False God of Rome (6 page)

The hundred and twenty men of the four turmae detachment of Libu light cavalry, armed with light javelins, a cavalry
spatha
– a sword slightly longer than the infantry gladius
– and curved knives and protected by small, round, leather-clad shields, took the conditions in their stride. Wide-brimmed straw hats shaded their faces and long, thick, undyed lambswool
cloaks, worn over similar woollen tunics, protected them from the sun’s intense rays during the day and kept them warm in the freezing night air – fires were impossible as there was
nothing to burn. Their Roman decurions had followed their men’s example for this expedition, since metal cuirasses and helmets were impractical in the scorching heat.

Each man carried a water-skin that held just enough for him and his mount to last for two days; that, together with the extra water, as well as grain for the horses and spare rations for the
troopers, carried by the trail of pack-mules following the column, meant they could last for three days without resupplying. Navigation through the almost featureless landscape was therefore
crucial as they were obliged to travel via two wells, part of a network of ancient wells dug throughout the desert by the Marmaridae, generations ago, to enable them to make the crossing from their
grazing lands in the north, near the coast over a hundred miles east of Cyrene, to the oasis at Siwa and beyond.

‘How the fuck does Aghilas find his way out here?’ Magnus asked Corvinus as they approached the outcrop where, their guide had assured them, they would find the first well of their
journey. ‘There’s nothing to navigate by.’

Corvinus looked haughtily at Magnus before deigning to reply. ‘He was taken as a slave by the Marmaridae when he was a boy and lived with them for ten years before escaping. He’s
made countless trips across the desert; I’ve used him before and he’s never let me down.’

‘When was the last time you were out here?’ Vespasian enquired, trying to be friendly to this aloof patrician; he had not had much contact with Corvinus, who spent most of his time
at Barca, southwest of Cyrene, where the auxiliary cavalry were based.

‘Just before you arrived, quaestor.’ There was almost a tone of mockery in his voice as he used Vespasian’s official title. ‘We chased a raiding party for a couple of
days; didn’t catch them, though. Their camels aren’t as fast as horses in a gallop but they can do eighty or ninety miles in ten hours without stopping for water; at that speed and in
this heat our horses just collapse.’

‘Have you ever caught any?’

‘No, not once in the seven months that I’ve had the misfortune to be stationed here. And I don’t know what makes you think that it’ll be any different this time;
you’d have to surprise—’

A sharp cry from Aghilas as he fell from his horse cut Corvinus short; an instant later his own mount reared up, tipping him onto the ground. Vespasian heard the hiss of an arrow passing just
over his head followed immediately by the cry of a trooper behind him.

‘Form line by turma,’ Corvinus shouted, jumping to his feet as his horse crashed, screeching, to the ground next to him; a blood-soaked arrow protruded from its chest.

The four thirty-man turmae fanned out across the desert; the whinnying of wounded horses and the shrill blare of the
lituus
, a cavalry horn, filled the air.

A hundred paces away among the rocks Vespasian could see their attackers breaking cover and sprinting towards a dozen or so similar-coloured, smaller, more rounded rocks. A few moments later
these rocks seemed to spring to life as the fleeing men jumped on them and they rose from the ground, as if they had suddenly grown first back legs then front; they turned and galloped away
southwards.

‘Decurion, take your turma and get those camel-fucking Marmaridae bastards; we’re close enough to catch them. I want one alive,’ Corvinus bellowed at the nearest Latin-looking
face.

As the turma peeled away Vespasian shot Magnus a questioning glance.

‘I don’t hold with fighting mounted but I suppose it’ll make up for not hunting lions,’ Magnus said, kicking his horse forward.

With a grin Vespasian followed, urging his mount into a gallop. The wind immediately tore his hat from his head and it fluttered behind him attached by the loose, leather strap around his
throat.

They quickly cleared the outcrop and Vespasian felt that they were gaining on the slower but more durable camels, less than two hundred paces ahead; he could count about twenty of them. The
turma had spread out into dispersed order, the troopers expertly guiding their horses around the larger stones that littered the baked, cracked ground. The occasional wild shot passed overhead or
to one side but there were no hits – accurate archery from a moving camel at an enemy behind you would prove difficult, Vespasian surmised from the ungainly gait of the strange beasts.

