
Drying himself, Valens ordered the men to pitch camp for the night.
They left at dawn, and by the afternoon any remaining doubts Valens had entertained about not having left Rome wholly behind were dispelled. A multitude of large black birds wheeled around the summit of a lonely hill to the south. At the apex of the outcrop was the silhouette of a curved building.
‘Ahuramazda be praised,’ Narses said.
With one accord, as if summoned by that deity, they turned their animals away from the stream and up the incline.
The walls shone golden in the sunlight. Twenty or more of the birds sat on the wall like dark sentinels. A ramp ran up to an open gateway at the top of the building. Dismounting at its base, they hobbled the horses. The mules they left standing in a line, the leading reins between them trailing on the ground.
The birds on the wall did not take flight, but watched them without curiosity or alarm as they ascended the walkway. The clean desert air was tainted at the top of the ramp. It was worse in the darkness under the gate. When they got inside, they saw the horror.
They were standing on a sort of viewing platform. The building was round, with a flat roof. A low parapet ran around the edge, and there was a pit in the centre. The corpses were laid out in concentric circles around the pit: the small bodies of children innermost, then women, the men at the outside. There were forty or more, in all stages of decomposition. Some were little more than bones, ready to be shovelled into the pit. Others appeared to have been dead for only a few days.
Valens found himself staring at a nearby corpse. The man was on his back, his legs splayed in a vaguely obscene way. Strips of clothing, just tattered rags, still clung to the putrefying flesh. A vulture was tearing at the meat of his calf. The bird looked up malevolently, as if the intruders might dispute its food.
‘Everywhere, custom is king,’ Valens said.
‘What?’ Clemens said. The question was peremptory, the armourer’s voice tight.
‘A story in Herodotus. A Persian king asked some of his Greek subjects what they would take to expose the bodies of their dead. They refused, and begged him not to even say such a thing. He asked some of his own people if they would bury their dead. The response was the same. The moral is that people everywhere believe their own customs are natural.’
‘I don’t give a fuck about some old Greek.’ Clemens’s jowls were quivering with disgust. ‘No Roman would ever contemplate such a thing. Only savages could treat their own with such inhumanity.’
‘This is a holy place, a tower of silence,’ Narses said.
‘It is revolting,’ Clemens almost shouted. ‘A crime against the gods and men!’
‘It is the will of the Lord of Light, Ahuramazda.’ Narses spoke softly.
‘No god would command such a thing, only an evil daemon!’
‘Careful what you say, it is death to insult Ahuramazda.’ There was a fierce gleam in the eyes of the Persian.
‘Barbarian!’ Clemens spat out the word.
They were facing each other, hands on hilts. Valens knew he should act, but was frozen, captured by the drama, as if at the theatre.
It was Hairan who stepped between the irate men. ‘It is not just the Greeks who preach tolerance. Bardaisan, the wise man of Edessa, collected the customs of many peoples. All Indians, when they die, are burnt with fire, and their wives are burnt alive on the pyre. All Germans who do not fall in battle are strangled by their relatives when they get old. They regard it as a kindness. They have been living for thousands of years according to their own laws. Nothing can alter their customs.’
Clemens stopped glowering at Narses, but muttered under his breath.
‘Look!’ It was Decimus who broke the final strands of anger.
From this high place they could see for miles. Everyone looked where the horse master pointed.
To the east, a river curved through the dun landscape. Its waters flashed silver in the sun. The Tigris – half a day’s ride away.
‘Let us go,’ Valens said.
‘Gladly.’ Clemens stomped off. The rest moved to follow.
‘I will catch you up.’ Iudex was sitting cross-legged. He had a stylus and a pot of ink, and was sketching in a notebook.
Valens looked over his shoulder. The drawings were detailed and precise, catching every nuance of the dead.
Iudex glanced up. ‘I had heard that Orientals putrefy differently to westerners. Of course these are all easterners . . . a missed opportunity.’ He smiled happily. ‘Do not worry, sir. I will not be long.’ He bent back over his work.
Valens hesitated, feeling he should assert his authority, yet reluctant to intervene.
Frowning with concentration, Iudex spoke, probably to himself. ‘The unexamined death, like the unexamined life, is nothing.’
CHAPTER 11
Rome
IT WAS HOT. THE PAVEMENTS and the facades of buildings radiated back the heat of the day. Murena had walked down from the Caelian, through the Forum, and across the Campus Martius. It was not that far, and it was good to get away for a time from the endless reports that his secretary piled on his desk. Murena was fit, but he was out of breath and sweating hard. No wonder that most of the elite left the city in high summer. Those that remained travelled the streets in shaded litters. Murena could have hired a litter, but it would not have suited his purpose. Instead he trudged, red-faced and panting, dressed in nondescript tunic and sandals. Just another of the urban plebs making his weary way through the metropolis.
