Thunder of the Gods (29 page)

Looking at his trumpeter once more, he raised a hand and, with a warning look that made clear what would befall the man if he blew too soon, waited as the oncoming wave of armoured horseflesh struggled through the chaos caused by their comrades’ crippled mounts, brushing aside those men who had fallen from their beasts with the chilling, bloody reality of the battlefield. The Parthian line gradually reformed, presenting a solid face to the Romans once more, their lances now only fifty paces from the solid line of infantrymen waiting to receive their charge.

The thunder that had shaken the hillside was stilled within half a dozen breaths as the Parthian charge faltered on the sharp iron teeth of ten thousand caltrops. Marcus stood and watched as the horsemen fought to regain some semblance of order, as the unlucky men among them fought to control animals driven wild with pain, or slid from their saddles as their mounts staggered and fell. Their king was shouting again, some encouragement or other, Marcus supposed, and while the man goaded his riders with harsh words whose purpose rang clearly across the narrow gap separating the two armies, a fresh onslaught of arrows shrieked out from the Roman line in a cruel horizontal sleet of iron. Glancing back at the legionaries behind him he was met by expressions of astonishment for the most part, his soldiers clearly daunted as never before by the line of enormous armoured horses and their shining riders, looming huge in their vision even at fifty paces. He turned to face them, putting his back to the enemy.

‘Tungrians!’

A thousand pairs of eyes snapped onto him, recognising in his shouted challenge the urge to kill that had his body taut with the need to fight.

‘Do you see that man?!’

Pointing with his sword, he watched as the king realised that he was the subject of the Roman’s ire.

‘That man is
mine!
The soldier who kills him will face me when this is done with, when whatever’s left of these donkey fuckers has ridden away with their pride in tatters! He’s
mine!
’

He turned back, knowing that the eyes hidden in the shadow of the man’s helmet beneath the slim gold crown that encircled his armoured head were locked on him, the presence in their invisible stare almost palpable, and with a kick at his mount’s flanks the king spurred his beast forward, lowering his lance to charge the lone figure waiting for him in front of the legion’s line. With a roar his men followed his example and rode at the Romans with renewed purpose, spending the last of their war horses’ wind in a trotting advance towards the waiting Romans.

The trumpets screamed for the last time, and with one final glance at the Parthian king, Marcus turned his back to the oncoming enemy, almost insolent in his leisure, casting the shield aside and raising both arms to point to the line’s rear, ordering the cohort to carry out the manoeuvre that had so infuriated them with its incessant repetition over the previous days.

‘Fall back!’

Obeying with unconscious skill, the legion stepped backwards up the gentle slope in one perfectly coordinated movement, washing back up the hill like a retreating tide to reveal the gifts that they had left for their enemy in their wake. Emerging from the receding line of legionaries was a row of iron-tipped wooden teeth, the stakes that had been set in place while the soldiers had waited for combat, each one three feet from the next. Jutting forward to face the oncoming Parthians in a mile-long rampart, they would offer an enemy on foot no more resistance than a moment’s delay, but to a body of charging cavalry they represented a deadly threat. On the beat of the sixth pace, Marcus turned his hands outwards to display his palms, and the Tungrians before him halted their retreat. With the long spears still pointing to the rear over their shoulders, they stared over their tribune’s shoulder at the oncoming Parthians, now barely twenty paces distant, as he strolled nonchalantly between a pair of stakes and turned to watch the enemy’s final approach. A hand snaked out and gripped the collar of his bronze armour, gently but firmly pulling him back through the line of spear men as Dubnus’s familiar voice chuckled in his ear.

‘No you fucking don’t. I saw you eyeing up their king, and you can just wait your turn with the rest of us!’

The trumpet blew for the last time, and Marcus bellowed the last of the commands that had been drilled to the point of perfection.

‘Spears!’

As one man the legionaries swung their spears up and over in a ripple of movement that spanned the line’s entire length, sharp iron flashing as the front two ranks levelled weapons twice the length of a man’s body at the charging cavalry. Watching the king’s oncoming horse intently, Marcus saw the man stiffen as he realised the nature of the trap into which he had led the pride of his kingdom’s nobility.

