Thunder of the Gods (28 page)

Encouraging his horse forward with no more than a touch of his heels, he rode out in front of the heavy cavalrymen, nodding his respect to the soldier who, recognising an unspoken command when he saw one, bowed at the waist once more and backed his horse into the body of his kinsmen, a pack of brooding killers with a fierce reputation for their valour in battle.

‘Well now!’

The king’s voice rang out across the horsemen’s ranks, every man craning his neck to see and hear their king.

‘Shall we spare our horses’ strength while we talk?’

He dismounted, holding onto his mount’s reins and stroking its scale-armoured head affectionately, waiting while his men followed his example. When every man was standing alongside his mount, the king took a step forward, looking to either side at the solid wall of armoured men and beasts in front of him before raising his voice to address them.

‘Knights of Media! Honoured brothers of Adiabene! Desert warriors of Hatra! Our fight with the Romans has come down to one simple truth! We must dislodge them from that hillside, either that or we must retire from this place before nightfall, to avoid the risk of their attacking us in the darkness!’

He paused, silently revelling in the hard set of their faces.

‘In truth, I have been waiting for this moment! This is our destiny! This is the moment in which we show these usurpers that they can never stand against Parthian nobility!’

Stepping away from the horse he gestured to it with his free hand.

‘Those of you who are my kinsmen will know that when I first set eyes on this animal I knew I had to have the beast for my own.’

Men in the ranks before him were smiling, recalling the stories that were still told of the moment when Osroes had watched the horse as it had exercised under the command of a skilled rider. He recalled that moment when, despite his possession of a dozen such mounts, the animal’s sheer speed across ground, and the graceful fluidity of its movement seemingly impossible given the weight of armour and rider, its barely controlled savagery in close fighting exercises, was enough to make him cry out in astonishment.

‘You know that I was robbed like a blind man by this beast’s owner, and you know that I would have paid three times as much to own this creature …’

He paused, smiling wryly.

‘Although I would probably have flogged the man as the price of his impudence, if he hadn’t been sweating like a young man on his wedding night.’

Laughter rippled across the ranks of horsemen, the assembled cavalrymen grinning as they recalled the story of how the horse’s owner had walked a fine line between negotiating the sale of a treasured and valuable asset and the risk of incurring the wrath of the most powerful man in his world.

‘So you can imagine just how delighted I am at the prospect of taking this magnificent creature up this hill to confront
that!
’

He pointed up at the Roman line.

‘A single arrow could fell this, the best and most beloved of all the things I own. A bolt from one of their catapults could kill the noble creature in an instant – and if I am afraid for Storm Arrow here, how much more do I fear the loss of a single man from among you? No, my brothers, I do not wish to charge our enemy, up a slope and without the chance for our archers to reduce their numbers a little first!’

He paused for a moment, allowing the words to sink in.

‘But, reluctant or not, Storm Arrow and I, and all of you, must take up arms against these trespassers! We must take that righteous fury that burns fiercely in our hearts at the sight of their boots fouling our homeland, and use it to inspire us to their slaughter!’

He strode forward, raising a fist to challenge the men before him.

‘Ride with me, fellow knights, ride with me against these followers of false gods who sully our homelands! Ride with me, and we will have our revenge for their destruction of the King of Kings’ city of Ctesiphon, a deed to make our fathers proud again! Ride with me, and we will show these ants in iron what it means to face the
hunar
of the
artestarih!
’

The knights arrayed before him erupted in a cacophony of shouts, echoing his last words.

‘The honour of the warriors!’

Swinging his body into the saddle, he raised his kontos over his head.

‘For Adiabene!’

The locally recruited men cheered in response, raising their own lances in salute. Narsai spurred his mount forward a few paces, bellowing something incoherent at the Roman line.

‘For Hatra!’

Wolgash’s knights added their voices to the swelling noise, raising their weapons high.

‘For Media!’

