Thunder of the Gods (49 page)

He paused, looking around him.

‘Not much, if the truth’s being told. You’re all good men, but there’s not one of you I’d call an old-fashioned hero, born to hold the blood-slicked hilt of a notched sword. But you can give them one precious gift, if you have it in you.’

The silence stretched out until it seemed certain that someone would ask the question.

‘Equality. Today, just for a few hours, you have the opportunity to see the world from their point of view. You can fight alongside them, kill with them and risk dying with them. If they see you taking your part in the slaughter that’s going to win or lose this battle for us, they’ll fight with you and perhaps even fight
for
you, if you’re really convincing.’

He shook his head.

‘Enough. Just go out there and share the dangers that your men are going to be facing, and perhaps the men fighting with you will be moved to give that part of themselves they usually hold in reserve. For some of them that will include their lives, so don’t insult them by asking them for anything you’re not willing to give yourself.’

He paused and looked round the room again.

‘Make the legatus proud, and you’ll have done enough to earn my respect. Now, as to how this battle will be fought …’

With the briefing complete, the officers went back to their cohorts with serious expressions, while Scaurus, Julius and Petronius climbed the walls to stare out at the enemy formation marshalling to the city’s north, just outside bolt-thrower range.

‘It won’t be long now.’

Scaurus nodded at his first spear’s comment. The ditch in front of the Parthian siege lines had been filled with earth, and the flat ground behind it was packed with rank after rank of Median infantry who had been formed into a column fifty men wide and two hundred men deep, their spears and helmets winking in the sun. To either side looser formations of dismounted horse archers stood ready to advance, while at the infantry’s rear a compact block of shining armoured figures stood perfectly immobile. A horn blew, and with commendable precision the spear men started their march towards the fortress’s shattered walls, the archers walking easily alongside them with their bows strung and arrows nocked. Scaurus nodded at Petronius, who looked across the gap at his own senior centurion and pointed a finger at the enemy. The senior centurion’s gruff voice grated out a command over the distant rumble of marching boots.

‘Bolt throwers! Target, enemy infantry!
Shoot!
’

With a twanging thump the first bolts arced down into the leading Parthian ranks, punching one- and two-man gaps in the marching column. For every spear man killed by the missiles’ eviscerating impacts, a dozen more were sprayed with the blood of a man who had been walking beside them a moment before, but for all the horror that was being visited upon them, the column’s pace didn’t falter.

‘They’ve got discipline, I’ll give them that.’

Scaurus nodded grimly.

‘I can’t argue with you on that, First Spear. Archers, Prefect?’

Petronius raised two fingers, and the response was instant.

‘Archers! Target, enemy infantry!
Loose!
’

The legatus pursed his lips as the Hamians rose from the parapet’s cover and launched their first volley, arrows whipping out from the walls and hanging in the air for a moment before plunging down into the advancing Parthian line, hundreds of shafts peppering the raised shields or flicking between them to kill and maim the unwary and unlucky. The officers had debated which would be the best target for their bows, but in the end a blunt statement from Julius had ended the discussion.

‘It won’t be archers who win this fight, it’ll be infantrymen, and they have ten thousand to our five. Every Parthian spear man we kill with an arrow is one less man in the fight for that wall, and every man we wound is another obstacle in their way as they try to get bodies forward. Our archers have a parapet to hide behind, and the men on the wall have thick enough shields to keep the enemy arrows off. There’ll only be one rule in this fight – if we kill enough of their infantry then we win the battle, and probably the entire campaign.’

The oncoming infantry’s ranks were already looking ragged, with less than half the distance to the makeshift defence that plugged the walls’ breach covered, but Julius stared dourly at the marching men.

‘We’re hurting them alright, but the rear ranks haven’t even started moving yet.’

Scaurus looked down at the hastily constructed wall that filled the gap between the two ends of the inner wall, and the marine infantry waiting in its shelter, invisible to the enemy soldiers. Prefect Ravilla looked up at the same time and saluted, nodding in silent thanks for Scaurus’s display of trust in putting his men into the front line.

