Empire of the Eagle

2

Past Quintus and his men the Parthians marched, almost at parade pace, toward the front of the ragged column, where Crassus's staff would no doubt try to prop their commander up into a semblance of decent bearing. Rustles and faint splashes told Quintus that officers were turning their troops over to centurions and slipping forward, to be in on whatever council their commander might hold.

Quintus saw no reason to believe that his equestrian face would be any more welcome in defeat than it had been in prosperity. And the men...

Even the auxiliaries had drawn close, seeking the protection of an officer of Rome. Such protection as it was. Persians, this knot of them. Horsemen condemned to walk, like Rome's own mules. Traitors, perhaps, did Rome not war with Parthia. But loyal thus far.

"Forget you outrank a centurion." Quintus had had it drummed into him in training. "When you don't know what to do, forget your fancy armor—" not that Quintus's harness was anything to boast of, "—and ask him what is to be done."

Pride and honor had died under The Surena's arrows, but not good counsel. He found Rufus and hunkered down beside him.

"They've brought The Surena in," he muttered. It did not seem at all strange to be reporting to the older man. Rufus.

The older man shrugged, then turned thumbs down. "Morituri te salutamus," he remarked, then spat. "Doesn't look as if I'll get that wooden sword now, let alone my twenty acres and my mule. Damn. Mule would have been easier to train than some of these boys."

"You think too, then, that this is surrender." Quintus didn't even bother making it a question.

"I think our guide was bought cheaper than a Tiburtine whore," muttered the centurion. "And I think that we're about to see a bargain struck."

"You think they'll offer terms?" The younger man kept his question low-voiced.

Rufus nodded once, curtly. "Unless they want us all dead. And they could have had that a time before if they'd had the mind to. We pass under the slaves' yoke probably," he spat. "Better off dead—all of us."

Voices rose from the direction that the proconsul had taken, angry, threatening. Crassus had called his officers about him. Predictably enough, Quintus had not been included. He could imagine Lucilius, as he had several times before, telling him, "We couldn't find you," as if tending to his soldiers were somehow a dereliction of duty and reason enough for excluding the man who was not of their inner circle.

"What do you think's going on?"

The centurion grimaced as if he wanted to spit again. "You saw. The Parthians have offered terms. Now we'll have to have the noble talk about honor. Nobles' talk. It'll probably take all night. In the end. Crassus will deal." Not "the proconsul." Not any one of a number of titles that a centurion should use for his commander. "It's his way."

Quintus could not help but look up sharply.

"Pardon, sir. Strange words for the likes of me. But they'd be the first to tell you. I haven't got honor like..." He jerked his chin toward the sound of the conflict.

"You want to know about my honor? It's all about you. Sleeping or talking, or it's—you there, I warned you not to drink! And as long as any of that looks to me and obeys me, I have my honor. When they're gone, I can think about dying. But not till then. Meanwhile, we wait."

He settled with a sigh that had more of exhaustion than aggravation to it.

You will never see the land now. At least, though, you leave no one desolate.

Quintus's temples throbbed with new punishments. Too many whispers in the night. Too many sounds in the marshes. The water and the weeds and the trees had murmured by Tiberbank, not whispered this way. And there were other voices too. Hush, they murmured at him. Be comforted. And, most seductive of all and the most mad, Live.

He still wore his child's bulla when he had found the little bronze statue that might have been new in the days when the Tarquins ruled Latium. Even now he carried it with him, a solemn little thing with a face worn away under its peaked bronze cap, its stubby arms upraised and bearing torches, its feet eternally dancing, but solemn somehow. Even now he remembered how the earth-warmed metal had felt as he clawed it from the earth and cleaned it. In the next moment, he almost dropped it. A voice, praising him, brought him upright. Yet, when he looked around wildly, the only disturbance was the undergrowth he himself had rustled; the sun glinted off the rippling water.

