Thunder of the Gods (25 page)

‘It’s going to be close! Your legatus may get a cavalry action whether he wants it or not!’

The Parthian horse archers had already reacted, galloping forward towards the suddenly visible Romans with all the speed they could muster. Felix looked down the wheeling line of his wing with narrowed eyes, nodding slowly.

‘Once the wing’s in position, sound the gallop! We need to get out from under the threat of those archers!’

Quintus nodded, raising an arm ready to give the signal, and as the furthest right squadron wheeled through ninety degrees, he swept it forward, bellowing the order at the decurions who had already ridden their mounts forward of their men to better see him, anticipating the command.

‘At the gallop … GO!’

The wing’s horses leapt forward, eager to run, and with a hammering cacophony of hoofs, the squadrons accelerated away from the pursuing archers who fell away behind them, their mounts clearly blown from their impetuous charge. Looking over his left shoulder, Felix gauged the amount of progress that the fleeing wing had made, then turned in his saddle to stare back at the pursuing archers, who were now peeling away from their erstwhile prey to rejoin the main body in its remorseless advance towards the Roman main body.

‘Slow them down to a canter and give the horses a chance to breathe!’

He waited while Quintus gave the order, watching as the archers fell in with the line of their army’s advance.

‘We haven’t distracted them enough yet!’

His senior decurion looked back at the Parthians, then back at his prefect with a knowing expression.

‘What are you thinking?’

The Phrygians were now riding out past the Parthian right flank, the closest of the enemy horsemen a good mile distant from the furthest right squadron in their line.

‘As long as we just buzz around their line of advance like a sand fly, we’re not going to distract them enough to give the legatus the time he needs!’

He looked back at his subordinate, his face hard with the certainty of what they were going to have to do.

The soldiers were sweating heavily now, working hard at the double march that was taking them north towards the distant mountains that formed the border with Armenia. Scaurus looked over his shoulder, seeing the Phrygians’ dust moving slowly across what he presumed was the front of the Parthian advance.

‘How far back do you think they are?’

Julius took a swift look back.

‘Five miles?’

Scaurus nodded.

‘No more than six. If they’re trotting their horses to keep them fresh for the battle we might just beat them to the hills. But if they’re cantering …’

Julius shrugged.

‘Then we’ll have to fight them on the plain. And we know from young Varus’s account how well that’s likely to go.’

‘My orders from the Legatus were to distract the enemy from the legion for long enough to let him set up a defence, Quintus, and at the moment it’s not working! We’ll just have to try harder!’

The prefect grinned at his senior decurion, provoking a shake of the older man’s head.

‘Right wheel?’

Felix nodded back at him.

‘Right wheel!’

Quintus shouted the order with a look of disbelief that was matched by the troopers around them as the wing began to pivot once more, turning gradually to the east, its path curving round to take the Roman cavalry around to the rear of the Parthian force and present a threat to the plodding infantrymen that he calculated the enemy general would be unable to ignore. Turning in his saddle, the young prefect watched the enemy host intently. Quintus shook his head.

‘They’re not reacting!’

‘Just a little longer …’

The Phrygians had turned most of the way through ninety degrees, their course taking them past the right-hand side of the Parthian host with half a mile of empty desert between the two bodies of men. Quintus opened his mouth to argue with his prefect, closing it as Felix snapped out a terse command.

‘Left wheel, canter pace!’

The Parthian host had abruptly wheeled to their right and accelerated to a headlong gallop, their commander heedless of his force’s reserves of stamina as he drove them across the plain in pursuit of the Romans. For a moment even Felix was convinced that he had gambled and lost, as the leading Parthian horse archers galloped at his wing’s rear with arrows ready to loose.

‘Should we gallop them?’

The veteran shook his head with a scowl, looking back at the pursing archers.

‘Their mounts will soon be blown at that speed, so they’ll never catch us. Only question is whether they can get close enough to loose their—’

‘Here it comes!’

