Barry Sadler - Casca 06, page 10
Anobia shared the King’s wish to bear a child, but though she’d tried as hard as she could to have the seed of her man take place and grow, her womb remained empty. Nothing worked, not even the po-tions from the wise women. But still, the effort of trying was pleasing and not at all a wasted one.
Casca, for his part, enjoyed the attentions of hiswoman. It was good to have a proper house to come home to. After months of campaigning in the deserts and mountains it gave him a feeling of permanence. He pushed from his mind the well-known fact that he would someday have to leave, content to enjoy the moments of peace and comfort that she could give him now.
He began to entertain a bit, not only the officers of his command, but also Imhept when he was available for good food and conversation. He enjoyed the old man’s company more than any other. There was a timelessness to him as solid as the pyramids. Nothing ever seemed to rattle him. Imhept took all things calmly, as though he always had more important things to consider other than such mundane things as living, or work.
A few months after his arrival back in Nev-Shapur, Masuul, his housemaster, came to him to complain about Anobia. With quiet amusement, Casca listened to his tale of Anobia’s extravagance. She had gone to the baths, then the hairdresser, then to the most expensive of dressmakers, and had even visited a house of the Hedria for a period of time. It was not to be tolerated for his master’s woman to consort with known courtesans and peo-ple of ill-repute.
Casca listened to his servant’s list of Anobia’s transgressions patiently, telling him he would look into the matter. He was actually curious as to why Anobia would be spending time at the house of courtesans, but then he’d never been able to figure out why women did half of the things they did any-way, so why worry? He was content that she gave him pleasure and ease of mind and, if she was alittle kinky, who the hell wasn’t nowadays?
The answer to his question, as to why she’d been doing whatever the hell it was that she’d been doing, came to him the following evening.
When he’d returned from the training fields and entered the house, the servants informed him that she refused to come out to see him. She had remained in her room all day, not even coming out to eat, having her meals sent in. He tried to figure out what he’d done to upset her, giving it up as one of the mysteries of the female species. He wondered if women were truly of the same origin as men; they sure as hell didn’t act like it at times.
He was relaxing on the divan, sipping white wine from Parnessius, letting his mind go.
The day had been a real bitch and he was worn out. For the past three weeks he had been trying to instill some semblance of discipline into a batch of raw recruits from the provinces and tribute states. About the only thing that the recruits had in common was a mutual hatred of one another and of their instruc-tors. It had been necessary to have two of them given twenty strokes of the bastinado to make them see reason and obey. He winced at the remembrance of his own experiences of the thin whipping rods striking the soles of his feet while imprisoned in Jerusalem. Merely having the feet whipped didn’t sound too bad, but the pain was un-believable. More than fifty strokes and a man would probably never be able to walk again without limping. Unpleasant thoughts; he pushed them from his mind and took another sip of the clear white squeezings of the grape. Masuul’s words of Anobia came again to his mind.
“Ahhhhhh shit!”It was bad enough to come home after a hard day and try to relax, let alone having to worry about what your damned woman might be up to. There was never any way of pleasing a woman. But, by the gods, when they wanted to be sweet there was nothing in the world like them to ease the pain in a man’s mind and bring satisfaction to his soul. As far as he was concerned, women were both the blessing and the curse of man’s existence.
A slight rustling sound interrupted his thought process.
Anobia had entered the room quietly. The rea-son for her strange behavior in the past weeks was now suddenly clear to him. She evidently had been preparing herself for this moment.
Casca had just taken a mouthful of wine when he’d turned to look and it had damned near went down the wrong pipe at the sight of her. Anobia had been spending her time not in a fit of temper, but preparing herself to please him.
Her hair was dressed in dark, oily, shimmering curls that dangled almost to her waist. Her eyes were accented with Kohl. The soles of her feet and the palms of her hands were reddened with henna. Gold and silver bracelets hung from her neck, wrists, and ankles; most of them set with tiny bells that tinkled softly as she walked.
She was wearing a costume that seemed vaguely familiar to Casca—scarves of fine colored gauze and silk draped in layers over her figure; a veil covering her face to the nose so that her eyes seemed too large for the face.
She moved her hands above her head; on the fingers were tiny brass cymbals. Gracefully, shestruck them once, letting their chimes die away, then struck them again. Casca was spellbound. A thin piping came to him from outside, then was quickly joined by the sound of flutes and the tam-bour, accompanied by a sambar that twanged strange, almost melancholy, trills. The cymbals on her fingers had acted as a signal for the musicians on the patio to begin.
Anobia moved, her body twisting slowly, beginning now to dance. Casca gulped down half a mug of wine. This looked as if it was going to be one helluva show.
One of her veils came off, then another. She whirled by the incense brazier and dropped a dark, doughy ball of matter into the brass bowl. It immediately began to smoke.
