Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth by M. C. Scott

lame, but if someone with a sharp knife can dig the point where it comes out—’ Aquila’s own knife was there, in front of me. I took it and dug the small pitted point on the horse’s sole and, in due course, he jerked a little and the knife’s tip broke through into the cavity where the foul-smelling black fluid dwelt. It oozed out, stinking, and I swept it away with a hank of straw that the groom had brought for the purpose.
    ‘Keep him on clean straw and stand him in a clean-flowing river for an hour, three times a day, and he’ll be fine in nine days,’ I said. ‘He’s a good, honest horse apart from that. He’ll see you well into your retirement.’
    Aquila was not my officer now, so I could say these things with impunity, although in honesty he had never been a vicious kind of officer, and we had liked what little we saw of him.
    He grinned now, and clapped me again on the back as if my father had known his in the baths of Rome, and then he took us on a tour of the camp nested beneath the snow-flanked hills and we saw for ourselves the changes General Corbulo had wrought.
    Finding the men grown soft in their ease, he had sent one third of each century into retirement, drafted in new men from the surrounding provinces (Syrians in the VIth! The older legionaries hated that), and set them to work in a way men had not done since Marius’ time.
    Discipline was fierce: in the short while we were there, I saw men flogged at the post who would before have been made only to dig the latrines; and men who deserted and might once have got away with a flogging, at least the first time, were stoned to death by the remainder of their unit.
    We left in two days, with gifts of food to see us on our way. Aquila came to stand at my bridle as I mounted.
    ‘Are you going to Oescus?’
    ‘To the Fifth?’ I leaned forward and took the reins from his hand. ‘There’s no need.’
    ‘What about your armour? Your sword? The quartermaster is holding them for you.’
    ‘Let him give them to a new recruit. We have gold from our … recent trip.’ Aquila had been party to our going, but I don’t think he knew much about what we had done, and certainly he didn’t know how much gold we had been given. ‘Damascus is famed for its armouries,’ I added. ‘We’ll buy something new there.’
    ‘I see.’ He held my eye a moment, almost sadly, and I jerked Adiabena’s head away, thinking that he wanted me to go back and say goodbye to the men I had left, as if they meant anything at all to me.
    I kicked the bay mare out of the gate and we left Melitene in a hurry, and did not slow until we were a day’s ride away, after which we moved at a more comfortable pace, not exactly dawdling, but not hurrying either.
    We reached Damascus just as the winter rains ceased and the streets were washed clean and the markets were alive in a chaos of colour and shouted Greek, and I felt at home for the first time in over half a year.
    ‘Damascus supplies the legions and Parthia equally,’ Cadus said. ‘Their armourers are unequalled in either empire.’ He knew his way about and led me on a fast route halfway across the city, past cross-legged men and high-browed women, past children who stared as us for our strangeness; we were not wearing armour, but we had bought some madder-dyed tunics in Melitene and so looked as if we had washed our clothes in blood before venturing on to the streets.
    In an alley off an alley, a street so narrow it should not have been dignified by the name, Cadus pushed against a hanging piebald goatskin and we entered a dim space that smelled of honed weapons and oil and fire smoke, so that, momentarily, I was back in the legions, newly entered, buffing my helmet through the night for fear of a flogging after parade the next day.
    My eyes sought light and, as we turned a corner, found it in three glowing braziers and a cascade of candles set in branched sticks around a room in which eight small boys sat cross-legged