Thunder of the Gods (43 page)

‘They want wood, and in some quantity given they’ve been cutting trees down all morning. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they’re building something … but what? As you say, siege engines might be their best bet, if they want to have any chance of putting a big enough hole in the city wall to attack through.’

‘Indeed. Towers wouldn’t be any use, because the moat’s too wide for them to get close enough to the wall. And what else would they want all that wood for?’

Scaurus stared out at the mystery Parthian activity for a moment longer before replying.

‘Damming the river?’

Petronius shook his head briskly.

‘What would be the point? It’s a well-known fact that the city has several fresh water springs within the walls, that’s the reason why it was built here in the first place. They can piss in the river, float dead cows down it and yes, they could even dam it without my losing any sleep. No, it’ll be something much more sinister than that, I’d imagine. I just wish I could work out what on earth they’re intending do with all that wood.’

After an hour or so the rain abated from its constant roaring deluge to a relatively gentle downfall, and Marcus ordered the crew to stop bailing out the water that had been threatening to swamp the
Night Witch
. The sailors slumped exhaustedly onto their rowing benches, and the young tribune took a head count while they were temporarily still.

‘Six men.’

He turned to find Gurgen behind him.

‘And there were twelve of them when we left your fortress. Barely enough to handle the boat, I’d guess.’

Marcus shrugged.

‘Barely enough will have to do. I’m not going to give up now, not having got this far.’

‘And the horsemen pursuing us? What if they—’

‘Cross the river while it’s in flood? They won’t dare that feat until the water’s receded a good deal, and stopped flowing quite so fast. And their bowstrings will have been soaked in that downpour. No, we’re safe from Narsai’s men, for the time being. But we do need to put some distance between ourselves and the last place they saw us.’

He beckoned Thracius’s deputy over.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Tertius, Tribune.’

‘Well then, Tertius, we need to move from here, or the Parthians may appear over that hill to finish the job.’

He pointed over the sailor’s shoulder at the shallow rise in the ground that ran down to the Khabur’s left bank.

‘Not too far, just enough to convince them we’re long gone, when they manage to cross the Mygdonius.’

‘I don’t know, Tribune.’

The bearded crewman shook his head with a look of exhaustion.

‘The lads’re pretty much all done …’

He waved a hand at the remaining crew members, half of whom were already asleep where they had slumped. Marcus stepped closer to him, lowering his voice.

‘You have food and water?’

The sailor nodded.

‘Not that anyone’s going to want water, after that.’

‘Wine?’

A knowing calculation crept over the other man’s features.

‘A little.’

‘Then here it is. Get them awake, get them fed, and give me twenty miles, and then they can sleep for an hour or two. And you, Tertius, will be master of the
Night Witch
, if you think you can manage the added responsibility. Of course, you could just name Thracius’s successor, if you’re not sure you’ve got it in you?’

The crewman grinned at him, his fatigue forgotten.

‘I’m your man, Tribune. Appoint me master and I’ll have these lazy bastards on their feet and pushing us south before you’ve got time to work out my pay rate.’

Marcus nodded, holding out his hand for the
Night Witch
’s new master to clasp.

‘Wake up, you rough-arsed refugees from a Syrian prick doctor’s waiting room!’

The crew stirred, turning indignant faces to stare at their erstwhile comrade.

‘Get your fucking feet on the deck, we’ve a sail to raise! You …’

He pointed at the youngest of them.

‘You, open the food locker and make sure every man gets a double ration of bread, and a cup of wine as well! We need to get twenty miles between us and those dick-beating horse humpers before we can sleep, unless any of you helmet polishers wants to risk having your foot nailed to the deck like poor old Tarsus there!’

All eyes turned to the stricken sailor whose foot had been freed swiftly but brutally once the immediate danger was past. The new master, with a swift and decisive approach to the problem, had pulled a pair of pincers from the tool chest and taken a deceptively experimental grip of the arrow’s iron head, as if sizing up the task at hand while the wounded sailor had moaned with pain at the arrowhead’s slight movement. Raising his eyebrows at the men behind the sailor, he’d waited until they had taken a firm grip of their comrade’s arms, wrapped a big hand around his ankles and, ignoring his mate’s bulging eyes and babbled entreaties, clamped the pincers hard to the arrowhead and torn it free. The wounded man was now asleep on his bench, his foot wrapped in a bloody length of cloth, exhausted by the ordeal but still moaning with the pain.

