Fortune's Favorites (105 page)

“I will try. What do you require?”

“Call up the militia of Priene yourself and send to every town and community from Halicarnassus to Sardes to call up its militia. I want as many men as you can find as quickly as you can. Four legions, and all under their usual officers. The assembly point will be Magnesia-by-the-Maeander eight days from now.”

Light broke; Memnon beamed. “The governor has acted!”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Caesar. “He's placed me in command of the Asian militia, though unfortunately he can spare no other Roman staff. That means, Memnon, that Asia Province will have to fight for itself instead of sitting back and letting Roman legions take all the glory.”

“Not before time!” said Memnon, a martial spark in his eye.

“I feel the same way. Good local militia, Roman-trained and Roman-equipped, are much underestimated. But after this I can assure you they won't be.”

“Whom do we fight?” asked Memnon.

“A Pontic general named Eumachus and a renegade Spaniard named Marcus Marius-no relation to my uncle the great Gaius Marius,” lied Caesar, who wanted his militia full of confidence, not awed by that name.

So off went Memnon to organize the calling up of the Asian militia, without asking to see an official piece of paper or even pausing to wonder if Caesar was who and what he said he was. When Caesar was doing the pushing, nobody thought to question him.

That night after he retired to his rooms in Memnon's house, Caesar conferred with Burgundus.

“You won't be with me on this campaign, old friend,” he said, “and there's no use protesting that Cardixa wouldn't speak to you again if you weren't on hand to protect me. I need you to do something far more important than standing on the sidelines of a battle wishing you were a Roman legionary-or a militiaman. I need you to ride for Ancyra to see Deiotarus.”

“The Galatian thane,” said Burgundus, nodding. “Yes, I remember him.”

“And he's bound to remember you. Even among the Gauls of Galatia, men don't come as big as you. I'm sure he knows more about the movements of Eumachus and Marcus Marius than I do, but it isn't to warn him that I'm sending you. I want you to tell him that I'm organizing an army of Asian militia and will try to lure the Pontic forces down the Maeander. Somewhere along the Maeander I hope to trap and defeat them. If I do, they'll retreat back into Phrygia before re-forming their ranks and then trying to invade again. I want you to tell Deiotarus that he will never have a better opportunity to wipe this Pontic army out than if he catches it in Phrygia attempting to re-form. In other words, tell him, he will be acting in concert with me. If I in Asia Province and he in Phrygia both do our jobs well, then there will be no invasion of Asia Province or Galatia this year.”

“How do I travel, Caesar? I mean, looking like what?”

“I think you ought to look like a war god, Burgundus. Put on the gold armor Gaius Marius gave you, stuff the biggest purple feathers you can find in the marketplace into the crest of your helmet, and sing some frightful German song as loudly as you can. If you encounter Pontic soldiers, ride right through the middle of them as if they didn't exist. Between you and the Nesaean, you'll be the personification of martial terror.”

“And after I've seen Deiotarus?”

“Return to me along the Maeander.”

The hundred thousand Pontic men who had set out with Eumachus and Marcus Marius from Zela in the spring were under orders to concentrate upon infiltrating Asia Province as their first priority, but to travel in a more or less direct line between Zela in Pontus and any Phrygian backwater meant traversing Galatia, and Mithridates was not sure about Galatia. A new generation of chieftains had arisen to replace those he had murdered at a feast almost thirty years ago, and Pontic authority over Galatia was at best a tenuous thing. Eventually it would be necessary to deal with this odd outcrop of misplaced Gauls, but not first of all. His best men Mithridates had reserved for his own divisions, so the soldiers under the command of Eumachus and Marcus Marius were not properly seasoned. A campaign down the Maeander against disorganized communities of Asian Greeks would stiffen the troops, endow them with confidence.

