Thunder of the Gods (27 page)

‘Bolt throwers – shoot when ready!’

Another salvo of bolts tore at the advancing horsemen as they passed the four-hundred-pace marker, and Scaurus smiled tightly down at the oncoming mass of men and beasts.

‘So now the kings are looking at each other with
that
expression. We’ve all worn that face at some time or other, when something goes wrong without warning. After all, this isn’t what’s supposed to happen, is it? It’s not enough to put them off the idea that their victory’s predetermined, mind you …’

A third salvo of bolts hissed away from the Roman line, a little ragged this time as the faster crews loosed their bolts an instant before their comrades, and along the Parthian front more archers fell in bloody ruin or were thrown from their dying mounts.

‘After all, their losses are only a pinprick to an army of that size, and once those horsemen get into arrow range they’ll shower us with sharp iron in fine style. I doubt King Osroes is especially troubled at this point.’

He turned to Julius.

‘Archers, First Spear?’

The first spear nodded, raising his hand again.

‘Archers!’

From their places behind the legion’s line, two full cohorts of Hamians stepped back up the slope ten paces, gaining sufficient elevation to see the Parthian light cavalry trotting towards them. Some men rotated their right arms in readiness for the exertion to come without any conscious thought, already lost to the drilled routine that made them so deadly to an unprepared foe.

‘Archers … light targets!’

Each man reached his right hand back to the quiver of arrows waiting at his hip, using his thumb to find an arrow with a dimple drilled into the base of its shaft and delicately sliding it out of the press of its fellows. Some men kissed the missile’s broad crescent heads as they lifted them to their weapons, others muttered quiet prayers to their goddess, but the majority, eyes stonelike with concentration, simply nocked the arrow to their bows and waited for the next command.

‘At two hundred paces – draw!’

A thousand archers forced the perfectly trained strength of their upper bodies into their weapons, raising their arms until the arrows’ heads were pointing high into the air and then holding the position, waiting for the order to kill their enemies.

Julius waited in silence until the trotting horses passed the two-hundred-pace marker.

‘Loose!’

With a swishing sigh a thousand arrows flicked away from the Hamians’ bows, the archers’ previously slow, measured movements abruptly replaced by swift, merciless precision as they nocked their second arrows with hands that had been trained until the movements were simple muscle memory, mindless routine that they could repeat again and again until their quivers were empty.

‘Loose!’

The first flight of arrows was high in the air above the Parthians as the second volley flew in their pursuit, and again the archers reached behind them with movements almost too fast to follow.

‘Loose!’

The third volley was launched from the Roman line as the first struck, the isolated but crushing impact of Scorpion bolts suddenly augmented by something much deadlier to the men massed below the legion’s line. Cowering beneath their hopelessly inadequate wicker shields, the leading enemy ranks shivered under the rain of iron, scores of men dropping from their mounts, their bodies spitted by the arrows’ impacts, while some of the horses were hit by two or three of the broad-headed missiles. The screaming of men and animals rent the air, and the watching legionaries muttered to each other in genuine amazement as the Parthian advance slowed to no more than a walk, the ranks of horsemen following up behind obstructed by the dead and dying bodies of their comrades.

A horn blew, a clear and insistent command echoing out across the Parthian army, and the horsemen raised the bows that had been waiting for the command, arrows already nocked to their strings.

‘Have they got the range to hit us from that far out, shooting uphill?’

Qadir pursed his lips at the first spear’s question.

‘Shooting uphill, First Spear, their arrows will be robbed of much of their power to pierce our defences. They won’t be able to reach us here, and they won’t trouble the Scorpions, but they’ll be able to put their arrows into the infantry.’

Julius nodded to his trumpeter, and the horn sounded again.

‘Third legion – cover!’

The command was echoed down the line by his centurions, each century’s front rank promptly kneeling with their shields upright before them, while the second rank crouched behind them with their shields raised at an angle, the other two ranks standing with their boards held over their heads to provide protection against any arrows lofted high into the air above them.

