Blood of Eagles Read online

  Blood of Eagles

  A Novel of Ancient Rome

  Book III of

  The Bow of Heaven

  by

  Andrew Levkoff

  Copyright 2014 Andrew Levkoff

  Peacock Angel Publishing LLC

  ISBN 978-0-9839101-7-6

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you.

  A note about this ebook edition:

  Clicking on an underlined word or phrase in the text will (hopefully) take you to the Glossary and back again.

  If you experience any difficulties in formatting after downloading this ebook, please contact me at [email protected] with a description of the problem and the reader you are using. Thanks!

  In memory of Gigi and Little Pop

  •••

  “How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the

  rocks of ignorance.” ~ Petrarch

  •••

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Characters

  Prolog

  The Scrolls of Antioch

  The Scrolls of Carrhae

  Epilog

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  GLOSSARY (clicking on an underlined word or phrase in the text will take you to the Glossary and back again)

  Timeline

  Bibliography

  Excerpt from Melyaket, a Tale of Ancient Parthia

  About the Author

  Illustration credits

  Map: Christopher Jones, riversfromeden.wordpress.com, with additions by Andrew Levkoff

  The Scrolls of Carrhae, Parthian Shot, Courtesy Osprey Publishing

  Click on the image below and you will be taken to andrewlevkoff.com where you may enlarge this and other maps. If the link is not working, got to andrewlevkoff.com/maps2.

  CHARACTERS

  Romans & Greeks

  Alexandros of Elateia - former slave of Marcus Licinius Crassus and narrator, nicknames Andros, Pelargós

  Cassius Longinus - quaestor to Marcus Crassus, future conspirator against Julius Caesar

  Darius Musclena - chief medicus of the army

  Felix - son of Alexandros and Livia, slave of Crassus

  Hanno - disabled teenager adopted by Crassus and Tertulla, nickname Hannibal

  Livia - slave of Crassus, army medicus, “wife” of Alexandros, nickname Vulpecula

  Ludovicus - legionary, former lover of Sabina

  Publius Crassus - son of Crassus, commander of Celtic cavalry

  Sabina - mother of Livia

  Tertulla - wife of Crassus, nickname Columba

  Vel Corto - primus pilus or “first spear” Cohort I, Legion I

  Velus Herclides - legionary, former thug of Clodius Pulcher

  THE CONTUBERNIUM - LEGIONARY TENTMATES

  Drusus Quintilius Malchus

  Flavius Salvius Betto

  Arthfael - the Celt

  Metius Pictor - the Etruscan

  Hostus Broccus

  Tarautus Broccus

  Valerius Fuscus

  Tullus Glabrio

  LEGATES OF CRASSUS

  Legion I - Octavius, second in command of the army of Crassus

  Legion II - Petronius

  Legion III - Vargunteius

  Legion IV - Antoninus

  Legion V - Ignatius

  Legion VI - Gaius Cassius Longinus - quaestor to Marcus Crassus, future conspirator against Julius Caesar

  Legion VII - unknown

  Parthians

  Esmereh - wife of The Surena

  Hami puhr Baruk - friend of Melyaket

  Karach - father of Melyaket

  Melyaket puhr Karach - friend of Alexandros, spy for Crassus, nickname Ketya

  Mithridates III - former king of Parthia, brother of Orodes

  Orodes - king of Parthia, known as Arsaces XX

  Pacorus - son of Orodes

  Phraates - son of Orodes

  Pouri - wife of Karach, mother of Melyaket

  Salar - captain of horse

  Scolotes - captain of horse

  The Surena - Rustaham Suren-Pahlav, title Eran Spahbodh, commander of all the armies of Parthia

  Celts

  Brenus - son of Culhwch

  Culhwch - father of Brenus, Publius’ commander of horse

  Taog - friend of Brenus, his “heartwall”

  Others

  Abgarus II- king of Osrhoene, given name Ariamnes

  Artavasdes - king of Armenia

  Ashur - Syrian master of iron

  Eleazar - high priest of Judea

  Mardokh - high priest of Atargatis

  Zohreh - daughter of Ashur

  Prolog

  17 BCE - Fall, Siphnos, Greece

  Year of the consulship of

  Gaius Furnius and Gaius Junius Silanus

  It is so dark, ears see better than eyes. No one speaks.

  There is a place we have to find. We have to reach it because something is coming. Fear prickles my skin and dries my tongue.

  They are coming. Through our feet, we feel their dread approach. We trudge up a long slope and at the peak of this mound make our meager defenses from the whispered commands of the centurions.

  Soon they are upon us, monsters riding monsters, their teeth impossibly long. After a time, we think their thirst for our blood has been slaked, for they withdraw and lumber off. Suddenly we are alone.

  A rain of arrows begins to fall.

  •••

  Would that we could choose our dreams. My mind uses an incomprehensible calculus to determine which recurring nightmares will torture my sleep. For weeks, even months at a time I grant myself the visions of normal men, men who have not known war. I am a mongrel that shrugs his mangy coat free of these biting antagonists for a time, but in the end, the night terrors, like hungry flies, return to torment me.

