The Lost Ten

by Harry Sidebottom

  The older one smiled. ‘The taxes are lower here.’

  ‘Your new religion has taken your courage,’ the younger man snapped.

  ‘Mind what you say, boy.’ The older man exhaled noisily. ‘But yes, I have come to see the light.’

  ‘The light?’ Valens asked.

  ‘No harm here in bearing witness to my faith. It will not bring the pincers and the claws, will not see me burnt or mauled in the arena, as it would at home. For all the Persian priests talk of kindling sacred fires in conquered temples, Shapur tolerates all creeds. Jews, Manicheans, followers of the Olympian gods, all can practice their own rites. No harm in admitting that I have become a Christian.’

  Valens and Aulus leant back, as if proximity might bring contagion.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Southern Shores of the Caspian Sea

  ‘THE SEA! THE SEA!’

  There, spread out below them, was the Caspian. Its waters glittered in the sunshine of the autumn afternoon. They extended further than the eye could see.

  The men laughed and yelled and hugged each other. Thalassa! Thalassa! They capered like children, and shouted like the ten thousand of Xenophon at the end of their long march out of Persia.

  It was an achievement to have come so far, yet Valens thought the exuberance misplaced. Xenophon’s men had escaped the lands of the Persian king. The ten thousand had reached the Black Sea. Its shores were studded with Greek cities. From any of them a man could take a boat, and sail back to Byzantium in a matter of days. Nowadays there were Roman garrisons around much of its coasts. The Caspian was an altogether different sea. It offered no succour and no passage back to civilisation. In the old days it had been believed to be a gulf opening off the northern ocean, and there was a story that an underground waterway linked the Caspian to Lake Maeotis, and thus to the Black Sea. They were no more than travellers’ tales. Even had they been true, neither would have provided an easy voyage home. The men with Valens had not escaped. They were deeper in enemy territory than ever, and their main dangers still lay ahead.

  ‘Mount up.’ Valens thought they should get down to the shore and find a campsite before dusk.

  They rode down in a mood of easy congeniality.

  ‘Did you know,’ Clemens said, ‘there are islands out there full of gold? It is only the indolence of the Persians that leaves them unmined.’

  Behind his big, square beard, Narses pulled a face. ‘Nothing but an avaricious fantasy typical of a Roman,’ he said. ‘You forget that I went to the south-east coast when I was stationed in Hyrkania. The islands are poor, and their inhabitants primitive. In the summer they live off roots, and in the winter dried fruit. They do not even drink wine. At their feasts they light a bonfire, sit around it, and throw hemp on the flames. They sniff the smoke and become intoxicated. Eventually they stand up and dance, and burst into song.’

  ‘I heard it was full of huge serpents, and strange-coloured fish,’ Clemens said.

  ‘It depends what colour you expect of a fish,’ Narses said. ‘Mind you, the serpents do grow to a prodigious length.’

  ‘It is the women that interest me,’ Hairan called back over his shoulder. ‘Apparently they copulate out in the open, let anyone have a go.’

  ‘I think that is somewhere else,’ Valens said, ‘perhaps some tribes in Armenia.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Hairan, not disheartened, ‘was it not here that the Queen of the Amazons entertained Alexander for thirteen nights and days? That man had staying power.’

  ‘Not in the more reliable sources,’ Valens said.

  ‘There are bound to be some women.’ Hairan was not to be deflected.

  ‘You should write a book,’ Clemens said. ‘The sexual mores of all the peoples of the world.’

  ‘A fine idea,’ Hairan said. ‘It would take much dedicated practical research.’

  They had become so used to Lucia that her presence did nothing to inhibit their talk.

  They camped on the beach, and built a fire of driftwood. Having carefully scanned the water to be sure that it was free of the rumoured serpents, the men stripped and swam naked in the sea. Narses volunteered to stand first watch. Like every Persian, he had a prim aversion to public nudity, both his own and that of others. He kept his gaze fixed inland. As the soldiers splashed about, roaring from the cold water, Lucia sat on the beach, tending the fire. If she was offended by the sight, she gave no sign. As with their conversation, the men paid her no more heed than they would a bath attendant or a statue.

