The Tiger Warrior (2 page)

Licinius saw Fabius begin to make his way up the hill. He watched the others wade out to the boat, carrying the sacks of booty, led by Marcus, the shipbuilder from Aquileia, who would try to keep it afloat. He felt his own bag, the shape in it. He had wrested the bag from the trader when they found him. There had been another bag, identical, and he had given it to Fabius. The trader had pleaded with them not to open the bags, and to keep them separate. They had humored him, needing him. Licinius still did not know what lay inside. He would open it as soon as he had dealt with the trader and found somewhere to sleep that night. The rest of the booty had been taken from the Sogdians. The traders had been leading camels across the plain, heading west, laden down with bags of precious stones, textiles, shimmering cloth they called
serikōn
. The legionaries had killed them, all but one. They killed everyone they came across. It was what they did. Then they had made a pyre of it all, the bodies, the textiles, everything, and gorged themselves. They had been famished, and had gnawed at the bones like dogs. They had found wine, skins of it, and had drunkenly fashioned crude branding irons from the camel bits. They had branded themselves. He could still smell the burning flesh. He looked at his forearm, squeezed it, watched the blood oozing out, coagulating. There would be a good scar, one that would cut through all the other scars, the scars of whipping and beating, the old scars of battle. It hurt like Hades, but he relished the pain. It helped him focus. It was how they had been trained. It was how they had survived thirty-four years enslaved, whipped by day and chained by night, building the walls of the Parthian citadel. Most had died. Those who remained were the toughest. He held his fist in a hard ball and grunted. The mark of the brand was a number seared into their souls.
XV
. Fifteenth Apollinaris. The lost legion. A legion of ghosts.
Their legion
.

It was as if their souls had been locked within them, frozen for the past thirty-four years. Ten thousand had marched from the battlefield at Carrhae. They were only nine now, one fewer than the day before.
“Frater,”
he whispered, remembering Appius.
“Ave atque vale
. Hail and farewell. Until we meet in Elysium.” They had spent the night in a fearful place, full of crumbling canyons and dead ends, rent with the moans and howls of the spirits who lurked within. The sky had blackened and crackled with lightning, as if Jupiter himself were slashing at the fabric of the heavens. The wind had shrieked up behind them like a dragon breathing fire through the canyons, licks of poisoned breath seeking them out, reaching into every nook and cranny. They had huddled down under interlocked shields, the
testudo
, the tortoise, as they had been trained to do, under square shields they had made for themselves, while the rain thundered down and the arrows of their enemy slammed in. Appius had gone half-mad, screamed at their enemy to show themselves, to fight like men, and had broken free, and then an arrow had taken him. Licinius had dragged him back under, gurgling, wide-eyed, and held him with an iron grip even after he had passed beyond, shaking and convulsing. Death in battle as it really was, not as Licinius had once sculpted it in stone for his patrons in Rome. He had gone half-mad himself, smearing his body with the blood, and had unhorsed the bowman, bellowing in rage and grief, clamping and twisting the man’s throat, tearing his eyes out. They were human, he had screamed, not demons, and if they were human they could be defeated. He had wrenched away the horseman’s great dripping sword, its gauntlet in the shape of a tiger, ripped off the scale armor, throwing it over his back, and had taken the severed head in his hand, held by the long plaited hair and knot. But the other legionaries had already gone, taking Appius’ body with them, leaving him to struggle behind, and he had slipped and dropped the head in the maw of some mighty waterfall.

Hours later he had come upon them, the dwindling band, with the trader in tow, on the edge of the lake. They had found boulders with mysterious carvings, and they had laid Appius there with his weapon, a broken bronze dagger-axe. They had put coins on his eyes, one coin from the altar of Alexander the Great, the other a strange coin with a square hole they had taken from the Sogdians. They could not risk the smoke from a pyre, but he, Licinius, the former sculptor, had used a chisel he had fashioned to gouge out a few words on a rock beside the body. He had put the sacred number of their legion on the stone, so Charon would know where to take Appius when he came for him, to join all the others who shadowed them, the ghost legion.

Fabius reached him and sat down, looking east. Licinius sat beside him, angling the sword on his back out of the way, the gleaming metal tiger gauntlet above his shoulder. Fabius was from the Alps, tall, with blue eyes and red hair, still visible amid the gray stubble. For a while they said nothing. They were blood brothers, the last of the
contubernium
, the eight who had answered the call to arms when Julius Caesar had marched on Gaul, who had messed and camped and fought together through all the glory days of the legion. Like Appius had been. Licinius glanced at the place where they had laid him, then took something out of a pouch on his belt and passed it to Fabius. It was a small, smooth stone, light in weight, with a hole in the center. Fabius took it, and held it up. “The color of honey,” he said. “It has something inside it. A mosquito.”

“I took it from Appius’ body,” Licinius said. “It was an heirloom, passed to him by his mother. It’s a strange stone he called burn-stone that comes from the shore of the sea to the north of Germania. You remember the patterns on the shields of the Gauls we fought at Alesia, the swirling animals? You can see the same, etched on the stone. Appius’ mother was a German, you know. He said this stone was for children. It brought them luck. He hoped one day he might have a child. I promised I would take it if I survived him. Somehow he kept it, all those years in the quarries.”

“I hate to think where he hid it,” Fabius said. “But knowing Appius, it makes sense. He was always talking out of his arse.”

“We will miss him.”

“Until Elysium.”

Licinius closed his pouch. “It’s yours. We are old, but not too old, and maybe one day you will escape from all this and find a woman and have a child. My time for that has passed. I had a child once, a boy whose hair would now be flecked with gray, but for me there will be no more. Hold it, and remember Appius. Remember
me, Frater
. Remember all of us, this day.”

Fabius said nothing, but held the stone. Licinius looked him over. Macrobius, the leatherworker, had fashioned sandals from camel skin, good, sturdy marching sandals, tied up their bare calves to the knees. With those, they could go anywhere. Apart from that, they looked like barbarians. Fabius wore armor and weapons he had pillaged along the way, a leather jerkin rigid with dried blood, shreds of Parthian chain mail crudely sewn into it. The chain was in the Roman fashion, better able to counter a sword thrust, but Licinius’ new shirt of segmented metal squares might stop a few arrows and would help to keep the wind at bay. Fabius had their prized weapon, a short bronze thrusting sword covered with intricate foreign patterns, dragons and tigers and demons. It was like a Roman
gladius
, perfect for close-quarters fighting. The great sweeping sword on Licinius’ back was a slashing blade, as sharp as swamp grass, and had decapitated his enemy the night before as if it were a head of cabbage. But sweeping blows left the body exposed, and were not the Roman way. He would get Rufus the metalsmith to cut the sword down to size. But then he remembered. Rufus was gone too. And it scarcely mattered now. He extended his bare arms, and held out his hands. “Look at us. I hardly feel the cold anymore. My skin is like camel leather. And when I kill now, I do it with my bare hands.”

“Maybe we are becoming gods.” “The gods are our brothers who have gone before.” When Licinius heard Fabius speak he still heard the voice of a young man, but when he looked he saw a man ravaged by the years, gray-stubbled and hoary, halfway to Elysium already. The day before, blind drunk and freshly branded, they had shorn their hair and beards, preparing for the final battle. They had not expected to survive the canyon, and when they joined the others in Elysium they had wanted to look right. Licinius felt his scalp. It was rough, hard, like every surface of his body, like the freshly sawn marble he had once traced his fingers over in their workshop in Rome. He felt the weals around his wrists, as thick as elephant hide.
Thirty-four years in chains
. They were survivors, but he felt they were living ghosts, men whose souls had departed that day on the scorching battlefield of Carrhae.

“You are remembering? The battle?” Fabius said quietly.

“Always.”

The expedition had been ill-fated from the start. Crassus had been their general. Crassus who saw himself as equal to Caesar. Licinius snorted. Crassus the Banker, Crassus who had only wanted gold. They had despised him, loathed him even more than their Parthian enemy. When they crossed the river Euphrates, there had been peals of thunder, crashes of lightning, and a fearful wind, half-mist, half-hurricane. Then the sacred eagle standard of the legion had turned face-about, of its own accord.
Of its own accord
. And yet they had marched on. It was not the defeat that was unbearable, it was defeat without honor. Crassus, too weak to die by his own sword, had to be slain by his tribune. Poor Caius Paccianus,
primus pilus
of the first cohort, whose fate it was to bear the closest likeness to Crassus, had been paraded around by the Parthians in a woman’s red robe, trumpeters and lictors on camels ahead of him, the dripping heads of Roman dead suspended from axes all around. The Parthians had filled his throat with molten gold in mockery of Crassus, a man who had thought that pay and promises of gold were the only guarantee of a soldier’s loyalty.

But that was not the worst. The worst was to lose the eagle, ripped off its standard and taken away before their eyes. From then on they were ghosts, all of them, the living and the dead.

“Does the trader give us any news of Rome?” Fabius asked quietly. “You’re the only one who can speak Greek. I heard Greek sounds when he was pleading with us.”

“He’s been many times to Barygaza, a place on the Erythraean Sea where traders come from Egypt. That’s where the Sogdian caravan was heading, and that’s where he learned his Greek.” Licinius paused, not sure how Fabius would take it. “There is some news, my friend, about Rome.”

“Ah.” Fabius leaned forward. “Glorious news, I hope.”

“He says the wars are long over. He says there is a new peace.” He put his hand on Fabius’ shoulder. “And he says Rome is now ruled by an emperor.”

“An emperor?”
Fabius looked hard at him, his eyes ablaze. “Julius Caesar. Our true general. He’s the only one. It must be him.”

Licinius shook his head. “Caesar is long gone. You and I both know that, in our hearts. And if he’d become emperor, he’d have come looking for us. No, it’s someone new. Rome has changed.”

Fabius looked downcast. “Then I will seek Caesar in Elysium. I will serve no other as emperor. I have seen what emperors do, in Parthia. We are citizen-soldiers.”

Licinius held out his hands again, gnarled, scarred, caked in blood and grime, the ends of two fingers missing. “Citizens,” he said ruefully. “Thirty-five years ago, maybe. Are these still the hands of a sculptor?”

Fabius leaned over on one elbow. “You remember Quintus Varius, who the Parthians made foreman of the southern sector of the walls? First centurion of the third cohort? He’d been a builder on the Bay of Naples before joining up, knew all about concrete. He persuaded the Parthian vizier that the dust that choked us for all those years was the key ingredient of concrete, like the volcanic dust of Naples. Of course it was nothing of the sort. Varius was executed years ago, some trivial thing, but we put that dust with our mortar ever since. Those walls we spent thirty-four years building won’t last another ten. You mark my words. They’ll crumble to dust. That’s a citizen-soldier for you. Brings all his skills as a civilian to bear.”

“And a citizen-soldier can go back to civilian life.”

“What are you thinking?”

“The trader said something else.”

“Spill it, Licinius.”

“He said this emperor has negotiated peace with the Parthians. He said he had seen a new coin, celebrating the peace as a great triumph. He said the eagles have been returned.”

Fabius shook his head angrily. “Impossible. He’s spinning you tales. He knew who we were, knew about our looted Parthian treasure. Word must have spread about us along the caravan route. He was eager to please, and thought a tall tale of an emperor would satisfy us. Well, he was wrong. We should have butchered him along with the others.”