The Parthian (61 page)

‘I have arrows left, my love,’ said Praxima. ‘We can go back and kill some more.’

Nergal and those men within earshot laughed. ‘I think there has been enough killing today, my sweet.’

And so there had been, for the stretch of ground that some call the field of honour had today been seeded with the dead. They lay in heaps where the fighting had been the fiercest and where men had been unable to escape the rain of arrows that had been showered upon them. Dead Gauls lay piled around their knights, while scores surrounded their dead chiefs, cut down trying to protect their lords. The ditch was filled with a great mound of dead and dying Gauls where they had thrown themselves in, while along its bottom for a distance of at least three miles lay a carpet of corpses.

‘A great victory, highness, my congratulations,’ said Rhesus.

‘Thank you, Rhesus.’

I looked at him and suddenly realised that he was very pale. Then he tumbled from his saddle onto the ground. I leaped down from Remus and crouched by his side, as others also dismounted and crowded round.

‘Give us some room,’ I shouted. ‘Fetch some water.’

Diana gave me her waterskin and knelt beside Rhesus, then gently lifted his head so he could take a sip. A spasm of pain shot through his body and I saw that his right was soaked with blood. Diana cradled his head as the pain swept though him.

‘A Gaul spear, highness,’ he said to me weakly.

‘Don’t talk. We’ll soon have you patched up.’

Diana looked at him with brown eyes filled with kindness and understanding, smiling and giving him another mouthful of water.

‘Thank you, lady.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you believe in heaven?’

‘Of course,’ she replied.

‘I lost my wife and child to the plague a few years ago. I have always hoped that they would be waiting for me.’

She smiled at him. ‘They are waiting for you, Rhesus, they are waiting for you in a place where there is no sickness and pain, only happiness and love. Go to them.’

Diana held his hand as Rhesus, a brave soldier from Thrace, slipped away from this life and joined his family in heaven. Diana closed his eyes and then kissed his forehead as those around knelt and bowed their heads. I nodded to Diana in thanks as tears began to run down my cheeks.

Thus ended the Battle of Mutina. We were now free to march north and out of Italy. Spartacus had kept his promise.

Chapter 14

A
fter spending a night fitfully sleeping on the ground, we awoke on a mist-filled dawn with aching limbs, dry mouths and unshaven faces. I stood, bleary eyed, amid a group of similarly dishevelled and unwashed horsemen and their mounts. The air stank of sweat, leather and horse dung. An hour after dawn I held an impromptu meeting with Burebista and his senior officers. We chewed on hard biscuits and drank lukewarm water from our waterskins, those who had any. Gallia also attended, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep and her hair tied in a plait. My hands were filthy and my tunic was smeared with blood, though none of it my own. The edge of my sword had been blunted somewhat in the previous day’s fighting. I had four arrows left in my quiver, most had less or none at all. Burebista was downcast, as ten of his men had died of their wounds during the night.

‘We will take them back and their bodies will be consigned to the balefire with all the others, including Rhesus,’ I told him. 

I glanced at Gallia, for Gafarn had informed me that eight of her women had also been killed in the battle and a further thirty wounded, but she said nothing, looking ahead with a face as hard as stone. The battle must have been a sobering experience for her and her comrades, but she and them had fought well. She could take comfort from that at least.

‘We will walk the horses back to camp, but two companies will serve as flank guards at all times. I don’t want to be surprised by a war party of Gauls.’

‘The Gauls in this region will never again carry their weapons to war,’ said Gallia, curtly. She looked at me. ‘The best of them lie dead upon this ground. The rest are now broken in spirit. They will trouble us no more.’

On the way back to camp we skirted the battlefield to avoid the piles of carrion that were even now providing a feast for the mass of crows who had come to add to the horror that stretched for miles around. Their squeals and squawks got on our nerves and made our horses jittery, and made us even glummer. We had won a great victory, though all I wanted to do was eat a good meal, wash my filthy clothes and body and rest, above all, rest. I walked beside Gallia as she led Epona, her stare fixedly ahead. The mist had been burned away by the sun now; it was going to be another warm day. I broke the silence first.