As a result of these cogitations, the King of Pontus kept Eumachus and Marcus Marius and their army with him as he marched into Paphlagonia. He was, he congratulated himself, superbly well equipped for this sally against Rome; in Pontic granaries there lay two million medimni of wheat, and one medimnus produced two one-pound loaves of bread a day for thirty days. Therefore in wheat alone he had sufficient in storage to feed all his people and all his armies for several years. Therefore it mattered to him not at all that he carried an extra hundred thousand men with him into Paphlagonia. Petty details about how these enormous quantities of grain and other foodstuffs were to be transported he did not concern himself with; that lay in the domain of underlings, whom he simply assumed would wave their conjuring sticks and transport. In reality these hirelings had neither the training nor the practical imagination to do what came naturally to a Roman praefectus fabrum-though no Roman general would have dreamed of moving an army over long distances if it numbered more than ten legions all told.

Consequently by the time that Eumachus and Marcus Marius split their hundred thousand men away from the three hundred thousand belonging to Mithridates, supplies were running so short that the King was obliged to send snakelike trails of men back many miles to struggling oxcarts and make these men carry heavy loads of foods on their shoulders to feed the army. Which in turn meant a percentage of the soldiers were always exhausted from having to work as porters. The fleet was bringing supplies to Heracleia, the King was told; in Heracleia all would be set to rights, the King was told.

However, Heracleia was scant comfort to Eumachus and Marcus Marius, who left the main forces to march inland down the Billaeus River, crossed a range of mountains and emerged in the valley of the Sangarius. In this fertile part of Bithynia they ate well at the expense of the local farmers, but soon were heading into heavily forested uplands where only small vales and pockets lay under cultivation.

Thus what brought Eumachus and Marcus Marius to the parting of their ways was their inability to feed one hundred thousand Pontic soldiers.

“You won't need the whole army to deal with a few Asian Greeks,” said Marcus Marius to Eumachus, “and certainly you won't need cavalry. So I'm going to remain on the Tembris River with some of the foot and all the horse. We'll farm and we'll forage, and wait for news of you. Just make sure you're back by winter-and that you're marching half the people of Asia Province with you as food porters! It isn't far from the upper Tembris to the lands of the Galatian Tolistobogii, so in the spring we'll fall on them and annihilate them. Which will give us plenty of Galatian food to eat next year.”

“I don't think the King my cousin would like to hear you belittle his glorious military venture by speaking of it in terms of food,” said Eumachus, not fiercely or haughtily; he was too afraid of Mithridates ever to feel fierce or haughty.

“The King your cousin is in bad need of some good Roman training, then he'd appreciate how hard it is to feed so many men on a march,” said Marcus Marius, unimpressed. “I was sent to teach you lot the art of ambush and raid, but so far all I've done is general an army. I'm not a professional at it. But I do have common sense, and common sense says half of this force has to stay somewhere on a river where there's enough flat land to farm and yield sustenance. Hard luck if speaking of a campaign in terms of food upsets the King! If you want my opinion, he doesn't even live on the same earth the rest of us do.”

More time was wasted while Marcus Marius relocated himself, for Eumachus refused to leave until he was sure whereabouts he would find Marius on his return. Thus it was the beginning of September before he and some fifty thousand infantrymen crossed the Dindymus Mountains and picked up one of the tributaries of the Maeander. Naturally the further downstream the army moved the better foraging and food became, a stimulus to continue until the whole of this rich part of the world belonged once more to King Mithridates of Pontus.

Because most of the biggest towns along the ever-winding river lay on its south bank, Eumachus marched on its north bank, following a paved road which had started in the town of Tripolis. Promising the soldiers that they would be allowed to sack when Asia Province was secured, Eumachus bypassed Nysa, the first big city they encountered, and continued downstream in the direction of Tralles. It was impossible to keep the men entirely together on the march, since food had constantly to be found, and sometimes attractions like a flock of succulent young sheep or fat geese would send several hundred men whooping and chasing until every last animal was caught and slaughtered, by which time troop unrest had spread.

In fact, the pleasant and placid progress through rich land had produced an element of festival. The scouts Eumachus sent out reported back twice a day, always with the same news: no sign of opposition. That, thought Eumachus scornfully, was because no focus of resistance existed south of Pergamum! All the Roman legions (even those of Cilicia) were garrisoned on the outskirts of Pergamum to protect the governor's precious person; this had been known to every Pontic general for some time, and Marcus Marius had confirmed it by sending scouts to the Caicus.