  With their bows, Aulus and Narses had each shot a brace of duck on the way down. After their swim, when the men were dry and clothed, and safe from any real or imagined water snakes, they plucked and gutted the birds. Valens went to skewer one on his sword, but Decimus produced proper iron spits.

  ‘Use your blade to cook, and the fire will ruin it, make the steel brittle,’ Decimus said. ‘Isn’t that right, Clemens?’

  The armourer grunted an affirmative.

  ‘If your sword breaks in combat,’ Decimus added, ‘you are totally fucked.’

  Clemens looked vaguely put out, perhaps at the pronouncement of the horse master on his own area of expertise.

  Soon the aroma of cooking meat wafted around the little camp. The duck would make an enticing change from the endless meals of bacon, and would help preserve their rations. Valens was hungry. The dripping fat sizzling in the flames increased his appetite.

  Hairan had relieved Narses on sentry. He called that there was someone coming from the west, alone and on foot, seemingly unarmed.

  His weapons to hand, Valens could not be bothered to get up. The others shared his disinclination.

  The figure appeared, staggering down the beach with exhaustion. But his head was up, and his eyes fixed on them like those of a doomed man gazing at salvation. It was the young man from the bar in the settlement by the bridge. He came to a stop a few paces off.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Valens said.

  The fugitive’s chest was heaving, and he swayed where he stood.

  ‘Sit down by the fire, before you collapse.’

  The youth did as he was told.

  ‘Someone give him a drink.’

  He took a gulp and choked. Once he had dragged some air into his lungs, he tipped the wineskin up again. This time his throat worked furiously as he swallowed.

  ‘Does your uncle know you are here?’ Valens asked.

  The young man stopped drinking, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘The officer asked you a question,’ Clemens said.

  ‘No, I slipped away.’

  ‘Why have you followed us?’ Valens asked, although he thought he knew the answer.

  ‘We do not all think like my uncle. With his native wife, and his new religion, things are different for him. The Christians always talk about turning the other cheek, enduring suffering in silence.’ The words tumbled out of him in a stream.

  ‘What is that to do with us?’ Valens interrupted. This was heading in an even worse direction than he had feared.

  The youth looked at him, as if baffled by the slowness of his comprehension. ‘There are over a hundred Roman prisoners working on the bridge. All of them soldiers. The majority would give anything to return home. There are only twenty guards. We have no weapons, but we have our tools and knives. In the night, we could overpower them with ease. You could lead us back to the empire.’

  ‘We are here to trade, not fight,’ Valens said. ‘We are a merchant caravan.’

  ‘My uncle said you were soldiers. The two with you in the bar have military tattoos on their arms. He saw them under their sleeves, when they were drinking. And that one,’ he pointed at Clemens, ‘just called you an officer.’

  ‘It is nothing but a courtesy. I am a trader, these are my guards. Some may be veterans, but what they did previously in life is not my business, and no concern of yours.’

  The youth waved a hand in dismissal. ‘My uncle said he recognised your sor
t. He would swear that you were spies, would put money on you being frumentarii.’

  So much for our disguise, Valens thought. Still, an ex-centurion, after a lifetime in the army, would have sharper insight than any local.

  ‘Christians are forbidden to gamble,’ Iudex said. ‘They hold it a sin.’

  The youth looked at him, as if he had said something incomprehensible.

  ‘It does not matter what we are.’ Valens had to put a stop to this. ‘The thing is impossible. The road is too long and hard. There are the mountains of Matiene and the deserts of Arbayestan. You have no horses. Every Persian warrior in the realm would be hunting you. None of you would reach Mesopotamia.’

  ‘We would be happy to die in the attempt.’

  ‘It would not only be you that would be dying,’ Aulus said. ‘There is us to consider.’

  The young prisoner looked crushed. Then a spark of renewed hope gleamed on his face. ‘Then take me with you.’

  ‘No,’ Valens said. This was what he had feared.

  ‘It is a terrible thing to be an exile,’ Clemens said.

  ‘Listen to him,’ the boy said. ‘Please listen to what he says.’