The legatus gazed at the stolid marines’ ranks, arrayed along the wall’s fighting platform in the cover of the four feet of wall that was their main defence against the Parthians’ spears. Avidus had been unable to do much more than throw up a rough stone rampart eight feet tall, backed by a twenty-pace long ramp that rose from street level to allow a cohort of legionaries easy access to the broad flat surface that the African’s pioneers had constructed four feet up the wall’s rear surface. At the ramp’s end a fresh cohort was waiting for their turn in the line, successive units queued up along the length of the strip of pitted and lumpy ground that was what was left of the street into which the wall had toppled.

‘I suggest we have the waiting cohorts prepare to come under attack from the enemy archers, First Spear?’

Julius nodded, and at the prearranged trumpet call, each of the units behind the wall moved quickly to erect unbroken walls of shields across their fronts. Another volley of artillery bolts snapped down into the advancing infantry, the leading units slowing their pace to redress their lines and allow men from the following ranks to fill the gaps, men dropping with each step forward as the Hamians poured arrows into them in a deadly rain of iron. The rattle of metal on stone and the whirr of flight feathers whipping past the wall’s defenders announced the fact that the enemy archers had advanced sufficiently to loft arrows at the men lining the city’s walls to either side of the breach. A Hamian to the officers’ left turned with a shaft protruding from his throat before falling to the parapet, his body shaking violently as blood flowed out across the stone surface.

‘Get him away from those pots!’

Another Syrian dragged his comrade clear of the earthenware containers that had been placed in the parapet’s protection earlier that morning, making the warding gesture as he did so. Standing, he was struck by an arrow that pinned his hand to his thigh, tottered for a moment and then fell into the gap between the inner and outer walls with a shriek that was only silenced by his impact with the moat’s mud and debris-filled surface.

The screams of the enemy wounded were now loud enough to break through the rhythmic footfall of thousands of boots, as the enemy infantry came on with the clear purpose of getting to grips with the men sheltering behind the city’s last line of defence, taking advantage of the slackening in the Hamians’ shooting as the archers took cover from the arrows being launched at them from below. As the greasy mud thickened underfoot, the spear men started to throw bundles of brushwood onto the soft, yielding crust that lay over the liquid layer beneath, repeating the action as more improvised fascines were passed forward to them by the men behind. Slowly, inexorably, the Parthian infantry crept closer to the wall, their pace increasing as they grew more confident with the firmer footing under their boots.

With twenty paces left to march, the enemy horns blew and the marching men lowered their long spears to point at the wall before them.

‘Man the defences!’

The marines rose from cover, raising their shields and swinging their own long spears to point down at the oncoming enemy. The Parthians were suddenly struggling, their pace slowing abruptly as they reached the ground where Avidus’s men had laboured hardest over the previous evening, pouring buckets of water passed out to the walls by a human chain of the city’s inhabitants to soften the dried mud, saturating it to the point where a booted foot could sink a foot deep without gaining any purchase. Reaching the space between the outer and inner walls, the gaps on either side between the two plugged with rubble to prevent any attempt to get between them, the footing got even worse for the attackers as they floundered into the deeper mud that filled the now invisible moat. The braver Hamians were leaning out over the walls, ignoring the Parthian archers’ threat to pour arrows down into the struggling enemy infantry as they floundered forward, dropping more bundles of brushwood into the seemingly bottomless mire. As Scaurus watched aghast, an officer who had been urging his men forward paid the price for making himself too obvious a target and went down into the mud face first with a shaft sticking out of his back, blood staining the mud red as his men trampled him into the swampy ground, successive ranks stamping his struggling body deeper into the ooze until all that was visible were two hands, the fingers no longer clenched as he lost the fight for life.

