Avenger of Rome

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-shaped 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.