  ‘He is not coming with us,’ Valens said. ‘The Persians will hunt him down, and us with him.’

  ‘Not for days.’ The boy tripped over his words in his eagerness. ‘They will not start to search for me for days. As an engineer, my uncle has more freedom than most. If my absence has been noted, he will tell the Persians that he has sent me on some errand. It will be alright.’

  ‘Then it will be safe for you to return to him tomorrow,’ Valens said.

  ‘Please do not send me back.’ The youth was close to crying. ‘You do not know what it is like to live as a slave in an alien land, to have no freedom.’

  ‘What you take for freedom is nothing but a legal fiction.’ Iudex was measuring his words, as if ladling something weighty. ‘True freedom lies in the soul. Stone walls and iron bars do not make a prison. Mere externals cannot touch the true nature of a man. The lowest captive, although he is whipped and branded, is cruelly beaten and degraded, providing he has a noble and virtuous soul, is as free as any man.’

  ‘Easy to say when you are not a prisoner.’ Anger was fast overcoming self-pity. ‘How many philosophers are slaves?’

  ‘Epictetus was a slave,’ Iudex said. ‘He knew of what he spoke.’

  ‘Enough,’ Valens said. ‘It is time to eat. You can stay here tonight, then in the morning you will go back.’

  *

  Valens had taken the last but one watch. The sky was getting light when the sounds of men and horses shifting about, and the smell of cooking, made him reluctantly wake after an all too brief sleep.

  He stretched, then turned and lay on his back. His shoulders and hips ached from the hard compacted sand. Last night he had scooped out hollows for each, but it was no substitute for a mattress or a soft bed. The serpents had been on his mind – he had a particular loathing of snakes – and he had placed his bedroll well up the beach from the fire. Now, lying there, gradually surfacing from slumber, fragments of dreams slipped from his grasp like smoke.

  In Hades, Odysseus had reached to embrace his father. The insubstantial shade of the old man had slid through his arms. Valens knew that he had dreamt of his parents, but the memory moved tantalisingly and irrecoverably out of reach.

  He threw off his blanket and sat up. One at a time he turned his boots upside down, and beat them on the ground to dislodge any scorpions that might have crept in for shelter during the night. His boots on, he clambered stiffly to his feet.

  Walking a little away from the camp, he fumbled with his trousers, then relieved himself. Idly he directed the stream of urine into a hole under a bush. Then he remembered the snakes, and pissed elsewhere.

  Walking back, he retrieved his sword belt and buckled it tight. Everyone except Clemens, with whom he had shared the watch, was already up, and the endlessly repeated routine of the morning was under way.

  ‘Where is the boy?’ Valens asked.

  ‘Gone,’ Iudex said.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘He left before first light.’

  Valens felt a rising dread hollowing out his stomach and chest. ‘Have you harmed him, without my orders?’

  Aulus stopped grooming his horse. ‘Far from it.’ There was a sardonic smile on his ugly, drooping old face. ‘We had a talk to him, while you were asleep, and we gave him one of the spare horses.’

  ‘What is going on?’ Valens had thought that the journey had made things better between him and the men. But this ignoring of his authority was as bad as ever.

  ‘Of course we would have killed him,’ Iudex said. ‘In our line of work a certain heartlessness is often necessary. You have not been with us long enough yet to become acclimatised to the required brutality. But in this case it was the wrong option.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We advised him to leave before you woke.’ The cherubic features of Iudex, so oddly set in his huge bald head, beamed amiably. ‘You are a man of great cruelty. We told him that you intended to do away with him in the morning, and throw his body in the sea for the fishes. After that he needed no further persuasion to return.’

  ‘But I had no such intention!’

  ‘Otherwise he would not have gone back,’ Iudex said.

  ‘It is like this,’ Aulus said. ‘The boy’s uncle is no fool. He will have guessed where the lad had gone. But, if his nephew returns unharmed, there is a chance that he will not inform his Persian masters of his suspicions about the nature of our mission.’

  ‘Although,’ Iudex said, ‘there is no guarantee that he will not set the Persians on our trail.’

  CHAPTER 23

  Rome

  IT WAS DARK IN THE CELL.

