Thunder of the Gods (35 page)

He’d stood, moving on to the next man in the line of casualties with a grimace.

‘Orderly! Pass me a bone saw please! That’ll have to come off …’

Marcus looked up at the swaying figure beside him.

‘Do you know where you are, King Osroes?’

The response was taut with exhaustion, but edged with an unmistakable anger.

‘Of course I know where I am, Roman. I’m sitting on a mule with a bag on my head in the middle of my father’s vassal kingdom of Adiabene, the day after I was stupid enough to let that halfwit Narsai to push me into sending the best men in my army uphill at a prepared position, against an enemy with every trick in the history books to use against us.’

Osroes shook his head, visibly wincing at the pain induced by the movement.

‘And so now here I am, reduced from riding the proudest war horse in all of Parthia to sitting astride a mule with a bag over my head.’

He paused for a moment before speaking again.

‘Doubtless your legatus is now using the prospect of my death to keep Narsai at arm’s length?’

‘Yes.’

The king was silent for a moment before speaking again, his voice edged with bitterness.

‘A smart move. He displays a high degree of cunning … for a Roman.’

He lapsed into silence, and Marcus stepped out of the column to look back down its length. Half of the legion was off the hill now, and the waggon train that formed its centre on the march was now rumbling past the watching enemy host. Supply carts loaded with the Scorpions and their bolts, transports bearing tents and cooking equipment and scores of waggons loaded with everything too heavy for the legionaries to carry, their passage raising clouds of dust that blew across the watching Parthians. In its wake came Felix’s cavalry, and the young tribune smiled at the thought of the dark looks that would be directed at them by those men who had managed to escape the marauding Phrygians in the cataphracts’ flight down the hill’s merciless open slope. Behind the horsemen came the archers and slingers, followed by a rearguard of two more legion cohorts and the Second Tungrians, each one an imposing fighting unit in itself but taken together they were a fighting machine of incredible power and ferocity.

‘Narsai can’t allow you to reach Nisibis, you know.’

The Roman shrugged at his prisoner, his response phrased with the appropriate respect for Osroes’ rank, but brutally frank nonetheless.

‘He won’t stop us, Your Highness. Not as long as we have you to deter another attack.’

Osroes snorted, his body jerking again at the sudden pain in his head.

‘Then you’d better be sure to keep me safe, hadn’t you? I doubt I’m much use to you dead.’

Narsai watched the Roman column marching down from its perch atop the hill with a mixture of frustration and calculation.

‘No man is to provoke them, understood? Your king is at their mercy.’

Osroes’ gundsalar inclined his head.

‘Your command has been passed to the army, Your Highness, with a threat of a slow and painful death for the man who dis-obeys. But I must ask you …’

‘How do I plan to free the king?’

The soldiers stared at him, and Narsai felt the weight of their expectations settle upon him like a cataphract’s armour.

‘In truth, gentlemen, I do not yet know. But …’

He waited ostentatiously for their muttering to die down, picking a piece of dried flesh from his mace.

‘What I do know is that knowledge is power. So, Gundsalar, send out your scouts. I want to know everything that these Romans do as they march east. Any further trick that this legatus plays without our having predicted them will carry a bad portent for the man who had the chance to predict it.’

The general bowed in his saddle once more.

‘Oh, and Gundsalar?’

‘Your Highness?’

‘There was a minor skirmish with the Roman cavalry yesterday, as I recall it?’

The older man nodded.

‘Indeed, Your Highness.’

‘Your scouts were overwhelmed, I believe, but they killed a number of the enemy?’

‘We found thirteen dead Romans, Highness.’

‘And the bodies?’

The Median general waved a dismissive hand.

‘We left the barbarians to rot.’

Narsai raised a regal eyebrow at the man’s apparent lack of foresight.

‘Then I suggest you drive off the vultures and bring them to me. I have a use for them.’

The legion’s column moved fast once the last cohorts had reached the road’s smooth surface, trumpet calls for the double-pace march pealing out to pass Julius’s orders to the most distant of centurions, and within a dozen heartbeats his men were moving at the fastest march pace short of a running gait.

Once the Tungrians were on the rough road and up to speed, Dubnus called for a song to take their minds off the coming exertions, and the marching soldiers roared out a ditty that had been several days in the composition:

Cassius Ravilla had dropped back to check on his rearmost men, and if his greeting to Dubnus as he waited for the Briton to reach him was acerbic, he was unable to keep some vestige of a smile off his face.

‘I suppose this means that we’re now sufficiently accepted to be openly abused?’

The procurator’s brother officer grinned back at him.

‘You haven’t heard the rest of it yet.’

As if on cue, the Tungrians launched into the second verse:

The Parthian host responded by moving out from the positions in which they had watched the Romans march off the hill, their loose formation pacing the legion to the north of the road’s long ribbon.

‘You really think they’ll resist the temptation to attack?’

Varus had run up the column’s length from his place at the head of the Seventh Cohort, grinning at the good-natured jibes that had followed him as he revelled in both his new-found fitness and the legion’s sudden rediscovery of its pride. Marcus looked up at Osroes, lolling loosely on the mule’s back and apparently asleep in the saddle, blessed with the innate skills of a man trained to ride from his earliest days.

‘The king here thinks so, at least until we stop moving.’

‘And you? What do you think, Tribulus Corvus?’

Marcus watched a fifty-man group of horse archers trotting back across the plain towards the enemy, one of several that had been dispatched from the Parthian army during the day to scout the ground before them.

‘What do I think? I think that the man leading that host will be desperate to get to the king here, although whether he’ll be hoping to rescue him or simply kill him …’

‘Narsai won’t care. All he needs is my body, living or dead. Once the tribes know I’m no longer a reason not to attack, he’ll have you at his mercy. No amount of clever trickery will save you now that you’ve abandoned the security of that hill.’

