…and stared straight into Hades.
He had thought on the battlefield outside Carrhae that he was a witness to nefas, the unspeakable, incomprehensible evil that all Romans fled as they fled impiety. Nefas was not just slaughter: Had that been so, Crassus’s earlier campaign against Spartacus might have defined it, and the gods would have punished him.
But this … this betrayal!
The Surena stood quietly as one of his men—Quintus would have bet the land he no longer owned that the prince could, but would not speak perfectly adequate Latin—finished his translation of his master’s words.
“And he offers you truce and friendship on behalf of Orodes the Great King…” a howl of outrage rose from the assembled officers, drowning out the Parthian’s other titles, “…in return for surrender.”
Crassus forced himself to his feet. He was sixty years old and always had the best of everything—food, wine, protection. Why shouldn’t he have looked well-preserved, the old mummy? Now, grief and—Quintus had to admit—fear made him look years older than Quintus’s grandfather at his death. A torch guttered, then flared up, showing Crassus’s face in every detail. Almost as red as the torchlight, it was contorted with a coward’s rage. Under the thinning hair, tousled out of its usual careful trim, veins throbbed at the commander’s temples.
If he died now, we might escape with our lives, Quintus thought, then despised himself for it.
The torchlight picked out Lucilius’s sharp features, intent on his master, and the tall Parthian was watching him too as he might have watched an old dog soil the floor. Put him down now or wait? The question seemed to play about The Surena’s scornful eyes and lips.
“Surrender?” Crassus demanded.
“Say, rather, you agree to return to your own place after swearing suitable oaths of friendship to my king.” The Surena’s words were as silken as his banners, and as deadly. His eyes flicked over to Vargontius and paused: brief respect for the way his twenty surviving men—out of four cohorts—had tried to fight their way through the Parthian ranks to their fellows. The Surena had even ordered his troops to withdraw, a vast honor guard, as the twenty limped into Carrhae.
“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.