  The man hung from a hook in the ceiling. He was naked. His feet did not touch the floor, and the heavy weight suspended from one ankle increased his suffering.

  ‘Tell me again the message Acilius Glabrio gave you to take to the pretender across the Alps,’ Volusianus said.

  There was a pool of blood and urine under the dangling feet.

  The terrible pressure on his chest made it hard for the man to speak.

  Volusianus dragged the claws down the prisoner’s thigh. The skin peeled away, exposing the flesh like that of an overripe fruit.

  As the fresh blood ran, the man gasped out a line of poetry. ‘Save me, unconquered hero, from evil.’

  ‘Eripe me his, invicte, malis,’ the Praetorian Prefect repeated. ‘Virgil, the words of the shade of Palinurus to Aeneas on the banks of the Styx.’

  Murena admired the thoroughness of Volusianus. The Praetorian Prefect had sent away the torturers, and was conducting the investigation himself.

  ‘And the reply Postumus sent back?’

  ‘Please, I have told you all this. I am just a messenger.’

  Volusianus raised the claw, and the prisoner desperately tried to twist away. The swaying motion this caused was enough to escalate his pain, so Volusianus lowered the claw again and waited.

  When the prisoner’s body had ceased its agonising pendulum, the man spoke again. ‘I will not cross to those shores. Cease to hope that fate, once spoken by the gods, can be altered by prayer.’ His voice, little more than a harsh whisper, sank to nothing.

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘You, set forth on your path, pull the blade from its scabbard.’

  ‘There was nothing else?’

  ‘No, by all the gods. Please, I don’t know what any of it means.’

  Volusianus went to put down the claws, careful not to step in any of the foul liquids on the floor. ‘You should read poetry. It is improving, good for the soul.’

  ‘Please, cut me down.’

  Volusianus ignored him, washed his hands, and turned to Murena. ‘Two separate passages, also from the descent to the underworld, both these are spoken by the Sibyl. The first has been altered to suit the circu
mstances.’

  Murena’s respect for the Praetorian Prefect grew. Volusianus might have started life as a peasant, but he knew his Virgil.

  ‘It is odd,’ Volusianus said, ‘how some senators seem to believe that epic poetry is a code known only to themselves. But this all seems clear enough.’

  It did not to Murena, but he kept quiet.

  ‘Eripe me . . . Acilius Glabrio sent an invitation to Postumus, pledging his support if the rebel crossed the Alps to overthrow the Emperor.’

  ‘Most likely the death of his cousin in Gaul prompted him to act.’ Murena had always been quick to pick things up. ‘He blames Gallienus.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Volusianus said. ‘But Postumus has made repeated public proclamations that he is content to rule what he holds. In his reply he had to adapt the lines of the Sibyl to Palinurus to restate that, for him, Gaul, Britain and Spain are empire enough. But in the final line, the one originally addressed to Aeneas – pull the blade from its scabbard – Postumus encourages Acilius Glabrio to assassinate Gallienus, and bid for the throne here in Rome himself.’

  ‘It is more than enough evidence to condemn Acilius Glabrio for treason,’ Murena said. ‘Ironically, he is at Cumae, consulting the oracle. There are frumentarii watching him. Shall I send word to make the arrest?’

  ‘Not yet. Keep him under close observation. Have all his correspondence intercepted, copied, resealed and then delivered. That it has been tampered with must not be detected by the recipients. It is a skill for which the frumentarii are notorious,’ Volusianus said. ‘If Acilius Glabrio has the courage to follow the advice of Postumus, he will first look for support. Most likely he will implicate other malcontents.’

  ‘But is there a danger he might act alone?’

  ‘If he is well watched, we can prevent him getting near enough to the Emperor to strike the blow.’ Volusianus thought for a moment. ‘Acilius Glabrio has many relatives in high places. If he is condemned, they must share his fate. The scandal might delay next year’s campaign.’

  ‘If the Emperor recovers, he intends to cross the Alps again?’

  ‘That is Gallienus’s intention. After all, Postumus did murder his son.’ A knowing look passed across the bluff features of Volusianus. ‘But other things might intervene.’