David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

“And perhaps it did, but only in small part-Pliny refers to the prisoners in Merv, but nothing about the escape east,” Jack said.

“But you talked to me in the helicopter about this, Jack,” Costas said. “About how Roman legionaries might have got to China. The evidence in the Chinese annals.”

“It’s been on my mind for several months now, since I saw Katya.”

“At the Transoxiana Conference?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“Katya’s his new girlfriend,” Rebecca said matter-of-factly to Aysha. “Well, not new, exactly. He met her when he was searching for Atlantis in the Black Sea, but after that she needed some off-time. Then Dad kind of saw someone else for a while, but she was traumatized after another guy she was seeing got spread-eagled. Or something like that. Anyway, she needed some off-time as well.”

Costas coughed, and Jack stared hard at the ground, trying to keep a straight face. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying”-he shot Rebecca a look-“the Chinese connection. In the 1950s an Oxford scholar published a radical theory that Roman mercenaries were used by the Huns of Mongolia in a Chinese border war during the Han period, the Chinese dynasty at the time of the Periplus. The evidence was a reference to a formation that sounded like the Roman testudo, the tortoise, where shields are interlocked above. The battle was in 36 BC. Then a study of the Han annals suggested that Roman prisoners from the battle had been settled in a town in Gansu on the final stretch of the Silk Road toward Xian. Someone noticed that the population of the village today contains a proportion of fair-featured people, and so began the legend of the Roman legionaries in China.”

“What’s the archaeological evidence?” Costas asked.

“There’s nothing definite,” Jack replied. “But you wouldn’t expect to find much. A band of Roman soldiers after decades of imprisonment would have little with them that was recognizably Roman. Escaped soldiers could have made themselves legionary sandals for marching, and possibly rectangular wooden shields, the basis for the testudo theory. But otherwise they would have scavenged what they could on the way, weapons, armor, clothing, anything from Parthian and Bactrian to Sogdian and Han Chinese. But one thing they could have done was leave inscriptions on stone. That’s what got Katya interested. It’s right up her street. The Romans loved making inscriptions, milestones, grave markers, stamps of authority in newly conquered territory. And that’s where archaeology comes into play. A few years ago a Latin inscription was found in a cave complex in southern Uzbekistan, three hundred kilometers to the east of Merv near the border with Afghanistan.” Jack flipped through a notebook he pulled from his pocket, then opened a page with a sketch on it. “Katya drew it for me.” He showed them the letters: LICAP. LG

“Fascinating,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “The first line’s a personal name, probably Licinius. And the second line’s Apollinaris Legio, isn’t it? That’s the legion dedicated to Apollo. That was the Fifteenth legion, wasn’t it, raised by Augustus?”

Jack nodded. “Pretty good for an Egyptologist. I remember your boyhood passion was the Roman army in Germany. But this wasn’t Augustus as emperor. He raised the legion in his earlier guise as Octavian, adoptive successor of Julius Caesar. The Fifteenth Apollinaris that he raised dates from 41 BC, soon after Caesar’s assassination. That’s twelve years after the Battle of Carrhae. Over the next three centuries it spent a lot of its time in the eastern frontiers of the empire fighting the Parthians. One theory has the inscription carved by a legionary captured by the Parthians and used as a border guard, on the far eastern edge of the Parthian Empire.”

“But?” Costas said.

“I’ve never bought the idea of prisoners of war being used as border guards, let alone one of them making an inscription. Katya and I brainstormed it one day walking the walls of Merv, and came up with another hypothesis. This line from the Periplus gives it just that little bit more weight.”

“Spill it, Jack.”

“At the time of Crassus, most legions were raised for specific campaigns and usually disbanded after six years. We know very few of these legions by number or name, and the same numbers might be used repeatedly. Plutarch and Dio Cassius, the main sources for Carrhae, don’t tell us the names of the legions involved. But already a few legions were gaining legendary status, the legions that had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul and Britain in the years before Carrhae. Several of those legions survived to become the most famous of the Imperial army, cherished by Augustus because of their association with Caesar. The Seventh Claudia, the Eighth Augusta, the Tenth Gemina.”

“You’re suggesting the Fifteenth was one of these?”

“The Fifteenth was founded in 41 BC, right? That’s only a couple of years after Caesar was assassinated. The young Octavian was trying to consolidate his strength, and anything that harked back to his illustrious father was seized upon. The historians tell us that a thousand of the cavalry at Carrhae were veterans of Caesar’s campaigns. Why not one of the legions too? Our theory is that the Fifteenth Apollinaris wasn’t founded in 41 BC, it was re founded. We’re suggesting that Octavian deliberately reconstituted one of Caesar’s revered legions, one that had been shamefully lost by the incompetence of Crassus. It would have been a massive show of confidence and of reverence for past glory, exactly the kind of thing Octavian would have done.”

“Not so glorious for the surviving legionaries, chained up in Merv,” Costas said. “It would have written them off.”

“It was too late for them anyway,” Hiebermeyer said. “Even if people knew the defeat was caused by the incompetence of Crassus, the survivors still couldn’t hold their heads high. They would already have been marching with the dead, looking forward only to finding death with honor so they could join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”

“But you’re suggesting that some escaped prisoner was not above inscribing the name of his legion in a cave on the trek east,” Costas said.

“For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone.”

“So they were still loyal to Rome.”

“They had fought for themselves, for their comrades, as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among them, primus inter pares. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter.”

“And the legion?” Costas asked.

“The legion was sacred,” Hiebermeyer replied. “That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the contubernium, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other br other, frater”

“So losing the eagle was bad, big-time,” Rebecca cut in.

“The worst. A battle they could lose, Crassus they couldn’t care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families.”

“Do you think they fragged him, Crassus?” Costas said.

“Crassus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it assisted suicide.”

“These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough,” Aysha said.

“There are always a few,” Jack said. “Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Crassus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands.”