Thunder of the Gods (38 page)

‘So now we’ll see how dearly the king’s men value his life. And whether it’s born of love of the man or fear of his father, whether that value can outweigh Narsai’s need to see him dead.’

He turned to Julius with a nod.

‘We’ll march the legion now, if you will First Spear? Let’s not give them any time to think it through.’

The First Cohort went out through the hastily demolished eastern gateway at the double march, the Romans clearly intending to make the most of the morning’s cool, the soldiers’ heads thrown back to suck in the air while their centurions barked commands and struck out with real venom at any man not displaying sufficient vigour.

‘You’ve turned them into Tungrians, brother.’

Dubnus grinned at Julius as the Second Cohort lurched into motion, the air abruptly filled with the sound of Aramaic curses and imprecations that the Tungrians had quickly come to recognise.

‘Listen to that! I swear I just heard that centurion call his front rankers a useless shower of cock suckers!’

Julius smiled quietly.

‘They’re not Tungrians. But they’re something close enough that I’m starting to get quite fond of them, the dirty, idle bastards. And as for you, Your Highness, don’t you have a cohort to be beasting?’

Dubnus turned away with a smug grin.

‘No need. All my centurions know their duty well enough, as you’d expect given they’re the best soldiers in their cohort. My lads will have had them lined up and ready to run before the rest of the legion had put their cocks away. It’s discipline, that and the relief of not having to suffer under their former first spear …’

Julius waved him away, turning back to Scaurus to find the legatus still watching the legion’s cohorts as they formed for the day’s march.

‘Today’s the day, Julius. Today we’ll discover if we’re fated to die here, unlamented on a featureless plain, or survive to face death by starvation in Nisibis instead.’

The first spear raised an eyebrow.

‘You don’t believe that the city has food enough for us?’

‘I might be wrong – but if they’ve been under siege for as long as I suspect, then they’ll already be low on supplies before another five thousand mouths arrive.’

‘But if we’re marching into a death trap …?’

‘Not that we have much choice. But yes, if we’re marching into a trap, then your next question is a valid enquiry. How do I plan to get us out again, given that if Narsai doesn’t manage to turn the Medes loose on us, all he’s going to do is ring the town with peasant soldiers and try to starve us out?’

Julius waited expectantly, and the legatus shook his head with a faint smile.

‘The truth is, First Spear, that I really hadn’t thought much beyond getting in there. That, I’m afraid, will be a matter for Our Lord Mithras to arrange.’

‘There’s still no sign of any pursuit!’

Felix looked back over his shoulder reflexively, finding the western horizon still free of any indication of pursuit. He grinned at Marcus, patting Hades’ neck as the big stallion trotted effortlessly across the flat ground laid out before them, raising his voice to be heard over the thunder of his cohort’s horses.

‘With any luck the men watching Nisibis won’t realise who we are until it’s too late.’

Walking their horses across the plain until dawn’s first light allowed them to mount, they had prevented their horses from alerting the enemy by the simple expedient of muffling their hoofs with rags and strapping on nosebags full of fodder while the beasts were walked out of the camp’s southern side. Felix’s cavalrymen had already covered two-thirds of the distance to their objective. Looking out to either side, Marcus saw only the empty plain running away in all directions as far as the eye could see.

‘What do you think we’ll find when we get to the city?’

Felix looked out over Hades’ head to the east.

‘I talked it through with the legatus. His expectation is that Osroes brought every horseman with him that he could, and most of his infantry too. There will probably only be two or three thousand of them, left behind to ensure that no supplies can reach the defenders.’

Marcus shook his head.

‘That’s still a lot of spears.’

‘If they’re levelled at us, then yes it is
. If
they’re levelled at us …’

‘They’re just going to watch us?’

Julius looked to his left, at the mass of cavalry tracking the legion across the empty land towards Nisibis, the cohorts’ every pace to the east reducing the amount of time available to Narsai if he sought to bring the marching soldiers to bay.