He had not fled ... not quite. His grandfather's face rose before him—practical, strong, sure of his rights. His grandfather would frown at a boy who did not master his fears. So he kept the little statue with him. And he had forced himself to return to the spot the next day, unwilling to be run off by what might be no more than his own fancies. Strangely enough, it was the memory of that first all-but-flight from the voices he imagined that had sustained him during the long, long hours in the shrinking square, while the Parthians charged and charged, their banners swooping behind them and turning the sunlight into fire.

The fear of madness, of religious madness at that, made death in battle a cleanliness that, if not to be sought, could be welcomed.

He remembered his fear beside the river and his conquest of fear. A voice had spoken to him, true enough, from the rushes and the trees. It was the genius loci, the spirit of the place, as much a guardian of him and his land as the lares and penates to whom his grandfather, attended by Quintus's father, gravely sacrificed. The voice was deep, sleepy, like bees about their hive on a hot summer's day: honey, strength, and a little fear commingled. It was a woman's voice, not mother or sister or nurse, not any voice Quintus had ever heard; and it made him want to be taller and stronger and wiser than he was.

He feared such voices, of course. He was a Roman who trusted very little in gods. But he did not fear that voice; it was part of his soul. An odd thought—had you asked him before he heard it, he would have sworn by all the hardheaded Roman gods that he did not care about such things.

Day after day, like the sort of expensive Greek pedagogue his family would never have approved even if they could have afforded one, the genius loci taught him of the land, of the waves of men and women who had strode across it, bled for it, and loved it. One day, he took his own dagger—his first, and a gift—and slashed his finger, letting his blood too drip into the soil. That day, he swore he had seen a figure reflected beside him in the pool— dark hair, honey-dark skin, flickering in and out of his line of vision so quickly he never knew for sure what he had seen. A wave of love and acceptance washed over him. It had felt like his family's approval. It had also felt like the dreams that had, this close to his coming to manhood, begun to haunt his sleep. No matter: The land was his, and he was the land's, whether or not he ever saw it again.

And now it looked as if he would not. Never mind. Even if he left his bones in Syria, a part of him lived forever in the grasses outside Rome.

"This one will make a fanner," his grandsire said approvingly at a supper as frugal as that of their tenants. Chickpeas. Some lettuces. Cheese. Very little meat. His father seemed pleased. His mother, like the good woman that she was, sat and tended her wool.

Quintus slipped a hand into his tunic to feel the small bronze statue. It seemed to warm at the praise. He thought then that his life was beginning. But that was the evening he first heard the name "Sulla." He heard it more in the days to come until he came to hate the sound. Often he heard it coupled with the name "Marius," spoken by his father in a tone of reverence that rivaled the way he addressed to his grandsire.

In the days that followed, Quintus's bulla lay upon the house altar. Wrapped in an unfamiliar toga virilis, he stood beside his grandsire to watch his father march away. The old man kept a hawk's dignity, but he looked as worn as the tombs on the Via Appia they passed on their way into the City of Seven Hills. Even Quintus's bronze figurine, frozen in its ancient dance, had been no more weathered. But six months later, he saw how much older his grandsire could look. A man had come to the door, his tunic poor, his body twisted by ill-healed wounds. Not the sort of man a gentleman wanted visiting him, Quintus thought, until he saw the care with which the stranger limped over the threshhold, careful not to stumble and thus bring bad luck to the house.

He could not have brought more ill-luck to the house had he fallen flat. The news he brought was the death of Quintus's father.

"Did he die well?" asked the old man.

The visitor nodded.

"Then I have a son yet," he said.

Quintus had clasped his hand about his talisman. It paused in its dance, and one of the bronze torches stung his palm as if it were in truth alight. His mother, who had lingered to hear, had grasped her spindle so hard that blood dripped onto the bleached wool. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the old man's hand forestalled her lamentations. It shook once, then closed, clasping the hand of his son's friend, urging him to accept what hospitality the house could muster.

"Leave that wailing to hired mourners," he commanded. He was paterfamilias. He was obeyed.