The Temple of Vulcan was down by the Tiber. It was eight days before the Kalends of September, the Volcanalia, the festival of the lame and ugly blacksmith-god. Vulcan had been married off to Venus, the beautiful goddess of love, much against her inclination. She had wasted no time cuckolding him with Mars, the straight-limbed and virile god of war. Discovering the betrayal, the outraged husband had retired to his forge and hammered out a bronze hunting-net, as thin as gossamer but quite unbreakable. Telling his wife that he would be away, he left the trap suspended above the marital bed. Sure enough, at dawn, Vulcan summoned the other gods to witness the illicit lovers naked and entangled. A man of traditional piety, Murena knew the myth well. It was propitious, he thought, for his task. It was the duty of the frumentarii to uncover the secret and the shameful.
The approach to the sanctuary along the embankment smelt of mud and decay and sewage. The yellow-brown waters of the Tiber were low at this time of year. Wide swathes of the sludge of its bed were exposed – the indescribable filth deposited by a city of a million souls.
Suddenly, Murena had the sense that he was being watched. Stopping to tie the laces on his sandles, he surreptitiously studied those in the street. He recognised no one, and there was nothing suspicious. Certainly none of his frumentarii were present. Since taking up his office, Murena had made a point of memorising the faces of all those under his command in Rome. The sense was nothing but a trick of his imagination.
Murena followed the crowd into the old, gloomy temple. Tradition held it to have been founded by Romulus, at what was then a remote place outside the city, so that he could consult the senate in privacy. That seclusion had been the downfall of Romulus – it was here that he had been murdered. After the deed, the senators dismembered his corpse, and each carried away a piece hidden in the folds of his toga. Nothing remained, not even a shred of clothing. They gave out to the plebs that he had been snatched away to the heavens.<
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The senators remained as treacherous today. Given the opportunity, many of them would still turn on their ruler, hack him into bloody hunks of meat. That was why Murena was in this ancient sanctuary. The target was easy to spot: tall, clad in a snowy toga, a broad purple stripe on his tunic, standing in the space reserved for the Honestiores, the honest men of wealth and position. This senator would be denied the chance to strike down the Emperor.
‘He came here alone.’ The unseen speaker whispered in Murena’s ear. ‘In a litter, he did not stop, talked to no one.’
Murena gave no sign that he had been spoken to. He had been expecting the approach, and he did not look around. The frumentarius would have melted back into the crowd.
It had started with an impecunious magician. In a backstreet bar down in the Subura, the down-at-heel charlatan had bragged that he could predict the future. Nothing was hidden from him. His art had divined the nature and time of the death of the Emperor. The drunken boast had been his undoing – the man to whom he spoke was a frumentarius. To meddle in such forbidden things carried the death penalty. After his arrest, in a forlorn attempt to avert his fate, the sorcerer claimed that he knew of a conspiracy against the life of the Emperor. The desperate ploy was unwise. All it had brought was the attentions of the torturers. In a cell in the Camp of the Strangers, under the pincers and the claws, through his agony the magician had gasped out that he had been hired by a senator to discover what would kill the Emperor. The revelation, as so often, was enigmatic, poetically vague: On the Ausonian plains, the sons of Ares, men inured to violence, will ring him around. He will be smitten by gleaming steel, betrayed by companions. The wizard had named the inquisitive senator as Marcus Acilius Glabrio. The unholy rites he had commissioned to reveal what the gods ordained for the Emperor had been conducted in the dead of night in a secluded corner of the Gardens of Lucullus.
The circumstantial details were accurate. The gardens were owned by the family of Acilius Glabrio. They were deserted after dark. Even so, the sorcerer’s confession had been given little credence. Men on the rack always tried to implicate someone. The frumentarii heard the like all the time. Nothing had been done, except open a file, and place a spy in the household of Acilius Glabrio. The magician had been burnt alive in the arena, his tongue prudently removed to prevent him saying anything unseemly.
In retrospect, the execution had been a mistake. Subsequently, the informant in Glabrio’s household had reported that at a dinner party, during the serious drinking after the food, thinking himself secure in his own home, safe among his own kind, the senator had made treasonous criticisms of the Emperor. Glabrio had mocked Gallienus Augustus as an effeminate and a coward and a fool. No wonder the empire tottered when the throne was occupied by a spendthrift who squandered money needed for the army on lavish buildings to flatter his vanity: a luxurious portico along the Flaminian Way; a statue larger than the Colossus on the Esquiline; Platonopolis, a whole city of philosophers in the Apennines. Was there no end to his profligacy? By all the gods, the majesty of Rome was dragged through the dirt by a degenerate who drank himself into insensibility, dressed as a woman, and was a slave to his lust for a barbarian mistress. Know a ruler by his companions. Gallienus surrounded himself with pimps and prostitutes, Greek philosophers and Syrian dancers. Reviling the Senate, the nobility of Rome, Gallienus gave high office and military commands to common soldiers, men who had started life as peasants or goatherds.
These might have been nothing but inebriated words, and no actual threats had been uttered, but then Acilius Glabrio changed the routine of a lifetime. This summer he had not retired to his villa on the Bay of Naples, but had remained in the swelter of Rome. A man who previously had paid no more than lip service to the demands of traditional religion, now, under the scorching August sun, had taken to traversing the city to attend obscure festivals in out-of-the-way shrines. Either the senator was seeking divine approval for some desperate act, or the ceremonies were a cover for clandestine meetings. Murena had decided it was time he saw for himself.
