Thunder of the Gods (42 page)

‘We’re almost there! I recognise that rock! Just three more bends!’

The boat was heeled over in a turn to the west, and in the moment before the master snapped the rudder over to haul her around the river’s bend to the east, Marcus stared over the vessel’s right-hand side at the oncoming riders. The main body were too distant to be any threat, but the outriders were close enough that he could make out individual horsemen, spectral figures engulfed in the dust of their passage. Thracius flicked a swift glance over his shoulder.

‘How close are they?’

‘A mile or so!’

The older man’s scowl of concentration hardened, his eyes locked on the next bend, and with nothing to contribute the Roman stared back over the stern, attempting to calculate the fast closing distance between the hunters and their intended prey.

‘I’d be amused, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ll soon be dead if we don’t outrun them!’

Martos had come to stand next to him, bracing himself against the boat’s side as the master threw his rudder over and slewed the vessel into another hard turn.

‘No means of shooting back at them! No way to protect ourselves against their arrows! We can only hope that the captain there has it right when he says we are almost at the next river.’

Cutting the bend’s apex so close that Marcus could see the sand beneath them through the river’s water, Thracius pointed forward, bellowing an order at his crew.

‘Row! Row for your worthless lives!’

Marcus and Martos looked forward, realising with rising hope that the river before them ran straight for a quarter of a mile before seeming to meet a dead end, the junction with the Khabur. The crew threw themselves at their oars, pulling with all their might at the shafts in one last frantic effort, and the two friends turned back to stare at the oncoming riders, now less than half a mile distant. As they watched, the foremost rider loosed an arrow, the iron head a bright flash of polished metal against the looming storm’s dark grey curtain.

‘Is he mad?’

Martos’s comment died in his throat as the shaft soared improbably high into the air, literally carried on the storm’s arms, then tipped over at the apogee of its flight and flickered down towards them, vanishing into the water a hundred paces back in the vessel’s wake. The two men looked at each other in dismay, Martos shaking his head. The entire group of horsemen loosed their arrows, which were lifted and strewn by the storm’s fury to land in a wide scatter, none any closer to the
Night Witch
than fifty paces, but the next volley, sent skywards straight after the first, fell closer still. Flicking his gaze back to the junction with the Khabur, Marcus watched as Thracius eased his rudder over to the right, expertly leaning his vessel into a steadily tightening left turn designed to put them into the Khabur’s wide main channel as swiftly as possible. He looked back with a grin, still unaware of the Parthian archers’ threat.

‘The Khabur’s running fast! Once we’re round this bend we’ll be out of range so quickly that—’

A windblown scattering of arrows speared down across the
Night Witch
’s course, a pair of shafts seeming to spring out of the boat’s deck less than a foot from one hapless rower, and while the master goggled at them, another arced down out of the black sky with the cruel accuracy of the random shot, stabbing deep into the space behind his collarbone with barely more than its fletching still exposed. With an upward roll of his eyes he sagged onto the rudder, forcing it hard over and sending the speeding boat curving round to the left, the taut sail’s driving force throwing it bodily onto the mud beach where the two rivers joined. With a rasping grind of wood against gritty sand the boat ran hard aground, stuck fast in the deep mud where river and land met.

Shorn of their leader the crew dithered momentarily, long enough for another volley of arrows to fall in their random scatter across the beach. Most of them overshot the stranded vessel, but three struck the boat’s wooden planks with dull thumps, further terrifying the sailors. Seeing the rising panic in their faces, and, as the first of them dropped their oars and stood with the clear intention of running for their lives, Martos jumped over the side onto the soft mud below, ploughing through the morass to firmer ground and then striding up the bank before turning to draw his sword, bellowing a warning down at them.

‘Any man who tries to run, dies here!’

The crew turned to face Marcus, who had drawn the eagle-pommelled gladius and was looking down it at them with a furious scowl. He gestured to the stricken master, lolling against the rudder with the ashen face and quick, panting respiration of a man with little time left to live.

‘Who’s his deputy?’

