David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

“Maybe we are becoming gods.” “The gods are our brothers who have gone before.” When Licinius heard Fabius speak he still heard the voice of a young man, but when he looked he saw a man ravaged by the years, gray-stubbled and hoary, halfway to Elysium already. The day before, blind drunk and freshly branded, they had shorn their hair and beards, preparing for the final battle. They had not expected to survive the canyon, and when they joined the others in Elysium they had wanted to look right. Licinius felt his scalp. It was rough, hard, like every surface of his body, like the freshly sawn marble he had once traced his fingers over in their workshop in Rome. He felt the weals around his wrists, as thick as elephant hide. Thirty-four years in chains. They were survivors, but he felt they were living ghosts, men whose souls had departed that day on the scorching battlefield of Carrhae.

“You are remembering? The battle?” Fabius said quietly.

“Always.”

The expedition had been ill-fated from the start. Crassus had been their general. Crassus who saw himself as equal to Caesar. Licinius snorted. Crassus the Banker, Crassus who had only wanted gold. They had despised him, loathed him even more than their Parthian enemy. When they crossed the river Euphrates, there had been peals of thunder, crashes of lightning, and a fearful wind, half-mist, half-hurricane. Then the sacred eagle standard of the legion had turned face-about, of its own accord. Of its own accord. And yet they had marched on. It was not the defeat that was unbearable, it was defeat without honor. Crassus, too weak to die by his own sword, had to be slain by his tribune. Poor Caius Paccianus, primus pilus of the first cohort, whose fate it was to bear the closest likeness to Crassus, had been paraded around by the Parthians in a woman’s red robe, trumpeters and lictors on camels ahead of him, the dripping heads of Roman dead suspended from axes all around. The Parthians had filled his throat with molten gold in mockery of Crassus, a man who had thought that pay and promises of gold were the only guarantee of a soldier’s loyalty.

But that was not the worst. The worst was to lose the eagle, ripped off its standard and taken away before their eyes. From then on they were ghosts, all of them, the living and the dead.

“Does the trader give us any news of Rome?” Fabius asked quietly. “You’re the only one who can speak Greek. I heard Greek sounds when he was pleading with us.”

“He’s been many times to Barygaza, a place on the Erythraean Sea where traders come from Egypt. That’s where the Sogdian caravan was heading, and that’s where he learned his Greek.” Licinius paused, not sure how Fabius would take it. “There is some news, my friend, about Rome.”

“Ah.” Fabius leaned forward. “Glorious news, I hope.”

“He says the wars are long over. He says there is a new peace.” He put his hand on Fabius’ shoulder. “And he says Rome is now ruled by an emperor.”

“An emperor?” Fabius looked hard at him, his eyes ablaze. “Julius Caesar. Our true general. He’s the only one. It must be him.”

Licinius shook his head. “Caesar is long gone. You and I both know that, in our hearts. And if he’d become emperor, he’d have come looking for us. No, it’s someone new. Rome has changed.”

Fabius looked downcast. “Then I will seek Caesar in Elysium. I will serve no other as emperor. I have seen what emperors do, in Parthia. We are citizen-soldiers.”

Licinius held out his hands again, gnarled, scarred, caked in blood and grime, the ends of two fingers missing. “Citizens,” he said ruefully. “Thirty-five years ago, maybe. Are these still the hands of a sculptor?”

Fabius leaned over on one elbow. “You remember Quintus Varius, who the Parthians made foreman of the southern sector of the walls? First centurion of the third cohort? He’d been a builder on the Bay of Naples before joining up, knew all about concrete. He persuaded the Parthian vizier that the dust that choked us for all those years was the key ingredient of concrete, like the volcanic dust of Naples. Of course it was nothing of the sort. Varius was executed years ago, some trivial thing, but we put that dust with our mortar ever since. Those walls we spent thirty-four years building won’t last another ten. You mark my words. They’ll crumble to dust. That’s a citizen-soldier for you. Brings all his skills as a civilian to bear.”

“And a citizen-soldier can go back to civilian life.”

“What are you thinking?”

“The trader said something else.”

“Spill it, Licinius.”

“He said this emperor has negotiated peace with the Parthians. He said he had seen a new coin, celebrating the peace as a great triumph. He said the eagles have been returned.”

Fabius shook his head angrily. “Impossible. He’s spinning you tales. He knew who we were, knew about our looted Parthian treasure. Word must have spread about us along the caravan route. He was eager to please, and thought a tall tale of an emperor would satisfy us. Well, he was wrong. We should have butchered him along with the others.”

“Then we would never have got here. He guided us through the canyon.”

“We would have died fighting. Death with honor.”

“If the eagles have been returned, then we can return too, with honor.”

Fabius paused. “The eagles would be this emperor’s triumph, not ours. We would be an embarrassment.” He peered at Licinius. “But I know you too well, brother. You are thinking of your son.”

Licinius said nothing, but squinted at the rising orb above the eastern horizon, casting a shimmering orange sparkle on the surface of the lake. His son. A son who would not know him, who had been little more than a babe in arms when he had marched off A son who would have carried on in his father’s trade, as generations had done before. Licinius thought about what Fabius had said. I have seen what emperors do. Emperors did not just enslave and terrorize. They also built palaces, temples. There would be work for a sculptor, in this new Rome.

“Don’t be deluded,” Fabius said. “If what the trader says is true, the world has changed. Rome has forsaken us. We only have ourselves. The band of brothers. Everything else is gone.”

“My son might still be alive.”

“Your son is probably in Elysium by now. He too may have become a citizen-soldier, fought and died with honor. Think of that.”

There was a muffled yell from somewhere beyond the hill. Fabius grabbed his sword handle, but Licinius stayed him. “It’s only the trader. He’s chained up.”

“I thought you’d killed him. That’s what you came up here to do.”

“I wanted to see that he was telling the truth. That the boat wasn’t some kind of wreck.”

“Tell me again what he said. We need to set off now. Dawn is upon us.”

“He said that where the great orb rose, glistening, was Chryse, the land of gold. To get there, you must first cross the lake, then go over a pass, then traverse the desert, a place worse than anything we have yet endured, that sucks men in and swallows them up forever. You follow the camel caravans east, and you come to a great city called Thina. And there the bravest will find the empire of heaven. All the riches of the world await those who can defeat the demons that had stalked the trader, a treasure awaiting us, his new masters.”

The trader had talked too much. He had told them all they needed to hear. He had kept nothing back. That had been his mistake. He had not been used to bargaining with the Fates.

The trader had told Licinius something else, while he was chaining him up. To the south, due south, was another route. Great mountains stood in the way, then the kingdom of Bactria, and beyond that a mighty river, the river Alexander the Great had crossed. And south from there, for untold miles, through jungle and along coast, was a route to a place called Ramaya, where there were Romans. There were untold dangers. Always beware the tiger, he had said. But at this place, like Barygaza, the goods of trade-the riches from Chryse and Thina, the serikon and the precious jewels, the jade and the cassia and the malabathron-would go in ships across the Erythraean Sea, and from there you could make your way to Rome. To Rome.