‘What is it? Are the animals not ready?’
‘No, Dominus, they are all here.’
‘Then what? Trouble finding musicians or men with the right sort of name?’
‘It is the ram, Dominus.’
‘Providing its entrails show the favour of Mars, it will not matter if it is not too good-looking a beast outwardly.’
The Spanish officer took a deep breath. ‘ Dominus, I do not want you to think that we have in any way deserted the traditions of Rome, or her religious rites, which have given her imperium without end. Although stationed in a far-off place, we are soldiers of Rome. We renew our sacramentum every year. We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.’
‘What is it?’ Felix said, not unkindly.
‘The majority of our men are drawn from the local population; have been as far back as our muster rolls go. It is against the customs of Colchis to sacrifice rams. It is the same in Iberia and Albania, throughout the region of the Caucasus. Tacitus mentioned it.’
Felix considered this seriously. ‘Our expedition has been dogged by misfortune – Gothic pirates, storms – we have lost time and men. The gods have not been well disposed towards us. A new beginning is necessary. A lustrum is the time-honoured way for Romans to supplicate the gods in such a case. To alter the ritual might offend the natural gods of Rome. While I have no wish to offend our subjects, we have our mandata – Rome must come first. Let the lustrum be performed.’
To brazen tunes, the bull, the boar and the contentious ram were brought out and led around the members of the expedition. Three circuits from their violent end.
Ballista thought about the elderly senator Felix. He was no more hidebound than most of his order. He had been faced with a difficult choice. He had made his decision. It was not the one Ballista would have made. But Ballista, unlike Felix, was far from convinced the natural gods of Rome existed, or any gods at all.
XXI
On the fifth day, the kalends of June, the expedition had divided. Felix sailed for the north-eastern shores of the Black Sea to pursue his diplomacy with the two kings of Abasgia and their clients the longbeards and the lice- eaters. As the Armata had already returned straightaway to Byzantium bound then for the west, the consular had been obliged to charter a merchant vessel. The best the put-upon prefect at Phasis could provide was a small liburnian as escort.
Hippothous noticed that, as soon as the self-appointed embodiment of old Roman values and virtue had left, the spirits of the others lifted. As a Hellene, Hippothous could understand. A little conspicuous western antique mos maiorum and virtus could go a long way, but there was something inherently wearing in constantly, if silently, being made aware that you fell somewhat short of the ideal.
The remainder of the expedition was to travel together up the river Phasis as far as a fort called Sarapanis, said to be set in a range of hills on the border between Colchis and Iberia at the very limit of navigation. This involved embarking themselves and their baggage on several native boats. Hippothous was most unimpressed with these so-called camara e. Long and narrow, they were dirty and uncomfortable. There was no cover; far from having a cabin, they were actually undecked. Each had benches for thirty rowers. The camarae were so cramped that, although the expedition now totalled just eighteen persons, they had to distribute themselves and their possessions across five of these squalid craft. And there was something more distinctly unsettling about these camarae. Clinker-built, they had a prow and steering oars at either end. To Hippothous’s eye, they looked like nothing so much as small versions of the longboats of the Goths and Borani – hardly an auspicious thing.
At first, the river Phasis was very broad, wonderfully calm – like smoked glass – after the Kindly Sea. On either bank, beyond a thick screen of reeds, was low, marshy primeval forest. Everything was very green, very flat. The air was humid, misty. At clearer moments, the Caucasus loomed on the left.
The river meandered in great sweeps, little archipelagos of sodden, uninhabitable islands in the bends. Nothing but the splash of the oars, the water singing down the sides of the boats, and the endless croaking of innumerable frogs. However, not all was peace. A constant impediment, if not actual danger, was the great lashed- together rafts of logs the natives floated down to sell in the city for shipbuilding. Again and again, the camarae hurriedly had to pull to the banks to avoid collisions with the unwieldy masses of timber. It was, Hippothous thought sourly, the only time their oarsmen displayed the merest hint of energy or alacrity.
By the end of the second day, another problem materialized. The silt carried down by the river created an ever-changing pattern of shallows and mud banks. A man in the prow of the lead boat probed the riverbed with a long pole. The helmsman was faced with continual choices as the channels of the river divided again and again. Not all his choices were good. Although the camarae drew little water, they ran aground with increasing frequency. Here, the double-ended form of the boats came into its own. Quite often, the rowers merely reversed their position, the helmsman scurried to the other end of the boat, and the oars pulled her off. If that did not suffice, things became considerably more fraught. The crew had to go overboard and, standing waist or even neck deep in the turbid water, manhandle the boat free. This they were most reluctant to do. Like most of the great watercourses, the Phasis bred man-murdering monsters. The travellers were told these looked like catfish but were larger, blacker and stronger; as man-eating as any in existence, as deadly as the horrors that were hauled from the Danube with teams of horses or oxen.
Each time the men came back over the side, muddy but unmolested, the Colchians would laugh, clap, break into song. One solemnly assured Hippothous that their continued good fortune was owed to all on board heeding local wisdom. Before setting out, Hippothous and the others had been enjoined to empty all their water skins and the like. To carry alien water on the Phasis was to bring the very worst luck.
Whether it should have been credited to the absence of foreign water, or to the kindly hand of a deity, none of the dark monsters made an appearance. But with the searching for a channel, the logs and the groundings, the perceived idleness of the natives, progress was very slow.
Dawn on the fourth day, and the river narrowed and the forest thinned. Signs of habitation increased: fields, orchards, isolated log huts. Small, near-naked children tended flocks. They waved as they brought their charges to water at the riverbank. To the north, the Caucasus seemed only a little closer. But to the south, the hills advanced near, rising in steep, timber-covered slopes.
The things that did not change were the dampness, the lushness and the interminable noise of the frogs: brekeke-kex, ko-ax, ko-ax. They preyed on everyone’s nerves. Brekeke-kex. None more so than Maximus – what he would not do for some fucking peace. Sat in the stern of one of the stinking camarae, Hippothous told Maximus every fable of Aesop featuring frogs that he could recall. It was like soothing a child. The barbarian enjoyed the ones where the frogs suffered and died an unpleasant death. His favourite was the one where the frogs, tired of their democratic existence, asked Zeus for a king. The god sent them a log. Unimpressed with its inactivity, they petitioned for a new monarch. So Zeus sent them a water snake, which ate them.
‘And the moral is?’ Hippothous asked.
‘Be very afraid of snakes.’
‘No.’ Sometimes Hippothous wondered if the barbarian was mocking him. ‘It is better to be ruled by an indolent emperor than an active one who is malevolent.’
‘Or,’ Calgacus suddenly spoke, ‘the obvious truth that all change is likely to make things infinitely fucking worse.’ Hippothous was not sure he had ever met anyone more gloomy than Ballista’s old Caledonian freedman.
They slept that night in a town with the happy name of Rhodopolis. There were indeed roses. The polis was set in a fertile plain. Once, maybe in the days of Hellenic freedom before Rome crossed the Adriatic and her greed impelled her to the ends of the earth, Rhodopolis had been a fine place: temples, agora, Bouleuterion; everything a Hellenic polis should have. But it was much decayed, and bore the signs of both violence and neglect. Possibly, Hippothous thought, in this case Rome was not to blame. Rhodopolis had been sited with a view only to wealth and not defence.
On the fifth day, the hills crowded close on both sides. The stream was narrow and fast, the going slow. At
