The Caspian Gates

XXIII

Riding the last few miles to the Caspian Gates, Ballista felt the world close in around them. The valley twisted and turned. Its grey walls reared up impossibly high; jagged, naked rock – no birds, no animals, not even an ibex or mountain goat. Above, the sky seemed no more than a pale ribbon. Wraiths of mist often pursued one another up there. When they caught each other, they coalesced into a fog which cut off the heavens, oozed down the fissures and threatened to engulf the travellers. At the bottom, the track was little wider than an ox cart; the river filled the rest of the space. The Alontas tumbled and roared over the boulders in its shallow bed. Its surface was just a handspan below the level of the road. When the rains were heavy, when the snow melted fast on the peaks, obviously the Alontas would rise, fill the pass and sweep away almost everything in its way. Given this, the ever-present likelihood of rockfalls, and the character of the neighbouring peoples, the pass struck Ballista as a particularly dangerous place.

‘ Cumania,’ the Suani prince Azo said. The gorge turned to the right here. The path was on the inside of the curve, hard up against the eastern wall. The river thundered along, trying to undermine the opposite rocks. Up above the waters, away to Ballista’s left, there were stone walls, slate roofs: a small fort perched on an outcrop forty or fifty feet over the Alontas.

‘The Gates,’ Azo said.

Ballista looked north around the bend: the river, the track, fallen boulders, the walls of the ravine. He looked harder, and there, in the torrent, the stumps of three stone piers – all that remained of the famous Caspian Gates.

‘Much work for you to do.’

The words of the Suani were borne out as the day wore on. While the prince sat on a sheepskin rug, drinking and talking with his warriors, Ballista and his familia scrambled and splashed about. The water was shockingly cold, the rocks slippery. Inspecting the fort, Ballista discovered that some of its roof timbers were rotten; parts of its walls needed replacing. Apart from raw stone and water, there were no building materials to hand.

‘My sister,’ Azo said. A mounted group was approaching. ‘She likes to hunt. Our brother has a hunting lodge beyond the Gates in the hills to the north.’ A slight look of distaste passed across the speaker’s face. ‘Saurmag often goes among the Alani barbarians.’ Ballista got the impression that neither barbarians nor brother pleased Azo.

Pythonissa headed the cavalcade that clattered up from the direction of Dikaiosyne. She was dressed for the chase, armed like a man. She rode astride. Perhaps for a woman’s respectability, there were two eunuchs in her train. The other twenty or so riders were warriors.

Azo and Ballista bowed where they stood in the road, blew a kiss. Pythonissa pulled up her mount a few paces short. She tossed the reins to one of the eunuchs, and jumped down. She bowed and blew a kiss back. She spoke to her brother in Greek about coverts and game, wild boar and deer, about nothing of any importance.

Ballista watched her. She reminded him of Bathshiba in Arete. Pythonissa was taller, her skin paler, her hair blond. She looked nothing like Bathshiba. But the wild Amazonian quality was the same.

The girl turned to Ballista. She stood unexpectedly close. He was terribly aware of what he had done to her life, no matter how indirectly. He framed a polite, neutral question. ‘What quarry are you after?’

She continued to regard him wordlessly. Her eyes were grey-blue.

‘You and your men are well armed,’ he continued. ‘Equipped to deal with big game.’

The girl spoke. ‘It is a mistake to decide in advance. Hunting is a lesson in the philosophic life. You sight the thing you have sought for a long time, then you lose it. The hunter learns to deal with extreme emotions: elation, despair, boredom.’ She delivered this in a mock-earnest tone. Then she became very serious. ‘I wanted to speak to the man who killed my husband.’

‘I am sorry it had to happen.’

‘Tell me how you killed him.’

‘I had set a trap for the King of Kings. Your husband rode at Shapur’s side. The wrong man died.’

‘An artillery bolt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he die well?’

‘He rode out that morning as a man. Thousands mourned him, tried to revenge him.’

