Tiberius watched the general as he deliberated, marvelling at the calm of the man. The Parthians had launched a second armoured attack midway through the morning, but it had been a half-hearted affair with few of the horses even attempting to charge the Roman cohorts directly. The arrow storm had been the worst torment and he knew he had been fortunate to survive after so long in the front rank. Now he was at Corbulo’s side, the most junior of aides, courtesy of an arrow fired with particular venom which had soared over the lines to impale his predecessor through the right eye. The sweetly sick scent of death was thick in his nostrils and nothing he had witnessed since daybreak had changed his opinion that his own decaying flesh would soon be adding to the stink of corruption. Until now.
He had to look twice before he realized what he was seeing. ‘General!’
Every eye turned to the far horizon.
Smoke.
A great dark swirling pall hanging in the still air behind and to the east of Vologases’ army.
Corbulo’s stern features were split by a grim smile and he sent up a prayer of thanks, asking the gods to aid the endeavours of Gaius Valerius Verrens. He had stopped Vologases in his tracks, he had bloodied him and now he had confused him. But that was nothing to the horror Corbulo was about to unleash on the hemmed-in Parthian army.
‘Gentlemen, take your positions.’
A ragged cheer went up from the Roman line. Tiberius could hear the shouts of the centurions demanding silence and he imagined the gnarled vine sticks cracking on backs. But the cheer had unsettled the Parthians and it was as if a collective shudder ran through that packed mass of humanity.
Corbulo saw it too. Now. Now was the time.
‘Loose the screens and deploy the artillery.’
On both sides of the valley, invisible to the Parthians because of their cunning construction, woven screens made from the long golden stems of dried grass that carpeted the valley had hidden Corbulo’s secret weapon: the siege artillery, carried at such great cost in time and manpower from Zeugma. Behind the screens Roman engineers had constructed two pairs of great catapults that now dominated the valley. Others had assembled the legion’s light artillery of stone-throwing ballistae and their cousins, the smaller but horribly effective scorpios, which fired giant arrows with the enormous power that gave them their well-earned nickname: shield-splitters. Each of the seventeen cohorts was equipped with a single ballista and ten scorpios and now the cohorts moved into open formation to allow the deadly machines to be positioned across the valley. Almost two hundred artillery pieces over a width of less than a mile. One every six or seven paces.
But it was the big siege catapults that Corbulo trusted would shatter the already cracking Parthian resolve. Designed to smash wood and stone and cow the inhabitants of great cities, the massive constructions of wood and iron could throw a stone weighing as much as a small ox for up to half a mile. It had taken patience and fortitude not to use them. To watch his soldiers die without fighting back. But now the destructive power that could destroy a city wall would be turned against flesh and bone.
The eighteen-foot throwing arm had been hauled back on its thick rope of twisted oxhide in preparation for the first throw. The projectile, a roughly carved rock the size and shape of a large cauldron, was in its sling.
‘Loose!’
Tiberius heard the order and his eye turned automatically to witness the launch. Released from the incredible tension that held it in place, the oak throwing arm lashed forward with a force that kicked through the wooden frame of the huge siege engine and would have thrown it into the air if the engineers hadn’t pegged it to the ground. With a gigantic whuuuup of released energy the arm collided with the padded buffer of hay-filled cloth sacks and sent its enormous projectile towards the Parthians. Unlike many of his peers, Tiberius had taken time to study the intricacies of his profession and he knew that the catapult was notoriously inaccurate. But with a target almost a mile wide and three miles deep accuracy didn’t matter.
