Ballista led them through the dark streets. Their progress was slow and noisy. One or two missed their step, even staggered a bit. Demetrius thought that they would be fortunate not to injure each other with the burning torches. In a strange mixing of cultures, they began to sing a marching song from the legions of Rome, one as old as Julius Caesar: Home we bring our bald whoremonger Romans, lock your wives away. All the bags of gold you sent him Went his Gallic whores to pay. By the time they reached the barn they were being trailed by a crowd of the curious, civilians and soldiers alike. Ballista roared at a small group of soldiers to open the gates. They stopped staring incredulously and obeyed. The gates swung back, and there, polished wood softly gleaming, were Acilius Glabrio's wagons. Ballista asked one of the soldiers if they were unloaded. The man stammered that he thought so.
'Haul them out, boys.' Ballista's voice carried well. 'Haul them out and push them together in the middle of the agora.'
Demetrius could feel the way that this was going. It was not well. The wagons, their shafts up in the air, were crammed up tight together in the centre of the open space. Ballista stepped forward from the gaggle of the comus. He called for oil. While he waited, he swung his burning torch through the air. The oil arrived. Ballista tossed his torch to Maximus, who had appeared from nowhere. Ballista sloshed the oil over the nearest wagon and threw the empty amphora into another, where it shattered into a hundred shards. He gestured to Maximus, who handed him back the torch.
'No one in this army disobeys orders.' Ballista swung back the torch and threw it overarm. It whooshed through the air towards the oil-soaked wagon. It landed, and instantly, with a crump, fire broke out. A cheer went up and the torches of the others were arcing through the air. The first thick, black coils of smoke went up into the clear night sky.
Demetrius sensed a movement in the crowd at the edge of the agora. Ballista and the officers around him were oblivious to it, passing a wineskin from hand to hand. Demetrius saw Gaius Acilius Glabrio, his face immobile, like that on a portrait bust in the atrium of a great house, watch his wagons catch and begin to burn.
Demetrius turned back to the crowd around Ballista. They had not noticed Acilius Glabrio. Ballista was laughing at something Aurelian was saying. There was much about his kyrios that reminded Demetrius of his boyhood hero Alexander the Great. There was the courage, the openness, the impulsive generosity, but there was also the darker side, the dangerous, often drink-fuelled, violence, seldom far from the surface. Today Ballista was not the good Alexander who had put the first torch into his own wagons to lighten the baggage train in distant Bactria. Instead he was the drunken Alexander torching the palace of the Persian kings at Persepolis at the suggestion of a whore.
Demetrius looked back at Gaius Acilius Glabrio. The young patrician was staring at Ballista with open loathing. Whether or not he was the young eupatrid who had set assassins on Ballista, there could be no doubt that Acilius Glabrio hated the big northerner. After a time, without a word, the nobleman turned and left.
Nothing good could come of this, thought Demetrius, nothing good at all.
IX
The army saw its first Persians at the Balissu River. There were three of them on the far bank. They sat on their horses, quietly watching the Roman army approach.
These were the first Persians that Gaius Acilius Glabrio had seen. Gods below, he had been waiting for this moment. Ever since that humiliating day in Caeciliana he had been waiting to see the Persians. Cold steel would show that bastard Ballista the difference between barbarian filth like him and a Roman patrician, the difference between mindless, brittle ferocity and virtus, the true, enduring courage of a Roman. What was it the Spartans had said in the old days? If you think your sword is too short, take a step closer.
And how long he had waited. First, seventeen interminable days training around Caeciliana, seventeen days of pointless drill and manoeuvres, the barbarian Dux Ripae fussing and fretting like an old woman. It was as if the northern barbarian were more interested in collecting boats and pack animals for the baggage than in fighting. It seemed that he was reluctant to march out and face the enemy. The young patrician had been only too aware of the sniggers and smiles behind his own back, of sordid plebs, barbarians even, laughing at a member of the Acilii Glabriones. In response, he had just trained his cavalrymen all the harder.