  Aristotle believed that dreams were capable of showing us scenes yet to be played out in our waking hours. If that be so, would it be too far a flight of the imagination to envision a night’s rest that would, with a scalpel’s precision, excise memories of the past?

  Shall we blame the gods for my sweat-drenched bedding? Let us do that, for if I am my own harpy, I am also powerless to prevent these shades from crawling into bed with me. All these years, I rather thought I was quite fond of myself. Why then would I be so unkind to my sleep-dulled and vulnerable self? I think I shall choose to believe that Morpheus sends these re-enactments to plague my sleep, though I can’t imagine what I might have done to offend the god of dreams. I wring my hands and pray for relief, though between you and I, I suspect that quite a bit more conviction is required on my part before anyone on high begins to pay attention.

  Do I credit the gods, then, vaporous immortals to whom I refuse to give the gift of form with my full faith, do these Olympians punish me for a crime I did not commit? I am too old not to have rid myself of the word “impossible.” Still, these dreams come to me unbidden, and whether by god or my own unforgiving mind, I am convinced they are a life sentence for the sin of sitting on this cushioned chair and feeling the warm sun upon my upturned face. I am the lamentable living proof of the randomness of fortune that governs my world’s preoccupation with war.

  Call it what you will, the judgment remains the same. Life preserves a cruel balance: I survived the war of Marcus Crassus, but as penance I must relive the agonies of those who perished, over and again until the little de
aths of memory that greet me when I wake equal the one actual slaughter I managed to avoid. It is a debt, I imagine, that will only be paid in full when I am taken from this earth.

  I rise to sit up on my side of the bed, tuning up my small orchestra of grunts and wheezes. Livia’s hand reaches out for me and I turn back to embrace her.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you, Vulpecula.”

  “You always say that. But you always do.”

  “We must ask Nicias to place a can of oil by the side of the bed.”

  “Or place Nicias in the bed. That would serve.”

  “Words lacking in earnest do not make them any less cruel,” I pouted.

  “Come, sweet Pelargós, you know I can’t help teasing. You love me for it.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, no. Let me think. No, there are many qualities for which I love you, but I cannot count this among them.”

  “You are infuriating,” she said, kissing my cheek. “I wish you wouldn’t take everything so literally.”

  “You know I can’t help it. You love me for it.”

  We rise, share a bit of bread and honey with Tertulla on the north terrace, then Livia walks me to my writing desk and leaves me to my work.

  •••

  I must speak of the lives of two men before I rest, perhaps three. If you have been following these chronicles, you know one well enough—Marcus Crassus, patrician, consul, general, master of 20,000 slaves; myself, after thirty years, chief among them. The story of our final parting will come soon enough. Did you think it already had? Did you imagine that after Antioch, I would never see Marcus Crassus again?

  I almost wish I hadn’t, but I did see him again. I cannot speak of it now; I must procrastinate a while longer, for I know my heart will break all over again in the retelling. For Crassus. For his family. For mine. For the friends I lost. For the innocents swept along by the bloody, foaming crest of consequence set in motion by one man’s lust for power and another’s misguided campaign for revenge. Caesar and Crassus. Greatness laid low.

  Over the years I have come to believe that applied intelligence may overcome any obstacle, with the glaring exception of my miserable failure to convince Crassus to turn away from his senseless scheme to invade Parthia. War as an act of aggression is immoral; as an act of revenge it is unforgivable. There is no torment too hellish to punish Julius Caesar for the rape of my master’s wife. But invading a sovereign nation to destroy Caesar’s political aspirations compels a multitude of innocents to pay the price Caesar ought to have paid himself a thousand times over. Crassus in his right mind would never embark on such an adventure. I could only imagine that his personal anguish had snapped his wits. In matters of the heart, reasonable men may harden themselves against reasonable action.

  When I began my tale so many months ago, I told you it was Melyaket who slew my lord. How this came to pass is a debt I shall repay before the last scroll has dried. This Parthian bowman, the man who contrived with Crassus himself to save me from oblivion in Antioch, this young man was brushed by something extraordinary, and generally speaking, whenever that happens in this life, no good can come of it. It remains to be seen if Melyaket will prove the exception to the rule. From what I have gleaned so far, I doubt it. Ignorance and superstition have far more allies in this world than open-mindedness and tolerance. Greatness, I have observed, is a highly overrated commodity, to be shunned with the zeal of the devout. Seek rather the halcyon shadows of anonymity if you desire a happy, contemplative life.

  And what of the third individual? When I began this narration, I thought to explain the motives and uphold the memory of one man, Marcus Crassus. Every word, each thought and incidental action by my lord led inexorably to the bloody fields beyond Carrhae. But there were two armies that met on the day when the world learned something new about the invincibility of Rome. And the enemy, I was to learn, was not a faceless horde, but men of valor, and men bent crooked by the iron rod of uncaring fate. Mirrors of the men they faced.