One of the riders pointed at their pursuers with an urgent warning shout. Felix followed his pointing arm and cringed as the Parthian horsemen, knowing that the Romans would soon be out of range, loosed a volley of arrows at their maximum range.

‘Shields!’

The first volley was swiftly followed by two more, the third flight of arrows leaving their bows before the first had fallen to earth, while each of the Phrygians raised his long oval shield to protect both horse and rider from the falling arrowheads. With an eerie whistle the first volley fell onto the very rearmost of the wing’s riders, an iron rain that battered at their raised shields, hammering down into horses and riders alike. A score or more of the rearmost horses were hit on their unshielded hindquarters, most of them continuing on their way with no more reaction than a squeal of protest as the falling missiles drove the protective iron scales of their barding into the flesh below, but in four cases the arrows penetrated the armoured protection and drove deep into the flesh, causing the beasts unbearable pain and driving them to throw their riders in their kicking, screaming agony. The second and third volleys lanced down onto the fallen riders even as Felix hesitated, only one of them retaining sufficient of his wits to raise his shield and take shelter beneath its thick wooden protection. The other three troopers jerked under the arrows’ impact, but as the Phrygians rode on, the last of their comrades threw aside his shield and stared after them in disbelief at his fate. Readying himself to turn and ride to the man’s rescue, the prefect felt a hard grip clamp onto his right arm.

‘No! No man breaks formation!’

Felix started at Quintus’s barked command.

‘And especially not you, Prefect!’

The prefect stared bleakly at his senior decurion.

‘But …’

The decurion shook his head sadly, staring back at the solitary trooper as the Parthian archers rode towards the doomed man.

‘You gave the order, no man to leave the formation, now you can honour it! He knows what to do … if he has the sense to use his dagger on himself before they get hold of him.’

The first cohort of legionaries marched wearily onto the hill’s lowest slopes and were promptly turned from the line of march by the waiting Julius. He stalked alongside their senior centurion for a moment, barking out instructions and pointing out their intended position.

‘Just as we practised it! Climb until you’re a hundred paces from the crest, then turn to your left and take them along the hillside for three hundred paces, then stop! Make sure there’s enough room behind you for the artillery to shoot over your heads! Face your men down slope and get your long spears to the front, then let them have a rest and a drink of water. I want a continuous line along the hill with no gaps, so make sure your boys and the next cohort have a seamless join! Right, get on with it!’

He turned away and walked down the cohort’s column past rank after rank of grim-faced, sweating soldiers, ready to repeat his instructions to the next cohort’s commander. The bulk of the legion was deploying across the hillside before Scaurus marched up with the rearguard, smiling when he saw the first spear waiting for him. The two men paused as the Tungrians marched on into the heart of the swiftly composed defence, taking their place in the central section of the line.

‘Doesn’t look like much, does it?’

Scaurus nodded, his gaze running along the line of men stretching across a mile or so of the ridge that ran from east to west, then turned to look out over the landscape below, the road they had left lost in the distance to the south. The legion’s defensive positions were effectively at the top of a shallow climb of over a mile’s length that steepened discernibly in its last two hundred paces, and Julius shook his head as he looked at the ground before them.

‘I can’t see how this gentle slope is going to make it any easier for us to beat them?’

His legatus turned and looked back to the cloud of dust that indicated the Parthian host’s progress, already visibly closer.

‘It looks just right to me.’

Julius raised an interrogatory eyebrow, and the younger man’s lips twitched into a smile.

‘I know you can’t see it, but trust me, this is dangerous ground for an army that depends on horse archers and heavy cavalry.’ He pointed to the approaching enemy, now less than five miles away. ‘That said, perhaps we’d be wise to put a legion between ourselves and those Parthians?’

The Parthian kings rode out before their men to see the Roman position for themselves, each of the three men escorted by a hundred of their respective household bodyguards, the knights surrounding them glorious in their shining magnificence.

