The Sun That Rises Twice

"There are battles that are won on a field and battles that are won in a memory, and the second kind are never forgotten by the loser."

Among the peoples of the far south there is an old saying, that the sun is a king who dies each evening and is born again each dawn, and that a nation which has watched it die may yet watch it rise. The Romans did not know this saying. They knew only that the desert had given them a name to fear, and that the name was carried out of the sand on the backs of a hundred thousand horses. They called him a tyrant, because they had no other word for a man who could not be bought. His own people called him the Sun that Rises Twice. And somewhere in the vast cold halls of the Palatine, a woman who had once knelt beside a chained man in the dark read the name aloud, softly, to herself, and did not yet know that she was reading her own.

…

By the second summer, Rome had lost two legions, and the word Africa had begun to taste of ashes in the mouths of senators.

It had not seemed possible. For two hundred years the southern frontier had slept in the sun, a lazy rim of white cities and olive groves and tax-farmers' villas, guarded by a few cohorts of bored provincials and a screen of tame client kings. It had been a place where retired centurions went to grow figs. And then, in the space of eighteen months, as though a hand had been drawn across a slate, it was gone. The cities of the coast had been taken one by one in a series of lightning marches that no Roman strategist had seen coming. Leptis had fallen in a night. Thysdrus had opened its gates after three days' siege, and been burned. A column of twelve thousand men sent out from Carthage under a veteran legate had marched into a dry valley south of the Chott and had never marched out of it; the survivors, eleven in all, had been found weeks later, wandering in the sand, raving, without their weapons, speaking of a wall of horsemen that had risen out of the earth.

Claudia heard it all at her desk.

She had been hearing it for a year and a half. She heard it in the small hours, in the quiet of the library, with a single lamp burning on the cedar table and the reports spread before her in untidy heaps: letters from governors, dispatches from frightened centurions, the sworn testimonies of merchants who had fled the burning cities in open boats. She read them all. She made no remark. She sorted them, by date, by region, by source, with the neat precise mechanical movements of a clerk, and by the third month she had begun to see what the generals could not. The Tyrant did not fight like a barbarian. That was the whole of the mystery. The barbarians whom Rome knew rushed in howling, in a mob, and broke against the legions like surf. This army was different. It marched like a machine. It formed and re-formed with the cold unfailing patience of a man playing at draughts. It never attacked a strong point, and never missed a weak one. It used the desert as a weapon, the wells as a lever, the wind as an ally, and hunger as a general, and it struck always at the moment when the Romans had divided their forces to meet the last strike.

A mind, she thought, with a cold prickling at the nape of her neck. Not a horde. A mind.

She did not yet allow herself to think the rest.

…

The army embarked from Ostia on a grey morning in the month of Maius, in a drizzle that made the harbour look like a sheet of hammered pewter.

There were a hundred and forty ships. They lay at anchor in the roads in long ranks, grain-freighters and war-galleys and fat-bellied transports, with their sails furled and their painted eyes staring blindly at the horizon, and lighters went to and fro between them and the quay, loaded to the gunwales with soldiers. The embarkation had been going on for three days. The quay was a trampled sea of mud and ropes and bales and shouting men. Mules brayed. Centurions swore. Women in cloaks stood in the rain at the edge of the dock, in a silent, shifting line, with children in their arms, looking out over the water.

Claudia stood a little apart from them, under a canopy of black oiled leather, with her cloak drawn tight about her shoulders.

She had not wished to come. She had told herself that it was unnecessary, that a regent's place was in her library, that a woman who showed her face on the quay before the whole army would be remarked upon. But she had come. She stood now in the thin cold rain with her hands buried in her sleeves, and watched the tall figure in the crimson cloak at the head of the gangway take his leave.

Livia clung to him.

She had been crying for an hour. She had given up trying to hide it. She had thrown her arms round Cassian's neck in front of three thousand men and pressed her wet face into the hollow of his shoulder, and he held her, quite silent, with his hand cupped round the back of her golden head and his cheek against her hair. He was bent a little to her height. He was murmuring something low in her ear. Claudia could not hear what it was. She saw only the girl's shoulders shake, once, and stop, and saw her look up with her small tear-stained face lifted to his, and heard her say, loudly, in a thin little voice that carried across the dock, "You must come back."

"I will."

"You must."

"I will come back, Livia." He was looking down at her with an expression Claudia had never seen on his face before, naked and gentle and rather helpless. "Wait for me. That's all. I'll be home before the vintage."

He kissed her. Then he put her aside, firmly, with both hands, as a man puts aside the one thing that might weaken him, and turned and went up the gangway without looking back.

The mud sucked at Claudia's sandals. The wind off the sea was bitter, and smelled of tar and salt and rotting weed. She watched the great ships begin, one after another, to swing slowly out into the grey tide, and she thought, with the strange vertigo of a dream, that she had stood in this place before. She had not. She had never been to Ostia in her life. But there was something in the shape of the harbour, the long curving mole, the crowded masts, the gulls crying in the drizzle, that stirred in her a vague and persistent sense of loss, like the faded memory of a song heard in childhood.

A grain ship, she thought. Bound for Carthage.

She did not know why the words had come into her head. She put them away.

…

Livia came to her that night.

It was past the third watch, and the villa was asleep, but a thin gold line showed beneath the library door, and the girl pushed it open without knocking and stood in the lamplight in her nightgown with her hair in a rope over her shoulder and her eyes swollen from weeping. She had not been able to stay in the bridal chamber. She said so, haltingly, on the threshold, twisting her hands: the bed was too big, and the pillow smelled of him, and every time she shut her eyes she saw the water. Claudia set down her pen. She held out her arms, and the girl crossed the floor in three bare-footed steps and knelt at her knee and hid her face in her lap, and for a long time there was no sound in the room but the wind against the shutters and the muffled rhythm of her sobbing.

