‘Your Numidian said twenty-four.’
Caladus shrugged. ‘The Spaniard never came back.’
‘We don’t have time for this…’
He was interrupted as a silent figure stepped from the dark. Serpentius dropped the two heads he carried with the others.
‘Twenty-five.’ He turned to Caladus. ‘I would have word with the Numidian.’
The Thracian laughed. ‘You could count yourself fortunate, indeed, for then you would be in Elysium. He was always too cocky for his own good. You can never underestimate a Parthian.’
Three men dead, an hour lost. But the way was clear.
The sun was well up when they reached the river and Valerius despaired of discovery by some wandering patrol or foraging party. Corbulo had said time was his enemy’s enemy, but now it was Valerius’s. He had promised the general he would be in position at dawn on the second day. Instead, his ten thousand cavalry were still straggling across two miles of path and he didn’t dare move out on to the narrow strip of floodplain that separated the mountains from the river until he was ready.
Petronius explained their position. ‘Yonder you see the river.’ He pointed to a deep gorge half a mile distant. ‘It is only crossable at one place in this area, and that is at Cepha a mile upstream. From Cepha it is another four miles to the gap. Vologases will undoubtedly have left a guard on the crossing place, but beyond it all that will be between you and his army is the baggage train. The plain below us is hidden from the bridge by rising ground, but it is possible we will be seen forming up from the far bank, so there is no time to lose.’
‘Pass the word to put on the tunics.’
Every man had carried a rolled-up bundle behind his saddle as well as his weapons and rations. Now they unwrapped them to reveal the Armenian tunics Corbulo had ordered his quartermaster to requisition on the long march from Zeugma. Short and woven of light cloth, they had intricately embroidered facings of gold and blue and red, similar to those of the Parthians. The tunics were loose enough to be worn over mail and Valerius gambled that any observer who saw them from a distance would be lulled into thinking it was one of his own formations.
‘It may seem unnecessary, even foolish,’ Corbulo had told him. ‘You may not convince them, but even if you confuse them for only a second, that could be the second that makes the difference between victory and defeat.’
A courier forced his way past the riders behind Valerius and announced that the rearguard was ready.
With his heart pounding, Valerius gave the order to advance out on to the plain. After the long hours in the mountains it felt very open and vulnerable. There was no turning back now. In truth, for all his doubts and fears on the long night march there had never been any turning back. Corbulo had chosen his man well. They had outflanked the Parthians.
Yet the mountain crossing had merely been the first hurdle. Now he must attack Vologases’ army of seventy thousand men with barely a tenth that number. His cavalry troopers were exhausted and hungry. There was no hope of support if the attack faltered and no place to retreat if the Parthians prevailed. If he failed, every man here would die, along with the thousands of Romans fighting for their lives a bare five miles away.
They were late to the fight, but they were here. The only thing in their favour was surprise, but as the cavalry wings began to form up behind him, with Hanno and his Third Thracians in the centre, Valerius felt the first rising of that glorious sense of invulnerability that preceded battle and he sent a silent prayer to Fortuna, the goddess of good fortune.
‘At the walk… advance.’
XLI
Tiberius knew this was his day to die.
In the first light of dawn he had snatched a mouthful of bread from his pouch and a hurried drink from one of the carriers who traversed the depleted Roman line with a dozen skins of brackish water hanging from his shoulder. It was clear he would not complete his mission now, but that did not matter. He had done his duty. Even his father would be proud.
The initial Parthian sorties had come not long after daylight and the hail of arrows rattling against the curved Roman shields had resumed. That had been two hours ago, and already the man on his right had changed twice. First the fool who replaced the legionary with the wounded foot inched his shield to the side to take a look at the enemy and received a shaft through the brain for his trouble. An hour later an arrow had found a weak spot in a scutum and burst through as if it was made of parchment to pierce the shield’s owner through the heart.
Yet now there was an unlikely respite when the arrows stopped. For a few moments he wondered if the Roman gods he had been invoking all morning had prevailed over the Parthian deities.
