The message never reached Statianus. Unbeknownst to scouts or foraging parties, Artavasdes of Media had joined forces with Monaeses; forty thousand cataphracts and horse archers dogged the Roman route just too far away for their dust to be noticed. When the baggage train crossed the pass coming down to Lake Matiane, its wagons were in single file thanks to the narrowness of the very poor road, and Statianus decided to keep them in single file until the terrain flattened a little. Ten thousand Median cataphracts attacked every part of the train simultaneously. His communications shattered, Statianus didn’t know what was happening where or when, couldn’t send his two legions in any direction with certainty. As he dithered, his men were slaughtered, those who survived the attack killed afterward to make sure Antony had no idea what had happened to his supplies. And what a prize! Within a day every last wagon was rumbling north and east to Media Atropatene, well out of Antony’s way. His force now had only the month’s provisions it carried with it, and no artillery or siege equipment.
That accomplished, Monaeses took the Parthian segment, thirty thousand strong, in Antony’s wake but without attacking. He now had the two silver Eagles of Statianus’s legions to add to the nine in Ecbatana: seven from Crassus, and now four from Antony.
The oblivious Antony reached Phraaspa intact, to find that it was far from the rude, mud-brick place of his imagination; it was a city the size of Attaleia or Tralles, immured behind huge bastions of stone and equipped with several mighty gates. One look told Antony that he would have to besiege it. So he sat down with his army to pen the inhabitants inside, very relieved that the country around Phraaspa was heavy with wheat in ripe ear no Parthian had thought to burn, as well as thousands of plump sheep. They’d eat.
Day succeeded day without any sign of the baggage train.
“Plague take Statianus, where is he?” Antony demanded, aware that one in every two of his foraging parties wasn’t returning.
“I’ll try to locate him,” said Polemon, who had decided to accompany his slingers. He rode off with a thousand of his light cavalry, waving cheekily at the Parthians atop Phraaspa’s walls, absolutely confident in Antony and his magnificent army.
Day succeeded day, but Polemon didn’t return.
With no timber to fell, only Roman numbers kept the Phraaspans within their fortifications; it was clear that the city was well provisioned, and had water sources. A long siege, a slow siege. The month of Julius had come and gone, Sextilis began to follow it, and still no sign of the baggage. Oh, for that eighty-foot ram! It would have made splinters out of the Phraaspan gates.
“Face it, Antonius,” said Publius Canidius after the army had been camped outside Phraaspa for seventy days, “the baggage train isn’t coming because it no longer exists. We have no wood to build siege towers, no catapults, no ballistas, no anything. Thus far we have lost twenty-five thousand foreign levies sent out to forage, and today I had a flat refusal to budge from the Cilicians, Jews, Syrians, and Cappadocians. Admittedly that’s twenty-five thousand fewer mouths to feed, but we’re not bringing in enough from the fields to keep up bodies and morale much longer. Somewhere out beyond our scouts—those who manage to come back, anyway—is a Parthian army doing what Fabius Maximus did to Hannibal.”
His belly seemed permanently filled with lead these days, a sign that Antony could no longer ignore for what it was: the knowledge of defeat. Phraaspa’s dark walls mocked, and he was as lost, as impotent in fact as he had felt in premonition for many, many months. Years, even. All leading up to this—failure. Was this why the melancholy had enveloped him? Because he had lost his luck? And where was the enemy? Why didn’t the Parthians attack, if they had spirited away his supplies? An even worse, more awful dread invaded him: he was not even going to be offered the chance of battle, of dying gloriously on a field as Crassus had, redeeming in his last hours all the hideous mistakes of a bungled campaign. For that reason alone, Crassus’s name was spoken with respect, with sorrow for his sightless head fixed to Artaxata’s walls. But Antony’s name? Who would remember it, if there wasn’t going to be a battle?
“They don’t intend to attack us while we sit here, do they?” he asked Canidius.
