had good men, and these, suffering along with him and in shock from the magnitude of the defeat, refused to give up. They dared not light a fire for fear of being seen and curled up on the ground, shivering, for the night was cold. They had nothing to eat and little to drink – one leather flask of sour wine between the six of them – and Bassianus could not sleep. He stared up at the stars and the clouds which lay over them, thinking of his family in their village near Antioch, who lived in a small stone house, facing into a courtyard, animals downstairs, rooms upstairs, and an olive press worked by the villagers. A good life, one that Cincinnatus himself would be proud of, Bassianus thought.
‘Wake up,’ came a voice from nearby, followed by a stiff prod – ‘time for your picket. Sir’, the man added respectfully.
‘Right’, Bassianus grunted, and, wrapping himself the best he could in his clothes, he sat up to keep watch while the other man, a rough German whose name he didn’t know, fell gratefully into a fitful sleep.
It was close to dawn when he heard the noise which they all dreaded. A thin pall of dust hung in the sky, and the sound of hooves came with it. Bassianus, his watch over, had attempted to get some more rest but had given up, and now sat up straight like a spear – ‘Christ! They’re on to us’, he whispered hurriedly to Quintus, but Quintus was already awake and stirring his companions to action. Quickly they realised that the odds which they faced were too great – at least a hundred heavily-armed horsemen came out of the gloom towards them, circling, whooping, laughing, and then the first arrow sliced out of the whirlwind and took Quintus in the neck, the heavy shaft snapping his spine and dropping him to the floor. Bassianus was terrified, but rallied the other five men to face death. And then, for the second time in the space of a day and a night, he was struck over the head, and fell to the ground. The last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness was the surprised look on Quintus’ face and the clouded, vacant eyes.
This time they had him. Taken east, far east, with the other five. For days they were dragged over the dusty ground, fed just enough; Bassianus drank filthy water, and on the third day had a high fever, and was racked with powerful cramps which emptied his bowels and enfeebled him. He kept going; he was determined to survive, knowing that if he fell out he would surely die, his eyes picked out by the women who taunted their ragged column and stood ready with curved knives and hooks. On the fourth day they stopped while their captors handed them over to a new group of horsemen, who took them on with a larger group of Roman captives which they had rounded up elsewhere. The respite was welcome; slowly Bassianus gained strength, and the food improved slightly, although Marcianus, one of Quintus’ men, died that afternoon on the road. Bassianus kept his head straight and walked by Marcianus’ corpse, ignoring the stares of one of the horsemen who dared him to stop and pay his respects. Bassianus said a silent prayer for Marcianus and his soul, and his family, if he had one. He refused to take the challenge from the guard, his eyes daring any of the captives to stop for a fellow Roman, an act which he was sure would get him killed. He walked on.
Much later they arrived at a great city; one, Bassianus thought, which rivalled Antioch, but full of people who spoke a strange language, and who watched them with unbridled hatred. Here they met thousands of other captives from the rout at Edessa, but did not stay long; instead, they were taken south and set to work on a great bridge which they learned was named, in mockery, after the defeated emperor who had led them to their doom at Edessa. The years passed, and they steadily learned to forget their old lives. There was to be no going home – no more fights with the Sixth, no more days on the road looking for new enemies. In time, they had reached an accommodation with the people around them, and Bassianus thought that his family was probably dead; he himself had taken a new wife, a local girl, and learned her language, although he spoke it haltingly and with a poor accent, for which she teased him. She had borne him two fine boys – dark, like their father, and with the high cheekbones of their mother, who, she said, had come west from a mountainous and proud land of lapis, jade, and silk. The people who had defeated them so completely on the battlefield and who humiliated Bassianus as he dirtied his tunic, suffering from dysentery on the march, had forced them to settle and find new lives for themselves. It had always been clear that there would be no return for them, although tales were told at night about Xenophon’s Ten Thousand and even the men of Alexander’s expedition, some of them heading west to Macedon after ten years fighting to find old farms, old wives, and children they hadn’t fathered. Better this way, they convinced themselves, some with greater fervour than the rest.
*****
In his new life, Bassianus had found his skill as a cutter of inscriptions, his job before he joined the army, in some demand. He created dedications for the tombs of his Roman comrades as they died – a little rough, to be said, for he had lost the daily practice required for precision. He even worked on some of the funerary monuments for some of the petty Iranian nobility in the city where he lived. Over the years, he acquired some sort of a reputation for his art. One autumn morning, the settlement where they lived was woken to a commotion. Bassianus rubbed water into his face and dragged his fingers through his white beard. His wife had died several years ago and one of his sons had fallen in a skirmish somewhere to the north against an enemy who took the devilish name of the Hepthalites, a people whom Bassianus had never heard of before. He was an old man, but he understood well enough the meaning of the horseman who rode into the camp, shouting. The message was clear. The King-of-Kings, Shapur, the man who had beaten them so long ago, was dead. The news spread quickly, as did the demand for workers to create the most elaborate tomb the Iranian Empire had ever seen. It would rival, they said, the monuments of Darius and Xerxes, and the long inscription commemorating the Great King’s many victories over his Roman enemies would need to be finished. Together, the King’s tomb would proclaim the cultural might and political suzerainty of Shapur, and spread the message of his victories over Rome to all who saw it, and taunt the ambassadors of the impertinent Romans when they came to Iran to beg for mercy and forgiveness. Bassianus, having little to do, his wife gone, journeyed with the rest of the masons, stone-cutters, artists, and makers of inscriptions to a desolate spot, many days south. There he laboured for many days, finishing the great story at the Kaaba of Zoroaster, wryly completing Shapur’s great boast of his slaughter at Edessa. 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. ‘You weren’t that good’, he thought to himself with a grimace as he incised into the fresh rock the fanciful numbers of Roman dead, and the names of all the peoples whom Shapur had conquered. Later, he and his companions travelled even further into the wasteland to a huge cliff-face, where an elaborate carving showed Shapur receiving the divine sanction of his god, Ahura Mazda; it reminded Bassianus of one he had seen at the place where he had completed the great inscription, which showed Valerian, the Roman Emperor under whom Bassianus had fought at Edessa, kneeling before Shapur in submission. This one was different, though – far bigger, it was to be Shapur’s final resting place. Over the next year, he and hundreds of others carved the rocks for the tomb, and finished the inscriptions which recorded, again, the King’s feats and endeavours. Inside the chamber chiselled out of the cliff-face, elegant marble panels repeated some of the images and motifs and showed Shapur’s brilliance. Bassianus was one of the small group chosen to work these panels and complete the inscriptions which lay on them. As he completed the job, he added, in Latin, his own testament. Finally, his job done, he returned to his home, where he died, content, a few years later.
Shapur was buried in the tomb. For years his body lay there, a place of reverence and honour. A fire temple lay nearby, the god, Ahura Mazda, present for the man who had served him so well. Within the family dynasty to which Shapur had belonged, known as the Sasanian dynasty, new leaders came and went, and the Empire of Iran’s fortunes rose and fell with them. Finally one, Khusrau, who took the epithet ‘Parvez’, ‘Ever Victorious’, emerged, who could fulfill the aspirations of the Sasanian dynasty’s founder, Ardashir, a man who dreamed of reclaiming and reconquering for Iran all the lands which lay to the west, taken by Alexander, and then governed by his successors, Seleucus, Ptolemy, and the sons of Antigonus, and then, at