  Let me ask you, do you believe in the existence of evil? Can you say without a doubt that evil men exist? I can not. For in order for evil to exist, its counterpart, a pure and recognizable good must also be extant roaming about the cosmos. Does such excellence exist in man? I defy you to find it. And nature, being the way of things as they are—simply is; one may not ascribe values of good or evil to a state of being. Having said that, I am a steadfast advocate of the power of the inertia of circumstance. But say, for the moment, that evil does exist, do you then believe in redemption? If so, I applaud your optimism. Forgiveness, however, is another matter. And yet, to forgive, as you know if you have had the stamina to read these scrolls from the outset, can be an undertaking of the most gritty, arduous sort.

  Personally, I ask for forgiveness every day. There are times when I am even inclined to grant it to myself.

  The Scrolls of Antioch

  Marcus Licinius Crassus

  Chapter I

  54 BCE Fall, Antioch

  Year of the consulship of

  Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and Appius Claudius Pulcher

  Let us continue the tale, then, almost precisely where we left off, in the delightful, if for me thoroughly tainted city of Antioch, to the place and time shortly after my abridged execution. For my own part, I cannot abide it when a storyteller in the market flops from one narrative to another, thrashing my imagination about like a beached mullet. I would not wish you to come away from someone else’s recounting with such a beating, and will do my best to leave you unbruised and unblemished at the conclusion of this one.

  Understand that Livia herself, once we had been reunited, communicated to me all that had transpired in my absence, and though the reporting that follows is second-hand, know that she would fabricate nothing. For the purposes of consistency and to keep you sitting upright paying rapt attention, I shall relate what transpired as dramatically as I am able. In the rare instance where necessary, I shall infer conversations or events as I believe they must have taken place.

  •••

  Crassus summoned her just after dawn the day after my hanging. Bless my former masters, they did not let her suffer long under the delusion that I was dead. Nebta and Khety, the two Africans who had befriended Livia on the crossing to Dyrrachium, walked beside her, their faces wet with mourning. Their gaily colored wraps seemed out of place. Livia had shed no tears, but they would come. The three women approached the guards at the end of the long hall in the Regia where the massive blue and gold double doors stood open. Livia carried our sleeping son in her arms. She wore her red-trimmed medicus tunic. A leather doctor’s bag was slung across her shoulder.

  “Wait for me.” She kissed each of them, and they sat cross-legged, still crying, by one of the large, vine-draped urns that lined the hallway. Livia turned toward the general’s quarters, where light from the sunrise spilled out to color the floor tiles and give form to the very air.

  Nebta said something in her African tongue. Livia turned and waited. With the back of her hand, Nebta wiped the wetness from the nostril pierced by a golden hoop. “It means,” she said, “‘I hold my friend with both hands.’”

  Livia did her best to smile at the whores who had saved her life on the crossing to Dyrrachium, then turned to look at a guard, transformed into a radiant silhouette by the dawn. He nodded. She stepped into the doorway, momentarily blinded, the brightness an apt herald for the power that waited within.

  At that moment, Gaius Octavius, Crassus' second-in-command came bounding up the steps from inside the governor’s suite and barely kept the lot of them from tumbling to the floor. He had just called back into the room, “I’ll have them waiting for you in the gallery, general.” Now he exclaimed, “Medicus! I beg your pardon.” He put his large hands on her shoulders and stared down at her to ascertain that neither she nor the baby had been injured. Though he was in his mid-thirties and wearing the splendid uniform of a Roman legate, his earnest enthusiasm and boyish effervescence gave one
the impression he was playacting. Livia averted her eyes under the intensity of his stare. Octavius gave her shoulders a squeeze and said, not unkindly, “Look at me.” She did; there was a queer light in his eyes. “It will be all right,” he said. Then he released her and strode off down the hallway. The way he had spoken was unsettling; she stood in the doorway, mesmerized by the rhythmic swing of his receding red cloak.

  How she wished she could cling to those common words of comfort. Instead, she whispered, “You’re wrong.”

  “There’s a draft,” came a voice from within. “Would you mind?”

  Livia came to herself and turned to face into the room. Servants closed the doors behind her. She stood at the top of an open antechamber. Crassus had removed most of the opulent furnishings favored by the previous occupant. The floor tiles were large, cut from sand-colored limestone. Three steps led from where she stood down to the main room whose twelve-foot ceilings were painted gold, blue and red. If one descended to the right one would find the baths; to the left lay the open bed chamber. Straight ahead, at the bottom of the steps, stood Marcus Licinius Crassus and his wife, Tertulla. Beside them, Publius Crassus waited, angry and impatient.

  Crassus was also dressed for the field, though his head was bare. An ornator was fastening his cloak with a silver fibula. As her eyes became accustomed to the light, Livia sought the old man’s grey eyes and held them. She would not let this master of Rome take anything more from her. Was there anything more to be had from her? She was a shadow. A husk.

  Crassus held out a welcoming arm and smiled. “Come, child,” he said, “we have news.”

  “When will you take my son?” Livia remained where she was.

  “Mind your tongue, woman,” Publius snapped at her.

  “That’s all right, son. Let her be,” Crassus said. “She’s had a rough go of it.”