Only the Eastern Empire maintained a predominately cavalry Legion with their noble cataphracts. These men must be mercenaries, thought Colonna, probably Armenians by the look of their beaded tack and bridle. He heard they were brave fighters, but touchy.
"You, centurion!" One of the men, blessed with a thick dark beard, was pointing a stubby finger at Colonna. "Your men are wounded?"
"No," Colonna said, rising to his feet. It felt good just to sit for a moment, but officers rarely thought about things like that, leastways not when centurions were lolling about. "We're fit. A rider from the Lord Prince told us and our mates to fall back and let the reserves take over."
"Good," the man barked, and Colonna saw the rider's breastplate had been gilded before someone tried to stave it in with a mace. "You've charge of the bridge crossing. Get this herd of addled sheep sorted out and the road open!"
Colonna started to salute, but the black-bearded man had already curveted his horse around in a half-circle and ridden off, his escort in tow. Some of the legionaries were coughing and waving their hands to dispel the dust.
"Let's go," Colonna growled, wedging the helmet back on his head. "Now we're vigiles."
"You there," he shouted at the first of the drovers crowding the road with a wagon. "Get that rattletrap off the road!"
Behind him, the rest of his detachment fanned out, spears in hand, trying to get the walking wounded and stray farmers all onto one side of the roadway.
– |Theodore let the stallion take its head and pick up to a run as they approached the dry streambed lying between his day camp and the battle. The horse leapt the sandy wash with ease and the Lord Prince laughed, feeling the power coursing in the magnificent beast. The Faithful had fallen behind, crashing through the thickets lining the dead stream. Theodore reined around to let them catch up.
Boleslav jogged up, his thick, trunklike legs seemingly tireless.
Theodore opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, hearing a great shout rise up behind him.
Allau Akbar!
The Prince turned in the saddle, staring up the slope, as the Faithful reestablished their cordon around him. There, under the eaves of the rocky hill, was sudden, violent motion. The Prince raised an eyebrow, seeing the massed ranks of his army stagger back as the Arab bandits, trapped on the higher ground, suddenly charged pell-mell down the slope.
Allau Akbar!
The sound echoed from the hills, raising a chill on Theodore's arms. It seemed the cry of tens of thousands of men, not the bare handful struggling with the front ranks of his own army. The sun was beginning to fall behind the hills and Theodore shaded his eyes with a hand.
"Boleslav, where are my couriers and runners?"
The north-man grunted, his own deep gray eyes searching the slope for any foes that might have broken through the main line of battle. "None have yet returned, altjarl. Soon they will, I think."
Theodore grunted in disgust. The din of battle was rising sharply. These bandits had acquired unexpected fervor. "Then we shall have to find them. Forward!"
– |Mohammed stood, though the wind picked up again, plucking at his robes with sharp fingers. Thistles bounced past, driven by the gusts. Under his feet, on the slope below the outcropping, the men of the Decapolis, stiffened by the Ben-Sarid and the Yemenites, had thrown themselves into the Roman lines with terrible energy. The enemy, still forming up for a second round of battle, had been taken off-guard. Two wedges of Decapolis heavy infantry had hacked their way into the Legion ranks. Behind them the Yemenis were filling the air with arrows, firing up at an angle to let the shafts plunge into the Romans massed downslope.
They have proven themselves, Mohammed thought. The city men had paid a terrible price throughout the long day, taking the brunt of the Roman attack on their shoulders. Now they should be on their last legs, exhausted and bled white by the struggle. Despite this, they attacked ferociously, regardless of their casualties. The storm of their war cry echoed up around the boulder like the beat of a drum. Twenty thousand throats, crying out to the heavens.
"Now His strength comes," Mohammed whispered, leaning into the wind. Sand and gravel whipped at him, but he ignored the cuts on his hands and the dull roar that had been building out of the east in the last hour. "Now, you men that lay your hearts down before Him, who take His guidance and law into your own houses, know that He will succor you. He, the Compassionate and Merciful One, will hold you in the palm of His hand."
