The Parthian (63 page)

As Spartacus had predicted, the Gauls attacked in a mad, disorganised rush of feral rage, hoping that the fury of their charge would carry all before it. But their assault broke lie a wave against a seawall. For a few seconds the Thracian line buckled but did not break, then the front rank went to work with their swords, stabbing them at exposed thighs, legs, bellies and groins. Very few of the Gauls wore armour, some were naked, and though they hacked and jabbed with their swords, spears and axes, they could not find a way through the disciplined ranks of their opponents. The first rank held their shields in front of them, the second rank held their shields above the heads of those in front, and all the while the front rankers stabbed with their swords. Three inches of steel, Spartacus had once told me, was all it takes to kill a man. And how the Thracians were killing now, grinding their way forward one pace at a time. The Gauls in the rear were pushing those in front forward, hoping to create enough momentum to push through our ranks, but all they did was push their comrades onto Thracian swords. Death in battle is seldom instantaneous; rather, it is a long drawn-out process. A few, the lucky ones, are pierced through the heart or have their throat slit, but most are run though the belly by a spear, slashed by the edge of a sword or stabbed by its point, or hit by an arrow or slingshot. They die bleeding from the resulting hideous wounds, screaming or weeping as they watch their lifeblood gushing from shattered limbs and sliced bellies. If they stumble and fall in the melee they are crushed to death by their comrades or the enemy in the ebb and flow of the battle line, or are suffocated by a press of the dead and dying piled on top of them. In their terror they foul their leggings and piss themselves, the stinking effusion mixing with blood and churned-up earth to create a disgusting manure of death. And so it was today as the Gauls were slaughtered. The terrible din of battle resounded across the clearing and reached a crescendo as the Thracians gave a mighty cheer and then began to advance. They stepped on and over their dead enemies, ramming their feet down hard on faces, necks and arms, shattering bones as they did so.

‘They are breaking,’ I said to Gafarn.

‘Yes, highness, they are.’

I turned to him and offered my hand to him. ‘You saved my life, I am in your debt.’

He grinned. ‘I had no choice, Gallia would never have forgiven me.’

In front of us the rear rank of the Thracians threw another volley of
pila
, the shafts angling through the air to pierce flesh and strike shield. If they hit a shield the soft iron of their shaft immediately bent, making it impossible for it to be freed from the shield and thus rendering it useless to its owner. I saw a riderless horse bolt in terror into the trees, and saw another horse carrying a man wearing a green cloak, steel cuirass and helmet, and armed with a long sword in his right hand and a round shield on his left side painted with some sort of animal symbol. He was riding up and down behind his men, waving his sword, urging his men on. He gestured to and instructed other mounted warriors, who rode away to do his bidding. I recognised him. It was King Ambiorix, who by his frantic activity was obviously seeing any hopes of victory rapidly disappearing. The Thracians were still pushing forward, grunting like pigs as they cut through the wall of flesh in front of them.

I turned to Gafarn. ‘An arrow, quick.’

He passed me a shaft and I placed it in my bowstring. I could see Ambiorix, waving his sword in the air and shouting, though he was several hundred feet away and I could not discern his voice amid the general tumult of the battle.

‘You’ll never hit him from here.’ Gafarn had guessed my intention and his archer’s instinct told him that the shot was too long against a target that only fleetingly showed itself. I took aim but realised that Gafarn was right. Ambiorix was riding up and down the line, shouting encouragement, and he frequently disappeared behind other riders.

‘You’re right,’ I said to Gafarn. ‘I need to get a clear shot.’

I called my men to gather round me.

‘We need to get into the trees and behind the Gauls. Share out the arrows you have remaining.’

A quick count revealed that there were only enough arrows for each man to have two each, thus I picked ten men at random, including Gafarn, told the rest to surrender their arrows to us, and led them towards the right flank and into the thick oaks that surrounded the clearing. We slowed as we moved through the trees, fanning out in a line with bows at the ready. I was at the far left of the line, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the two sides hacking and stabbing at each other. We kept moving forward until we were well behind the Gaul battle line. I raised my right arm and gestured to the rest to close up on me. I knelt on the ground and they huddled round me.

‘That man on the horse, with the green cloak, steel cuirass and shiny helmet, that is their king. Kill him and it’s all over.’