“That’s how I read them, Marcus,” Canidius said, keeping the compassion out of his voice; he knew what Antony was thinking.
“And I read them that way too,” said Ahenobarbus, scowling.
“We’re not going to be offered battle, they want us to die slowly and of things more mundane than sword cuts. We’ve also had a traitor in our midst to tell them everything—Monaeses.”
“Oh, I don’t want it to end this way!” Antony cried, ignoring the reference to Monaeses. “I need more time! Phraaspa can’t be living on full rations, no city has that much within its walls, even Ilium! If we persist a while longer, I say Phraaspa will surrender.”
“We could storm it,” said Marcus Titius.
No one bothered to answer; Titius was a quaestor, young and foolish, game for anything.
Antony sat in his ivory curule chair and stared into the distance, his face almost rapt. Finally he came out of his reverie to look at Canidius. “How much longer can we last here, Publius?”
“It’s the beginning of September. Another month at most, and that’s too long. If we don’t get inside Phraaspa’s walls before winter, then we must retreat to Artaxata by the same route we came. Five hundred miles. The legionaries will do it in thirty days if they’re pushed, but most of the auxiliaries we have left are foot, and they can’t begin to match that pace. It means splitting the army to preserve the legions. The Gallic troopers who have lived through foraging will be all right—there should still be grass. Unless thousands of cataphracts have cut it into mud and sod. As you well know, Antonius, without scouts we’re groping like blind men in the middle of a basilica.”
“That we are.” Antony gave a wry grin. “They say Pompeius Magnus turned back three days short of the Caspian Sea because he couldn’t stand the spiders, but I’d cheerfully take a million of the biggest, hairiest spiders imaginable just to have a reliable report of what’s waiting out there if we do decide to retreat.”
“I’ll go,” said Titius eagerly.
The rest stared at him.
“If Armenian scouts haven’t come back, Titius, why do you think you will?” Antony asked; he was fond of Titius, who was Plancus’s nephew, and tried to let him down gently. “No, I thank you for the offer, but we have to go on sending out Armenians. No one else could survive.”
“But that’s just it!” Titius said earnestly. “They’re Enemy, Marcus Antonius, no matter what else they purport to be. We all know the Armenians are as treacherous as the Medians. Let me go! I promise I’ll take care of myself.”
“How many men do you want to take?”
“None, Publius Canidius. Just me on a local pony. One the color of the fields. I’ll wear goatskin trousers and coat, blend in too. And maybe I’ll take a dozen local ponies with me so I look like a horse breeder or a horse shepherd or something.”
Antony laughed and clapped Titius on the back. “Why not? Yes, Titius, you go! Just—come back.” He managed a wide grin. “You have to come back! The only quaestor I’ve ever known worse than you at totting up figures was Marcus Antonius, but he served a more demanding master—Caesar.”
No one from the command tent was there to see Marcus Titius begin his mission because no one wanted to carry the memory of his perky, freckled face into the future as more than that wretched nuisance of a quaestor, Titius, in charge of the army’s finances and utterly incapable of managing his own.
He had been gone a nundinum when the wind changed direction and began to blow out of the north. With it came rain and sleet. And on that day some Phraaspans atop their walls roasted sheep, the smell of it floating through the vast encampment on the plain; a way of telling the besiegers that Phraaspa had plenty of food for the winter, that it would not surrender.
Antony called a war council, not a meeting of his intimates
but a gathering that included all his legates and tribunes, plus the primipilus and pilus prior centurions—sixty men altogether. An ideal size for personal communication; he could be heard by everyone without the nuisance of having heralds follow his words and transmit what he said onward, outward. Those commanded to be there exchanged significant looks: no foreigners were present. A meeting for the legions rather than the army.