His own men, by far the largest of the three factions present, drowned out their comrades from the smaller kingdoms with a roar that Osroes knew would be audible on the hill above them, and he grinned ferociously at them, his heart swelling with pride as he pulled lightly at the beast’s reins to point it at the enemy.

‘Ride with me!’

Julius nodded slowly as the loudest of the three cheers from the Parthian ranks echoed across the hillside.

‘That’s them ready to come up here then, I presume?’

Scaurus nodded.

‘It does appear that way. And I see they have their archers following up behind to harass our line. I think we’ll greet this attack in the way we agree, First Spear.’

The older man nodded brusquely, beckoning his trumpeter.

‘Sound the Stand Fast.’

On the hill above the Tungrians a horn sounded, and Marcus stepped out of the shield wall to look up and down the line at the senior centurions on either side before raising his sword and shouting the first of the three commands that had been drilled into the legion over the previous weeks.

‘Cohort! Ground and cover!’

The line of soldiers seemed to sink into the ground, each man kneeling to hug the hillside behind his shield, allowing the bolt throwers behind them to shoot with a flatter trajectory as the enemy cavalry drew closer. Turning back to face the oncoming horsemen and dropping into the cover of his shield, Marcus was struck by the sudden silence that had gripped the battlefield, the distant rumble of hoofs no more than a rumour of war compared with the sudden rattle of arrowheads on the line’s shields as the enemy’s first volley scattered across the defenders.

The Parthian cataphracts were moving, their horses striding easily across the last of the plain’s flat surface as it slowly began to angle up towards the waiting legionaries.

‘Archers! Hard targets – loose!’

As the enemy cavalry reached the two-hundred-pace marker, the legion’s archers let fly from their positions behind the line of Scorpions, stringing and loosing arrows at their fastest possible rate. No longer consciously aiming, they were flinging their pointed armour-piercing arrows at the oncoming mass of horsemen as fast as they could, lofting the missiles high into the blue sky to let them fall onto the armoured cavalrymen and their mounts. The purpose-designed spiked arrowheads would strike with enough power to rock a man backwards and, if the missile’s point of impact was favourable, to pierce the armour worn by their targets. Only a few of the oncoming horsemen were affected, but where a mount staggered at the shock of an arrow punching hard at its facial protection, the beasts following it were momentarily slowed, and where a man slid from his saddle with a shaft protruding from a chink in his armour, the chaos was that much greater.

With a massed snap of heavy bowstrings the Scorpions spat their deadly loads over the recumbent line of soldiers with almost horizontal trajectories, every one of the heavy bolts finding a target and piercing the layered armour plates that protected man and beast. All along the advancing line of gleaming iron, riders and their mounts died in searing agony, their bodies smashed by the catastrophic wounds inflicted by bolts as thick as a man’s thumb, each one tipped with a pointed iron head that punched through their armour with ease. Horses simply died as they ran, ploughing head first into the dirt and throwing their masters onto the ground before them, too stunned to react before their fellows were upon them, trampling them into the battlefield’s earth to die under a merciless succession of iron-shod hoofs. Where a rider was hit, the effect was less catastrophic, some of the dead merely lolling lifelessly in their saddles. Others were thrown from their mounts if the bolts that had taken their lives failed to penetrate the armour across their backs and instead spent their remaining energy lifting their victims bodily from their saddles, and pitching them into the equine maelstrom.

The legionaries watching from beneath their shields cheered loudly at the sudden carnage, their shouted abuse continuing as volley after volley of arrows arched down into the advancing mass of horsemen. One chance shot in a thousand caught a horse in the front rank squarely in the face, piercing the perforated eye cover that had been set in the lavishly gilded chamfron that covered the beast’s face and skewering deep into the socket, sending the hapless creature into paroxysms of agonised, aimless rage. The legionaries cheered again as the beast gyrated out into the open in front of the advancing line, bucking and kicking in pain and shock as its helpless rider, unable to do anything more than cling on with his legs as his mount gyrated uncontrollably, was flung back and forth like a rag doll until his grip failed, then was catapulted into the path of his comrades. An instant after he struck the ground, the advancing mass of horsemen was on him, stamping him helplessly into the dirt to the loud enjoyment of the Tungrians. The noise was swelling as the armoured mass came on up the hill, the words that the soldiers were yelling at their foes indistinguishable from more than half a dozen paces, almost lost in the swelling roar of the cataphracts’ approach.