‘Archers – cover!’

Stepping in behind the legion’s line, the Hamians ducked under the shield wall’s roof, while the big men waiting to either side of each Scorpion lifted the massive shields that had lain on the ground before each of the bolt throwers, holding them together to form a wooden wall behind which the crews continued to work their weapons.

The Parthian horns sounded again, and the horsemen loosed a massed volley of arrows that arced up the hillside, seemingly hanging in the sky for a moment before hissing down into the legion’s line, each heavy iron head smacking into the raised shields with a sharp thudding rattle that sounded like winter hail on a wooden roof.

‘The shields are working!’

All along the legion’s line the soldiers’ shields were studded with arrows, but where the missiles would normally have ripped through the wooden boards and into the men behind them, they had for the most part utterly failed to penetrate the enhanced protection afforded by the layers of linen and leather so painstakingly applied in Antioch. Here and there a lucky shot would slip through the inevitable small gaps in the wall of leather-faced wood to find a target, but along the line the Third Gallica’s cohorts were standing firm against the arrow storm. Scaurus grinned back at his genuinely amazed first spear.

‘I wonder which one of the three kings is going to be the most unhappy when they realise what’s happening!’

Few of the arrows had sufficient range to reach the legion’s line of Scorpions, but those that did had no more effect on the giant shields than upon those wielded by the legionaries, protruding in lonely solitude from the protective screens. With a slapping twang the nearest Scorpion spat a bolt over the legionaries’ heads, the missile vanishing into the mass of horsemen with unknown but deadly effect. Some of the Hamians were shooting arrows through small gaps in the line of shields, a rapidly swelling torrent of missiles raining down onto the Parthian archers and adding to the confusion on the plain below.

‘We’ve stopped their advance! They can’t perform their usual trot to within a hundred paces, loose and turn away, not with our Hamians shooting at them and dying horses struggling about the battlefield!’

Scaurus nodded, looking beyond the milling archers to where the Parthian heavy cavalry stood waiting for the moment that their monstrous power would be unleashed to deliver the legion’s death blow.

‘Indeed. I wonder what Osroes is making of this.’

‘They’re killing my archers! We have to
do
something!’

Narsai was bolt upright in his saddle, his thighs stiffened to raise his body higher for a better view. Ignoring the shouted imprecations of his fellow monarch, Osroes looked over the mass of the combined force of archers, their usual cycle of attack and retreat clearly reduced to a shambles by the growing number of horses and riders who were being killed and wounded by the Romans’ unceasing shower of arrows and artillery bolts. On the slope above them, the enemy line was apparently untroubled by the volleys of arrows that were being launched at them by the remaining archers.

‘There’s something wrong here …’

Narsai leaned in close to him, almost climbing out of his gold- and jewel-encrusted saddle in his urge to be heard, bellowing at Osroes with such vehemence that his saliva spattered across the king’s immaculate gilt armour.

‘The only thing that’s wrong is that we’re sat here doing nothing while good men die at the hands of those fucking invaders!’

Osroes stared at him for a moment before replying, as curiously calm as he always was when the release of violence beckoned him.

‘Show me that much disrespect just one more time, Cousin, and I’ll consider a change of heart as to whether I’m best off fighting the Romans or bringing your toothless little kingdom to heel.’

Narsai jerked backwards as if he’d been stung, one hand straying towards the handle of his mace, but the movement stalled as he considered the threat of the bodyguard clustered around the royal party. Osroes nodded grimly, gesturing at the magnificently equipped heavy cavalry of his most intimate bodyguard.

‘Wise, Narsai.’

He gestured towards the hill before them.

‘Our enemy seems to have our measure, at least so far. By now I would have expected to see gaps starting to appear in their line as our archers thinned out their numbers, but all I see is the Romans standing firm on that slope, seemingly untroubled. They have bolt throwers and archers behind their line, and by some trickery or other, their shields are resisting our arrows.’

He pulled at his lip thoughtfully.

