The four thirty-man turmae fanned out across the desert; the whinnying of wounded horses and the shrill blare of the
A hundred paces away among the rocks Vespasian could see their attackers breaking cover and sprinting towards a dozen or so similar-coloured, smaller, more rounded rocks. A few moments later these rocks seemed to spring to life as the fleeing men jumped on them and they rose from the ground, as if they had suddenly grown first back legs then front; they turned and galloped away southwards.
‘Decurion, take your turma and get those camel-fucking Marmaridae bastards; we’re close enough to catch them. I want one alive,’ Corvinus bellowed at the nearest Latin-looking face.
As the turma peeled away Vespasian shot Magnus a questioning glance.
‘I don’t hold with fighting mounted but I suppose it’ll make up for not hunting lions,’ Magnus said, kicking his horse forward.
With a grin Vespasian followed, urging his mount into a gallop. The wind immediately tore his hat from his head and it fluttered behind him attached by the loose, leather strap around his throat.
They quickly cleared the outcrop and Vespasian felt that they were gaining on the slower but more durable camels, less than two hundred paces ahead; he could count about twenty of them. The turma had spread out into dispersed order, the troopers expertly guiding their horses around the larger stones that littered the baked, cracked ground. The occasional wild shot passed overhead or to one side but there were no hits — accurate archery from a moving camel at an enemy behind you would prove difficult, Vespasian surmised from the ungainly gait of the strange beasts.
After a half-mile, the Marmaridae were less than a hundred paces away; sensing that they would certainly catch their attackers, the troopers urged their horses to greater efforts. Sweat foamed from under their saddles and saliva flecked from their mouths as they responded to their riders’ wishes.
Vespasian reached behind him and pulled one of the ten light javelins, which each man carried, from the carry-case strapped to his saddle and slipped his forefinger through the leather thong halfway down the shaft. Their target was now little more than seventy paces ahead and Vespasian felt the familiar thrill and tension of imminent battle; he had not been in combat since the attack on his parents’ estate at Aquae Cutillae over four years previously and his desire for it was heightened by the ennui of the last few months.
With only sixty paces separating the two groups, the Marmaridae, realising that they had no chance of escape, suddenly turned their camels and charged the turma, releasing a volley of arrows. To Vespasian’s right a trooper was punched out of the saddle with a scream; his horse raced on, taken up by the excitement of the charge.
‘Release,’ the decurion yelled with fifty paces to go.
More than thirty javelins hurtled towards the oncoming camelry, quickly followed by a second volley as the troopers endeavoured to cause as much damage as possible with their primary weapons. Scores of iron-tipped shafts slammed into the Marmaridae punching through the chests and heads of men with bursts of blood or burying themselves deep into their mounts, crashing them to the ground in a cacophony of guttural, animal bellowing.
Whipping long, straight swords from their scabbards and screaming death from behind their cloth face masks, the seven survivors of the onslaught, black cloaks billowing out behind them, thundered into the turma as they drew their spathae.
The strong, unfamiliar smell of the camels caused the riderless horse next to Vespasian to shy abruptly to the left; it crunched into his mount’s withers as a shimmer of burnished iron flashed down towards him. Agonised by the pain of the blow, his horse raised its head, whinnying madly, and took the vicious sword cut, aimed at Vespasian’s neck, in the throat. Blood sprayed over Vespasian’s face as he brought his spatha down, severing the sword arm of his adversary who howled as his camel crashed into the now side-on riderless horse. Both beasts and the one-armed tribesman, blood spewing from his freshly hewn stump, plunged to the ground with a cracking of bones and bestial roars of anguish.
With the severed hand still gripping the sword embedded in its throat, Vespasian’s horse galloped on for five paces and then crashed onto the desert floor. Vespasian hurled himself forward so as not to be crushed beneath the dead weight of his erstwhile mount and tumbled across the rough ground. Jarring to a halt he looked back and immediately leapt to his left, narrowly avoiding being trampled under the galloping hoofs of a rolling-eyed horse whose blood-spurting, decapitated rider sat firm in the saddle, the muscles in his thighs still gripping his directionless mount.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ Magnus shouted, pulling his horse up next to Vespasian.
‘I think so,’ he replied watching, with a morbid curiosity, the progress of the headless rider; within a few dozen paces the thigh muscles gave out and the body slithered from the saddle, leaving the horse charging off towards the deep-blue horizon.
Looking around, Vespasian counted another couple of riderless horses as the turma pulled up and rallied. The ground was littered with dead camels and their riders but fifty paces away, back towards the outcrop, one camel remained standing; the Marmarides pulled it around to face them, brandished his sword above his head and then charged.
‘He’s got balls, I’ll give him that,’ Magnus commented, jumping from his horse and grabbing his hunting spear. ‘He’s mine, all right, pull back,’ he shouted at the troopers who did as they were ordered, grinning in anticipation of the interesting contest.
Magnus stood four-square to the charging camel, holding his eight-foot-long oaken-shafted spear across his body; the leaf-shaped iron head glinted in the sun. The troopers shouted encouragement at him as the rider closed, screaming the ululating war cry of his people and slapping the flat of his bloodstained sword against his camel’s side to urge it into more speed.
Magnus remained motionless.
An instant before the camel hit him, Magnus dodged to the left, ducking under the wild swipe of the Marmarides’ fearsome sword, and jammed his spear, point first, sideways between the animal’s forelegs. Its right shinbone snapped as it cracked against the solid shaft; its forward motion twisted the spear around and, as Magnus let go, forced it up into the belly of the beast. With a terrified bellow the camel sank onto the spear as its right leg buckled unnaturally beneath it, catapulting its rider from his saddle; its momentum pushed the weapon up through its juddering body, shredding its innards, until it burst through the beast’s back in a shower of gore just above the pelvis. Screeching and snorting violently, the camel thrashed its back legs in a vain attempt to lift itself off the cause of its torment. Magnus grabbed the unconscious Marmarides’ discarded sword and raised it two-handed into the air; with a monumental growl of exertion he sliced the blade down onto the writhing creature’s neck, cleaving through its vertebrae and almost severing its head.
The body convulsed with a violent series of spasms and then went still.
A mass of cheers and whoops went up from the watching troopers.
Vespasian walked over to his friend, shaking his head in mute admiration.
‘I saw a
‘Paetus would have appreciated that,’ Vespasian replied, thinking of his long dead friend, ‘he loved a good wild-beast hunt.’
‘I think I’ve lost my spear, though. I’ll never pull it out of that.’
A moan from behind distracted them and they turned to see the Marmarides stirring.
Vespasian turned the man over. His headdress had fallen off; he was young, no more than twenty, short and wiry, curly-haired with a thin nose and mouth and three strange curved lines tattooed on each of his brown-skinned cheeks. ‘We’d better get him back for questioning; he might have seen Statilius Capella’s party.’
‘If you’re thinking about torturing him, forget it,’ Magnus said, standing over the prostrate man, ‘see if there’s another one alive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you’re not going to hurt my property. He’s now mine, I’m going to keep him; I think I won him fairly.’
‘You’re in luck,’ Vespasian said, kicking the recumbent form of Magnus awake as the sun glowed red on the eastern horizon the following morning. ‘I’ve just been to see Corvinus; Aghilas the guide is going to pull through, the arrow was removed from his shoulder without too much loss of blood and he seems to be fine this morning.’
‘Why does that make me lucky?’ Magnus asked groggily, unwilling to come out from under his blanket.
