But she stopped, took a deep breath, and with a mischievous smile handed him first the helmet and then a shining red apple, her fingers brushing the leathery palm of his left hand as she placed it there.
‘I must congratulate you on your horsemanship, tribune, and my father on his choice of gift. Truly she is a wonderful horse.’
He returned her smile, feeling like a boy again for the first time since he had left Rome for Britain to join the Twentieth. ‘The finest I have ever ridden, lady, and unless I am mistaken the choice of gift was not only your father’s.’ He accepted the fruit and Khamsin scented the apple and nuzzled his fingers until he handed it over. ‘A horse like Khamsin never forgets generosity,’ he added chivalrously, and more quietly, ‘and like Khamsin I will never forget this gift.’
She heard the catch in his voice and a shadow fell over her eyes. ‘Is it always like this when a woman sends her man away to war?’
His heart tripped at the phrase her man. ‘Seneca called it “this magnificent melancholy”. At the time I dismissed him as unduly sentimental because he was a fat old man who had never gone to war. But that wasn’t true. He had served on the Rhine frontier as a tribune.’
‘This magnificent melancholy.’ She ran the words over her tongue and liked them. ‘Yes, I can understand that. A mixture of feelings. Pride and sadness. Loss and…’ She couldn’t finish, but her eyes filled and again he felt that surge of need.
‘Tribune.’ There could be no doubt that Corbulo had seen what had passed between Valerius and his daughter, but the tone was almost kindly. ‘Your command awaits you. Work them hard and use them well. When you have fixed your defensive positions come to my headquarters tonight and we will see whether you can master Caesar’s Tower as well as you can master a horse.’
He nodded and offered Domitia his hand.
As they walked away, Serpentius ran up grinning. ‘Now that,’ he said with enormous understatement, ‘is a horse.’
XXVII
For a frontier town, Zeugma, a sprawling community of mud brick and marble built across a low hill which sloped gently down to the Euphrates, was a surprisingly sophisticated place. Or perhaps not so surprisingly. Hanno, who had proved a wellspring of knowledge and experience during the six-day march from Antioch, informed Valerius that the city was another creation of Alexander’s general Seleucus. It had been built more than three centuries earlier, and until it had been conquered by Pompey the Great it had been known, like Antioch’s port, by his name.
‘Now it is Zeugma, the place of the bridge.’ The Syrian gestured towards the crossing, which was of a construction the Roman had never seen before. A bridge of perhaps twenty stone-built arches stretched two thirds of the way across the river and ended a hundred paces from the near bank. The gap between was filled by ten or twelve sturdy boats which carried a jointed wooden platform to complete the link to the bank. Hanno noticed his interest. ‘For two reasons,’ he said, holding up scarred fingers. ‘First, when the river floods the prefect in charge of the bridge will order the pontoons to be detached. If he is fortunate, they will swing back to the bank and he will recover them. If he is unfortunate, the river will wash them away. But he will only have lost part of the bridge and they are easily replaced, whereas if it was entirely of stone he would lose much more and it would be a major project to rebuild. Second, in time of war the pontoons can be removed and any invasion force from the east must find another place to cross.’
‘But we are at war now,’ Valerius pointed out.
‘Yes,’ Hanno grinned, his white teeth shining in the dark face. ‘But we are the invading force. The pontoons will remain in place until we return, either in triumph or, may Mars preserve us, pursued, as the lion sees off the jackal, by King Vologases’ cataphracts, his armoured cavalry.’
Valerius felt a shiver of unease as he looked down at the narrow structure and imagined a defeated army packed on to the narrow crossing with the Parthian army pressing it on every side. Arrows sheeting the sky. Carnage and chaos. Men fighting and dying. Bodies in the river and the sparkling grey-green waters running red with Roman blood. He shrugged off the unhappy thought.
‘I’m sure that will not happen, prefect. Everyone has complete confidence in the general. You said so yourself.’
