in a circle. The first two wound iron wire on to pegs, cut it, and swept the results on to a pile; the third made rings from the split loops; the last five looped those rings into others to make shining new mail such as I had seen on Vologases’ cataphracts. In the legions, everyone wore old mail, mostly with the rings stitched to leather shirts which were hot in summer and held the damp in winter and stank of old shoes by the second day of wearing.
‘If you’re going to be a courier, you should have a good mail shirt,’ Cadus said cheerfully.
I was sullen and moody, feeling like a conscript again, dreading the next day’s journey to the camp. I turned away, unwilling to join in his cheer. ‘I’m not going to be a courier. A clerk has to be with his centurion. I can’t be riding post across the country if I’m also taking notes and securing the men’s pay.’
‘Even so: all you have to do is throw the spare in a barrel of sand and trip over it twice a day. At least look at what’s on offer.’
Cadus spoke the local Greek better than I did; they stretch the vowels here, and round them off, so that words that look the same on the written page sound as if they are spoken by a goat with catarrh.
He asked a question, wrapping it round with flattery; I could tell by the intonation. A nasal bleat came from the farthest, darkest corner of the room by way of reply, followed by the appearance of a man not much taller than the boys who worked so assiduously on the floor.
His back was bent. His face was long and yellowed with age. Beads of white matter gathered at the corners of his eyes, but he looked at me as if measuring my soul for the gods; I could feel the press of his stare down the flat of my ribs, my legs, my arms.
He nodded, gave another, more guttural bleat and turned back into the dimness of his demesne. I could see it more clearly now; shelves upon shelves of boxes, each marked with a carving on the fore, in the shape of a beast. His bleating dulled to a murmur, as of a man to his lover, or his horse, he reached into one marked with a stork.
‘He says you are beautiful as a god, but taller than he is used to.’ Cadus sounded amused. I was perhaps a hand’s width taller than him and he, in turn, had been a hand’s width taller than Pantera, although my memory by now had stretched the Leopard until he was the tallest of us all.
I think I blushed under the flattery. The armourer-boys watched open-mouthed as I stripped to my skin and then donned the layers the goat-man ordered, of linen, then padded wool, then a silk scarf to keep my neck from chafing.
And then he brought out not a mail shirt, such as I had imagined, but a leather shirt with strips of polished iron laid across and across, so that they overlapped like the ribs of a snake.
He held it out to me, grinning his gap-toothed grin, bleating encouragingly.
‘He says this is a new thing. He has only sold one other, and he thinks it will be suitable for a young god to wear in battle.’
‘Ask him who bought the other one.’
‘He says a centurion in the Fourth Scythians.’
‘Then you have this one,’ I said. ‘I can’t go into the Twelfth and wear something that even their centurions don’t have. It’ll be hard enough as it is.’
Cadus didn’t want it any more than I did, and for the same reasons. They argued back and forth, volubly. In the end, Cadus, grinning now, said, ‘He wants you to keep it in your pack, for when you are a centurion.’
I laughed aloud, and meant it. ‘Tell him I’ll come back for it if I am ever made centurion,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, a mail shirt would be welcome.’
They wrangled some more, but in the end the little armourer brought out for me a shirt of rings so fine that it rippled like sharkskin in the candlelight. I stretched my arms high above my head, and let it slide down about my ribs and shoulders, link on kissing link.
The fit was perfect. The armourer lifted a shield of polished
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