Father and Son

"A man may fight an enemy for years and never learn his face; but he will know, in the first hour, if the enemy fights like himself."

The dust lay on the plain of Siwa like a yellow fleece, and Cassian watched it settle with the cold patience of a man who has made up his mind to be killed by nothing but his own mistakes.

It was the fourth morning of the battle. The sun had not yet cleared the eastern ridge, and the air was still blue and cool and strangely sweet, the way the desert air is in the last hour of darkness, with a thin breath of dew on the thorn-bushes and the smell of crushed sage rising from under the horses' hooves. Below him on the slope the Roman line stretched away to left and right in neat unbroken ranks, shield on shield, helmet on helmet, three legions drawn up in the old order, the hastati before, the principes behind, the triarii in reserve, with the cavalry on the wings and the great bronze-headed standards glinting above them in the dawn. Twenty-two thousand men. They stood in total silence. They did not shift or cough or mutter. They had learned in four days that something terrible lived in the desert before them, and they were waiting for it with their eyes fixed forward and their knuckles white on their spear-shafts.

On the farther slope, half a mile away across the shimmering flat, the enemy waited too.

He could see them quite clearly. They had made no attempt to hide. A dark mass of horsemen lay along the base of the southern ridge, sitting their small tough desert ponies in loose swaying ranks, with their white cloaks wrapped about their faces and their long spears slanting against the sky like a bristling reed-bed. Behind them, on foot, came the infantry, in long deep columns, ten thousand, twenty thousand, more than he could count. And on the highest point of the ridge, apart from the rest, stood a single banner.

It was not a Roman standard. It was a plain pole of dark wood, tipped with a disc of beaten bronze. There was no eagle on it, no crest, no streaming pennant. Only the disc, round and bright, catching the first light, so that for a moment it burned like a small sun planted on the skyline. And beside the pole, a long way off, so small and still that he might have taken it for a rock, a man sat on a horse.

"That is him," said the old legate at his elbow. "The Tyrant."

"Yes."

"Do you see his face, general?"

"No." Cassian narrowed his eyes against the glare. "Too far."

"I have heard he is a giant. Eight feet tall, with skin like iron, and a beard down to his belt."

"I have heard that he eats children."

"Do you believe it?"

"I believe that he has not lost a battle in eleven years," said Cassian, "and that if he did not eat children he would have no need to." He turned his head. "Varro. How long have you been in the army?"

"Thirty-one years, sir."

"Have you ever seen a line like that?"

The old man looked at the dark, patient, silent mass on the farther ridge, at its flanks drawn back a little too far, its centre a little too thin, its pony-lines a little too neatly aligned. He chewed his moustache. "No," he said at last, slowly. "No, general. If you want the truth, I never have. It's like looking at a trap with the bait laid out on a plate."

"Yes," said Cassian. "That is what troubles me."

…

He had known from the first day.

It was a thing he had no way of explaining to the others, and had stopped trying. They thought he was clever. The staff officers whispered that the young Dux had a gift, an animal instinct, a wolf's sense for the weak point. It was nothing of the kind. It was simply that, on the morning of the first engagement, watching the enemy infantry wheel out of the dust in their long white lines, he had felt a prickle on the back of his neck, as a man feels when he hears his own name spoken in an empty house. He had watched them manoeuvre. He had watched the centre crumble under the first Roman charge, the horns swinging smoothly back, the quiet closing of the gate. And he had known, in the same breath, with a jolt of cold recognition, that he had done exactly the same thing himself.

Not in a battle. In a game. A boy's game, played with pebbles and sticks on the dust of the practice yard at Capua, in the long dull hours of the afternoon when the others were asleep. He had been nine, perhaps ten. He had arranged the pebbles in a curve and thought: if I were a general and I wanted to catch an army, I would let it think the middle was weak. He had pushed them back. He had pulled the horns around. He had been rather proud of it. And old Rufus, passing, had stopped and stared at the dust for a long time, and then given him a clip across the ear and told him that if he ever drew that again in front of a sergeant, he would be flogged for a spy.

He had never drawn it again. But he had never forgotten.

It is only coincidence, he told himself, now, at the head of the line, with the sun rising over the ridge. There are only so many ways to arrange an army. Any child who plays with pebbles would find them.

But he did not believe it.

The enemy general fought as he thought. That was the plain unsettling fact. In the nine battles of the summer he had learned the habits of the man across the sand as a chess player learns a rival's, and they were his own. The Tyrant never wasted a man. He never attacked in anger. He never pursued a beaten foe too far, but drew back and let the survivors crawl away, and tightened his grip a little on the neck. He liked to hold his best troops in reserve till the very last moment. He liked to wait until the Romans had thrown their whole weight against a feint, and then fall on their flank from nowhere, like the stroke of a hawk. And he was never, in any circumstances, in a hurry.

It was, Cassian thought, the most beautiful way of fighting he had ever seen. It was exactly the way he would have chosen himself.

…

The attack came at the second hour.

It began with the horns, deep and low and trembling, rolling out across the plain from somewhere behind the southern ridge, a sound like the bellowing of a monstrous cow. The dark mass of the cavalry stirred. A long ripple passed down the white line of the infantry, like wind across a field of barley. And then, with a roar that shook the earth, a thousand horsemen broke from the enemy's centre and came pouring across the plain in a wedge, whooping, whirling their spears, straight at the Roman line.

"Steady!" bawled the centurions. "Steady! Hold!"