‘Brace!’

The horses were already starting to baulk at the solid line of men before them when the first rank of horsemen saw the deadly peril laid out before them. Reining in their mounts, they shouted warnings that the real threat wasn’t the retreating Roman line but rather the iron-shod points of thousands of wooden stakes revealed by the legion’s short retreat, but the men following up behind them neither heard nor heeded the warning. The simple remorseless weight of their continued advance was unstoppable, forcing the gesticulating riders in front of them inexorably onto the unforgiving barrier, behind which a glittering hedge of iron spearheads waited in their turn. Fighting to hold their mounts off the deadly iron spikes, the Parthian front rank ground to a halt, several horses being pushed onto the defences in a chorus of agonised screams as the waiting iron punched inexorably through their barding and tore into their bellies.

‘Forward!’

The cohort’s line advanced a single step, the front two ranks thrusting their spears out with a brutal lunge that brought the stranded riders face-to-face with their doom.

‘Forward! Faces, armpits and balls!’

The men to either side of him advanced another pace and repeated the thrust, each man aiming for the points they had been instructed to seek out with their spear blades, and the screams of horrifically wounded men were added to the thrashing death throes of the stricken mounts. Marcus saw the Parthian king slide from the saddle of his maimed beast, tossing away his lance and pulling a heavy mace from its place on the transfixed animal’s saddle. Half turning, Marcus nudged Dubnus, raising his gladius and staring at its eagle-headed pommel for a brief moment.

‘Are you coming?’

‘We have them! Now we close the back door before they realise they’re dead men if they don’t turn and run!’

Julius nodded at his legatus’s command, gesturing to the big man waiting behind him.

‘The black flag!’

Sprinting up the short stretch of hillside that separated them from the summit, the bull-like soldier wielded the flag with all of his strength, a nine-foot square of black linen snapping in the breeze of its passage through the air. A moment later an answering peal of trumpets signalled that the order had been received, and Scaurus nodded his satisfaction.

‘That’s going to come as a nasty surprise.’

On both flanks of the mass of horsemen, three centuries of tunic-clad slingers slipped through the legion’s line, shaking out into a loose formation that gave them the space to swing their slings. Their lead bullets were innocuous enough in appearance, but when released from the whirling weapons they struck with sufficient power to punch through armour plate. As men and horses began to take casualties on either side of the cataphract’s formation, riders turned their beasts and went after the lightly equipped skirmishers, only to watch in frustration as they scurried back into the legion’s line, leaving their would be assailants dangerously exposed to the archers who were loosing arrows at them at no more than twenty paces. Julius nodded in satisfaction as the slingers darted out to loose their deadly missiles again, taunting the cumbersome cavalrymen as they pecked lethally at the Parthian flanks.

‘And if that’s bothering them then what’s coming next will tear the arse right out of their day.’

Marcus stepped forward from the Tungrian cohort’s line, smiling as the long spears to either side of him angled away to make room for his advance. Dubnus turned away from the press of battle for a moment, cupping his hands to bellow the only order he would need to issue to his men.

‘Tenth Century, to me! For the Bear!’

Spurred by the reference to their former centurion’s memory, his men were up and running from their places beside the Scorpions in an instant, each with his axe gripped in one hand and the other clenched into a fist, pumping their legs to cover the hillside at their best speed. Turning back and hefting his own weapon, he stepped in behind Marcus as the tribune crabbed forward towards the Parthian king with his gladius ready to parry, the longer spatha’s lethally sharp blade waiting behind it.

‘Osroes! Face me!’

The king’s head snapped round at the sound of his name, his eyes visible in his gold-chased helmet’s eye slits, locking stares with the Roman as he strode forward. Clad from head to foot in heavy armour, each scale edged with gold or silver in a glorious display of wealth, he paused for no more than a heartbeat before giving combat, raising his shield to match the threat from Marcus’s gladius while the mace’s many bladed head hovered at his shoulder, ready to strike. A sleet of arrows flew at the horsemen around him as the Hamian archers sought to protect their tribune, a rider behind Osroes falling backwards from his saddle as a well-aimed shot found the heavy chain mail that hung from his helmet to protect his face, brutally smashing the rings into the back of his throat.

