Chapter V

 

 

 

Asia Province

 

Malorix follows the Phrygian cap for about an hour and is soon damp with sweat from the weight of his pack and weapons. Leaving the city via the northernmost gate they divert from the main thoroughfare following a narrow shepherd’s path concealed within clumps of scrub brush and tall grasses. Timon sets a torrid pace and Malorix struggles to keep up. The path remains level and dry until it emerges southeast of the city near a muddy irrigation canal. Lucian is waiting on horseback with two other riders.

"Hail, Decimus Malorix." Lucian waves. "Gentlemen, this sticky specimen is Malorix." He indicates them in turn. "These are Duris and Gelanor, two-thirds of your crew." As he speaks a third rider appears. "And that is Maecius, your shadow these many days."

Malorix studies his new companions as the one called Maecius jumps from his horse and relieves him of his gear. Clearly the youngest of the group, Maecius is a dark, smooth-skinned, man-child of the type that moves the loins of wealthy Romans of both sexes. Impossible to tell if Duris is young or middle aged. The effects of wind and sun have etched a portrait upon his face that defies time. The slender line of his cheeks and bird-of-prey features distinguish him as a desert Arab. Gelanor is a burly man, expressionless, slumped in the saddle like a pile of fresh concrete.

Lucian directs his mount around behind the group and reappears leading a tall, big-shouldered mare. "This is Athroula. You may thank Duris for this boon, he having endured tedious hours of haggling with a parsimonious Nabataean to acquire her.”

Arabians have endurance and speed.” Duris adds matter-of-factly.

Malorix casts an appraising eye over the horse. Black from her nose to her hooves, in profile she looks almost square. A long flat croup and longer tail add to her appeal, her head held high and proud. A fine animal. He grasps the saddle and springs lightly onto her back.

Lucian claps his hands like a host to dinner guests. "Let’s be off." Timon leads them south. When the path opens to permit riding abreast, Lucian falls in beside Malorix. Buoyed perhaps by the bright morning sunshine he sweeps his arm across the landscape. "Regard the Aegean, and the open road."

"Yes,” says Malorix. “How long have you known these men?”

Tut. Such scenery, and you are all business, Sarmatian." Lucian shakes his head tragically. “Fear not for your security. An aptitude of mine, talent spotting. I’m always alert for new faces. As you have devoted yourself to your weapons, I am a keen student of human nature with a flair for spotting a useful agent. I assure you, each is a man of talent, loyal and battle-tested.”

The road passes a large milepost indicating they are heading south toward the city of Ephesus. To the east the rolling hills climb abruptly, while to the west they descend toward a dazzling azure sea. Soon the route turns inland, and Timon directs them to a series of limestone ledges bisected by a narrow brook. On the second of these, hidden behind a tangle of bracken and cactus, a small shepherd’s hut fronts the opening of a cave. Provisions and equipment are stacked near the entrance, and here they make camp.

A trio of slaves remove the horses to a makeshift animal enclosure somewhere deeper into the trees, and then prepare a meal. There is little talk. Malorix accepts a bowl stuffed with bread, fish, and some beans called lupins, previously unknown to him. He tastes them gingerly at first and then tucks-in, conscious suddenly of his hunger. The slaves distribute wooden cups of syrupy local wine.

Malorix registers the shuffling unease of the slaves, and the way Lucian’s men sneak glances at him when they imagine he isn’t looking. Only the Arab seems genuinely indifferent to his presence. Perhaps they know him by reputation. They have no doubt taken note of his plaited hair, and the leggings that mark him as a barbarian in their eyes, something to be feared. Still, this feels familiar. Romans and Greek share a propensity to pass negative judgement upon that which is foreign to them. He directs his attention to his food. Let them stare. Let them fear him.

 

* * * * *

 

Another restless night. Once Malorix welcomed the dream-time of sleep and its nightly travel to a happier past. Visits by his father to reminisce about adventures, of places and animalsespecially the animals. His grandfather might appear, accompanied on occasion by ancestors who had trodden the vast Sarmatian plains in ages past. Malorix took pleasure in this, to know that he was part of their line and that they took an interest in this world.

A different time. Months before he embarked on the road to Byzantium they ceased to visit him. The dream-time no longer welcomes. In its place a void, or worse. Seven moons has he prayed to the thunder god, Targitai for their return, his prayers unanswered. What comes instead are dark figures, unknown, to him. Those who whisper a language he does not understand. One in particular fills him with dread. That one calls to him from a distance—by name.