After a half-mile, the Marmaridae were less than a hundred paces away; sensing that they would certainly catch their attackers, the troopers urged their horses to greater efforts. Sweat foamed
from under their saddles and saliva flecked from their mouths as they responded to their riders’ wishes.

Vespasian reached behind him and pulled one of the ten light javelins, which each man carried, from the carry-case strapped to his saddle and slipped his forefinger through the leather thong
halfway down the shaft. Their target was now little more than seventy paces ahead and Vespasian felt the familiar thrill and tension of imminent battle; he had not been in combat since the attack
on his parents’ estate at Aquae Cutillae over four years previously and his desire for it was heightened by the ennui of the last few months.

With only sixty paces separating the two groups, the Marmaridae, realising that they had no chance of escape, suddenly turned their camels and charged the turma, releasing a volley of arrows. To
Vespasian’s right a trooper was punched out of the saddle with a scream; his horse raced on, taken up by the excitement of the charge.

‘Release,’ the decurion yelled with fifty paces to go.

More than thirty javelins hurtled towards the oncoming camelry, quickly followed by a second volley as the troopers endeavoured to cause as much damage as possible with their primary weapons.
Scores of iron-tipped shafts slammed into the Marmaridae punching through the chests and heads of men with bursts of blood or burying themselves deep into their mounts, crashing them to the ground
in a cacophony of guttural, animal bellowing.

Whipping long, straight swords from their scabbards and screaming death from behind their cloth face masks, the seven survivors of the onslaught, black cloaks billowing out behind them,
thundered into the turma as they drew their spathae.

The strong, unfamiliar smell of the camels caused the riderless horse next to Vespasian to shy abruptly to the left; it crunched into his mount’s withers as a shimmer of burnished iron
flashed down towards him. Agonised by the pain of the blow, his horse raised its head, whinnying madly, and took the vicious sword cut, aimed at Vespasian’s neck, in the throat. Blood sprayed
over Vespasian’s face as he brought his spatha down, severing the sword arm of his adversary who howled as his camel crashed into the now side-on riderless horse. Both beasts and the
one-armed tribesman, blood spewing from his freshly hewn stump, plunged to the ground with a cracking of bones and bestial roars of anguish.

With the severed hand still gripping the sword embedded in its throat, Vespasian’s horse galloped on for five paces and then crashed onto the desert floor. Vespasian hurled himself forward
so as not to be crushed beneath the dead weight of his erstwhile mount and tumbled across the rough ground. Jarring to a halt he looked back and immediately leapt to his left, narrowly avoiding
being trampled under the galloping hoofs of a rolling-eyed horse whose blood-spurting, decapitated rider sat firm in the saddle, the muscles in his thighs still gripping his directionless
mount.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Magnus shouted, pulling his horse up next to Vespasian.

‘I think so,’ he replied watching, with a morbid curiosity, the progress of the headless rider; within a few dozen paces the thigh muscles gave out and the body slithered from the
saddle, leaving the horse charging off towards the deep-blue horizon.

Looking around, Vespasian counted another couple of riderless horses as the turma pulled up and rallied. The ground was littered with dead camels and their riders but fifty paces away, back
towards the outcrop, one camel remained standing; the Marmarides pulled it around to face them, brandished his sword above his head and then charged.

‘He’s got balls, I’ll give him that,’ Magnus commented, jumping from his horse and grabbing his hunting spear. ‘He’s mine, all right, pull back,’ he
shouted at the troopers who did as they were ordered, grinning in anticipation of the interesting contest.

Magnus stood four-square to the charging camel, holding his eight-foot-long oaken-shafted spear across his body; the leaf-shaped iron head glinted in the sun. The troopers shouted encouragement
at him as the rider closed, screaming the ululating war cry of his people and slapping the flat of his bloodstained sword against his camel’s side to urge it into more speed.

Magnus remained motionless.

