The Wolves of the North (43 page)

They did not speak of what had happened, or what might happen. They hardly spoke at all. Wrapped in his cloak, Ballista tried to empty his mind. With every thought came memories of Calgacus. He repeated Julia’s words to himself: the dead do not suffer, that is for those left behind. At last, he slept.

Maximus woke him. The sun was not yet up, the sky just paling in the east. The fire had gone out. Ballista was cold, tired, and his stomach was uneasy. They tried to eat the raw horsemeat. It made Ballista’s gorge rise. He persevered. He would need the sustenance.

The dawn came up behind them as they walked. Their shadows, canted and misshapen, marched ahead. The sky was clear. That was something. If it had rained as before, the trail would have been washed away.

With the warmth of the day, the Steppe came to life. First in patches, then in great swathes, the grass turned green again. Miraculous yellow flowers opened. It was as if the storm had turned back time, ushered in a second springtime. Birds sang, plovers swooped around them. There were butterflies, yellow like the flowers. All of it was superficial, false to Ballista’s eyes. It did not lighten his mood an iota.

They could not go wrong. The trail was the only thing to
follow in the immensity of the plain. Ballista kept his eyes on it, a few steps in front of his feet. To look up was to accept the scale of the Steppe, to invite the admission of the futility of what they did.

They crossed small streams with banks that had been swept by flash floods from the storm. Their soil, where it had been undercut, was red; sometimes hanging like bloodied stalactites.

The north wind sang across the Steppe.

That evening, they halted early at a place where a stream broadened out into a mere. They concealed themselves in the cover around the edges. When the ducks had flighted and were on the water, in the lingering light that remained, Ballista shot one. The others rose up, clamorous in their fear.

Ballista lit a fire. Maximus plucked and dressed the bird. Cooked, it was an infinite improvement on the horsemeat.

Ballista did not want to talk about Calgacus. He could tell Maximus did not want to either. There was nothing else to talk about.

There were a few clouds that night, coming down from the north. They gave the moon a fugitive air, as if any one of them might conceal the wolf. Of course, some peoples did not think the moon was masculine, or that it would one day be eaten by a beast. For the Greeks, it was Selene; a goddess riding for eternity in a chariot drawn by shambly-footed oxen. He wondered what Calgacus had thought when he looked into a moonlit sky. He wondered what view Calgacus had held of an afterlife. They had never talked about it seriously. They never would now. It would be a comfort to believe he would be reunited with the old Caledonian, in Valhalla or somewhere. But it was hard to give it credence. This life was unforgiving; no reason to think the next would be better. If it existed.

The third day was much tougher. Ballista’s feet were blistered. He took off his boots and bandaged them. The bandages slipped, chafed, soon did no good. Maximus was walking badly too. The
only advantage in their slower pace was the time it gave them to find the trail; it was getting harder to follow as the rejuvenated grass sprang up.

Twice – once to the north, once the south – they saw herds dotted and indistinct in the distance.

The Steppe stretched on, pitiless in its enormity. But they knew they were getting closer to Lake Maeotis. The smell of it was in the air, and the streams they had to cross were much fuller, broadening out into real rivers. Each of the latter was somehow shocking in its sudden declivity, as it brought trees and wildfowl, and a reflection of the sky, things near forgotten and almost unimaginable in the previous hours of their absence.

They cut thin branches to use as walking sticks.

They walked all day. They had nothing left to eat, and did not stop to hunt. As the sun began its final descent – they moved like old men now – they heard the sea birds. Looking up, Ballista saw the overgrown earthworks, and ditches full of brambles and thin trees of some long-abandoned fortification. Beyond, there were reed beds, and beyond them the open water of some quiet inlet. There was the thatched roof of a lone cottage. Off to the right, eight horses grazed in a water meadow.

Dogs hurtled out, three of them: vicious-looking, snarling, eyes popping.

The horses stamped away to the far end of the meadow.

Ballista and Maximus stood still, leaning on their walking sticks.

The dogs circled.

