'No. It has to be the same. Last night, sure those three may have soon killed you, but I cannot be certain. When you saved me there was no room for doubt; on my back, weapon knocked out of my hand, one more second and I was dead. Certain, it has to be the same.'
'Some religions hold pride to be a terrible sin, I believe.'
'More fool them.'
Ballista and Maximus drifted south along the wall walk. Here and there as they passed in and out of the pools of torchlight, they were challenged by sentries, lean-cheeked men in war-worn tunics: Libertas- Principatus, Libertas-Principatus.
At the fourth tower they came to the sentries were playing dice. They were legionaries from IIII Scythica. Their oval shields, red with blue victories and a golden lion, were piled near by. Ballista and Maximus stayed in the shadows watching the firelight play on the men's faces, listening to their talk.
'Canis,' a player groaned as his four dice landed in the 'dog', the worst throw possible.
'You have always been unlucky.'
'Bollocks. I am saving all my luck for tomorrow, fuck knows we will need it.'
'Bollocks to you. Tomorrow will be a walk in a paradise. We have whipped them before and we will whip them again.'
'So you say. There aren't that many of us left. Most of the men on this wall are just fucking civilians playing at soldiers. I tell you, if the reptiles push it home tomorrow, we are fucked.'
'Crap. The big barbarian bastard has got us through so far. He'll see us right again tomorrow. If he says we can hold this wall, are you going to argue with him?'
Ballista grinned at Maximus in the shadows.
'I would rather argue with him than that fucking Hibernian bodyguard of his.'
Maximus's teeth flashed white in the shadows.
'You have got a point. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley. Ugly bastard, isn't he?'
Ballista took Maximus by the arm and led him down the stairs.
By the time they had reached the Palmyrene Gate the night was creeping on and they had heard enough. The regular soldiers seemed solid enough; moaning furiously, their contempt was evenly divided between the enemy and the conscripts on their own side. The much-derided conscripts, especially those new to the desert wall, were either very quiet or boastfully loud – just as was to be expected from those who had not yet looked closely into the face of battle.
Ballista decided to return to the palace. They needed their sleep. Tomorrow was another day.
Demetrius finished dressing. Fussily he retied his writing block and stylus to his belt, getting them to hang just so. He looked at himself in his mirror. Despite the distortion in the polished metal, he could see that he looked awful. There was a network of fine blue veins under his eyes. He felt awful too. For the first half of the night he had remained fully dressed, pacing about. He had told himself that he would be unable to sleep until Ballista and Maximus returned from their foolish theatrical errand. When, some time after midnight, they had returned, in high spirits, laughing, teasing each other, Demetrius had gone to bed. He had still been unable to sleep. Stripped of his concerns for the others, he had had to face his fears for himself.
There was no escape from the thought that in the morning the Persians would come again. Demetrius had not been much reassured by Ballista's performance at the dinner. He knew his kyrios well: the big, bluff northerner was not good at lying. There had been a hollowness to his claims that the hearts of the Persians would not be in it. When that fat eunuch had asked if it was true that if they survived tomorrow they would be safe, what was it that Ballista had replied? Something like it being broadly true. The kyrios was not good at dissembling. But there again, privately, the kyrios was a worrier. It was part of what made him such a good soldier, the obsessive care for detail that made him such an excellent siege engineer. But this time surely he was right to be worried. This would be the Persians' last throw. Shapur and his nobles would have whipped their warriors into a lather of fanaticism and hatred. They would want to eat the defenders' hearts raw.
Although he did not want to, Demetrius kept remembering that first Persian assault. The fierce dark bearded men swarming up the ladders, long swords in their hands, murder in their hearts. And tomorrow it would happen again: thousand after thousand easterners over the parapets, laying about them with those terrible swords, cutting down those who stood in their way: an orgy of blood and suffering.
Needless to say, at gallinicium, when the cocks start crowing but in peacetime men are still fast asleep, that time well before dawn when the entourage of the Dux Ripae had been ordered to assemble, Calgacus had had to wake Demetrius from a troubled sleep, a sleep in which he endlessly chased an aged dream-diviner through the narrow, filthy back alleys of the town. Tantalizingly, the man had remained out of reach, while from behind had come the sounds of the pursuing Sassanids, the screams of men and women, the crackle of burning buildings.
'There is no time to lose,' the old Caledonian had said, not unkindly. 'They are all breakfasting in the great dining room. Everything will be all right. They are feeling good.'
Calgacus was not wrong. As Demetrius entered the dining room, where the lamps still burnt at this early hour, he was greeted with a wave of laughter. Ballista, Maximus, the centurion Castricius, the standard-bearer Pudens, the two remaining messengers, the one remaining scribe and ten of the equites singulares were crammed together eating fried eggs and bacon. Ballista called Demetrius over, shook his hand, had Maximus slide along to make him a space. If anything, Ballista and Maximus were in even higher spirits than they had been when they returned the previous night. They were laughing and joking with the other men. Yet Demetrius, the unwanted plate of food in front of him, wedged between the two men from the north, thought that he detected an underlying tension, a fragility to the humour. Maximus was teasing the Dux for drinking just water. Ballista said that he wanted to keep a clear head – a state he assured everyone that his bodyguard had never known; tonight he would drink until he sang maudlin songs, told them all he loved them as brothers, and passed out.
Breakfast finished, they trooped into the main courtyard of the palace to arm. They were quieter now; low conversations, short bursts of laughter. One after another men disappeared to the latrines. From the living quarters emerged Calgacus and Bagoas, carrying the parade armour of the Dux Ripae, unworn until now.
'If you are going to defeat the Sassanid King of Kings you should look like a real Roman general,' said Calgacus.
Ballista would have preferred his old war-worn mail shirt, but he did not argue. Calgacus always had a desire to send him off well turned out, a desire that Ballista all too often frustrated. He stood, arms outstretched, as Calgacus and Maximus buckled him into the breast and back plates of the muscled cuirass, fitted the ornate shoulder guards and the fringe of heavy leather straps designed to give protection to manhood and thighs. Ballista put on his sword belt then let Calgacus pin a new black cloak over his shoulders. Over the cloak Calgacus draped the wolfskin from the previous night against the chill of the early morning and handed Ballista his helmet. Ballista noted that the wolfskin had been cleaned, the helmet polished.
'If you don't defeat Shapur, sure you will turn up well dressed in Valhalla,' Maximus said in Ballista's native tongue.
'I hope that this is not the end of the long road for us, brother,' Ballista replied in the same language.
They set off from the main gate of the palace, silent now. In the darkness, torches flaring in the chill southerly breeze, they walked down through the military quarter, across the campus martius and to the northern end of the desert wall. As they climbed the steps by the temple of Bel to the north-west tower a sentry challenged them: Isangrim, the outlandish word correctly pronounced. Ballista gave the Latin response, Patria, fatherland or home.
Ballista greeted the men out on the battlements, a mixture of soldiers from Cohors XX and local conscripts, shaking each one by the hand. Then he climbed half up on to the artillery piece. He took off his helmet and his hair streamed away. The leather of his moulded cuirass gleamed in the torchlight. He addressed the men.
'Commilitiones, fellow soldiers, the time has come. Today is the final throw.' He paused. He had their full attention. 'The Persians are many. We are few. But their numbers will be nothing but an encumbrance. Our sword arms will have all the room they need.' There were rueful smiles in the torchlight. 'Their numbers do not signify. They are the effeminate slaves of an eastern despot. We are soldiers. We are free men. They fight for their master. We fight for our freedom, our libertas. We have whipped them before. We will whip them again.' Some of the soldiers drew their swords and began quietly to rap them against their shields.