‘And our archers are shooting uphill, at their longest range …’

Turning in his saddle he summoned his gundsalar, the general of his army, the bodyguard around him parting to make a path for the man’s horse.

‘Your counsel, Gundsalar.’

The cavalry commander bowed from the waist.

‘The archers are failing, Highness. They will not break that line, and while they continue to try they will also continue to take casualties. They should be withdrawn, and used to threaten the Romans from another direction to make a shattering blow from our cataphracti possible!’

Narsai nodded violently, pointing at the legion and almost screaming his agreement.

‘We must ride now, Osroes!
Now!
The honour of our nations depends upon it!’

The king of Media looked round to take the gauge of the third monarch’s commitment, finding Wolgash white-faced with fear.

‘Might a feigned retreat not lure them down from their positions?’

Osroes smiled despite himself, speaking kindly to the young man.

‘Under normal circumstances, Cousin, that would be a most expedient tactic to use with the usual mindless barbarians thrown at the empire by the Romans, but in this case …’

He paused, looking up at the figures standing on the hill’s crest.

‘In this case it seems that someone with a little more subtlety has been placed in command of their attempt to relieve our siege of Nisibis. With this one, I suspect that only irresistible force will serve.’

‘That’s faster than I expected.’

Julius raised his vine stick to point at the Parthian archers, watching as they turned and pulled back away from the arrow-swept strip of ground across which the bodies of so many of their comrades was scattered. Scaurus nodded.

‘It’s the decision I’d make in his place. All they can achieve by persevering is to get a lot more of those poor bastards killed, whereas pulling them back now leaves most of them fit to fight another day.’

‘So we’ve won?’

Scaurus turned to smile at Tribune Varus, who stood next to Marcus watching the battle.

‘Not really, Tribune. At the moment I think the best we could claim is a draw, given that we’re tied to this hill just as long as those archers are close enough to attack us on the march to the next one. If they were to catch us out in the open, I suspect that the balance would tip towards their side of the table. If I were the king of Media, I’d be considering sending for supplies and setting up camp to starve us out, although he probably suspects I’d make him regret the choice once the sun was down for the night. And he’s right.’

The killing ground before them was now deserted, more or less, although the plaintive cries and whinnies of agony from wounded men and horses alike were clearly audible at two hundred paces. Beyond the corpse-strewn wreckage of the archers’ attack, the enemy’s heavy cavalry was on the move, hundreds of the powerfully built steeds necessary to carry both an armoured rider and their own body protection being marshalled into formation.

‘They’ve going to attack us, aren’t they?’

Scaurus smiled at Varus again, realising that tribune was in the grip of a powerful emotion.

‘Yes, I suspect they are. They’re going to come up this slope as fast as horses carrying that much iron can move, and they’re going to try to tear a hole in our line one way or another, either by causing panic among our men or by using their lances to kill from outside the range of our spears. And then, Tribune, we’ll find out if all that drill we’ve been doing has been a waste of time, won’t we? Perhaps you young gentlemen had best go and join your cohorts? And remember, your ancestors are watching. Make them proud, gentlemen, show them that we still know what it is to be Roman.’

Marcus and Varus hurried down the hill towards the Fourth and Fifth Cohorts.

‘I’ll command both Tungrian cohorts to start with. They’re more used to fighting as one unit in any case. If I go down, then you have command.’

The younger man nodded at Marcus, watching as he put on his helmet and drew the shorter of his two swords.

‘And no heroics. If I do fall then these men will need you to command them. You’re no good to them dead. That reunion with your ancestors you’re planning will have to wait a while.’

Osroes watched with a wry smile as his cavalry commander arrayed the three kingdoms’ cataphracts into their formation, the veteran soldier shouting and cursing as he laboured to make order out of their ranks, trotting his horse to and fro to deliver his commands in person rather than depend on messengers.

‘I do believe that man won’t be happy until we’re as neatly paraded as those Romans up there. But, since we’re not Romans …’