But not for long.
Because the thunder of the Parthian drums heralded a new terror.
The King of Kings had summoned his Invincibles.
From his position to the right of the Roman defences, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, proconsul of Syria and Cappadocia, commander of the armies of the east and three times holder of the triumphal regalia, watched the valley fill with a long line of gleaming metal and glittering spear points, and fought the unfamiliar gut-wrenching ache of despair. He stared out beyond the gaily coloured pavilions at the centre of that vast army to the horizon beyond, but the sky was empty and the signs he was looking for existed only in his mind. Valerius had failed him.
He understood he was being too harsh. That he had expected too much. His great plan had depended on a combination of exact timing and good fortune that no sane man could have expected. He had taken the cooperation of the gods for granted and now they would have their revenge for his hubris. And down there, in the shattered cohorts of the Roman front line, were the brave men who would pay the price. For a moment his heart told him to take his staff and share their fate. But he was General Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo and Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo did not shirk his duty, even if his duty meant watching his men die and feeling every spear, arrow and sword as if it was entering his own body.
A quarter of a mile separated the mismatched armies, but he saw movement as the long strip of armour shimmered and snaked like a viper shedding its skin and he knew they were straightening the line for the advance. The drums went quiet and an awful silence settled over the field. The Parthian host lumbered into motion.
‘Prepare for the signal.’ The young cornicen at Corbulo’s side licked his lips and put his mouth to the curved bronze trumpet.
For the first hundred paces the Parthian cataphracts advanced at the walk. Only a thousand men out of an army of seventy thousand would make the attack because less than one in a hundred could afford the prohibitively expensive armour of bronze and iron that could take a craftsman a year to make. A nobleman like Sasan might arm and horse ten retainers, and arm them well, but many were protected by helms and mail handed down through generations which showed the marks of repair and long service. Precious few could fully armour their horses, and that made the horses vulnerable. Those without trappers made up the rear ranks of the five divisions bearing down on the hated Roman enemy. The van of the charge consisted of the most heavily armoured, and therefore the richest and most powerful, of Vologases’ retainers.
By the time they reached halfway they had broken into a trot and Corbulo knew from experience that they would go no faster. Their sheer weight and the length of the twelve-foot lances they carried meant they did not need to. He tensed, ready to give the order.
Courage was something Tiberius Claudius Crescens took for granted. Fear was bewildering. Fear meant a mouth dry as any desert, legs you knew could not run fast enough and the feeling that ants were crawling all over you. As he stood behind his arrow-scarred shield in the front line, Tiberius watched the great horses come and felt the ground shaking beneath his feet. One part of him wanted to applaud the magnificence of that armoured host, in their polished mail and their gleaming plate armour, the horsehair plumes streaming out behind their helmets. The other watched the spears drop so that every leaf-sha
ped iron point as long as a legionary’s gladius was directed at a Roman shield and knew that his body was about to be ground to dust beneath the giant hooves.
‘Now,’ Corbulo said quietly. ‘Sound the withdrawal.’
The harsh call of the trumpet rang out across the valley.
‘Withdraw!’ Tiberius’s shout was echoed in every cohort across the Roman line.
The rear ranks were already on the move, cutting diagonals through the escape corridors the Roman engineer had marked. The front rank jogged directly towards the rear, shielding the route of their comrades from curious eyes, watching the ground below their feet and praying that the Parthians were far enough away to allow them to make their escape.
A shriek from Tiberius’s left was testament that one legionary had been too slow, or a Parthian too fast. The young tribune turned just in time to see the sword-like point of the long spear punch through iron, flesh and bone as if they were silk, spitting the screaming man like a roasting duck and carrying him off the ground. Another stride and the Parthian charger’s front leg snapped like a rotten branch and her shoulder dropped to throw her helpless rider in the air. The heavily armoured nobleman sailed a dozen paces and landed helmet first in the earth with a metallic crash, while the horse somersaulted in a cloud of dust to lie screaming with a broken back and its ruined leg flapping. At last Tiberius was through to safety and into the first ranks of the new defence line. His senses reeling, he turned to witness a scene of utter carnage.
