Thunder of the Gods (40 page)

‘How are we going to get past those sentries?’

Thracius spat over the side, looking over the Roman’s shoulder at the waiting sentries and considering the question before answering in a hoarse whisper.

‘By means of a right nasty shock, Tribune.’

He looked back at the fortress with a grimace.

‘When the prefect gives the order, there’s going to be a few of them Parthian bastards wishing they’d not sat quite so close to the fire.’

The three senior officers emerged into the torch-lit street, Petronius leading them to a doorway that opened onto a spiral stair, climbing vigorously up towards the top of the city walls.

‘Ever since your legion marched in here with that motley collection of soldiers at your heels, the Parthians have been busy digging siege trenches, and of course we’ve been equally busy trying to disrupt them.’

Emerging from the stairs onto the walls’ broad fighting platform, he strolled across the flat stones to the nearest of the city’s bolt throwers, larger versions of the legion’s Scorpions, deadly engines of wood, metal and sinew. The weapon and its crew were lit from behind by a pair of torches whose flames guttered and spat in the gentle breeze.

‘This beauty can hurl one of these …’

He took a bolt from the leader of the weapon’s crew and handed it to Scaurus, an evil iron-tipped length of dense, hard wood with metal flights pinned to its tail to provide stability in the air.

‘What’s the slot for?’

Petronius glanced down at the bolt’s metal nose, and the long rectangular hole that had been drilled through the iron spike. He took the missile back and passed it to the crew’s leader, a keen-eyed chosen man.

‘Demonstrate to the centurion how our night shooting works, would you?’

Deft fingers threaded a folded length of cloth through the slot, the material hanging out on either side.

‘We soak the cloth into lamp oil, First Spear. Then we put a light to it, so that when we loose the bolt you can see it fly all the way to the target, which lets us adjust our aim just as long as we can see something to shoot at.’

The prefect patted the man on the shoulder.

‘We’ll get out of your way. Things are going to get busy very shortly.’

He led them away to stand by the parapet, looking out over the sea of camp fires that marked the Parthians army’s closest approach to the fortress walls.

‘You see gentlemen, we’ve been shooting the occasional bolt at them over the last few days, but the bastards have been delighted to see that we could only land the blasted things within twenty or thirty paces of their lines. Seems that some bright lad noted our initial shots and used them to set the siege line at a safe distance. We got lucky the other day and bounced a bolt off a piece of rock, and some poor unsuspecting soldier walking through their camp stopped it between his shoulders, but apart from that all we’ve done is waste good iron …’

He paused, grinning conspiratorially.

‘That, and convinced them they’re out of range of course. Which, as you might have guessed, isn’t strictly true, not given that all those shots were taken with the springs only wound back to three-quarters of their full torsion. If, however, we wind them back until they’re creaking …’

He turned to his first spear.

‘I think it’s time to provide our messengers with a little distraction. Shall we begin?’

The senior centurion saluted and turned away, raising his voice to a stentorian below.

‘All bolt throwers – load!
’

The crews leapt into action as the order was repeated by their officers in a chorus of equally loud roars, the command rippling round the city walls as each crew in turn leapt to their task, their swift and precise response to the order testimony to long hours of drill. Loaders laboured to wind back their weapons’ thick strings with straining muscles while the crew commanders waited, cloth-tipped bolts in hand. Watching the nearest machine, Scaurus smiled quietly as the chosen man gingerly fitted the missile to the waiting machine’s taut bowstring.

‘Ready!’

A chorus of similar shouts rang out as the crews stepped away from their labour, each commander taking a burning taper and standing ready to light the waiting missile’s incendiary cargo while the last fine adjustments were made to the weapon’s point of aim.

‘Shoot!’

The tapers dipped in unison to set light to the waiting bolts, and then, with a whip crack of unleashed power, the weapons spat their deadly missiles out over the space between city and besieging army, the bolts’ flaming path describing a gentle arc down towards the unsuspecting Parthian siege line.

‘Reload!’

