Sands of Egypt

by S. J. A. Turney

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  It was a horrifying sight. The chariots were terribly close now, having covered almost half the distance from the white marker, and they were moving at an incredible pace, given the slope.

  If this failed there were going to be a lot of bisected legionaries screaming on that hillside.

  Fronto’s hand dropped.

  ‘Now.’

  Whistles gave two short blasts. He counted two before the bows began to rise. Strings were drawn back. He counted another two until with a sound like a whisper of death, a thousand bow strings snapped tight, sending their arrows into the air.

  Fronto prayed.

  The arrows arced up over the heads of the legionaries who, almost to a man, were cringing back in panic, bending away from the enemy menace and gripping their shields in white-knuckled hands.

  The missiles fell.

  Fortuna had been with him.

  All along the Roman lines, the charging chariots reached the two hundred pace mark just as the arrows plunged down. One or two struck a driver or a spear man. Many went wild, thudding into turf or skittering off scree, or simply snapping in the tangle of wheels and wooden vehicles. But enough hit the mark just as Fronto had planned. Enough to change it all.

  The horses were the key. Any chariot driver would tell you that a biga or a quadriga was only as effective as the horses pulling it. Oddly, Fronto had never given it much thought. He preferred bouts in the arena to chariot racing, but over the years Galronus had been with him, the Remi noble had become something of an afficionado of the races, and like all enthusiasts felt the need to barrage Fronto with facts and titbits with monotonous regularity.

  Now, perhaps it was paying off. If it hadn’t been for Galronus’ little notes, he’d probably have had them aim for the drivers. Most would have missed and it wouldn’t have made much difference.

  The horses were the key.

  Arrows thudded into the beasts that raced forwards, pulling the chariots. Each vehicle was drawn by four horses, and at best two, or occasionally three were hit, which was enough. One would be enough. The moment a horse in one of those traces felt the arrow plunge into its muscly hide, it screamed in agonised panic, and it did what all panicked beasts did. It stopped, or it reared, or it slewed and fell. No matter what it did, though, the fact was that it was not doing what the other horses in the trace were.

  Every vehicle was suddenly a chaotic mess of contradictory forces, pulling this way and that. Many immediately fell, the horses suddenly coming to a halt. One chariot even pitched impressively up into the air with the momentum, over the top of the beasts pulling it, slamming down to the ground and mangling the men beneath it. Others scraped to a halt in the dirt as the traces broke, wounded animals racing away in panic as the others milled in confusion. A little to the left, two chariots collided and the result was like one of the more horrific accidents in the circus, a massive explosion of kindling, a cacophony of snapping limbs from both men and horses, and then just a shuddering pile of timber and animal parts. A screaming heap of death, and the nearby legionaries lightly misted with a spray of blood and dust.

  At least one chariot got through. He could hear desperate cries in Latin way off to his left, probably in Calvinus’ legion, and screams and carnage. But even as the chariot tried to pull away from its line of victims and leave the fray, the driver realised there was no hope. The chaos of ruined chariots in the way prevented his flight, and before he could leave, he was struck by a dozen shafts from enterprising archers along to the west.

  Fronto watched the result of his action with grisly satisfaction.

  There had been maybe sixty chariots fielded along the line. He could see six racing away for home, at the periphery of the field, around the rest of the enemy force, which stomped resolutely towards them. Another five or six chariots were milling around, their drivers either dead or desperately trying to coax panicked or wounded horses into action.

  The enemy’s charge had been meant to break the Roman lines.

  They had failed.

  Caesar’s tones cut through the general din.

  ‘Impressive.’

  It was all he said, but it was enough. They had a moment to breathe. The enemy infantry were now trudging up the slope, filtering between ruined chariots to form up on the near side once more. Fronto couldn’t see their faces yet, but he could only imagine the look on them. The utter destruction of their shock weapons would have shaken them, and then having to walk through the carnage would not have improved matters.

  It spoke of their discipline and spirit that they were still coming at all, let alone at such speed and in such tight formation. Pharnaces might be impulsive, but he was no fool. He had sent out a dreadful attack to break and demoralise his enemy, and then followed it up with a superior force of strong and determined veterans. It could hardly be said to be Pharnaces’ fault that his attack had failed. It might so easily have succeeded.

  Caesar’s voice once more, though apparently speaking to someone else. ‘See how poor a commander Pharnaces is? If this is the quality of enemies we have left to face, then thank the gods I must soon face Scipio for a challenge.’

  Someone laughed.

  Not Fronto.

  He turned and glared at Caesar, though the look he caught momentarily on the general’s face was not the one of derision he expected, but one of uncertainty. The comment had been bravado, aimed at a doubter. Politics again. Fronto’s lip curled as he turned back to the enemy who, as far as he was concerned, were presenting a perfectly adequate challenge, thank you very much.

