Thunder of the Gods (9 page)

The legion’s tribunes gathered late that afternoon, Flamininus among them with his face bruised and his eyes boring into Marcus at every opportunity. The object of his ire, for his part, chose to ignore the challenging stare, smiling quietly to himself at some private joke, or so it seemed. After a few moments, Scaurus swept into the room, looking around the gathering with apparent surprise.

‘All nine of you? That’s gratifying. I had wondered if a few of you might have chosen to ignore my message.’

‘Legatus, if I might make some intro—’

‘Introductions? Not just now, thank you Tribune Umbrius. There’ll be plenty of time for getting to know each other later, when we’ve worked out which of you will be staying with the legion.’

He looked around at them, waiting for someone to break the silence.

‘Staying with the legion, Legatus?’

The broad stripe tribune had spoken again, clearly intent on playing to his role as the most senior of the group, and his legatus’s deputy.

‘Indeed, Tribune. Which of you will be considered fit to remain in your positions, and which of you I will be forced to dismiss from imperial service. As of now this legion is under wartime conditions. We will be marching for the border within a few weeks, with the intention of finding, challenging and destroying the Parthian force that has been harassing our outposts in Adiabene.’

‘But surely it’s too early in the year for a campaign of any duration. The weather …’

Scaurus shook his head at the attempted intervention.

‘The worst of the winter is over, Tribune. The weather from this point onwards, from my previous experience of the province, won’t ever get cold enough to freeze water. Compared to northern Britannia, or Dacia, that’s positively comfortable for a well-equipped infantryman kept warm by sufficient food, thick clothing and plenty of exercise. I think we’ll be safe enough making a swift march from the Euphrates to Nisibis. And when I say swift, gentlemen, you should take my words at face value.’

They looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘The route I plan to take is, I’ll admit, a little risky. There will be times when we have no option but to double pace the legion for ten or twenty miles at a time.’

He waited for a moment for the real meaning of his words to dawn upon the officers gathered around him, but none of them showed any sign of comprehension.

‘I see that I shall have to make this very clear indeed. When I say that the legion will be forced to march at the double pace, I was speaking literally. Every man in the Third is going to have to learn to cover twenty miles in five hours with full equipment.’

Still the officers failed to react with any sign of understanding.

‘Every
man, gentlemen. Including all of you.’

‘But …’

‘Yes, Tribune?’

Umbrius’s face was creased in a frown.

‘Legatus, the legion’s gentlemen
ride
to war. We do not march like the common soldiery.’

Scaurus raised an eyebrow, apparently intrigued by the idea.

‘I see. How very …
gentlemanly
. And tell me, Tribune, what will you do if your horse goes lame?’

‘I’ll get on my spare, Legatus.’

Scaurus nodded, conceding the point with a knowing smile.

‘And if a Parthian raid makes off with your horses – all three of them, obviously – what then?’

Umbrius looked back at his commanding officer with dawning horror.

‘I’ll … march?’

Scaurus nodded slowly.

‘Indeed you will. The purposes of an officer’s horse, gentlemen, are several. The horse provides a vantage point over the heads of the men around the officer, allowing him to see and be seen. The horse provides its rider with speed over the ground for the swift delivery of messages, and allows him to move quickly to points where his presence is essential. It provides a means of following up behind a retreating enemy, in order to guide in the pursuers and be sure that no ambush has been set by the rearguard. It is most emphatically not intended to enable him to avoid undertaking the same hardships we expect of our men. And gentlemen, I expect every man in this room to be capable of matching our soldiers stride for stride over any distance and at any speed of
march
. While we train for war you will therefore march alongside your men, all of whom will be carrying a good deal more weight than you since your possessions are carried in carts while they have to hoist everything they own onto a pack pole.’

He looked around at their horrified faces.

‘You may not like it, but there it is. You all volunteered to be officers, and in
my
legion officers don’t sit around all day allowing their centurions to run the show. Your days of indolent luxury in Daphne are over, as from the moment you walked into this office. This legion needs officers. Your soldiers need leaders, men they can see sharing their hardships, living alongside them, fighting alongside them and if necessary, dying alongside them too. You will all, every one of you, learn to march very quickly indeed, and brush up on your weapons skills too, if you don’t want to be left behind when the legion marches.’