The air above the waiting boat’s crew was suddenly alive with screaming missiles, a dozen fiery streaks shrieking down into the Parthian lines to impact with audible thuds. Somewhere in the darkness a man was suddenly screaming, pausing only to draw breath before howling more helpless outrage at whatever it was that had happened to him. The sound stopped suddenly, silenced by a merciful sword stroke, Marcus surmised, and the sound of voices raised in fear and anger reached their ears.

After a short wait another volley of bolts whistled into the Parthian line, their aim adjusted to concentrate on the only available points of aim, given the lack of either moon or stars to illuminate the battlefield. More than one shot hit the target at which it had been aimed, sending showers of sparks and chunks of burning wood flying as the heavy bolts smashed into the enemy watch fires. Half a dozen missiles landed around the watch posts on either bank of the river, at least one finding a human target to judge by the wet, crackling sound of impact, and the chorus of imprecations and shouts from the hapless Parthians redoubled. A commanding voice was raised over the furore, bellowing a single repeated command. The boat master laughed, calling to his crew.

‘Hah! He shouts to extinguish the fires! Cast off, but use your oars to back water and keep us from drifting. We must be ready, but the time is not yet.’

‘See? That will teach these blasted easterners some manners!’

Another salvo of bolts arced out from the city’s walls, slamming down into the Parthian lines in a random scattering of terror and death. Somewhere out in the darkness beyond the fires’ light, a horse was screaming in its death throes, and Scaurus decided that it was the most horrendous noise he had heard in a military career that had contained more than its fair share of unpleasantness.

All along the siege line the enemy were struggling back from ground they had previously believed safe. Some of the enemy soldiers were running to kick sand onto the fires that were providing the Romans with such a convenient point of aim, others taking refuge from their deadly light by huddling in the darkness between the fire pits.

‘Switch point of aim!’

Another volley of bolts was hurled from the city’s walls, this time plunging down into the spaces between the fires where the press of men seeking the darkness’s protective embrace would be at its thickest. A fresh chorus of screams and enraged bellows erupted as each of the heavy missiles killed and maimed with arbitrary brutality, redoubling the enemy soldiers’ panic in the face of such impersonal and unpredictable murder. Petronius looked out over the Parthian line, more and more of the fires being extinguished as the besiegers hurled handfuls of sand to quench their flames.

‘Two more bolts apiece and then I think we’ll call it a night, shall we First Spear? I think we have the desired result.’

The watch fires overlooking the Mygdonius were suddenly dimmed, the ruddy pools of illumination they had cast over the waters masked by the dozens of men who had run at the command of their officers to snuff out the flames.

‘Go!’

With the unhurried speed born of long practice, the crew flashed out their oars and bent their backs with a will, digging into the black water with swift, coordinated strokes that took the loitering boat from standstill to a swift marching pace in a dozen heartbeats. The master called out another command in the same harsh whisper.

‘Ship oars!’

Ceasing their rowing and pulling in their wooden blades, the oarsmen slid under their hides as the
Night Witch
hissed through the water towards the river’s gap in the Parthian line. With his night-adjusted vision, Marcus could see the scene on both banks with perfect clarity, dozens of Parthian soldiers still milling about around the glowing embers of the dying fires.

‘They will still see only the fire. Cover yourself!’

The Roman slid under his own hide, leaving the narrowest of openings between deck and leather and watching with helpless fascination as the boat swept swiftly towards the point where their fates would be decided by the night-blinded eyes of the men gathered on either bank. A single Parthian was standing on the right bank and staring at the water, perhaps more aware than his comrades, perhaps simply fascinated by the Mygdonius’s dark ribbon. With one last twitch of the rudder, the boat master eased her course towards the eastern bank, aware of the lone watcher, and then they were upon the point of maximum danger. To their left the Parthians were unheeding, still focused on completely extinguishing the fire’s last glow, but on the right the soldier still seemed to be following their progress intently, as if, despite the fact that his eyes could not yet have fully adapted to the darkness, he suspected that there was something on the water that ought not to be present, a hint of foam at the vessel’s bow, or the faintest gleam from her wet timbers.

