The Storm of Heaven (7 page)

"Not many," the thaumaturge said, some strength returning to his voice, "but they stood only on defense, while we must make do with attack. It is draining work, trying to twist the world that way. Still, we overcame them..." He paused, and Theodore could see that the man was sifting memory, trying to find a pattern in the day's chaos.

"Why," Demosthenes said, surprise in his voice, "I believe there were only two! But skilled, my lord, and well used to one another... perhaps brother and sister. Great strength can be had that way, if the minds can find a common join."

The Lord Prince stood, grinning from ear to ear. "But not enough to carry the day, master wizard!"

Not enough. The Prince swung around, his step light. He looked west, checking the sun. There were still hours of light left. Enough time to smash the Arab army into the dust.

"Send word to the mages' encampment," he called to a courier rider that was standing close by; "tell them their work is done for the day. Tell them to rest, to recover their strength."

"All day we wait, sitting and getting fat." The Tanukh's voice was low, but it carried to where Khalid was sitting on his horse, half shaded, half covered by the overhanging branches of a thorn tree. The young commander feigned deafness, brilliant eyes focused on the clouds of dust rising beyond the pass and the two dark hills.

"The city men, they are being heaped with glory. Soon they will rest in soft paradise, their every whim catered to by white-limbed maidens with long, rich hair..." Shadin had been dwelling overmuch on this topic throughout the long, endless day. "...each a virgin and willing, even eager, to learn from a man's hand. Soft-spoken, too, and demure, with downcast eyes."

Khalid ignored him. The big Persian, Patik, waited quietly behind him, squatting in the shade of a thorn tree. The rest of the men were resting in whatever shade they could find, or moving quietly among the horses.

Beyond the little pass, the battle had moved away to the left, though there was still some fighting around the encampment. Khalid ignored that. The wagons were empty, the carts overturned. The camp followers were within, it was true, along with some men wounded earlier in the campaign. The Romans were more interested in the mass of Arab and Decapolis troops now fighting on the shoulders of the hill where Mohammed's banner and tents stood. He squinted, watching a singular figure, dressed in white and brown, standing on the height.

The Romans can see him, too,
Khalid mused, his thoughts disguised behind a carefully bland face.
But will they know what they see? Can they feel him, their sorcerers?

"These men of the city, they are dying with the word of god on their lips. They will find Paradise." Shadin was still holding forth to the men of his squad, most of whom were trying to sleep, upon the world that awaited them after death. "They will find two cool gardens planted with shady trees, each watered by a flowing spring. Every tree, for I have heard it from his lips myself, will bear every kind of fruit, each in pairs."

Distantly, horns blew and Khalid sat up a little straighter. His eyes swerved to the hilltop. The lone figure remained, standing on the dark boulder, wind blowing its robes out like a flag. The young man looked back to the pass, eyes narrowing. He could see a great flock of banners and pennons moving, as if a mass of mounted men were coming up out of the streambed.

Khalid hissed in delight. Behind him, Patik's cold gray eyes flickered open and the Persian
diquan
stood. His lamellar armor of overlapping iron plates rippled like a snakeskin. Gentling his horse, the easterner mounted. The other men, roused by the movement, looked to their own horses. Shadin, interrupted in the middle of a long and detailed description of the "dark-eyed
houris
," scrambled to his feet.

Khalid ignored them all, his full attention focused on the hilltop. He ignored the sky darkening behind them.

Light flashed there, from metal turning across the path of the sun, across the mile or more of scrub and twisted thornbush. Khalid felt something like a physical shock as the tiny figure on the boulder turned and looked at him.

"Mount up!" Khalid's voice carried, strong and clear, across the rocky hillside. Hundreds of men scrambled for their horses, armor jingling in the hot afternoon air. Ahead of them, scouts raised their heads, preparing to rise and run alongside. "Paradise is waiting!"

"This is the last act," Theodore said to the cluster of courier riders waiting beside his pavilion. They were very young, these scions of the great houses. For many, this was their first campaign. As had generations before them, they would run errands and messages for the
cataphracts
, for the nobles who commanded the armies of the Eastern Empire, even—as now—for the Lord Prince himself. Someday these boys would carry the lance, bow and sword of the
cataphract
themselves.

