The Caspian Gates

PART THREE





The Mountains of Prometheus

(The Caucasus, Summer–Autumn, AD262)




Slim indeed are our hopes, if we must entrust our safe return to women.



–Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, 3, c. 488–9





XX



When the sea fret lifted, there, fine over the starboard bow, were the Caucasus mountains. Forty, fifty or more miles away, the immense green-grey slopes thrust up and, far behind them, cloud-topped, the jagged white peaks of the mountain wall. They were, thought Ballista, a fitting place for a high god to chain an immortal traitor.

Ballista had crossed the Alps several times, and as a young man he had served in the Atlas, but those mountains were as nothing to this eastern range. He could see why some men held that the Caucasus might stretch as far as India. Somewhere high in that wilderness of rock and snow, he had to seduce a king from his Persian inclination and cajole him back into friendship with Rome. Somewhere up there was a grim pass he had to defend from the savage northern nomads. It was the far edge of the world; a sort of armed exile.

‘Arrian was right,’ Hippothous said. ‘The Phasis river does have a strange colour.’

Ballista looked. Mud carried down by the great river of Colchis stained the sea in a wide yellowish fan. The waters of the Phasis were indeed light with a tawny shade, just as the bookish governor of Cappadocia had written more than a century before. For these Greeks and Romans, everything was seen through a filter of literary texts.

The Armata turned and nudged in towards Phasis. The last leg of the furthermost run had been slow. They had taken eight days at Amisus repairing the trireme after the storm. It had been a miserable time: hard, dirty work tightening the hypozomata around the vessel, making sound the sprung planks, caulking the seams, splicing and replacing damaged rigging, cleaning the fouled bilges. The spirits of the passengers as well as the labouring crew had been oddly oppressed by the fate of one young barbarian slave boy. The death on shore of one of the unconscious crewmen had passed almost unnoticed.

Two days out from Amisus, they had docked in the neat man-made harbour below the towers of Trapezus and a smoke-blackened temple to Hadrian and Rome, where a battered statue of the deified emperor pointed out to sea. They had gone ashore. The fold of his toga over his head, Felix had sacrificed an ox, inspected its entrails – nothing untoward – and poured a libation. Trapezus was the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet, and the most important garrison town for the army at the eastern end of the sea. The next morning, the consular, for all the world as if he were the governor of Cappadocia, had inspected the ships, the troops, their weapons, the walls, the trench, the sick, the muster rolls, and the food supplies. All were sadly depleted. Only a few years earlier, the Classis Pontica had boasted no fewer than forty warships here; there had been some ten thousand local troops as well as many regulars. But then the northmen had come, the garrison had failed in its duty and courage and the Borani had sacked the city. Now there were but ten liburnians – four of them laid up – and just three units of soldiers. The two units of local infantry, Numeri I and II Trapezountioon, numbered no more than a hundred and fifty men each, and the cavalry regulars, Ala II Gallorum, about two hundred, even including those absent without leave and the ill.

The subsequent two days, a similar story had played out. Just down the coast at the fort of Hyssou Limen, the old, proud Cohors Apuleia Civium Romanorum Ysiporto had only two hundred and fifty men with the standards all told. Eighty miles to the east, things were yet worse at the city of Asparus. In the glory days of Arrian, Asparus had been home to five cohorts. Now Cohors II Claudiana and Cohors III Ulpia Patraeorum Milliaria Equitata Sagittariorum, despite a notional compliment of around fifteen hundred soldiers, could put just three hundred men on the parade ground. There was no reason to suppose things would be better at Phasis.

They entered the estuary slowly. The Phasis ceaselessly created new, shifting mud flats. A man in the bow swung the lead, calling back the soundings. When they were over the main bar, Felix poured out unmixed wine into the river, a libation to Earth, the divine genius of the emperor Gallienus, the gods who inhabited this land and the spirits of the dead heroes.

The trireme backed water to the military jetty. Longshoremen caught the ropes, made her fast. The boarding ladder was run out. Headed by the venerable senator Felix, the mission to the Caucasus clattered off the ship. Bruteddius called farewell. Five days before the kalends of June, twenty-six since they had weighed anchor at Byzantium, and the outward voyage of the latter-day Argonauts was over.