"I am so afraid, Mother," Livia whispered at last. "I have never been so afraid in my life."

"I know, my darling."

"They say the Tyrant has never been defeated. They say that he eats the hearts of the men he kills." Her voice cracked on a hiccup. "And Cassian will go straight at him. He always goes straight at them. He told me once that it is the only way to win, to hit the thing you are most afraid of first, and hardest. But what if this time he cannot? What if there is something he cannot hit?"

Claudia stroked the golden hair. Her fingers moved slowly, steadily, over and over, in the same long gentle strokes she had used for eighteen years to quiet a child's nightmares, and she looked past the bowed head at the lamp, at the neat stack of dispatches on the desk, at the thin bright line of its flame.

He is your husband, she thought, and he is the son of the man he is going to fight. The knowledge had not yet risen to the surface of her mind. It lay beneath it, like a stone beneath dark water, and she felt the cold of it without seeing its shape.

"He will come back," she said. "I have never known him fail at anything he put his heart to."

"Do you promise?"

It was a child's question. She had answered it a thousand times for a thousand small fears, with a kiss and a smile. But Livia had lifted her face, and the pale blue eyes in the lamplight were wide and drowned and full of a trust so complete that Claudia felt it like a hand laid against her throat.

"I promise," she said.

She would remember that, afterwards. She would remember the words, and the lamp, and the damp warmth of the girl's cheek against her palm, and she would think, in the dark of a different night, that of all the lies she had ever told, it had been the only one she had believed.

…

The dispatch from Siwa arrived in the first week of autumn, and it was the one that undid her.

It came from a Roman officer of the Third, a young tribune named Valerius, who had commanded the rear cohort at the great battle in the south and had survived, as he put it, through "the clemency of the barbarian general, whose reasons I do not understand." He had been captured, stripped, held for nine days, and released at the edge of the desert with a message for the Roman commander. The message was one line. It said, in perfect Latin, Tell him I will meet him at the wells. But the tribune's report, composed in a hospital tent at Carthage in the first fever of his freedom, was a long one, and carried at its end a hasty sketch in ink on a slip of papyrus.

Cassian had sent it to her in a sealed packet. He wrote, in a note scrawled across the corner: The tribune is a good man and an observant one. I think you should look at this. It is the only thing in three months that I have not been able to explain.

She unrolled it on the cedar desk.

It was a diagram. It was hurried and crude and smudged where the writer's hand had trembled, a dozen crabbed lines, some arrows, a few small crosses. It showed the order of battle at the Wells of Siwa, as the tribune had seen it from the top of a ridge in the grey light of the dawn. The Roman line, drawn in a neat row of rectangles, stood in the centre. And on either side of it, curving away across the sand in two long arms, enclosing it, hollow, open, patient, lay the dark crescent of the enemy.

She looked at it for a long time.

It was not a new formation. Every Roman child knew it. It was the old trap of the crescent, the cornua, the horns, and the oldest tricks in the book were as good as any if the man who used them had a genius for patience. But the tribune had added a note, in small cramped letters beside the northern arm. The centre of their line gave way when we charged. A feint. We pursued. Then the horns closed behind, and they were not where we had thought them, and the gate we had come in by was shut. It was as though they had known in advance exactly how far we would run.

And beside the southern arm, in the corner of the sketch, scratched so lightly that she could scarcely see it, a tiny sign.

A river. A winding line, with three short strokes through it, like teeth.

The room was very quiet. A log shifted in the brazier. Outside the window, in the dark garden, a night-bird gave a thin call and was still.

Claudia sat with the slip of papyrus held between her finger and thumb, unmoving, and found that she could not feel her hands.

She had seen this before.

Not in a book. Not in any camp or treatise. She had seen it on the floor of a cell, twenty years ago, in the grey dust of the Suburra, drawn in a man's finger by the light of a failing torch. A long, patient, careful finger, tracing tribe by tribe and ridge by ridge the whole terrible shape of a valley called the Omo. Here, the voice had said, deep and quiet and absorbed, in the dark. Here, where the river bends. You see? They believe the centre is weak. They will always believe the centre is weak, if you let them see it fall. And then you close the horns.

She had listened with her chin on her knees. She had asked questions. She remembered each answer.

A river, she thought. A winding line with three strokes.

The Mahali.

The papyrus slid from her fingers. It floated down onto the polished surface of the desk and lay there, a small pale rectangle in the lamplight, with its crooked cross and its clumsy arrows and the tiny impossible sign of a river that no Roman had ever heard the name of. She did not touch it. She did not move. She sat in her high-backed chair, in her gown of deep violet, in the great library of the Tullo house, and the blood in her ears was like the roar of a distant sea.

It could be a coincidence. It could be nothing. A hundred generals had used the crescent. A hundred maps had been marked with the sign of a river. She told herself so, quite steadily, in a voice she hardly knew. She told herself that twenty years was a long time, that men died, that the dead did not rise. She told herself that she had seen the herbwife's face and heard the old woman's warnings, and that the sleeping draught was a cunning thing, but that no cunning could outrun a Roman winter on an open rubbish-heap with no one to find the body.

But Zuberi had come. She had sent the message herself.

On the third night of Saturnalia, she had written. The Mahali does not run dry.

She sat quite still. And in the silence of the sleeping house, with the lamplight dancing on the grain of the cedar and the night wind sighing in the garden, a vision rose before her eyes of a boy of fifteen in a drill-yard, shading his eyes with his hand, looking up at a grove of pines.

Her hand closed around the arm of the chair until the knuckles stood out like bone.