“Without siege equipment we cannot take Phraaspa,” Antony began, “and today’s little exhibition says the Phraaspans are still eating well. We’ve been sitting here for a hundred days and have denuded the surrounding countryside, but at a price—the loss of two-thirds of our mounted auxiliaries.” He drew a breath and tried to appear sternly resolute, the general in total command of himself as well as the situation. “It’s time to go, boys,” he said. “We know from today’s weather that it swings from summer straight to real winter, and on the last day of September. Tomorrow, the Kalends of October, we march for Artaxata. One thing the Phraaspans won’t be prepared for is the speed of legions on the move. By the time they get up tomorrow morning, all that will be left of us are campfires. Order the men to carry a month’s supply of grain—century mules are to be used for food and firewood, and the mules drawing wagons will be turned into pack animals—what we can’t carry on our backs and mules will have to be left behind. Food and burnables to go, everything else to stay.”
Most had been expecting this announcement, but no one liked hearing it. However, of one thing Antony could be sure—these men were Roman, and would not mourn the fate of the auxiliaries, tolerated but never esteemed.
“Centurions, between now and the first sign of dawn, every legionary has to know the situation and understand what he must do to survive the march. I have no idea what lies out there just waiting for us to retreat, but Roman legions don’t give in, nor will they on this coming march. The terrain means it will take us about a month to reach Artaxata, especially if the rain and sleet continue. They mean muddy ground and freezing conditions. Every man is to dig his socks out of his pack—if he has rabbit or ferret skin ones, all the better. Keeping dry is going to be a lot of the battle, for it’s the only kind we’re going to get, boys. The Parthians are out there using Fabian tactics—they’ll pick off the stragglers but they won’t engage us in mass. Worst is the fact that there’s not even enough wood for kindling between here and Artaxata, so no fires for warmth. Any man who burns his picket stake, section of breastworks, or pilum shaft will be flogged and beheaded—we may need them to fight Parthian raids off. Nor can we trust any foreign levies, including the Armenians. The only troops Rome expects us to preserve are her legions.”
A small silence fell, broken by Canidius.
“March formation, Antonius?” he asked.
“Agmen quadratum where the ground is flat enough, Canidius, and where it isn’t, in square anyway. I don’t care how narrow a track may be, we never march in rank and file, is that understood?”
Murmurs from all sides.
Ahenobarbus’s mouth was open to ask another question when a stir started on the perimeter of the group; some men moved aside to permit Marcus Titius a passage to Antony’s spot, faces wreathed in broad smiles, some slapping the young quaestor on the back.
“Titius, you dog!” cried Antony in delight. “Did you find the Parthians? What’s the true situation?”
“Yes, Marcus Antonius, I found them,” said Titius, face grim. “Forty thousand of them, commanded by our friend Monaeses—I saw him clearly on several occasions, and he was riding around in gold chain mail and had a coronet on his helmet. A Parthian prince at least as important as Pacorus was, by Ventidius’s description.”
The news about Monaeses came as no surprise by this time, even to Antony, his staunchest supporter. King Phraates had tricked them, put a traitor in their midst.
“How far away are they?” Fonteius asked.
“About thirty miles, and right between us and Artaxata.”
“Cataphracts? Horse archers?” Canidius asked.
“Both, but more horse archers.” Titius grinned briefly. “I suppose they’re short of cataphracts after Ventidius’s campaign—about five thousand, no more. But hordes of archers. An entirely horsed army, and they’ve done a fine job of cutting up the ground—with this rain, our soldiers are going to be floundering through mud.” He stopped, looked a question at Antony. “At least, I presume we’re planning to retreat?”
“That we are. You came back in the nick of time, Titius. A day later, and you’d have found us gone.”
“Anything else to report?” Canidius asked.
“Only that they don’t act like warriors sniffing battle. More like a force determined to stay on the defensive. Oh, they’ll raid us, but unless Monaeses is a better general than I think he is after watching him prance around looking important, we should be able to hold off whatever he throws at us if we have enough warning.”
“Warning we won’t need, Titius,” Ahenobarbus said. “We march agmen quadratum, and when we can’t do that, we march in square.”