‘Of course,’ the Syrian said. ‘But they will be many and we are so few. Thousands of cataphracts — armoured lords on great horses, swathed in iron so our arrows cannot kill them. Swarms of mounted archers who live, eat and sleep in the saddle. Horses are their currency and their passion. A Parthian would sacrifice his wife before he would sacrifice his horse.’ His eyes ranged over the legionary camps on the near and far banks, their scale almost equalled by the tented towns which had grown up since Corbulo had closed the busy crossing to civilian traffic. ‘Much will depend on the enemy’s mood. Sometimes, he is like the jackal. He prefers to bark rather than fight. But then he can be like the leopards which once roamed here. He will come fast and silent, and he will come for the throat. Beware of Vologases the leopard, tribune.’
On Corbulo’s instructions Valerius had divided his cavalry between the east and west banks of the great river. Hanno’s Thracian Third Augusta was camped with two other thousand-strong alae and two of the smaller five- hundred-strong wings alongside the permanent fortress now occupied by the Fifteenth legion Apollinaris. The rest of the units had orders to range the eastern bank of the Euphrates and harry or destroy any enemy forces they found there. The Tenth Fretensis had already crossed, and the Fifteenth, minus the three cohorts who would have to hold the bridge in their absence, would cross tomorrow, along with the rest of the auxiliaries, cavalry and infantry. All around them the tent lines buzzed with activity as units and individual soldiers frantically made their last-minute preparations for the advance into enemy territory. The air was heavy with the scent of burning charcoal as the armourers of the Fifteenth sweated to repair swords and plate armour, the ceaseless clatter of hammer on anvil punctuating their efforts. Hundreds of carts had been requisitioned to carry the supplies essential to feed more than twenty thousand men and as many horses, mules and camels, in a land that would yield barely a tenth of what was needed to keep them alive. Now those carts must be checked to ensure their wheels were sound and the base and walls undamaged. A single axle break could mean a century going hungry. Valerius was surprised to see the legion’s carpenters dismantling the unit’s siege weapons ready for transportation. It seemed an extravagance for an expedition that was otherwise designed to travel light and had no plans to invade town or city.
When Hanno left to join his men for the evening meal, Valerius stood for a while at the edge of the camp and contemplated the distant mountains on the other side of the river; just a dusty line on the far horizon that shimmered in the dry heat of the late afternoon. He found that the very land oppressed him. Once they had left the fertile strip by the sea they had marched fifteen miles a day over a bleak patchwork of dirty brown and scorched ochre, the monotony only broken by the occasional barren height where eagles and vultures soared, or some blessed river valley where they were able to water themselves and their horses in the cool of the stream. The experience had left him longing for the lush green plains, swampy moors and damp valleys of Britain, where he had once cursed the mud and the rain, or even the shady, ordered olive groves of the estate at Fidenae. After six days, they had found relief at Zeugma, where the Euphrates ran like a broad ribbon of grey and emerald through the sun-blasted rocks, spreading its bounty a mile and more to each side of the fast-flowing waters. Beyond the river lay a true wilderness where the midday sun burned hot enough to crack rocks and a man could ride for days on end before finding water. Yet Corbulo had not only taken his army all the way to Tigranocerta and Artaxata, but fought there and won. Won against incredible odds. Now he was going back, and Valerius would journey every last step with him.
He flinched at the old familiar pain in the bones of a hand that lay among the burned-out ruins of a town two thousand miles away — a pain he knew would never leave him — and walked towards the walls of the city and his nightly lesson from the general.
Surprisingly, what had begun as a trial had quickly become a pleasure. Valerius amazed himself by becoming proficient at the governor’s version of Caesar, though the game was mind-numbingly complex and he was certain he would never become as skilled as his tutor. His proximity to Corbulo inspired jealousy and he was forced to ignore the stares of his fellow officers of the general’s staff who believed him a spy or worse. In time he understood that
