Thunder of the Gods (30 page)

Julius shook his head in horrified amazement.

‘Is that usual?’

Scaurus shook his head.

‘Hardly. But when your enemy has a weakness it’s wise to exploit it, I feel. If we allow that many armoured cavalry to escape they’ll soon enough regain their wits and come at us again. And all of those surprises we’ve sprung on them today won’t catch them off guard the next time. Let’s hope that our men remember that each of the enemy knights they take alive is worth his weight in gold.’

As the cataphractoi retreat quickened to a rout, a single man defied the tide of horseflesh washing back from the Roman line, stepping off his horse and striding forward to the place where his king lay stunned, drawing a long sword with his right hand even as he batted away an axe blade with the mace held in his left. Pivoting to kill the Tungrian behind the blade so quickly that the long sword was free in a shower of blood before his victim’s lifeless body could slump into the gore-foamed mud beneath him, he planted his feet firmly over his ruler, snarling defiance at the Romans before him, ready to die in Osroes’ defence.

‘Hold!’

Marcus stepped forward, his gladius ready to fight but with the empty hand that had held his spatha half raised and covered in the blood running from his wound, the palm wide open. He bellowed at the warrior in Greek.

‘Hold! Surrender and the king will live! Look around you!’

The cataphractoi were in full-scale retreat now, harried down the hillside by Phrygian cavalrymen who were taking a savage advantage of their unexpected vulnerability when attacked from the rear.

‘You’re alone! Throw down your sword, and live to protect your king in captivity!’

The nobleman looked about him again, seeing the spears levelled at him from all sides, then stared back at the tribune before him, clearly reckoning the odds. Marcus shook his head and sheathed his gladius, stepping forward with his right hand dripping blood from the wound to his arm. Face-to-face with the man, close enough to see the hatred in his eyes, he shrugged.

‘You can kill me now. But you’ll die here beside me, and what will become of your king without you to stand over him?’

The eyes held his own for a long moment before the helmeted head shook in brusque disgust. Sheathing his weapons, the warrior raised his arms and waited in silence for the inevitable. An axe man stepped in behind him, kicking hard at the back of the armoured giant’s knee to drop him beside his king. Marcus nodded down at him, reaching down to pick up the king’s mace and bellowing a challenge at the soldiers around him.

‘
Alive!
The man that harms him pays the price with
me!
’

Narsai reached the safety of the Parthian infantry waiting at the slope’s base with the dozen men who remained of his bodyguard trotting on either side.

‘Gundsalar!
’

The general hurried forward, looking to either side of the king with an expression of hope, but his only answer was a brusque head shake as Narsai pulled the helmet from his head.

‘Osroes is fallen. Dead or captured, it makes little difference. Those honourless scum fought us from behind a wall of wood and iron!’

The older man looked up the hill with a calculating expression.

‘We have suffered grievously, Your Highness …’

He looked at Narsai for guidance, but the king’s gaze was locked on the ground.

‘Your orders, Highness? In the absence of my king, your word is the army’s command.’

The black-armoured monarch looked up.

‘So it is …’

He sat straighter in his saddle, looking across the ranks of infantry waiting in silence, their faces set hard at the sight of so many dead men and horses scattered down the hill’s bloody slope.

‘Send our foot to dislodge them from their roost, Gundsalar.’

The general bowed.

‘As you wish, Highness.’

He turned away, issuing a volley of orders to the waiting officers, and Narsai turned in his saddle to look back up at the Roman line with a calculating expression.

Scaurus walked across to the line of wooden stakes, shaking his head at the scene of devastation. The corpses of over a hundred magnificent horses were strewn in bloodied heaps across the churned, gore-covered ground, scores more studding the slope where the survivors had been harried back down the hill by Felix’s cavalrymen. They were told to take prisoners.

‘It worked. There was a part of me that wondered whether the histories were just so much nonsense made up to make the old generals look good, but it actually worked …’

He shook his head in bemused regret.

‘If only we hadn’t been forced to kill so many of these magnificent creatures.’

