Fortune's Favorites (91 page)

At first he had not fretted about its absence. Beautifully trained, it never soiled the interior of any building with urine or droppings, so Sertorius had simply assumed that it had gone off to do its business. But while he broke his fast it also broke its fast, and during the summer it was always hungriest after the respite of darkness. Yet it did not come back to eat.

That had been thirty-three days ago. His alarm growing, Sertorius had quietly searched further and further afield without result, then finally had needed to ask other people if they had seen it. Immediately the news had spread-it seemed like a fire in tinder-dry scrub-until the whole camp had scattered panic-stricken to look for Diana; Sertorius had been driven to issue a harsh order that discipline must be maintained even if he disappeared.

The creature meant so much, especially to the Spaniards. When day succeeded day without a sign of it, morale plummeted, the decline fueled by that stupid disaster at Valentia which Perperna had brought on when he refused to work with poor loyal Gaius Herennius. Sertorius knew well enough that the fault lay with Perperna, but his people were convinced the fault lay in Diana's disappearance. The white fawn was Sertorius's luck, and now his luck was gone.

It was almost sunset when Sertorius committed his army to battle, secure in the knowledge that his troops were in much better condition to fight than Pompey's, obviously suffering from the long wait under the summer sun. Pompey himself was commanding his right with Lucius Afranius on the left and the center under some legate Sertorius suspected was new to Spain, as no one among his scouts could put a name to the face. Their encounter outside Lauro the previous year had given Sertorius a profound contempt for Pompey's generalship, so he elected to fight opposite Pompey himself, which left Perperna to deal with Afranius; his center belonged to Sertorius as well.

Things went excellently for Sertorius from the beginning, and looked even better when Pompey was carried from the field just as the sun set, one thigh scoured to ribbons by a barbed spear. Behind him he left his big white Public Horse, dead by the same spear. Despite the valiant attempts of young Aulus Gabinius to rally it, Pompey's rudderless right began to retreat.

Unfortunately Perperna was not doing nearly as well against Afranius, who punched a hole in his lines and reached Perperna's camp. Sertorius was forced to go to Perperna's rescue in person, and only contrived to eject Afranius from the camp after sustaining heavy losses. Darkness had fallen as the full moon rose, but the battle went on by moonlight and torchlight despite the dust; Sertorius was determined that he would not break off the engagement until he stood in a strong enough position to win on the morrow.

Thus it was that when hostilities did cease, Sertorius had good cause to look forward to the next dawn.

“I'll string the kid's carcass from a tree and leave it for the birds,” he said, smiling nastily. Then, with an eager yet despairing look: “I don't suppose Diana has come back?”

No, Diana had not come back.

As soon as it was light enough to see, battle was joined again. Pompey was still in command, lying on a stretcher held at shoulder height by some of his tallest men. Formed anew during the night, his army was drawn together tightly and had obviously been ordered to minimize its losses by not incurring any risks-just the sort of enemy Sertorius detested most.

And then a little after sunrise a fresh face and a fresh army strolled onto the battlefield: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, marching out of the west and through Perperna's ranks as if they did not exist. For the second time in less than a day Perperna's camp fell. Metellus Pius pressed on toward the camp of Sertorius. Time to go.

As he and Perperna beat a hasty retreat, Sertorius was heard to wail desolately, “If that wretched old woman had not arrived, I would have kicked the kid all the way back to Rome!”

The retreat ended in the foothills to the west of Saetabis. Here order began once more to emerge from disorder as Sertorius, trying to ignore Perperna, counted his losses-perhaps four thousand men all told-and put the men (mostly Perperna's) from badly mauled cohorts among cohorts in need of a few extra men. It had been Perperna's intention to make a formal protest about this, to complain loudly that Sertorius was deliberately undermining his authority, but one look at the set face with the maimed orbit decided him to leave well enough alone. For the time being.

Here too Sertorius finally got the news that Lucius and Gaius Hirtuleius had been killed at Segovia, together with the entire Spanish army. A crushing blow, and one Sertorius had never expected. Not when the enemy had been the old woman from the Further province! And how cunning, to march so circuitously that his real intentions had never even been suspected, to hustle himself past Miaccum and Sertobriga in the distance pretending to be Hirtuleius, to march then by the light of the moon and raise no dust to give his presence away as he came down the Sucro!