He looked about him again with a hard smile.

‘Oh yes, there’s a threat that some of you will be considering with an inner smirk, isn’t there? To be left behind in Antioch, while the rest of us march off to provide the Parthians with a little light target practice, doomed to die in the desert at the hands of eastern barbarians? That doesn’t sound so bad an alternative, I’d imagine. Except, gentlemen, consider this.’

He pinched the wool of his tunic, emphasising the garment’s thin stripe.

‘I’m sure you noticed it the moment I walked in. I’m just an equestrian! An upstart! A man with everything to prove, which is probably why the freedman who’s currently running the empire gave me command of this legion. He knows that I’ll beat you all into prime condition, and give the enemy more to think about than they’re expecting, given just how dissolute their spies will have been telling them
you
are.’

He grinned at them without a trace of humour.

‘But while I may only be an equestrian, I’m nobody’s fool, gentlemen. I accepted this command from the imperial chamberlain in return for one simple promise. He guaranteed me that any man I choose to send home, any of you judged to be unfit to hold the position of tribune in my legion for the reason of failing to make sufficient effort in his training, would have his family’s affairs investigated most thoroughly.’

He smiled at them knowingly.

‘It was a promise he was delighted to make. You’re all the sons of rich men, by comparison with the poor bastards you’re supposed to be leading. Can you all say with absolute certainty that your fathers came by that wealth fairly? That they’ve all paid their taxes on time and in full? That none of them has ever bribed an imperial official? I wouldn’t have thought that even the most scrupulous of men would relish Cleander’s investigators picking apart the seams of their lives, looking for hidden gold. And that, I promise you, would be the least of it.’

‘I have nothing to fear. My family’s wealth is honestly come by, and so vast that fraud really isn’t necessary.’

Scaurus smiled back at Umbrius.

‘On the contrary. The empire, by which of course I mean the emperor, has an insatiable thirst for gold. Anyone’s gold, whether fairly taken or not. I’d imagine that the prospect of turning his men loose on your father’s great fortune would make Cleander’s mouth water. Even the smallest of financial irregularities, the most innocent of mistakes by a scribe, would be enough to redouble their interest in your father’s doings. Few men’s affairs can stand up to such thorough scrutiny.’

He smiled at them, seeing the realisation that their lives were about to change irrevocably dawning upon the brighter among them.

‘So here it is, gentlemen. If you’re invalided out of the legion while genuinely trying to prove your fitness to come with us, then I’ll allow you to take passage back to Rome by merchant ship, after the winter, when the seas are open again. But if you fail to display the zeal I’m looking for, or try to count yourself out with some imagined ailment, then I’ll put you on a praetorian warship that’s waiting in the harbour at Seleucia for just the purpose, ready to sail immediately. Cleander’s waiting for that ship, gentlemen, and the men that walk off it in Misenum can be assured that their families’ lives are about to get a good deal more interesting than might be considered healthy. You choose. It’s really all the same to me.’

‘So, Vibius Varus, tell us about the destruction of the Sixth cohort.’

The tribune looked about him, uncertainly, and Scaurus smiled reassuringly.

‘I know, you’ve told the tale a hundred times already, I’ve read the record. Your previous legatus called you a coward for not dying with your command, despite not having set foot over the Euphrates in all his time in command of this legion.’

Varus nodded warily.

‘I hear the insult a dozen times a day. They call me coward behind my back, loudly enough to be sure I’ll hear, men with no idea what it was that we faced.’

Scaurus spread his hands in agreement.

‘Exactly. But
we
understand. We’ve all seen the same terrible face that battle wears.’

He gestured to the men gathered around his desk. Marcus, Julius, Dubnus, and Cotta.

‘Varus, it’s clear to me that your First Spear sent you away to make sure that the manner of his cohort’s destruction reached his legatus. None of us is going to judge you, and if your failure to have died alongside the men of the Sixth Cohort troubles you, then you’ll have the chance to prove yourself soon enough, if that’s what you want.’