No body was ever returned to the farmhouse near the Tiber, just as none would come back from Carrhae. His father slept gods only knew where, not in the roadside tomb carved with a mantling Roman eagle rather than mourning figures. Some whispered that his father had died a rebel and it were best to cut the ceremonies short or omit them altogether: His grandsire stood by the tomb in his toga, dark for mourning, refusing to veil his head with a fold of cloth as anyone had a right to at the funeral of his only son. Perforce, Quintus too did not cover his head or face. He fought to keep his mouth from jerking in grief, trying to convince himself that that battle meant as much to him as the wars between Marius and Sulla that had robbed him of a father and his country of its peace.

Like two dogs, he thought, as curs fight on the paving stones, who fought over a stolen haunch until both beasts were bleeding and the meat was spoiled.

Whenever he might, he escaped to the river. The voice he had come to trust crooned comfort for his loss, a comfort that warmed him even as he returned to a cold hearth and a mother whose life turned feverish, flaming high and fitful like a dancer's torch, then guttering out as if it were thrust into sand.

They had few slaves left. Even Quintus's grandsire took his turn at tending her. But she died, and it seemed to Quintus that his dark mourning toga was made of lead, not his mother's wool. Even the coos of the doves by the riverbank seemed to mourn her.

"She was a good, thrifty woman," said his grandsire. "I have my son's son yet. And my land."

Quintus's mother had served him well and loved his son well, but the old man did not weep. One weakness only he showed: that Decia, who loved her husband so well that she could not live without him, should not lie alone in the family tomb, but instead sleep in peace beneath the olive trees of their farm. She would hear the doves and the voices, Quintus thought. He took comfort from that, if nothing else.

The day after that the orders came: They were displaced, evicted from the farm they had held since the Tarquins ruled.

Come with me, Quintus implored the shadowy figure in the water.

I cannot.

I will win back these lands, he vowed.

Whatever comes, you will see me again.

They had sold his mother's jewelry that should have gone to Quintus's wife, if ever he should be able now to marry and if any decent gens would welcome him. They had taken space in one of the insulae within the City itself, and the old man had declared his intent of pleading his case to some of the greatest men in the Senate.

Life as a client for such as he—as well ask the cliff to melt as the old eagle to bend his neck and smile. Quintus knew that shuttling between the insula and his patron's house on the Palatine shortened his grandfather's life as surely as a fever. It had been harder to be a sycophant, Quintus thought, than to lose at Carrhae.

With each attempt at a bow, each delayed petition, the knowledge came upon him. Their family had no skill at this type of battle. They would never see their farm again.

He thought his grandsire knew it too.

Neither ever spoke the thought aloud.

In the end, the old man had been relieved to die. He had secured for Quintus the little that he could—an appointment as a tribune in Crassus's service. Perhaps the grandson's more supple back could secure what he could not—a return to favor and their old home. If not, it was honorable service, or an honorable death.

Shouts boomed out, echoing in the marsh like a Greek actor's tragic speech, made louder by the mask. The voices held an edge of rage, made uglier by panic.

Quintus flicked a glance around his pitiful command. His men sat, heads between knees. Even in the dark, he could see that their faces wore the glazed, far-away look of men about to turn children again, retreating from an intolerable world.

Rufus met his eyes and shrugged. His hand fell to his gladius. If the men could not or would not march when the order came, it would be the blade for them, as it had been earlier.

Quintus could not permit that. And there was something he could do. At the very least, he could gather information and perhaps use it to keep his men alive a little longer.

Pulling away from the centurion, he crept forward, his boots making sucking noises in the marsh, chafing at his aching feet. He thought to discard them, then changed his mind.

He could be no more welcome at this staff meeting than he had been at any of the others. Lucilius would raise both supercilious brows. Someone else might sniff, as if at manure brought within the Senate chamber. Crassus might damn him with a frown.

Surprising, wasn't it, this close to death, how little any of that mattered?

There was no Via Principalis, no orderly encampment in the marsh. Quintus wondered if Crassus had ever seen the need for such a thing, even when he was victorious. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to set up a tent for the proconsul. It leaned drunkenly against some brush and a half-drowned tree, and every time fresh shouts erupted, it appeared to sag. Even the wings of the Eagle on guard outside seemed to droop as if the standard itself was ashamed.