So lulled and secure was Eumachus that he was not concerned when one evening his scouts failed to report back at their usual time, an hour before sunset. The city of Tralles was now somewhat closer than Nysa was behind, and the gently tilting undulations of the river valley which threw the Maeander into so many wandering, winding turns were flushed gold, long light upon harvest stubble. Eumachus gave the order to halt for the night. No fortifications were thrown up, no organized routine went into the making of a general camp; what happened resembled starlings settling, a process fraught with chatter, squabbles, relocations.

There was just enough light to see by when out of the dim shadows four legions of Asian militia in properly Roman rank and file fell upon the supping Pontic army and slaughtered its unprepared soldiers piecemeal. Though they outnumbered the Asian militiamen by more than two to one, the Pontic troops were so taken unaware that they could put up no resistance.

Provided with horses and by sheer chance located on the far side of the Pontic camp from Caesar's attack, Eumachus and his senior legates managed to get away, rode without caring about the fate of the army for the Tembris River and Marcus Marius.

But luck was not with King Mithridates that year. Eumachus arrived back at the Tembris just in time to see Deiotarus and the Galatian Tolistobogii descend upon Marcus Marius's half of the invasion force. This was a cavalry battle in the main, but it never developed into a bitter contest; the largely Sarmatian and Scythian levies which had enlisted with Mithridates fought best on open steppe, could not maneuver in the steep-sided valley of the upper Tembris, and fell in thousands.

By December, the remnants of the Phrygian army had struggled back to Zela under the command of Eumachus; Marcus Marius himself had set out to find Mithridates, preferring to tell the King in person what had happened than detail it in a report.

* * *

The Asian militia was jubilant, and joined with the whole population of the Maeander valley in victory celebrations which lasted for many days.

In his speech to the troops before the battle Caesar had harped upon the fact that Asia Province was defending itself, that Rome was far away and incapable of helping, that for once the fate of Asia Province depended wholly upon the Asian Greeks of that land. Speaking in the colloquial Greek of the region, he worked upon the feelings of patriotism and self-help to such effect that the twenty thousand men of Lydia and Caria whom he led to ambush the camping Eumachus were so fired that the battle was almost an anticlimax. For four nundinae he had drilled and disciplined them, for four nundinae he had imbued them with a consciousness of their own worth, and the results were everything that he could possibly have hoped for.

“No more Pontic armies will come this year,” he said to Memnon at the victory feast in Tralles two days after the defeat of Eumachus, “but next year you may see more. I have taught you what to do and how to do it. Now it's up to the men of Asia Province to defend themselves. Rome, I predict, will be so caught up on other fronts that there won't be legions or generals available for duty anywhere in Asia Province. But you know now that you can look after yourselves.”

“That we do, Caesar, and we owe it to you,” said Memnon.

“Nonsense! All you really needed was someone to get you started, and it was my good fortune that I was to hand.”

Memnon leaned forward. “It is our intention to build a temple to Victory as close to the site of the battle as the flood-plain permits-there is talk of a small hill upon the outskirts of Tralles. Would you allow us to erect a statue of you within the temple so that the people never forget who led them?”

Not if Lucullus had been present to veto the request would Caesar have declined this singular honor. Tralles was a long way from Rome and not one of Asia Province's biggest cities; few if any Romans of his own class would ever visit a temple to Victory which could claim no distinctions of age or (probably) great art. But to Caesar this honor meant a great deal. At the age of twenty-six he would have a life-sized statue of himself in full general's regalia inside a victory temple. For at twenty-six he had led an army to victory.

“I would be delighted,” he said gravely.

“Then tomorrow I will send Glaucus to see you and take all the measurements. He's a fine sculptor who works out of the studios in Aphrodisias, but since he is in the militia he's here with us now. I'll make sure he brings his painter with him to make some colored sketches. Then you need not stay for further sittings if you have things to do elsewhere.”

Caesar did have things to do elsewhere. Chief among these was a journey to see Lucullus in Pergamum before news of the victory near Tralles reached him by other means. As Burgundus had come back from Galatia seven days before the battle, he was able to send the German giant to Rhodes escorting the two scribes and his precious Toes. The journey to Pergamum he would make alone.