Thunder of the Gods (22 page)

He turned away, and his hard-faced senior centurion stepped forward and whispered in the lictor’s ear.

‘I think what the legatus is trying to say is this …’

He drew a deep breath, narrowed his eyes and bellowed a single word.

‘RUN!’

‘Shouldn’t people be cheering? Throwing flower petals? Kissing soldiers?’

Sanga laughed at his mate with a distinctly sardonic tone, adjusting the hang of the shield on his shoulder for what seemed like the twentieth time since they had marched from the fortress.

‘This fucking shield is going to cut me in half, it’s so bloody heavy. And no, in my experience the people of any city, town, or village do not turn out to send the boys on their way with loud cheers and tits hanging out. Tits only hang out when we march
into
town, and that’s only because the whores they belong to are looking forward to getting paid for letting us nuzzle up to them for a while. Perhaps when we march back again …’

‘You won’t be marching back again if you don’t pick the pace up Sanga!’

The veteran turned his head with a weary sigh.

‘It’s this shield, Centurion. All the stuff the bloody armourers have glued onto it has made it heavier than a soldiers’ balls after a month in the field.’

Quintus shrugged, waving his vine stick under the soldier’s nose.

‘Deal with it. And pick the pace up before I’m forced to use this.’

Sanga squared his shoulders and lengthened his stride, muttering under his breath.

‘Before he’s
forced
to it …’

He fell silent, then snorted with laughter at the sight of two men arguing at the city’s Oriental gate as the Tungrians swept towards the northern wall and the road beyond it. A man in the uniform of the city watch was remonstrating with the legion’s senior centurion, waving his arms for emphasis.

‘… and my orders are to close the gate! Orders from the gov—’

Sanga grinned again as Julius stepped forward, raising his vine stick.

‘And my orders come from my legatus, so you can kiss my hairy wrinkled arsehole …’

They passed out of earshot, the two men’s voices lost in the racket of thousands of pairs of hobnailed boots crashing onto the road’s stone surface.

‘He too late. We last cohort.’

‘That’s as maybe. You know Julius never steps back from a fight.’

Sanga cranked his head round to stare back at the two men, then raised his voice to shout a question at the century’s standard bearer.

‘Hey Morban, what do you reckon the odds are on Julius taking his vine—’

After a moment’s pause he shrugged and turned back to the direction of march.

‘Never mind! Question answered.’

‘The governor told me to send you in immediately.’

Dexter’s secretary and the Phrygian prefect exchanged knowing glances, it being routine for the governor’s appointments to begin with the usual lengthy wait in the anteroom that adjoined his office. He walked past half a dozen would-be supplicants, their irritation at his taking of their turn in the queue somewhat diluted by the rage-filled shouts that leaked into the room as the office door was opened. Setting his face into a professional mask, the tribune entered, to find a pair of lictors standing in front of Dexter’s desk beside the prefect who headed the city watch. While the former looked more than a little dishevelled, the prefect had clearly been in an altercation, a substantial bruise adorning his jaw.

‘First you two incompetents fail to arrest a man who clearly intends to flout my authority for all the world to see, and then you, supposedly the controller of everything that happens in the city, can’t even stop him from marching his legion across the bridge and onto this island, into the city and out through the Oriental gate! Between the three of you you’ve managed to make the office of the governor a laughing stock!’

The prefect waited for his turn, looking around at the office’s lavish wall hangings while Dexter heaped yet more anger onto his hapless functionaries. The story, the secretary had told him as they climbed the long staircase together, was already flying around the city, of how the lictors had run back to the city and ordered the gates closed only to find themselves and those members of the watch who had attempted to obey their orders forcibly restrained by armed soldiers.

‘And now he’s marching east with my bloody legion!’

His tirade exhausted, Dexter turned his attention to the prefect.

‘You took your time answering my summons.’

The Phrygian ignored his superior’s acid tone.

‘Apologies, Governor, I was on the practice ground with my men when your message arrived.’

The older man glowered at him for a moment.