The Parthian warlords were so fixed on their targets and so certain of their invincibility that they entirely failed to see the cunningly disguised traps. Each pit had been covered with a woven lid of dried grass that exactly matched its surroundings. Between them were scattered hundreds of the hellish four-pronged caltrops which would force four inches of iron into the tender flesh of a charging horse’s hoof. The front ranks of the Parthian charge disintegrated into a chaos of tumbling horses and riders. All along the Roman line, the flower of the Parthian horse herds, the sires and dams of generations of champions to come went down in a welter of shattered bone and sudden death. The bodies of smashed horses and men created a barrier for those behind and the second line of cataphracts had the choice of leaping over their dead and dying predecessors or crashing into the fallen in front of them. Those who chose to leap found more pits and spikes and the screams of the horses seemed never-ending. Only a few survived to take the fight to the Romans, and they were quickly engulfed by legionaries and auxiliaries who swarmed over the armoured horses like ants to bring them down.
Tiberius watched as a Parthian nobleman, his bearded face a snarl of hatred, speared one legionary while a second hacked the legs of his horse from under him with a sword. Once he was down, his heavy armour pinned him like an upturned tortoise. The metal saved him from the frenzy of hacking blades that smashed into his torso, but not from the dagger that first took out his eyes before slitting his throat as he screamed defiance in a tongue his killers could not understand. The democracy of the dead had no respect for rank. Mighty Sasan, spear carrier to the King of Kings, was among the fallen a yard from the Roman line. He had been tossed from his mount’s back like a sack of grain and the impact of his landing had broken half the bones in his body and smashed his internal organs to so much pulp. Now he lay paralysed and helpless, cursing the ambitions of kings with the taste of blood in his mouth, and praying for the killing stroke he knew could not be long in coming.
‘Prisoners.’ Tiberius belatedly remembered the order that had been given what seemed a lifetime ago. ‘We need prisoners.’
Two hundred of the Parthian elite were down, but hundreds more riders milled uncertainly in the dust storm beyond the barrier of dead and injured horses and men. A growl went up from the legionary line and they surged forward with sword, shield and spear, the memories of their hours of trial by arrow still fresh.
‘Hold your station.’ A senior centurion of Tiberius’s cohort lashed out with the vine stick of his office. ‘You don’t kill until I fucking say so. Spears, now, spears. Any who are down are already as good as dead. It’s those bastards still in the saddle we want. Aim for the horses.’
Each legionary of the Tenth and the Fifteenth had been supplied with four of the heavily weighted pila javelins, and in the gaps between the cohorts now appeared hundreds of auxiliary slingers and archers. They advanced until they were among the pits and the caltrops and the screaming horses and dying men, and forty paces from the survivors of the Parthian attack.
‘Ready!’ The cry went up all along the line and five thousand arms drew back. The cornicines ’ trumpets blared. ‘Throw!’
To penetrate plate or mail, a pilum must strike at the perfect angle, but the five thousand javelins which flew through the air with a prolonged sigh were not aimed at the armoured cataphracts of the Parthian third rank, but at their mounts. The pilum consisted of a length of ash tipped by a shaft of iron the length of a man’s arm and a weighted pyramidal point designed to pierce shield and armour. Now those shafts tore through the flesh and muscle and bone of the Parthian warhorses and thickened the bloody barricade of dead and dying which separated the two forces. Animal screams of agony and terror rent the air. While the victims of the first throw were still falling a second volley of javelins descended, killing and maiming still more. It was enough. A Parthian drummer sounded a frantic, unfamiliar beat and the survivors of the javelin storm turned their horses and fled, leaving their dismounted companions to stagger after them as best they could in their heavy armour.
