seemed to caress Annius’s flesh. ‘One name can spare you this.’
Annius stared at him. One name? What name? He drew himself up as well as he could in his chains. ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ he cried. ‘I am innocent of any crime. I demand to be tried by a court of my peers.’
‘Very well.’ Tigellinus sighed wearily. Two men appeared from the doorway. Annius Vinicianus had never seen eyes so empty. ‘Begin.’
After three hours Annius had delivered up to Tigellinus every name his pain-swamped brain could think of. As well as those with whom he’d discussed the possibility of removing Nero, he had implicated most of his family and friends, his father’s acquaintances in the Senate, many of the officers in his legion, and all the slaves on the family estate. It seemed even the honoured dead were among his co-conspirators. He lapsed in and out of consciousness, but whatever horrors were inflicted upon him he never spoke the name Tigellinus prayed to hear. Tigellinus was an experienced inquisitor, but more so a seasoned survivor. The clerks were here to record the list of the newly guilty. He knew he could not utter the name himself, because Nero would hear of it and that would weaken his position.
But if he could only get this young fool to say the name once of his own volition the last stone would be in place. The danger to the Empire would be nullified. The Emperor would be saved from his own weakness.
It was time.
‘Take him down.’ The torturers lifted Annius Vinicianus from the hook that held his chains and laid him on the filth-covered floor. ‘Is he alive?’ Tigellinus already knew the answer to his question, but he stooped, gripping the point on the young man’s arm where the shattered ends of two bones protruded from the flesh, and forced them together. Annius let out a shriek of mortal agony and his eyes flickered open. Tigellinus waited until they had focused on him before kneeling and putting his mouth to what remained of an ear. ‘One name, Annius, and it will all be over. One name.’ He frowned with annoyance at the incomprehension he read in the haggard face. ‘One name, Annius,’ he repeated. ‘ The name that is dearest to you.’
Every minute of Annius’s torment had been accompanied by the rattle of the naked thigh bone across the bars of the Egyptian’s cage. The inhuman red eyes had taken in every cut and every touch of the iron, the ears every scream and howl. Saliva drooled from his thin lips and the flat nose twitched at the scent of cooking meat. As the victim had been lowered from the wall the cannibal’s excitement had grown beyond containment and he began to howl like a dog.
For the Egyptian knew what was coming.
‘Very well, have done with him,’ Tigellinus said.
Annius felt himself being lifted. As his head lolled towards the cage the bright red eyes entered his vision and he remembered.
‘No!’ From somewhere he found his voice.
The cannibal had not been fed for a week and the howl was replaced by an animal shriek as he saw the living flesh being brought to him.
‘No.’ Somewhere in his incomprehensible terror part of Annius Vinicianus’s brain fought for survival. A name. His torturer wanted a name. What had Tigellinus said? The name that is dearest to you.
The name that is dearest to you.
He couldn’t think for fear. He had already soiled himself and now he did so again as he heard the rattle of the barred door being opened and saw the thigh bone pushed out to touch his flesh.
The name that is dearest to you?
The name that is dearest to you?
The name that is dearest to you…!
‘Corbulo!’ His scream was so piercing that even the cannibal recoiled from it. ‘Corbulo! Corbulo! Corbulo!’ The litany only ended when Tigellinus put a finger to his smashed lips. The Praetorian commander beckoned the clerks closer.
His voice was almost gentle. ‘What was the name?’
‘Corbulo,’ Annius sobbed, the awfulness of his betrayal only just dawning. ‘Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, general of the east.’
Tigellinus kept his face solemn. ‘Very well. Keep him safe for the Emperor, and remember, Annius Vinicianus: the Egyptian will always be waiting for you here.’
Left alone with only the whimpering cannibal for a companion, Tigellinus allowed himself a smile of pure triumph.
The game was won.
XXXIX
Tiberius winced as another Parthian arrow thudded into his shield with the sound of an axe biting into a tree trunk. It could only be a matter of time before one found a gap in his defences and he would join the growing number who crawled to the rear groaning in agony and coughing up blood. Two hours, and already the legion was bleeding to death.
Corbulo had deployed the Tenth Fretensis in a double line of cohorts, each eight men deep and with a front of sixty, which stretched across the valley. Behind them, ready to be rotated into the line, waited the seven full cohorts of the Fifteenth, plus the auxiliary spearmen, slingers and archers who had marched alongside them. He had spaced his forces at intervals to allow room between them for his cavalry to launch counter-attacks. It was a tactic that had worked since the time of Caesar and Pompey and he had used it to hurt the Parthians at Tigranocerta. He was gambling that Vologases would be wary of those cavalry who now raised a constant dust cloud in the valley at the rear of the Roman line. What the Parthian King of Kings did not know was that the dust was being created by a single ala of five hundred men, barely enough to provide patrols, scouts and couriers for Corbulo’s force.
Tiberius had watched the auxiliary mountain troops from Noricum scale the precipitous valley walls to take their positions on the heights above. With them went a unit of signallers, and the hillmen’s job was to protect them and ensure Corbulo’s dispositions stayed secret from Vologases while the Parthian movements would be communicated to the Roman general by flag. It would give him a small advantage, but advantages were few and far between.
‘Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.’ The man crouched behind the next shield muttered his profane mantra to the rhythm of arrows which fell like hailstones on a drum. ‘Just come a dozen yards closer and I’ll stick this pilum so far up your arse…’
But Tiberius knew they wouldn’t come close, because they didn’t have to.
Instead, massed ranks of mounted archers charged to within bow-shot of the Roman line to loose their arrows before withdrawing like surf from a beach and disappearing into their own dust, only to be replaced by the next wave of howling barbarians. Again and again they came, flaying Corbulo’s snarling, impotent legionaries with clouds of missiles from a seemingly never-ending supply. In the front rank of the left-hand cohort, Tiberius’s suffocating world was reduced to the rear panels of his curved shield, the only thing that was keeping him alive, and the sweating contorted face of his neighbour, packed close enough to share the stink of their combined fear that vied with the reek of voided bowels from someone nearby. Behind him, Tiberius could feel the presence of the man in the next rank whose aching arm held aloft the shield that covered them both from the aerial threat. His belly ached and his throat was filled with dust; heat, thirst and hunger were his constant companions. All around, above the constant rattle of falling arrows, he could hear the cries of the wounded and the dying to the accompaniment of the continuous thunder of the Parthian drummers urging the next wave forward. Cocooned within the claustrophobic protection of the shields he fought a rising tide of anger. The composite bows of wood, bone and sinew outranged any javelin and the general had ordered his auxiliary archers to hoard their precious arrows until they were needed most. It meant the Parthian bowmen could do their work unhindered and unthreatened. He imagined he could hear them laughing and prayed for the moment Corbulo would let loose his spearmen. A quick dash and a single volley of the heavily weighted pila would teach them to laugh at Rome. But Tiberius had seen what happened when a man broke ranks. Through a gap between the shields he had watched as a legionary tormented beyond reason had dropped his shield and run into the arrow-flayed no-man’s-land screaming for a proper fight. In the time it had taken
