‘Hard to say, but everything here will be long finished before he gets to the Mirror Fort.’ Mauricius shrugged. ‘I will send a couple of my men. Maybe—’
‘I would not bother.’ Sabinianus was shading his eyes with his hat. His bald forehead shone with sweat. He started laughing.
Gordian wondered about the effects of the ride, the desert.
‘Time for a nap, after all.’ Sabinianus said. ‘Unless I am much mistaken, here comes Arrian, and my little white-bottomed friend has brought the famous tough Frontier Wolves.’
Gordian held his war council in the room at the foot of the tower. It was the largest in the citadel. It had a high ceiling and, with the shutters closed and boys wielding fans, it was cool. There were six of them: Gordian himself, Valerian, the reunited Sabinianus and Arrian, Mauricius, and another local, Aemilius Severinus, the commander of the speculatores. They drank fermented palm wine and ate pistachios. From outside came the smell of chicken on a grill. Perhaps, Gordian thought, the nomads had not been entirely wrong: peasants always have something hidden.
‘Yes,’ Arrian said, ‘I could have got here quicker. But the scouts were dispersed all along the wall. Aemilius Severinus here agreed that it would be best to gather as many as possible. There are four hundred camped in the oasis.’
‘No one is criticizing you,’ Gordian said.
Sabinianus snorted.
‘No one apart from your twin, the other of the Cercopes.’ Gordian smiled.
‘The day I give a fuck about his views, I will—’
‘Sell your arse at the crossroads,’ Sabinianus said.
‘Possibly, although I was thinking of something else.’
‘If we could postpone the discussion of your descent into male prostitution,’ Gordian said, ‘it might be useful if you gave us some estimate of how many bloodthirsty savages were chasing you, and how soon they might be here.’
Arrian scratched his short, stubbly beard. He pulled the end of his upturned nose.
‘Hercules’ hairy black arse; it is as if he is auditioning to be in a comedy without a mask. What would a physiognomist read in his soul?’
Gordian gestured amiably for Sabinianus to be quiet. ‘If it helps him think.’
Arrian looked up, hands and face still. ‘I saw about two thousand, all mounted. But there was a lot of dust to the north of them. Although the majority of that would have been raised by baggage animals and captives.’
‘How long?’
Arrian spread his hands in a sign of hopelessness. ‘At first, the two thousand chased us hard. They gave up when they realized they would not catch us.’
‘Where was that?’
Arrian gestured to Aemilius Severinus.
‘Ten miles south of Thiges, fifteen north of here.’ The officer answered immediately and with confidence. Although most appointments were decided by patronage, probably the commander of the Frontier Wolves would not last long without certain qualities.
‘The afternoon wears on; most likely we can expect them at some point tomorrow.’
No one contradicted Gordian’s estimate.
‘How shall we greet them?’
Silence, until Gordian carried on. ‘I was thinking of a barrier – palm trunks, thorn bushes, whatever – across the neck of land.’
‘But it is near two miles across, and we are too few, with too little time,’ Sabinianus said.
‘A mounted charge, in a wedge,’ Valerian said. ‘No irregular troops will stand up to it, let alone a horde of nomads from the desert.’
‘True,’ Aemilius Severinus said. ‘But they would not need to. With their numbers, they would give way, flow all around us. Quite likely we could charge clean through them. But what good would it do? We would be charging at nothing, and all the time their arrows and javelins would be whittling down our numbers. Getting back might prove difficult, and if we ended up out there surrounded, on spent horses—’
‘What do these nomads value above everything?’ Gordian went straight on to answer his own rhetorical question. ‘They would do anything rather than leave behind the plunder they have amassed.’
‘They do claim to have a sense of honour.’ Aemilius Severinus spoke somewhat hesitantly. ‘Of course, they seldom live up to it. Things are not the same among them as with us.’
‘They are barbarians.’ Gordian waved aside the concept. ‘They saw several hundred speculatores riding here—’
‘And,’ Sabinianus cut in, ‘the gap between the salt lakes is narrow, and they will realize that it will be difficult to drive their stolen beasts and prisoners away under our noses.’
‘Exactly.’ Gordian grinned, feeling like one of those street magicians who haunt the agora when they produce something from up their sleeves. ‘Either they have to defend the herds, and we have something to charge, or they must come and root us out of the oasis. Either way, we get to fight hand-to-hand. And that is our strength, and their weakness.’
A breeze got up in the night, some time before dawn. It hissed and 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