After a moment of lethargic thought, the remaining crew members turned to their tasks like sleepwalkers, too tired to contest their new master’s flatly stated orders.

‘You chose well.’

Marcus shrugged tiredly at Gurgen’s statement as the vessel cast off once more, slipping out into the middle of the Khabur’s stream and heading south and east down the river’s winding course.

‘The man who taught me to fight was a retired gladiator. He showed me how to fight and kill an opponent with any weapon that comes to hand, but the most important thing I learned from him was always to watch the other man’s eyes.’

‘He was right. And in that man’s eyes you saw …?’

‘The same flat-eyed lack of interest in anything other than getting the job done that I look for in my officers. The look of a man who wouldn’t care what his friends thought of him if there was a promotion in it for him.’

The Parthian grinned.

‘And what is it that you see in my eyes, Tribune?’

Marcus looked back at him levelly, but before he could answer a weak voice from behind them snatched the Parthian’s attention from the conversation.

‘Where are we?’

Osroes was awake, blinking painfully in the afternoon’s dull iron light, and Gurgen hurried to him as the king’s face creased in puzzlement at the hard wooden surface beneath him.

‘On the river Khabur, my king, heading south to join the Euphrates. We managed to give our pursuers the slip.’

He helped the weakened king to sit up against
Night Witch
’s side, taking a water bottle from Marcus and lifting it to Osroes’ lips. The bidaxs covered the king’s legs with a thick cloak, the heavy wool still damp from the deluge, steam rising into the thick, humid air.

‘We were blessed, it seems, and yet cursed at the same time. The gods sent a storm to cover our escape from your cousin Narsai’s pursuit, but that same storm gave their arrows unnatural reach. Some men died.’

He waved a hand in dismissal of the fact, and Marcus’s lips narrowed in anger.

‘Forgive me, Your Highness. I have wounded to attend.’

He found Martos and the new master examining the wounded, the Briton’s eyes alive with concern for his friend. He looked down at the unconscious sailor.

‘This one will live to pull an oar, although whether he’ll ever prance around the ship with the rest of these water rats is less sure. There’s nothing we can do but let him sleep and see what state the wound’s in tomorrow. Whereas this monster …’

He gestured to Lugos, who sat in silence contemplating the arrow shaft that protruded from his thigh with stoic disregard.

‘This, I will admit, worries me. Their arrows are barbed, and this one is stuck deep in the meat of his thigh. I fear that its removal might well open a blood vessel and cause him to bleed to death.’

Marcus nodded thoughtfully.

‘He needs a trained medic. How far are we from Dura?’

Tertius thought for a moment.

‘At least one hundred miles, Tribune, perhaps another twenty or thirty besides.’

He shrugged.

‘I was not responsible for navigation. With the river in spate we will cover perhaps ten miles in each hour, with the sail raised.’

‘Gurgen?’

The Parthian stood, walking across the boat’s deck to his side.

‘Roman?’

‘You said you have studied maps of your empire. Where are we? Is this still Adiabene?’

The noble shook his head.

‘No. Where the Mygdonius and the Khabur meet is the point where Narsai’s rule ends, and thereafter it is the King of Kings who is master. This, Roman, is Parthia.’

As the sun dipped to meet the horizon, Tertius shook his men awake from their two-hour sleep, ignoring their exhausted curses and groans and setting them to work to raise
Night Witch
’s black sail. The vessel was quickly moving as fast as a distance runner’s best pace, the fresh northerly wind bellying her sail out. Marcus looked about him as the vessel ran out of the cover of the raised riverbanks, relieved to find the golden-hued landscape empty of the pursuing forces he had feared might be within sight.

‘We may stick out like a bridegroom’s prick now, Tribune, but give it an hour and we’ll be nothing more than a black hole in the river.’

He nodded at Tertius’s confident words, but the master beckoned him closer with a conspiratorial expression.

