The Seven Hills(19)

She had some decisions to make soon, but her situation was very precarious. She wanted the support of Rome, needed it, really, for without the Romans as allies she would soon be under siege again by the Carthaginians, or else the desperate Seleucids would have a try at Egypt, or the Parthians might take it into their heads to add the Nile to their expanding empire, as had the Persians in their day. As had Alexander.

It was wonderful being queen of the richest nation in the world. It was also perilous, owning the one thing coveted by all the grasping, rapacious powers on earth.





CHAPTER FOUR


The cold of the desert nights came as a surprise to everyone. Roman soldiers were inured to cold after so many years campaigning north of the Alps, but it seemed strange to encounter it here. The sentries stood muffled in their woolen cloaks, and the men not asleep gathered close to fires built with the skimpy brushwood that constituted the only available fuel.

The ground was hard and stony, but each day at the end of their march the legionaries got out their pickaxes and spades, their baskets for moving earth, and they dug their rectangular ditch, heaping the soil into a low rampart that they topped with the long, pointed stakes carried by each man. Only after they had accomplished this did they go within to erect their tents. Each fortified camp was exactly as it would have been on the Rhenus or Danubius or on some other nameless river in the northland. In all probability there was no enemy for many days' march in any direction, but that made no difference. Everywhere a Roman army stopped for the night, it erected just such a camp.

"Here we are," Cato said sourly, "fortified against jackals and foxes, when we could be camped in Sicily." He sat in a folding chair before one of the brushwood fires, a cup of watered date wine in his hand. Their wine was already souring from the heat of the days on the march, but it made the even fouler water drinkable.

"I don't care," said Lentulus Niger. "Sicily will take a year or two. As long as we're in on the finish, when we besiege Carthage, I'll be satisfied. The tale of this march will make our names, even if it doesn't bring us riches."

"You sound like a man trying to convince himself," Cato said.

"What's this?" The voice came from beyond the firelight. "Do I hear grumbling in the ranks?" Norbanus came into the firelight and held his hands out close to the flames.

"This isn't the ranks," Niger said. "It's the praetorium." He and Cato had both plodded their way up the ladder of office. Each had been military tribune, quaestor and aedile, each had put in years on the staff of a higher-ranking man and was ready to stand for the praetorship. It still rankled that Norbanus had what amounted to a proconsular command without having done any of that.

Besides, his was one of the new families, while theirs dated from before the Exile. In fact, their ancestors had been praetors and consuls when his were illiterate savages painting their backsides blue. The only thing that made him tolerable was the deadly enmity between Norbanus and Marcus Scipio, whom they detested even more. Scipio was more aristocratic than either of them and they resented that, too.

Norbanus smiled. He knew how little he was loved and was not at all disturbed by it. The envy of lesser men was a part of greatness. Men like Lentulus Niger and Cato were destined to be used by him and to be sacrificed for his advantage, at necessity. A great man needed supporters and followers. He needed few friends.

"We face only a few more days of this," he told them. "I've just interrogated those locals from the caravan. They say that their people call this place the Wilderness of Zin."

"It's a fitting name," Cato granted. "I couldn't have come up with a better. So where are we?"

"About two days' march west of a town called Kadesh. It's a caravan stop and like all of them has its own spring. We can restore our water there and graze the animals. After that, we swing north."

"Out of this desert?" Niger said hopefully.

He grinned at them. "Any direction we go takes us out of the desert, if we just go far enough."

Their march had taken them through the blighted landscape from oasis to oasis, each of them yielding scarcely enough water and forage to keep the army moving. They had passed by incredibly ancient turquoise mines, watched over by statues of the cow-eared goddess Hathor, who for some reason was the deity of such places. Herders of goats had fled before them, and they had seen few humans other than these herdsmen. The desert was crossed by a network of caravan routes, but these were little traveled and the caravan they had met that afternoon was the first they had seen in several days.

"What's north of Kadesh?" Cato wanted to know.