‘The king here thinks so, at least until we stop moving.’
‘And you? What do you think, Tribulus Corvus?’
Marcus watched a fifty-man group of horse archers trotting back across the plain towards the enemy, one of several that had been dispatched from the Parthian army during the day to scout the ground before them.
‘What do I think? I think that the man leading that host will be desperate to get to the king here, although whether he’ll be hoping to rescue him or simply kill him …’
‘Narsai won’t care. All he needs is my body, living or dead. Once the tribes know I’m no longer a reason not to attack, he’ll have you at his mercy. No amount of clever trickery will save you now that you’ve abandoned the security of that hill.’
Osroes had stirred, and was looking down at the two tribunes with a resigned expression.
‘You think your own people will try to kill you?’
The king shook his head wearily at Varus.
‘Not my people, Roman. Narsai’s people. Explain it to him, if you will, Tribune Corvus?’
Marcus nodded.
‘Parthia isn’t one kingdom, there are at least a dozen kings who owe their allegiance to King Osroes’ father, Arsaces, the King of Kings. Osroes is one of them, and King Narsai is another. Narsai rules Adiabene, a smaller and less important kingdom than Media, but were our guest the king to die in captivity, then Narsai will immediately have the right as the commander in the field to claim command of the Median army until another ruler can be appointed by Arsaces and his council. And if Narsai can present himself to the Great King as the man who defeated a Roman legion, and ejected Rome from a prize like Nisibis to boot, then his claim to that throne of Media would be hard for Arsaces to resist.’
‘So if he manages to kill the king here …’
‘He’ll blame my death on Rome, and position himself as the saviour of Parthia.’
Both men looked up at Osroes.
‘And if his killers come for you tonight?’
‘Yes, Tribune Corvus?’
‘Do you wish to live or die?’
The king shook his head tiredly, slumping back in the saddle.
‘How should I know? The Sun God will decide …’
The legion covered thirty miles that day, the exhausted legionaries digging out a marching camp, eating their rations cold and then for the most part collapsing into sleep, unless they happened to have the misfortune to have drawn guard duty. A handful of centurions patrolled the camp’s perimeter with unfailing vigilance, only too well aware that there were enough of the enemy to breach the camp’s walls, given a determined assault and an unready defence. Julius had paraded the legion’s centunions while their men were building the camp, expressing himself with a degree of robustness that had raised eyebrows among men who still harboured distant memories of a more relaxed way of life.
‘I couldn’t give a shit how degenerate a shower of arse-eating goat fuckers the enemy are, any man found asleep at his post will be beaten to death by his tent party in the morning, and any one of you that feels like making allowances can take his place. Understood?’
He’d looked across their ranks, his face hard with evident contempt for their collective abilities.
‘Just so we understand each other, I’ll be up and about during the night, and if I find any of your men with their eyes closed on guard then I’ll be the one doing the beating to death. Think on that, and on who I might choose to pay the price for those few minutes of sleep.’
In consequence the duty centurions were harsh in their vigilance, taking their vine sticks to any man looking the slightest bit like sleeping, and when the sun rose it was the opinion of them all that while their new first spear might be a bastard, he certainly didn’t spare himself, having been seen about the camp by several of his centurions during the night. The legion took a swift breakfast before forming up to resume its march at dawn, covering a good five miles before its Parthian escort managed to stir themselves and join the line of march, leaving the infantry to toil along to their rear.
‘So, there was no sign of your assassins last night, Your Highness?’
Osroes was little improved on the previous day, and if anything, less animated than before, and waved Marcus’s question away with a grimace.
‘Too soon. They’ll wait until you’re exhausted before making their move.’
The Roman had smiled back at his prisoner wryly.
‘They’d better not wait too long. There’s a reason that Julius has us wearing out our hobnails this quickly.’
They marched all day with only brief stops for food and water, their rate of progress alternating between the burning pain of the double pace and the marginal respite of the standard marching speed, enough in itself to cover twenty miles in a day.
‘Narsai will be getting twitchy, I expect. By the time we stop for the night we’ll be a good twenty miles closer to Nisibis than he would have expected, and with only one more day’s march ahead of us rather than the two he’d have been calculating. So if he’s going to make an attempt to get to our prisoners, it has to be tonight. We’ll double the guards, I think.’
The legion took Julius’s decision with an uncharacteristic lack of complaint, and the first spear looked about him as the cohorts toiled to throw up the customary walls of the camp that would be their defence once night fell.
‘Perhaps we’ve turned them into soldiers.’
‘Or maybe they’re just too weary to give voice to their complaints?’
Scaurus grinned at his subordinate’s jaundiced expression.
‘Yes, I know. Since when was a soldier ever too tired to complain? Perhaps they’ve realised that this is the last chance the Parthians will have to pull a victory out of this disaster. Tonight’s the night Julius, there’s no doubt about that.’
‘You are certain of this?’
The old man spoke without taking his head from the dusty ground where he lay prostrate.
‘Yes, Your Highness. I have ridden alongside the king since he was a young child. His seat on a horse is as evident to me as his hand on parchment would be to a scribe.’
Narsai nodded slowly, a grim smile of satisfaction settling on his face.
‘And he was riding alongside the officer leading the first cohort?’
‘Yes, Your Highness.’
The king turned to Osroes’ gundsalar.
‘Your scouts tracked each of their cohorts into the camp, and noted the place each one took inside its walls?’
The general inclined his head.
‘They did so with precision and diligence, Highness. If my king remains with the cohort that led on the march today then he will be found somewhere here …’
He sketched a map in the dirt at their feet with the point of his dagger, quickly scratching in the roads that divided its rectangle into four smaller sections.
‘Here. Where the roads meet in the camp’s centre, that is where my king is held captive.’
Narsai stared down at the crude map for a moment.
‘I will need the very best of your fighting men, Gundsalar. The bravest and the cleverest, men who can pass unnoticed in the shadows, but who will fight like uncaged beasts when the time comes for them to strike. I doubt we have a dozen men of this quality in our entire army, but we must assemble them quickly and make a bold strike into the heart of our enemy. This chance will not be offered to us again.’
The older man bowed deeply.
‘As you command, Your Highness. I will bring the chosen men here.’
The king waited until he had vanished into the gloom before turning to his own general.
‘Find Varaz and bring him here. Tell him that the moment of his glory is upon him.’
Narsai looked around the men who had been gathered from his army, taking the measure of them with a slow, calculating assessment in the light of the crackling fire. Each of them met his eyes with the appropriate deference, heads inclining in recognition of his exalted status, but the glint of their eyes and the set of their jaws betrayed supreme and untroubled confidence in their physical and martial prowess. Cataphracti nobility for the most part, they were big men with powerfully muscled frames, trained from childhood in the use of the lance, the sword and mace, on horseback and on foot, supremely conditioned to fight carrying the heaviest armour in the full heat of the day. His own champion stood among them dressed in the same unfamiliar garb they all wore, the neutral set of his body and the blank look on his carefully composed features masking the contempt that the king knew he was feeling for the men around him and for any man who lacked his unique and deadly approach to his craft. If the gathered soldiers were alike to swords and maces, weapons for hacking and bludgeoning at an enemy line, Varaz was an assassin’s blade by comparison, forged with the intention of delivering a single unpredictable and lethal wound.