Thunder of the Gods (36 page)

The older man bowed deeply.

‘As you command, Your Highness. I will bring the chosen men here.’

The king waited until he had vanished into the gloom before turning to his own general.

‘Find Varaz and bring him here. Tell him that the moment of his glory is upon him.’

Narsai looked around the men who had been gathered from his army, taking the measure of them with a slow, calculating assessment in the light of the crackling fire. Each of them met his eyes with the appropriate deference, heads inclining in recognition of his exalted status, but the glint of their eyes and the set of their jaws betrayed supreme and untroubled confidence in their physical and martial prowess. Cataphracti nobility for the most part, they were big men with powerfully muscled frames, trained from childhood in the use of the lance, the sword and mace, on horseback and on foot, supremely conditioned to fight carrying the heaviest armour in the full heat of the day. His own champion stood among them dressed in the same unfamiliar garb they all wore, the neutral set of his body and the blank look on his carefully composed features masking the contempt that the king knew he was feeling for the men around him and for any man who lacked his unique and deadly approach to his craft. If the gathered soldiers were alike to swords and maces, weapons for hacking and bludgeoning at an enemy line, Varaz was an assassin’s blade by comparison, forged with the intention of delivering a single unpredictable and lethal wound.

The man was untameable, giving his loyalty to none and his service to Narsai purely in return for gold, with an unveiled cynicism that would have long since earned him a swift death and an ignominious burial were it not for his unparalleled ability for swift and ruthless violence. He had bowed to his master on being brought before him, raising his dark eyes to stare unflinchingly at a man before whom he should in truth have been prostrating himself.

‘So, King. Your chamberlain tells me that my moment in the sun has arrived.’

He looked up at the crescent moon, his mouth twisted in irony. ‘And yet I see no sun. Only the moon, and a hunter’s moon at that.’

Narsai had shaken his head in amusement.

‘No man ever claimed to be your parent, Killer. No man knows where you were born, or how you came to be so skilled with blade and bone. You are nobody, as disposable as the water in which I shave, and yet you are the deadliest weapon at my disposal. You have served me well, and in return I have kept every promise I have made to you, have I not?’

The assassin inclined his head in acceptance of the point.

‘And now, King, with an enemy army camped one day’s march from a fortress so powerful that we may never break its walls, you call for me? What is it that you need that can be accomplished by a single man in the darkness? You wish the Roman general dead, perhaps?’

Narsai had smiled despite himself.

‘No. He goes everywhere in the company of more hard-eyed men than even you could defeat in combat. I have a different challenge in mind for you. A kill worthy of both your skills and your dark heart. A kill that will ennoble your descendants …’

Varaz had raised an eyebrow.

‘Ennoble?’

‘You have a son, by the slave woman I gave you. He shows promise with weapons for one so young, I hear. Would you like him to be raised as a royal prince?’

The other man stared back at him.

‘You offer to take my son into your household?’

‘Yes. I will swear the oath to the Sun God now, before my priest.’

His assassin’s face creased into a hard smile.

‘In which case it would be well if he were to commend my spirit to Ahura Mazda at the same time. For if you offer such a large inducement, I can safely assume that the price of delivering what you want of me will be that I have seen my last sunrise.’

Narsai had nodded, sharing a moment of understanding with his man.

‘I think that assumption is realistic. In return for your death I offer you a life of privilege for your son, and his sons and grandsons. You will catapult your blood to the heights of nobility, and fulfil your destiny.’

‘By killing King Osroes?’

Narsai had nodded tersely, aware that the man before him was quite capable of turning on him in an instant, even unarmed and in the presence of the royal bodyguard. The killer had looked at his booted feet for a moment before nodding his assent.

‘It was never my expectation to end this life in my bed. Fetch your priest, King. Make your oath and have him shrive me.’

Narsai completed his assessment of the men standing before him, nodding his approval to the gundsalar.