Julius watched anxiously as the advancing cavalry swept imperiously past the one-hundred-pace marker, their progress perceptibly slowing as the effort of hauling five hundred pounds of rider and the armour that protected both man and beast up the long slope began to tell on the horses, massively built as they were. Knuckles white, as his fists clenched around his vine stick, he looked down at the bolt throwers as the exhausted Tungrians stepped back to allow the archers to load their final bolts.

‘Come on …’

Scaurus grinned at him lopsidedly.

‘Careful, First Spear. You don’t want to go breaking that stick after all you’ve been through together. This is where all those drills bear fruit.’

The Scorpions spat death again, the range now so short that the collective snap of their release and the screams of dying men and horses were almost simultaneous. Julius swung to point his stick at the waiting trumpeter.

‘Ready!’

Raising his head and peering back over the line’s shields, Marcus saw the axemen step away from their Scorpions as the last volley whipped over his men’s heads and hammered into the oncoming Parthians. The enemy arrows had stopped falling, and he stood, shouting at the soldiers staring out from beneath their shields as the legion’s trumpets began to shriek again, unsheathing the eagle-pommelled gladius and raising it above his head, gesturing for his men to rise and reform their line.

‘Ready, Third Legion!’

The oncoming mass of cavalry was close enough that Marcus, still standing half a dozen paces in front of his men, waiting for the command that he knew either had to be given swiftly now or not at all, could see their full, terrible glory rushing towards him. A horse’s length ahead of his men rode the Parthian king, and the young tribune nodded quietly to himself as his noted the man’s glittering armour and ornate helmet. Raising his lance high into the air, Osroes swept the tip down to point at the Roman line, and with marvellously disciplined precision, the advancing horsemen copied the move a heartbeat later. Their collective war cry reached his ears through the thunder of hoofs that was now shaking the very ground beneath his feet as they levelled their lances to form a shining line of polished iron rolling inexorably towards him. The noise of their passage over the ground was now an incessant grinding phenomenon the like of which he had never heard, almost suffocating in its intensity, its violence making his body tremble involuntarily, whether by vibration or simple primal fear, not clear even to Marcus himself.

‘Now!’

The trumpeter took a swift breath and blew with all of his might, the peal taken up an instant later up and down the line by each cohort. Their collective single note split the air, the most basic and recognisable of signals, and legatus and first spear looked at each other wordlessly, unable to do anything more than wait for the legion to obey its command to do battle.

The harsh bray of trumpets sounded through the cavalry’s tumult, and Marcus gathered his wits, sweeping his sword forward and bellowing a command that was lost in the all-consuming thunder of the oncoming host.

‘Throw!’

A glittering shower arced out from the legion’s line as the soldiers hurled the three precious objects that each of them had carried with them from Antioch, and Marcus grinned with anticipation as the riders bored in towards them without any clue as to the nature of the deadly seed with which the ground before them had been sown.

‘Got you!’

Julius clenched his fist as the Parthian line abruptly disintegrated into chaos, dozens of horses suddenly pulling up in a cacophony of high-pitched screams as their horses’ hoofs found the caltrops that had been thrown into their path a moment before. Riders with uninjured mounts swerved around their helpless comrades, bunching unavoidably and presenting the Hamian archers standing behind the legion’s line with the targets they had been waiting for. While the advance faltered, they raised their bows and shot into the struggling horsemen at a range close enough for their arrows to fly almost horizontally across the short gap between the two lines of warriors, each impact marked by the
thump
of lethal pointed iron striking thick armour, snapping the horsemen back in their saddles and killing the unfortunate men whose layered scales failed to repel the arrows’ brutal power.