Field of Mars (The Complete Novel) (9 page)

All around, tens of thousands of legionaries took up the cry, yelling it thrice and ending the chant with a
hoot
that rose into the sky as loud as the dust cloud was high. The chant rippled down the line and, seemingly in reply, the cataphracts broke into a canter, their lances still pointed skyward.

Cornicens announced the order for the Roman cohorts to march forward at a walking pace, pila at the ready. Rufinius sheathed his gladius and swapped the pilum to his right hand, finding the balance holding it above his shoulder with instinct born of long practice. Legionnaires all around him followed Rufinius’s lead, lifting their javelins to shoulder height, bringing their scuta to the front and crouching behind them as they advanced.

With less than a third of a mile between the opposing forces, the distance between them closing fast, a shrill ululation reached the Romans’ ears. But then, suddenly, hundreds more cataphracts appeared as dun-colored robes the color of the desert worn by both horse and man were uniformly discarded, revealing serried ranks of hundreds more cataphracts in an arc that appeared to ring the front line of the Roman square. The cataphracts’ gleaming fish-scale armor caught the sun’s glare and hurled it back at the legionaries’ eyes.

“Excrementum!” Libo exclaimed, as all around them, more and more archers rose up out of the very desert itself.

“Landica!” muttered Dentianus.

The Parthian archers rode their horses with their knees, bows held at the ready with arrows notched and strings drawn tight, keeping to ranks as disciplined as those of the legionaries. These men were close – much closer – and their sudden and unexpected proximity to the Romans was a cause for fear. But the legionaries faltered not at all, marching with a cadence of unbroken rhythm, each man’s courage fortified by the legionary beside him.

Unfamiliar notes from the enemy’s own cornicens reached Rufinius’s ears and the horse archers released their arrows. The sky filled with them, thousands of incoming missiles clearly visible against the pale blue sky.

“Galeae!” Rufinius yelled, raising his own over his head. The air hummed distantly and then grew in intensity as if a swarm of ferocious steel hornets were descending on them.

But most, if not all, of this volley passed overhead and clattered harmlessly into the desert behind the leading cohorts. This by no means heartened Rufinius. The first volley was fired for ranging purposes and to bleed off the excitement of battle and he doubted the second volley would go long. And now there was a new and more terrible threat to meet. Coming at them, galloping across the desert, was a steel wall of cataphracts, their long lances lowering for the charge that would send them crashing into the Roman lines.

The thrill of the charge banished all thoughts of disaster from Surenas’s mind as he glanced to his left and right and enjoyed the precision and the beauty of the armored men and horse at his command. The Romans had not seemed to so much as blink when the army confronting them appeared to expand and multiply before their eyes, as if by some conjuring trick; thousands of his men dropping their coverings or surging out of the pits dug into the soft sand. Surenas admired the invaders for their fearlessness, but it had not blunted his own determination to kill every last one of them. His heart beat as fast and as hard as the hooves of his own horse thundering against the sand.

Ahead, the Roman front line extended into clouds of the choking dust so that he could not see their end, and the uniformity of each legionary in terms of his shield and helmet and even the distance from the man beside him and behind him, appealed to Surenas’s sense of order. But this square formation could be more manageable than the last. What had convinced the invaders to cease their ownership of the very horizon itself? Compressing their numbers in this new way gave him a manageable front he could attack. If this change in formation was in any way due to his man secreted within the enemy’s ranks, he would have to be further rewarded …

With the distance to the Romans closing ever more, Surenas could see through the rising dust how formidable and relentless were these men from the West. All the more reason to drench the desert they had come to conquer with their blood.

The spāhbed lowered his lance and chose a single Roman among the thousands lined up before him and the emblem of a bull on the man’s shield danced circles around the tip of the lance as Surenas took aim.

*

With some anxiety, Rufinius waited for the cornicens to blow the order for a general halt as the line of steel-encased horseflesh thundered toward his cohort. But the order never came.

“Pila!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, the order having been repeated up and down the lines. Hundreds of legionaries drew back their arms, cocked for the throw. As Rufinius watched the last fifty feet of the cataphracts’ charge, a calm settled on him. He could hear his own breathing – steady, strong. His heartbeat also slowed as he watched the plumes of sand and dust being kicked up by the galloping hooves and saw the horses’ nostrils flaring and contracting with every breath, the froth streaming from their mouths and the sharp, barbed tip of the approaching lance held steady, unwavering, and coming ever nearer.

“Now!” the optio yelled.

The legionaries hurled their javelins, muscles twitching with the power of the battle’s first strike. The volley of missiles arced from the lines, a thicket of hurtling death. The legionaries watched with anticipation. But the javelins merely clattered against the enemy’s armor like sticks, their tapered shafts now bent and rendered useless. Barely a dozen Parthians dropped from their mounts, only a few of the pila finding what little exposed flesh there was to pierce around the rider’s eyes or the horse’s mouth.

