Empire Of The Eagle Page 4

  "I will see you all in Hades first!" Crassus shouted. "And go there myself!"

  "That might be arranged," remarked Cassius, never raising his voice. "Out there—" he gestured. "The men are angry. They didn't like leaving the wounded for our friend here to kill. They didn't like it at all."

  The mutiny of a Legion—nefas such as Quintus had never imagined. And yet, he knew how close his men were to turning on their leaders. Desertion was better than mutiny, he thought and half-turned to go back to his men. Perhaps they could escape the swamp—but for what? To flee into the desert? Even properly equipped, his Legion had found the desert to be an ordeal. And thirst, they said, was an excruciating way to die.

  As painful as a cross?

  He might be out of choices.

  The torch sputtered again, casting the features of Lucilius into high relief. He leaned forward with the intentness of a cur watching two larger dogs fight for mastery of the pack. Once he saw a winner begin to emerge, he would dart in and slash the hamstrings of his enemy. Lucilius's eyes shifted from Crassus to his officer, flashed to The Surena, then back to the Romans. He gestured at the man leaning on his shoulder, the companion of a hundred dice games, and the man got up. Quintus backed up against the entrance to the tent, but the man slipped out beneath the soiled fabric.

  Was he going to tell the men? Rufus had calculated that some ten thousand yet survived. Some might die still of wounds or fever. Even so, there ought to be enough for one last, bloody fight. And such a battle would take out the Parthians who now watched them. Quintus thought he could die content if he could wash out the contempt in The Surena's eyes with blood.

  Voices began to rise from around the tent. The Surena barely raised a long eyebrow.

  Cassius leaned forward, slamming his fists on the table before the proconsul. Poorly balanced, it went over, spilling the wine—thick and unwatered—into the trodden muck. The winey mud looked like the ground outside Carrhae once 20,000 Romans had fallen.

  "I say we accept the terms. The Senate's far away. Caesar's far away. We have no choice."

  "And I say, I'll see you all in Hades first!" Crassus screamed. "Traitor and son of a traitor and a whore!"

  "By all the gods, I won't take that from a coward!" the staff officer shouted back. "You and your son have destroyed us all."

  With surprising strength, Crassus pushed the younger man aside and strode out of the tent. His staff followed, then split up in several directions. Some, Quintus knew, would disappear, not to return.

  The others surrounded the proconsul, shouting, waving their fists. One or two made as if to draw swords and rush at the Parthians. But The Surena shook his head, and they fell back.

  Up ahead, the proconsul flinched at last from the anger of his staff.

  "We have to have a chance!" A wail, in accented Latin, from one of the auxiliaries. Someone threw a punch, and a scuffle ensued as the auxiliaries fought among themselves. The scuffle ended when half their number fled into the marsh.

  "God send they sink," muttered Rufus.

  Pleas and imprecations. Quintus flinched as a centurion, a quiet man whom he had never known well, simply opened his tunic to show his general his old scars, gotten in a lifetime of service. He would not beg: He simply wanted a chance to live out what was left of his life.

  Crassus's eyes looked over at Vargontius, the officer The Surena had approved, appealing for some stroke of magic. Silently, the veteran turned his back.

  Quintus heard scuffling, the snicks and hisses of weapons drawn, and over the tumult, Rufus's voice shouting, "I'll gut any of you who lifts a finger. Hold! You, gods rot you, don't let that Eagle fall in the mud."

  Such pockets of discipline like that were rare. Thanks to Lucilius and his friends, news of the proposed terms had swept the Legions like blazing naphtha. If Crassus did not accept, he was a dead man.

  And if he did accept?

  Quintus knew what his grandfather would have said. He should have fallen on his sword before he ever saw this day.

  The proconsul looked about desperately for a distraction.

  "You!" he snarled at the guide who had led them from Carrhae's walls by night and into the marsh. "You led us astray. You sold yourself!"

  It was as bad as ever Quintus had thought. A trick, entirely a trick: The guide had been as much in the Parthian pay as the yellow-skinned barbarians who had fired arrow after arrow at the Romans as they stood in the sun, unable to rest, unable to drink, and after a time unable to do aught but die. How could anyone ever have suspected otherwise, even for an instant? What Asiatics would ever help the Romans? Romans were for battening off of, then betraying them—even as the easterners might do to one of their own. He knew that well. He might have said as much, but who would have listened to him, a mere equestrian, when patricians, from Crassus's now-dead son down to the merest aristocratic time-server, leaned on his shoulder, ready to tell him what he wanted to hear?

  The guide cringed, reeled under a blow from a ringed fist that sent blood spurting from mouth and nose. Then, drawing himself up, he spat.

  Abruptly, Rufus appeared between the guide and the mob that had once been members of Rome's proudest Legions. Beside him was the signifer, Eagle proudly aloft. It seemed to glint with a light all its own. Even as Quintus watched, that light intensified—and then, as a man drew his dagger with a scream of rage against the traitor guide, the light blazed out.

  When the red streaks and black splotches faded from Quintus's field of vision, he saw a man down on the ground, nursing a burnt hand. And the guide lay face down in the water, the smell of burnt flesh and singed, wet plants rank about him.