Mohammed's eyes closed, shutting out the vision of men dying, sliding in their own blood, their bodies pierced by the short-hafted spears of the Romans, on the slope below. The attack faltered as the Romans re-formed their lines, and now it was failing as the flanks of the wedges were attacked by hundreds of legionaries.
A voice came from the clear air and it rolled like thunder.
– |Khalid rose up in his stirrups, sword held high and forward, gleaming as the polished blade caught the westering sun. He howled, and his men howled behind him, a thousand riders on fleet-footed horses. The drumming of their hooves made the ground jump. Rabbits and birds fled before them, startled from their day nests.
Allau Akbar!
The ring of wagons swelled in Khalid's vision and the ground flashed past under the hooves of his mare. Before them, he saw the Ghassanid archers break away, fleeing before the weight of his charge. Behind him, and on either side, a flowing line of charging horses unfolded, filling the shallow pass. Some of the men, the Bedu, raised their voices in a long, ululating scream, and Khalid joined them. He and his personal guard, Patik among them, galloped past the wagons. No one tried to stop them, though the women and old men among the wagons cheered as they hurtled past.
Khalid flashed them a brilliant smile but then turned his attention to the roadway he could make out down the slope. It was crowded with men walking, and more wagons, and beyond all that, there was the dark slash of a ravine cutting across the plateau and a bridge.
– |The rest of the Arab reserve flowed past the wagons on the uphill side, with Shadin in the lead, his thick hand gripping the hilt of a long, hand-and-a-half sword. The drumming of hooves almost drowned out the war cries of the Tanukh and the Palmyrene knights, but those men raised their voices all the more. Shadin's thoughts flickered, momentarily, to his sword-brother Jalal, who had held the command of the center of the Arab line at dawn. Do you still live, my brother?
It didn't matter now, for the lead edge of the Arab charge, six thousand men strong, was about to slam into the rear cohorts of the Roman left wing. Shadin raised his voice in a scream of rage that echoed back from the empty sky. Allau Akbar!
– |Theodore and his bodyguards reached the standards of the tribune commanding the left wing of the Roman force as the sky began to darken. The Lord Prince was hurrying the man through the usual pleasantries, trying to find out where Vahan had gone, when Boleslav suddenly shouted in fear. Theodore's head snapped up in alarm; he had never heard such a cry from one of the Faithful.
The eastern half of the sky was gone, swallowed into a towering wall of darkness. The sky above turned a sickly yellow, boiling and seething with angry motion. Sodium-yellow lightning rippled through the depths of the black cloud, illuminating a rushing storm front from within. For an instant, the Lord Prince was aware that a terrible silence had settled on the field of battle. Men all around him looked up in awe and terror, seeing only the outline of the outcropping and a single white figure that stood on the summit, hands raised. There was no wind, no sound, not even the rattle of metal on stone.
"All-father, receive our souls on bright wings."
The Faithful broke the silence with their song, raised in a hundred basso throats. Theodore stared around wildly, seeing that the Northmen had raised their axes in defiance to the dreadful sky rushing towards them.
"All-father, hear us, send your winged messengers to bind our wounds, to lift us up from the field of battle. Valhalla is waiting, the golden hall on a green hill. All-father, hear us!"
> Then the song was drowned by the awesome roar of the wind and the world vanished in a howling storm of blinding sand and grit and Theodore's horse bucked in fear and he was falling.
– |Zoe cowered in the lee of a slab of cracked blackish rock. Odenathus crowded in beside her, his cloak stretched over both of them. The sky screamed and raged and she could hear, somehow, through the tumult the sound of Mohammed's voice tolling like a temple bell. Sand lashed at their shelter, spilling through the cracks between the stone and the cloak. The fabric was stretched taut by the pressure of the wind. Her cousin moaned in fear, feeling the power that was unleashed in the sky above them.
I knew he was strong, Zoe wailed to herself, palms pressed over her ears, trying to shut out the hammering noise. It was useless; the roaring sound was in the ground as well as the sky. It filled the hidden world. I didn't know what that meant!
The earth shook under her and she screamed in fear.