Rufinius registered the emptiness of the Roman defense in the brief moment before the cataphracts and their horses crashed into the cohort. “Scuta!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, the vibration of the pounding hooves stirring the sand beneath his own feet.

The legionaries jammed the bottom edges of their shields into the ground, angled them back and put their shoulders against them. Legionnaires behind threw themselves and their scuta and bodies against the rows in front. Down on one knee, locking his jaws and jamming his helmeted head down hard against his shoulder, Rufinius braced for impact.

*

As he gripped the horse with his knees and resisted the impulse to throw himself back in the split second before collision, Surenas saw how the gaps between the legionaries before him closed into a solid wall of interlocked shields. His lance plunged into the image of the bull, pierced the shield, and kept on going, and then his mount crashed into the wall. A brief moment of shock followed, both sides stunned by the violence of the impact, and then all around him horses began shrieking with fright. On both sides, men shouted and swore and some screamed, their bones broken or their bodies impaled. The wall of shields buckled here and there and between the gaps came the deadly Roman swords thrusting and stabbing, the legionaries quickly recovering from the shock. The horses reeled back, some rearing. Those cataphracts who were still mounted attempted to impose their will on the terrified animals and some fell to the ground hard, instant prey to the Roman gladius.

Spāhbed Surenas gained some control of his bucking horse, wheeled it around, and then around again. Shouts in an unfamiliar tongue caused him to glance over his shoulder. Individual legionaries had raced forward from their line and were stabbing men on the ground who, weighed down by their heavy armor, could not move easily or freely. Armored horses were also being killed, their cries of terror pitiful as the Romans slit their vulnerable bellies and left them to die slow and mean in the heat of the day.

Surenas gathered his men around him and cantered away beyond reach of the legions, the elation of the charge replaced with a sense of regret mixed with vengeance. He had lost too many good men trying to bash through this heavy infantry in such a foolhardy manner. The Romans were too disciplined and their lines too deep. But the battle was young. The spāhbed had other plans and he had his signalers put them into immediate effect.

*

Crassus, atop his horse and viewing the battle from a rise in the ground at the square’s center, was delighted by what he saw. “Legate Cassius Longinus didn’t like the defensive formation. Well, let them batter their heads on Rome’s shields!” he said. “Are you getting all this down, Appias?”

*

The dazed cataphract lay on the ground whimpering, his arm badly shattered by the fall from his horse. Rufinius put the Parthian beyond misery, turning him over to expose his unprotected back and then stabbing between the ribs into the heart. He swung the gladius at the ground, flicking the gore from it, and counted twenty-four cataphracts and fifteen horses dead, lying at the foot of the Roman cohort. The body count among the legionaries was uncertain. There were deaths, of course, but the numbers were obscured by the curve of their own lines.

The optio looked around, anxious to find the men in his contubernium, and saw Carbo kick the helmet off the head of another cataphract on the ground and then drive the tip of a broken lance through the man’s open mouth. “For Gracchus,” the legionary yelled at the now dead man as he swayed with rage, Gracchus a little further away and flat on his back with his neck torn out.

A growing hum that troubled Rufinius stole his attention from Gracchus and Carbo. That sound – he’d heard it before. And then a rain of arrows descended on the cohort whipping, snapping, fizzing, zipping through the air, driving down into the sand all around:
thunk, thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk.
The volley crept forward, reaching for the Roman lines like a squall front, and then men began to fall over or sink to the ground with arrows penetrating helmets, driving down through skulls and chests, smashing shoulders, maiming and killing. Rufinius joined other legionaries capable of running and headed for the protection of the cohort with his shield held above him, but the arrows mostly went straight through it. He felt a jolt against his leg, which caused him to stumble. His calf – an arrow had pierced it through. Rufinius hobbled the final few paces to the lines and dived for safety beneath interlocked shields. But even here the heavy arrows were barely deterred, as if penetrating sheets of papyrus rather than scutum – each three layers of wood pressed and glued together and covered in leather.

Legionnaires swore, screamed and cried out as thousands of shafts fell from the sky, punching holes through their wholly inadequate protection. And as quickly as the lethal shower began, it passed by to rain on another cohort further down the lines.

Rufinius worked quickly while the flesh of his calf was still numb with shock. The barbs on the arrowhead prevented it coming out the way it went in. Grinding his teeth, he broke the arrow shaft and then pushed it through his skin and pulled it out clean on the other side. Somehow the head had missed most of his muscle. Blood welled from the hole left behind, cleaning the wound. He bound strips of fabric around his leg, carried in his cuirass for this purpose. Bringing himself unsteadily to his feet, Rufinius limped into an empty space in the line vacated by a legionary who was sitting slumped on his ass with a glazed, unfocused look, an arrow buried deep in his neck.