The prefect in command of the imperial troops greeted them. A Spaniard of a certain age, he had a careworn, placatory demeanour: the Vir Clarissimus and his esteemed comites had been expected much earlier – it had been necessary to return the soldiers of the welcoming party to other duties – they were terribly overstretched – he very much hoped the Vir Clarissimus would understand, that no one would take offence.

Felix, urbanely but firmly, cut through the apologia: all would be splendid, quite splendid, if their baggage could be conveyed to their quarters, and if lunch was in hand; nothing like a return to terra firma to give one an appetite.

‘Just so, Dominus, just so.’

The prefect conducted them through the vicus. Ballista noted with approval the well-built brick wall and deep ditch which protected the landward approach to the settlement of veterans and traders. Better still, the fort itself had a double ditch before its walls and artillery visible on its towers. The state of the garrison remained to be discovered, but it was worth remembering that Phasis was one of the few localities that had not fallen in either of the great raids by the Borani.

The headquarters building was modest, and the lunch in keeping with its surroundings. When they were still on the hard-boiled eggs and pickled fish, one of Felix’s bodyguards came and whispered in his ear. The consular’s face flushed and assumed an appearance of dignitas outraged.

‘Prefect,’ Felix snapped, ‘your men may have committed some dereliction, but the soldiers with me have done nothing to deserve punishment.’

Ballista’s sympathy went out to the prefect, who appeared both baffled and anxious.

‘Millet!’ Felix said. ‘My men are being served millet.’

Understanding dawned on the prefect’s face, but not ease. ‘Oh no, not a punishment, nothing of the sort.’

Felix continued to look like thunder.

‘No slight intended,’ the prefect floundered on. ‘A forced measure, supplies of wheat have not been shipped to the garrison since … since the …’ He seemed to be struggling to find the right words to describe the recent years of continuous usurpation, civil war and repeated barbarian triumph. ‘Since the troubles,’ he concluded lamely.

Now it was the elderly senator’s turn for confusion. ‘Why not purchase wheat locally?’

‘We do, we do, but little is grown in Colchis. It is prohibitively expensive. Although, of course, we would never serve anything else to a Vir Clarissimus and his comites.’

‘Then requisition the stuff.’

The prefect looked as if he were going to raise some objection, but did not. ‘Of course, Dominus.’

Over the apples and nuts, Felix announced a desire to view the monuments and places associated with the heroic age, with Jason and the Argonauts, with princess Medea and her bloody-minded father Aeetes. So strong was his desire, he would set out straight after lunch.

‘Of course, Dominus.’

And when he returned he would both inspect the garrison and conduct a lustrum of the expedition.

The Spanish prefect looked far from happy at this.

Felix smiled. ‘Have no fears, Prefect, I am fully aware of the difficulties faced by commanders of far-flung forces in these difficult times.’

The prefect did not appear mollified. ‘Dominus, it is the lustrum.’

‘No, no,’ Felix said. ‘I will, of course, reimburse you the price of the sacrificial beasts – only those our traditions require: a boar, a ram and a bull. You will be put to no expense.’

‘Dominus.’ Clearly the prefect was still unhappy. Ballista had no idea where the problem lay, but he suspected it was not about money.

‘Make sure the attendants with them have propitious names – and that there are plenty of musicians, all soldiers, or suitably martial instruments.’

As soon as the Vir Clarissimus had sipped the last of his conditum, they made a start. A local guide led them first to the temple of the Phasian goddess on the headland. Here, they were shown two anchors – one iron, one stone – both said to be from the Argo. Next, they were led across the heavily wooded Plain of Circe. Walking the sun-dappled path overhung by a profusion of elms and willows, they all felt a pleasurable frisson of horror. Just as they had been led to expect, from the uppermost branches hung any number of untreated ox-hides, each containing its corpse.

The guide laughed like a conjurer who had completed his trick. ‘It is an abomination to us to cremate or bury a man. But do not think us barbarians, do not think we do not honour our mother the Earth – we give her the bodies of women.’

‘Everywhere custom is king.’ Felix sonorously quoted the famous line of Herodotus. This was the sort of exoticism hoped for at the edge of the world.