Another volley of bolts whipped in, plunging down into the Parthian line with the remorseless terror of shots launched blindly into the dark, one last shake of the dice cup, chancing a few dozen wood and iron missiles against the possibility of killing a man on whom the battle for Nisibis might yet hinge. A soldier standing within a few paces of the watcher was caught squarely, his body burst by the horrific impact, blood and shattered bone spraying across the men around him. The soldier recoiled, his attention wrenched from the river before him by the stinging impacts of bone fragments, and, in the moment that it took for him to regain his equilibrium, the moment in which he might have realised what it was that he was looking at, was lost. As the boat slipped away into the night’s deeper darkness, he shook his head and turned away, wiping the dead man’s blood away from his neck and hair in obvious disgust.

‘
Oars
.’

The crew rolled out from beneath their hides at the master’s command, rolling up the thick skins and placing them at their feet as Thracius stared back at the fortress.

‘Now we
run
.’

Petronius turned away from the wall, drawing a finger across his throat as a signal for his first spear, the officers watching in silence as the bolt thrower crews stood down and trooped away to their barracks with a general air of quiet satisfaction.

‘Our men got away cleanly, from the look of it.’

Scaurus nodded.

‘I think there would have been a good deal more excitement if they’d been detected. Well done, Prefect, that was a masterly piece of deception.’

He turned to the north, pointing at a spot low on the horizon where a flicker of light had caught his eye a moment before.

‘That looks ominous though.’

The prefect followed his gaze, and as the two men watched, the lightning flickered again, so distant that the rumble that eventually followed it was almost imperceptible.

‘Possibly. I’ll issue an order for the night watch to wake me if it looks like coming this way.’

Dawn found the
Night Witch
far down the river from Nisibis, the ship’s speed the result of both the strong southward current and continuous rowing in which Martos and Lugos took their turn while the crewmen took food and water, and relieved themselves over the boat’s side.

‘It is fifty miles from the city to the Khabur river as the birds fly, but the Mygdonius takes many turns on the way, and so it is in truth double that distance. We have covered perhaps one half …’

Marcus looked down at the mast, still lying flat across the rowing benches.

‘Why do you not use the sail?’

The master shrugged, putting the rudder over to guide his vessel around yet another bend.

‘This river meanders like the path of a snake in the desert, Tribune. If I were to order the mast raised then much work would be required to continually trim and re-trim the sail. Rowing is easier. And besides, see how flat the land is to either side of the river as far as the eye can see? The sail will be visible for miles, and might betray our position to a horse patrol – and we have far to go before we can forget the danger of the Parthian cavalry. Although that worries me more …’

He pointed back to the north, and Marcus saw a distant mass of dark cloud on the horizon directly above the river’s course, a bruise in the sky’s otherwise clear blue vault.

‘If that storm’s coming south we could be in trouble. The Mygdonius floods quickly, when the water from the mountains is swollen by rain on the plain, and it could run so fast as to be impossible to navigate. We should all pray to our gods to send it away to rain on someone else and not us.’

Scaurus and Petronius struggled onto the windswept parapet at first light, both men huddled into hooded woollen infantry cloaks thick with the natural oils that made them the best protection against the rain that was lashing down on Nisibis. Down below, the river was already significantly higher than had been the case the previous evening, swollen by run-off from the mountains to the north. Petronius pointed at the closest of the city’s roofs, water cascading from a drainpipe unable to cope with the flow of rainwater.

‘Things are going to get interesting for the crew of the
Night Witch
, I’d imagine.’

After another hour or so of steady progress, one of the vessel’s sharper-eyed crewmen called out, pointing to the northern horizon. Marcus saw what it was that had caught his attention, an almost invisible cloud of ochre dust, barely visible against the oncoming storm’s dark grey wall as it swept down from the north in pursuit of the fleeing vessel.