‘I am sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘For the deaths of so many of your warriors, the Gauls I mean.’

She smiled wryly. ‘The Romans used them and now they have paid the price. You think I would weep for such wretches?’

‘But they are your people.’

‘My people? What does that mean?’

‘Well,’ I replied rather meekly. ‘Gauls.’

 ’How big is Parthia?’ she asked me.

‘Thousands of square miles,’ I replied, proudly.

She continued to look ahead. ‘And in that territory you class all the people that live there as your brothers and sisters? Do you feel an affinity with them above all others.’

‘No.’

‘Then why should I have any bonds to a people who yesterday were trying to kill me, much less to a king, my father, who sold me into slavery and then enslaved me himself and again tried to profit from me? I feel nothing for these people except contempt.’

I persisted. ‘But…’

‘Enough, Pacorus,’ she snapped. ‘Your talk is giving me a headache.’

Her mood improved when Spartacus and Claudia arrived escorted by Nergal and two companies of his horse archers. The reunion between Claudia, Diana and Gallia was an emotional one, and all three wept as they embraced. The battle had obviously been harder on Gallia than I had imagined, and Diana must have been terrified and horrified in equal measure. It was good to see Spartacus again, and he looked as though there was not a scratch on him. He embraced me and slapped me on the shoulder.

‘Still alive, then,’ he beamed.

‘Still alive, lord.’

‘Let us walk together back to camp.’

After I had greeted and embraced Claudia, I walked beside him as we headed south towards the camp of wagons.

‘It was a hard fight, Pacorus, but you did well. Once you had broken their wing it was just a matter of rolling them up.’

I smiled. ‘Like a carpet.’

‘Carpet?’

‘It matters not, lord.’

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, we are making a rough count of the enemy dead and it looks as though thousands of them have perished. And I’ve also got a couple of thousand Roman prisoners that I don’t know what to do with.’ He looked at me mischievously. ‘Perhaps I should kill them, what do you think?’

I had to admit I was appalled at the idea, but said nothing. ‘It is your decision, lord.’

He laughed aloud. ‘Do not worry, my young friend, I promise I won’t kill them. In any case they are proving useful at the moment. Godarz has them prising arrows out of their dead comrades and Gauls. He was complaining earlier that your men shot too many arrows during the battle. He’s a typical quartermaster. When I served in the Roman Army they were often worse than the enemy, as they were most unwilling to surrender their carefully hoarded stores.’

‘You have done it, lord,’ I said. ‘We are free to leave Italy and leave the Romans behind us.’

‘Yes, we are finally free, though not quite yet. The army will need a few days to recover, and afterwards I have a small task to perform.’

‘Small task?’

A thin smile spread across his lips. ‘All will be revealed, my friend. But first we bind our wounds, bury our dead, rest and take stock of our losses.’

The next few days were occupied with the task of recovering from the effects of battle. Men and horses were tired, many were wounded and some were dead. The fact that we had Roman prisoners was fortuitous, as they dug great pits into which the dead were thrown. Normally we would have left the enemy dead to rot. But because we were staying in the area rather than immediately marching north, the dead had to be dealt with lest disease broke out. At the very least we would be rid of the crows and their incessant cackling. Under the watchful eyes of our guards the prisoners stripped the Roman dead of their mail shirts, sandals and anything else that our army could use. It was a grisly business, though Spartacus had no qualms about using what fell into our laps. The haul meant that all of his foot now had shields, mail shirts, helmets and swords. Many were still armed with spears, but each legion now had enough javelins to equip their first line cohorts, though Godarz still grumbled that the men had been wasteful during the battle when I found him directing a group of prisoners to search among the bodies of the dead Gauls and extract any arrows that were still usable. The blood-encrusted shafts were thrown into the back of a cart, one of many that dotted the carrion-filled ground. The stench of dead flesh was nauseating, and the area was alive with large black flies and the accursed crows. 

Godarz, his nose covered by a cloth veil, was yelling instructions at guards and prisoners alike. ‘Once you have taken anything useful, get the bodies over to the pit and throw them in.’

