Avenger of Rome

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 commanders 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.

‘Signaller?’

‘Sir.’ The man readied the lituus, the ornate trumpet used by the cavalry for relaying commands.

The sharp cry of a warning shout was answered by the thrum of bowstrings and followed by the screams of at least two men and the thud of falling bodies. Cries of consternation rang out from the camp to his left.

‘Sound the charge.’

The two distinct notes from the brass horn were echoed among the advancing squadrons and from behind, where Valerius knew Hanno would be launching his attack on the lightly defended baggage camps. Beneath him Khamsin responded to the call without the urging of his heels, surging into the trot and snorting through her nostrils. He could feel her excitement and that of the men around him as he reached for the long cavalry spatha and felt its familiar weight in his left hand. His ears echoed with the thunder of hooves across the packed earth. To his right, Serpentius snarled a litany of what sounded like curses, but Valerius knew would be prayers to the Spaniard’s native gods. A dozen more strides and the air was thick with the stench of human excrement as they passed over ground where Vologases’ tens of thousands of infantry had camped the previous night. In the far distance, still a mile away, a dark stain covered the gold of the fields of dried grass in the southern neck of the Cepha gap. His heart almost failed him at the sight of that huge mass of men. It had always been a gamble, but now that gamble was exposed as suicidal. The first rule of war was that a commander should not attack unless he was aware of his enemy’s dispositions. Valerius could only be guided by Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo’s advice and his own intuition. That advice and intuition said that Vologases would mass his cavalry against the Roman line and continue to use it in successive waves until Corbulo’s army was destroyed, or so weakened as to be helpless before a final Parthian charge. If the King of Kings held even a few hundred of his armoured cataphracts in reserve they were capable of blunting Valerius’s charge and destroying its momentum.

He chanced a look over his shoulder and was rewarded with a sky filled with towering clouds of smoke; the funeral pyre for King Vologases’ baggage train. Hanno had done his job well. If nothing else the Roman soldiers holding back this huge army would see it and know hope.

Half a mile now to the mouth of the valley. The first auxiliary cavalry were already sweeping through the gaping, stunned stragglers hurrying to join the Parthian army; swords slashed down and blood stained the golden grassland.

‘Hold the line.’ Valerius roared the order and the signaller echoed it with his trumpet.

A Parthian war drum answered the call with a frantic beat and Valerius saw movement in the ranks ahead, as what commanders there were frantically attempted to form a defensive line. But these were conscripts who had been waiting for two days while their cavalry fought to breach the Roman defences. They were farmers and peasants, townsmen and shopkeepers who had no option but to march behind their lord and no inclination for battle. If they expected to fight it was against a defeated enemy fleeing from the cataphracts’ spears. Yet even that expectation had been blunted by the endless hours of waiting. They were listless and bored, lying in groups wondering how long it was until the next meal. Now their leaders screamed confused orders and the sky to the east was black with the smoke of their burning rations and thousands of strange cavalrymen were bearing down on them at a terrifying rate. A few managed to form the semblance of a defence, but they were small groups of widely spaced spearmen. Most froze in confusion and terror.

A cantering horse takes less than a minute to cover half a mile. By the time the Parthians had worked out whether they were facing friend or foe that distance had halved, then halved again. Eight of Valerius’s auxiliary wings were made up of mounted archers and he had placed them in the front ranks. They loosed their first arrows at a hundred and fifty paces, darkening the sky with feathered shafts that arched gracefully before plummeting into the massed ranks of the Parthians. Before the first had landed, a second volley was on its way, instantly followed by a third. Twelve thousand arrows rained down on the Parthian spearmen in the space of twenty seconds. None of the defenders wore armour, few had helmets, and the wickedly barbed points pierced skull, shoulder and back as men crouched to avoid the rain of deadly missiles. Instinctively they sought shelter, pushing back into the unharmed mass behind them, but there was no shelter.

The archers turned away, using the same tactics which had tormented the Romans for the past two days, but they were immediately replaced by Numidian spearmen who added their light javelins to the horror, hurling them one after the other into the cringing mass of Parthians. By now the killed and wounded lay ten and fifteen deep along the length of the Parthian line, carpeting the valley in a twitching mantle of death. Still it was not enough, for the bowmen returned, giving the enemy no respite and firing again and again until their supply of arrows was spent, then turning away once more.

Valerius steeled himself against pity. The killing must go on, for when the Parthians stopped dying the agony of the Romans would begin. He waved the light cavalry forward once more. Their javelins were spent, but they were far from harmless. It was time for the swords.

