snake, dog, cock and monkey, then thrown in the Tiber. There were no animals to be seen here, and the Alontas river was both some way from the village square and, at the moment, too shallow to dispose of corpses with any guarantee of success.
The couple struggled madly, but the sacks were forced over their heads. They were held down while the sacks were sewn shut. The two bundles of coarse sacking were left to writhe on the ground for a time. Muffled yells came from inside. Both were kicked indiscriminately.
It took four strong men to lift and restrain each sack. They carried them towards the mouth of the well. It must be what Polemo had called the Mouth of the Impious. With no ceremony or delay, both were thrown in. The screams were cut off quickly, replaced by the sounds of heavy objects hitting water, then by silence.
‘The punishment of the impious, those who have defiled the sacred nature of the hearth, have betrayed the hospitality of god and man, is not over.’ Polemo’s tone suggested he was rather pleased with the idea. ‘From the Mouth of the Impious, the river will bear them underground to Lake Maeotis. In thirty days they will emerge there, crawling with maggots and, as ever, the vultures will come from nowhere, tear the corpses to pieces, and devour them.’
All the synedrion and the rest shook back their cloaks and coats, gave evidence that they thought this a fine thing.
‘Marcus Clodius Ballista, approach the throne.’
Ballista did as he was bidden, stepping across the blood-slick turf around the carcass of the stallion and between the fire altar and the Mouth of the Impious. In front of the king of the Suani he bowed and blew a kiss from his fingertips. If Polemo had been expecting full proskynesis, he would be disappointed. Ballista had no intention of grovelling in the dirt at the feet of this grubby, upcountry potentate.
‘ Kyrios, I bring you greetings from autokrator Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus Sebastos.’ It was no effort for Ballista to translate the emperor’s titles into Greek, for centuries the language of diplomacy employed by all powers in the east. ‘And a letter from his own hand, for your eyes only.’
Ballista handed the gold-encased roll of purple papyrus to the prince Saurmag, who gave it to his father. A half-memory flashed through Ballista’s mind – was it from Herodotus? – a man sent with a message that read ‘Kill the bearer of this letter,’ something like that. Had he been sent into a sort of unofficial exile, or to a remote place to be killed? The king did not read the letter but tucked the roll into his belt. Suddenly Ballista was very aware of the eyes of the daughter on him. It was only to be expected – he had killed Pythonissa’s husband, unpicked the promising threads of her young life.
‘ Kyrios, the sebastos sends you gifts.’ Ballista told Hippothous to unwrap the ornamenta consularia. Mastabates gave him a sharp glance. Ballista was reversing the order in which he had been told to present the first lot of gifts. Hippothous held forth the gleaming white toga with the broad purple stripe, the special, many-laced boots only a Roman senator might wear, then the twelve fasces, the rods symbolizing the power to beat, the axes they wrapped the power to kill.
‘The ornaments of a Roman consul; tokens of the emperor’s affection.’
Polemo grunted a less than fulsome appreciation. Ballista indicated the other gifts be presented. This time, as the covers came off, the king of the Suani leant forward. He had caught the gleam of precious metal. The extensive dinner service – wine jugs, coolers, plates, serving bowls, all in gold and silver – was spread out on cloths on the ground. Polemo’s hawk-like face broke into the uncomplicated smile of an acquisitive child. He had some of the choicer pieces passed up to him. He turned them in his hands, admiring their cunningly worked designs.
Sometimes, Ballista thought, the Romans are blinkered like a chariot horse that only sees its own lane. Just because consular rank, the right to be addressed as Vir Clarissimus, was close to the greatest felicity imaginable among them, it never crossed their minds it might mean something less to anyone else; that it might have fallen as something of an anticlimax after the gold and silver. Ballista had been right: precious metals were the way to the affections, if such was the right term, of this avaricious kinglet dressed in his grubby tunic high in the Caucasian mountains.
Polemo continued to peer closely at the metalwork, running the tips of his fingers over the embossed figures. Allfather only knew what message, if any, he was reading in those images of eastern barbarians looking a bit like the Persian mobads on their knees in front of suitably naked, heroic westerners.
‘We are pleased with the tribute sent by the basileus of the Romans,’ said Polemo.
Ballista bowed, not taking issue with the expression tribute.
‘You will stay the night here in the royal residence. At the feast, you will tell us of your plans to rebuild our fortifications at the Caspian Gates.’
As Ballista thanked the king in Attic Greek, he was sure the girl Pythonissa was smiling.
XXIII
Riding the last few miles to the Caspian Gates, Ballista felt the world close in around them. The valley twisted and turned. Its grey walls reared up impossibly high; jagged, naked rock – no birds, no animals, not even an ibex or mountain goat. Above, the sky seemed no more than a pale ribbon. Wraiths of mist often pursued one another up there. When they caught each other, they coalesced into a fog which cut off the heavens, oozed down the fissures and threatened to engulf the travellers. At the bottom, the track was little wider than an ox cart; the river filled the rest of the space. The Alontas tumbled and roared over the boulders in its shallow bed. Its surface was just a handspan below the level of the road. When the rains were heavy, when the snow melted fast on the peaks, obviously the Alontas would rise, fill the pass and sweep away almost everything in its way. Given this, the ever-present likelihood of rockfalls, and the character of the neighbouring peoples, the pass struck Ballista as a particularly dangerous place.
‘ Cumania,’ the Suani prince Azo said. The gorge turned to the right here. The path was on the inside of the curve, hard up against the eastern wall. The river thundered along, trying to undermine the opposite rocks. Up above the waters, away to Ballista’s left, there were stone walls, slate roofs: a small fort perched on an outcrop forty or fifty feet over the Alontas.
‘The Gates,’ Azo said.
Ballista looked north around the bend: the river, the track, fallen boulders, the walls of the ravine. He looked harder, and there, in the torrent, the stumps of three stone piers – all that remained of the famous Caspian Gates.
‘Much work for you to do.’
The words of the Suani were borne out as the day wore on. While the prince sat on a sheepskin rug, drinking and talking with his warriors, Ballista and his familia scrambled and splashed about. The water was shockingly cold, the rocks slippery. Inspecting the fort, Ballista discovered that some of its roof timbers were rotten; parts of its walls needed replacing. Apart from raw stone and water, there were no building materials to hand.
‘My sister,’ Azo said. A mounted group was approaching. ‘She likes to hunt. Our brother has a hunting lodge beyond the Gates in the hills to the north.’ A slight look of distaste passed across the speaker’s face. ‘Saurmag often goes among the Alani barbarians.’ Ballista got the impression that neither barbarians nor brother pleased Azo.
Pythonissa headed the cavalcade that clattered up from the direction of Dikaiosyne. She was dressed for the chase, armed like a man. She rode astride. Perhaps for a woman’s respectability, there were two eunuchs in her train. The other twenty or so riders were warriors.
Azo and Ballista bowed where they stood in the road, blew a kiss. Pythonissa pulled up her mount a few paces short. She tossed the reins to one of the eunuchs, and jumped down. She bowed and blew a kiss back. She spoke to her brother in Greek about coverts and game, wild boar and deer, about nothing of any importance.
Ballista watched her. She reminded him of Bathshiba in Arete. Pythonissa was taller, her skin paler, her hair blond. She looked nothing like Bathshiba. But the wild Amazonian quality was the same.
The girl turned to Ballista. She stood unexpectedly close. He was terribly aware of what he had done to her life, no matter how indirectly. He framed a polite, neutral question. ‘What quarry are you after?’
She continued to regard him wordlessly. Her eyes were grey-blue.
‘You and your men are well armed,’ he continued. ‘Equipped to deal with big game.’