A cheer rippled along the Roman line and but for the commands of their centurions the legionaries would have bounded forward in their thirst for more blood. Instead, they were hustled back into their defensive cohorts and the dying began again.
Because the Parthian bowmen were back.
XLII
Valerius rode in the centre of the front rank, with the reassuring presence of Serpentius at his shoulder. At first the land sloped steeply from the mountains to the river, making it awkward for the cavalry wings to keep formation on the dry, stony ground, but gradually it flattened out and the going became easier for man and beast. They were in loose formation, as befitted their thin disguise as enemy cavalry, and kept tight to the hill side of the plain. Valerius gambled that the Parthian baggage train and the camp followers of Vologases’ army would stay close to the river and a guaranteed supply of water.
The baggage train of a Roman army was a disciplined, tightly structured unit run by experienced quartermasters and designed to ensure the ready provision of food or weapons where they were needed at any given time. Corbulo had explained that what he would find in the Parthian rear would be very different.
‘The King of Kings has his personal baggage train, perhaps a thousand wagons and several hundred pack camels, from which he will feed and supply himself and the royal forces, and which will lead the march after the fighting troops. It also carries Vologases’ concubines and his war chest, so it will be protected by the elite of his palace guard. Each warlord or petty king will also have his own train and they will haggle for priority, making their own time. There will be few guards on the rearmost trains, because the Parthians believe they have nothing to fear.’
Scattered groups of camp followers were the first sign they were reaching the rear of the main force, and these had grown thicker by the time they came level with the Cepha bridge, which was a seething mass of frustrated humanity and nose to tail ox carts. Upstream of the bridge, on the heights overlooking the Tigris, an entire city of wagons and tents sprawled into the distance beneath a haze of smoke from hundreds of dung fires. The sun was high now, and although they drew complacent glances from the Parthians on the fringe of the temporary settlement no one challenged them. It was clear that Corbulo’s ruse was working. A cavalry formation in the rear of the Parthian lines wearing recognizably Parthian clothing must be a friendly force.
That was about to change.
Valerius called forward the command
ers of the cavalry wings of the left flank. Hanno with his thousand-strong Third Thracians was the most senior, and Valerius had given him command of the attack on the Parthian supply lines, with the support of two further regiments of five hundred spearmen.
‘You have your orders. When you hear my signal, burn the wagons and the supplies and scatter the horse herds. Leave them nothing. If you meet opposition in one camp, move on to the next, then the next. Remember, your job is not to kill, but to destroy.’
‘What about the bridge? Do we burn that too?’ Hanno asked.
Valerius shook his head. It was a tempting target, but Corbulo’s orders had been clear. ‘You’ve seen the size of this army. We can hurt Vologases and we can make his men go hungry, but we can’t destroy him. If this turns into a battle of attrition there can be only one winner. We have to leave him an escape route.’
While the three cavalry units moved into position, Valerius led the remaining horsemen up the valley. He knew their luck couldn’t hold much longer. The shelf between the river and the hills was beginning to narrow now and it was only a matter of time before they were challenged. To his left a circle of brightly coloured cloth pavilions dominated the most substantial of the Parthian camps and he guessed it must be home to members of Vologases’ closest retinue. Even as he watched a group of red-plumed riders broke from the camp.
‘Wait until they hail us before you kill them.’
Serpentius nodded and passed on the whispered order. Valerius ignored the approaching riders and concentrated on what lay ahead. A rumble which seemed to vibrate the air was now recognizable as the pounding of the Parthian signal drums. Yet it was almost drowned by an even more pervasive sound. A sound which made the hair stand up on the back of Valerius’s neck. It was as if someone had disturbed a giant beehive with a stick. The low drone of a million beating wings. But he knew what he was hearing was no sound heard in nature. It was the sound of a multitude, certainly, but a multitude of men. The last time he had heard that sound was when Boudicca’s mighty horde had breasted the ridge before Colonia, filling the slope like an incoming tide.
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