Thunder of the Gods (41 page)

‘Riders. Only a few, but even one is sufficient to bring more of them.’

They watched grim-faced as the thin plume thrown up by their pursuers’ horses grew steadily thicker, deviating to neither left nor right, and Thracius shook his head in disgust.

‘As if that bloody storm wasn’t enough. They’re riding down the line of the river.’

He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin and staring back at the oncoming riders.

‘Perhaps they’ve worked out that last night’s attack was a deliberate distraction. Or perhaps it’s just a patrol.’

‘But if they see us?’

The master stared at the horsemen’s dust for a moment before answering, and Marcus guessed that he was working out distances and travel speed.

‘We’re still hours from the joining of the two rivers, Tribune, and even then the Khabur winds just as bad as this. We need to buy ourselves more time, or they’ll catch us before we make the turn. You, Tribune, will have to make sure the king’s man doesn’t try to escape, or to draw attention to us.’

While he issued a string of orders to the crew, then steered the boat into the shelter of the right bank where the river swung to the west, Marcus went forward to join the king, Lugos looming behind him.

‘My apologies, Your Majesty, but I must restrain you both.’

Osroes nodded wearily, his eyes still dull and the set of his body listless.

‘I was wondering why your captain has pulled into the bank. You have seen some sign of my people?’

‘A patrol. Lugos?’

The big Briton stepped forward, Martos close by with a hand on the hilt of his sword, much to the amusement of Gurgen who held his hands out to be bound at the wrists.

‘Whatever it is that makes you think I might resist this monster without so much as a toothpick, Prince Martos, you are much deluded.’

Martos waited for Marcus’s translation, his face unchanging as he listened to the words.

‘I sense danger in you, Parthian, and the last time I ignored that sense it cost me my wife and children.’

The noble shrugged, settling into the boat’s curved side and closing his eyes.

‘Wake me when you’re ready to release me.’

Several of the crew had busied themselves anchoring the vessel to the bank’s grass-covered earth, while others had brought forth several bows from a wooden box in the vessel’s stern, each with a thick sheaf of arrows attached to the curved wooden staves, their strings kept safe from moisture in sealed waxed leather pouches. Stringing the bows and taking cover at the top of the bank, they peered over its lip across the flat ground beyond, and the plume of dust that was now close enough for the riders to be clearly visible.

‘Four men.’

Thracius nodded at Marcus’s count, waving his men down below the bank’s lip and speaking loudly enough to be heard by everyone, his voice hard with command.

‘They must
all
die here. If any of them escape to raise an alarm, then their mates will catch up with us within hours, most likely before we reach the Khabur. We’ll only have one chance to finish them all without leaving any survivors, and that means waiting until they are close enough that we can’t miss.’

Listening intently as the distant patter of hoofs on the hard baked earth gradually hardened to a drumbeat, the riders drawing steadily closer to their hiding place, the sailors waited with arrows nocked to their bowstrings, each of them looking to their leader for the command to attack. What it was that betrayed their presence was never clear to Marcus, perhaps a swift impatient glance over the bank’s lip at the wrong time born of fear, or nerves, or perhaps one of the riders sighted the boat’s black outline peeking from the bank’s cover, but whatever it was that alerted the Parthian scouts, their reaction was instant. Shouting a warning that had his comrades reaching reflexively for arrows, their bows already strung and out of their bow cases, the closest of them hurled his spear at whatever it was that he had seen, the long iron blade catching one of the crewmen squarely in the throat as he rose to shoot an arrow at the scouts, sending him toppling back down the bank to fall backwards into the boat at Gurgen’s feet with blood pouring from the deep wound.

The crew rose from their hiding places with brave determination and loosed their first arrows with more speed than accuracy, dropping one of the riders with the fletched end of a shaft protruding from his chest, and hitting two of the horses, but the Parthians’ response was swift and deadly. Another of the crewmen jerked back with an arrow in his chest, as the scouts’ return shots whipped into the ambush with the accuracy of men who had been using bows on horseback for most of their lives. Martos snatched the bow from his spasming fingers, nocking a shaft and rising from his place in defiance of the risk, sighting down the arrow for a moment before putting its wickedly barbed iron head squarely into the closest man’s chest. The master loosed his second attempt with equal nerve, ignoring a shot that whistled past his ear and pinning a rider’s thigh to his beast’s flank with a deliberately aimed arrow. The last man fell with a pair of Roman arrows in his side, toppling out of the saddle to land on his head with a distinct snap of breaking bone.

