'After them. Don't let them get away.' Leaning forward in the saddle, Acilius Glabrio urged his mount on. The Persian light horse were getting away. He pushed his horse harder. The sound of a Roman bucinator playing recall cut into his consciousness. How dare the bastard, without orders? Acilius Glabrio looked around. The widely scattered Roman catafractarii nearest to him were slowing down, reining in, coming to a stand. He stared after the Persians. Possibly it was for the best. The reptiles were outdistancing the pursuit. The south wind was blowing the dust of their passage into his face. He pulled up his own horse.
It was lame. He had not noticed. Now that he had, he did not care. He had another ten as good with the baggage train. He was sweating. His sword was slick with Sassanid blood. His heart was singing.
As the lame animal picked its way down to the riverbank, Acilius Glabrio counted six Persian corpses, the glorious colours of their clothes dimmed by dust and blood. One of them was his. He was not sure which. It did not matter. He had been the first to kill his man.
Puzzled, Acilius Glabrio looked at the pickaxes, shovels and other tools scattered by the riverbank. The Persians had been digging. Then he realized what they had been about. The shifty little easterners, too cowardly to face Roman steel, had been trying to enlist nature on their side. They had been digging through the embankment to flood the land between the Euphrates and the cliffs. Only a little longer and they would have succeeded. Well, he had put paid to that. Laughing out loud again, he kicked on his lame horse. Carpe diem. It was his day, his victory. A glorious victory. If your sword is too short, take a step closer.
X
Sunrise usually made Ballista happy. Today it did not. He was with the scouts, about a mile in front of the marching camp. He sat on Pale Horse, watching the sky over the cliffs turn a delicate lemon-yellow. A small hawk was hunting – a black, humped silhouette against the beautiful sky. None of it lightened his mood.
Gaius Acilius Glabrio was a fool, an insubordinate, arrogant fool. Yesterday he had disobeyed orders. His headstrong charge had scattered Equites I Parthi, worn out their horses – easy pickings had the Sassanids laid a trap. The charge had left the army in disarray, the van completely open if the Sassanids had been ready with an attack. He had courted utter disaster. But it had not happened. The Sassanids had not set a trap, had not been ready with a counter-attack. Not only had the fool got away with it, he had prevented the enemy sabotaging the levee and the irrigation sluices, prevented them from flooding the path that the Roman army must take. Had they done so, it would have stopped the army in its tracks, delayed them for days. The insufferable fool had returned a hero in his own eyes and even in the estimation of many of his men.
Angry as he had been, Ballista had somehow summoned the restraint to wait until they were in the relative privacy of the his tent before upbraiding Acilius Glabrio. It had done no good whatsoever. Yesterday's stupidity had merely served to reinforce the young officer's patrician pride. Six dead Persians, and he had had the gall to speak of a glorious victory. Ballista doubted the widows of the four dead troopers from Equites I Parthi would see it in the same light. Patting his ridiculously coiffed curls, Acilius Glabrio had started to talk of the famed celeritas of Julius Caesar. Unwilling to listen to a lecture on the efficacy of speedy action from the young fool, Ballista had summarily dismissed him from his presence. If only he could equally summarily dismiss him from his command. But the general could not. Acilius Glabrio had been appointed personally by the emperor. The fool had to remain cavalry commander, and the worst of it was that, now, he had been reinforced in his insubordination, now he would be even less ready to obey Ballista's orders. It did not look good – an insubordinate, arrogant fool, and possibly a murderous one… Who better fitted the assassin's description of a young eupatrid? At least he had not made an attempt on Ballista's life since Antioch.
Angrily, Ballista tried to push the patrician out of his mind. He returned his attention from the skies to the terrain his army must cross. Here, the cliffs started to run away to the west, opening up a wide, largely featureless plain between themselves and the Euphrates. Ideal terrain for cavalry. Ideal for the Sassanids; bad for the Romans.
A brassy peal of trumpets announced that the army was breaking camp. Ballista turned in his saddle to watch. He wanted to study the order of march that he had prescribed – to see it, as it were, from the outside, through the eyes of the enemy. Straight away, the four parallel columns that were the heart of the formation began to be apparent. First, out on the river, some one hundred boats of all shapes and sizes were being rowed, paddled and poled into position. Around the ungainly transports nipped five little one-banked galleys, chivvying like sheepdogs. Ballista was pleased that he had gone to the trouble of finding and requisitioning the galleys, partly crewing them with experienced boatmen from Legio IIII Scythica. He was even more pleased that he had bullied the military commander at Caeciliana into handing over five bolt-throwing ballistae to mount on the galleys. The galleys were manoeuvrable. The artillery on them had a far better range than any hand-held bow or sling. A Sassanid cavalry force was very unlikely to have any boats or artillery with it. The little improvised war galleys gave Ballista command of the Euphrates. And that secured one flank of his army.
Next, keeping as close to the riverbank as possible, came the land-based half of the baggage train – over three hundred indiscriminate beasts of burden: donkeys, mules, camels, horses and broad-shouldered slaves. Somewhere in that braying, surging mass were the ten spare mounts of Acilius Glabrio and the rest of his luxurious equipage. At least the latter was now carried on the backs of animals or men, not on lumbering wagons which got stuck at the merest hint of bad going. Ballista watched horsemen spurring up and down the column trying to instil some order. He was glad that he had not only seconded Turpio some legionaries for the galleys but twenty cavalrymen from the Equites Singulares. It was not just that they would help Turpio control the awkward land column; if everything went wrong, he would have some good men at his back to help him cut his way out of the rout. Ballista pushed the thought away. He was irritated with himself for thinking such an ill-omened thing.
The Dux Ripae switched his attention from the tail to the teeth of his army. Parallel to the baggage rode the cavalry: eight hundred heavily armoured men in column of fours. It was easy enough to spot Acilius Glabrio. One only needed to locate the standard of the lead unit, Equites Primi Catafractarii Parthi, and look just in front of it for the elegant figure in scarlet and gold who rode alone. Some way back, looming above the dust, was Ballista's own standard, the white draco. It marked the mid-point in the column where marched the Equites Singulares. The rear unit, the Equites Tertii Catafractarii Palmirenorum, was already completely obscured by the dust.
The fourth and final column was the tough outer carapace behind which the others sheltered. This was the column furthest from the river. Here was the infantry, Legio IIII Scythica followed by Legio III Felix: two thousand legionaries marching in a column four wide and five hundred deep. They were ordered just so, two paces between ranks to allow the bowmen, four hundred Armenians and four hundred Mesopotamians, to come and go. The tough, fiery Aurelian had taken his post at the centre of the column.
Finally, Ballista considered the three units that were not organized into the columns. Across the front and rear of the army were two thin lines of bowmen, turning the whole formation into a hollow square. But how very thin the line at the front looked – just two hundred Saracens. Ballista could not see them, but he knew that the line at the rear was little better, just three hundred Itureans. The last unit that made up the army was also lost in the dust. But somewhere between the columns of cavalry and infantry, the resourceful Sandario held his three hundred and fifty slingers ready to reinforce any part of the square.