‘It looks like it. Those that can keep up or who haven’t already buggered off chasing our donkey wallopers.’

Dubnus coughed, pulled down his scarf and spat a mouthful of grit into the roadside dust, then replaced the flimsy protection and looked back down the legion’s marching column. Far behind, almost lost in the dust that was being stirred up by the wind blowing across the plain, the Parthian infantry seemed to have given up attempting to maintain the pace that Scaurus was setting. To their left rode the cataphracts, their horses carefully positioned between the horse archers and the legion, their swords and maces on open display. Narsai had ridden ahead with his own men an hour earlier, hurrying away to the west in pursuit of the Phrygians with a thousand horse archers once it had become apparent that the Roman cavalry had ridden for the city under cover of the night.

‘It’s getting worse.’

Julius tightened his own scarf, shouting over the wind’s keening, mournful note.

‘The scout says it’s not unusual to get dust storms at this time of year! I’m going to drop down the column and warn the officers to be ready for a surprise attack! We’d be on top of a blocking force before we knew they were there in this muck!’

The salar commanding the infantry that had been left to maintain the siege of Nisibis followed his deputy’s pointing hand.

‘Horsemen!’

A pair of riders were galloping towards them, the advance party of a much larger force whose strength was lost in the clouds of dust blowing across the plain that surrounded the city, their swords raised in salute as they reined in a dozen paces from the general.

‘Peroz!’

The officers looked at each other.

‘Victory!’

A soldier behind them had caught the riders’ triumphant shouts and turned to his fellows, shouting the single word again loudly enough for hundreds of his fellows to hear, and with a roar the thousands of infantry men saluted the oncoming riders as their figures seemed to solidify out of the dust.

‘What …’

The salar’s deputy was quicker on the uptake than his commander, the first to realise that the cavalry trotting towards them were not what they seemed. As he turned to shout a warning, the advance riders peeled away to one side, and with a blare of horns the men behind them kicked their mounts into a canter, spreading out from their column of march into an arrowhead formation as they came across the open ground. The horn blew again, the horsemen pulling their bows from their gorytos cases and reaching for arrows.

‘Spears! Present your spears!’

Turning to the men behind him, intent on gaining the safety of their ranks, the salar’s stomach lurched as he found only terror in their eyes. Disordered and thrown off balance by the enemy’s sudden appearance, their formation shivered, clearly on the verge of disaster.

‘Present your—’

An arrow struck him squarely in the back, dropping him to his knees with the sudden agonising pain of its cold, iron intrusion. His deputy was already dead, sprawled across the ground with two arrows protruding from his armour, and dozens of the men in front of him were staggering with similar wounds. As he watched, a second volley of missiles whipped into his men, the regiment’s ranks dissolving into chaos as yet more men fell under the deadly iron sleet.

‘Hold … your …’

His voice reduced to no better than a whisper, the salar raised an imploring hand to the closest men, but their eyes were fixed on the oncoming enemy. With a sudden collective loss of will, the regiment broke, the ordered ranks reduced to a terrified mob in a single heartbeat as each man realised that those to either side were turning to flee. The noise of the Romans’ oncoming horses was now loud enough to outweigh even the screams of his panicked soldiers, trampling their wounded comrades underfoot as they frantically sought an escape from the implacable enemy, and turning his head to look back, the salar realised numbly what it was that had inspired such terror. A line of horsemen was upon him, barely a dozen paces distant, each of them pushing his bow into the case on his right hip and drawing a long sword. But it wasn’t the imminent onslaught that dismayed him, rather the fearsome aspect of their silvered cavalry helmets, rank upon rank of identical and cruelly emotionless metal faces offering their enemy no hint of fear or pity.

With another peal of the horn the riders came on with their swords raised, ready to kill those who failed to run or whose flight was too slow to evade their blades. The salar spread his arms, ready for the merciful blow that would end his agony and shame.