– |Mohammed stood on the boulder, staring down into the valley. The wind died around him, leaving a quiet space in the maelstrom. Not more than a dozen yards away, the storm raged, tearing out brush by its roots, whirling away tents and wagons. Eddies of dust and sand and grit curled around an invisible sphere, rushing past like the current of a river. Here, where he stood, listening to the sky, there was only a quiet whisper of movement in the air. Tiny grains of sand pattered down where the storm met the quiet, making little cones on the ground.
You must act, O man, but I will guide you.
A voice was speaking from the clear air, here in the heart of the storm. Outside, beyond this sanctuary, the wind ripped and howled, shifting the stones of the hill in their foundations. Darkness covered more than the sky now as the sandstorm flowed across the desert, cracking trees and lashing men as they lay huddled on the ground.
Some men still moved in the storm. Khalid and his riders were galloping down the road towards the bridge across the Wadi Ruqqad. Mohammed could see them, in the queer yellow-green light filling the quiet sphere. He knew that they would reach the span and seize it from the Romans, stunned by the storm. On the slope below him, where the men of the Decapolis had watered the ground with their blood throughout the long day, his followers could stand in the wind. The Roman army had already splintered, in fear and surprise, and Shadin and Jalal were meeting amid the carnage, their faces striped with blood.
You must strike to the sea. Swiftly. Swiftly.
Mohammed nodded. The voice from the clear air rarely gave him counsel, but in this thing he was already determined. He fingered a medallion hanging around his neck. It had come to him by a messenger's hand, while he and his men had been encamped at the old Nabatean capital of Petra. It was from his wife's sister. It was an old coin, struck in the mint of Mekkah in his father's time. On the obverse was stamped the image of a ship.
Mohammed stared out, into the storm, at the ruin below him. Across the valley, between curtains of hurtling dust, he could see lightning stabbing in the murk. The Quraysh shook his head slowly, feeling the ripple of power even at this distance. The Roman thaumaturges could feel the will in the storm and sought to meet it with their own.
Foolish.
Mohammed knew the strength of the Lord of the Empty Places, of the Wasteland. Was it not the strength of the whole world itself? Of all that existed, or had ever existed?
How can men seek to overturn that?
The lightning faded and died, muted and swallowed by the roiling yellow-brown sky. Intermittent red and viridian flashes continued for a little while, but then they too ceased.
The Quraysh turned away, pulling a scarf over his face. This work was done.
– |Wind shrieked and hissed, lashing Colonna with a stinging hail of sand and gravel. Bits of wood, splintered from the leaning trees, flew through the air like tiny javelins. The centurion was crouched in the lee of a wagon, close by the bridge abutment. Some of his men had climbed down the steep sides of the ravine, seeking shelter from the storm.
What a fine day, the centurion thought, head bent to his knees, hiding his face from the gale threatening to rip the flesh from his bones. All our work undone by a freakish storm, a khamsin, out of the deep desert.
Most of the men trying to cross the bridge had gone to ground when the thundering black wall had come roaring out of the east, but Colonna's detachment had tried to keep order on the span itself, shoving the remaining wagons across with main strength. Then the storm had hit, smashing them to the ground, tearing shields from men's backs. Carrying young Domus Aureus shrieking in fear, right off the bridge itself to fling him into the ravine.
The color of the air changed, deepening from a sickly yellow to a darker, more ominous shade. Colonna felt the wind shift too, and then suddenly it slacked off. Shaking dust and sand from his shaven head, the centurion staggered up and lurched out onto the road.
"Form up!" he started to call out to his men, then felt the echo of hooves on the ground.
Colonna turned sharply, his gladius sticking as it rasped out of a sheath clogged with red grit.
A horseman loomed out of the darkness, robes billowing in a following wind. Colonna started to shout, started to bring up his sword to block the lance tip flickering in the air.
Too late, he thought, feeling the point punch through his shoulder. The metal scales of his armor rang, screeching as they crumpled under the impact. Colonna gasped, feeling his arm go numb. Blood spattered across his vision and then he was lying, arms and legs askew, in the spiny brush by the side of the road. A river of horsemen rushed past, their faces covered with scarves, their long robes flying around them.
More screams filtered through the air. The storm continued.
