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 have 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….”
Quintus shivered. From the soles of his feet, he could sense the hot hate of other Romans in the tent. Outside the tent, the Parthians might be relaying this conversation to the survivors of the Legions: Asiatics loved to boast and gloat. He tensed, waiting for the first man to leap forward. The tiny statue in his breast warmed, as if the two torches it had held aloft all these centuries suddenly kindled.
Outside the tent came a clamor that made the Romans start. Better coached, the Parthians, Saka, and Persians did not move from their seats around the table. The Yueh-chih reached for weapons, but subsided at a glare from their master.
Warriors unlike any Quintus had ever seen entered the Prince’s tent, led by a man who was too young to be a general, but whose manner clearly proclaimed that he had a right to take a place at least the equal of those who sat at their ease in judgment upon Rome. His armor, like that of his guard, was scaled, his garments quilted, and his boots high, adapted for riding. He was stocky, foursquare; and if his eyes were slanted like those of the Yueh-chih, he was not bandy-legged like them. Despite the season, he wore a leopard’s skin over his armor, as if the heat that would soon rise from the earth was nothing to him. Oddest of all was his skin, which was the color of gold.
Placing himself well away from the Yueh-chih, who muttered but gave place to him, he seated himself near The Surena with the air of one taking a throne by right.
Now he was actually looking at a warrior of the Land of Gold, from beyond the eastern deserts, Quintus realized. It was said—by those eager for riches—that this land was so wealthy that the dust of gold had sunk into the skins of its inhabitants. And enough Romans had believed that legend to bring them to this place where they might die. Parthia, he had heard rumors, paid tribute to that realm in return for trade. At the time he found it hard to believe. Now, seeing the man’s imperial composure even though he was too young to hold rank equal to that of The Surena or Crassus before his downfall, Quintus wondered. It would be a great thing to control access to such a realm—great enough to make the downfall of Rome even more worthwhile than hatred could account for.
He stared at the cause of an army’s death, meeting for a sharp second the eastern warrior’s gaze. The eyes of that one flicked over the assembled princes as a dog-breeder might regard an unsatisfactory litter, then fastened completely on the Romans.
A small wave brought to his side a man with the quick, mobile features of a Sogdian, who—oddly enough—wore the same livery of scales and quilted fabric. He spoke.
“My lord says your men fought well. But they lost. And your son died. Now my lord asks you—” he jerked his chin at Crassus, “—why you yet live.”
“I still have an army to protect. They are all my sons,” said the proconsul. He drew himself up as proudly as he might.
If they all survived this day. Lucilius might laugh at Crassus’s words. But for the first time, Quintus saw the old man as one who could have been followed had Fortune not turned the scale.
Quintus felt his eyes sting, and another sting besides. Moving very slowly, mindful always of the watchful Saka guard beside him, he raised one hand to where the little bronze statue danced above his heart. A warmth, pervasive but not unpleasant, radiated from it as a promise of comfort. He felt, if not rested, fit to march or fight. Or, likelier than either, to endure what must be.
The Sogdian eyed Crassus, skepticism writ large on his mobile features. He glanced at The Surena as if for permission to smile. But the Parthian lord’s face was as impassive as that of the man from the Land of Gold.
The noble from the East nodded gravely, accepting the words as if they came from a victor and general, not a beaten man. “You said, Prince of An’Hsi, that this was the Prince of Ta’Tsien … that land to the west… who would turn his land to gold and count it? Who would venture to trade with us of the Han? Is he a noble, or is he a merchant?”
Again, the Sogdian spoke. Had the auxilia Quintus saw in the marsh survived? He would have been glad of an interpreter of his own. Some of the princes were shifting, impatient, in their seats. It was always dangerous when barbarians became restive. Apparently, the man from the Land of Gold—the Han, he called it—thought so too.
The Surena laughed now, a sound echoed by his Persian nobles, whose pride it was to live off their lands and never soil their fingers with trade. These patricians, these patricians, Quintus thought. They would be the death of him as they had been of his family’s hopes. The statue over his heart pricked at his flesh. Pay attention, fool. He all but heard his grandfather’s voice exhort him.
“How can this be?”
Abruptly, one of the deadly steppe riders broke into a tumult of words that sounded much like the speech of the man of the Han—and that young lordly officer listened, then spoke,
“Their gods, you say,” the interpreter repeated. “Their gods travel with their armies? Careless of them, should they lose. My most excellent Lord Surena, this insignificant one would see these gods of the West.”
The Surena clapped his hands.
And, carried any which way, as slaves would drag bodies out of a prison, Parthians brought the Eagles of Crassus’s slain Legions into the tent and hurled them onto the table.
The clash of the metal made everyone start. The Yueh-chih muttered as if they expected the Eagles to leap from their standards, mantle, and strike with beaks and claws. Several men, and those not the least in rank, muttered, gestured, and fumbled at amulets.
The captive Eagles of the Legions lay there on the table: no gods, but tarnished metal, hacked with sword-thrusts, stained with the blood of their Roman bearers.
The blood was fresh on one.
“We found this one just outside. He who carried it … fought us.”
Crassus half rose from his chair, then sank down at a glance from his staff officers.
Quintus closed his eyes. That Eagle’s bearer had been a brave man. Then he forced his eyes open again, condemning himself to watch every last instant of his country’s disgrace.