‘Well you can go straight back again, muster your wing and get after my legion! I want Gaius Rutilius Scaurus back here, in chains, and I want the Third Gallic back in barracks!
Now!
’

The Phrygian nodded his understanding.

‘As you wish, Governor. And what are my orders if the legatus refuses to surrender himself into my custody?’

Dexter’s rage exploded again.

‘I don’t care what you have to do! Bring him back in one piece or carve him into mince if that’s the only way to do it! Just don’t come back here without the man! Is that understood?’

The prefect saluted crisply.

‘Perfectly, Governor.’

‘This better than ship. Even with stupid spear and shield made from stone, I having good day.’

Sanga snorted his disgust, looking up at the point of his own weapon and rolling his eyes as a bead of sweat fell from the end of his nose. The legion was slogging up a narrow valley ten miles to the north of Antioch, and the lack of any shelter from the sun was making the legionaries suffer from more than just the exertion of the road’s remorseless incline.

‘You’re off your head, boy. It’s too fucking hot now, it’ll be too fucking cold when the sun goes down, there’ll be nothing to drink, nothing to screw, and probably not much to eat either. And this Nisibis place we’re marching for is four hundred miles away, across a bloody great desert full of snakes and scorpions. And just to make the whole thing perfect, at some point in the march a bunch of maniacs on horses are going to have a fair old go at recreating the battle of … what was it again?’

‘Carrhae. That what tribune call it.’

‘Well he might just as well have called it “goat fuck”, ’cause that’s what it’ll be. Add in the fact that the legatus has made us the rearguard cohort, so we’ll be last to get into our blankets and I reckon—’

Saratos turned his head, waving a hand at Sanga to silence him.

‘Quiet! I hear horses!’

A swift blast of the trumpeter’s horn brought Scaurus and Julius back down the column, the latter ordering the legion to halt.

‘Stand easy!’

Reaching the rearmost cohort, he barked a swift order to Dubnus that made it clear he expected trouble.

‘This may just be Silus and his scouts rejoining but I don’t intend getting caught with my dick hanging out. Fourth Cohort, battle order! Dubnus, give me a double line across the valley, long spears in the front four ranks!’

Throwing their packs aside, the soldiers scrambled to fulfil his instructions while the sound of horses’ hoofs grew steadily louder, so that by the time the leading rider appeared around the valley’s bend, the ground to either side of the road was blocked by a determined defence bristling with spears. Sanga and Saratos found themselves in the front rank, angling their spears out to join with their comrades in offering a thicket of iron spearpoints to whoever was approaching along the road that led back to Antioch.

‘Mind you, what I’m supposed to do with this fucking thing if it comes to a fight beats me. Swing the fucker around and hope to take some bastard’s eye out?’

The horsemen rode into view, half a dozen of them climbing the valley’s slope at a fast trot, and Silus led them through the gap that Dubnus had opened in the wall of spears, grinning as the hedge of iron spikes closed behind his last man.

‘They may look a bit stupid on the march, but they’ll give any of us donkey wallopers a creaky backside when he sees that lot pointing at him.’

He climbed down from the saddle and took a swig from his water skin.

‘There’s a full cavalry wing overtaking us from the south. I’d guess they’ll overhaul your mules before you’ve gone much further.’

‘In which case, we might as well wait here for them. It
is
the Phrygians, I presume?’

The sweat had barely dried on the soldiers’ scalps before their pursuers caught up with the waiting legion, the growing swell of noise from their hoofs abruptly doubling as the leading riders came into view around the valley’s bend, the officer at their head raising a hand to halt his men and coming forward at a trot. The cavalrymen waiting behind him were fully armed and equipped, their shields held ready to use rather than slung across their backs. Julius looked down at them from his vantage point on the valley’s side with a dour expression.

‘It’s the Phrygians alright, and they’re not out for a pleasure ride, that’s obvious. And I think it’s fairly clear what their orders are.’

The cavalry prefect reined his horse in just short of the forest of spears, looking up and down the Tungrian line with an approving smile before shouting a greeting to the waiting officers.

‘If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, Legatus. You actually plan to take the fight to the Parthians.’

Scaurus pushed his way through the line and stepped out in front of the cavalryman.