Finally, on the fifteenth day of February they had marched out. It was the day of the festival of the Lupercalia in Rome. Had he been in Rome, Gaius Acilius Glabrio would have been running with the other lupercali, everyone of them drawn from a leading family. He would have run naked except for a girdle cut from the skin of a freshly sacrificed goat, run through the streets striking out at passers-by with the goatskin thong. But he was not in Rome. He was hundreds of miles away on the Euphrates, desperate to meet the enemy, to prove himself in the terror of battle. They had marched out – and nothing had happened.
For fourteen days the army had crawled southward, the great Euphrates rolling along next to them. The army had been ordered by the timorous Dux Ripae into a ridiculous defensive formation, as if scared of meeting the Sassanid reptiles in open combat, and progress had been painfully slow. They had only marched in the mornings. By midday they would have halted and started to dig trenches and construct a fortified camp. At the well-fortified city of Soura, it had taken the army two days to cross the stone bridge to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Two short days' march after that they had halted for three whole days at Leontopolis. And in all that time they had not seen a single Persian.
A few miles south-east of Leontopolis, the Balissu river ran into the Euphrates from the east. The Balissu was a small, insignificant watercourse, probably dry in the summer, but it was here that the first Persians showed themselves.
Acilius Glabrio, riding in the van of the army, as was only proper for a man of his status, peered intently at the three Persians on the other side of the stream. He could see them clearly. They were less than a hundred paces away. They sat on their horses placidly and watched the advancing Romans. They wore loose, brightly coloured, patterned tunics, baggy trousers, bushy beards and long hair. One wore a cap, the other two tied their black hair back with a band. They were slender men, dark-skinned. It was true what he had often been told: their eyebrows joined, and their eyes were like those of goats.
When the Romans had almost reached the Balissu, were little more than twenty paces away, the Persians languidly wheeled their horses and rode off. They saw no others for the rest of the day. The army forded the small stream and laboriously constructed its fortifications for the night.
At dawn the next day, as the Roman army, with Acilius Glabrio well to the fore, marched out of its camp, the Persians were back – or Persians who looked just the same as the ones of the previous day. For the rest of that day and the two that followed, as the army marched down in easy stages to Basileia, the Sassanid scouts hung about. Two or three at a time, never more than five or six, now always keeping well beyond bowshot, sometimes in the path of the army, sometimes off to the left flank. When the army was safely quartered for two days in the great fortress town of Basileia, the Persians could still be glimpsed here and there outside the walls, now down on the narrow ground by the river, sometimes up on the cliffs. Their constant presence incensed Acilius Glabrio. How he wanted to get at them. What he would do to them when he did. Their hanging about at a distance reinforced everything that he had ever learned about easterners – born cowards, they were simply too scared to come to close quarters. He began to worry that they would just melt away back to Persia, that the army would relieve Circesium without a blow struck, that he would never have a chance to strike at the reptiles. It was still quite dark as the army marched out of Basileia. Gaius Acilius Glabrio stretched and yawned until his jaw cracked. He was tired. He settled back into his saddle, the creak of leather and wood lost in the general sound of the slowly moving cavalry. He was very tired. The barbarian Dux had summoned the consilium to meet four hours before dawn. By lamplight, the officers had been treated to the usual injunctions: hold the formation; keep the men closed up; above all, no one was to break ranks or to charge without express permission. As for what else they had been told, Acilius Glabrio wondered which of the officers were so stupid that they could not have seen for themselves that the road south of Basileia ran through a narrow gap between the Euphrates on the right and high cliffs on the left. Apparently, not far south, the road forded a watercourse, which ran from the hills into the Euphrates. The locals called it the canal of Semiramis. There had been reports of dust clouds to the south. The barbarian Dux had said it might signify that the Sassanids intended to make a stand there. Nonsense, thought Acilius Glabrio. The