He was referring to a large rectangular hole that had been dug by the prisoners and which was now rapidly being filled with the dead. Our own dead we had burned on massive balefires made from the thousands of stakes that had kindly been fashioned by the Gauls. We had lost nearly three hundred horsemen killed, most from Burebista’s dragon. The army as a whole had suffered an additional two thousand killed but the enemy had suffered more grievous losses. No one counted the enemy dead, but Godarz and his team of quartermasters estimated that each pit that was dug was filed with around three thousand corpses.

‘This one’s the sixth we’ve dug and I think we will have to dig at least three more.’

‘Lucky you had these prisoners to help.’

He sniffed. ‘If we hadn’t we would not have bothered. But it gives me a chance to salvage some iron and steel.’ He shot me a glance. ‘The foundries will be busy replacing all the arrows your men fired.’

‘You can never have enough arrows, Godarz.’

‘So it seems.’

He looked at two Romans, their faces dirty and their tunics drenched with sweat, hauling a dead Gaul towards the death pit. ‘Any idea what Spartacus intends to do with them?’

I shrugged. ‘No.’

‘For some reason he wants to stay in this area, otherwise we’d have left the corpses to rot where they fell. But seeing as we are apparently staying a while, we have to get them buried as quickly as possible.’

The reason Spartacus wanted to remain in the area was revealed to me a few days later. Castus and Cannicus had both recovered from their wounds, while Akmon and Afranius had survived the battle unscathed. Spartacus’ expression was one of stone when I entered his tent.

‘We must punish the Gauls for their treachery,’ he said. ‘Pacorus, your scout, Byrd, will lead us to the berg of Gallia’s father.’

‘To what end, lord?’ I asked.

‘To burn it, of course, and all those within it.’

The others banged their fists on the table in agreement. ‘First they kidnap one of our own, then they steal our gold and finally they take up arms against us,’ raged Akmon. ‘I say let them reap the whirlwind they have sowed.’

Spartacus held up a hand to silence the din. ‘Our retaliation will be swift and merciless.’

And so it was. We formed four flying columns of horse, each numbering three hundred men and composed of my best horse archers. We burned everything — homes, villages and farms. The dwellings of the Gauls were made out of wood with thatched roofs, and they burned beautifully. It took only a single torch or firebrand to ignite them, and once alight the dry timbers were soon consumed by fire. The larger settlements, the villages surrounded by palisades made from sharpened logs that mounted fighting platforms, we first surrounded. Then flame arrows were used to set the wooden houses inside them alight. It was so easy. We wrapped straw soaked in pitch in pieces of cloth and tied them to arrows, lit them and shot the arrows into the village. The straw roofs were bone dry, and soon flames and smoke were billowing from inside the palisade. Then the screaming began as those inside realised that they would die in the flames. The Gauls barricaded the gates so we could not batter them down, but when the flames erupted they desperately tried to escape from the settlement. And we were waiting. Spartacus had thought of everything, and afterwards I realised why he was such a capable commander. He weighed up all the options available to him and then chose the one that suited his purpose. So when the villagers, in their desperation to escape the flames, managed to open the gates, they ran straight onto our swords. In return for their freedom, the Roman prisoners were forced to cut down the Gauls as they fled their settlements. Each Roman was given a sword, nothing else, and told that he would be cut down instantly if he tried to use it against any of us. They were told that they were going to being killing Gauls. Only by shedding blood could they buy their freedom. Spartacus told them this when they had been gathered in one place after they had buried all the dead. And when asked what would happen if they refused, he ran the man through who had asked the question with his sword and then hacked off his head. One sword, nothing else. And so at village after village the Roman prisoners were the ones who did the killing, as we exacted revenge on the Senones and their allies.

Most of the tribes’ warriors had been slaughtered at Mutina, or were hiding in the forests, so those who were left were the very young and the old. But many still summoned a courage born of desperation, and in the brief fighting before the raping and the slaughter began, some Romans were killed. And Spartacus watched impassively as Gauls and Romans, former allies against him, killed each other. I also realised then that Spartacus possessed another quality that contributed towards his skill as a general: utter ruthlessness.