Ballista reflected that the Sassanid Persians, as Zoroastrians, exposed their dead too; men and women.

A brisk walk, the path damp underfoot, and they came to the palace of Aeetes. They stepped through the broad gates in the columned walls. There in the shady courtyard, the guide pointed out the bronze bulls crafted by the god Hephaistos and the four miraculous springs. The former no longer moved – indeed, they were now all bronze – and fire no longer belched from their mouths, and the channels of the latter no longer ran with milk, wine, unguent and water, but Felix seemed most impressed. Apart from a prurient interest in the bedroom of Medea – Ballista caught Maximus sniffing the sheets – the rest was less arresting; less opulent than many a senator’s villa on the Bay of Naples.

A walkway of wooden boards led them down to the river. They passed the temple of Hecate. ‘Think,’ the guide urged them. ‘The priestess Medea trod on that very threshold.’ Felix nodded, struck by the worn stone. Ballista was less convinced they would have decorated temples or palaces with Corinthian columns in the age of heroes before the Trojan war.

A suitably Stygian ferry conveyed them across the river. They crossed the Plain of Ares, the water again squelching under their boots, until they came to the sacred grove of oaks and the vine-tangled temple of Phrixus. ‘Nothing to fear now, ha, ha,’ the guide prattled. ‘The terrible draco, the serpent’s teeth which bring forth the armed men from the soil, all vanquished by your predecessor Jason from the west. Of course, his life would have ended here if not for the love of the princess Medea.’

They studied for a time a particularly venerable oak, on which, the guide assured them, the golden fleece had hung. Felix declared it time to return. He resolutely declined invitations to view the polis, its emporion or anything else modern. The primitive ferry rowed them back to the vicus and the fort.

There were two units stationed at Phasis, the Vexillatio Fasiana and the Equites Singulares. Both were notionally composed of select soldiers drawn from other units from across the province of Cappadocia. In reality, they were little more than a local militia. Even on the small campus martius their inadequate numbers were evident: perhaps three hundred in all. The prefect hurried to inform the Vir Clarissimus and his comites that another hundred men, fifty from each, were upriver in the fort of Sarapanis.

Felix was at his most gracious – he was certain that the detachment was as well turned out as the soldiers in front of him; a most creditable sight in a difficult age; sharp in their movements, resolute in their demeanour; it spoke most highly of their officers. As the prefect and his under officers relaxed, Felix mentioned the lustrum.

‘All is ready, Dominus.’ The prefect looked as if he were about to be thrown into the arena.

‘What is it? Are the animals not ready?’

‘No, Dominus, they are all here.’

‘Then what? Trouble finding musicians or men with the right sort of name?’

‘It is the ram, Dominus.’

‘Providing its entrails show the favour of Mars, it will not matter if it is not too good-looking a beast outwardly.’

The Spanish officer took a deep breath. ‘Dominus, I do not want you to think that we have in any way deserted the traditions of Rome, or her religious rites, which have given her imperium without end. Although stationed in a far-off place, we are soldiers of Rome. We renew our sacramentum every year. We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.’

‘What is it?’ Felix said, not unkindly.

‘The majority of our men are drawn from the local population; have been as far back as our muster rolls go. It is against the customs of Colchis to sacrifice rams. It is the same in Iberia and Albania, throughout the region of the Caucasus. Tacitus mentioned it.’

Felix considered this seriously. ‘Our expedition has been dogged by misfortune – Gothic pirates, storms – we have lost time and men. The gods have not been well disposed towards us. A new beginning is necessary. A lustrum is the time-honoured way for Romans to supplicate the gods in such a case. To alter the ritual might offend the natural gods of Rome. While I have no wish to offend our subjects, we have our mandata – Rome must come first. Let the lustrum be performed.’

To brazen tunes, the bull, the boar and the contentious ram were brought out and led around the members of the expedition. Three circuits from their violent end.

Ballista thought about the elderly senator Felix. He was no more hidebound than most of his order. He had been faced with a difficult choice. He had made his decision. It was not the one Ballista would have made. But Ballista, unlike Felix, was far from convinced the natural gods of Rome existed, or any gods at all.