Osroes had stirred, and was looking down at the two tribunes with a resigned expression.

‘You think your own people will try to kill you?’

The king shook his head wearily at Varus.

‘Not
my
people, Roman. Narsai’s people. Explain it to him, if you will, Tribune Corvus?’

Marcus nodded.

‘Parthia isn’t one kingdom, there are at least a dozen kings who owe their allegiance to King Osroes’ father, Arsaces, the King of Kings. Osroes is one of them, and King Narsai is another. Narsai rules Adiabene, a smaller and less important kingdom than Media, but were our guest the king to die in captivity, then Narsai will immediately have the right as the commander in the field to claim command of the Median army until another ruler can be appointed by Arsaces and his council. And if Narsai can present himself to the Great King as the man who defeated a Roman legion, and ejected Rome from a prize like Nisibis to boot, then his claim to that throne of Media would be hard for Arsaces to resist.’

‘So if he manages to kill the king here …’

‘He’ll blame my death on Rome, and position himself as the saviour of Parthia.’

Both men looked up at Osroes.

‘And if his killers come for you tonight?’

‘Yes, Tribune Corvus?’

‘Do you wish to live or die?’

The king shook his head tiredly, slumping back in the saddle.

‘How should I know? The Sun God will decide …’

The legion covered thirty miles that day, the exhausted legionaries digging out a marching camp, eating their rations cold and then for the most part collapsing into sleep, unless they happened to have the misfortune to have drawn guard duty. A handful of centurions patrolled the camp’s perimeter with unfailing vigilance, only too well aware that there were enough of the enemy to breach the camp’s walls, given a determined assault and an unready defence. Julius had paraded the legion’s centunions while their men were building the camp, expressing himself with a degree of robustness that had raised eyebrows among men who still harboured distant memories of a more relaxed way of life.

‘I couldn’t give a shit how degenerate a shower of arse-eating goat fuckers the enemy are, any man found asleep at his post will be beaten to death by his tent party in the morning, and any one of you that feels like making allowances can take his place. Understood?’

He’d looked across their ranks, his face hard with evident contempt for their collective abilities.

‘Just so we understand each other, I’ll be up and about during the night, and if I find any of your men with their eyes closed on guard then I’ll be the one doing the beating to death. Think on that, and on who I might choose to pay the price for those few minutes of sleep.’

In consequence the duty centurions were harsh in their vigilance, taking their vine sticks to any man looking the slightest bit like sleeping, and when the sun rose it was the opinion of them all that while their new first spear might be a bastard, he certainly didn’t spare himself, having been seen about the camp by several of his centurions during the night. The legion took a swift breakfast before forming up to resume its march at dawn, covering a good five miles before its Parthian escort managed to stir themselves and join the line of march, leaving the infantry to toil along to their rear.

‘So, there was no sign of your assassins last night, Your Highness?’

Osroes was little improved on the previous day, and if anything, less animated than before, and waved Marcus’s question away with a grimace.

‘Too soon. They’ll wait until you’re exhausted before making their move.’

The Roman had smiled back at his prisoner wryly.

‘They’d better not wait too long. There’s a reason that Julius has us wearing out our hobnails this quickly.’

They marched all day with only brief stops for food and water, their rate of progress alternating between the burning pain of the double pace and the marginal respite of the standard marching speed, enough in itself to cover twenty miles in a day.

‘Narsai will be getting twitchy, I expect. By the time we stop for the night we’ll be a good twenty miles closer to Nisibis than he would have expected, and with only one more day’s march ahead of us rather than the two he’d have been calculating. So if he’s going to make an attempt to get to our prisoners, it has to be tonight. We’ll double the guards, I think.’

The legion took Julius’s decision with an uncharacteristic lack of complaint, and the first spear looked about him as the cohorts toiled to throw up the customary walls of the camp that would be their defence once night fell.

‘Perhaps we’ve turned them into soldiers.’

‘Or maybe they’re just too weary to give voice to their complaints?’

Scaurus grinned at his subordinate’s jaundiced expression.

‘Yes, I know. Since when was a soldier ever too tired to complain? Perhaps they’ve realised that this is the last chance the Parthians will have to pull a victory out of this disaster. Tonight’s the night Julius, there’s no doubt about that.’

‘You are certain of this?’

The old man spoke without taking his head from the dusty ground where he lay prostrate.

‘Yes, Your Highness. I have ridden alongside the king since he was a young child. His seat on a horse is as evident to me as his hand on parchment would be to a scribe.’

Narsai nodded slowly, a grim smile of satisfaction settling on his face.

‘And he was riding alongside the officer leading the first cohort?’

‘Yes, Your Highness.’

The king turned to Osroes’ gundsalar.

‘Your scouts tracked each of their cohorts into the camp, and noted the place each one took inside its walls?’

The general inclined his head.

‘They did so with precision and diligence, Highness. If my king remains with the cohort that led on the march today then he will be found somewhere here …’

He sketched a map in the dirt at their feet with the point of his dagger, quickly scratching in the roads that divided its rectangle into four smaller sections.

‘Here. Where the roads meet in the camp’s centre, that is where my king is held captive.’

Narsai stared down at the crude map for a moment.

‘I will need the very best of your fighting men, Gundsalar. The bravest and the cleverest, men who can pass unnoticed in the shadows, but who will fight like uncaged beasts when the time comes for them to strike. I doubt we have a dozen men of this quality in our entire army, but we must assemble them quickly and make a bold strike into the heart of our enemy. This chance will not be offered to us again.’