With a clash of spearheads on shields, the Parthians staggered onto the Roman defences and the two armies collided at close quarters for the first time, the marines stabbing down into the mass of spear men, while the Parthians sought to fend off their iron blades, thrusting back up at the men on the wall above them. One of Ravilla’s men fell back from the wall with his throat open, and his comrades pushed him clear for the bandage carriers, working their spears with renewed anger to reap the attackers whenever an opening allowed them to thrust in their long spear blades, but where an enemy soldier fell another swiftly stepped forward. Successive ranks of infantry crowded up behind the leading men, shields raised over their heads in an attempt to fend off the arrows raining down on them. A horn sounded behind the marines and they exchanged positions, the rear rank moving forward to take up the positions vacated by the men staggering back, already exhausted by the first moments of fighting.

‘Look!’

Scaurus followed Julius’s pointing finger, peering over the parapet at the dismounted cataphracts following close behind the rear rank of the infantry with swords already drawn. As he watched, a lone Parthian infantryman turned to run, clearly unmanned by the screams of the men dying under the city’s walls, only to be cut down before he had taken the second step back.

‘Gods below.’

The first spear nodded grimly.

‘They’re going to herd those poor bastards forward to be butchered, partly to exhaust us and partly to carpet the mud with enough dead bodies to give them firmer footing.’

‘Can it work?’

Julius shook his head.

‘I have no idea. But if they pile up enough corpses and get enough men over the wall to allow the rest of them time to get into the city, they’ll hack us to pieces. Petronius, order your bolt throwers’ captains to concentrate their efforts on the cataphracts!’

He leaned over the parapet.

‘Rotate the cohorts!’

The horn sounded again, and the next cohort stamped forward up the debris ramp while the marines kept fighting, waiting until they were pulled away from the wall by their replacements, faces white with exhaustion, to take their place at the rear of the queue of cohorts that stretched deep into the city.

Tribune Varus saw Prefect Ravilla walking towards him, blood flecked across his face and chest, his eyes still wide from the combat he’d been pulled away from only a moment before.

‘How was it, Prefect?’

The equestrian officer looked at him blank-faced, white with the shock of battle.

‘Their column seems to stretch back to the horizon, Tribune. Every man we killed was replaced by another, and their wounded fall into the mud and are drowned if they don’t die of their wounds. We were killing them, and killing them, and killing them … but there are
so
many of them.’

Varus let him pass, turning back to his own cohort with a thoughtful expression.

‘What’s going on, Tribune sir?’

Varus nodded at Sanga, smiling at the feathers poking upwards on either side of his helmet.

‘Congratulations on your promotion, Watch Officer. As to what’s happening, it’s all very simple. The enemy are trying to overcome our defences by means of overwhelming numbers, and we’re doing our very best to kill so many of them that they decide that the game’s not worth playing.’

‘An’ who’s winning, sir?’

Horns blew, and the cohort marched forward twenty paces. The tribune shrugged.

‘Who’s winning? It doesn’t sound to me like anyone’s winning.’

An hour later the enemy soldiers were no longer fighting against a four foot height disadvantage. As Ravilla had told Varus, any spear man unable to crawl away when the Romans’ questing blades pierced his armour was simply trampled under the feet of the men behind to form the foundation of a ramp of human bodies, some dead, some still clinging to life and protesting feebly at the indignity of being so cruelly used by their fellows. Goaded on by the harsh commands of the cataphracts close on their heels, the Parthians were still flooding forwards, stabbing up at the Romans lined up on the makeshift wall before them.

‘Petronius!’

Scaurus was having to shout to be heard now, the cacophony of agony from the battle below making it almost impossible to communicate in anything less than a parade-ground roar. The prefect turned to face him, then staggered and toppled over the rear of the wall’s fighting platform with an arrow in his face.

‘Shit! You!’

He reached out and took a Hamian centurion by the arm, shouting in the man’s ear.

‘Tell your men I want them to shoot at the enemy archers! Pass the word to your prefect!’

Julius strode down the wall, completely ignoring the arrows flying past him as the Parthian bowmen loosed arrows as fast as they could.

‘Why have we stopped shooting at the infantry?’

Scaurus pulled him into the wall’s cover.