‘His father, old Hamazasp, would have you dead.’

Ballista smiled. ‘I know it.’

She nodded, stepped back. When she spoke again it was to her brother as well. ‘I will be gone some time. I will see you on the way back.’

‘Not me,’ said Azo. ‘As soon as the Roman tells me what things he needs, I am leaving this desolate place.’

‘So be it.’ She got into the saddle unassisted, easily. She led her men off down the track, around the turning in the gorge. She did not look back. They watched her go off to the north, beyond the Gates.

Ballista decided that his first impression of Azo may not have done the young prince full justice. Certainly the Suani had a fine self-regard and a wariness close to hostility. Yet these, Ballista thought, might be the products of being brought up in a royal court, even one – possibly especially one – as obscure as that of Suania. At least Azo was capable, did what he said he would. After Pythonissa had left, Ballista had presented Azo with a lengthy list of the materials and men he needed: timber, cut stone, bricks, slates, sand, lime, rope, chains, nails, a forge; stonemasons, carpenters and a blacksmith, all with their tools, and as many labourers as could be gathered. Azo had summoned his secretary, told him to note it all down, and ridden south. Ballista had been impressed when the first deliveries began the very next day.

The fort of Cumania was the initial priority. A garrison in the pass had to have somewhere to live, and the gorge was narrow enough for arrows from the fort to dominate the track on the other side of the river. On its own it could not totally prevent people from using the track, but it could make it unpleasant and dangerous.

Cumania was a small, dark hold; roughly circular, no more than fifteen paces in diameter, four storeys high. There was a walkway around the roof. Luckily, the repairs needed were not too extensive. Only part of the roof needed replacing, and a few patches of the walls. Ballista had regular Roman crenellations added. In these he set three refinements – projections from the battlements, each with a protected hole opening on to the void below. The central of these was directly over the only entrance to the fort. The southern was fitted with pulleys, chains and buckets to raise fresh water coming from upstream. The northern had the opposite intention, being designed as a latrine from which the waste would be washed away downstream.

The fort was set on a crag in the western wall of the ravine. It was inaccessible from the heights far above. The sole door, a solid affair of iron-bound oak – Ballista tested it, replaced both frame and hinges – faced the river. It opened on to the second floor and could only be reached by a flight of stone steps which exposed the right, unshielded side of anyone ascending and rose straight from the water. The defenders now could drop missiles on the steps, while remaining in perfect safety directly overhead. The arrow slits were on the second floor and above, had stout wooded shutters and were not nearly wide enough to admit a man. With mines, ramps, siege towers and rams all equally out of the question, and with no artillery among the peoples of the mountains or the northern steppes, Ballista thought a handful of men could hold Cumania for ever. The only ways the fort could fall were starvation or treachery. He set about provisioning the place.

The actual ‘gates’ which would seal the pass demanded more thought. First, the easiest, part was to design a gate to block the road. This was to be of dressed stone, and bound into the natural rock. It would have a fighting platform above. It would look like almost any Roman gate anywhere. But detached buttresses would be built to the south in front of the main load-bearing sides of the gate. When the Alontas was in flood, hopefully these would catch some of the boulders and tree trunks carried downstream. If that worked, and the waters poured through the open gates, the structure might not be battered down and swept away.

Extending the gates across the river was the crucial problem. Ballista decided to employ the three existing stubs of piers as breakwaters. Like the buttresses on either side of the track, they might take the force of debris when the river was in full spate. He ordered three concrete pillars erected behind them. On these he planned to put a simple wooden walkway, with a palisade facing just north. Either end of the defences would be supported by the natural rock and his new stone gate. There was to be a wide clearance between the surface of the water and the walkway, to allow the river to rise several feet. To block this when the river was lower, to stop nomads creeping under the walkway, he designed a series of metal portcullises which could be raised and lowered.

