rattled through the palm fronds. Gordian leant on the parapet of the watchtower, waiting. He had been unable to sleep. There was little to see as yet. The shifting canopy of foliage just below him was black. It hid the settlement. Beyond the oasis, the desert was flat, laid out in tones of blue and grey. There was no moon. The thousands of stars were as distant and uncaring as gods.
The previous evening, not long after the war council ended, the first of the enemy had arrived. The speculatores that Aemilianus Severinus had put on picket had been driven back into the village. In the night, off to the north, the campfires of the nomads had parodied the stars. At last, the fires had burnt out, leaving just the real firmament and the blackness.
All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals. No, Gordian thought. There was nothing to fear, he told himself. If, in the end, everything returns to rest and sleep, why worry? Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death does not, and when death is, we are not. Anyway, it would not come to that, not today. Menophilus would be here in the morning; and with him would be the five hundred men of the 15th Cohort Emesenorum. There was nothing to worry about.
Even thinking of Menophilus somewhat calmed Gordian. As Quaestor, Menophilus had been appointed by the Senate, unlike the legates, who were family friends chosen personally by the governor. Gordian had not known Menophilus before they came to Africa, but had warmed to him. On first meeting, Menophilus had seemed reserved, even gloomy. The Italian was young – still only in his twenties. He had sad eyes and wore an ornament in the form of a skeleton on his belt. He talked readily of the transience of life and was known to collect memento mori. And, to cap it all, he was a Stoic. Yet he little inclined towards the boorish asceticism many of that school so often paraded. No sooner had the governor’s entourage established itself in Carthage than Menophilus had begun an affair with the wife of a member of the city council. Her name was Lycaenion; she was dark, full-bodied, very beddable, Gordian thought. Menophilus liked to drink as well. While these traits showed an agreeable capacity for pleasure, it was the calm competence of the Quaestor on which Gordian was relying now. Menophilus would be here. There was nothing to worry about.
Swiftly, but by imperceptible stages, the sky lightened, turning a delicate lilac. Behind a haze, the white disc of the sun topped the horizon. For a moment, the Lake of Triton once again filled with water. Waves rolled across its dark surface. You could almost hear them. And then the sun rose higher and the illusion was dispelled. And again there was nothing but salt and mud and desolation.
Gordian looked off to the north. The leading edge of the barbarian encampment was about a mile distant. Dust and smoke were already shifting up from it. In the low, raking light of dawn, everything was blurred and indistinct.
If Gordian could make out little of the enemy, he could see even less of his own forces. There were four men – one for each cardinal point – with him on the watchtower, and below there were the sentinels on the walls of the citadel and the horse handlers in the courtyard. All the rest, and the whole of the settlement, were hidden by the thick, interlaced fronds of thousands upon thousands of palms. Gordian knew the men were in position. In the dead of night, when sleep had refused him, he had walked the lines. He was convinced that he had made the best dispositions he could, but he was far from content.
The narrow ends of the oval of the oasis were north and south. The tree line was about two thirds of a mile long and at its widest just under half a mile across. There were no defences – no ditch, wall or rampart – around this perimeter, and, anyway, Gordian simply did not have enough men to defend such a length. The village was set in the southern end of the cultivated land. As every inch of irrigated soil was used, the crops, shrubs and trees grew right up to the walls of the houses. There was no killing zone. Attackers could remain in cover until almost the moment they tried to scale the walls or storm the openings.
It was not a strong position, but Gordian had done what he could to remedy its deficiencies. Traps – sharpened wooden stakes concealed in shallow pits; the ones the soldiers called ‘lilies’ – had been dug in the more obvious trails through the gardens. Half the speculatores, a full two hundred men under a young centurion of local birth called Faraxen, were lurking among the undergrowth. In small groups they were to harass the nomads, falling back before them into the village.
The remainder of the scouts, under their commander Aemilius Severinus, waited in the settlement. All the entrances were blocked, except the two by which Faraxen’s men would retreat. Moveable barricades had been prepared to put across the latter. Gordian would have liked to make the place a more difficult proposition, but it had been impossible. There had been no time to cut back a space in front of the defences. There was no blacksmith, and no metal, to make caltrops to scatter where their sharp spikes would pierce the soles of the enemies’ feet. Normally, he would have ordered the collection of firewood and metal cauldrons in which to heat oil or sand. He had not done so, because the roofs of the mud-brick houses whose rear walls formed the defences did not look capable of withstanding the heat of a fire. Most were held up by palm trunks, and not a few were thatched.
If, as was likely, the nomads broke into the village, all the speculatores were to retreat into the citadel by its main gate. The labyrinthine alleys, and the nomads’ inextinguishable desire to pillage, should somewhat slow down their pursuit. Gordian did not allow himself to think what would happen to the inhabitants cowering in their homes.
The citadel was situated at the extreme southern tip of Ad Palmam. Mud brick, like every other construction, at least its walls were a bit higher and appeared a little more solid. Except on the north, it was ringed by only a shallow belt of trees. Two of its gates opened out west and south on to the plain; the third, the biggest one, north into the village. The seventy-seven remaining Africans raised by Mauricius and the other estate owners were distributed along the parapets. Mauricius was to act as second in command to Valerian. The equites of the Proconsular guard also were stationed in the citadel. Thirty-seven of them were on the walls to stiffen the resolve of the irregulars. The other forty were down in the yard with their horses, acting as a reserve. Arrian and Sabinianus were reunited as their leaders. The former in charge of those on the parapets, the latter the reserve.
Looking down, in the gathering light Gordian saw the two legates inspecting the close-packed lines of horses tethered in the courtyard. Every mount was saddled and bridled. All was ready in case the entire force had to try to cut its way out. Gordian had no intention that this should be remembered as the site of a desperate and ultimately doomed last stand.
Arrian and Sabinianus were checking the girth of each animal, and peering into the mouth to check the bit. Yet somehow they still managed to convey an air of patrician disinterest, even indolence. They never appeared to take anything seriously, and the appellation as the mythical Cercopes suited them. The originals had been brothers from Ephesus. They had roamed the world practising deceptions, until captured by Hercules. The hero had tied them up and slung them upside down from a pole over his shoulder. The skin of the Nemean lion did not cover Hercules’ arse, which was blackened by the sun. Luckily for the Cercopes, when they told Hercules why they were laughing, he saw the humour.
‘Riders coming!’
Maybe a dozen men on horses and camels had left the nomad camp. They were dark shapes under a dark flag. Now and then light saddlecloths, tunics or head coverings caught the early-morning sun. They rode at a canter, twisting between isolated clumps of vegetation and thorn bushes. A semi-opaque smear of dust marked their route.
They skirted the western edge of the oasis and reined in some hundred paces from the thin belt of trees which fronted the west gate of the citadel. There they sat, under their gloomy banner.
‘They are carrying a palm branch.’ Sabinianus had appeared at the top of the watchtower. ‘If they were civilized, you would assume they wanted a truce to talk.’
‘We
