A moment later, both he and Quintus had risen to their knees, hands snatching at the well-worn hilts of the gladius that each of them carried. Their swords drawn, the guards that Rufus and Quintus had posted when they entered the marshes were coming in. Without orders and with…
With Parthians under escort. But judging from the assurance of their walk, these were not prisoners.
Quintus hunkered down in the wet and the mud. Despite the chill that had long since crept into his bones, he went suddenly hot, ashamed that the Parthians looked upon Romans defeated yet still alive.
They walked like princes. Or executioners. Their harness held a somber glitter that the marshes reflected, a gleam like rotten wood. One of them turned to rake his eyes across the marsh.
Quintus had seen that one last on horseback, with a long banner like a tongue of flame overhead and the sun glinting on the heavy scales of his armor and his horse’s trappings. Then, too, his eyes, the pits darkened against the ferocious desert glare, had stared at his enemies, who had fallen and failed.
Once again. The Surena had come to view the vanquished.
All that was missing was the sound of the drums and bronze bells.
No swords were drawn. That might have been discipline. It was likelier to have been exhaustion. Of course, it was called safe-conduct.
None of the Romans were safe. Or were likely to live much longer.
2
Past Quintus and his men the Parthians marched, almost at parade pace, toward the front of the ragged column, where Crassus’s staff would no doubt try to prop their commander up into a semblance of decent bearing. Rustles and faint splashes told Quintus that officers were turning their troops over to centurions and slipping forward, to be in on whatever council their commander might hold.
Quintus saw no reason to believe that his equestrian face would be any more welcome in defeat than it had been in prosperity. And the men…
Even the auxiliaries had drawn close, seeking the protection of an officer of Rome. Such protection as it was. Persians, this knot of them. Horsemen condemned to walk, like Rome’s own mules. Traitors, perhaps, did Rome not war with Parthia. But loyal thus far.
“Forget you outrank a centurion.” Quintus had had it drummed into him in training. “When you don’t know what to do, forget your fancy armor—” not that Quintus’s harness was anything to boast of, “—and ask him what is to be done.”
Pride and honor had died under The Surena’s arrows, but not good counsel. He found Rufus and hunkered down beside him.
“They’ve brought The Surena in,” he muttered. It did not seem at all strange to be reporting to the older man. Rufus.
The older man shrugged, then turned thumbs down. “Morituri te salutamus,” he remarked, then spat. “Doesn’t look as if I’ll get that wooden sword now, let alone my twenty acres and my mule. Damn. Mule would have been easier to train than some of these boys.”
“You think too, then, that this is surrender.” Quintus didn’t even bother making it a question.
“I think our guide was bought cheaper than a Tiburtine whore,” muttered the centurion. “And I think that we’re about to see a bargain struck.”
“You think they’ll offer terms?” The younger man kept his question low-voiced.
Rufus nodded once, curtly. “Unless they want us all dead. And they could have had that a time before if they’d had the mind to. We pass under the slaves’ yoke probably,” he spat. “Better off dead—all of us.”
Voices rose from the direction that the proconsul had taken, angry, threatening. Crassus had called his officers about him. Predictably enough, Quintus had not been included. He could imagine Lucilius, as he had several times before, telling him, “We couldn’t find you,” as if tending to his soldiers were somehow a dereliction of duty and reason enough for excluding the man who was not of their inner circle.
“What do you think’s going on?”
The centurion grimaced as if he wanted to spit again. “You saw. The Parthians have offered terms. Now we’ll have to have the noble talk about honor. Nobles’ talk. It’ll probably take all night. In the end. Crassus will deal.” Not “the proconsul.” Not any one of a number of titles that a centurion should use for his commander. “It’s his way.”
Quintus could not help but look up sharply.
“Pardon, sir. Strange words for the likes of me. But they’d be the first to tell you. I haven’t got honor like…” He jerked his chin toward the sound of the conflict.
“You want to know about my honor? It’s all about you. Sleeping or talking, or it’s—you there, I warned you not to drink! And as long as any of that looks to me and obeys me, I have my honor. When they’re gone, I can think about dying. But not till then. Meanwhile, we wait.”
He settled with a sigh that had more of exhaustion than aggravation to it.
You will never see the land now. At least, though, you leave no one desolate.
Quintus’s temples throbbed with new punishments. Too many whispers in the night. Too many sounds in the marshes. The water and the weeds and the trees had murmured by Tiberbank, not whispered this way. And there were other voices too. Hush, they murmured at him. Be comforted. And, most seductive of all and the most mad, Live.
He still wore his child’s bulla when he had found the little bronze statue that might have been new in the days when the Tarquins ruled Latium. Even now he carried it with him, a solemn little thing with a face worn away under its peaked bronze cap, its stubby arms upraised and bearing torches, its feet eternally dancing, but solemn somehow. Even now he remembered how the earth-warmed metal had felt as he clawed it from the earth and cleaned it. In the next moment, he almost dropped it. A voice, praising him, brought him upright. Yet, when he looked around wildly, the only disturbance was the undergrowth he himself had rustled; the sun glinted off the rippling water.
He had not fled … not quite. His grandfather’s face rose before him—practical, strong, sure of his rights. His grandfather would frown at a boy who did not master his fears. So he kept the little statue with him. And he had forced himself to return to the spot the next day, unwilling to be run off by what might be no more than his own fancies. Strangely enough, it was the memory of that first all-but-flight from the voices he imagined that had sustained him during the long, long hours in the shrinking square, while the Parthians charged and charged, their banners swooping behind them and turning the sunlight into fire.
The fear of madness, of religious madness at that, made death in battle a cleanliness that, if not to be sought, could be welcomed.
He remembered his fear beside the river and his conquest of fear. A voice had spoken to him, true enough, from the rushes and the trees. It was the genius loci, the spirit of the place, as much a guardian of him and his land as the lares and penates to whom his grandfather, attended by Quintus’s father, gravely sacrificed. The voice was deep, sleepy, like bees about their hive on a hot summer’s day: honey, strength, and a little fear commingled. It was a woman’s voice, not mother or sister or nurse, not any voice Quintus had ever heard; and it made him want to be taller and stronger and wiser than he was.
He feared such voices, of course. He was a Roman who trusted very little in gods. But he did not fear that voice; it was part of his soul. An odd thought—had you asked him before he heard it, he would have sworn by all the hardheaded Roman gods that he did not care about such things.
Day after day, like the sort of expensive Greek pedagogue his family would never have approved even if they could have afforded one, the genius loci taught him of the land, of the waves of men and women who had strode across it, bled for it, and loved it. One day, he took his own dagger—his first, and a gift—and slashed his finger, letting his blood too drip into the soil. That day, he swore he had seen a figure reflected beside him in the pool— dark hair, honey-dark skin, flickering in and out of his line of vision so quickly he never knew for sure what he had seen. A wave of love and acceptance washed over him. It had felt like his family’s approval. It had also felt like the dreams that had, this close to his coming to manhood, begun to haunt his sleep. No matter: The land was his, and he was the land’s, whether or not he ever saw it again.