Theodore smiled genially, seeing their tense, determined faces. "We have held back our full strength throughout the day, waiting for the enemy to weaken. Now he has been driven back onto his camps, or onto that hillock yonder, where his tents lie. Go down into the valley and carry word to the centurions that the exhausted men are to fall back, while fresh troops take their place."

He clapped his hands sharply in dismissal and turned away. The boys scrambled for their ponies. "Boleslav!"

"Ja, altjarl?"

"We move, too. Have the servants break camp. I wish to see the end of this myself."

There was laughter amongst the Faithful, for their axes were hungry. It was boring, sitting on the hilltop. Red cloaks moved swiftly as Theodore swung into the saddle of his stallion. By the time he spurred the horse onto the trail leading down to the valley floor, a cordon of great-thewed Northmen surrounded him. The Prince laughed as he walked the stallion down the slope, the Northmen running at his stirrups. The wind of his passage dispelled a little of the day's heat. It was good to feel the air on his face.

Colonna stepped off the roadway, motioning for the men behind him to do the same. He had wrapped a cloth around his face to keep the dust off. The road they followed was barely a track. It meandered down from between the two dark hills and crossed a deep ravine lying behind the Roman camp. A rider had found Colonna and his detachment sitting in the shade of some stunted trees lining the little streambed. The boy directed them back to the main camp, beyond the hill and beyond the ravine. The centurion shrugged and rousted his men.

Now the road was crowded with wounded men as they approached the bridge.

It wasn't much to look at, this bridge, only a single arch of stone over the narrow slot of the ravine, but it was still standing. Men and horses and wagons carrying those too wounded to walk were backed up on the near side of the crossing. There was only room enough for a single wagon to cross at a time. The ravine, steep sided and choked with brush, was impossible to cross.

"Make way! Make way!" A rider on a well-lathered horse trotted up behind Colonna and his men. A troop of men in heavy armor, their helmets held on their saddlebows, followed. They looked weary and hot and Colonna could see from the make of their armor and saddles that they were not regular Legion troopers.

Only the Eastern Empire maintained a predominately cavalry Legion with their noble
cataphracts
.
These men must be mercenaries,
thought Colonna,
probably Armenians by the look of their beaded tack and bridle.
He heard they were brave fighters, but touchy.

"You, centurion!" One of the men, blessed with a thick dark beard, was pointing a stubby finger at Colonna. "Your men are wounded?"

"No," Colonna said, rising to his feet. It felt good just to sit for a moment, but officers rarely thought about things like that, leastways not when centurions were lolling about. "We're fit. A rider from the Lord Prince told us and our mates to fall back and let the reserves take over."

"Good," the man barked, and Colonna saw the rider's breastplate had been gilded before someone tried to stave it in with a mace. "You've charge of the bridge crossing. Get this herd of addled sheep sorted out and the road open!"

Colonna started to salute, but the black-bearded man had already curveted his horse around in a half-circle and ridden off, his escort in tow. Some of the legionaries were coughing and waving their hands to dispel the dust.

"Let's go," Colonna growled, wedging the helmet back on his head. "Now we're
vigiles
."

"You there," he shouted at the first of the drovers crowding the road with a wagon. "Get that rattletrap off the road!"

Behind him, the rest of his detachment fanned out, spears in hand, trying to get the walking wounded and stray farmers all onto one side of the roadway.

Theodore let the stallion take its head and pick up to a run as they approached the dry streambed lying between his day camp and the battle. The horse leapt the sandy wash with ease and the Lord Prince laughed, feeling the power coursing in the magnificent beast. The Faithful had fallen behind, crashing through the thickets lining the dead stream. Theodore reined around to let them catch up.

Boleslav jogged up, his thick, trunklike legs seemingly tireless.

Theodore opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, hearing a great shout rise up behind him.

Allau Akbar!