The biggest of them raised a hesitant hand, flinching as another shower of arrows hissed down into the water off the boat’s right-hand side.

‘Get your men ready to row us off this sandbank, and get that sail down, it’s holding us against the beach! Do it!’

Not giving the sailor time to question his orders, he turned to Lugos, who nodded his massive head and strode to the boat’s bow, vaulting over the raised wooden prow and placing his massive hands on the wooden hull, straining his bulging muscles in an attempt to push the boat off the mud. Behind Marcus a deep commanding voice rose above the wind’s bestial howl.

‘He’s not enough on his own!’

Marcus swung to face the Parthian captives, finding Gurgen on his feet and pointing at the recumbent Osroes.

‘My only responsibility is to protect my king’s life, and to stay here is to die here!’

The Parthian hurried up the ship’s length and jumped over the side, ranging his strength alongside that of the massive Briton. Martos sheathed his sword and ran down the bank to join them, the three men heaving at the ship’s hull with the corded muscles in their necks standing proud. A faint shiver ran through the boat’s frame, and Marcus called out to them as he realised what had caused the slight movement.

‘The river’s rising fast! Keep pushing and she’ll float off!’

Lifting the dying master away from the rudder, he laid the stricken sailor to one side, wincing as the pain of the movement contorted Thracius’s face into a silent scream, then crouched into the stern’s slight protection and looked across the river. The huge towering mass of dark cloud loomed almost vertically above them, flickers of lightning illuminating it from within and sending booming crashes of thunder across the empty landscape. Beneath it on the Mygdonius’s far bank, the Parthian horsemen had dismounted, and were loosing arrows as fast as they were able, the shafts blown in every direction by the gusting wind. The
Night Witch
lurched again, lifted slightly by the river’s inexorable rise, and the three big men at her bow threw their full strength against the deadweight of her massive timbers. Still the sandy mud’s sucking grip held the vessel fast, and Marcus pointed his gladius at the crew with a barked command that had them moving before they had time to think.

‘We need to lighten the boat! Over the side!’

Swarming over the
Night Witch
’s side, they slid into the water with terrified stares towards the bowmen on the far bank who were still shooting steadily at a target that was, were it not for the wind playing havoc with their archery, too large to miss.

‘Heave!’

Lugos’s voice rose over the wind’s din, and the three men arrayed on the boat’s left side strained their sinews again, Martos bellowing as his feet pumped in the mud that was denying them a clean purchase on the ground beneath them. The deck beneath Marcus’s feet lurched as the
Night Witch
slid a foot down the beach, and all three of the big men threw themselves at the boat’s side with roars and curses as her hull, lifted fractionally by the rising river, slid slowly back down the muddy slope. With a scrape of gravel that was more felt than heard, the boat eased her bulk gratefully down into the deeper water, drifting out into the fast-flowing water with a slow, uncontrolled pirouette that was turning her bow to point back up the river.

‘Oars!’

The crew pulled themselves over the
Night Witch
’s side, one man jerking as he heaved himself out of the river, an arrow’s long shaft protruding from his back. He stayed where he was for a moment, balanced between the effort that had lifted him out of the water and the iron’s agonising intrusion deep into his body, then fell back into the racing water and was lost to view. The rest of the crew threw themselves at their oars, knowing what to do without having to be ordered, backing water on the right side while the opposite bank pulled mightily to swing the boat’s prow back round to the south. Marcus sighted down the boat’s length, waiting for the prow to clear the riverbank to the left before bellowing his next command, pointing with gladius down the vessel’s length.

‘Row!
’

Another scattering of arrows fell like iron sleet as the crew strained their bodies at the oars, their bodies stretched back over the men behind them with each stroke in an explosive effort inspired by the prospect of escape from the murderous rain of arrows from the far bank. A man close enough for Marcus to reach out and touch screamed as an arrow pinned his foot to the deck, but kept rowing despite the sudden horrific pain of the shattered bones. Realising the danger to Osroes, Martos snatched up the Parthian shield that Marcus had taken from the initial skirmish, holding it over the unconscious king to protect him from the arrows’ random paths.

