At least the night’s darkness had brought relief from the glare of the Syrian sun on bare land or brown water. However, Quintus’s headache worsened—lights seemed to shoot red and white behind his eyelids. Even keeping on his helmet was some kind of small victory. Others, he knew, had hurled theirs away as useless weight, discarding all to stampede like beasts. Shame—the proconsul had made sure they already had their fill of that, if nothing else.
“May as well rest, young one … I mean, sir.” Rufus’s voice was slurred with exhaustion.
Obedient, Quintus dropped once more, covering his face with his hands as he shut his smarting eyes.
After a moment, he was ashamed. Even a most junior tribune who owed his sword to place-seeking and fool luck should set the men a better example. Nearby knelt one of the signifers. The standard-bearer had grounded the butt of his Eagle in the mud, and the bronze bird high overhead looked as dispirited as the man who had borne it. At least that had not fallen or been or lost. Not yet. Not like so many of the others. Eagles of Rome’s Legions had fallen into enemy hands. That was worse, even more than abandoning their wounded. For the Eagles, most who marched behind them believed, were the very spirit of the Legions as the genius loci was the spirit of a place.
Quintus raised his head, startled as he might be at a familiar scent or voice. Best not think of that part of the past unless he wanted to run mad and gibber like one of the Asiatics afflicted with the religious mania that passed among them for faith. Hard to believe it, but under the influences of their religions, they would cut at themselves or anyone else. He shuddered, and for once, hoped it was fever, not the beginnings of madness. He was a Roman. Prophecy and spirit voices were for lesser peoples.
At least the drums, these damned throbbing drums of The Surena’s victorious Parthians were stilled. Quintus was no soldier, not in the way centurions like Rufus were—bred and wed to the Legions—but his few years as a tribune had taught him a little. The drums were a bad omen: All the omens had been bad since Marcus Licinius Crassus had marched his seven Legions, the auxilia, and his gods-be-damned haughty cavalry east of the Euphrates.
Wait for the cavalry, proconsul Crassus had said. Thousands of crack riders from Gaul, led by his son. Wait for them. Then, keep pace with the riders until your lungs ached and you nearly choked with the dust of the plains, and some of the older men were limping while you hoped their hearts didn’t burst. Well, all those horsemen had been slaughtered, Publius Crassus with them; and the rest fled, avoiding the panic of the common rout.
Gods, he just wanted to lie down and die in his armor, his already-rusting armor. In the breathless days before his final treachery, that Arab dog Ariamnes had jeered at the Romans’ pace. Fine for him: He went mounted, he and his six thousand men that he had promised would fight beside the Romans. He had fawned like the vilest client before the very men he betrayed. Traitors, all of them. Gods, Quintus threw back his head a little to try to see the sky. He wished he were back by the Tiber, on the land no longer his.
The panic of their retreat to the marshes was behind them, he could hear from the mincing voice of that prancing Lucilius.
“Seeing his son’s head fly-bit on the spear was what did it. The proconsul gave one stare and screamed like a woman in childbirth,” Lucilius reported. “Wept. Offered to fall on his sword, though his hand was shaking the way it does after a three-day drunk. I can’t imagine how he could have held any sword steady long enough to fall on it.”
Naturally, the young aristocrat had been in Crassus’s tent—as Quintus had not—for a very select staff meeting the night Crassus had finally been forced to make any decision at all, let alone the one to abandon the wounded and retreat to Carrhae. Quintus should have known that Lucilius would have joined the other patricians, deciding arbitrarily whose lives would be spared and whose sacrificed.
Now, he was laughing as lightly as if he traded gossip in the baths at home. “I swear, he screamed and shook and nigh-on soiled himself.”
Quintus had no love for Crassus, who had tossed the farm his own family had held for generations to a client about as casually as Quintus might toss a coin to a beggar. Still, that a general and a proconsul of Rome could abandon his men on a lost battlefield—best that grandfather had died before this day. The old man had died twice already, once with the loss of his lands, a second time when Quintus had held him for his last breath two years ago. This would have given him a third death.
Lucilius’s eyes glinted with that gambler’s fervor that had forced him out to Syria, one jump ahead of the creditors he had lived off since putting on the toga virilis. This flight too was a kind of gamble, one Lucilius was sure he would win even now. Why not? Hadn’t his luck always come around before?
“So who leads?”
“Cassius. Pushing from behind.”
Crassus had looked enough like a leader to keep heart in the men. Now, this staff officer stepped into his boots. Quintus had never trusted the lean, saturnine elder tribune, but at that moment he would have followed him as his own grandfather followed Marius to destruction. Cassius was a politician. He might be a tribune—the same rank that Quintus held, however inadequately—but the older man had survived the ambushes of Roman politics, and Quintus reckoned he might survive this, too. Another of Lucilius’s friends, sleek even now after a rout and hours in a marsh, bared his teeth in a grin.
“Pro di,” Lucilius added, “it was almost worth losing the battle to watch that Cassius slap old moneybags back into decency.”
Even in the dark now, Quintus saw Legionaries making gestures to avert evil. Their eyes were wide as the eyes of stalled horses who smelled wildfire. Even Romans had to reckon with defeat, but to learn that their leader had lost his courage…
“Keep a decent tongue in your head!” Quintus hissed. Lucilius had powerful friends who could snatch the armor off Quintus’s back and blight his last hopes of ever regaining his family’s land—if the Parthians didn’t stick them all full of thrice-damned arrows first.
“Our senex there. We’ll all turn old and gray,” the young aristocrat mocked. “If we live that long.”
But the centurion turned his head and glared, and Lucilius’s voice softened to a whisper and a too-hectic laugh. Many of the men had not drunk all day. Despite Rufus’s oaths, Quintus knew some of them were stealthily lapping up the thick water. There would be fever in the marsh before dawn.
Behind him, some of the younger tribunes diced. Fortunes could rise and fall on the throw of the dice, even in the Legions. That was one of the ways Lucilius had gotten himself into trouble. Quintus had never had any money to play. Callous to play now, he thought—not that it mattered. Still, if one of Crassus’s staff happened by, the gamers would regret it in the short time they probably had left.
But they were undoubtedly privileged, as usual. Cassius and his troops were likelier to stay with the proconsul, enjoying whatever comforts he had been able to wrest from the wreck of his armies. Rufus’s deep rumble set about disposing the men as comfortably as might be until dawn, when they must break free of the swamp or die. Quintus heard himself repeat orders—to his surprise, he spoke the right ones—as if in a waking dream that differed totally from the memories he had brushed against.
“Why don’t they come after us?” a young Legionary whispered in the darkness, then fell silent when someone chuckled.
“Why should they? Got us pinned here, haven’t they? They can just wait and pick us off, unless they get bored and want to go hunting. They’ll wait till dawn for anything. Or offer us terms. But that’s a hope I wouldn’t count on, son. However, they just might want some new slaves to push around.”
Mumbles about the guards just sneaking off into the swamp rose. Rufus’s eye swept round, and the men were silent. Quintus too had heard those voices in the ranks, careless around a green tribune as they dared not be around the wily old veteran. Only hours ago, he had heard them as he stood sweating in the square, too hot to feel as hungry or thirsty as they all had been kept for days. Some men had collapsed from the heat, from the lack of proper food, water, and rest, which had not been enough to keep the Legions marching at their best-known pace, let alone the cavalry pace Crassus had been goaded into ordering. He had heard their mutters of hope when, looking out, no one saw any of the deadly Parthian cataphracts.