Shades of victims, returned, seeking retribution. Malorix prays it is not this, for there are many to appease. Surely the family spirits have not abandoned him, but they remain aloof, blocked. Every instinct tells him they would not stay away by choice. Instead it seems they are kept away. How, and by what, he cannot tell. What he knows for certain is that something is stirring. And although Malorix understands little of this strange mission that has fallen to him, he senses these things are connected.

As he lifts his head from the roll of hide that serves as his pillow, the aura in the eastern sky is yet but a suggestion of morning. He feels clammy, but not from the heat. Eyes fixed on the fading stars he stands and offers a prayer to the Sky God. Lucian and the others lie in misshapen heaps that mimic the loose dishes and trash strewn around the remains of their fire. Taking up a small axe from his satchel, corselet in hand he steals quietly from the camp.

The ground is August dry. Sandy soil beneath his feet soon changes to a thick carpet of brittle needles fallen from the scraggly pines. His spirits lift as he inhales their scent, and he savours the pre-dawn coolness on his skin. Further ahead the ground turns to brown scrub with patches of green grass, as he encounters a clearing surrounded by a stand of stout cedars. Taking a position in the centre of the clearing he offers a prayer to the spirits of the place, and then paces out distances to the trees in a radius around him. Using the axe, he shaves away portions of bark on selected trees, exposing the clean white of the trunk. The sky brightens as he works. Returning to his central position, he straps on the corselet and feels for the dagger handles, eight in all, that protrude from the sheaths concealed within the leatherwork. He selects one.

"Breathe…"

Feeling the breeze as it tugs gently at his hair, he grips the dagger loosely in his left hand and allows his eyes lose their focus. As he springs forward, the dagger cleaves the air and strikes the trunk near the centre of the white, burying the tip. He turns to his right and hears the dull impact of his next dagger. Now three, and four…

When all are spent he moves lightly from tree to tree to collect them. A few wild throws. One struck butt-end first, otherwise not bad. He resumes the cycle. Time has no meaning as his body warms to the task. In this place he is at peace, his dreams have no power. He could be nine years old, at his father’s side at a Sarmatian village fête. Perhaps performing at a palace picnic for an assembly of drunken senators or giving the guards another way to lose their pay betting on how often he would hit or miss. He could be anywhere, any time. In this moment, there is only the steel.

Malorix learned to hunt and to throw from his father. Mastor was a Jazygian warrior taken captive in the war with Rome, along with thousands of kinsmen. Sold into imperial service, his strength and daring were such that he found a place as a favoured huntsman of the Emperor Hadrian, and ultimately pre-eminent among those responsible for acquiring the game that adorned the imperial table. The demand for game to fill the pantries of the palace was then as now insatiable, as were its guests. Mastor was charged with satisfying it, and his success was such that in time he was rewarded and made a freedman. Such honour would have been enough for Mastor and his family. But the hand of Targitai was upon him.

Emperor Hadrian was destined to meet a slow and painful death from a wasting disease. When he could take no more, he called on Mastor to end his life. The Emperor’s personal physician showed Mastor where to strike, drawing a coloured line around a spot beneath his nipple, ideal for a finishing blow. Mastor was nobody’s fool. Imperial command or not, Hadrian was like his father, and in Rome the penalty for patricide was to be whipped, enclosed in a leather bag with a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey, and then cast into the Tiber. The killer of an Emperor was doomed, as were his progeny, for all time. And so Mastor defied his Emperor.

Claiming his sword unequal to the challenge, he feigned to fetch a new one. Instead he returned accompanied by the Emperor’s adopted son, Antoninus, known later as Pius, who begged from his father a promise to go on living. For this betrayal Hadrian cursed Mastor and called him a disloyal son. He raged and screamed of this betrayal and swore on his death-bed that if Mastor could not kill, his son would be cursed to a lifetime of killing. The ravings of a dying man, they said.

Pius felt sympathy for Mastor’s plight. As heir apparent he could protect the huntsman from the Emperor's vengeance, and following Hadrian's death made him a knight with a stipend with which to live the rest of his life a wealthy man. A few years later Malorix was born. With his father he travelled the length of Italy and the frontiers of the Danube and the Rhine in search of game. By the time he was ten years old he had tracked or haggled in the market for every imaginable fish, fowl, or beast of the Roman table. He ran errands and made deliveries to the quarters of the city where the Greeks, Spaniards, Celts, Egyptians, Syrians, Germans, Jews, Africans, and indeed Sarmatians gathered in their close communities. He learned the rudiments of their languages; he had no choice.

When not on the road with his father, Malorix benefited from the opportunities for education that were open to the friends of the court and the entourage of Antoninus Pius. He joined the lessons of the many relations and hangers-on of the imperial family.