‘Media!’

The armoured figure stepped in quickly, dispensing with any subtlety with his first sweeping strike, the mace’s viciously sharpened ridges whistling through the air over Marcus’s head as he flexed his knees to evade the strike. Lightning-fast despite the weight of his armour, Osroes snapped a foot out to catch the Roman while he was off balance, only to stagger as his intended victim sprang to one side, hammering the flat of his gladius at the outstretched leg hard enough to break the extended knee had it not been protected by overlapping iron scales. The Parthian staggered backwards, his eyes wide with the pain, then reeled as his attacker broke the blade of his spatha against the magnificent helmet with a brutal blow, sending the golden crown flying into the mud. Tossing the weapon’s hilt aside he snatched up the king’s fallen mace as a pair of unhorsed cataphracts struggled through the press, desperate to rescue their king.

The first of them had drawn his sword, but as he swung the blade back to strike Dubnus stepped in swiftly, hammering the heavy spike that backed his axe’s blade hard into the Parthian’s scaled chest and dropping him, writhing in agony. He stepped back as half a dozen lances stabbed out at him from the second and third ranks, but Marcus advanced to attack, parrying the other warrior’s first sword stroke and then backhanding him with a sweeping mace strike that deformed his helmet, and bounced him off the armoured flank of a dying horse to fall limply into the blood-stained dust. With a savage cry, a rider in the second rank took his chance, jabbing his lance at the Roman while his attention was on the fallen man, catching him unawares and sinking the long spear’s leaf-shaped head deep into his right bicep. His face contorting with the pain, Marcus wrenched his arm free, stepping back with his sword hanging limply from nerveless fingers, and the rider spurred his horse forward a precious foot, driving it into the mass of dead and dying animals as he raised the spear overarm, ready for the death stroke.

‘For the Bear!’

The first of Dubnus’s men to reach the scene thrust his way through the Roman line and leapt forward with utter disregard for his own safety, hacking his blade down into the horse’s long face, the force of the blow sending armour scales flying as he killed the animal with a single blow. Collapsing into the churned and bloody dirt, the beast spilt its rider forward at the soldier’s feet, and with a brutal economy of effort, the Tungrian wrenched his weapon’s blade free, reversing his grip on the axe’s handle as he raised it to strike before sinking the thick iron pick deep into the stunned Parthian’s face through the mail that hung from his helmet, screaming the cohort’s battlecry in his moment of triumph.

‘Tungriaaaaa!’

More of Dubnus’s Tenth Century were flooding into the fight, each man swinging his axe with a wide-eyed ferocity that had those cataphracts still in control of their mounts frantically seeking to back them out of the fray, knowing that their long lances were too unwieldy and their swords and maces too short to prevent the slaughter of their horses and their own inevitable defeat.

‘Forward. Support them!’

With a roar the cohort stepped forward again, their long spears stabbing out at the riders stranded on their immobile horses.

Looking out to the legion’s flanks, Scaurus saw the distant silhouettes of horsemen riding around the ends of his legion’s line.

‘Any moment now …’

With a sudden blare of horns the cataphracts were starting to disengage, those men who were able, turning their horses away from the fight and riding back down the hill, their mounts capable of little more than an exhausted trot after the exertion of their charge up the slope only moments before.

‘Too late, I’m afraid. Far too late.’

The Roman cavalry bored in from either side of the legion’s line, riders bent over their mount’s necks to encourage them to their greatest speed as they raced across the hillside in pursuit of their shattered enemy. At their head the legatus could see Felix, his spear held high as he closed on the first of the fleeing cataphracts, Hades seeming to float across the ground such was the speed of his gallop. With a swift adjustment in his saddle, the young prefect lowered his weapon, leaning gracefully out of his saddle to thrust the long blade deep into the unarmoured anus of his target’s mount. The horse went down in a flurry of limbs, throwing its rider heavily to the ground as Felix ripped the bloodied spear free and went after his next victim, while a man on his flank reined his horse in and jumped nimbly from the saddle, drawing his sword and standing over the fallen horseman.