He raised his sword and I prepared to meet his attack, but instead there was a blast of noise as thousands of men suddenly charged from the city. From the remains of the gatehouse and from the two breaches in the walls on either side they flooded out — a great mob of warriors on foot wielding axes, javelins and small wicker shields. They had no organisation or discipline but headed for the legions like a great herd of maddened animals, piercing the air with their feral screams. There were thousands of them.
Nicetas shouted in triumph and raised his sword once more, before letting out a groan when the arrow slammed into his shoulder. He grimaced in pain and then wheeled his horse away as the unstoppable wave of oncoming warriors threatened to engulf me.
‘Move, Pacorus!’ screamed Gallia as she rode to my side with the Amazons forming a screen in front of us. She grabbed Remus’ reins and then shouted at Epona to move as we galloped back to the Durans, the Amazons turning in the saddle and shooting arrows at the oncoming enemy over the hindquarters of their horses.
‘Let them through,’ I heard a voice in front of me shout as the ranks of the legionaries opened to allow us to pass through them. We halted in the space between the first and second lines of cohorts as a loud scraping noise filled our ears. The enemy wave had hit the breakwater that was the legions. The air was thick with javelins as the Cilician warriors hurled their missiles at the locked shields of the Durans and Exiles, then they went to work with their axes, literally trying to hack the legionaries’ shields to pieces.
The wild charge buckled and bent the front line of the legionaries but did not break it, and as the Cilicians spat and cursed and hacked with their axes, the rear ranks of the first-line centuries hurled their javelins forward into the stinking, seething mass of enemy warriors.
The Cilicians wore no armour or helmets and so every javelin found flesh and bone, felling hundreds in the densely packed press. The line had held.
I rode north along the rear of the Duran first line to where the cataphracts were deployed in two lines, each one of two ranks.
Vagises galloped over as the Amazons deployed in three ranks behind us.
‘You should let Alcaeus see to that arm,’ said Gallia. ‘I told you it was a trap.’
But my attention was focused on what was happening directly ahead as horsemen began pouring through the gaps in the city walls — Sarmatian horse archers wearing ox-hide corselets and helmets — grouped round their chiefs and their dragon windsocks.
I pointed at them. ‘Destroy them, Vagises.’
He saluted and galloped back to his horsemen. Moments later three thousand horse archers had deployed into thirty columns as companies charged at the disorganised mass of Sarmatian horsemen and began discharging arrows, the men at the front of the columns shooting their bows and then wheeling right to gallop to the rear of the formation as their comrades behind shot their bows in turn and likewise rode to the rear of the column.
Vagises’ men were outnumbered by the Sarmatians but the latter lacked discipline and cohesion and never recovered from being assaulted by horsemen who directed a withering arrow storm against them. A few loosed their bows and attempted to charge but too many of their comrades had been hit by missiles and so they began to disperse, most back to the city. A few fled north into the desert.
To my right the Cilicians were still hacking at the Durans and Exiles but were suffering fearful casualties as the legionaries went to work with their short swords and began pushing them back towards the city. In the ever-increasing cloud of dust that was being kicked up by thousands of men and horses’ hooves I could not discern what was happening beyond the Exiles, on the army’s right wing, but felt certain that Nergal’s men would be holding their own at least.
I felt a surge of pain shoot through my left arm and looked down to see the whole of my ripped lower sleeve was covered in blood that had dripped onto my leggings.
‘Get that wound seen to,’ commanded Gallia as arrows thudded into the ground a few paces from her — the parting shots of the Sarmatian archers.
‘I’m fine,’ I insisted, wincing from the pain coming from my arm.
She reached over, grabbed my reins and led me to the rear.
‘Take command of the Amazons,’ she said to Zenobia, leading me through the cataphracts and then behind the battling Durans. The men of the second line stood with their javelins in their right hands and their shields on their left sides, ready to reinforce their comrades in the first line. Men ferried the wounded on stretchers to the rear where Alcaeus and his physicians were waiting to treat them. Gallia led me over to our Greek friend. He was standing with his canvas bag slung over his shoulder, running a hand through his black wiry hair. Gallia called to him.
I slid off Remus’ back as he approached and saw my bloody arm.
‘Sword cut,’ said Gallia.
‘It’s nothing,’ I protested.
Alcaeus reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of sprung scissors to cut away the bloodied sleeve of my shirt just below the shoulder.
‘It doesn’t look like nothing,’ he scolded me as he put the scissors back into his bag and examined the wound.
‘Fortunately for you your opponent chose to slash instead of stab. Looks worse than it is, though you appear to have lost a deal of blood.’
He pulled a small clay pot from his bag and removed the cork, then poured some of the watery contents onto my arm. It felt as though he had laid a red-hot iron on my flesh. I winced.
‘Acetum to clean the wound,’ he said.
He took another pot from his bag of wonders, this one containing honey, which he applied to the wound before binding it with a bandage.
‘You should go back to camp, really,’ he remarked, ‘but I suppose there is little chance of that.’
‘Thank you, and no, I will not be going back to camp.’
I hoisted myself back into the saddle and went to find Domitus. I discovered him standing behind the first-line cohorts with Kronos and a group of their senior officers. He saw my bandaged bare arm.
‘You and the other lord high general ran out of words, then?’
‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘What’s left of them are falling back to the city. Do you want us to pursue them?’
‘Not yet,’ I replied. ‘Casualties?’
‘Very light. They gambled on their mad charge breaking us but we stopped that easily enough.’
‘Nergal sent a rider over to report that he had thrown back the horsemen that had assaulted his wing,’ added Kronos.
I looked up at the sun and judged the time to be midday. It was now very warm and legionaries were drinking from their water bottles to quench their thirst.
‘Are we going to storm the city?’ asked Domitus.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but send for Marcus and his machines. I think we will need them.’
A lull descended over the battlefield as the fighting petered out and the remnants of the Cilicians withdrew to the relative safety of Seleucia. With Gallia I rode back to where my heavy horsemen remained in their initial positions, having been nothing more than front-row spectators to the carnage. As usual the Durans and Exiles had been very efficient in their work, the ground in front of their positions carpeted with Cilician corpses and the badly wounded. Already parties of legionaries were going among the fallen looking for those still alive, slitting their throats when they found them to put them out of their misery.
The shrill blast of whistles followed by trumpets called them back as fresh troops marched from Seleucia. There was a rapid reorganisation among the Durans and Exiles as the rear centuries in each front-line cohort swapped places so that fresh legionaries stood ready to receive a new enemy. Whereas the Cilicians had hurled themselves against the legions in a disorganised, feral rush, these soldiers — Thracian mercenaries — emerged from the city and deployed into battle formation before they advanced.