M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

‘He says you are beautiful as a god, but taller than he is used to.’ Cadus sounded amused. I was perhaps a hand’s width taller than him and he, in turn, had been a hand’s width taller than Pantera, although my memory by now had stretched the Leopard until he was the tallest of us all.

I think I blushed under the flattery. The armourer-boys watched open-mouthed as I stripped to my skin and then donned the layers the goat-man ordered, of linen, then padded wool, then a silk scarf to keep my neck from chafing.

And then he brought out not a mail shirt, such as I had imagined, but a leather shirt with strips of polished iron laidacross and across, so that they overlapped like the ribs of a snake.

He held it out to me, grinning his gap-toothed grin, bleating encouragingly.

‘He says this is a new thing. He has only sold one other, and he thinks it will be suitable for a young god to wear in battle.’

‘Ask him who bought the other one.’

‘He says a centurion in the Fourth Scythians.’

‘Then you have this one,’ I said. ‘I can’t go into the Twelfth and wear something that even their centurions don’t have. It’ll be hard enough as it is.’

Cadus didn’t want it any more than I did, and for the same reasons. They argued back and forth, volubly. In the end, Cadus, grinning now, said, ‘He wants you to keep it in your pack, for when you are a centurion.’

I laughed aloud, and meant it. ‘Tell him I’ll come back for it if I am ever made centurion,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, a mail shirt would be welcome.’

They wrangled some more, but in the end the little armourer brought out for me a shirt of rings so fine that it rippled like sharkskin in the candlelight. I stretched my arms high above my head, and let it slide down about my ribs and shoulders, link on kissing link.

The fit was perfect. The armourer lifted a shield of polished silver, and after a moment’s embarrassment when I thought he was offering it to me to buy, and started to decline, I realized it was a reflector, like water in a bowl, and that I could see myself with the star-points of the candles all about, and the red glow of the braziers behind.

I stood longer than perhaps was polite, for I had seen myself painted in water, or on the back of my knife, but never like this, whole, sharply, all in the right proportion. I am not, and never will be, as beautiful as Tears, but I could see nowwhat the slant-eyed Hyrcanian men had seen, what women whispered at behind their hands, what my mother had wept to lose when I packed Great-uncle Demetrios’ sword and took my father’s second best gelding and joined the lines of conscripts heading east for war.

Time has worn me now, but then I had black hair, buffed to a high shine by the red glow of the brazier, and a lean nose, well balanced, that might have done good service on a statue in the Acropolis. I had fine, evenly matched brows and a clean jaw, half the width of Cadus’, but not falling back to my throat as some men’s are. The dark, smudged mark on my right cheek that my mother called the Kiss of Apollo was not so visible in the dim light, but still served to draw the eye, to break what would have been too great a symmetry.

And beneath all that, I shimmered silver, as Vologases’ Parthians had done. In all, I was content, and more than content. I paid the gold that was asked for the shirt and did not think myself hard done by.

Nor did I later, when Cadus took me to other places, and we bought a helmet of the new design, raised about the ears and with iron there to stem a sword-blow, made in the factories of Gaul which are the best in the empire. We also bought two swords: a gladius and a longer cavalry blade, both well balanced for my reach; an oval cavalry shield, faced in bull’s hide and red silk; and a square scutum faced in leather for infantry work, for even then I was determined to serve on foot, alongside my fellow legionaries.

Late in the evening, after dinner and wine, we bought ourselves tunics and ten pounds of madder, that we might dye to blood red the entire cohort, possibly the entire legion, for I had started to believe that this wasn’t a disaster, that the XIIth was not so bad and that Cadus and I could singlehandedly turn it into something with a reputation as good as that ofthe Vth, which was now couched in memories of the same cherished flavour as the Macedonian horse meadows.

We were deluded, of course, and we knew it, but I think not even Cadus knew the depths of Hades we were about to plumb when we reached the camp at Raphana.

Raphana, in the plain of Abilene, south-east of Damascus

The permanent legionary camp at Raphana stands half a mile from the town, in the eastern crook of a mountainous ridge known as the Mountains of the Hawk that shelters it from the savage westerly winds, but does nothing to shade it from the sun until late afternoon.

Like all permanent encampments, it was built on a square, with roads that passed north to south and east to west and crossed at right angles in the centre. It had a hospital, an armoury, a quartermaster’s stores, granaries, workshops for the engineers and stables for the horses. It had a parade ground within the walls and another around the outside. I knew the layout already, for each camp was the same wherever it was built, and a legionary comes to know every pace of interior and exterior as well as he knows his lovers’ faces.

We presented there in the late afternoon on the last day of April. The watch guards at the gate gave us the names of the men we must find and waved us through, eyeing our pack mules, our horses — the bay mare had been pampered inDamascus and looked especially fine — our madder-red tunics and in particular my shining shirt of mail.

I loved the feel of it too much to pack it on the mules, and in any case we had decided to present ourselves as fighting men, not as weaponless recruits. I wore my armour, my cavalry sword and my rounded shield, and Cadus wore his helmet with full transverse plume, a thing he had not done since the last legate’s demonstration over eighteen months before.

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion’s Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins. The legions’ respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.

At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched the Scythians’ sign of the goat and the Fulminata’s crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself.

The ache in my gut that had hit me when Pantera first named our destination returned and multiplied. The door ahead of us was closed only by a linen sheet with lead weights stitched haphazardly along the bottom; no bars, no guards, no sign that those inside took any particular care to protect the legions’ wealth stored in the cellars below.

I glanced at Cadus. His face was set fast and hard. He shrugged, and jerked his chin at the doorway and I tugged aside the linen so that he could pass through ahead of me, wretchedly aware that this was the last time I might come under his order.

The clerk of clerks was a short, bulbous man named Munius Cattulinus, whose only narrow parts were his lips and his eyes. He sat behind a desk that was far more solidly built than the hut — I will not dignify it with the name of an office — that was his domain. He was writing when we approached, and, as is normal for small men promoted beyond their capacity, he made us wait before he looked up.