It had been one thing for Quintus to approach the proconsul enthroned in the midst of a proper camp, with all the other patricians around him, their stares casting him back to his days as a client, cringing on the Palatine. This shabbiness no more meant "proconsul" or "Rome" than some nameless fat man in robes, wallowing drunk in an alley, was the Pontifex Maximus.

They were all going to die, anyhow, weren't they? He was damned if he would observe the false niceties of rank even in death. Squaring his shoulders as a tribune ought to do, he pushed into the sorry tent, drew himself into the salute...

...and stared straight into Hades.

He had thought on the battlefield outside Carrhae that he was a witness to nefas, the unspeakable, incomprehensible evil that all Romans fled as they fled impiety. Nefas was not just slaughter: Had that been so, Crassus's earlier campaign against Spartacus might have defined it, and the gods would have punished him.

But this ... this betrayal!

The Surena stood quietly as one of his men—Quintus would have bet the land he no longer owned that the prince could, but would not speak perfectly adequate Latin—finished his translation of his master's words.

"And he offers you truce and friendship on behalf of Orodes the Great King..." a howl of outrage rose from the assembled officers, drowning out the Parthian's other titles, "...in return for surrender."

Crassus forced himself to his feet. He was sixty years old and always had the best of everything—food, wine, protection. Why shouldn't he have looked well-preserved, the old mummy? Now, grief and—Quintus had to admit—fear made him look years older than Quintus's grandfather at his death. A torch guttered, then flared up, showing Crassus's face in every detail. Almost as red as the torchlight, it was contorted with a coward's rage. Under the thinning hair, tousled out of its usual careful trim, veins throbbed at the commander's temples.

If he died now, we might escape with our lives, Quintus thought, then despised himself for it.

The torchlight picked out Lucilius's sharp features, intent on his master, and the tall Parthian was watching him too as he might have watched an old dog soil the floor. Put him down now or wait? The question seemed to play about The Surena's scornful eyes and lips.

"Surrender?" Crassus demanded.

"Say, rather, you agree to return to your own place after swearing suitable oaths of friendship to my king." The Surena's words were as silken as his banners, and as deadly. His eyes flicked over to Vargontius and paused: brief respect for the way his twenty surviving men—out of four cohorts—had tried to fight their way through the Parthian ranks to their fellows. The Surena had even ordered his troops to withdraw, a vast honor guard, as the twenty limped into Carrhae.

"I will see you all in Hades first!" Crassus shouted. "And go there myself!"

"That might be arranged," remarked Cassius, never raising his voice. "Out there—" he gestured. "The men are angry. They didn't like leaving the wounded for our friend here to kill. They didn't like it at all."

The mutiny of a Legion—nefas such as Quintus had never imagined. And yet, he knew how close his men were to turning on their leaders. Desertion was better than mutiny, he thought and half-turned to go back to his men. Perhaps they could escape the swamp—but for what? To flee into the desert? Even properly equipped, his Legion had found the desert to be an ordeal. And thirst, they said, was an excruciating way to die.

As painful as a cross?

He might be out of choices.

The torch sputtered again, casting the features of Lucilius into high relief. He leaned forward with the intentness of a cur watching two larger dogs fight for mastery of the pack. Once he saw a winner begin to emerge, he would dart in and slash the hamstrings of his enemy. Lucilius's eyes shifted from Crassus to his officer, flashed to The Surena, then back to the Romans. He gestured at the man leaning on his shoulder, the companion of a hundred dice games, and the man got up. Quintus backed up against the entrance to the tent, but the man slipped out beneath the soiled fabric.

Was he going to tell the men? Rufus had calculated that some ten thousand yet survived. Some might die still of wounds or fever. Even so, there ought to be enough for one last, bloody fight. And such a battle would take out the Parthians who now watched them. Quintus thought he could die content if he could wash out the contempt in The Surena's eyes with blood.

Voices began to rise from around the tent. The Surena barely raised a long eyebrow.

Cassius leaned forward, slamming his fists on the table before the proconsul. Poorly balanced, it went over, spilling the wine—thick and unwatered—into the trodden muck. The winey mud looked like the ground outside Carrhae once 20,000 Romans had fallen.