The meeting calmed into a discussion on logistics—which of the fourteen legions should go first, which last, how frequently the men on the outside of each square should be rested by being pulled in and replaced, how big the squares should be, how many pack mules could be contained within each square at its smallest size—a thousand and one decisions that had to be made before the first foot in its socked caliga started the march.
Finally Fonteius asked what no one else would. “Antonius, the auxiliaries. Thirty thousand infantrymen. What happens to them?”
“If they can keep up, they can form our rearguard—in square. But they won’t keep up, Fonteius, we all know that.” Antony’s eyes grew moist. “I am very sorry for it, and as Triumvir of the East I am responsible for them, but the legions must be preserved at all costs. Funny, I keep thinking we have sixteen, but we don’t, of course. Statianus’s two are long gone.”
“Including noncombatants, eighty-four thousand men. Enough to make a formidable front while ever they can march agmen. We have four thousand Gallic troopers and four thousand more Galatians to protect our flanks, but if there’s not much grass, they’ll be in trouble before we’ve gone half the distance,” said Canidius.
“Send them ahead, Antonius,” said Fonteius.
“And cut up the ground even more? No, they travel with us, and on our flanks. If they can’t deal with the number of archers and cataphracts Monaeses throws at them, they can at least come inside the squares. My Gallic horse especially are precious to me, Fonteius. They volunteered for this campaign, and it’s half a world away from home,” Antony said, and lifted his hands. “All right, dismissed. We march at first light, and I want everyone moving by sunrise.”
“The men aren’t going to like retreating,” Titius said.
“I am well aware of that!” Antony said sharply. “For which reason, I intend to do a Caesar. I’m going to be in every column talking to the men in person, even if it takes me a nundinum.”
Agmen quadratum was a formation that saw an army of sufficient strength spread in columns across a wide front, ready in an instant to wheel and take up battle stations. It also permitted the formation of squares very quickly. Now was the time when the densest soldier understood the days, months, even years of remorseless drilling; his maneuvers had to be automatic responses, no thought involved.
With the auxiliary infantry tacked on behind this mile-wide front of legionaries, the retreat began in good order, though into the teeth of a biting north wind that froze the mud and turned it into a jagged field of knifelike edges—slippery, punishing, lacerating.
The best the legions could do was twenty miles a day, but even that was too fast for the auxiliaries. On the third day, with Antony still visiting his soldiers full of jokes and predictions of victory next year now that they knew what they were up against, Monaeses and the Parthians attacked the rear, the archers picking off dozens of men in one sortie. Few died, but t
hose too wounded to keep up had to be left behind; as the enormous expanse of Lake Matiane loomed like a sea, all but a handful of the auxiliaries had vanished, whether to execution at Parthian hands or to a life of slavery, no one knew.
Morale was surprisingly high until the country became so steep that the columns had to be abandoned in favor of squares. While ever he could, Antony kept his squares a cohort in size, which meant six centuries of men marching four deep around the four sides of a square, the shields of the outermost file slung protectively, as when forming a tortoise. Inside the hollow middle were the noncombatants, the mules, and what tiny part of the artillery had always traveled with the centuries—scorpions firing wooden darts and very small catapults. If attacked, a square turned with all four sides out to fight, the rear rank of soldiers holding long siege spears to go for the bellies of horses persuaded to jump inside—not something Monaeses was prepared to do, it seemed. If cataphracts were becoming scarce in Parthian lands thanks to old Ventidius, big horses took even longer to breed.
The days went on at a dismal pace of between seventeen and nineteen miles up and down, up and down, everyone now aware of the Parthians shadowing them. Skirmishes developed between Galatian and Gallic cavalry and the cataphracts, but the army pushed on in good order and reasonable spirits.
Until, climbing into ever higher peaks to hazard the eleven-thousand-foot pass, they encountered a blizzard the like of which Italia never saw. Blinding snow like a featureless white wall, howling gales, the kind of surface that dropped away underfoot leaving men stranded thigh deep in powdery crystals.