And then The Surena had signaled. At his command, the drums and bronze bells throbbed, all over the battlefield. The Parthian prince was tall, handsome for a barbarian, much as Quintus hated to admit it. His eyes were huge, painted against the sun, which could blind you here, where even in May the sunlight burned. A dancing boy’s trick, but no one said that after seeing the killing light in those eyes—and feeling the sun’s glare themselves.
Sunlight blazed off the gleaming arms of The Surena’s deadly riders and shimmered from thin, brilliant banners that floated in the still air like tongues of fire. Helmets and breastplates caught fire as the light glinted off the armor of the Parthian horse archers. Some of the men were Parthians. Others, though, were unlike their prince. They were rather small and yellow and bowed of leg. Their eyes seemed hidden in slanted folds, and they smiled at the Romans as a glutton gloats, facing his feast table.
“The Seres,” Quintus had heard. They had made the steel that the Romans knew they were about to taste. And the banners?
“What would that stuff cost in Rome?” some fool with a patrician accent breathed.
“More than you want to pay … sir,” rasped a centurion before the drums and bells drowned out his words.
To their eternal credit, none of the Legionaries had broken. They stood firm in the hollow square, twelve cohorts on each side, Crassus, his pet cavalry, and the baggage in the center. Quintus got a glimpse of the proconsul. He was sweating—they all were—and the whites of his eyes were showing. Even as he watched, Cassius flung down his hands in a gesture of disgust.
“That doesn’t look good,” muttered the man next to Quintus. “Probably told him that the cavalry should be divided up. We should be spread out, not penned up like this.”
Hard to tell when the battle started. At first, it had seemed promising. The Surena’s cataphracts raced forward, to be stopped by the deep Roman formation. The arrows fell like deadly rain against the Roman testudo. It held, of course: Like a strongly shelled tortoise, they would wait for the archers’ quivers to empty.
The Legions had settled in to wait for the archers to run out of arrows. When such flights grew sparser, the Romans cheered. Rufus had started swearing then, in between shouting the orders that let the buccinatores horns bray before those trumpeters screamed and died, shot by men who aimed at the glinting metal of their horns. When they fell, he had shouted, reforming his men, cursing and begging them to fight and die like Romans. Ultimately, the drums had drowned out his voice and hopes. You couldn’t tell the sweat on his face from the tears.
The drums sounded again as the Romans fled, a hateful mercy, as the Parthians slaughtered the wounded Crassus had ordered must be left behind. Quintus wondered if he would ever forget those screams and cries for aid—or for their mothers.
How long since Quintus had been able to cast his helmet down, bury his face in flowing water, and drink his fill? He could not remember. His canteen held the water and vinegar mixture that now stank of leather, and precious little of it. Water trickled in the swamp near Carrhae. Thirsty, he had always seemed thirsty since they left the Euphrates for the desert that was so different from his home near the Tiber.
One or two of the men had already escaped into memories and tumbled forward like men asleep. Rufus had slain another who refused to move, who curled up like a newborn, whimpering deep in his throat.
“Better than just leaving him, sir,” he muttered, then spat, cursing how the desert got into his throat.
Memories flowed on, trickling like the water in the swamp. In the desert, Quintus had dreamed of moisture. Now, he had far too much. Sweat trickled under his filthy tunic. If the night got cold, he could expect fever, and that was probably the best death he could expect. Maybe he could rest…
The underofficers had hoped to camp their men by the little Ballisur stream for a night, but even that mercy had been denied them by Crassus’s son Publius and his Gaulish riders. Press on at the wretched cavalry’s pace, press on, without food or water to sustain a mule, let alone Rome’s mules, the men of the Legions. It was a gift from Mars that more men had not fallen out, never to rise.
Or perhaps the gift from Mars was embodied in Rufus, whose curses, made more foul and more frightening by the unwonted quiet of his voice, flowed as filthy as the water in the marsh by the walled city—the city they must reach if they hoped to save their lives and the old soldier was to get the wooden sword he joked, in his rare good moods, about looking forward to. Everyone had always played along, though a good First Spear was likelier to get a castra to command than the reward of a freed gladiator. Best not think of them either. Life as a slave might be the best fate any of them could face.
Quintus shut his eyes. Life as a gladiator was no mercy while Crassus ruled. Young though Quintus was, he could still remember how brutally the proconsul had put down the gladiators’ revolt. The roads had been lined with crosses, and the air smelled like death. Crassus could be ruthless when surrounded by an invincible army. Still, Spartacus … the gladiator turned renegade had been the bogey of Quintus’s childhood, just as The Surena, no doubt, would haunt the rest of his life, however brief it was.
But nothing, he thought, nothing could have been worse than what had befallen his family—his father killed, his family driven from the comfortable farm that had been theirs since the Tarquins were expelled, and with only him, the only grandson who survived life in a Roman insula with its fevers and fires, to try to win it back.
“What’s that?”
He started. Requests for orders. Plans. He took it on his own initiative to order that those men who had extra food share with those who had none. Rufus caught his eye and nodded, bleak comfort where he had never expected to find it.
Bowing and saluting and waiting on the family’s shrewd patron: He remembered that too. The gifts that meant a week of scant food. The snubs that meant setbacks; the rebukes that almost put paid to his hopes of a place following the Eagles. Jupiter Optimus Maximus knew he did not wish to follow the Eagles. He was a farmer, not a fighter. But they had snatched his farm, and there would be nothing at all for his family unless he earned it back.
If he shut his eyes and forced himself not to hear the prayers and imprecations of his centurion, the marsh sounds made him almost happy. He remembered the light upon the Tiber, the way it shone through the leaves of the twisted olive trees and heated the vines before harvest. He remembered how every clod of earth felt as he ran to his favorite places in the gnarled roots of trees by the river, when the heat hummed and the sun burned almost white. There, he would fling himself down and sleep or watch the blue haze fill the river valley as the afternoon drowsed away.
Voices murmured in the marshes outside the accursed walls of Carrhae. Treachery lay in their whispers. Had the city not been there, perhaps Crassus might have summoned the courage to let them die like Romans, but with a way of escape, the old thief had craft, if not honor.
“Buys his Legions like cupbearers…” muttered Rufus, too furious to be prudent. “And pours them out like vinegar before that … that … Persian with his catamite eyes.” Persian, Parthian—Rufus would hardly care. The Surena wore kohl beneath his eyes to cut the glare. Who knew, if they had a chance, how many else might do so if it helped them fight in this land? Maybe, they could make do with mud. Enough of that lying around here.
“He’s going to get himself killed talking like that,” Lucilius whispered to one of his ten dearest friends.
“Small loss. But hush, you’ll wake our graybeard.”
The other patrician officer meant Quintus, he knew. And he knew enough to control himself. Don’t antagonize anyone, least of all a patrician, even ones as worthless as those two. It was not safe.
A hand on his shoulder brought him back to the stinks of marsh and frightened men. Pain in his ribs, right over the earlier bum, jolted him to full alertness.
The centurion, with at least thirty more years on him to weaken back, ears, and eyes, heard the rustle in the marshes about the time that the guards stirred. Quintus nodded that he had heard it too, glad he had not started, much less cried out. The you’ll do in Rufus’s eyes, squinting even now as if unused to the comfort of darkness, was praise enough.