M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

Presently, when I had shown no sign of joining him, he looked up at me again. ‘A friend of mine died recently, a philosopher and a great friend to Rome. He asked me a question in a letter sent after his death and now I ask it of you. “Who would you name emperor if you had all the power in the world?”’

‘Cadus,’ I said, without hesitation.

Pantera laughed, not unkindly. ‘Well, yes, but I think not even we four could get a Greek son of a centurion on to the throne. A man must have at least a scintilla of breeding for the senate to accept him.’

‘A man who had the legions of the east marching at his back could be bred by a donkey on a mule and the senate would have no choice but to accept him,’ Horgias pointed out. ‘But Cadus wouldn’t want to be emperor; he’s happy leading his cavalry. You were asking the wrong question: not who would we name, but who would accept it, did we have the power to make such an offer?’

‘Who then?’ Hypatia asked. ‘Who would you offer it to, and think that they might accept?’

‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘Other than Cadus, I don’t know anybody left alive who’s good enough, and if I was I would walk away. Nero kills those who oppose him, and I have better reasons to die.’

Pantera stared at me oddly for a moment or two. ‘Let’s hope there is somebody ready to try now that Corbulo is gone,’ he said.

He left then, and we didn’t see him again for over a month and when we did, everything changed one final time, and this time, something did happen.

It was a morning in late winter or early spring; that time between the seasons when frequent storms boiled the waters of Caesarea’s harbour and only the maddest of the fishermen dared set sail. Gulls nested in the high towers of the lighthouse and the ewes were close to lambing in the pastures outside the town.

Horgias and I had spent freely of Pantera’s gold and bought a dozen unbroken two-year-old colts and fillies brought in from the Syrian lands to the east. They were well matched, well grown, strong in wind and limb, but prone to the fits of hot blood and nerves, by which all their kind are afflicted, that make them such a challenge in the early days of riding.

That we might not be overlooked, we were working them on the rising land outside the city, below the aqueduct that brings water down from the mountains. I sat a particularly sharp blue roan filly and was trying to steady her so that I could shoot my bow — in truth it was Pantera’s bow, but I will for ever think of it as mine — from her back. Actually, I was trying to repeat his feat of hitting two targets out of three while firing backwards at the gallop. Using four differentyoungsters, I had hit sixty-eight out of one hundred and thirteen tries, and was quietly pleased.

I came to the end of the rising ground, where we had set a cord across the route to mark a turning point. I spun the filly, careful of her mouth, turned to look at the last three targets — and saw Pantera leaning against the last, chewing on a stalk of grass that he must have picked up further down the hill.

‘That was well done,’ he said.

I felt myself flush. Of all the men I had not wanted to see me try and fail, Pantera was the first.

He raised one shoulder in a kind of apology. ‘It took me two years of practice,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hit one in thirty the first few times, and that was on a steady gelding.’

I glowered: I didn’t want his praise any more than I wanted his advice. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘Vespasian is in Antioch,’ he said; just that. I frowned, not knowing the name.

‘The new governor of Syria.’ Pantera pushed himself upright. ‘The man who will be your new general, when you finally reinstate your legion. He has arrived here from Greece.’

‘He sailed? In this weather?’ I had thought he sounded stupid. This confirmed it.

Horgias was on a fine dark colt, the colour of burnt almonds. He brought him over, riding with his legs, his hands barely a feather’s weight touch on the reins.

‘He can’t have sailed in,’ he said. ‘The sea lanes won’t open for another month. He must have marched overland.’

Pantera inclined his head. ‘He did.’

‘He came overland from Greece?’ Not a complete idiot, then. Whatever route he took, that journey could not have been a good one, nor easily accomplished. ‘Why are you telling us this? He’s the second son of a tax collector wholets marketeers throw turnips at him. He’s finished before he starts.’

Pantera regarded me for a while, running his tongue round his teeth. ‘You may choose to believe that,’ he said at length. ‘But you are required to present yourselves to him in Antioch by the month’s end. I suggest you go in legionary uniform.’

In uniform, therefore, we presented ourselves to the centurion of the Xth who stood guard outside the door of the general’s quarters in Antioch five days later.

As she had predicted, Hypatia had left the night before us, heading overland for Alexandria. I had been surprisingly sorry to see her go. Pantera had accompanied us on the road to Antioch, with — of course — Mergus and Estaph, Moshe and Simeon as our outriders. I was coming to think of them as I might think of another man’s hounds; safe and dependable, if sometimes irritating.

Arriving, we were clean and sober and tired and wary of everyone and everything. We were angry, too, because the thing Pantera had omitted to mention was that he was also required to present himself to the new general, and he had gone in first.

And he had been in for an hour and had not yet come out.

A gong sounded from inside. The centurion unhitched his gaze from the horizon on which it had been resting and stared at Horgias and me as if we had recently crawled out of the sewers.

‘You were with the Twelfth at Beth Horon?’

I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

‘And yet you lived?’

I sucked in a breath. Horgias leaned in to my shoulder and said, ‘By the gods’ gift we lived, that we might recover our Eagle and the honour of our legion.’ He left no room for question or comment.

The door opened. Pantera walked out, and did not favour us with his gaze. The centurion held us both a moment longer, then cracked a salute and let us in.

We stepped from the cool damp of a Syrian spring into the warmth of a hypocaust-heated room. The dry air was scented with smokes of sandalwood, rosemary and something else peppery that caught the back of my nose and made me sneeze, but not unpleasantly.

A slave took our riding cloaks and our swords and led us down a long corridor paved in marble, with friezes on the walls of other generals in other times; Gallus wasn’t there, nor Corbulo, and it occurred to me that perhaps all the men depicted in such detail on horseback or on foot, defeating Parthians, Syrians and Hebrews, had never truly existed, but were safely imaginary.

Closed double doors ten feet wide kept the new general safe. Another centurion guarded it, from the Vth. He didn’t ask if we had survived Beth Horon. He didn’t speak at all, but only nodded and rapped and let us through to the steward inside who hurried us on to stand before a plain wooden desk such as senators and procurators carry with them on long journeys, and behind it a plain wooden camp stool with a canvas seat and no back, and seated on that… a man who looked and smelled as if he had just walked in from a hard-fought campaign, or a difficult mountain crossing, which can often amount to the same thing.

There was no incense to be found in here, only the stained air of leather and sweat-sweetened iron and the subtle tones of wood smoke that cling to a man from morning to night when he lives with the legion.