‘But you should be aware that the crew ain’t happy to be making this run in the darkness.’

‘Why? Isn’t this the entire reason that the boat’s painted black?’

The soldier chuckled quietly.

‘It ain’t the darkness that scares them. It’s the spirits.’

‘Spirits?’

The sailor laughed again.

‘Judge for yourself, Tribune. We’ll be there soon enough.’

The boat ran south at a brisk clip, riding the Khabur’s flow with the breeze filling her sail and, with little else to do, her crew watched with obvious concern as the sun sank slowly down onto the western horizon.

‘There! Shadikanni!’

A sharp-eyed sailor pointed south, and Marcus followed his arm to find a barely discernible cluster of ruined buildings in the dusk’s gloom. The man made a warding gesture with his index and ring fingers raised, his face pale in the gloom.

‘We should not pass through Saddikanni after nightfall. It is a place of evil!’

Staring at the ruins, Marcus shook his head.

‘Our wounded cannot afford to wait another day. If we wait for daylight before passing this place, we will then be forced to wait for nightfall before we try to sail through the Parthian settlements to the south. And besides …’

He looked to the west, where the sun was sinking beneath the horizon.

‘It won’t be dark for a while yet. If you want to be through the city before then I suggest you row.’

The man stared at him for a moment, then hurried to his bench and took up his oar, shouting imprecations at his comrades as he urged them to do the same. Propelled to the speed of a sprinting athlete by the oars’ additional thrust, the
Night Witch
flew across the water, Tertius grinning at his mates’ discomfiture as he steered her through the river’s bends towards the ruined city.

‘I know a little of the history of this place.’

Gurgen was at Marcus’s shoulder, his face unreadable in the growing gloom.

‘The name for it these days is Horaba, but when this was a great city of Assyria it was named Saddikanni. This place was built when your great city of Rome was no more than a collection of savages living in huts made of mud, and the empire of which this city was only a very small part endured for two thousand years, from the time when a weapon made of bronze was the deadliest thing a man could put in his hand. The men that built this city conquered Egypt, Babylon and Persia. They ruled the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Jews and the Arabs. They defeated the Hittites, the Ethiopians, the Cimmerians and the Scythians. They rose to rule the world, Roman, in the same way that your empire aspires to control everything it touches, but it crumbled to dust, as all empires must when they no longer produce men with the strength and will to keep them vital. They became soft, and were overrun by the younger and more vital peoples around them, and now we do battle over the scraps of what was once the mightiest power in the world. Such is the way of all kingdoms, unless the strong act when they have the chance.’

He fell silent, and both men stood in silence as the boat rounded the last bend and slid into the ruined city’s deep shadow. The wind gusted, rippling the
Night Witch
’s black sail, and while the crew stared at it aghast, their oars momentarily forgotten, the breeze suddenly fell away to no more than a zephyr, leaving the canvas dangling emptily. The ship’s new master snarled an order at his men.

‘Row! Row like fuck!’

Even the previously amused Tertius seemed to have taken his crew’s nervousness to heart, bellowing at his men to put their backs into their rowing. On both sides of the river the wreckage of a once proud city rose above the river’s banks, themselves lined in the remnants of what was once a stone dockside. On the eastern bank rose a single tall column, above which stood the silhouette of a winged bull, still visible as a black outline against the deep purple sky behind it, and the nearest sailor to Marcus quailed at the sight.

‘It has no power! I am an acolyte of the light bearer, he who slew the bull and feasted in heaven above with the Sun God himself! The Lord Mithras will protect us from any evil that dwells here!’

The crew rowed even harder, caught between the ancient city’s terror and the hard-voiced tribune’s cast-iron certainty in his own god, but where several of them muttered their own prayers to Mithras, Gurgen simply shook his head and laughed aloud.

‘
My
god is Ahura Mazda, which means “
the light of wisdom
” in your barbarous tongue. All other deities are subservient to his will, and the sun and moon dance to his command. And this?’

He waved a hand at the ruins passing on either side of the vessel. ‘This is a warning, nothing more and nothing less. All empires come to dust in their time, when strong men are no longer to be found. Wake me when we reach anything of note.’