An instant before the camel hit him, Magnus dodged to the left, ducking under the wild swipe of the Marmarides’ fearsome sword, and jammed his spear, point first, sideways between the
animal’s forelegs. Its right shinbone snapped as it cracked against the solid shaft; its forward motion twisted the spear around and, as Magnus let go, forced it up into the belly of the
beast. With a terrified bellow the camel sank onto the spear as its right leg buckled unnaturally beneath it, catapulting its rider from his saddle; its momentum pushed the weapon up through its
juddering body, shredding its innards, until it burst through the beast’s back in a shower of gore just above the pelvis. Screeching and snorting violently, the camel thrashed its back legs
in a vain attempt to lift itself off the cause of its torment. Magnus grabbed the unconscious Marmarides’ discarded sword and raised it two-handed into the air; with a monumental growl of
exertion he sliced the blade down onto the writhing creature’s neck, cleaving through its vertebrae and almost severing its head.

The body convulsed with a violent series of spasms and then went still.

A mass of cheers and whoops went up from the watching troopers.

Vespasian walked over to his friend, shaking his head in mute admiration.

‘I saw a
bestiarius
deal with a camel like that in the circus,’ Magnus admitted, ‘so I thought that it’d be fun to have a go myself, seeing as they don’t put
up much of a fight.’

‘Paetus would have appreciated that,’ Vespasian replied, thinking of his long dead friend, ‘he loved a good wild-beast hunt.’

‘I think I’ve lost my spear, though. I’ll never pull it out of that.’

A moan from behind distracted them and they turned to see the Marmarides stirring.

Vespasian turned the man over. His headdress had fallen off; he was young, no more than twenty, short and wiry, curly-haired with a thin nose and mouth and three strange curved lines tattooed on
each of his brown-skinned cheeks. ‘We’d better get him back for questioning; he might have seen Statilius Capella’s party.’

‘If you’re thinking about torturing him, forget it,’ Magnus said, standing over the prostrate man, ‘see if there’s another one alive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’re not going to hurt my property. He’s now mine, I’m going to keep him; I think I won him fairly.’

‘You’re in luck,’ Vespasian said, kicking the recumbent form of Magnus awake as the sun glowed red on the eastern horizon the following morning.
‘I’ve just been to see Corvinus; Aghilas the guide is going to pull through, the arrow was removed from his shoulder without too much loss of blood and he seems to be fine this
morning.’

‘Why does that make me lucky?’ Magnus asked groggily, unwilling to come out from under his blanket.

‘Because it means that we won’t have to force your new little friend to show us where the next well is,’ Vespasian replied, looking at the young Marmarides sitting against a
rock with his hands bound behind his back. ‘If you want any breakfast you’d better hurry, the turmae are saddling up. We need to get a move on; it’s five more days to
Siwa.’

Refilling the water-skins of one hundred and twenty men at the well had taken most of the rest of the day after the skirmish, so they had camped at the outcrop. One of the tribesmen had been
found sufficiently alive to be able to confirm through a translator – with the help of the skilled use of one of the trooper’s curved knives – that Capella and a couple of his men
had been captured by the Marmaridae; they had been taken to Siwa to await the departure of the next slave caravan bound for the distant city of Garama, seven hundred miles to the southwest.

Grumbling, Magnus roused himself and rummaged in his bag for a strip of dried pork and some semi-stale bread; his new slave looked greedily at the food.

‘I think he’s hungry,’ Vespasian observed, ‘you’d better feed him otherwise you’ll find yourself owning a dead playmate.’

Magnus grunted. ‘Keep your sword handy while I untie him, then.’ He moved over to the Marmarides and manhandled him round to get at the knot. ‘You’d better behave
yourself, savvy?’ he hissed in the man’s ear as the rope came loose. Understanding the tone of voice the captive nodded.

Magnus cut a hunk of bread and a slice of pork and handed them to him; taking them gratefully in one hand he touched the other to his forehead while saying something in his own language.

‘I think he’s thanking you,’ Vespasian commented.

‘So he ought to, he owes me his life.’

After quickly swallowing a couple of mouthfuls, the young man looked up at them and pointed to himself. ‘Ziri,’ he said nodding, ‘Ziri.’

Vespasian laughed. ‘Oh dear, you know his name now, you’ll have to take him home.’

‘Ziri,’ he said again and then pointed at Magnus.