‘At least this time someone has had the sense to find some ground that does not insult us.’

The other two men regarded King Osroes of Media, the most senior of them by dint of the size of both his kingdom and his army, in an appropriately respectful silence.

‘A good deployment too.’

He stared up the shallow slope with a keen gaze. A long line of infantry stretched along a half-mile of the ridge, their position apparently chosen with an eye to defence against cavalry.

‘See how both ends of the line are anchored on breaks in the ridge line? We won’t be able to take them in the flanks, and if we try to attack their rear I suspect we’ll find the ground too difficult for our horses. Someone’s been reading the histories.’

The young king of Hatra, barely a man and less experienced than the other two, stared up at the Romans with wide eyes.

‘What will we do then, Osroes? How will we defeat them?’

The oldest man of the three, a black bearded thug of a man clad in black armour, in whose kingdom the Romans had chosen to make their statement of domination over the King of Kings’ throne decades before by seizing his fortress city of Nisibis, growled the answer before the Median had a chance to answer.

‘In the same way our ancestors dealt with them at Carrhae, Wolgash. With the flail of our archers to weaken their line until blood flows down that hill like water. And then …’

He slapped a heavy gold and silver decorated mace into his palm.

‘Our knights will tear through them with the righteous rage of the Sun God’s true followers! We will deal out the same fate to these men that we visited upon their brothers not far from here. And once they are scattered, Nisibis will surely fall to us.’

Osroes raised an eyebrow at his older cousin.

‘But first, Narsai, given their numbers, we will exercise a little diplomacy.’

‘Diplomacy!
While their boots sully the earth on which my kingdom is founded?’

The Median smiled tolerantly.

‘Our brother Narsai wishes to bathe in Roman blood once more, and paint himself from head to toe with the gore that will reaffirm his claim on the city.’

The king of Adiabene nodded his agreement.

‘I do! And only their abject surrender will cure me of that need to put my foot on Rome’s throat!’

‘And yet …’

‘And yet
what?
’

‘And yet, Narsai, there may be a way to send them away, defeated and humiliated, without having to lose good Parthian warriors to their defence. It would be remiss of us not to enquire of them as to whether they would rather die in agony or live to recross the border with their skins intact.’

The older man snorted derisively.

‘As you wish, Osroes. Perhaps your father’s abject defeat at their hands has made you overly wary of these …
children.
’

The Median smiled slowly.

‘Or perhaps you, Narsai, king of
half
a kingdom, are braver with my men at your back than you might be with only the force you can muster from your own land?’

His question was posed in the same light tone with which he had appraised the waiting Romans, but one hand had moved to rest on the handle of his own mace in its place at his belt.

‘Whatever might be the truth, never forget that my father, his long life be blessed, sowed his seed in the most evil tempered of his wives to beget me. The patience he has bequeathed me wars with her implacable urge to cause damage during my every waking moment, and just once I might be tempted to unleash that darker side.’

Osroes met the older man’s eyes and widened his own in challenge, the household knights around them fidgeting nervously at the threat of internecine bloodshed. He smiled suddenly, prompting an unconscious copy of the expression to break out across the younger king of Hatra’s face in simple relief.

‘And trust me, Narsai, one quick conversation with the leader of those walking dead men ought to suffice. He will surely realise that they will never be able to stand against five thousand of the finest archers in the world.’

‘They seem to want to negotiate.’

Scaurus looked down at the party of knights approaching the legion’s line up the hillside under a flag of truce, watching as the heavy horses’ feet slipped and slid in the loose soil.

‘Negotiate? The only thing they’ll want to negotiate over is whether we get to keep our weapons, once we’ve marched under the yoke. And I’m not surprised. Someone down there has come to the unhappy realisation that this fight isn’t one that he wants to risk, so he’s willing to spend a few minutes finding out if we’d be good enough to abandon this rather impressive defensive position and slink off with our tails between our legs. And that’s
before
he sees the surprises we have in store for them.’