The Iranian Conspiracy
Greg Fisher
Copyright © 2011 Greg Fisher
This is a work of fiction and the product of the author’s imagination. Unless otherwise explicitly stated, all characters, situations, and events appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, situations, or real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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2011-09-01
Dedication
For Paola and Amanda
Prologue
Near Edessa, Turkey, AD 259
In the third campaign, when we advanced against Carrhae and Edessa and were besieging Carrhae and Edessa, the Roman Caesar Valerian marched against us. He had a force of 70,000… and at Edessa we joined a magnificent battle with Caesar Valerian. We made prisoner, through our own hands, Caesar Valerian, as well as all the others, the leaders of that army, the praetorian prefect, and the senators. We took all of them as prisoners, and transported them to Persia.
From the Deeds of the Great Shapur, Naqsh-i-Rustam, Fars Province, southern Iran, written in the late third century AD.
*****
On a hot afternoon, in a wretched storm of dust, noise, sweat, and blind terror, Bassianus, centurion, third century, fourth cohort, Sixth Legion, had watched his unit fall apart, run, and be slaughtered. It should not have gone that way, of course; there were far more of them than of the enemy, some of whom looked weak and unprepared over their shields as the two lines closed after the Romans had successfully resisted the initial punch of the Iranian armoured horsemen. Despite the bloody flux which had afflicted them all, weakening them and taking some of his soldiers, Bassianus was confident of his abilities and those of his men, whom he had trained hard and worked, day after day, drilling them so that their movements under pressure came automatically, the responses to the orders of their officers and sergeants natural. But something had gone horribly wrong, and Bassianus had stared, spellbound, as the army slowly gave way and crumbled about him. At last, deciding that there was nothing more to be done, he had pulled off his helmet with its ornate decoration, a filigree done for him by an armourer in Antioch, the crimson transverse plume from the tail of a fine horse that the mendacious merchant claimed was descended from Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus himself, and threw it the ground. He had seen in disbelief the Emperor taken, along with the senior army commanders and at least two senators, and Bassianus thought to make himself as obscure as he might. He was a Syrian from the north whose family had risen to prominence with the Caesar Decius; his father had drowned in the same filthy Balkan swamp as his Emperor, as the ill-fated army had blundered into the barbarian trap which awaited them. But he could, if he wanted, with his olive-sheened skin and dark eyes, make a pretence of a local caught up in the present drama, if God allowed, or at the very least, pass for a common trooper. He knew that the Praetorians, soft as they were, rich and pampered, and the senior commanders, would make fine prizes for Shapur. Not for the first time, Bassianus was grateful that he had opted to stay with the legions instead of those purple-robed buffoons. So, with a silent prayer looking for absolution for what he was about to do, and remembering the ancient words of the Greek poet Archilochus of Paros about the practicality of committing the terrible sacrilege of throwing away one’s shield, Bassianus had done just that, stripped off his remaining armour and weapons, and run for his life.
Of course, he had not been successful. He was rounded up by horsemen with round faces and almond-shaped eyes, terrifying in their victory. As he was marched with the others away from Edessa, eastwards, taunted by the cocky and victorious guards who were boasting of their success in an alien tongue and who were less than shy about reminding with the stick, spear, or the axe, he looked for the other officers in the cohort, desperate to find some companionship. He thought he had made out Drusus at the front – a rare breed, actually from Italy, teased for his old-fashioned name, and Caecus, one of the best, the name meaning ‘the blind’, given to him for the eye he had lost in Germania several years earlier. Caecus had repaid the favour by taking the eyes of a whole village, but nobody wept for the Germans. He called out to Drusus, and a stink of rotten teeth and the stench of stale goat’s milk arrived with a sharp blow to his kidneys as the heavy guard punched him once, and then again. Blacking out, he fell the ground, breaking his lip and a front tooth, and vomiting hard into the dirt. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness was the shuffling of feet over his head, the odour of unwashed tunics stained with sweat and ordure, and the jeering of the guard who hit him once, hard, in the head with the flat of his short sword. When he woke up, he was alone, left for the vultures which still circled the piles of the dead.
Much later on, after the sun had set on the bloodied battlefield, the bodies gathered up and burned, the wounded finished with thrust of sword or spear or necks quickly and quietly broken, plunder taken, and the light from the sun diffused red and brown and black through a pall of greasy smoke, Bassianus was found by a small group of soldiers who had survived the massacre and avoided being taken in the chaos which followed. They were making, they said, for the west, towards the setting sun, but were wary of groups of roving cavalry whom they had seen and which they presumed were still looking for stragglers.
‘Quintus, second cohort of the Sixth’, the man said, holding out a hand and pulling Bassianus up, noting the ugly, angry welt on his head, the way he held his side, and his dazed look.
‘Bassianus, fourth of the Sixth’, he replied, weary, but recognising with a small smile a new officer who had joined the legion after his predecessor died of the flux.
‘We’re heading to Antioch and the reserve units – if we can get there’, Quintus said, adding, ‘me and my boys managed to get away before the rest got clobbered. You’re welcome to come with us mate, but you look pretty rough. Don’t slow us down.’
Bassianus stood up, then bent over, retching again and coughing into the dust. His mouth felt like it had been rubbed with coarse Egyptian parchment and tasted like the hide of a Thracian donkey. The smell of fear, he thought, and sweat from the horses, and from the men, hung all around them. Antioch seemed like a good idea – and, for Bassianus, it was near his home. Coughing again, he looked at Quintus and the grim faces of the legionaries with him – tough men, hard men, some still with their swords but almost all without shields or helmets. ‘The Emperor…,’ he asked, although he knew the answer.
‘Taken’, replied Quintus, looking away for a moment; ‘we saw the bastards ride off with him. Almost all the army, too. And they got Asclepiodotus’ – the colonel of the Sixth, and Bassianus’ commanding officer – and the praetors and tribunes with him. By Poseidon, Christ, Mithras, and all that’s left that’s holy, what a disaster.’
‘Let’s be gone, then.’
They walked for hours west, stopping when the sun finally sank below the low hills nearby. Bassianus