It was a perfect charge. It was the charge of a man who wanted to be repulsed. Cassian watched it come, and his lips thinned, and he felt the old cold clearness settle over his mind like the surface of a pool freezing. The centre of the Roman line was already stirring in anticipation. He could feel it, a hunger, a tightening of the muscles along the front ranks. Another moment, and the trumpets would sound, and the hastati would lunge forward, and the barbarian wedge would fold like paper before them, and the whole Roman army would go surging after it across the open ground, in a roaring, jubilant, undisciplined rush, straight into the closing jaws of the crescent.

He raised his hand.

"No pursuit," he said.

Varro stared at him. "General?"

"Pass the order down the line. The hastati will hold the first charge, and break it, and halt. On pain of death, nobody is to pursue. Nobody. Not a cohort, not a man." His voice was perfectly level. "Whatever happens. Whatever they see. If the whole enemy centre turns and runs, we stand."

"But sir, if they break…"

"They will not break. They are going to pretend to."

The old legate hesitated, then saluted, and went. Cassian sat very still on the white stallion, with his hands resting on the pommel, and watched the cavalry come.

They hit the line with a sound like the crash of a landslide. For a long, dreadful, chaotic moment he could see nothing but a seething welter of dust and horses and flashing steel; then the sound of the trumpets, brassy and clear, and the Roman shields locking forward like the closing of a gate, and the barbarian wedge staggering, breaking, flinging itself back in apparent disorder across the sand. A roar went up from the front ranks. The line surged. A hundred centurions were screaming for the advance, and a thousand men had already begun to run.

"Hold!" Cassian thundered.

He had not meant to shout. It came out of him in a voice that none of them had ever heard, huge and harsh and absolute, a voice that tore across the plain like the crack of a whip. The trumpeter beside him blew three sharp blasts. And along the whole length of the Roman front, the running men checked, wavered, and stopped, uncomprehending, with their spears half-lowered and their mouths open.

Across the plain, the enemy did not follow.

The white cloaks that had been fleeing so convincingly came to a halt a hundred yards away, and wheeled, and stood. And for a minute, which seemed as long as a year, nothing moved at all on that wide flat field except the dust, drifting slowly in the sun. Then, from the farther ridge, faint and thin, there came a single note on a ram's horn. It was a signal. The horns of the crescent, which had been sliding silently round the Roman flanks in the shadow of the dunes, halted, hung motionless, and drew slowly back.

The gate, he thought, with a cold exultation, was not going to close.

…

It was over by noon. The dead were few. The enemy withdrew in good order, with their wounded, leaving a scatter of slain horses and a few hundred corpses on the sand, and by the middle of the afternoon the sun had beaten the plain into a white glaring silence. Nobody cheered. The soldiers stood in their ranks, leaning on their shields, drenched with sweat, looking at their young commander with an expression he could not read. It was partly fear. It was partly something else.

He rode out alone across the field, with the dust rising in lazy plumes around the white stallion's feet.

The dead lay where they had fallen. He walked his horse among them slowly, looking down, as one looks at the pages of a book he has already read. They were tall, lean, dark-skinned men, with high cheekbones and long hands, and most had died quietly, with their faces turned to the sky and their eyes open. One was hardly more than a boy. He lay with his arms flung wide and a drum still strapped to his hip, and a dry brown trickle of blood on his chin. Cassian looked at him for a long time. He found that he did not hate him. He did not know why.

At the foot of the southern ridge, beside a dead pony, he dismounted.

The ground was dark with blood. There was a scattering of white cloaks and broken spears, and a single crushed ram's horn lying in the sand, and half-buried by the hoofprints, a small round object that glinted. He bent and picked it up. It was a disc of beaten bronze about the size of his palm, crudely stamped with the figure of a sun, a thing a soldier might wear as a charm. A leather thong was knotted to it. The rim was bent where a hoof had struck it.

He turned it over in his scarred fingers.

A sun.

Slowly, almost without meaning to, he put his free hand to the neck of his tunic, and drew out the thin cord that hung there. The half of the little ebony disc swung against his knuckles, warm from his skin. He held the two of them side by side in the glare of the afternoon sun, the bronze and the wood. They were nothing alike. They were of different sizes, different metals, different makers. And yet he stood there with the dust blowing round his boots, looking from one to the other, and the hairs rose on his arms, and his heart began, for no reason that he could name, to beat very slowly and hard.

"General?"

It was Varro. The old man had ridden up behind him, red-faced and wheezing, and sat with his reins in his fist, looking down. His eyes went from the soldier to the dead boy and back again.

"The men are asking for orders, sir. And the surgeons would like to know… is something the matter?"

Cassian let the cord fall back against his chest. He looked out, past the dead pony and the ridge, across the white and shimmering plain to where, far away on the edge of the world, a small pole with a disc of bronze still glinted against the sky. It was empty now. The rider had gone.

"No," he said slowly. "Nothing is the matter."

"You look as though you'd seen a ghost."

"Do I?" He gave a short, dry, baffled laugh, and pushed back his helmet and wiped the sweat from his scarred jaw with the back of his hand. "I was thinking, Varro, that I have fought nine battles against that man. I have never seen his face. I have never heard his voice. And yet I could tell you tonight what he will do tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and I could tell you why."

"That's what makes you a general, sir."

"No," said Cassian. He stared at the horizon. "That's what makes me uneasy."

He stood a moment longer, in the silence of the dead, with the sinking sun on his back and the shadow of his own long body running out across the sand before him like a dark road.

"That man fights," he said quietly, "as though he had taught me."