A fine rain of sand began to fall out of the air. Colonna blinked, trying to keep it out of his eyes. It was very dark.
CHAPTER THREE
The Wasteland, East of the Bay of Neapolis
The land lay gray under a sullen brown sky. A lone figure moved in the devastation, crawling slowly along the side of a military road. Dirty white flakes drifted on hot, sluggish air. Foot-high drifts of ash buried the road.
The figure was twisted and bent, one arm dragging uselessly in the powdery grit. Gasping in pain each time she moved, the woman crawled onward. The dim ochre disk of the sun was touching the western horizon before she stopped, overcome with exhaustion. The woman's rich red-gold hair had once been plaited into a single thick braid hanging down her back. Now the half-burned remains were matted and foul. Soot streaked her face and back, where a charred tunic clung to her flesh. Her arms, chest and legs were dark with ground-in pine needles.
She shuddered, wracked by a smoky cough. She lay on the stunted, burned grass, resting. Even lying perfectly still was torment. Her abused body was near death. Blood leaked slowly from dozens of cuts. There was a sound, muffled but distinct. The faint chuckling of water over rocks.
The woman raised her head, flinching from pain grinding like crushed glass in the nerves of her shoulders and neck. She could see the road dipping down ahead of her, and burned trees thick in a streambed.
Gritting her teeth, she dragged herself up onto the road. The smooth, carefully fitted stones drove cinders and tiny crescent-shaped flakes of volcanic glass into her good arm. With the tiny rise in height, she could see an arched bridge abutment ahead. She gasped, consumed by fierce, all-encompassing thirst. Dragging herself forward, she inched towards the bridge and the stream.
– |A dark pall hid the light of the stars. Even the moon was only a faint blur. The woman woke, shuddering with cold. Sharp rocks dug into her flesh. Her head lay in running water. Her nose and mouth were above the sluggish flow. She blinked, trying to focus on something in the darkness. There was nothing.
A sour, sulfurous taste filled her mouth and she tried to spit. Even that much effort brought a blinding wash of pain. Faint sparks flooded her vision. After a time they passed. Turning her head a little, she filled her mouth with water from the stream. It was strong-tasting and gritty,
but it was water. She drank slowly. There was a vague memory of doing this before. Full, she leaned back, letting the current lap against her. She felt a chill seeping into her, but there was nothing she could do. Weariness overcame her.
– |A moon, bobbing and yellow, flickered over the edge of the bridge. The woman felt light touch her face and her gray-green eyes opened. The moon came closer and she heard the clatter of rocks knocking into one another.
The woman blinked and turned her head away from the moonlight. It was bright and hurt her eyes. What remained of her hair was floating in the current like a net, clogged with burned leaves and twigs.
"Otho! Look, another corpse in the stream."
The sound reverberated in the woman's skull. She tried to move her hand, to cover her face.
"Fool Celt, it's alive. See, the arm moved."
Metal clinked on stone and there was a splashing. The current changed, blocked, and the woman closed her eyes. The moon was close now, huge and burning. She could smell pitch and wax and the chalky odor of sweating men. Something touched her useless arm and she cried out.
– |Muted gray striped the woman's face. Her hair had been brushed back and covered a thin white pillow. The caked-on blood and soot were gone, revealing ugly bruises covering her face and neck. A cut above her eye was shiny with ointment. She lay on a narrow bed built into a wall.
The room rocked with an even rhythm. Bands of light, falling from a window set high above her, slowly moved across her body. Sometimes they faded away entirely and she lay in soft, dim quiet. From time to time she heard the braying of donkeys. But it was faint and muted by distance and the walls of red cedar surrounding her. Soft woolen blankets covered her. One arm lay atop the coverlet, bound in strips of cloth and held straight by wooden slats.
She snored softly. Occasionally she would stir and moan, but her mind was far from the world. A man sat with her, watching her quietly while she slept. He was elderly, with a polished bald head, a long white mustache and a prominent, skewed nose. His deep-set eyes watched her gently. His hands were thick with calluses and corded with muscle. Under his shirt, his body was lean and hard, without even the memory of fat.
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