I looked at each of them to make sure they understood. They all nodded solemnly. One of them suddenly looked wild-eyed at me and lurched forward onto the ground. In his back was a spear, and then there were shouts and cheers as the Gauls came at us. There were around a dozen of them, all carrying square shields and spears, their half-naked bodies covered in tattoos and filth. They must have been sent into the woods to scout, and now they had found an easy prey. I raised my bow and shot the man who had thrown the spear, while the rest of my men likewise returned fire. We cut down another five but then they were on us. I threw my bow aside and drew my sword, just in time to deflect a spear that was aimed at my belly. The Gaul’s momentum carried him past me and I hacked down hard on the back of his neck as he did so, sending him sprawling to the ground with blood oozing from the wound. He did not get up. A wild man, naked aside from a silver torque around his neck, came yelling at me with a long sword held above his head clasped with both hands. I jumped aside and rolled on the ground to avoid the blow, then sprang up as he turned and came at me again with great scything sweeps of his blade. They were easy enough to avoid, but his attack was relentless. I could smell his sweat and foul breath as he threw insults at me. His bloodshot eyes were bulging in their sockets. He swung his blade again, he was amazingly quick for a big man, but it swept past me I lunged with my own sword and stuck the point into his upper arm, just below the shoulder. He screamed in pain. He came at me once more, raising his sword above his head and then bringing it down where he thought my head would be, but once again I leapt aside and he cut only air. Blood was pouring from his wound, and every time he raised his sword he winced in pain. He attacked once again, but this time his strikes were slower and more predictable. He cut down at my left shoulder, missed and as his blade swept towards the ground I lunged and stabbed him in the belly. He gasped with surprise, stood for a moment and then sank to his knees. I screamed and aimed a downward cut against the side of his neck. The steel blade cut deep into his flesh, sending a fountain of blood into the air as he collapsed on the ground. I glanced around me. I could see three of my men lying lifeless on the ground, but the others had fought off the Gauls and were now firing arrows at the last three who were alive. They felled two but the third escaped. I retrieved my bow and ran up to Gafarn.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No, highness, but we have few arrows left.’

There were seven of us left and each clutched his remaining arrows in his right hand. Not one had more than two, three had none at all. I took all the arrows, gave half to Gafarn and told the men to get back to the others. They could do nothing here. They saluted and departed, while Gafarn and I went to kill a king.

We ran forward through the trees and then swung left into the clearing, where we emerged well behind the enemy’s position. In front of us hundreds of men were still fighting each other.

‘You see him?’

‘I see him, highness.’

‘Then let’s kill him.’

We both fired but it was Gafarn who hit him. It was a masterful shot, a once-in-a-lifetime shot, for as my arrow went through the air and disappeared into the mass of fighting men, Gafarn’s arrow hit Ambiorix in the face at the moment he was turning his horse. He immediately fell from his saddle onto the ground, dead. Gafarn whooped with joy and I slapped him on the shoulder, but within seconds men on horseback were coming at us, for we had been spotted. We ran as though a demon was snapping at our heels, back into the trees and then raced through the oaks until we reached the safety of our own lines. Gafarn and I were like excited children as we jumped, embraced and laughed with delight, for he had given us victory because the Gauls, seeing their king killed, lost heart and began to flee the battle. Their chiefs and knights tried to stop them but they had had enough. Soon their retreat turned into a rout and Spartacus and his Thracians stood triumphant on the battlefield.

I went to search him out and found him in the front rank of his men, who were drinking greedily from their water bottles. Beside him Akmon was nursing a nasty wound to his shoulder, his mail shirt having been ripped open.

He spat blood on the ground. ‘These Gauls love their axes.’

I was concerned. ‘Are you badly hurt?’

He grinned. ‘Nothing that won’t heal. I’ve suffered worse as a gladiator.’

Spartacus embraced me and I told him about King Ambiorix. ‘So, the bastard’s dead. I wondered why they gave way so suddenly.’ He looked around at his men sitting on the ground and taking off their helmets. ‘Akmon, get them back on their feet. We are going to march on.’

‘They are tired, Spartacus.’

‘They can sleep tonight. We are near to their royal headquarters, and I want it to be a pile of ashes before we turn back.’

