M. Scott: The Eagle of the Twelfth

In this heaven lay the headquarters of the VIth legion, the Ferrata, named Iron-clad, for they were the first to use the scale armour down the arm that protects a man from the Parthian spear-sword.

The VIth was a hard legion of hard men: they had fought under Caesar, then Antony, and if they had been better used at Actium, then surely Octavian, who became Augustus, would not have won. Afterwards, the new emperor sent them east, because he was afraid of them, and they had faced the Parthians ever since. Tiberius used them when he was still a young man, and they won back two stolen Eagles from Vologases’ predecessor by their displays of skill at arms.

In their camp, we met one known face: Gaius Tertius Aquila, third son of an equestrian family who had volunteered as a centurion and then chosen not to move beyond that rank. He had led the sixth cohort in the Vth when we had been part of it; now, it seemed, he held a like post in the VIth. He was tall, stately-looking, with a true Roman nose and pale grey eyes. His hair was nearly white, for he was long past the age when men retired from the legions.

We met him at the stables, where he was testing out a newhorse, sent for his use, a blue roan gelding with a small white stripe on its nose.

‘Demalion!’ He clapped my shoulder. ‘Sent by the gods. I think this beast is lame, but I’m just not certain. Tell me, am I right?’ And to the groom, ‘Trot him out again.’

We stood in a streak of warm sunlight, for the gods blessed Melitene with an earlier spring than the land around it. The blue roan trotted back and forth, back and forth, with an honesty that showed on its face. And it nodded on the right.

‘Hold him,’ I said to the groom, and felt the foot and the leg leading to it.

‘He’s got the foul matter in his foot,’ I said. ‘It makes it hot and causes the leg to swell and sets him lame, but if someone with a sharp knife can dig the point where it comes out-’ Aquila’s own knife was there, in front of me. I took it and dug the small pitted point on the horse’s sole and, in due course, he jerked a little and the knife’s tip broke through into the cavity where the foul-smelling black fluid dwelt. It oozed out, stinking, and I swept it away with a hank of straw that the groom had brought for the purpose.

‘Keep him on clean straw and stand him in a clean-flowing river for an hour, three times a day, and he’ll be fine in nine days,’ I said. ‘He’s a good, honest horse apart from that. He’ll see you well into your retirement.’

Aquila was not my officer now, so I could say these things with impunity, although in honesty he had never been a vicious kind of officer, and we had liked what little we saw of him.

He grinned now, and clapped me again on the back as if my father had known his in the baths of Rome, and then he took us on a tour of the camp nested beneath the snow-flanked hills and we saw for ourselves the changes General Corbulo had wrought.

Finding the men grown soft in their ease, he had sent onethird of each century into retirement, drafted in new men from the surrounding provinces (Syrians in the VIth! The older legionaries hated that), and set them to work in a way men had not done since Marius’ time.

Discipline was fierce: in the short while we were there, I saw men flogged at the post who would before have been made only to dig the latrines; and men who deserted and might once have got away with a flogging, at least the first time, were stoned to death by the remainder of their unit.

We left in two days, with gifts of food to see us on our way. Aquila came to stand at my bridle as I mounted.

‘Are you going to Oescus?’

‘To the Fifth?’ I leaned forward and took the reins from his hand. ‘There’s no need.’

‘What about your armour? Your sword? The quartermaster is holding them for you.’

‘Let him give them to a new recruit. We have gold from our… recent trip.’ Aquila had been party to our going, but I don’t think he knew much about what we had done, and certainly he didn’t know how much gold we had been given. ‘Damascus is famed for its armouries,’ I added. ‘We’ll buy something new there.’

‘I see.’ He held my eye a moment, almost sadly, and I jerked Adiabena’s head away, thinking that he wanted me to go back and say goodbye to the men I had left, as if they meant anything at all to me.

I kicked the bay mare out of the gate and we left Melitene in a hurry, and did not slow until we were a day’s ride away, after which we moved at a more comfortable pace, not exactly dawdling, but not hurrying either.

We reached Damascus just as the winter rains ceased and the streets were washed clean and the markets were alive in a chaos of colour and shouted Greek, and I felt at home for the first time in over half a year.

‘Damascus supplies the legions and Parthia equally,’ Cadus said. ‘Their armourers are unequalled in either empire.’ He knew his way about and led me on a fast route halfway across the city, past cross-legged men and high-browed women, past children who stared as us for our strangeness; we were not wearing armour, but we had bought some madder-dyed tunics in Melitene and so looked as if we had washed our clothes in blood before venturing on to the streets.

In an alley off an alley, a street so narrow it should not have been dignified by the name, Cadus pushed against a hanging piebald goatskin and we entered a dim space that smelled of honed weapons and oil and fire smoke, so that, momentarily, I was back in the legions, newly entered, buffing my helmet through the night for fear of a flogging after parade the next day.

My eyes sought light and, as we turned a corner, found it in three glowing braziers and a cascade of candles set in branched sticks around a room in which eight small boys sat cross-legged in a circle. The first two wound iron wire on to pegs, cut it, and swept the results on to a pile; the third made rings from the split loops; the last five looped those rings into others to make shining new mail such as I had seen on Vologases’ cataphracts. In the legions, everyone wore old mail, mostly with the rings stitched to leather shirts which were hot in summer and held the damp in winter and stank of old shoes by the second day of wearing.

‘If you’re going to be a courier, you should have a good mail shirt,’ Cadus said cheerfully.

I was sullen and moody, feeling like a conscript again, dreading the next day’s journey to the camp. I turned away, unwilling to join in his cheer. ‘I’m not going to be a courier. A clerk has to be with his centurion. I can’t be riding post across the country if I’m also taking notes and securing the men’s pay.’

‘Even so: all you have to do is throw the spare in a barrel of sand and trip over it twice a day. At least look at what’s on offer.’

Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.

He asked a question, wrapping it round with flattery; I could tell by the intonation. A nasal bleat came from the farthest, darkest corner of the room by way of reply, followed by the appearance of a man not much taller than the boys who worked so assiduously on the floor.

His back was bent. His face was long and yellowed with age. Beads of white matter gathered at the corners of his eyes, but he looked at me as if measuring my soul for the gods; I could feel the press of his stare down the flat of my ribs, my legs, my arms.

He nodded, gave another, more guttural bleat and turned back into the dimness of his demesne. I could see it more clearly now; shelves upon shelves of boxes, each marked with a carving on the fore, in the shape of a beast. His bleating dulled to a murmur, as of a man to his lover, or his horse, he reached into one marked with a stork.