The thin, lined face smiled wryly. 'It takes a lot to kill me.'
'I would bloody say.' Ballista tipped his head back, eyes almost disappearing in laughter. 'A bugger who can survive the imperial mines can survive anything.'
Demetrius winced. Tact was not always the strongest asset of his kyrios. It was far from sure that Centurion Castricius would want his legionaries or anyone else to know that, before he had joined the army, he had been found guilty of a crime serious enough to warrant being committed to the living hell of the mines. Demetrius himself had always had the greatest difficulty in reconciling himself to having been enslaved at all. It was somehow easier to pretend to have been born a slave. The young Greek knew he would not have wanted anyone to know if he had been in the mines. Not, of course, that the issue could ever have arisen. He would not have survived.
Castricius just laughed. 'As I tell this rabble, the good daemon that watches over me never sleeps – keeps them on their toes. Let me present the boys.'
'Yes, that would be good. And then, afterwards, you must tell me how you got out of Arete. You shall do so over a proper feast to celebrate. We will kill the fatted pig – or whatever it is the Christians say.'
'The Christians to the lion,' said Castricius as he turned to lead the way.
The inspection passed well. Silent, serried ranks of men. One thousand large, red, oval shields, on each the golden lion and eagle, the latter crowned by two winged personifications of victory. The symbols of Legio IIII Scythica were repeated on the scarlet vexillio on its crossbar above their heads. Hoplites, thought Demetrius, 'armoured men'. Possibly not quite the same styles of armour as one found on the pots and bas-reliefs of the ancients, but undoubtedly the spiritual descendants of the heroes of Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea: the embodiment of western freedom once again called on to defy the countless barbarian hordes from the east.
The feast also started quite well. The official house of the cursus publicus was, if anything, more spartan at Caeciliana than it had been at Batnae. But at least the main room was warm; a fine fire burned at one end, and braziers placed here and there throughout kept the early evening chill away. The dining room was just big enough. The Dux Ripae had invited his three senior officers, the commanders of cavalry, infantry and the baggage train and the commanders of the individual units under them. There were thirteen dining. There should have been fourteen, but Gaius Acilius Glabrio had sent to announce that he was too busy to attend.
First, they stood, sipping a glykismos. The sweet aperitif did little to take a certain stiff formality out of the air. The non-appearance of Acilius Glabrio made the three cavalry commanders uncomfortable. It was not really the place for the prefects of the Armenians, Saracens, Itureans or Arab and Armenian slingers to hold forth, good Romans though they all considered themselves, irrespective of the ethnicity of their men.
Things did not improve immediately when they reclined at table. Hard-boiled eggs with salted catfish and spicy black pudding appeared. Then a light, very easy-to-drink white wine from Ascalon went round, Castricius got into his stride with the story of his escape from the fall of Arete, and things began to flow more easily.
By the time the few remnants of the first course had been removed, all had had the chance to exclaim at the Odysseus-like cunning and fortitude of Castricius' escape: the arrows whistling out of the dark, the screams of horses and men, the fall – so he thought – of Ballista, the surge of Sassanid warriors, the flight through the chaos to the tunnels which brought water up from the river, Castricius' employment of the knowledge gained when he had surveyed those self-same tunnels to hide in a dead end in one of the furthest recesses – three, maybe four, days in the dark, licking moisture from the rock walls, at last hunger driving him above ground, into an empty world which smelled of wood smoke and something revoltingly like burnt pork: the moonlit shell of a sacked city.
The main course was served. In accordance with prevailing medical opinion, as it was winter there were few vegetables, just a couple of cabbages – it was important to prevent the inner man from becoming damp and cold. There was a Homeric quantity of meat: beef, pork, mutton, and one of a pair of ostriches that the officers of Legio IIII Scythica had caught on the march down. There was a great deal of a strong red wine from Sidon – most doctors held that wine warmed the blood. Momentarily, the conversation became general, if not inspired: the ostrich was tough, the wings a bit better, the only good way to eat it was air-dried.
