march? He and Cocceius, the decurion, were riding up and down the column, in and out of the pools of torchlight, shouting.
To Ballista's eyes, individually, the troopers looked the part – horses in good condition, helmets and armour cared for, weaponry complete and ready to hand. They looked tough. They handled their mounts well. But something was wrong. They did not work together as a unit. Men were getting in each other's way. They appeared sullen. There was none of the banter Ballista expected in a happy unit.
At last, Turpio appeared. He was bareheaded, his helmet strapped to his saddle. His short-cropped hair and beard were damp from the fog.
'The column is ready to march.' It always sounded to Ballista as if Turpio were challenging him to question what he said while at the same time dreading just that. He had not called Ballista Dominus.
'Very good. Maximus, unfurl my personal banner, and we will inspect the men.'
The bodyguard took the protective covering from the white draco. The windsock shaped like a dragon hung limp in the still air when he held it aloft.
Ballista squeezed his horse with his thighs, and the grey set off at a walk. They first passed the rearguard, thirty troopers under Cocceius, then the staff and baggage train under Mamurra and, finally, the advance guard of the other thirty troopers, which would be under the direct command of Turpio. Leaving aside the usual problems with the hired civilians of the baggage train, all seemed serviceable enough.
'Good. I will ride here with you, Centurion. Send out two scouts ahead of the column.'
'There is no need. There are no enemy for hundreds of miles.'
Ballista knew he needed to assert his authority. 'Have them ride about half a mile in front of the column.'
'We are just outside the main gate of the provincial capital. There is not a Persian this side of the Euphrates. No bandit would take on this number of men.'
'We need to get used to being on a war footing. Give the order.'
Turpio gave it, and two troopers clattered off into the thick fog. Ballista then gave the command to begin the march, their long march to the client kingdoms of Emesa and Palmyra, and then to the city of Arete, that isolated outpost of the imperium Romanum.
'It was only three years ago that there were a lot of Persians here,' he said.
'Yes, Dominus.'
Despite the man's attitude, Ballista decided to tread carefully. 'How long have you been with Cohors XX?'
'Two years.'
'How do you find them?'
'Good men.'
'Was Scribonius Mucianus already in command when you joined?'
'Yes.' Again, at the mention of the absent tribune's name, Turpio took on that aggressive, hunted look.
'How do you find him?'
'He is my commanding officer. It is not my place to discuss him with you. No more than it would be my place to discuss you with the Governor of Syria.' There was no great effort to hide the implicit threat.
'Did you fight the Sassanids?'
'I was at Barbalissos.'
Ballista encouraged Turpio to tell the story of the terrible defeat of the Roman army of Syria, the defeat which had led directly to the sack of Antioch, Seleuceia, and so many other towns, to so much misery in the time of troubles just three years earlier. The attack by swarms of Sassanid horse archers had seen the Romans caught in a cleft stick. If they opened ranks and tried to chase the archers away, they were run down by heavy cavalry, the clibanarii, mailed men riding armoured horses. If they stayed in close order to hold off the clibanarii, they made an ideal, dense target for the archers. Hours in the ranks under the Syrian sun, tormented by fear with the safety of the walls of Barbalissos visible in one direction, tormented by thirst with the glittering waters of the Euphrates visible in another. Then the inevitable panic, flight and slaughter.
While Ballista heard little about the battle that he had not heard before, he did gain the impression that Turpio was a proficient officer – so why then was this turma of Cohors XX so miserable and unhandy?
'What were the Persian numbers?'
Turpio took his time replying. 'Hard to say. A lot of dust, confusion. Probably fewer than most people think. The horse archers keep moving. Makes them look more than they are. Possibly no more than ten to fifteen thousand all told.'
'What about the proportion of horse archers to clibanarii?'
Turpio looked over at Ballista. 'Again, hard to be sure. But a lot more light horsemen than heavy. Somewhere between five to one. and ten to one. Quite a lot of the clibanarii carry bows, which confuses things.'
'They were all cavalry?'
'No. The cavalry are the noblemen, they are the Sassanids' best troops, but they have infantry as well – the mercenary slingers and bowmen are the most effective; the rest are levies of peasant spearmen.'
The fog was lifting. Ballista could see Turpio's face clearly. It had lost some of its defensive look. 'How do they manage sieges?'
'They use all the devices we do: mines, rams, towers, artillery. Some say they learnt from us; maybe when the old king Ardashir took the city of Hatra some fifteen years ago.'
They were riding over one of the foothills of Mount Silpius. Dead black leaves clung to the trees which flanked the road. Wisps of fog wound round the base of the trees, slid up through the branches. As they neared the crest of the ridge, Ballista noticed one of the leaves move. Ahead, the sun was beginning to break through and Ballista realized that it was not leaf he had seen but a bird – a raven. He peered more closely. The tree was full of ravens. All the trees were full of ravens.
This time, Ballista knew that there was no phrase or gesture that might turn the omen. A sneeze had a human explanation; so did a stumble. But ravens were the birds of Woden. On the Allfather's shoulders sat Huginn, Thought, and Muninn, Memory. He sent them out to observe the world of men. Ballista, Woden-born, carried a raven as the device on his shield, another as the crest of his helm. The eyes of the Allfather were on him. After a battle, the stricken field was thick with ravens. The trees were thick with ravens.
Ballista rode on. Some long-forgotten lines of poetry came to mind: The dark raven shall have its say And tell the eagle how it fared at the feast When, competing with the wolf, it laid bare the bones of corpses.
V
Off to the left of the road Ballista saw signs that they were within a few miles of the city of Emesa. The pattern of the fields changed abruptly. The broad, rambling, often ill-defined meadows, normal in the valley of the Orontes river, gave way to smaller, rigidly rectangular fields in grids, their boundaries clearly drawn by ditches and marker stones. This system, centuriation, was the product of Roman land surveyors, agrimensores, imposed originally when Rome settled her veterans in colonies on land taken from her enemies. Later, as here at Emesa, it was adopted by Rome's subjects, either for practical reasons or to indicate their closeness to Rome, their aspirations to become Roman. Centuriation had been so wide-spread within the empire for so long that it now seemed the natural order of things here. But to those born and bred outside the imperium Romanum, including Ballista himself, it still looked alien, still carried a freight of connotations of conquest and lost identity.
Ballista pulled his horse to the side of the road and waved the column on, calling out to Turpio that he would catch up in a short while. The men passed at a walk. Nine days on the road had shaken the unit down to some extent. The men seemed a little bit more disciplined and quite a lot happier. Even the civilian baggage train, thirty pack horses and their drivers and the fifteen men of his staff, was no longer the atrocious sight it had been on leaving Antioch.
It had been an easy march, never more than twenty miles in a day, billets in a town or village at almost every stop, only once camping beneath the stars. An easy march, but it had done them some good.
Ballista watched the men as they passed. How strong was their commitment to Rome? The cohors was a unit of the regular Roman army, but its men had been recruited from Palmyra, at once a client kingdom and a part of the Roman province of Syria Coele. Their first language was Aramaic; for those that had a second it was Greek. Their Latin was limited to army commands and obscenities. Their helmets, armour, shields and swords were Roman army issue but their combined bowcases and quivers were of an eastern design, and highly personalized. Eastern ornaments swung and clashed on the tack of their horses and their own belts and striped and brightly coloured baggy trousers beneath the Roman armour pointed to the men's eastern origins.