‘Time is short, so I will not waste it with unnecessary appeals to your virtue or duty. You all know why you have been gathered. You are the greatest warriors in our armies, the strongest, the bravest and the best of us, and your king has need of you. He is being held within the Roman camp, and while they have him we cannot mount an attack on them for fear of killing him. In the morning they will march again, and by nightfall the King of Kings’ oldest son will be a prisoner within a fortress city so strong that he might never be freed. Tonight, my brothers, you must enter the camp of the Romans by stealth, find the king and bring him to safety.’

The most senior of them bowed before speaking, a black-bearded officer with a fresh cut down one cheek from the battle on the hill, the wound’s edges roughly stitched together and black with dried blood.

‘Your Highness, we may well find the king, but bringing him to safety may be impossible if the Romans detect us. What then?’

Narsai inclined his head in recognition of the question’s ramifications.

‘In the event that you find yourselves alone among the enemy, then you must follow the instructions of King Osroes himself, whatever they may be.’

The noble nodded.

‘And if the king is not capable of making such a decision? His bidaxs Gurgen told us that he was suffering badly from the effects of a blow to the head.’

Narsai waited a moment, allowing the question’s full implications to unfold in the minds of the men before him.

‘In that case, you will have to make your own decision, for only you will be able to enact that choice.’

The noble held his eye for a moment, then nodded tersely.

‘We will do what we must. Come, brothers.’

The king watched them walk away with a carefully composed face, his thoughts racing as he watched the assassin follow in their wake.

In the darkness between the two camps the infiltrators paused, waiting for their eyes to fully adapt to the darkness, checking by touch that each other’s unfamiliar armour and equipment was as it should be. Then, following the big officer’s lead, they moved slowly around the Roman camp until they were approaching it from the east, removing any risk of their being silhouetted against the glow of the fires burning in the Parthian encampment.

When they were no more than one hundred paces from the sentries guarding the camp’s eastern gateway, the big man gestured for them to stop.

‘Stay here.’

Narsai’s killer shook his head, raising his hands to demonstrate the appropriate respect.

‘Lord, you are a man of the greatest possible honour. This is a task that ought to be undertaken by a man who, through his long experience of the dirtier aspects of serving his king, has already sacrificed his honour. If you will allow me, I do have some small measure of expertise in such matters.’

The bearded noble nodded, quietly relieved to have the responsibility lifted from his shoulders.

‘Go then. And do not fail.’

Varaz paced away into the night, smiling to himself in the darkness and permitting himself a whispered response once he was out of earshot.

‘And in addition, Lord, where I am expert at moving quietly in the darkness, you blunder around like a blind bull. Now …’

He sank to the ground and watched the guards from no more than thirty paces, quietly calculating the best point at which to strike. The legionaries were most strongly concentrated around the gateway in the middle of the earth wall, keeping close to the fires that burned on either side, which would seriously reduce their ability to see into the darkness. A pair of men were positioned at each corner of the camp, their beats a good fifty paces from the nearest sentry and who, he noted, tended to spend more of their time getting as close to the fire as possible and as little as they could actually patrolling their section of the wall.

Retracing his steps, he found his fellow infiltrators waiting impatiently.

‘I have scouted the best way into the enemy camp. Follow me.’

The noble tugged at his arm, whispering fiercely.

‘Have you killed the guards?’

‘No, Lord, not yet.’

‘But—’

Biting down on his exasperation, he shook his head with an expression he hoped would not betray his frustration.

‘Lord, from the very moment we make our first kill we will have only a short time before their bodies are discovered. We must make that time as long as possible. Trust me in this.’

He turned and led them to the point from where he had watched previously.

‘Stay silent and still.’