Then, as is the way, the hubbub died down to a respectful silence as the commanding officer began to talk. Ballista told the tale of the fall of Arete. He told it well, turning to Turpio and Castricius to confirm points of detail; it seemed to be relived before their eyes. The numbers of the Sassanids; the dust darkening the sky. The skill of their siege works; the towers, the great ram, the ramp and mines. The horrible ingenuity of the tortures inflicted on prisoners, the blinding and impaling. The fanaticism of their assaults; the thousands who died before they were thrown back. The god-given zealotry of Shapur, the King of Kings; his mission to conquer the world, to make all peoples worship the Bahram fires, the sacred fires of his god Mazda. Finally, when the dangers seemed overcome, the shattering betrayal by Theodotus the Christian.
It was a subject that Demetrius preferred not to think about. As a slave standing at the foot of the couch of his kyrios, naturally he was not brought into the conversation. He envied the others their easy familiarity with Ballista. It was not just that they were free and he was a slave. There was a sense of a hard to define but evident relaxed comradeship between them. Possibly, he thought, it came from the largely unreflective nature of military life, and possibly it came from a sense of dangers shared.
As Demetrius poured more drinks, his thoughts wandered to Hierapolis, the holy city through which they had passed a few days earlier. For once, there, the military itinerary had given him two days of rest. Pleasant images drifted into his mind: the beautiful Ionic temple with its golden doors, the exquisite, lingering aroma of incense inside, the eyes of the cult statue of the goddess following him around the sanctuary, the fire jewel on her brow lighting the gloom; sitting by the sacred lake with its bejewelled fish, which came when called, meeting the stranger Callistratus, walking back through the gardens to his house, the long afternoon behind the shuttered windows.
'Demetrius, you are dreaming, boy.' The voice of his kyrios cut not unkindly into his consciousness. 'We all need more to drink.' The others cheered.
'Absolutely arseholed, every one of them,' Calgacus whispered in his ear. 'Our revered leader the worst of the lot.'
More drink in their hands, more drink inside them, half a dozen conversations flourished. Sandario was telling a long story about a young noble Tribune who found a camel on parade when he arrived at a lonely desert outpost. Again Demetrius' thoughts wandered back to Hierapolis, this time less pleasantly, to the hordes of Galli, the eunuch devotees that thronged the precincts. He was glad his visit had not coincided with the hideous ceremony when worshippers maddened by the goddess Atargatis seized their own manhood and, the obsidian knives glittering in the pitiless sun, publicly castrated themselves. Self-mutilated and shameless, they would run through the streets of the town until they chose into which house they would hurl their bloody, severed genitals. It was unspeakably barbaric. Demetrius wondered if these eastern provincials had less in common with Hellenes and Romans than with the Sassanid Persian enemy. In a war, how loyal would they prove to the imperium?
'No, my dear Tribune, the men use the camel to ride to the nearest brothel.' Sandario's joke was hardly novel but, helped by the wine, it won a hearty burst of laughter. The officers were still grinning, the Tribune of the Saracens shaping to tell the story of the ass and the murderess, when Calgacus ushered one of the Equites Singulares into the room. The cavalryman spoke quietly to his unit commander. It seemed it took a moment or two for the message to get through, but when it did Mucapor's bovine face darkened with anger.
'How bloody dare he… outrageous… teeth before tail, every fucking time.' Mucapor slammed his cup down and rose, none too steadily, to his feet. He addressed Ballista. 'A bloody outrage… my men are cavalry, fuck all use if their horses are fucked.'
'Whoa, whoa.' Ballista made soothing noises, exactly as he would to a horse. He smiled. 'Back up and try the fence again – I have no idea what you are talking about.'
'Gaius Acilius Glabrio has just ordered some of my men's mounts turned out of the barn I have stabled them in so that those fucking carts which carry his possessions can be sheltered.'
Ballista's smile was frozen for a moment. Then his face changed. 'Has he indeed.' The big northerner took a drink. The others were silent. There was expectation as well as alcohol in the intensity of their gaze. 'Calgacus, Demetrius, fetch torches.' Ballista smiled in the direction of Demetrius, although largely unseeing, his eyes glassy. 'We are going to form a comus.'
With a sinking heart, Demetrius went to do as he was told. It was seldom that anything good came of the Greek tradition that, at the end of a party, drunken revellers formed a torch-lit procession through the streets. The comus was nothing but trouble.
