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

silver, and after a moment’s embarrassment when I thought he was offering it to me to buy, and started to decline, I realized it was a reflector, like water in a bowl, and that I could see myself with the star-points of the candles all about, and the red glow of the braziers behind.
    I stood longer than perhaps was polite, for I had seen myself painted in water, or on the back of my knife, but never like this, whole, sharply, all in the right proportion. I am not, and never will be, as beautiful as Tears, but I could see now what the slant-eyed Hyrcanian men had seen, what women whispered at behind their hands, what my mother had wept to lose when I packed Great-uncle Demetrios’ sword and took my father’s second best gelding and joined the lines of conscripts heading east for war.
    Time has worn me now, but then I had black hair, buffed to a high shine by the red glow of the brazier, and a lean nose, well balanced, that might have done good service on a statue in the Acropolis. I had fine, evenly matched brows and a clean jaw, half the width of Cadus’, but not falling back to my throat as some men’s are. The dark, smudged mark on my right cheek that my mother called the Kiss of Apollo was not so visible in the dim light, but still served to draw the eye, to break what would have been too great a symmetry.
    And beneath all that, I shimmered silver, as Vologases’ Parthians had done. In all, I was content, and more than content. I paid the gold that was asked for the shirt and did not think myself hard done by.
    Nor did I later, when Cadus took me to other places, and we bought a helmet of the new design, raised about the ears and with iron there to stem a sword-blow, made in the factories of Gaul which are the best in the empire. We also bought two swords: a gladius and a longer cavalry blade, both well balanced for my reach; an oval cavalry shield, faced in bull’s hide and red silk; and a square scutum faced in leather for infantry work, for even then I was determined to serve on foot, alongside my fellow legionaries.
    Late in the evening, after dinner and wine, we bought ourselves tunics and ten pounds of madder, that we might dye to blood red the entire cohort, possibly the entire legion, for I had started to believe that this wasn’t a disaster, that the XIIth was not so bad and that Cadus and I could singlehandedly turn it into something with a reputation as good as that of the Vth, which was now couched in memories of the same cherished flavour as the Macedonian horse meadows.
    We were deluded, of course, and we knew it, but I think not even Cadus knew the depths of Hades we were about to plumb when we reached the camp at Raphana.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    Raphana, in the plain of Abilene, south-east of Damascus
    THE PERMANENT LEGIONARY camp at Raphana stands half a mile from the town, in the eastern crook of a mountainous ridge known as the Mountains of the Hawk that shelters it from the savage westerly winds, but does nothing to shade it from the sun until late afternoon.
    Like all permanent encampments, it was built on a square, with roads that passed north to south and east to west and crossed at right angles in the centre. It had a hospital, an armoury, a quartermaster’s stores, granaries, workshops for the engineers and stables for the horses. It had a parade ground within the walls and another around the outside. I knew the layout already, for each camp was the same wherever it was built, and a legionary comes to know every pace of interior and exterior as well as he knows his lovers’ faces.
    We presented there in the late afternoon on the last day of April. The watch guards at the gate gave us the names of the men we must find and waved us through, eyeing our pack mules, our horses – the bay mare had been pampered in Damascus and looked especially fine – our madder-red tunics and in particular my shining shirt of mail.
    I loved the feel of it too much to pack it on the mules, and in any case we had