With the river’s spate at their back, the
Night Witch
gained speed quickly, spearing out into the racing current where the Mygdonius and the Khabur’s courses met with her hull bucking against the chop, and Marcus threw the rudder over to his right to sling her into a sharp turn to the left, into the bigger river’s stream. More arrows fell around them, but the shooting was growing wilder as the distance between bowmen and target lengthened, the gusting storm winds toying with the lofted arrows and dropping them across the Khabur’s racing waters without regard to the archers’ aim.

Marcus realised that while Martos had managed to climb aboard as the boat’s stern had slid back into the river, Gurgen and Lugos were still clinging to the vessel’s bow.

‘Get them aboard!’

A pair of crewmen pulled their oars on board, rose and took a grip of Gurgen’s arms, pulling him over the boat’s side to flop exhausted on the deck in a pool of water from his soaked clothing, gasping for breath just from the effort of clinging onto the bow’s timbers as the river had pulled at his body. As they were struggling to drag Lugos’s massive weight on board, a final flight of arrows arched down out of the blackness that pressed down on the river from the north, one last volley loosed at a far greater distance than would have been possible without the wind behind the archers. One of the men hauling at Lugos’s arms released his grip and scrabbled with both hands at the arrow buried in his back, dropping to his knees with his spine arched and his mouth open in a scream that was lost in the wind’s howl. The big Briton pulled himself over the bow, his teeth gritted against the pain of his own wound, standing on the deck with blood running down his leg from the shaft protruding from the side of his thigh.

A bright flash of sheet lightning lit the bruised sky a sudden livid orange, the clap of thunder that followed an instant later seemingly loud enough to split the world in two, and with a hissing fury that tore the river’s roiling surface into watery chaos, a sheet of rain ripped across the landscape, instantly reducing visibility to a hundred paces and putting paid to any further archery. The boat’s exhausted crew slumped over their oars, the man closest to Marcus staring at his ruined foot in silent horror as the teeming rain washed away the blood that was still oozing around the arrow’s shaft, his comrades’ attention fixed on Thracius’s corpse. The big man who had declared himself the master’s second in command stood, walking down the boat’s length and bending to speak into Marcus’s ear.

‘Best if I steer her now, sir. We need to moor up until this rain lets up, or we’ll risk running into a rock and ripping her bottom out.’

The Roman stood, gesturing to the rudder.

‘As you think best. I doubt the enemy will be doing anything more constructive under this deluge.’

‘What the bloody hell do you think they’re up to?’

Scaurus looked out over the city’s northern wall, shading his eyes with a raised hand. The Parthian line that surrounded the fortress was unchanged, the soldiers busy at work deepening and extending the entrenchments that had been dug in a complete circle around the walls. A massive white tent had been erected across the Mygdonius’s course just outside the range of Nisibis’s bolt throwers, presumably to act as Narsai’s headquarters and makeshift palace, a stream of officers coming and going while smoke from cooking fires hazed the air above it.

‘King Narsai’s not a man to forego his luxuries, is he? How many other men have a river running through their tent?’

The prefect pulled a face.

‘If I could just get another fifty paces range out of the bolt throwers, I’d give that bastard the shock of his bloody life.’

Petronius had ordered his first spear to limit the bolt throwers to occasional harassing shots, not wanting to waste their stock of missiles, and so the enemy had dug more or less without interference while the prefect had laughed at their efforts.

‘Completely without any military value, given they’ve no means of putting a hole in the walls. Whereas whatever it is that they’re up to over there in the hills looks somewhat more interesting, don’t you think?’

The legatus nodded slowly, staring out over the enemy lines to a spot a mile or more distant, where the walls of the river’s valley ran down to merge with the plain, leaving the Mygdonius to run across the plain’s open expanse. The repetitive sound of axes striking wood echoed distantly across the landscape, and as they watched, a tree on the river’s banks toppled to the ground, the creaking roar of its fall reduced to a sigh by the distance.