The Prince turned in the saddle, staring up the slope, as the Faithful reestablished their cordon around him. There, under the eaves of the rocky hill, was sudden, violent motion. The Prince raised an eyebrow, seeing the massed ranks of his army stagger back as the Arab bandits, trapped on the higher ground, suddenly charged pell-mell down the slope.

Allau Akbar!

The sound echoed from the hills, raising a chill on Theodore's arms. It seemed the cry of tens of thousands of men, not the bare handful struggling with the front ranks of his own army. The sun was beginning to fall behind the hills and Theodore shaded his eyes with a hand.

"Boleslav, where are my couriers and runners?"

The north-man grunted, his own deep gray eyes searching the slope for any foes that might have broken through the main line of battle. "None have yet returned,
altjarl
. Soon they will, I think."

Theodore grunted in disgust. The din of battle was rising sharply. These bandits had acquired unexpected fervor. "Then we shall have to find them. Forward!"

Mohammed stood, though the wind picked up again, plucking at his robes with sharp fingers. Thistles bounced past, driven by the gusts. Under his feet, on the slope below the outcropping, the men of the Decapolis, stiffened by the Ben-Sarid and the Yemenites, had thrown themselves into the Roman lines with terrible energy. The enemy, still forming up for a second round of battle, had been taken off-guard. Two wedges of Decapolis heavy infantry had hacked their way into the Legion ranks. Behind them the Yemenis were filling the air with arrows, firing up at an angle to let the shafts plunge into the Romans massed downslope.

They have proven themselves,
Mohammed thought. The city men had paid a terrible price throughout the long day, taking the brunt of the Roman attack on their shoulders. Now they should be on their last legs, exhausted and bled white by the struggle. Despite this, they attacked ferociously, regardless of their casualties. The storm of their war cry echoed up around the boulder like the beat of a drum. Twenty thousand throats, crying out to the heavens.

"Now His strength comes," Mohammed whispered, leaning into the wind. Sand and gravel whipped at him, but he ignored the cuts on his hands and the dull roar that had been building out of the east in the last hour. "Now, you men that lay your hearts down before Him, who take His guidance and law into your own houses, know that He will succor you. He, the Compassionate and Merciful One, will hold you in the palm of His hand."

Mohammed's eyes closed, shutting out the vision of men dying, sliding in their own blood, their bodies pierced by the short-hafted spears of the Romans, on the slope below. The attack faltered as the Romans re-formed their lines, and now it was failing as the flanks of the wedges were attacked by hundreds of legionaries.

A voice came from the clear air and it rolled like thunder.

Khalid rose up in his stirrups, sword held high and forward, gleaming as the polished blade caught the westering sun. He howled, and his men howled behind him, a thousand riders on fleet-footed horses. The drumming of their hooves made the ground jump. Rabbits and birds fled before them, startled from their day nests.

Allau Akbar!

The ring of wagons swelled in Khalid's vision and the ground flashed past under the hooves of his mare. Before them, he saw the Ghassanid archers break away, fleeing before the weight of his charge. Behind him, and on either side, a flowing line of charging horses unfolded, filling the shallow pass. Some of the men, the Bedu, raised their voices in a long, ululating scream, and Khalid joined them. He and his personal guard, Patik among them, galloped past the wagons. No one tried to stop them, though the women and old men among the wagons cheered as they hurtled past.

Khalid flashed them a brilliant smile but then turned his attention to the roadway he could make out down the slope. It was crowded with men walking, and more wagons, and beyond all that, there was the dark slash of a ravine cutting across the plateau and a bridge.

The rest of the Arab reserve flowed past the wagons on the uphill side, with Shadin in the lead, his thick hand gripping the hilt of a long, hand-and-a-half sword. The drumming of hooves almost drowned out the war cries of the Tanukh and the Palmyrene knights, but those men raised their voices all the more. Shadin's thoughts flickered, momentarily, to his sword-brother Jalal, who had held the command of the center of the Arab line at dawn.
Do you still live, my brother?

It didn't matter now, for the lead edge of the Arab charge, six thousand men strong, was about to slam into the rear cohorts of the Roman left wing. Shadin raised his voice in a scream of rage that echoed back from the empty sky.
Allau Akbar!