The last of the legion’s cohorts marched into the fortress in good order, the massive wooden drawbridge that spanned the deep moat between inner and outer walls raising slowly to leave the city completely isolated from the Parthian forces now flooding onto the level ground surrounding Nisibis. The flat plain before the watching Romans was still scattered with the bloodied corpses of the spear men who had been routed and then slaughtered by Felix’s cavalry as they fled, a trail of dead and dying men that ran away from the city to the north until it petered out in the foothills two miles distant. By the time Narsai had arrived with his own horsemen, the one-sided battle was already over, and the Phrygians were safely ensconced inside the massive walls encircling the fortress that had once been part of his kingdom.

‘So, First Spear, what do you think?’

Julius looked out over the fortress, still struggling to come to terms with the scale of the city’s defences.

‘It’s hard to take in, Prefect Petronius.’

‘I understand only too well.’

The prefect commanding the city’s garrison waved a hand at the scene laid out before them from their vantage point over the western gate.

‘I was equally amazed the first time I laid eyes on it. A man gets used to the grandeur of the place after a time, but it really is quite surprising to find fortifications this strong out here in the middle of nowhere. I mean to say, there’s nothing worth taking as far as the eye can see, and yet look at all this …’

Julius looked out across Nisibis, marvelling again at the tall brick walls that encompassed the city in two concentric rings, a deep dry moat having been dug between them.

‘Not much use mining against these walls, I’d imagine.’

‘No indeed! You might damage the outer wall, but to what end? The inner wall’s at least as thick again, and both walls are buttressed, so mining would be more likely to make the outer wall slump, rather than collapsing it. And even if an attacker managed to take the outer wall, with the bridges over the moat destroyed it would be almost impossible to take the inner wall and force a way into the city, under constant attack and without any solid ground to work with.’

Petronius shook his head with a smile.

‘I’d say the place is more or less impregnable, unless an attacker manages to starve the garrison out. I asked one of the elders why the place had been made so strong when there’s nothing here worth having …’

He shook his head at the memory, and Scaurus tilted his head in question.

‘The cheeky old bugger looked me up and down with a pitying expression, then folded his arms and gave me an ancient history lecture. He was a damned sight more interesting than my old tutor, I can assure you of that! Apparently, once we’d got past his repeated assertion that Rome was just another empire, and would one day surely fall, he pointed out to me that the city has been besieged at one time or another by all manner of people. Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, and of course ourselves, all wanting the wealth to be had from possession of the only decent spring for a hundred miles. Everyone’s had a go at the place at one time or another, and so, he told me with more than a hint of pride, they’ve got rather good at the whole fortification thing. And he has a point. After all, all we’ve ever done since the Parthians ceded the place to Avidius Cassius is keep the brickwork in good order, because the place was this strong when we took control of it.’

‘Defences are all very well, but what about supplies?’

‘If you’re worried about feeding your men, First Spear, then put your mind at ease. Since the city sits right astride a major trade route, money isn’t overly hard to come by and therefore neither are the staples of life. There’s enough spare grain in the stores to feed your legion for a year, and those men out there will have vanished off to their homelands long before that. Besides, the first decent storm of next winter would clear them away even if they had the staying power to sit out there for the entire summer.’

He frowned.

‘Exactly what it is that this Narsai hopes to achieve isn’t clear to me, or for that matter why King Osroes thought it would be a good idea to sit watching a fortress that he’s got no hope of breaking into. Surely they’ve both got better things to be doing than banging their heads against these walls?’

Scaurus shrugged.

‘An interesting potted history, thank you Prefect Petronius. And I see your point as to the futility of whatever it is that the kings thought they might achieve by besieging the city, but to be frank I’m too relieved to have fought my way through to you to be giving much thought to what their aims might have been. My only concern now is to how we’re going to get Osroes back to his father in Ctesiphon.’

Petronius raised an eyebrow.

‘You’re going to return the King of Kings’ son to him, having taken him fairly in battle? What’s the ransom?’