Julius shrugged.

‘I would have been happy to have had a choice in the matter. I’ve given orders for them to be butchered. We’ve little enough food, if those bastards decide to keep us penned up here.’

Scaurus winced at the prospect, but gave no sign of countermanding his senior centurion’s orders.

‘As you decide, First Spear. But I doubt there’s much risk of the Parthians trying to stop us leaving.’

He fell silent, and Julius looked up to find him staring down the hill.

‘Well now …’

The Parthian infantry was marching forward, marshalling to attack at the slope’s foot, densely packed formations of spear men forming a fighting front barely half the width of the defenders’ line. Julius stared down at them for a moment before voicing an opinion.

‘Really? Are they mad?’

Scaurus shrugged.

‘Probably not, but they seem brave enough to follow the orders some fool has given them.’

The two men watched the infantry’s slow advance for a moment before Julius turned away, gesturing to his trumpeter.

‘Sound the Stand To!’

Marcus had stood a close guard over the Parthian king as half a dozen Tungrians lifted the supine figure onto their shoulders and carried him with appropriate dignity to a spot high on the hill above the line of bolt throwers. The nobleman who had dismounted to protect Osroes had insisted on accompanying his ruler, surrendering his sword to Marcus with a flourish, holding the ornately decorated hilt out to the Roman while the Tungrians around him waited with their own blades ready to strike.

‘This is the finest weapon in the whole of my
gund
…’ He’d searched for the right Greek word for a moment. ‘The word means
speira
.’

‘Cohort?’

‘Close enough. It has been edged with steel from the far south, and will cut cleanly through a silken scarf that is dropped upon the blade. A single blow will cleave an armoured man from his collarbone to his balls, if wielded by an expert.’

Marcus lifted the scabbard with a questioning expression.

‘May I?’

The other man nodded, and the sword floated from the leather and gold sheath, perfectly balanced and as light as air.

‘A fine weapon.’

Marcus handed the sword to Varus, who had joined him in the fight’s aftermath, smiling as the younger man made a single hesitant cut with the weapon under its owner’s disapproving eye before returning it to the scabbard. Marcus took the sword back, placing it beside the unconscious king.

‘It will be kept safe until the time comes for your release, as will the crown your king was wearing.’

A sudden bray of trumpets pulled their attention back to the legion. The legionaries were hurrying for their positions, and three men looked down the hill over their heads while the Tungrian line reformed in front of them, centurions and chosen men pushing the exhausted soldiers back into their places with shouts and swift, urgent strikes with their sticks.

‘An infantry attack. Perhaps your leaders would have done well to combine your foot soldiers with the cavalry, but to throw them in separately seems … unwise?’

The Parthian followed his captor’s gaze.

‘It is not the finest day for the empire, I’ll grant you that.’

Marcus bowed.

‘I’ll leave you here with a few men to keep you safe from interference. My duty lies down there …’

He turned to find Dubnus striding up the hill with a forbidding look on his face.

‘Orders from the legatus. He said to tell you that this fight’s going to be no place for a man with one arm, and he’s right. It’ll be swords and shields that win this one, and you’ll be no use to anyone face down in six inches of piss-foamed mud. Your orders, Tribune, are to stay here and make sure nobody takes a dagger to the king there while we’re busy. Tribune Varus is ordered to take your place.’

Varus’s face went pale as he absorbed the order. After a moment he looked at Marcus with an almost questioning expression, and the tribune nodded reluctantly, wearily waving his friends away.

‘Go and do your duty. I’ll watch over our guest. And you, Vibius Varus …’

His colleague turned back to look up at Marcus.

‘No stupidity, Tribune. If you’re going to sacrifice yourself then at least go to meet your ancestors with some style, not fighting a mob of half-trained peasants.’

The younger man nodded and was away down the slope, leaving Marcus staring at Dubnus with a raised eyebrow.

‘Will you watch him for me?’

The big man nodded, his lips twisting in a mocking smile.

‘Cocidius knows I’ve had enough practice.’