The surviving scout turned his horse and spurred it away, ducking under the arrows that were sent wildly after him, both horse and rider badly wounded by the arrow protruding from his left thigh to judge from the beast’s uneven gait and its rider’s stiff, agonised posture. Martos loosed again, putting his last shot into the man’s right shoulder and almost knocking him over the horse’s neck, but by some miracle the Parthian stayed on his mount and rode on, too distant for any realistic attempt to bring him down. Marcus leapt to his feet, sprinting towards the spot where the only unwounded horse stood nudging its fallen rider with a gentle muzzle, uncomprehending of the fact that the man was already dead, his head canted at an unnatural angle. Snatching up the dead man’s spear with his good left hand he stabbed it into the ground beside the horse, heaving himself into the saddle and then pulling the weapon’s blade free of the earth in which it was buried, transferring it to hang from his right hand before wheeling the beast around with the reins gripped in the other, digging his heels into its flanks.

The wounded rider had a quarter-mile start, but his horse was clearly struggling with the effects of the arrow wound it had sustained in the short bloody fight, its pace slowing as the blood loss that painted its flank and its rider’s leg dark red weakened its muscles. The Parthian looked back, and on seeing Marcus bearing down upon him raised his bow, blood-covered fingers groping for an arrow. Putting the shaft to the bow’s string he drew it back as far as his weakened arm could manage, but the resulting shot was both weak and misdirected, the arrow striking the ground a dozen paces to the right of the oncoming Roman. He reached for another, but as he was struggling to nock the arrow, his hand shaking visibly with the shock of his wounds, Marcus dropped the reins and gripped the spear in his left hand, leaning in to stab the long blade into the hapless rider’s chest, punching him out of his saddle to lie broken and bleeding in the plain’s dust.

Reining the horse in and dismounting, he walked slowly back towards the fallen Parthian, looking down the spear’s shaft at the dying man. The scout stared up at him uncomprehendingly, muttered something unintelligible and then spasmed, his body tensing for a moment before collapsing back onto the dry earth with a death rattle in his throat, the life leaving his eyes as the last breath sighed from his body.

The
Night Witch
’s crew were already hard at work digging a grave for their comrades when he reached the river, Thracius nodding his respect as the Roman pushed the bloodied spear’s head into the ground, dropped the shield he had taken from the dead man beside it and dismounted. They dug in silence, Martos and Lugos taking spades from the first men to tire and working alongside the sailors to deepen the hole until the master judged it sufficient to protect their comrades from carrion animals.

‘Get them in and fill it up. We’ll say the words later, when we know we won’t be joining them for a quick trip across the Styx.’

Marcus made his way down to the
Night Witch
, releasing Gurgen from his bonds and placing the shield beside the king, who had fallen into a deep sleep despite the hectic events taking place around him.

‘This may prove useful for the king’s protection.’

The noble looked dourly at the blood speckled across the Roman’s tunic, then at the pool of blood left in the boat’s curved bottom by the crew member who had fallen to the thrown spear.

‘His blood, or another’s?’

Marcus looked down at the stains.

‘One of yours, a wounded scout. He probably wouldn’t have lived long, there were two arrows in him.’

‘A mercy killing then.’

The Roman looked up, but where he had expected to find a stare of irony, Gurgen’s face was sympathetic.

‘Perhaps. He was still trying to kill me, when I put him down.’

‘No man can do any more to bring honour to his name. He would have been grateful for the speed of your strike, at the end. As you may come to understand, when we reach Ctesiphon …’

Bodies buried, and with the dead Parthians and their horses left to lie where they had fallen, the vessel’s crew reboarded and cast off, raising the sail at the master’s command.