He couldn’t speak, his throat had suddenly contracted to the point of closure. He’d always considered her beautiful, but he’d never dreamed of her looking like this. He poured more wine in his mug.
The scarves, one by one, were removed. Emerald green, translucent and glowing, followed next by one
of sky blue; each revealing a little more of her body as she danced to the Oriental strains of the music from the patio. She danced, slowly at first, then gaining in tempo until musky sweat glistened on her now half-bared breasts.
The smoke from the brazier, not unpleasant at all, was seeking its way into Casca’s lungs, causing him to lose all perspective. Anobia was the only thing that was real now and she was dancing for him, giving herself to him in the only way she knew how. His mind moved with the music and the rhythm of her body. Another scarf dropped to thefloor, to be kicked away by the tinkling bells at her ankle.
She dropped to her knees before him, swaying her upper torso back and forth, the sweat beginning to run freely down the valley of her breasts. Eyes closed, she made love to him. He reached to touch her but she was gone. The time was not now.
The fumes from the incense brazier filled his mind, distorting his surroundings, giving everything a surrealistic flavor. It was all unreal, but evidently … Casca was stoned out of his gourd!
As the last scarf fell to the floor, the chiming of the bells and the cymbal movement of her fingers ceased. Anobia was naked. Her body sweating, her breasts heaving from the effort of dance, she stood before her man for a moment, thighs quivering nervously.
The music stopped, the silence broken only by the beating of their hearts and the pounding of pulses in their temples.
Anobia came to him and they joined, a joining that took Casca to what he believed to be the paradise that the eastern mystics called Nirvana.
It was later on that night, as she lay next to him in sleep, that the memory came back to him. Salome! Anobia had performed the dance of the veils.
There were some months of leisure for him after the Battle of the Five Thousand, and he made the most of it, spending every hour he could steal with Anobia. But Shapur hadn’t let him stay idle for long periods. There were always men to be trained and tactics and politics to be discussed.
Shapur had a healthy respect for Casca’s mind and used him as a counterpoint to many of his advisors who only told him what they thought he’d want to hear.
Casca, it seemed to Shapur, had more balls than the rest and would tell it like it was, regardless of the outcome.
There were months of campaigning for the King. The borders of Persia were surrounded by hostile elements and Shapur made good use of Casca’s experience, subduing one tribe after another.
Shapur had accompanied him once on a campaign all the way to the Indus River, where they’d faced elephants in battle for the first time. He had seen some of the monsters previously in the arenas of Rome, trained to execute prisoners condemned to die, either by picking them up in their trunks and bashing their victim’s brains out, or by kneeling on them. The most popular method with the crowds was when the huge animals would impale their victims on their tusks and toss them high in the air.
Casca had heard that they only killed in one manner, and that was in the first method taught. If it was true, he didn’t know, but it made very little difference anyway, the end result was still the same. Death…
The beasts were frightening in combat, though. The warriors from the Indus Valley painted their elephants in various colors and mounted small for-tresses on their backs where archers and spearmen were cached in relative safety. But once you got used to the big ugly mammoths they weren’t nearly as dangerous as they looked and could easily bespooked by fire or smoke. They would turn on their own riders and trample them underfoot in their haste to escape.
That particular trip had also afforded him the opportunity of watching Shapur in action. The man was fearless, but in Casca’s opinion, not foolhardy, and his sword was as good as any he’d seen, even among the professionals of the Arena. Shapur was a craftsman, and Casca had his doubts about whether he could hold his own with this King of Kings. He was certain, however, that if the fight lasted for any length of time his reserves of strength would eventually give him an edge on Shapur, but he still wouldn’t relish facing him one-on-one.
While others around him killed in rage or passion, Shapur went about the act like a man cutting off the heads of chickens for his dinner. He was nothing but pure business. Casca wondered! What did give the King pleasure?
Shapur had only gone on the trip to allow his men to see him in action and know that he was a fit and able king; that, and to keep an eye on Casca in person. He’d heard too many reports of the Roman’s growing popularity. Not that he considered Casca any real threat to his throne, but there were events about to take place that could give the Roman the opportunity to make a certain degree of trouble for him if he wished, and the wise general always had plans laid for any contingency.
Yes, as they said, war was hell. But at least he had someone to return to—a good woman and a place offering gentle contrast to the horrors of war.
Anobia gave him peace of mind and soul when he needed it most and it was good to be able to return home and lose himself for awhile.
But he knew each period of rest and peace would be broken in time by the heavy-handed knock of an Imperial messenger. They would beat on his door in the wee hours of the morning, summoning him with bad news to Shapur’s side. Why did bad news always come at night?
The seasons turned one after another, winter came and went, and he was pleased with life. He had respect and power, wealth and honors, and, above all else, he was loved.
Sometimes, when he thought of the old Jew, Samuel’s warnings that Persia was not for the likes of a man like Casca, he would laugh. Hell, Persia was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time, and he was content.