  ‘Front line, back step. Behind the sudis,’ called a voice. Fronto glanced off to his left to see Cassius giving orders. Caesar shot the officer a look born of surprise and irritation, yet he nodded. Fronto had thought to do as much before the initial contact but, with that unpleasant decision officers sometimes had to make, he had left the line of men in deadly danger in front of the stakes. Had he not, the chariots might not have been induced to charge into the killing zone of the arrows. He had used them as bait to kill off the enemy’s main strike. It was a horrible decision to make, but it had worked.

  Now, however, Cassius was quite right. It was time to pull the men back. In response to the officer’s command, centurions all along the front issued orders. Every few paces along the line, men shuffled aside to leave gaps, and the soldiers who had stood out front and faced down the chariot charge filtered through and to the rear lines, where they could recover and where, Fronto hoped as some of them passed close by, the more nervous ones might have a chance to change their underwear. A chariot charge was a terrifying thing, after all.

  In a matter of heartbeats the front line had changed. The men – those who had survived – from the front were safe at the rear now, and the gaps that had opened to let them through closed once more. Those grimly-determined looking foot soldiers stomping up the slope would have watched their enemy filter back and then been faced instead with a fence of sharpened points, behind which fresh legionaries waited.

  He still couldn’t see their faces clearly, but he’d be willing to bet that the change had shaken them further. Fronto smiled coldly. Every tiny thing now would be another nail hammering into the crucifix of their morale. They were still strong, numerically superior, and disciplined. But the one thing they had been, which would be starting to slide, was certain. They had to now be questioning their ability to win the day. And as their morale slid, it would begin to take with it the discipline.

  That was how it worked. Those moments when a battle’s outcome hung in the balance and an army teetered on the edge of a rout. It always began with faltering confidence. Then that ate away at discipline, eroded the chain of command until it rusted and broke. Then went their strength. All that remained was numbers, and numbers meant nothing if they were running the other way.

  He had to break them. That had begun with the chariots, then the stake fence and the fresh lines of men. Now, he th
ought, let’s try the old fashioned way.

  ‘Carfulenus.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Have the men give them the old war drums.’

  The centurion grinned and saluted.

  ‘To my rhythm, lads,’ he called out, then began to pound his vitus vine cane against the bronze greave encasing his right shin. In moments the rhythm was picked up all across the legion. Men were rapping their swords against their shield edges in time, signifers were slapping the silver discs on their standards with their free hands, centurions smacking their greaves and optios hammering their staves on the stony ground. The rhythmic banging was impressive.

  The enemy did not falter, but they were coming close and now Fronto could see their faces. There was uncertainty. Their officers were keeping them in line and in order, but were it not for such rigid control, Fronto doubted they would be marching so keenly.

  They were going to break.

  He knew it at that moment. The enemy would break. It was just a matter of pushing until it happened, and making sure his own men did not break first.

  Before he realised he was doing it, his voice cut out across the general hubbub, just about audible over the crash of swords on shields.

  ‘Ro – ma – vic – trix… Ro – ma – vic – trix…’

  By the third iteration, the chant was spreading, first through the centurions and signifers, then throughout the legions. There was an odd lull as the Galatian army of King Deiotarus faltered, uncertain whether or not to join in this foreign chant. After all, they were not Romans, yet as the army of Pharnaces closed on the Roman line, they began to pick up the rhythm.

  The din was such, as four legions crashed and chanted, that it was all but impossible to hear anything else across the field. The enemy tried to respond with their own war cries, some Bosporan song of battle backed by the booing of horns, but it was as ineffective in the face of the Roman effort as a man shouting in a howling gale.

  ‘Fourth line: pila,’ shouted Carfulenus, an order that echoed across the Roman line from centurion to centurion. The front line of the enemy had reached missile range. The first three rows of legionaries remained locked in their shield wall behind the sudis fence, second and third lending their strength to the first, helping brace them. The fourth and fifth lines, however, were spaced out, three paces between they and the men in front. At the command, every legionary in the fourth line brought down the heavy javelin that they had held upright and positioned it, gripping underneath the shaft behind the weighted section, angled up and ready to throw.

  ‘Release.’

  Even as they did so, drawing their blades immediately and stepping forwards to join the first three lines in tight formation, and even as the shafts flew out over the heads of the Romans, the centurions were repeating themselves.

  ‘Fifth line: pila.’

  Again, the next line lowered their javelins, shifting their grip and angling ready.

  Such was the speed of the command and its obeying, that the second volley was ready to launch just as the first fell.

  Fronto watched the pila plunging down out of the air in a long narrow cloud. He had no idea how well the other younger, or foreign, legions did, but the Sixth were veterans and only the best throwers had been placed in the fourth and fifth lines. The pila slammed into shields and bodies, eliciting screams and bellows all along the enemy line.

  Men fell with their limbs, torsos, shields and more pierced, one man before where Fronto stood had the misfortune for a pilum to plunge into his foot, pinning it to the ground hard. He stopped in his tracks with a shriek, but there was no hope of halting, for the entire army of the invading king were behind him, still pressing forwards. The man screamed again as he was pushed forward and his foot pulled up from the turf while the pilum remained lodged, tearing its way out between the toes.