‘Vulcan, God of Fire, hear our prayers.’ The sacrifice was about to begin.
The priest held a fish caught in the Tiber. It twisted and gasped in his hands.
‘Mulciber, Quietus . . .’ The titles of the deity were intoned.
The priest threw the fish alive into the fire. Its silver scales hissed and blackened.
Murena continued to watch Acilius Glabrio, but his thoughts roamed. It was a skill he had learnt early as a frumentarius. Nothing must be missed, but if you gave all your attention to the object of your surveillance you drew attention to yourself.
The priest took another fish.
The strange sacrifice made sense to Murena. By offering things usually safe from Vulcan, it might induce the god of conflagrations to spare things that would burn only too easily in the hot season. Rome was largely built of wood, and the fear of fire was a terrible reality.
The next fish was added to the flames. The stench of the river was overlaid with an agreeable kitchen-like smell.
So far, Acilius Glabrio had made no contact. Perhaps, for whatever reason, the senator was communing with the god. Yet, Murena reflected, the time is ripe for treason.
The news from the north was not good. The public despatches spoke of victories, strategic gains, and a prudent early withdrawal into winter quarters. The private letter from Volusianus told a different story. The Praetorian Prefect urged Murena to added vigilance. The campaign in Gaul had failed. Besieging the rebel Postumus in the city of Autun, Gallienus had been wounded by an arrow. The imperial field army had fallen back across the Alps. The Emperor was in Milan. It was thought he would live. Yet there was no certainty, and Gallienus was incapacitated.
The unsuccessful expedition had given Acilius Glabrio another, very personal grievance. A cavalry column led by the general Ballista had not returned from Gaul. It was thought to have been destroyed or captured by the rebels. Among its number was a cousin of the senator.
More fish were being immolated on the altar. Such a thing would be unimaginable in Murena’s home province. Across Syria, fish were widely considered sacred. Many of the great temples had elaborate marble ponds in which swam carp and other prized fish. They lived long lives, were cared for and fed; sometimes they wore jewels like earrings. Killing them was sacrilege. Mankind found innumerable ways to worship the gods. It was no part of the brief of a frumentarius to judge the religious beliefs of others. Unless, of course, they were devotees of a proscribed cult, like the Christians.
Acilius Glabrio still stood alone.
The thoughts of Murena continued to dwell on the east. The abortive campaign into Gaul, and the injury to the Emperor, made it ever more necessary that the mission to the Castle of Silence fail. Prince Sasan must remain a Persian prisoner. Events in the west left Rome even more unready for war with the Sassanids. No excuse to invade could be offered to Shapur.
Murena wondered where the caravan had reached. Had it crossed Mesopotamia yet? Was it in Persia? There was no way of telling. Severus was a resourceful commander. Yet, if the traitor had carried out his orders, Severus would be dead, and Valens would have assumed command. Valens was young and inexperienced. The soft and pampered youth owed his commission in the Horse Guards to patronage untouched by merit. And Valens was a heavy drinker. When his parents had been killed he had fallen into maudlin lethargy and drunken self-pity. Murena had appointed Valens to fail. If the gods were kind, Valens, guided by the malign hand of the traitor, would have led his men to disaster, and their bones would already be whitening in some distant desert.
The ceremony was drawing to a close. Acilius Glabrio turned to leave.
Murena slipped out unobtrusively. The reek of the river again assailed his nostrils. He watched the senator stride through the blistering sunshine to where his litter waited. The very way he walked conveyed an air of entitlement. Acilius Glabrio did not pause, and he talked to no one suspicious or otherwise.
CHAPTER 12
Adiabene
THEY RODE DOWN TO THE TIGRIS. The river curled, sinuous and expansive, across a flat and dusty land. Yet the vegetation and fields along its banks were almost shocking in their vibrant green after the long journey through the high plains.
There was no bridge, but the river was broad and shallow. A rough path led them to a ford. There was a small mudbrick settlement on the far side. The sprays of water glittered like diamonds as they splashed across.
A crowd had gathered, as if summoned by the clanking of the bell on the mare that led the mules. The inhabitants stared silently at the apparition of the travel-stained riders.
Valens raised his hand to halt the column.
The throng parted, and an official stepped forward. Portly, smooth cheeked, full of self-importance, the man was obviously a eunuch. He spoke in Persian.
‘A customs officer,’ Hairan said.
Even in this fly-blown, out-of-the-way place, taxes had to be paid.
Valens waved Narses forward to deal with the eunuch.
‘Who are you who wish to enter the domain of the Mazda-beloved Shapur, King of Kings?’ Hairan translated in an undertone for Valens.
‘All the Earth is mine, and I have a right to go over it and through it,’ Narses replied.
Valens whispered to Hairan. ‘Why is he antagonising the eunuch?’
‘What else would you expect from a Persian? Arrogance and cruelty are in their blood. Narses comes from the noble clan of the Suren.’ Hairan smiled. ‘Although perhaps it is necessary in this case. Show weakness to a eunuch, and he will rob you blind.’
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