And so, after only half an hour to gather ourselves, we continued on towards Ambiorix’s berg. We had suffered fifty dead and a hundred more wounded but the clearing was littered with Gaul slain, most lying in a long strip from treeline to treeline where the battle had been fought, hundreds of them. We found the body of Ambiorix with an arrow through its right eye socket. Spartacus cut the head off, rammed a spear into the earth and stuck the bloody head on top of it.

We left the wounded and a hundred uninjured Thracians to escort them back to camp as we tramped onwards. Our pace was slower now for battles are tiring affairs, but we ate hard biscuit and drank and refreshed our water bottles from the stream that cut through the meadow on the route that led to the berg. It was here that I had killed Gallia’s brother when we had delivered the gold, and now we were back. How unnecessary it had all been, really. If only Ambiorix had left us alone. But his cunning and ambition had led him to believe that he could use us to free himself of Rome’s rule and become the king of kings of the Gauls. And now he was dead, his warriors slaughtered and his people emasculated. Like Gallia told me, they were a beaten people.

The berg fell without a fight. When we arrived the gates were open and the walls and platforms unmanned. The people, no doubt having learned of the death of their king, had fled. Byrd reckoned they had gone into the mountains, though Spartacus suspected that some still watched us from the forest. It didn’t matter. We took firebrands and threw them into the royal hall, which was soon a raging inferno as the flames devoured the Senones’ centre of government. Here, generations of their kings and princes would have sat and carried out their duties, and now it was being turned into ash. The rest of the buildings were also set alight, the loud roar of the fires at our backs as we marched away.

In the evening, after we had reached camp and I had washed and changed, I told Gallia that her father was dead. She looked into my eyes, then put her arms around me and kissed me.

‘I am glad you are safe.’

‘I am sorry for your loss.’

She shook her head. ‘I was nothing to my father, so why should I weep for him? You and the people that I am close to here are my family. I have no other.’

In the next few days the army moved north to the River Pagus, a great, winding river that flowed east to the Adriatic Sea. Here, we made camp and enjoyed, for the first time since we had left Thurri, a period of rest. We pitched our tents on the south side of the great river, which was a thousand feet wide at this point, with Thracians in the centre and the other contingents either side in a great but organised sprawl that extended for miles. My horsemen were established on the right flank of the army, occupying a spit of land half a mile across on a great bend in the river. The grassland either side of the river was lush and the river itself full of fish. Very soon, a host of men were fishing along the banks and reaping a rich haul of rainbow trout, lake trout, brown trout, grayling, whitefish, barbel, catfish, pike, perch, tench, carp, chub, dace, bream and roach. Immediately west of our camp was a stretch of open ground on the concave bend of the river. Here, the riverbank was almost flat and we could take the horses up to the river and walk them into the water. The river itself, though deep, flowed gently so it was possible to coax a horse into the water up his shoulders quite safely. I did this with Remus, and though at first he was slightly reticent, he soon got to enjoy the experience.

The wounded were tended to and began their recovery, weapons were mended in the forges that were set up and Godarz organised the making of thousands of new arrows. As usual, Byrd established his camp on the perimeter of the army and sent his scouts out each day to watch for the enemy. But no enemy came. Indeed, his men found scarce evidence of anybody. Clearly our fearsome reputation had spread far and wide and had terrified all and sundry.

We had been at the Pagus two weeks when I rode with Gallia, Diana and Gafarn to find Spartacus after receiving an invitation to attend him. Byrd had just returned from one of his scouting missions and had informed me that a great trail of people were fleeing towards Mutina, but that he and his men had seen nothing to the north, which meant that our route to the Alps and freedom was open. We found Spartacus in the river, stripped to the waist and stood in the water up to his thighs with a javelin in his hand. Beside him stood Domitus, likewise stripped to the waist, both of them looking at the water intently. On the bank sat Claudia and Akmon, with two wicker baskets between them. We halted and dismounted, tying the horses to a wagon that lay nearby. Claudia raised her hand to us then put a finger to her lips to indicate that we should not make any noise. Suddenly Domitus jabbed his
pilum
down and extracted an impaled wriggling trout from the water. He grabbed the fish and threw it onto the bank, then Akmon put it in one of the baskets.