  He disappeared beneath the feet of his comrades, howling in agony. The enemy’s war song seemed to have stopped. They were still coming, though. The number of dead from the pilum volley was comparatively small, after all. The second volley hit even as Fronto was wondering how close they were to breaking. More men fell, injured, transfixed, issuing bloodcurdling howls, lost amid the tramping feet of their fellows.

  Fronto turned. The Hamian archery officer was still close by.

  ‘Can your men drop arrows among them safely without hitting our lads in between?’ he yelled.

  The man bowed his head sharply, pointed helmet almost putting Fronto’s eye out, and replied loudly in a thick Syrian accent.

  ‘Yes, Legatoos. For certainment.

  ‘Do it. Pepper the bastards at will.’

  ‘Quid, Legatoos?’

  ‘Shoot them,’ he said simply and with exaggerated clarity.

  ‘Yes, Legatoos. Happyness.’

  He hurried back to his unit, who had clearly been waiting for such an order. The front line of the enemy were almost at the barrier. Fronto leaned across to Carfulenus and bellowed in his ear over the crashing noises.

  ‘We’re going to break the shitbags, Carfulenus.’

  ‘That we are, sir.’

  Fronto grinned. ‘I don’t mean the army as a whole, Carfulenus. I mean us. The Sixth. We’re going to break them and push them back. Then we’re going to flank them. They’re only confident now because of the numbers. They think they can swamp us, and little can disabuse them of that notion, but if we can flank them, then they’ll realise that their numbers no longer mean anything. If we do that, we win. We break the flank and use that to panic the rest. Got it?’

  Carfulenus nodded. ‘How though, Sir?’

  Fronto snorted. ‘No special trick. Just sheer brutality. The Sixth are the strongest unit in this whole valley. They fought at Alesia, for Jove’s sake. At Pharsalus. They are undefeated lunatics. And you are the man who broke the king of Aegyptus. The man who took a fortress of ten thousand with a hundred men and frightened them into surrender. And me? Well I’m just a cantankerous, unkillable old bastard.’

  Carfulenus laughed.

  ‘Let’s break them, then, sir.’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  The enemy engaged at that moment. The sudis stake fence was a serious impediment, and the detritus beyond it was effective. Fronto watched between men as the enemy reached the fence and attempted to pull the triple-stake contraptions aside and out of the way. Some found that the loose earth, brambles, broken pots and the like were simply too treacherous on the slope for good footing, and the moment they began to heave at the stakes, they slipped and fell. One man not far away felt his feet disappear out from under him on a loose pot sherd and pitched forwards, ending his days impaled on the sharpened stake, gurgling, dark blood pouring from his mouth as he twitched, while his friends attempted to shift the sudis contraption with him still stuck on it.

  Gradually, the sudis fence was dismantled, pulled away and separated by the enemy, the ropes binding them together hacked apart and the whole thing dismantled, leaving the enemy with a clear run at the waiting legionaries. Of course, that achievement came at a high price. They might have managed to clear away the obstacle, but for every single stake that was shifted a man died, stabbed at any given opportunity by the legionaries in the front row. Additionally, of course, the Hamian archers at the rear were dropping clouds of arrows with constant accuracy amid the approaching block of men, causing havoc. The carnage was horrifying. Bosporan soldiers were now standing two feet taller than the waiting Romans due to the sheer volume of bodies carpeting the ground beneath them.

  Fronto could feel it in the air. He looked up. Black shapes were circling in the gold-azure dawn light high above. The carrion birds could feel it too. The battle was close to the moment of decision. Close to an end.

  He caught sight then of Carfulenus to his right beginning to move. The centurion had spotted a small gap opening and had ripped his sword free, marching in that direction. The legate turned and looked around. The knot of senior officers who had been hovering nearby at the start had moved away. N
o senior commander placed themselves in the thick of it, after all. Well, almost no senior commander.

  Fronto felt a moment of guilt. Somewhere way off west, Lucilia and the boys were sitting in a villa, safe from the world of civil war, but probably worrying about him, wondering where he was, what he was doing, and when he was coming home. Lucilia would smack him repeatedly around the head if she knew the danger in which he kept placing himself.

  He had vowed now that he was a little older to take more of a back seat. To actually act like an officer and direct battles. He’d begun the winter by doing precisely that in Alexandria, but as the season had turned, he’d found himself slipping more and more into old habits, beginning with that stupid jump from the ship to Pharos’ shore, where he’d almost ended his days drowned in the harbour, then finding himself trapped on the Heptastadion fortress wall and having to belly flop gracelessly into the water.

  He felt that guilt.

  But he also felt it overridden by his very nature. With a feral growl, he ripped his sword from its sheath and raced after the centurion.

  * * *

  Decimus Carfulenus had seen the gap opening up. A small knot of enemy warriors more heavily armoured and richly dressed than the rest had managed to force a breach, and were now trying to exploit it, pushing their way in among the Romans. One of them had dropped his shield and drawn a dagger, using it and a short sword in the press to horrifying effect, knifing legionary after legionary. The others were laying about them with longer swords and axes, those with shields using them to punch the iron or bronze boss out at the Romans, breaking limbs and faces.