An elderly man clad in rags appeared out of the reeds, an eldritch figure with the low sun behind him. He whistled, and the dogs fell back a little. He put his right palm flat to his forehead.

Ballista cleared his throat to speak.

The old man spoke first. ‘He has taken the only boat. He made my son sail it.’ He used the language of Germania.

Neither Ballista nor Maximus said anything.

‘He said you would come.’ The aged fisherman held his hands out placatingly. ‘It is not our fault. Do not blame us. He was armed; a man of violence. What could we do?’ He fell to his knees.

‘When?’ Ballista said.

‘Yesterday morning, just after first light.’

Ballista felt as if something was broken inside him, something that had been keeping him upright.

‘How far are your neighbours?’ Maximus said.

The old man pointed to the south-east. ‘Near Tanais.’

‘How far?’

‘A long day’s walk.’

‘The other way?’

‘Further.’

Ballista spoke. ‘The horses are ours.’

‘Yes, of course. He said you would want them. We have looked after them.’ The old man showed his teeth like a dog which fears a beating. ‘We had no choice.’

‘Get off your knees. Do you have any food we could have?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ The old fisherman scrambled up, started backing towards the cottage. ‘Fish stew, and bread, good bread.’

‘And chain up those dogs.’

‘Yes, right away,
Atheling
, right away.’

The dogs winding around his legs, the old man went to the cottage.

‘When we have eaten, we can ride to Tanais,’ Maximus said. ‘Keep the water on our right. We should be there before morning. Good chance of hiring a boat there and then.’

‘No,’ Ballista said. ‘The wind has been set in the north. It would have been on his quarter. He would have reached Panticapaeum some time last night. If he did not stop, by now he could be across the Euxine. It is over.’

‘If the gods ever let me find him …’

‘Yes.’ Ballista felt unutterably weary; vaguely sick, but hungry. ‘Would you check the horses?’

When Maximus was gone, Ballista stared at the dying sun, and tried not to think too much about anything.

The working title of this novel was
The Nomad Sea
, and it was referred to as such in the Historical Afterwords to previous novels in the series.

As in all but one of the
Warrior of Rome
novels, the surface story – here, Ballista’s mission to the Steppe – is fiction, while the background in all its forms is as historically plausible as I can make it.

The Roman empire of the
AD
260s is a profoundly obscure and uncertain place, and the Pontic Steppe in antiquity seldom is anything else. Some trust can be put in the map of the Roman empire in
AD
263, but that of the Steppe is a contentious product of guesswork and inference.

The standard work (in German) on this fascinating kingdom centred in the eastern Crimea (Greek in origin, heavily influenced by the Sarmatians, and a client of Rome, but one that at times in the third century
AD
is found providing shipping for the Gothic raids into Roman provinces) is V. F. Gajdukevĭ,
Das Bosporanische Reich
(Berlin and Amsterdam, 1971). For this period, two useful works in English are N. A. Frolova,
The Coinage of the Kingdom of Bosporus
AD
242–341/2
(Oxford, 1983); and M. Mielczarek,
The Army of the Bosporan Kingdom
(Łódź, 1999). Not being able to read Russian is a constant limitation in researching the kingdom.

A reconstruction of Bosporan history in the third century
AD
mainly has to be based on the coinage of the monarchs which can be dated. Rhescuporis V minted
AD
242–76, with gaps between
AD
258–60 and
AD
268–74. Coins also survive for other kings: Pharsanes
AD
253; Teiranes
AD
266 and
AD
275–8; and Sauromates
AD
275.

For the novel, I have reconstructed things as follows:

Pharsanes, Teiranes and Sauromates were sons of Rhescuporis (possibly with different mothers, who may have been from different tribes – Kings of Bosporus married women from various local tribes: see Lucian’s
Toxaris
, which may be an ancient work of historical fiction, but was intended to be plausible to its original audience). In
AD
251, after the defeat of Rome by the Goths at Abritus, the emperor Gallus withdrew the annual Roman subsidy which the King of Bosporus mainly used to pay his troops and bribe surrounding tribes not to attack (interestingly, the lack of Roman coins in the eastern Crimea suggests it was paid in bullion,
which was not the normal Roman practice). In
AD
253 the Goths attacked the Kingdom of Bosporus. Rhescuporis elevated Pharsanes to be joint king, but the latter was killed in battle. Rhescuporis was then forced to let his subjects ‘connive’ with the northern tribes by providing vessels for the northerners’ first seaborne descent on Roman territory, which ended in defeat for the northerners at Pityus on the Black Sea.