My Spaniards are right, he thought. When Diana disappeared I lost my luck. Fortune no longer favors me. If Fortune ever did.

The kid and the old woman, he was informed, had evidently decided there was no point in continuing to march southward; after they had cleaned up the field and looted hapless Saetabis of all its food, their armies had turned into the north. Well, that was good thinking. Sextilis was upon them and they had a long way to go before the kid could insert himself into winter camp. Only what did the old woman intend to do? Was he going back to Further Spain, or was he marching all the way north with the kid? Aware of an awful lassitude he did not know how to shake off, Quintus Sertorius decided his wounds were now licked sufficiently to heal; he would follow the old woman and the kid as they headed north, do what damage he could without risking another outright confrontation.

His camp was dismembered and his army moving out, its guerrilla units in the lead, when two little children of the area came to him shyly, their bare feet even browner than their naked bodies, nostrils and ears pierced by shining balls of gold. In between them, a precious strand of family rope around its neck, was a dirt-encrusted brown fawn. The tears sprang unbidden to Quintus Sertorius's remaining eye-how nice, how kind! They had heard of the loss of his beautiful goddess-given white fawn, and come to offer him their own pet as a replacement.

He squatted down to their level, his face turned away so that they only saw its good side, would not be frightened by its bad side. To his great surprise, the creature they led began to leap and struggle at his advent; animals never shied away from Quintus Sertorius!

“Did you bring me your pet?” he asked gently. “Thank you, thank you! But I can't take it, you know. I'm off to fight the Romans, and I'd much rather you kept it safe with you.”

“But it's yours,” said the girl-child.

“Mine? Oh no! Mine was white.”

“It's white,” she said, spat on her hand, and rubbed the juice into its coat. “See?”

At this moment the fawn managed to pull its neck free of the rope and launched itself at Sertorius. Tears pouring down the right side of his face-the good side-he took it into his arms, hugged it, kissed it, could not let it go. “Diana! My Diana! Diana, Diana!”

When the children had been sent off with their precious bit of family rope put into a big bag of gold carried by a slave under instructions to deliver everything to their parents, Quintus Sertorius bathed his fawn in the nearby spring and looked it over, crooning and clucking. Whatever the reason for its original disappearance might have been, it had clearly not prospered in the wild. Some large cat had attacked it, for it bore the deep and half-healed marks of vicious claws on both sides of its rump, as if it had been pounced on from behind and dragged down. How it had managed to escape only the Goddess knew-or had contrived at. Its poor little trotters were worn and bloodied, its ears shredded along their edges, its muzzle torn. The children had found it when they took the family sheep out to graze, and it had come straight up to them, put its nose in the girl-child's grimy hands and sighed in shivering relief.

“Well, Diana,” said Sertorius as he put it into a box upon the tray of a wagon, “I hope you've learned that the wilds are for the wild. Did you smell a stag, was that it? Or did the camp dogs bait you? In future, my girl, you'll travel like this. I can't bear the thought of losing you again.”

Word had flown swifter than birds on the wing; Diana was back! And so was Quintus Sertorius's luck.

Pompey and Metellus Pius left Valentia behind, continuing north to Saguntum. The food they had plundered from Saetabis (there was nothing else to plunder) was a welcome addition to their dwindling supplies, and so was Pompey's cache in the disused quarry outside Valentia. They had agreed that both would march together up the east coast to Emporiae, and that Metellus Pius would winter that year in Narbonese Gaul; though his men had not voiced any complaint at their thousand-mile detour to reinforce Pompey, the Piglet thought that another five-hundred-mile walk would do them for the year. Besides, he wanted to be in the thick of the action in the spring, and he knew that the annihilation of the Spanish army would keep the Further province safe from any raiding Lusitani.

Saguntum had sent them an embassage to inform them that it would do whatever possible to assist them, and was still stoutly Roman in sentiment. Not surprising: it had been Saguntum's Roman (and Massiliote) affiliations which had caused the outbreak of the second Punic war against Carthage a century and a half earlier. Of food, however, the town had little to offer, and this the two generals believed. The harvest was poor because the rains of winter had not come to give the crops their best drink of the growing season, nor had the late spring rains come to send them shooting up heavy with ears of grain.

