M. Scott - The Eagle of the Twelfth

That night, Pantera bought us wine, and we toasted our time together. I had lost my resentment, my envy, my bitterness. I was grateful to him for taking me out of a winter’s quarters where I would have spent half of the six months marching over the mountains and the other half digging encampments in waist-deep snow. I told him so, and that I was taking back to the Vth Macedonica all I had learned.

And that was when he set his beaker down and looped his hands round his knees and I remembered the inn on the eastern border, and the messenger, and Pantera’s temper.

‘What?’ I said.

Cadus answered for me, slowly, testing. ‘We’re not going back to the Fifth, are we? That was the message?’

‘That was the message.’ Pantera looked down at his thumbs. ‘It was signed by the emperor; there is nothing I can do to countermand it. If it makes you feel any better, they’re sending me to Britain, which, as you so rightly observed, is a swamp surrounded by sea and full of women who fight like harpies.’

‘Perhaps the emperor thinks you can save him money there as you did here.’ I looked down at the table as I spoke, and drew whorls with my fingertip in a puddle of spilled wine. I felt a kind of tugging grief in my chest and charged my voice to sound cheerful. ‘If you can do what you did in Parthia, they’ll make you a hero when you come back to Rome.’

‘If I come back,’ Pantera said. ‘The chances are never high. But even if I do, spies are never heroes. We do our work unseen, behind men’s backs.’

‘What of us?’ Cadus asked.

Pantera raised his head. He was too much a man of honournot to meet Cadus’ eyes, and mine. He said, ‘I am to leave you here and cross overland. You are to journey as swiftly as you may to Raphana where-’

‘Not the Twelfth?’ My hand splayed flat, loudly. The puddle of wine smeared across the table. I may have resented the Vth on principle, but I knew they were one of the most honoured legions in the empire and had some pride in that. The XIIth was quartered in Raphana with the IVth Scythians and both legions were universally despised.

I read the answer in Pantera’s eyes, and his regret, which did nothing to make me feel better.

‘I recommended you for promotion,’ he said. ‘It didn’t occur to me they’d move you. They need good men in the Twelfth to strengthen its heart, and you are both that. At least you are accorded your worth. You’ — he nodded to Cadus — ‘will become first centurion of the sixth cohort, with pay to match.’

First centurion. It had a good ring to it. Of sixty centurions in a legion, only ten were first of their cohorts, paid twice as much as the rest. And you might think that the sixth cohort was a long way down the line, with only four below it, but in reality, the layout of battle meant that the sixth was the veteran cohort, manned by the best of men, who held the rear line in battle and never retreated. If the legion had such men. From what we had heard of the XIIth, its men were worth less than sheep, but even then, you would have to suppose that some must be better than the others.

Pantera’s gaze was turbulent, but Cadus met it squarely and I saw his chin go up. He was the fourth generation of his family to enter the legions: his great-grandfather had fought for Octavian when the Vth Macedonica had first been formed, and then for Antony. His grandfather had died in service as a centurion. His father had enlisted at eighteen and been raised to camp prefect before he retired. Cadus himself had joined ayear younger, lying about his age, and been made centurion by the age of twenty-five. He was a man to polish mud and make it shine. I realized how much I would miss him. Both of them. In an act as unlikely as any that whole six months, I closed my eyes and prayed to join him at least in his cohort, if not his century.

I didn’t see Pantera’s face, but heard him speak from the darkness beyond my closed lids.

‘Demalion,’ he said, ‘will be scribe and clerk to one Aulus Aurelius Lupus, centurion of the first century, second cohort. I suggested also that he be the cohort’s courier, and that he be allowed to keep his horses.’ There was a gap. I had my eyes shut still. He said, ‘Demalion, I’m sorry.’

I was too numb to hear the care in his words, although I thought about it afterwards. At the time, all I could think was that the second cohort was a disaster; weakest of any legion. The new men were put there, the dispensable ones, left to die in the front line of battle, at no cost to anyone. If they survived, then they could move to a new cohort soon after. Small consolation, then, that I might be courier as well as scribe, allowed to keep my horse, to ride when others walked, a promotion that excused me from the outset from the duties every man hated: digging and filling the latrines, digging the ramparts at each new camp, setting and breaking the tents.

But still… the second cohort. The second. In the XIIth. I thought my heart would break.

I heard the slide of linen on skin and snapped open my eyes. Pantera had reached into his tunic. As he brought out his hand, he opened his palm to reveal a small scroll, like the manumission papers of a slave, only smaller. This he held out to me.

‘I’m giving the bay mare to you,’ he said. ‘She will make you a good courier if you are offered the position. Think about that. Nothing is set in stone, and with the Twelfth inSyria, well behind the battle lines, you can carve your own niche to fit what you want of it.’

I took the scroll and Pantera stood, as an officer dismissing his men; he had been that to us. ‘If you bear yourselves in service as well as you have with me, the Twelfth will lose its reputation for ill-luck long before Vologases decides to wage his war. And if you can drill the manoeuvres we have planned into your men until they can do it without thinking, you’ll come to love the feel of battle, and the men you fight with. Nothing is as bad as it seems.’

On his order, we retired to bed, and woke in the morning to find that he had gone without saying goodbye. I’m sure it was easier that way for all of us, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

I named the bay mare Adiabena, after Monobasus, the fox-faced king whose mark was the blue tern.

In my bitterness at Pantera, I considered giving her to my elder brother, who had become the family’s horse-trader since a colt had reared backwards on my father and killed him, but I grew to love her faster than I had any other horse; and while foot soldiers, on the whole, despise those who fight on horseback, and I knew already that I could not afford to set myself apart from the men at whose side I must one day stand, I did not want to part with her yet.

I might not go back to the horse fields of Macedonia, for they would surely hunt me down there, but as far as I could tell there was nothing to stop me mounting my new mare and riding back east, away from Rome and all things Roman. I was comely, I knew that, and I had seen enough of the fat-cheeked, almond-eyed men of Hyrcania casting their gaze at me sideways to know I would have a welcome there, in the land between the leaden sea and the forest. And with my gold — the petty kings had been excessive in their generosity — I could easily have set myself up well as a horse-trader and continued the profession I loved.

I have no idea if Cadus considered the same, or if he simply read my mood, but from the moment Pantera left us he made sure I was so busy obeying orders that I had no time to plan my desertion.

He took us at a fast pace west to the breathtaking mountains of Melitene in Cappadocia. If ever a place was beautiful, it was there; a small town nested about by spring flowers that scattered the high mountains with hazy colour. Goats grazed there on impossible slopes, and the oxherds took their small, deer-like cattle high up to calve away from the hyenas on the plain, and to feed on the lichens and mosses and new sward that grew only in spring and gave the cheese a flavour of mint and citrus.