With the assault from above having moved on, the shields came down and across the plain the enemy could be seen shimmering in the desert heat, thousands of horsemen maneuvering far beyond the retribution of Roman sword or spear. Beside Rufinius, a legionary holding his unsheathed gladius aloft raged, “Bring yourself to the Undertaker here, and I’ll show you cunni what death looks like!”

“Your hand,” said Rufinius, swaying on his wounded leg, and the legionary glanced at the hand holding his scuta, blood pumping freely from the stumps of two fingers recently amputated by an arrow. The legionary examined the wound in wonder for a few moments before dropping the shield and clenching his fist, jamming the fresh stumps into the flesh of his palm to staunch the worst of the bleeding. “The Senate and People of Rome,” Rufinius said, with a pat on his shoulder to offer some comfort, and left to find his contubernium. All along the line, behind the wall of shields, Rufinius could see that a surprising number of men were wounded, dead, or dying.

*

Surenas watched with pride as waves of archers, 500 at a time, rode past the Roman lines, firing all the while. The archers were becoming bolder and riding ever closer to the Romans after realizing that their enemy had nothing with which to return the punishment. On all sides of the square now, Surenas saw the Romans were taking arrows, the copper bosses on their shields flashing in the sunlight as they turned them in the direction of each volley. It was clear that arrows were finding targets as, here and there, holes began to appear in the seemingly impenetrable wall. As their lines pulled back, the bodies of legionaries were often left on the desert sand before being recovered by fellow legionaries. But the Romans held their formation and didn’t falter and Surenas was still uncertain about the strategy employed and its chances of success. Surely this Marcus Licinius Crassus would find some response?

*

Publius rode hard with Megabocchus, Censorinus, their weapons bearers, and many of their most trusted lieutenants, toward the Herculean knot hanging limp in the heat of the overhead sun. The prefect leaped from his horse and ran to his father, who stood peering at the dust clouds rising ever higher everywhere on the plain, towering proof that the enemy had surrounded them. Lessor tribunes, who had been dispatched by their superiors from the front lines, had gathered to bring news about the enemy’s attacks and movements to the proconsul. The mood was anxious to say the least, their news consistently bad. It was clear to Publius that his father was overwhelmed, solutions to their vexatious predicament eluding him.

“Proconsul!” Publius called out. Crassus turned toward him, the relief on his face apparent at seeing his son alive. For the first time that he could recall, his father seemed an old man. “A word if I may …”

Crassus made a gesture and the officers crowding around him parted to let the prefect through, and then moved beyond earshot.

“Let my Celts loose, Father,” Publius began. “We will hound them, get behind them and force them forward onto the tips of our legionaries’ swords.”

Crassus looked into the eyes of his son and saw not a single hint of doubt. “No, Publius. I have dispatched orders already for our response.”

*

Cornicens delivered the order, blasting it over the legionaries taunting the enemy with a ribald chant, and the square opened up to release the archers and light infantry onto the plain. The men formed up in good order in front of Rufinius’s cohort and advanced at the double toward the lines of Parthian horse archers.

“It’s about time those shirt lifters kicked in,” shouted someone over the chant, earning the mirth of the men around him.

As Rufinius watched, far beyond the range of the Roman archers, a cloud of Parthian arrows soared high through the dust and into the blue sky above, then hung there seemingly suspended before changing course and dropping toward the plain. When the missiles started to reach their mark and men toppled where they stood, panic gripped the ranks and the archers and infantry ran into each other or turned and fled, helter-skelter, back to the relative shelter provided by the lines of legionaries.

The Parthians, emboldened by the success of their arrows, began an advance on the main square at the gallop, at least 500 of them, and loosed more arrows at shields that quickly and methodically came together to form a barrier.

Arrows thudded into scuta, thumping like clubs and mostly punching straight through in a puff of fine splintering wood. Rufinius heard a loud exhalation of breath beside him. It was Albas. The man looked down at his chest in surprise and then disbelief, the arrow having penetrated his shield and chainmail cuirass to the depth of several inches. Blood welled up like water from a spring in the ground and gushed down the front of his cuirass. Albas knew he was dead. He glanced at Rufinius a little stunned and then slumped sideways as two more arrows blasted holes in his shield and pinned an arm and a leg so that he rolled sideways.

The swearing and the screaming started anew as more and more of the deadly shafts drilled holes in the lines. Some of the legionaries that Rufinius could see had become attached to their shields, unable to move at all, the arrows fixing them like hands and feet nailed for crucifixion.

A brief lull in this onslaught brought calls for water, the air under the shields super-heated by the legionaries’ sweating bodies and as unbearable as any steam room.

“Any o’ you shitlips got water?” Libo asked, breaking off arrow shafts in his scutum with a sweep of a gladius. “Where in Hades is that cunnus water donkey?”