Valens went to the nearside, abreast of the mule’s shoulder. Narses had left him as the main loader. Valens placed the woollen pad on the beast’s back, canvas side down, then put the saddle blanket on top. He aligned them carefully, a couple of inches further forward than the blanket would be on a cavalry horse.

Narses had placed the wooden and leather frame which would bear the weight the wrong way round. Valens turned it, so that the crupper was towards the rear of the mule. He hefted it above the mule, so that Narses could take the far side. Together they placed it several inches to the rear of its proper position. When Valens had bent the crupper, and fitted it beneath the mule’s tail, they slid the frame forward.

Together they set about lashing the rigging tight. Valens’s hands moved without thought. Cinch – take – break. If Severus had hoped to humiliate him with this task, the officer would be disappointed. There had been pack animals, as well as hunters, in the yard of Valens’s father.

Take – cinch – tie.

As he worked, Valens looked over the mule’s back at the tombs of the necropolis. Among the sculpted reliefs were portraits of the dead: men and women in respectable clothes, children clutching toys and pets. Here and there were carvings of the eagles that the pious hoped might carry their souls to a better place. The paint was peeling from many of the reliefs and some of the burials had been looted. Their doors gaped open, the interiors looming black in the sunshine.

This was an inauspicious place to begin the dangerous journey into Mesopotamia. Although the towns between the two rivers – the Euphrates and the Tigris – had changed hands more than once, for now they were held by the Romans. But the same could scarcely be said of the country between those walled settlements. It was rumoured to be a hard place, the landscape parched and unforgiving. Its inhabitants were lawless and cruel: bandits, nomadic tent-dwellers and Persian raiders. The gods alone knew what they would find in the mountains beyond.

To set out to travel hundreds of miles into enemy territory, to rescue a child from a well-guarded fortress, let alone to aim to escape across the wastes of the unknown Steppe, was madness. And those undertaking the desperate venture were not united. Yesterday had made it evident that Clemens the armourer loathed the easterners in the party. Today had revealed that Hairan despised Zabda the thief. And Severus mistrusted all those under his command, and had nothing but contempt for Valens himself. If he had still believed that the gods cared for humanity, Valens would have prayed.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Mesopotamia