‘Forward!’
The cohort’s line advanced a single step, the front two ranks thrusting their spears out with a brutal lunge that brought the stranded riders face-to-face with their doom.
‘Forward! Faces, armpits and balls!’
The men to either side of him advanced another pace and repeated the thrust, each man aiming for the points they had been instructed to seek out with their spear blades, and the screams of horrifically wounded men were added to the thrashing death throes of the stricken mounts. Marcus saw the Parthian king slide from the saddle of his maimed beast, tossing away his lance and pulling a heavy mace from its place on the transfixed animal’s saddle. Half turning, Marcus nudged Dubnus, raising his gladius and staring at its eagle-headed pommel for a brief moment.
‘Are you coming?’
‘We have them! Now we close the back door before they realise they’re dead men if they don’t turn and run!’
Julius nodded at his legatus’s command, gesturing to the big man waiting behind him.
‘The black flag!’
Sprinting up the short stretch of hillside that separated them from the summit, the bull-like soldier wielded the flag with all of his strength, a nine-foot square of black linen snapping in the breeze of its passage through the air. A moment later an answering peal of trumpets signalled that the order had been received, and Scaurus nodded his satisfaction.
‘That’s going to come as a nasty surprise.’
On both flanks of the mass of horsemen, three centuries of tunic-clad slingers slipped through the legion’s line, shaking out into a loose formation that gave them the space to swing their slings. Their lead bullets were innocuous enough in appearance, but when released from the whirling weapons they struck with sufficient power to punch through armour plate. As men and horses began to take casualties on either side of the cataphract’s formation, riders turned their beasts and went after the lightly equipped skirmishers, only to watch in frustration as they scurried back into the legion’s line, leaving their would be assailants dangerously exposed to the archers who were loosing arrows at them at no more than twenty paces. Julius nodded in satisfaction as the slingers darted out to loose their deadly missiles again, taunting the cumbersome cavalrymen as they pecked lethally at the Parthian flanks.
‘And if that’s bothering them then what’s coming next will tear the arse right out of their day.’
Marcus stepped forward from the Tungrian cohort’s line, smiling as the long spears to either side of him angled away to make room for his advance. Dubnus turned away from the press of battle for a moment, cupping his hands to bellow the only order he would need to issue to his men.
‘Tenth Century, to me! For the Bear!’
Spurred by the reference to their former centurion’s memory, his men were up and running from their places beside the Scorpions in an instant, each with his axe gripped in one hand and the other clenched into a fist, pumping their legs to cover the hillside at their best speed. Turning back and hefting his own weapon, he stepped in behind Marcus as the tribune crabbed forward towards the Parthian king with his gladius ready to parry, the longer spatha’s lethally sharp blade waiting behind it.
‘Osroes! Face me!’
The king’s head snapped round at the sound of his name, his eyes visible in his gold-chased helmet’s eye slits, locking stares with the Roman as he strode forward. Clad from head to foot in heavy armour, each scale edged with gold or silver in a glorious display of wealth, he paused for no more than a heartbeat before giving combat, raising his shield to match the threat from Marcus’s gladius while the mace’s many bladed head hovered at his shoulder, ready to strike. A sleet of arrows flew at the horsemen around him as the Hamian archers sought to protect their tribune, a rider behind Osroes falling backwards from his saddle as a well-aimed shot found the heavy chain mail that hung from his helmet to protect his face, brutally smashing the rings into the back of his throat.
‘Media!’
The armoured figure stepped in quickly, dispensing with any subtlety with his first sweeping strike, the mace’s viciously sharpened ridges whistling through the air over Marcus’s head as he flexed his knees to evade the strike. Lightning-fast despite the weight of his armour, Osroes snapped a foot out to catch the Roman while he was off balance, only to stagger as his intended victim sprang to one side, hammering the flat of his gladius at the outstretched leg hard enough to break the extended knee had it not been protected by overlapping iron scales. The Parthian staggered backwards, his eyes wide with the pain, then reeled as his attacker broke the blade of his spatha against the magnificent helmet with a brutal blow, sending the golden crown flying into the mud. Tossing the weapon’s hilt aside he snatched up the king’s fallen mace as a pair of unhorsed cataphracts struggled through the press, desperate to rescue their king.
The first of them had drawn his sword, but as he swung the blade back to strike Dubnus stepped in swiftly, hammering the heavy spike that backed his axe’s blade hard into the Parthian’s scaled chest and dropping him, writhing in agony. He stepped back as half a dozen lances stabbed out at him from the second and third ranks, but Marcus advanced to attack, parrying the other warrior’s first sword stroke and then backhanding him with a sweeping mace strike that deformed his helmet, and bounced him off the armoured flank of a dying horse to fall limply into the blood-stained dust. With a savage cry, a rider in the second rank took his chance, jabbing his lance at the Roman while his attention was on the fallen man, catching him unawares and sinking the long spear’s leaf-shaped head deep into his right bicep. His face contorting with the pain, Marcus wrenched his arm free, stepping back with his sword hanging limply from nerveless fingers, and the rider spurred his horse forward a precious foot, driving it into the mass of dead and dying animals as he raised the spear overarm, ready for the death stroke.
‘For the Bear!’
The first of Dubnus’s men to reach the scene thrust his way through the Roman line and leapt forward with utter disregard for his own safety, hacking his blade down into the horse’s long face, the force of the blow sending armour scales flying as he killed the animal with a single blow. Collapsing into the churned and bloody dirt, the beast spilt its rider forward at the soldier’s feet, and with a brutal economy of effort, the Tungrian wrenched his weapon’s blade free, reversing his grip on the axe’s handle as he raised it to strike before sinking the thick iron pick deep into the stunned Parthian’s face through the mail that hung from his helmet, screaming the cohort’s battlecry in his moment of triumph.
‘Tungriaaaaa!’
More of Dubnus’s Tenth Century were flooding into the fight, each man swinging his axe with a wide-eyed ferocity that had those cataphracts still in control of their mounts frantically seeking to back them out of the fray, knowing that their long lances were too unwieldy and their swords and maces too short to prevent the slaughter of their horses and their own inevitable defeat.
‘Forward. Support them!’
With a roar the cohort stepped forward again, their long spears stabbing out at the riders stranded on their immobile horses.
Looking out to the legion’s flanks, Scaurus saw the distant silhouettes of horsemen riding around the ends of his legion’s line.
‘Any moment now …’
With a sudden blare of horns the cataphracts were starting to disengage, those men who were able, turning their horses away from the fight and riding back down the hill, their mounts capable of little more than an exhausted trot after the exertion of their charge up the slope only moments before.