‘My men are still at the stage of wondering just how their new spears are supposed to be used, but yes, I’m under no illusions that we’ll have to give battle, and I’m damned if I’m going to make it easy for them.’

He looked up at the Phrygian with a grim smile.

‘And so you, Prefect, I presume, are under orders to take me back to Antioch?’

The horseman nodded sombrely.

‘In chains.’

‘In chains? I’d imagine nothing less would satisfy the governor’s need to restore face. And if you can’t achieve this act of submission on my part?’

The cavalryman shrugged.

‘Domitius Dexter was completely unambiguous on the subject; I’m to take you back to Antioch, intact or in pieces. He went as far as to tell me that if I can’t bring you back to Antioch, and
his
legion as well, then I’m not to come back at
all
. Which puts me in something of a difficult position, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’

Scaurus pursed his lips, then waved a hand back at his waiting spear men.

‘My orders aren’t exactly open to misinterpretation either, and they certainly don’t leave room for me to do anything other than march for Zeugma and then on into Osrhoene. Which leaves us both with a dilemma that there may only be one way to resolve. So, if that’s the way it has to be, Prefect Felix, and if your men are as ready as they seem, then shall we get on with it?’

Marcus marched into Zeugma two days after the legion’s arrival, leading a long column of lightly armoured soldiers, each man with a bow over his shoulder and a quiver of arrows at his thigh. Behind them marched five hundred slightly built men clad only in thick woollen tunics. Sanga, watching from his sentry position on the earth wall of the legion’s marching camp, turned to Saratos in bemusement.

‘Some bow benders and a cohort of little boys. What fucking use are they going to be?’

Scaurus and Julius greeted the auxiliary cohorts’ prefects at the fortress’s main gate, the legatus grinning broadly at the sight of another part of his plan coming to fruition.

‘Well now, Tribune Corvus, what have we here?’

The biggest of the three men stepped forward and clasped the legatus’s arm, slapping his shoulder in the manner of a man greeting an old friend.

‘What we have here, Legatus, are three prefects wondering how in Mithras’s name an equestrian gets to command a legion! If a bad-tempered young hothead such as yourself can make make it to the peak of our profession, there’s hope for the rest of us yet!’

They clapped his shoulders in congratulation while Julius walked out through the gates to get a closer look at his new archers.

‘You’re lucky to find us all still here you know, another six months and we’d all have been replaced by new men.’

Scaurus nodded at the speaker, the tallest of the three.

‘And I’m more grateful for that turn of fortune than you can imagine. Without some form of missile threat, my legion would have been at something of a disadvantage against the Parthians, even with the modifications that we’ve been making to weapons and tactics.’

‘Your man Corvus has been telling us all about it, but I’d like to go through the way you plan to take them on once we’re over the frontier. Without cavalry you’ll still be at a disadvantage when it comes to …’

He frowned at the legatus’s slight smile.

‘You have cavalry? How did you pull
that
one off? As far as I’m aware there’s no one left in command of a wing from the days when you were last here.’

‘And you’re right. But the Lightbringer has shown me one last small piece of favour. Prefect Felix?’

A man stepped forward from the group of officers behind him, and with a laugh Marcus strode forward to meet him, taking him by the hand.

‘Gaius Cornelius Felix! Of all the men I expected to have found their way here, I’d have put you close to the bottom of the list. Surely stopping a Selgovae arrow in Britannia entitled you to a position with a little less risk attached to it? Shouldn’t you be commanding an auxiliary cohort somewhere nice and quiet, rather than riding to war again?’

The cavalryman saluted him briskly.

‘Something of that nature was offered, Tribune, after my rather lengthy convalescence. I couldn’t have condemned any other man to the risk of having to ride that bad-tempered bastard Hades though.’

‘He still bites?’

Felix nodded with a weary smile.

‘Yes, And when the bastard’s not biting, he kicks like a bolt thrower. But gods below, he’s still the best horse in the empire. Give that nasty-tempered creature his head and it’s like riding one of Zeus’s thunderbolts! And my wound is fully recovered.’