  Odd. You would have thought the guide's body would have made a louder splash as it fell. He floated, face down. Quintus could imagine the staring eyes, the blood, trailing from the treacherous mouth. They were all treacherous here, all the easterners.

  "No loss," someone muttered. "The Harpies spit on his liver."

  Quintus stumbled forward, dimly aware that earth ought to be sprinkled on the dead man, a coin placed in his mouth.

  "Let him rot," came a vengeful whisper.

  That was more impiety. He would pay for it: They all would.

  Crassus gestured. Out. That way. The Surena took his place with his men at the head of a ragged and very dispirited file that prepared to escape the marsh with even less honor than it had used to enter it.

  And following the Parthians, the luster of its metal tarnished, was the Eagle of Quintus's Legion.

  3

  THE SUN WAS rising far over Asia when the remnants of Crassus's great army finally came to The Surena's camp. Save for a small group, the Parthians had ridden away, "to prepare a welcome," someone had said bleakly. "Morituri te... We who are about to die..."

  "Quiet there!" a centurion shouted before one of the Parthians could enforce silence. All told, it was a small group of guards. Possibly, the Romans could have broken free. But the Parthians had bows, and the Romans' will to fight was gone with their leader's. The Surena had promised a truce; a truce they would have.

  Quintus forced himself not to stagger into the great square outside the prince's tent. From the corner of his eye, he saw the signifer raise his battered Eagle proudly, as if its presence alone could turn the camp into a Roman conquest.

  Remember, you are a Roman, he told himself as he put foot ahead of foot. It was an effort not to shake or weave, and his kit felt as if he carried all Rome upon his back. Crassus and some of the other, most senior officers had been given horses and Quintus saw sidelong smiles at how poorly they sat them, tired as they were and as unused to the breeds of Parthia and Persia. (Lucilius, Quintus noticed, had somehow acquired a horse too and rode with a grace that made the other tribune, worn as he was, want to pull him out of the saddle.) Their world was ending, but Lucilius managed to look almost jaunty ahorse.

  Remember you are a Roman.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp. The Parthians were watching... long sidelong glances and sly smiles
were as much of their faces as you could see under their helms.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp. Remember you are mortal. Remembering that was all too easy, even though Crassus had probably dreamed of returning in triumph to Rome, throwing down his colleague Caesar (who would never have permitted such a defeat as this), and becoming a Sulla who never, never resigned his power. Of the great army that had marched from Armenia—28,000 Legionaries, 3,000 Asian mounted auxiliaries, and 100 Gaulish cavalry—perhaps 10,000 Romans survived.

  As captives, no matter what sort of gloss was put on it.

  Outside the camp, bland-faced guards requested they stack their arms. There were more guards than Romans.

  "Where's the yoke?" muttered Rufus, marching with his men. Quintus was willing to wager the pay he'd never see now that most of the men had hidden daggers or even a gladius somewhere about them. He had sanctioned enough of a departure from the ranks that hale men bore along those who were wounded or nigh dropping from exhaustion or fever.

  It was a Roman custom, marching captives beneath the iugum, their necks bent in token of servitude.

  "Vae victis," Quintus muttered out of his memories of boyhood Livy. Woe to the conquered. It had happened to Romans before. It was still a disgrace.

  The sun's first rays shot down over the great plain, turning the sallow land ruddy as if the rays were arrows. And fine scale armor and weapons blazed as the light rose toward full dawn. It kindled on the fittings of drums and brass bells, which rang as the Romans marched toward inevitable dishonor. Only the Legion's Eagle did not shine.

  Outside the prince's great tent, troops were drawn up—proud Parthians, their Persian auxiliaries so like those of Rome (and possibly men who had eaten Roman bread among them), the tall Saka, masters of horse, and, strangest of all, the Yueh-chih with their sallow skins, narrow, slanting eyes, and those bandy legs that only were revealed on the rare occasions when these mercenaries from the steppes and high deserts of Asia dismounted. Their battle standards were strange: But last time that Quintus had seen such men in the field, it had not been their standards that concerned him.

  There were even officials of Carrhae, that whore of garrisons, and some wealthy merchants whose long, rich robes bloused over their bellies, making them look slack and weak by contrast with the men who had destroyed Rome's greatest army. Their eyes were eager, though: the clever, ancient eyes of the Levantine, eager for advantage, hoping now that Rome's defeat meant the end of Rome's taxes.

  All watched the sorry remnants of what had been the -greatest army in Asia. Romans in defeat. Remarkable: They bleed like other men. Can they also serve as slaves?

  The princes held the arms; the merchants held other power. Quintus fancied that they cast knowledgeable eyes over the conquered Romans, assessing this one's strength and that one's skills, where each might be needed, and how to dispose of the infirm, the useless, and the merely dangerous.

  Quintus and the standard-bearer found themselves shunted subtly toward the front of the Roman column, away from the remnants of the cohort that Rufus had managed to keep together. To his horror, he realized he might well have welcomed a command to kneel: At this point, "kneel" meant "rest," not disgrace. He thought that even Rufus would have accepted it if it meant his sons, the Legionaries, could rest. There he waited, disarmed, his body shivering a little in the dawn wind. The scarlet silk banners of Parthia lifted in the wind and the rising sunlight turned the sallow plain to gold.