"A blessing from Apollo", "touched by the gods", "Minerva’s child", they called him as word began to filter around the palace that he possessed a special gift for languages. They would trot him out to entertain foreign visitors. A stranger might speak to him in a new and unknown tongue, and perhaps show him objects around the room, offering up their names and using gestures to convey meaning. Within the hour he would be able to translate for his hosts and hold simple conversations, to the amazement and delight of the guests, and sometimes the Emperor himself.

Malorix even knew Marcus Aurelius, from a distance. His admiration for the young prince grew to hero worship. There was no one like the young Marcus. He was what Malorix imagined the gods were like. Ethereal. Serious. Marcus was like the opaque white glassware of the imperial table, so frail, but with an eggshell lustre just below the surface suggesting hidden strength. Within lay the powerful mind fixed on its secret mysteries.

The idyll did not last. Malorix became in time an object of envy and of jealousy. In his eleventh year the children turned on him as a body. For a while he did not understand, and he suffered. But with time to reflect he deduced that at a certain age children assume the prejudices of their parents. He had no great lineage. They were an elite. He was pure Sarmatian, and so to them a mere savage. They were of established Italian families, or social-climbing Greek stock. The Greek children most of all seemed to bear him some secret grudge. As a young man Malorix concluded their hatred of him was the product of their own unique pain that had its origins in the submission of a proud people to the might of Roman Imperium.

More than this, Malorix came to believe there was something missing in him that nurtured their hate. And so, shunned, harassed, or bullied when he was among them, he withdrew into the personal solitude that has been his ever since. Five long years he suffered the children of the court, the sons and daughters of Rome’s finest citizens. In the end, for all the love of the learning he had gained he couldn’t wait to escape them. The opportunity came in the form of Marcus Gavius. The Praetorian Prefect recruited Malorix, now in his fifteenth year, to train as an army scout. With a keen eye for talent, Gavius knew that one day the boy would join his world of spies. Assassin born. Curse fulfilled. The son of the huntsman who would not kill an emperor destined to kill on behalf of that Emperor’s successors, over and over again.

Mesmerized by his memories and the flash of the blades, his pace increases. He alternates the targets from one to another in random order. Harder and faster. There are no further misses. Every dagger a kill. When at last he pauses, the sun is noticeably higher. Standing relaxed, arms hanging easily by his sides, he loses the blades again, drawing another from his corselet as soon as its predecessor has left his hand.

One … three … six …

His concentration is broken when a face comes into view. Lucian. Standing beside the target.

Seven …

The blade bisects the wood half a foot from the Syrian’s ear. Lucian blinks, then blows out his cheeks and reaches up to touch the blade wedged in the tree trunk. Withdrawing it with some difficulty, he wipes it on his tunic and tucks it under one arm. As he walks toward Malorix he brings his hands together in silent applause. If shaken by the knife throw, he doesn’t show it.

"Impressive, Sarmatian. Claudius does not do justice to your skills. You are without doubt the terror of the woodpile. But tell me, how long have you harboured this arboreal aversion? In what way have these poor saplings offended you? You should know there may be dryads here, or all manner of nymphs. The gods know it’s just got to be someone’s sacred grove. Old Silvanus perhaps? As for the poor satyrs, they’re probably still cowering with their hands firmly covering their private parts. And the trees, the poor things. Where will it end? It’s bad enough we chop them up into bits of firewood, or manufacture chairs to play host to fat farting buttocks for all eternity, but now we must hold them at knifepoint and terrorize them at dawn."

Still in the cold-heat trance of throwing, Malorix launches his final blade past Lucian’s head where it arrives humourlessly on target. "You talk much, yet say little."

"I told you before, I live for words." Lucian peruses the blade in his hand. It is all one, handle and blade wrought from a single casting, and sharp as a barber’s razor. He hands it over handle first. "Where did you learn this unusual pastime?"

"Among my people children hunt rodents and birds in this way." Malorix slides the blade into its place on his corselet. He gestures for Lucian to accompany him, and they stroll around the clearing to collect the remaining knives. "I don’t know what Claudius told you, but I work alone."

"He mentioned it, but do not judge too hastily. They each have their talents. Maecius, for example, is an accomplished thief."

"Duris?"

"Quiet and dependable. Just your type, I’m thinking. As you no doubt have surmised, he is an Arab of the desert, not the city, although he hails from Palmyra. When he speaks, which is rarely, I generally listen. As for Gelanor, he usually leads missions to Armenia. He is Armenian and knows the country."

"How does he feel about taking his orders from a newcomer?"