He winked at his friend and turned away down the slope to his men, shouting orders and spitting bombast as he strode back into their midst.

‘Now
there’s
a man who could give me a fight …’

The tribune turned to find the big Parthian at his shoulder, staring after Dubnus with a wistful look in his eye and unconsciously stroking his pointed beard.

‘I could have taken you with one good arm.’

His prisoner guffawed at the suggestion.

‘I would have bested you in a dozen heartbeats if you had three arms, but you had already earned your
hunar
by the time I faced you.’

He turned a level gaze on Marcus.

‘The warrior, my friend, is the only member of society willing to sacrifice himself for the good of those men who sit at ease among their wives and children, and thus he learns to respect the
hunar
displayed by his brothers and those against whom he fights. And no true warrior could have shamed himself by taking his iron to a man who stopped fighting to preserve the life of a fallen king.’

‘
Hunar?
’

The noble laughed curtly.

‘You Romans may have heard of it, although your ways of fighting show little evidence of such a familiarity.
Hunar
is a man’s most noble ornament, not simply his skill at arms but his willingness to use it, to risk a fitting death. His manliness, his—’

‘Virtus. What you call “hunar”, we call virtus.’

‘Vir-toos.’

The big man rolled the word in his mouth.

‘Well you, Roman, have vir-toos. I saw you challenge my king to single combat, and I saw you put him down as easily as if you were simply sparring on the training ground. And your men fight like uncaged beasts in your presence, each of them seeking to outdo your prowess.’

Marcus laughed.

‘The Tungrians? That’s just how they are. Experience has taught them that they are more likely to stay intact going forward than if they were to show an enemy their backs.’

The other man nodded sagely.

‘Your words have the power to wound, given my men’s defeat.’

He held out a hand.

‘I am Gurgen, my king’s
bidaxs
, first among his nobles, the fastest sword, the best saddle and the man with more vir-toos than any other knight of my king’s court.’

Marcus made the clasp with him.

‘And I am Marcus, a tribune of the Third Legion. Shall we watch the battle together and see which of our armies has the better of it?’

Sanga and Saratos obeyed the order to stand to with little more enthusiasm than their comrades, taking their places in the Ninth Century’s front line beside each other and staring down the slope at the enemy infantry as they manoeuvred from column to line, spreading along the legion’s frontage. The Dacian nudged Sanga, inclining his head to indicate the young tribune who had been keeping company with Marcus. Shorn of his friend, Varus was standing out before the cohort and watching the oncoming enemy infantry, one hand unconsciously fretting at the hilt of his sword.

‘He looking for a fight to jump into, eh?’

Sanga shrugged, muttering a reply under his breath.

‘Better him than me. And since that’s the one who stood and watched the goat fuckers slaughter his cohort I won’t be in any hurry to pull his nuts out of the fire …’

They watched the Parthian infantry for a moment, grinning at the distant shouts and screams of the enemy officers as they pushed and kicked their men into line. Sanga shook his head, his practised eye having already spotted a weakness in the formation facing them.

‘Whoever ordered that lot to attack must be fucking insane. They’re going to have open flanks on both sides.’

Saratos nodded at the observation. There were probably as many men facing the Third Legion as there were in the Roman line, but the spear men were arrayed four men deep.

‘Why the fuck they have so short a line?’

Sanga shrugged, but the young tribune in front of them answered the question without turning.

‘I saw them fight, on the day I stood and watched
the goat fuckers slaughter my cohort
…’

Sanga’s ears reddened with embarrassment.

‘They present four spearheads to every man facing them, the front ranker stabbing at any target in front of him. The men behind him use their spear in support, attacking any man who looks like presenting him with a threat.’

‘Present with threat, Tribune?’

Varus turned to look at Saratos with a half-smile.

‘If you look dangerous, Soldier, they will point their spears at you to keep their comrade safe. Wait until we’re face-to-face with them, and then see if you fancy going in with your sword against that many long spears. It should be interesting.’

He turned back to his consideration of the Parthian line which, now more or less formed, had lurched into action to the sound of horns.