Varus nodded slowly.

‘When the cohort’s first spear sent me away, I rode far enough to see the whole thing without becoming a target. I took refuge in a fold in the land, a slightly elevated position from which to watch the battle, as the first spear had requested.’

He shook his head at the memory.

‘It was like a scene from one of the arches in the forum, our men in a four-deep line and crouching behind their shields, with the rear two ranks protecting their heads.’

Scaurus shook his head grimly.

‘All very well in the assault, but not the best choice if you find yourself trapped under the bows of the Parthians with no cover to be had. How many archers were there?’

‘At least five thousand, Legatus, all mounted. Once the cohort had formed a square they rode around it, just shooting volley after volley of arrows in from all sides. When their arrows were spent they rode to meet men on camels laden with spares, then came back and started the whole horrible thing again. Some of the legionaries died instantly, hit by arrows that found a gap in the shields, or simply punched straight through the wood at close range.’

He grimaced at the memory.

‘They were the lucky ones. Others were only wounded, unable to hold their shields up against the constant rain of arrows. I saw one man crawl out into the middle of the square, to get out from under his comrades’ feet, I suppose. I watched him jerk as each successive arrow hit him, until he just stopped moving.’

‘How long did they keep this up?’

Varus turned to face Marcus.

‘Two hours? Perhaps three …’

‘And then?’

The tribune shook his head.

‘I thought that watching five hundred legionaries being picked apart one man at a time was the worst thing I’d ever seen. But then, as the afternoon heat really started to tell on the men left standing—’

‘How many were still able to fight?’

The tribune pursed his lips in thought.

‘Perhaps two hundred. They were still huddled together around the dead and wounded in the double line, facing both ways. Their shields were black with the shafts of arrows by this point, and many of them were already wounded. I knew their time had come when the cataphracts mounted their horses. They had sat on the ground watching as the archers killed our men, talking amongst themselves and waiting for the right moment to make their attack. I remember one man losing his wits under that unrelenting rain of death, and charging out of the line with his spear ready to throw. He only managed twenty paces, of course, before they shot him down with half a dozen arrows clean through his shield, and the cataphracts stood up and applauded his bravery. But eventually they mounted their horses and rode forward to finish the job.’

The men sitting around him waited patiently while he took a deep breath.

‘Even now the thought of it terrifies me. The archers rode back to either side, leaving those men that were still alive to stand and stare as the heavy cavalry formed up. They mounted without any noise or shouting, seemingly without urgency, as if they were simply parading for inspection. Their leader rode out in front of them, spoke a few words of encouragement, then started trotting his horse towards what was left of our men with the rest of them following him.’

‘How many where they?’

‘A thousand, all fully armoured. The horses too.’

Dubnus shook his head in disbelief.

‘Armoured
horses
?’

Varus nodded grimly.

‘Scale armour, hundreds of pieces of iron plate the size of a small child’s palm sewn onto heavy coats, and overlapped until the resulting defence is thick enough to stop a thrown spear. The plates were silvered, to make them shine like the sun itself, and when they started to move it was like a wall of light crossing the desert. They went from a trot to a canter when they were two hundred paces or so from our line, and the
noise
…

‘My family has an estate on Sicily, on the slopes of Etna, and when I was young the volcano erupted for several days before the gods saw fit to calm its anger. I’ve never forgotten the grinding, bone-shaking fury of the mountain’s rage, and the sound of their hoofs was the closest thing to it I’ve heard in all those years, a constant growling thunder even from a mile away, as if the gods themselves were fighting. What it must have been like for the men standing helplessly waiting for them to attack is beyond my imagination, but only two of them ran. How they can have imagined they were going to escape from an army of mounted men baffles me, but I don’t suppose they were thinking all that clearly. The rest of the legionaries just stood and waited while the cataphracts rode up to them and started into them with their lances, stabbing down from out of sword reach. A few men threw their spears in reply, but they didn’t seem to have much effect. Then a horn sounded, and the riders dropped their spears and rode in closer with what looked like maces.’