Work on the ‘gates’ got under way slowly. Partly it was due to materials. There was no suitable sand or lime for the concrete in the whole of Suania. After a few days, a little was found in a royal store, just about enough for the new pillars in the river. Everything else would have to rely on local mortar. Again, the cut stone arrived slowly, in small quantities. But the sluggishness of the early stages of building was much more down to the workers. Azo had sent plenty of them, skilled and unskilled. The problem was not one of numbers but attitude. They were proud mountaineers, warriors. There was not one among these Suani, even if he had no shoes and wore a rag on his back, who did not regard such building work as far beneath him. They were worse than the Greeks and Romans; at least they reserved their contempt for labouring for money at the whim of another, rather than at the whole concept of hard, physical work.

Ballista suspected that his attempts to encourage by example – attempts he was sure would have worked with Roman soldiers – had failed completely. When Ballista, Maximus and the others stripped off their tunics and heaved buckets up the perilous timber scaffolding or stood waist deep in the fast, chill water to manhandle beams into position, the Suani just despised them all the more.

Ballista and old Calgacus wandered down the track, past the hammering and sawing, off to the north. It was hard getting any sustained work out of the Suani. The carpenters, stonemasons and blacksmith were not too bad – they had a craft – but the labourers… Ballista would have to ask Azo about it during the prince’s next fleeting visit. Still, it was not raining; for once, there was not even any mist. The sun was actually out. The sky was a translucent blue, with a few very high white clouds.

‘Another few weeks, even at this rate, and we are done,’ said Ballista.

Calgacus shook his head. ‘We might as well let the lazy bastards take their time. We cannot leave without imperial orders. Until we get new mandata, we are stuck here at the arse end of the world.’

Out of the noise and dust, Ballista was not going to let the Caledonian spoil his mood. Where the sun fell on the tops of the gorge, the rocks glowed pink. There was an incredible clarity to the air. ‘Do you see that eagle up there?’ They both craned their necks.

A terrible, loud crack, like a siege engine breaking. Ballista and Calgacus whirled around – hands on hilts. The noise echoed off the canyon walls, confusing its origin. A deep groaning of wood, followed by a volley of further cracks. Shouts and screams from back down the track. Men running towards them. Others running away, hurling themselves into the river. The scaffold high above the track over the beginnings of the gate shifted outward. It held for a second or two, slightly swaying. There were men clinging to the top of it. Another series of cracks, vicious splinters flying, a definitive lurch and the edifice collapsed out and down into the river. The limbs of those falling pumped futilely. With hideous abruptness, they vanished into the spray that masked the stony bed of the river.

A great pall of dust mushroomed up from where the timber structure had been. The noise of the river, the screams of the injured; all sounds seemed to come from a long way away. The water whirled a beam past where they stood. Then a man. He was floundering, but alive. He grabbed a half-submerged rock. Ballista shrugged out of his sword belt.

‘No, you fucking fool,’ Calgacus shouted.

The water was not deep, not up to Ballista’s waist. It was icy cold, the bed treacherous, stones shifting underfoot. He waded out. His boots were full of water. The man was only three or four more paces away. He was clinging desperately. There was blood – a lot of it – on his arms, his head.

‘Look out.’

Another chunk of timber was swirling down towards them. Ballista scrambled back – the curious, slow high-steps of a man in water. Not enough time. He hurled himself backwards. He went under, the water rushing in his ears, eyes blurred. As he came up, the shattered end of the beam caught him on the left shoulder. The pain was intense. There was blood in the water. He held the wound tight with his right hand.

‘Come on.’ Calgacus was with him.

‘I am fine. Help me get him.’

They waited, timing it, while other debris scoured the space between them and the injured Suanian.

‘Now!’ They spoke at once. Five, six stumbling steps. They had him, a hand under each armpit, dragging. They made no attempt to keep his head above water – drowning was the least of his problems in those few moments to the riverbank. They were there – crawling out, spitting, spluttering.