There was little cohesion to the Roman line, but there did not need to be. Fear was as great a weapon as any blade. The Parthian foot soldiers on the fringes of the great mass that made up Vologases’ rearguard were already demoralized by the carnage caused by the Roman spears and arrows. Now their only thought was to escape these phantoms who had appeared where no enemy had a right to appear. Many had already thrown away their spears in blind panic, and as Valerius’s mounted cohorts urged their horses over the corpses of those already fallen they scrabbled to bury themselves deeper in the illusory safety of the crowd. But there was no escape from the swords.

This was not war. It was slaughter.

The spathae rose and fell with the relentless rhythm of a farmer’s scythe and with similar effect. Valerius cut left and right, carving through terrified, shrieking faces and balding skulls, chopping torsos from shoulder to rib and removing hands and arms raised in desperate attempts to protect their owners. And all along the Roman line men did the same. Though he didn’t realize it, he snarled and grunted and cursed with every blow he struck. He tried not to see the grey porridge of an opened skull, the splintered bone of shattered arms or the pink mess of a sword-slashed lung, but he knew the images would remain with him for ever. Within minutes his left arm was slick with other men’s blood; it coated his armour and he could feel it on his face and taste it on his lips. The sheer scale of Vologases’ army, allied to the narrowness of the valley, protected Valerius’s men from counter-attack, because the Parthian war bands which had retained their cohesion and fighting spirit had to battle their way through the men trying to flee the butchery. Even so, amongst the dead, the dying and the defeated there were still men prepared to fight.

‘To your left.’

Serpentius’s snarled warning gave Valerius the heartbeat he needed to duck away from the spear point that would have taken out his throat. He slashed frantically at the shaft and kicked Khamsin through the cowering bodies towards his attacker, a bearded Parthian with dark eyes and a mouth that snarled hatred. Inside the point he knew he had little to fear from the spearman, but this easterner was no shopkeeper. The long ash shaft came round in a hammer blow to the cheekplate of Valerius’s helmet, almost knocking him from the saddle. As he clung to Khamsin’s side, the men he had been killing saw their opportunity and with a collective howl rose up to haul him from her back, hands tearing at him and gouging at his face. Pinned by four or five bodies he felt a sting in his ribs as a dagger point managed to pierce his mail and the leather tunic beneath. It was only a matter of time before its owner sought out his throat or his eyes. Roaring with fury and with the violence of despair, he lashed out at the men holding him, but they were too many. A man pinned his sword hand and the bearded spearman sat on his chest and spat in his face before drawing the knife that would kill him.

A glint of metal flashed in front of Valerius’s face, swift as any lightning strike, and the spearman’s head spun from his shoulders leaving his still upright body fountaining blood from the neck. Another man shrieked as a blade split him from throat to crotch, spilling intestines in long coils from his torn body. Valerius hauled the dead weight of the headless man from his chest as his attackers scattered from the ferocious assault of a whip-thin madman with a face that was a gory mask of horror.

‘Here!’ Serpentius reached down and with another trooper’s help hauled Valerius to his feet. Miraculously Khamsin still stood over him and he pulled himself back into the saddle. He had lost Corbulo’s spatha, but when he reached over his shoulder the familiar grip of the gladius moulded itself into his hand and he was armed again. His ears rang from the blow to his head and he could feel blood running down his ribs from where the dagger had struck, but he had no time to rest. He forced himself to concentrate on the cacophony of sounds around him and tried to sense the battle. From somewhere he found a moment of calm, though the breath rasped in his throat and his heart hammered as if it was trying to break free from his ribs. Oddly, it was the soft hiss of disturbed air that registered first, confirming that the mounted archers had returned with their quivers replenished from captured Parthian supply camels. That told him Hanno was in control of his operation and, for the moment, he could disregard his rear.

The slaughter of the spearmen continued. There was no let-up in the butcher’s-block smack of edged metal cutting into flesh and bone, but he knew the situation could not continue indefinitely. More and more Parthians were fighting back, and Roman blood now mingled with that of the enemy. Eventually the arms of his auxiliary cavalrymen would tire, the arrows would run out and the attack would lose its momentum. When the killing stopped the Parthians would be able to draw breath, and when they did they would see how relatively few the Roman horsemen were. Panicked or not, someone would organize a counter-attack and that counter-attack could only have one outcome. But Valerius had made his pledge to Corbulo and that pledge was to fight to his last breath, and that of every man with him. The question was, what was happening on the far side of that great army where the Roman line had endured all this long day? It endured still, Valerius was certain of that, or the Parthian foot would have been able to withdraw and reorganize. Vologases was still trapped between two forces, even if those forces were vastly inferior to his own. But this was not Caesar; being trapped did not bring automatic victory. Somehow, the king’s confidence must be destroyed and his vast army demoralized. That could only be achieved by one man.

Valerius raised his sword and urged Khamsin back into the carnage, praying not to any god, but to Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo.