Magnus laughed, spraying onion over the calves of a kneeling auxiliary shaping stone with a hand-pick. The man turned round, invective ready on his lips, but it stayed there and died when he saw who was responsible. Since the sack of Amida, ten days previously, Vespasian and Magnus had become objects of curiosity to the auxiliaries. It was known that Vespasian had prevented Paelignus from giving the men two days’ rest – one of the centurions gossiping, he assumed – and it was also known that he had recommended some executions to help bring the men back into line; over twenty had lost their lives. This had made Vespasian someone to fear: a man who ostensibly held no command and yet could order death and countermand their commander. Being auxiliaries raised in Cappadocia, none of them recognised Vespasian from Rome where his time as consul, admittedly for only two months, had made him a familiar face in the Forum Romanum, but not here in the southern foothills of the Masius mountains between the Tigris and the Euphrates. So the rank and file did not know Vespasian’s identity and the officers, if they did, kept it to themselves, having been warned to do so.
However, the auxiliaries had more pressing concerns than the identity of the man in their midst with the power of life and death: why were they fortifying a city in order to wait behind its reconstructed walls for a Parthian army that was rumoured to be heading their way and would surely outnumber the small Roman force by tens of thousands? But that question was not answered as their centurions and optiones bullied them and their civilian co-workers into working harder, faster and longer, hauling stones, shaping stones, lifting stones, placing stones and doing just about anything with stones that could be conceived even by the most imaginative of centurions.
In five days the four thousand men of the five cohorts and roughly the equivalent number of citizens had repaired most of the large gaps in the two-mile wall to a tolerable standard and it once again stood twenty feet high continuously around the entire city. Now the men were working on the lesser damage in the hope that they could bring the defences up to a state of near-perfection so that the host coming up from the south would break upon the walls when it arrived.
‘Then he said,’ Vespasian continued, ‘that we should at least reduce the number of hours spent repairing the defences every day from twelve to six.’
Magnus looked up to the royal palace that dominated the whole city. ‘So Paelignus is still trying to make himself popular with the men? It’s beyond me why he bothers. None of them is ever going to show that hunchback any respect more than is due to his rank. The way he tries to buy their favour is by slackening their discipline, which, of course, will make them into weaker, sloppier soldiers; and they’re the sort that generally end up dead. Who wants to be popular with dead men?’
‘Quite. I think that if I hadn’t been here, Paelignus would have four thousand very drunk and surly men with which to defend Tigranocerta from the Parthians.’
Magnus knotted his brow, puzzled. ‘From what I can make out, if you weren’t here then none of us would be. And I’m still trying to work out why we’re here anyway.’
Vespasian stopped and looked out to the south, shading his eyes from the midday sun, down the length of the Sapphe Bezabde pass with the Tigris glinting at its base, the Royal Road coupled to its eastern bank; at its far end, thirty or so miles away, the pass opened up into the Parthian satrapy of Adiabene in what had once been Assyria. ‘We’re here because we want the Parthians to attack us; whoever heard of a war without someone attacking someone else?’
‘Yes, but why do we want the Parthians to attack us? And if we do then why didn’t we bring enough men to make a decent fight out of it?’
‘We don’t want a decent fight. In a decent fight lots of men are liable to be killed.’
‘Oh, so fewer of our lads will get killed if we’re outnumbered ten to one than if we had even numbers; is that what you’re saying?’
‘It is indeed.’
‘Then you evidently know less about soldiering than Paelignus.’
‘That’s about to be tested,’ Vespasian said very slowly as his eyes narrowed.
Magnus followed his gaze south to the horizon and then after a few moments he too saw what had taken his friend’s concentration. ‘Fuck me!’
‘I think that we’re all going to be far too busy to take you up on that very kind offer.’ Vespasian did not look away from the dust cloud smudging the horizon.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ Magnus agreed, his eyes also fixed on the brown smear that stained the clear blue sky.