It was therefore imperative that the two armies move as swiftly as possible to the Iberus, where the harvest was later and richer. If they could reach it by the end of Sextilis it would be theirs, not Sertorius's. The embassage from Saguntum had therefore been thanked and sent home; Metellus Pius and Pompey would not be staying.

Pompey's leg wound was healing, but slowly; the barbs of the spear which had inflicted it had torn chunks out of sinews and tendons as well as muscles, and much tissue had to grow and reknit before he would be able to bear any weight on it. The loss of his Public Horse he seemed to feel, thought the Piglet, more than he did the use of his leg or the loss of its beauty. Well, a horse was more beautiful than a man's leg. Pompey wouldn't find one to match it this side of the rosea rura in Sabine country. Spanish horses were small and underbred.

His spirits were down again, not unnaturally. Not only had Metellus Pius been the sole reason for the victory on the Sucro, but Metellus Pius had also slaughtered Sertorius's best general and best army. Even Lucius Afranius, Marcus Petreius and Pompey's new legate, Lucius Titurius Sabinus, had fared better than poor Pompey himself. All very well to say that it was upon Pompey personally that the brunt of Sertorius's venom had fallen; Pompey knew he hadn't met the test. And now, his scouts told him, the renegade Marian was dogging their footsteps as they marched north, no doubt waiting for his next opportunity. His guerrilla units were already in evidence, harrying what foraging parties were sent out, but Pompey had learned as much wisdom as the Piglet in this respect, so the two armies suffered very little. On the other hand, they obtained very little in the way of food.

Then-apparently quite by accident-they ran into the army of Quintus Sertorius on the plains of the coast just after they had passed Saguntum. And Sertorius decided to engage them, making sure that he and his own legions faced Pompey. Pompey was the weak link, not Metellus Pius.

The strategy was a mistake. Sertorius would have done far better to have contained Metellus Pius himself and left Pompey to Perperna; Pompey appeared on the field on his stretcher, unwilling to have it said that, like Achilles, he skulked in his tent while his allies got on with the battle. Hostilities began in the early afternoon, and it was all over by nightfall. Though he had sustained a slight wound on his arm, Metellus Pius had carried the day. He inflicted losses of five thousand upon Perperna but experienced few himself. Poor Pompey's ill luck continued to dog him; his cavalry was killed to the last man and his casualties stood at six thousand-a legion and a half. That they could claim the engagement as a victory for Rome was due to Perperna's losses plus the three thousand men who died fighting for Sertorius.

“He'll be back at dawn,” said the Piglet cheerfully when he came to see how Pompey was.

“He'll withdraw, surely,” said Pompey. “It didn't go well for him, but it went disastrously for Perperna.”

“He'll be back, Gnaeus Pompeius. I know him.”

Oh, the pain! Oh, the gall! The wretched Piglet knew him!

And he was right, of course. Sertorius was back in the morning, determined to win. This time he rectified his mistake and concentrated his own energies upon Metellus Pius, whose camp he attacked as soon as it was light enough to see. But the old woman was ready for him. He had put Pompey and his men in the camp as well, and trounced Sertorius. Looking a lot younger and fitter these days, Metellus Pius chased Sertorius into Saguntum, while Pompey on his stretcher was carried back to his tent.

But the action had brought Pompey a personal grief, despite its success. Gaius Memmius-brother-in-law, friend, quaestor-was killed, the first of Pompey's legates to perish.

While he wept huddled in the back of a mule-drawn cart, Metellus Pius commanded the march north, leaving Sertorius and Perperna to do whatever they wanted, which was probably to exact reprisals on the inhabitants of Saguntum. They wouldn't stay long, of that Metellus Pius was sure; Saguntum could hardly feed itself, let alone an army.

At the end of Sextilis the two Roman armies reached the Iberus only to find the harvest-such as it was-safely in the granaries of Sertorius's formidable mountain strongholds, and the earth burned to a uniformly black desert. Sertorius had not stayed long in Saguntum. He had outmaneuvered them and got to the Iberus first, there to wreak devastation.