  It was not the blue river valleys of his home, but it was, nevertheless, beautiful country. Would he have chosen it as a place in which to die? Better the square amid his troops, he realized. Better yet the farm, with its river and the mourning voice of the spirit who touched his mind and heart. Better than all, however, would have been to go on living with health and honor. Since that did not seem possible, Quintus tried to tell himself he had no regrets. He thought he could believe that the dancing feet of his amulet would tread out the measures long after he would cease to breathe. It had existed so long that it challenged time itself.

  Crassus sat his horse before his army, preserving the illusion, for one last moment, of a general, not a suppliant come to submit to whatever terms The Surena thought good. Then an officer emerged from The Surena's tent and gestured. Crassus began to dismount and wavered. His face twisted.

  Cassius slid out of his saddle quickly and was at the wretched proconsul's side, aiding him to dismount, keeping a supportive hold on his arm as master and officer vanished into the tent. Sunlight struck the doorflap, making the space within look very dark. Other officers followed the proconsul, last of them Lucilius. His eyes, despite the circles beneath them, were bright as if he were about to spend the day dicing.

  Perhaps he was. They all were. The difference was that Lucilius had no doubts he would emerge with his hands full of coin.

  A cataphract in full heavy armor rode by and shoved Quintus on the shoulder. Pointless to resent the petty insult, and worse than that: He knew how quickly the Parthians could nock and shoot when they wished. He wore an officer's sigils; he must go inside.

  He caught Rufus's eyes. They narrowed and the old soldier tightened his lips, wishing him good luck without speech, as was safest.

  Then, as best he could, he marched into the dark maw of The Surena's tent.

  The air was thick with mansmell: sweat, leather, armor, and the perfumes that these easterners used to scent themselves, even in battle. Too many men crowded into the huge tent; as one of the last and least of the Romans, Quintus would have found himself pressing against the tent wall, had a guard not stood between him and any quick knifeslash up that wall that might have bought a few Romans at least a chance for freedom had he still a ready knife.

  Even though it was dawn, torches still flared, and he blinked. It took some time to become accustomed to the changing light and shadow in the prince's tent. The torchlight danced, a flickering, treacherous pattern in which partners changed and betrayed each other in the flickering of an eye. The Surena and his men. Representatives of the six other great Parthian families—and probably even a spy or two from Pacorus, the king's renegade son. Arabs from Edessa, no doubt servants of Ariamnes and Alchaudonius, the chieftains who had snatched their six thousand riders away.

  And even though Orodes of Parthia had led half his army into Armenia to punish Artavasdos for sending troops to Crassus, Armenian lords sat as witnesses. No doubt their king prepared to turn his coat, too. Empty chairs, richly draped, stood at the center of the cluster of Rome's enemies. They did not face the chief of them, yet.

  Crassus stood before the men who had destroyed him. Despite the weathered armor he wore and the sword he had been allowed to keep, he looked like an old man, a sick man, a man who had lost his son. Like Priam in Achilles's tent, stripped of his pride. Cassius stood away from him, and Crassus raised his chin. That gesture took an effort which impressed Quintus.

  Achilles had raised Priam, offered him food and wine, honor and even mercy of a sort. These princes were slow to offer the proconsul even a chair, much less the honor due a patrician of Rome. The one they finally brought him was low; he must look up into the conqueror's eyes. Cassius stood stiffly at his back.

  Quintus wondered if Lucilius would still place odds on Crassus.

  The Surena chose that moment to take his seat. As if to underline his disdain for his adversaries, he had taken the time to bathe and put on fresh robes. Now he was resplendent in shimmering fabrics brought all the way from the Land of Gold—some of the very wealth Crassus had hoped to gain by taking this land.

  No sooner than Crassus sat, he must rise in reluctant homage. He glared at the guard who hissed at him, but submitted. With the Parthian general came officers—men of the Saka and of the Yueh-chih.

  The morning passed in a blaze of misery. Quintus, his jaw set against a protest that might have meant the death of all of them, listened to the terms of "truce" and "friendship" promised them the night before as they lay in the marsh. Some part of him might h
ave rejoiced. It was a balancing of the scales for him and his family. It was vengeance, even, for those deaths whose stench polluted the great roads outside Rome.

  It was disgrace, not truce.

  "You might as well decimate what's left and have done!" sputtered one officer. Cassius hissed at him and, had he been nearer, looked as if he might have struck the speaker.

  "That too might be arranged," purred The Surena. "The decision lies in your hands."

  The proconsul stiffened. For a moment it looked as if he would hurl himself from his chair, but his staff officers' hands dropped upon his shoulders. Comfort, it looked like, until one remembered that only last night. The Surena had given him a clear choice: Surrender or die.

  Now Crassus removed his helm. His thinning hair lay sweat-plastered to his skull. He shook his head. "That decision has already been made. We will have peace."

  "That is what you call it when your men, when your son, all lie dead, is it? Peace? We would call it...."