‘They’ll be too tired to row after that, and I reckon the river’s running too fast for oars in any case. I’ll let half of them get some sleep while the rest help me steer this bitch.’

Marcus watched while he skippered the boat through the seemingly unending succession of bends in the river. Those crew who hadn’t rolled themselves into their hides and immediately fallen asleep worked constantly to adjust the sail’s angle to the wind, while Thracius steered the vessel expertly around the river’s meanderings. He looked round to find Marcus studying his expert use of the rudder to cut each bend in the river as closely as he dared, and pointed back at the storm-laden northern horizon.

‘If you want to do something useful Tribune, you could keep an eye open back the way we came? I’d like some warning if we’re going to be run down by several hundred of those bastards, because being taken alive by those animals isn’t on my list of good ways to die. And wash that blood out of your tunic before it dries hard, you’re supposed to be a Roman emissary but you look more like a river pirate.’

‘A pirate? There are bandits on the river?’

The master laughed tersely.

‘Why else do you think we carry weapons? You’re not sailing the Middle Sea now, young sir, the river we’re heading for carries enough wealth to make an unscrupulous crew who aren’t afraid of the sight of blood rich very quickly indeed, if they don’t pick the wrong ship to attack. And trust me, when you consider just how much fun it is to earn a living from fishing, it’s no surprise that more than one village on the Euphrates harbours pirates.’

The
Night Witch
ran south before a freshening northerly wind, the oncoming storm’s gusts bellying her sail, and after a while the master told his men to bring down the canvas and raise a smaller sheet in its place.

‘The wind’s getting too strong, the mast’ll break if I leave that sail up! And the river’s running so fast that all I really need is enough of a push to keep control of her heading!’

The shouted words were torn from his mouth by the wind’s scream, barely audible to Marcus from less than a foot away, the two men watching the crew fight to pull the sail down without losing it.

‘If it gets much worse we’ll have to take shelter against the bank!’

A yell from behind made them both turn, to find a sailor pointing back up the river into the mass of darkness that dominated a third of the sky, his eyes fixed on the horizon. Against the brooding tower of iron-grey cloud, the smudge of ochre dust was almost invisible as it blew straight towards them, and Marcus shook his head as he realised that their pursuers were almost certainly riding into the gritty, choking fog churned up by their horse’s hoofs. The master looked at the dust plume for a moment, then turned back to the river ahead of them, turning the rudder to accommodate yet another bend.

‘That puts mooring up out of the question! There’s another two or three miles to run before we reach the Khabur, so it’s going to be a close thing whether they catch us before we make the turn, from the look of it! But if we do get there first, the river runs straight and true for a few miles, pretty much, a chance for us to lose them by running as fast as this bitch’ll go when she doesn’t have to make a turn every few dozen paces!’

Cupping his hands he bellowed an order at the struggling sailors.

‘Leave that sail up! I want every last bit of speed out of the old cow!’

Listing violently under the wind’s harsh treatment, with the crew taking turns to lean out over the hull’s side to keep the
Night Witch
from turning over, Thracius guided his vessel through the Mygdonius’s remaining bends with cool-headed precision, never once looking back to check on their pursuers’ progress, so intent was he on cutting each turn as finely as possible. After a few moments Marcus saw a second, smaller dust plume separate itself from the main body and begin to outpace the larger group. He shouted to the master, pointing back to the north.

‘They’ve detached a party of outriders on the fastest horses! How much more of this river do we have to cover?’

The older man shrugged, putting the rudder over and aiming for the apex of the next bend.

‘A mile or so? I’ve been concentrating on not sinking, not bend counting!’

The enemy advance party came on swiftly, thrashing their horses mercilessly as if they knew that they would lose the chance to stop the boat’s escape if they didn’t reach a shooting position before the
Night Witch
made her imminent turn south into the Khabur’s course. Marcus momentarily considered getting Martos to string a bow and ready himself to shoot back at them, then realised that with the wind so strong in their faces the effort would be futile. The master shouted encouragement to his crew, pointing to a massive rock on the riverbank as he guided the vessel round the next bend so tightly that Marcus could have reached out and touched the enormous boulder.