Lucian hesitates. "Naturally, Gelanor would prefer to be in charge. I have explained these are special circumstances.

"And the others?"

"The slaves are loyal walk-ons in the manner of Aeschylus or Philocles. They wear their slavery tragically for all to see, full of sighs and affected resignation. As a rule Greeks make poor slaves. Their heads are far too full of their own history."

"Rhetoric is lost on me, Lucian. What do you want to speak about?"

"Ah yes," Lucian withdraws a pace. "As you may have guessed, our leader Claudius has not been entirely forthcoming about this mission."

"Sending his most valuable agent a thousand miles to survey the site of a battle that happened nearly a year ago? Why should I see anything queer in that?"

As they approach the next tree Lucian wiggles the dagger free and hands it to Malorix. "You normally work Pannonia and points west. The sector immediately to the east of you is Dacia. Operating there under cover was an important agent with the code name Ferrata. You know him as Afranius Silo."

"I know him as both. Silo trained me when I joined the Frumentarii."

"You are close then?"

"My brothers died in infancy. Silo is my brother, though …" he looks into the distance, "we are not so much alike."

"How are you so different?"

Malorix reflects on this. "Silo likes people."

Lucian smiles. "When did you see him last?"

"I have not had contact with him for perhaps two years."

Lucian struggles to withdraw the blade from the next tree. It gives way with a jerk. "Well then. Perhaps now we know why Claudius selected you for this mission."

"What of Silo?" Malorix asks with sudden urgency.

"Officially, Silo was the First Spear of the Ist Italian Legion, stationed at Novae." They move toward the next target. "Unofficially, he handled all the Frumentarii agents east of Pannonia to the sea, and special investigations for Claudius. His legion did a lot of escort duty and elements of it were always on the move, so Silo had agents all over. One of their most important functions was escorting gold convoys coming down from Dacia, most of which end up in the imperial mint at Serdica.

"Silo learned there was a lot of gold circulating among the Dacians. Roman gold, distributed by a Parthian agent."

"Cocconas of Chalcedon."

"Indeed."

"The last thing I did before coming here was send him to Rome. The gold I am carrying was in his possession."

"Precisely. The Frumentarii tracked Cocconas for the better part of a year. We knew he was using his gold to stir up the tribes, but there was more to the conspiracy. Silo reported that he was to meet in Serdica with a close contact of this Cocconas. Unfortunately, the contact lost his head. Literally."

"And Silo?"

"We believe Silo met the contact before he was killed."

"But what of Silo?"

Lucian elicits patience with a gently raised palm. "Something interesting happens. Unknown to Claudius or the Frumentarii, Silo is transferred. Suddenly, mind you, and not just him, his entire unit. A vexillation of the Ist cohort of the Ist Legion is urgently required to reinforce a legion elsewhere. Can you guess which legion?"

"IXth Hispana," Malorix says quietly.

"Exactly, to the Spanish Legion. Strange, don’t you think? Contact murdered, and Silo transferred. The commander of IXth Hispana was told to stay put, yet soon after the arrival of reinforcements from only a single cohort, he marches them to their collective destruction. No Silo, no conspiracy. End of our story."

"He sent no message from Novae?"

"We received nothing. Afranius Silo was a good agent, but messages can be intercepted."

"Silo is dead?"

"He was written off as dead, but as I told you we have since obtained a report of Roman captives. Silo may be among them."

"I’m here because I know Silo?"

"Clearly."

"But who would have the kind of influence to arrange such a thing? To transfer a cohort?"

"I scent a Praetorian connection. As you say, who else could arrange it? More to the point, we believe if Silo knew he was going to end up dead, he would find some way of getting a message to Claudius."

"He would," Malorix agrees. "A message at Elegia?"

"It’s possible. Or among the survivors."

"Silo may yet live."

"The gods know, but you must follow Silo’s trail east to where it leads. If he is alive, he will be a slave. Slaves can be bought, and you have enough gold to buy an army of them. Bring Silo out. If he is dead he may have left a message or talked to somebody about what he learned in Serdica. The message might be as simple and small a thing as a single name.

"You have sufficient gold to purchase most of Armenia, not that it’s worth so much. Just remember you are not on a rescue mission. Unless the prisoners are useful to your mission the fates have spoken for them. Claudius has made that point quite clearly."

Malorix shrugs, the matter being of indifference to him. "What of Cocconas? If he was part of the conspiracy with this contact then we already have our answer, or will once Claudius can dispatch it."

"Perhaps. But the mystery of the fate of the IXth Legion remains, and the fate of our agent."