A tremendous whooshing surge accompanied the low arcing flight of the stone and for a moment the whole battlefield seemed to fall silent. Tiberius followed the dark blur until it was absorbed into the mass of humanity below. The ground seemed to explode and men exploded with it. He imagined he could see the pink haze as Vologases’ soldiers were pulverized when the giant missile ploughed through them, robbing men of limbs and heads and swatting the big Parthian horses aside as if they were house flies. The power and the speed of the rock was so tremendous that men outwith the epicentre of the landing would be pierced by flying shards of bone and bludgeoned with lumps of still warm flesh. And that was just the first impact. Six times the stone skipped through the massed ranks, and each time it struck it caused carnage and consternation until at last it rolled to a halt in front of a pale and trembling Parthian princeling who looked down at the flesh-smeared lump of rock and fainted dead away.
The first missile was followed in quick succession by a second, a third and a fourth, and each missile killed fifty men and maimed a hundred more. But each of Corbulo’s giant death bringers took at least thirty minutes to reload, and in the interval the Parthian warlords urged their men forward in a desperate bid to break the Roman line before the next cast. There was no thought of strategy now, only of survival and revenge. Vologases had lost control of his army.
However, before they could reach Corbulo’s defences the Parthians had to get past the hundreds of dead horses and men from the earlier attacks. In the aftermath of the first Parthian charge the legionaries had used the lull to drag the big armoured horses together to create an almost unbroken barrier of dead flesh. The respite had also given the Romans time to collect the remaining caltrops and scatter them beyond the new line, and to recover the spent pila from the flesh of the dead and the battleground to their immediate front.
Vologases’ infantry, had they been brave, well led and disciplined, could have crossed the barricade of dead horses and men, but no horse would, and so, for the moment, it was the war bands of Parthian bowmen who were left to charge and countercharge, peppering the Roman line. But the hail of arrows had begun to thin as supplies from the camel trains dried up, and more and more Parthians looked fearfully to the rear where the smoke from their precious supplies wreathed the sky.
And as they wavered, the ballistae and the shield-splitters opened fire.
Twenty at a time, in steady, evenly spaced volleys, a hail of ten-pound stones and five-foot arrows raked the Parthian front line. The ballistae could fire a missile a quarter of a mile, but here they were being used at forty paces and the destruction they caused was terrible to behold. Archers were smashed from the saddle with their chests and skulls stove in. Horses shrieked in mortal agony as the heavy arrows of the scorpio s tore great gaping holes in ribs and chest. The devastating power was such that if the bolt missed the cavalry it would streak through to take the infantry behind, spearing not just one man but two, three and even four. Lack of arrows and the carnage they were suffering at the hands of Corbulo’s artillery persuaded the mounted bowmen to retire through the infantry. At last, Rome’s greatest general saw the opportunity he had been waiting for.
‘Signal the advance,’ Corbulo ordered. As the trumpet blared, he turned to Tiberius. ‘You may join your cohort, young man. It is swords which will bring victory now, not strategy. Tonight we will drink a toast to Victory. Lead them on. For Rome.’
Tiberius saluted with tears of joy in his eyes. He had never felt so proud to be a Roman. He had fought and he had endured and now he had no doubt at all that he would win. He sprinted the hundred yards to where his unit was forming line along with the men of the Fifteenth and the auxiliary cohorts who had made up the reserve.
‘Advance.’
They had begun the battle twelve thousand strong. Now they were closer to ten, but they started off down the valley at the relentless, measured tread that had made the legions feared from the windswept moors of northern Britain to the sun-scorched deserts of Arabia, and from Africa to the Danuvius. Still in their ranks they clambered across the stinking barricade of horse flesh that had kept the enemy at bay since morning and re-formed on the Parthian side.
Tiberius dressed his men’s ranks and the long line of big shields straightened. All along the line other officers did the same. Behind the shields the sweat-stained, dust-caked faces were fixed and unyielding. They had suffered and endured and watched their friends die. They were still outnumbered seven or eight to one, but now they were doing what they were trained to do. Not standing around as helpless targets. Attacking their enemy. For hour upon hour they had stood and died without complaint and now it was all they could do to stay in their ranks. They had made their sacrifice; now they demanded the blood price.
‘Forward, at the trot.’