Renewed war with the barbarians brought chaos in
AD
258–60. Rhescuporis, with tribal help bought with money from the pretenders Macrianus and Quietus (
AD
260–1), regained his throne and a little measure of stability in
AD
261. As Rhescuporis had recognized Macrianus and Quietus, relations between him and the emperor Gallienus may have remained strained for some years: Bosporan coins featuring two emperors begin in
AD
261, but continue well after the fall of the Macriani, until
AD
264.

It must be stressed that the above is a background story necessary for this and the next novel,
The Amber Road
. While it is inspired by the coins, other sources and wider events in the empire, as a historian, I have no faith in it whatsoever.

The Kingdom of Bosporus fell under the military sphere of the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus. However, in this novel, the auxiliaries with Ballista have been sent by the governor of Moesia Inferior, because they have come with imperial functionaries from Byzantium, which, while part of Bithynia-Pontus, was defended by the former.

Most of the ancient city is buried under the modern town of Kerch on the eastern Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. For introductions to the archaeology (in English), see G. R. Tsetskhladze in T. H. Nielsen (ed.),
Yet More Studies in the Ancient Greek
Polis
(Stuttgart, 1997), 44–9; and V. P. Tolstikov in D. V. Grammenos and E. K. Petropoulos (eds.),
Ancient Greek Colonies in the Black Sea, volume II
(Thessaloníki, 2003), 707–8.

The ancient city of Tanais lay to the west of modern-day Rostov on Don, where the Don met the Sea of Azov. On this town, see B. BÖttger in G. R. Tsetskhladze (ed.),
New Studies on the
Black
Sea Littoral
(Oxford, 1996), 41–50; and T. M. Arsenyeva in Grammenos and Petropoulos, op. cit. above under
Panticapaeum
, 1047–102. Both stress the complete abandonment of the settlement for a century or so after its sack by the Heruli/ Goths. I have given it a little more life.

Our bit of the Steppe – north-east of the Black Sea, north of the Caucasus and west of the Caspian and the Volga river – lies at the edge of the focus of two monumental works of scholarship. It is at the western end of C. I. Beckwith,
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age
to the Present
(Princeton and Oxford, 2009), and the eastern of R. Batty,
Rome and the Nomads: The Pontic-Danubian Realm in Antiquity
(Oxford, 2007) areas of study. Useful introductions to the Steppe can be found in E. H. Minns,
Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast
of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus
(Cambridge, 1913); and R. Rolle,
The World of the Scythians
(Eng. tr., London, 1989).

The essential comparative work on pastoral nomadism is A. M. Khazanov,
Nomads and the
Outside World
(2nd edn, Wisconsin and London, 1994).

On nomadic warfare, see P. B. Golden, ‘War and Warfare in the Pre-Cinggisid Western Steppes of Eurasia’, in N. di Cosmo (ed.),
Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800)
(Leiden, Boston, and Köln, 2002), 107–72; also useful for its concision and illustrations is A. Karasulas,
Mounted Archers of the Steppe
600
BC
–
AD
1300
(Oxford, 2004).

The Heruli (also spelt as Eruli, and several other variations) are deeply obscure. There are various problems with our literary sources. They are all written long after the third century. They all work within the classical ethnographic tradition, which on the one hand makes all nomads the same and on the other allows for considerable invention of detail. Our main source, Procopius, is extremely hostile to the Heruli. Archaeology is not much help. Nomads leave few archaeological traces. Contrary to modern popular ideas, it is often impossible to match archaeological artefacts to ancient peoples or political groups (i.e. we are often unable to tell if an artefact from the right time and place belonged to the Heruli, Alani, Sarmatians or Goths).