"I say we accept the terms. The Senate's far away. Caesar's far away. We have no choice."

"And I say, I'll see you all in Hades first!" Crassus screamed. "Traitor and son of a traitor and a whore!"

"By all the gods, I won't take that from a coward!" the staff officer shouted back. "You and your son have destroyed us all."

With surprising strength, Crassus pushed the younger man aside and strode out of the tent. His staff followed, then split up in several directions. Some, Quintus knew, would disappear, not to return.

The others surrounded the proconsul, shouting, waving their fists. One or two made as if to draw swords and rush at the Parthians. But The Surena shook his head, and they fell back.

Up ahead, the proconsul flinched at last from the anger of his staff.

"We have to have a chance!" A wail, in accented Latin, from one of the auxiliaries. Someone threw a punch, and a scuffle ensued as the auxiliaries fought among themselves. The scuffle ended when half their number fled into the marsh.

"God send they sink," muttered Rufus.

Pleas and imprecations. Quintus flinched as a centurion, a quiet man whom he had never known well, simply opened his tunic to show his general his old scars, gotten in a lifetime of service. He would not beg: He simply wanted a chance to live out what was left of his life.

Crassus's eyes looked over at Vargontius, the officer The Surena had approved, appealing for some stroke of magic. Silently, the veteran turned his back.

Quintus heard scuffling, the snicks and hisses of weapons drawn, and over the tumult, Rufus's voice shouting, "I'll gut any of you who lifts a finger. Hold! You, gods rot you, don't let that Eagle fall in the mud."

Such pockets of discipline like that were rare. Thanks to Lucilius and his friends, news of the proposed terms had swept the Legions like blazing naphtha. If Crassus did not accept, he was a dead man.

And if he did accept?

Quintus knew what his grandfather would have said. He should have fallen on his sword before he ever saw this day.

The proconsul looked about desperately for a distraction.

"You!" he snarled at the guide who had led them from Carrhae's walls by night and into the marsh. "You led us astray. You sold yourself!"

It was as bad as ever Quintus had thought. A trick, entirely a trick: The guide had been as much in the Parthian pay as the yellow-skinned barbarians who had fired arrow after arrow at the Romans as they stood in the sun, unable to rest, unable to drink, and after a time unable to do aught but die. How could anyone ever have suspected otherwise, even for an instant? What Asiatics would ever help the Romans? Romans were for battening off of, then betraying them—even as the easterners might do to one of their own. He knew that well. He might have said as much, but who would have listened to him, a mere equestrian, when patricians, from Crassus's now-dead son down to the merest aristocratic time-server, leaned on his shoulder, ready to tell him what he wanted to hear?

The guide cringed, reeled under a blow from a ringed fist that sent blood spurting from mouth and nose. Then, drawing himself up, he spat.

Abruptly, Rufus appeared between the guide and the mob that had once been members of Rome's proudest Legions. Beside him was the signifer, Eagle proudly aloft. It seemed to glint with a light all its own. Even as Quintus watched, that light intensified—and then, as a man drew his dagger with a scream of rage against the traitor guide, the light blazed out.

When the red streaks and black splotches faded from Quintus's field of vision, he saw a man down on the ground, nursing a burnt hand. And the guide lay face down in the water, the smell of burnt flesh and singed, wet plants rank about him.

Odd. You would have thought the guide's body would have made a louder splash as it fell. He floated, face down. Quintus could imagine the staring eyes, the blood, trailing from the treacherous mouth. They were all treacherous here, all the easterners.

"No loss," someone muttered. "The Harpies spit on his liver."

Quintus stumbled forward, dimly aware that earth ought to be sprinkled on the dead man, a coin placed in his mouth.

"Let him rot," came a vengeful whisper.

That was more impiety. He would pay for it: They all would.

Crassus gestured. Out. That way. The Surena took his place with his men at the head of a ragged and very dispirited file that prepared to escape the marsh with even less honor than it had used to enter it.

And following the Parthians, the luster of its metal tarnished, was the Eagle of Quintus's Legion.