Carrhae Read Free

coolly. ‘Then Dura must remain protected at all times.’
    ‘And what of the Armenians?’ I asked.
    She shrugged. ‘What of them? The old fool Tigranes believes that the empire is weak and will fall into his lap. He will soon be disabused of that notion.’
    But the empire was weak, and even though I concluded the meeting by informing all present that we would wait until we received word from Orodes I worried that the Armenians would flood into Hatra and Gordyene with ease. Following the Battle of Susa the victorious kings badly needed a period of rest in which to rebuild their forces. The Kingdoms of Hatra, Gordyene, Babylon and Media, to say nothing of Dura, had suffered substantial losses, especially among their heavy horsemen. To wage another war would sap their depleted resources further. My spirits were not improved when I received a letter from Orodes at Ctesiphon, the palace of the high king, informing me that aside from royal bodyguards the Kingdom of Babylon would be able to field a mere ten thousand horse archers, two hundred mounted spearmen and no foot soldiers to counter the Armenian threat. Those few foot soldiers the kingdom possessed – five thousand – were needed to garrison the cities of Babylon, Kish and Seleucia and the royal compound of Ctesiphon itself. Just as I could not leave the walls of Dura undefended, so Orodes could not denude the cities of his wife’s kingdom of soldiers lest civil disorder broke out. The temples and palaces were a tempting target for organised bands of thieves and other undesirables who infested every city on earth.
    ‘He’s king of kings now,’ said Domitus, ‘so he can summon the forces of all the kingdoms in Parthia.’
    The day after the meeting I had made an evening visit to his tent in the legionary camp located half a mile west of the city. Now that he had a wife – Miriam – and a residence in the city he usually spent the evenings inside the city walls, but he was sleeping in his tent as the army made ready to embark on a field exercise.
    I poured myself a cup of wine and sat facing him at the table.
    ‘There are only two kingdoms that have been largely untouched by the recent civil war,’ I replied. ‘Carmania in the southeast corner of the empire and Nergal’s Kingdom of Mesene to the south. Carmania is around twelve hundred miles from Hatra and even if its king, Phriapatius, has been summoned it will take his army ten weeks to travel the length of the empire before it is any use.’
    ‘Nergal will come,’ Domitus assured me. Nergal was a Companion, one of those who like Domitus had returned with me from Italy following our time fighting by the side of Spartacus.
    ‘Nergal will come,’ I agreed, ‘and will join with Orodes and then we will join with them. Let us hope it will be enough.’
    ‘And the other kingdoms?’
    I sipped at the wine. ‘Exhausted by years of strife they will be reluctant to send troops to the west and leave their own lands vulnerable to attack. The nomads of the northern steppes and the Indians would exploit any weakness along the empire’s northern and eastern borders.’
    He leaned back in his chair. ‘It is down to us, then.’
    I tried to smile. ‘It has always been down to us, my friend.’
    ‘It won’t take long to build up the army,’ he reassured me. ‘There is always an endless supply of young men presenting themselves at the gates of the Citadel to volunteer their services.’
    Service in Dura’s army was open to anyone and advancement was dependent on merit alone. That said, there were certain qualifications that Domitus as its general had insisted on, which were the same as those applied in the Roman Army. These were: a healthy body with all limbs intact (it never ceased to amaze me the number of one-legged individuals who tried to enlist on the grounds that sitting in the saddle did not require the use of two legs!), unmarried, no dwarfs, good eyesight and a good character. All those initially