Last, I had looked at Tears, who was waiting, ready to march. His armour had caught the smoky sunlight, so that he had been a mirage, only half there, a ghost-form already, waiting for me to join him. At any other time, that would have been omen enough to cripple my courage, but this morning it had left me heartened that he would wait for me in the lands of the dead as Proclion waited for Horgias. Not long, now, until we were all united again.
‘Yes,’ I had said, when I looked back at Cadus again, and lifted my horn to settle on my shoulder. ‘I do love battle. I will love this one, until the moment it takes all love from me.’
‘If we can manage the manoeuvre with the stakes properly, that may be a lot further away than the Parthians think. Keep your horn ready, and watch Lupus for the signals. He’s a good centurion; he’ll do his best to keep you all alive.’
‘Sound.’
A single word. A single act. A single breath shuddered through my body into the horn, translated by the magic of brass into a peal of golden notes from the ten cohort horns that lanced through the morning and the thunder of the silver tide that was nearly on us.
On each note, three thousand men moved in flawless synchrony. The morning was shot with the spark of flying iron, with the reach and stamp as one legion and two companies of archers took one step to the side and four steps back and left their bedded stakes bare to the coming horses.
We felt the implosion of air as the shields came up and lay edge on edge together and we made our wall with our blades ready to force the gaps, and then they were on the stakes, the cataphracts, in their mirror-bright armour, and the men in their shimmering mail.
‘Throw!’
On Cadus’ command, we threw our spears in a withering rain of iron, that met the charge just as the charge met the stakes.
The carnage as iron and flesh met sharp and solid oak was horrible to watch, made worse by the storm of spears before, and the hail of arrows that followed as our Pannonian archers shot from the flanks into the centre. Horses fell, churning the earth with their dying feet; their riders died, crushed under so much armour.
The whole Parthian front rank fell, but they jammed the stakes and the next ones jumped them; they had no chance to slow, and so they met the second rank of stakes, and then the next wave met the third and suddenly we were held safe by a wall twenty paces deep of dead and dying beasts.
The force of the Parthian charge was broken, at least for now. On the far side of the stakes, they tried to form up, to remake their line.
‘Archers, loose at will! Legion, step back!’ I heard Cadus, saw his arm flung high, and sounded the high, keening notes he required. A storm of arrows fell and under their cover we all stepped back and back until we stood on the higher ground, with new javelins passed to us from the ranks at the sides, who held the stores. There, we stood firm and waited while the living Parthians picked their way through the dead, all the time dying themselves under the blanket of our arrows.
Even so, they outnumbered us by thousands and did not seem to fear death. With the sun at their backs, they came ever closer until we could see the eyes of the horses behindtheir face-helms, which meant, in turn, their riders could see ours.
An axe spun at me. I ducked even before I knew what it was, and heard it kill behind me, felt the gap at my back, and felt it closed, as men stepped together where their fallen comrade had been.
An armoured horse breasted the mass of men. I saw blue silk, and the mark of the tern, and screamed at it, but it was not Monobasus, only one of his men, and Horgias pulled at his spear as it stabbed through and Tears thrust his shield up, catching the horse on the face so that it half reared and I stabbed up under its flanks at the only place where there was no armour, and it fell, and Syrion stamped on the head of its rider, and broke it, and buckled his helmet.
He grinned at me, and we joined our shields, and the dying horse thrashed its way to the afterlife ahead of us, making a new part of our defences.
The day became a storm of killing of which I remember only brief flashes, where time slowed, and the air crystallized around a certain threat, a particular sword blade or spear point, or axe. I remember the moment around noon when our archers had spent all but a few of their shafts and Vologases sent forward his own archers to shower us with death.
If Lupus hadn’t seen them, and hadn’t roared the command at me so that I heard it over the tumult of battle; if I hadn’t sounded the signal to raise shields, if we hadn’t drilled it so often that men even in the act of killing or dying lifted their left arms without thinking… if not all of those, the battle would have ended there and then, with the Parthians only left to strip the dead and give final grace to the wounded.
But he did see and I did hear and the men did respond and, from fighting side by side, we were suddenly sheltering under a roof of shield-tiles with only those of us on the front rank holding our shields to the fore, and like that we weathered thestorm until they ran out of arrows, or someone changed the command and the hail stopped, and we brought our shields back and the Parthians came forward again, who had drawn back for fear of dying under their own missiles.
The light cavalry came at us then, with horses unarmoured and men in short mail shirts who fought with axe and curved swords. They reaped us as if we were old standing corn, but slowly, and with losses of their own.
For each ten of our men killed we drew a pace back, and for each pace back, the pass narrowed and the incline steepened. The enemy cavalry had no room properly to move and so they sent the men in on foot with their spinning axes and their long-spears and we ordered our own archers to loose their last shafts on to them so that they, too, knew what it was to have to shelter from a killing rain; except that they had not drilled as we had, and more of them died.
As the day grew old, the fighting grew ever closer until we were battling hand to hand, face to face, knee to groin. The sun was behind us by then, shining in their faces. I remember seeing it glint on a Parthian shield boss and ducking, for fear of being blinded, and using that same shaft of light in my own right, raising my blade until the light bounced into the eyes of the screaming demon who came at me with his axe raised, but never saw the straight thrust into his mouth that killed him.
Dusk fell slowly, without our knowing, just that we had to strain harder to see the difference between mail and flesh, between skin and blood and bone. The sides of the pass became vast walls of unlight, and the blanket of night slowly drew across the Parthian forces, so that we no longer had any idea of how many were behind the battle line.
We had no one behind now to send for brands from the old camp fires; our line was one man deep, and not long.
A man fell in that line, away to my left. Lupus roared his command hoarsely now, and I sounded the horn and heard only one other match it, thinly, as we stepped back a pace, to keep our dwindling wall of shields intact.
But the other, thinner, horn kept sounding its long, rolling note, which was nothing at all like our three short, falling blasts that took us back.
‘That’s the retreat. The Parthian retreat. They’re going back!’ Someone shouted that from my left. I thought it was Sarapammon, but now I think it must have been Horgias. At the time, I barely dared lower my blade for fear of who would step in to take advantage of it, until I saw Syrion drop his head to rest his brow on his shield’s edge and heard Lupus say, in a tone of weary, half-joyed disbelief, ‘Demalion, sound the battle’s end.’