Pacing forward in the darkness, he waited until the guards to his left had turned and walked down their beat towards the fire, stepping quickly and lightly across the space separating him from the wall, easing noiselessly into its shadow and staring intently at the men standing at the camp’s corner as he knelt to scoop up a handful of the dusty soil. When they showed no sign of reaction, he rose from the gloom and paced towards them with a measured, confident tread. He had no shield, but in every other respect he appeared authentic enough to stand up to a brief scrutiny in the darkness, his armour and helmet pulled from a dead Roman cavalryman retrieved from the open desert. Drawing his long knife, and reversing his grip on the hilt to put the blade in the shelter of his arm, he strode towards the guards, being careful not to speed up as he got closer.

The nearest of the two registered his presence in his peripheral vision at the very last moment, turning with a question as Varaz punched the knife through his throat and ran at the other man, hurling the handful of sandy dust at his target to buy a moment’s confusion before the knife tore into his neck and severed both windpipe and vocal cords. The dying man gasped silently for air as he contorted into his death throes, then shuddered, and was gone. Dragging the corpses into the earth wall’s cover, the assassin scowled as his comrades made their inevitably noisy appearance, feet scuffing in the dirt as they crouched low in poses.

‘Over the wall!’

They obeyed his hissed instruction without question, their leader pausing for a moment to look at the bloodied killer.

‘And you?’

Varaz looked at him with none of his previous deference, noting the hint of fear that had replaced the man’s previous air of superiority.

‘I’ll stay here until you’re well into the camp. As well for the Romans to see one their own when they walk back this way. When they turn back again I’ll follow you in.’

The noble nodded, swallowing nervously without even realising it, and went over the wall in pursuit of his fellows. Varaz stared after him for a moment, calculating the odds that they would get close enough to the king to strike the fateful blow, then hefted a fallen shield and stood up, strolling out into the moonlight with a deliberate pace, quietly muttering to himself.

‘Just another bored sentry.’

Exhausted, the legion’s men had needed no encouragement to sleep on the hard ground in their blankets, rather than taking the time and effort required to erect the leather tents that could only encumber them in the event of an attack. Julius found himself accompanied by Varus as he walked the perimeter wall with a tent party of Tungrians, having disdained sleep once again in order to ensure that the legion was ready to defend itself against the attack he believed to be inevitable. The young patrician stopped, looking up and down the wall’s length at the sentries patrolling their allotted sections of the defence, then turned to the senior centurion with as close to an apologetic expression as he was likely ever to get.

‘I have to admit, First Spear, that I may have misjudged you. When the legatus first took command I was of the opinion that you were nothing better than a northern lunatic. When you had the entire legion sleep overnight without tents I called you a sadist, and then when you had the trumpets blown in the middle of the night I cursed you for a maniac …’

He paused, smiling wryly.

‘I can only apologise. Clearly you had just such a situation as this in mind.’

Julius nodded at him, accepting the hard-earned respect with a straight face.

‘It’s not that hard, Tribune. Once you’ve seen a campaign or two, you find it natural to place yourself in the enemy’s boots, so to speak, and ask yourself what he might do, if he’s desperate enough. It’s simple experience.’

The younger man took a moment to stretch his back before resuming their walk towards the lone sentry standing at the point where the northern and eastern sides of the camp met.

‘That may be true, but nonetheless, First Spear, you’ve become the heartbeat of the Third Gallic. If we survive this insane expedition on which the emperor has sent us, it will be entirely due to the legatus’s cunning tactics and your iron control of the men that enables him to even consider them.’

He looked at Julius with unabashed admiration, something the first spear was ill-accustomed to receiving from the legion’s senior officers.

‘You won’t have any problems from any of the young gentlemen either, not since that remarkable vic—’

Turning back to their path around the wall he stopped, frowning at something barely visible in the shadow of one of the camp’s entrances.

‘Is that a man lying down?’

Julius started and strode forward, putting a foot under the supine body and kicking the man onto his front. A dark, wet stain covered his neck and chest, and his weapons and helmet were missing. Another dead sentry was lying in the shadow of the earth wall, and, looking up, he realised that the lone figure they had seen patrolling the wall a moment before was nowhere to be seen. The first spear spun to face his superior, pulling the sword from his left hip.