His peace was interrupted again in late spring. This time the messenger’s knock on his door came at a very critical time—he and Anobia were joined and Casca was approaching the area called the short rows. Damn!
Instinctively, he knew there was trouble. His sword was needed again by his king, Shapur.
EIGHT
From the rise, he could see the snaking line of his soldiers, twisting through the pass below him, laboring
their way to the heights. Ten thousand warriors. Archers, light cavalrymen on horseback, and two thousand infantry. The men were leading their animals over the treacherous rocks and through places where the trail diminished in size to a width so narrow that the horses’ bellies rubbed the rock walls.
Soon, they would start heading back down, down to where the air would be thick again and the men wouldn’t have to gasp for breath every other minute.
Casca knew that on the other side of these mountains lay plush green valleys with plentiful fodder for their horses and fresh food for his men. At this rarified altitude, it was seldom that you could find anything other than moss or lichens that were stubbornly trying to eke out an existence on the granite face of the windswept rocks.
He had removed his helmet and tied it to his sad-dle. Cool wind came from the peaks to rustle through his hair. It was odd how a man could build up such a sweat in a location like this, with air coldenough that even now, in the heart of summer, breath was misting from the horse’s nostrils at high noon. A distant scream came to his ears.
Another of his Persian warriors had lost his footing and had plummeted down thousands of feet, to smash on the rocky bed of the gorge below. Too bad. But they had been lucky, all in all. Only eleven men and ten horses had slipped today, but it had been enough to make the others wary and had slowed their movement. Casca yelled down for his commanders to speed their men up a little. He didn’t have time to exercise as much caution as he would have liked. They must hurry. Twenty thousand Huns were up ahead, laying waste to Kushan, an ally and tribute state of Persia, and the gateway to the Indus and China.
It was there that Jugotai, as a boy, had served as his guide some forty years before.
Jugotai! A child then, but determined to be a man before his time. It had been he that had led Casca over this same mountain pass to safety. The raging torrents of winter wind and snow had kept them penned up for days in a small cave. It was easier this time.
His reflections were interrupted by the arrival now of Indemeer. The hoary old warhorse had in-sisted on coming with them on this mission. Casca knew the climb had been hard on Indemeer. The thin air had left his face flushed with white spots at the cheeks, but he would show no sign of visible difficulty to his men or his leader. Still, Casca thought, he had seemed relieved when he’d told him they were nearing the summit and for him to go on ahead of them and check the trail. Casca knew that this would get him on the other side firstand down into thicker air, where the old man could breathe a little better.
As the lead element of archers passed him, he dismounted. Taking his horse’s reins in the man-ner of his men, he walked the animal carefully over the loose stones and patches of ice remaining from the last storms of winter. Raising his eyes, he looked up even higher. The bare, craggy peaks wore only their eternal coat of ice and snow, standing out in stark contrast to the pale blue of the sky, fading into varying hues of purple and blue with the distance.
He reached the crest. Somewhere behind him, he knew, was the cave that he and Jugotai had stayed in, but he had not seen it on this trip up. Perhaps it had been concealed by one of the countless rock-slides that plagued these hellish peaks.
In the distance, he could see the broad back of Indemeer just disappearing around a curve in the mountain. He’d started down now, and wasn’t wasting any time in doing so. He figured the old soldier would reach the base of the mountain be-fore nightfall. It was much shorter going down than coming up.
They would only have to drop four or five thousand feet to reach the valleys of the highlands of Kushan. On the Persian side, the one they just came up, they’d had to climb over twelve thousand feet to reach the top of the pass. It had taken them four days.
He wondered if he’d ever meet Jugotai and his son, Shuvar, again, or even if they still lived. Jugotai would be old now, for a man of the hills anyway, and if he had survived the many battles with the rapacious Huns, he would certainly look much older than Casca. How would he explain thatto Jugotai? What would he say to him about that? He shook off the thought. Time to worry about that when they met, if they met.
The trail had widened enough to accommodate horse and rider now. He threw his leg up and settled himself uncomfortably in the saddle.
He jerked and swayed down the trail until he came upon Indemeer. The old man rested against a large boulder, a skin of water in his hands, beads of perspiration rolling off his face. The white spots on his cheeks were gone now and color was slowly returning to his face. Casca was unsure if the old fel-low would be able to make the return trip over the mountain behind them. But he was certain that the old bastard would try.
Indemeer waved him over, offering him his wa-ter skin. Casca dismounted, thinking that after this campaign he would find a good excuse to send Indemeer and a detachment of his best soldiers back home via the long route on the silk road. It would be longer, but easier on the old sucker.
He took the offered skin and uncorked it, taking a long pull. It was a flat, tepid fluid and it tasted of sweat. They would have fresh drink soon. Indemeer pointed down the trail.
