Carrhae (21 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘we will organise a pursuit in the morning.’

But I was troubled by the thought that we would not be able to follow Mithridates, especially if Tigranes launched an assault against Hatra. If that happened I would have to take the army back north and Mithridates would be free to create mischief in the eastern half of the empire once more.

At that moment a legionary, a member of the Exiles, arrived with news that Kronos’ men were being shot at from the palace. I slapped Domitus on the arm.

‘Or perhaps Mithridates is trapped in the palace.’

Though I had been in the saddle since the early morning and had fought a battle during the day, any tiredness left me instantly at the prospect of cornering Mithridates. The messenger escorted us to where the Exiles were taking up positions around the palace prior to an assault.

Seleucia’s palace was built in the Greek style reflecting its heritage. A large, square building, it was enclosed within a strong circuit wall that had square towers at regular intervals along its length. These towers had tiled roofs and square windows fronted by wooden shutters, from which archers, slingers and spearmen could launch missiles at an attacker. The large and impressive gatehouse on the south side of the wall also had wooden shutters on each of its two storeys above the huge twin gates to rain down missiles upon a foe.

Though Ctesiphon was thought of as the greatest palace complex in the empire, Seleucia’s royal residence was also an impressive structure. Its east wing housed the vaulted throne room, the south wing the royal suites whose floors were decorated with rich floor mosaics and columned courtyards. The banqueting hall was located in the west wing, while in the north wing there was a high, open veranda that gave spectacular views of the Tigris to the north of the city. Around the palace were granaries, barracks, stables, armouries and storerooms.

We found Kronos three hundred paces from the gatehouse giving directions to his senior officers. His men were deployed in their centuries all around the wall beyond the range of enemy missiles. They carried no torches now so as to deny the foe any aiming points but they were still visible in their white tunics and carrying white shields sporting griffin wings. Kronos dismissed his officers before we reached him.

I looked at the walls that appeared empty of any soldiers. In fact I could see no torches on the walls and no lights beyond them.

Domitus read my thoughts.

‘Looks deserted.’

‘It is not,’ replied Kronos. ‘I sent a couple of centuries forward to the gates but they were shot at before they got near them. The enemy are behind those shutters.’

‘Did you lose any men?’ I asked.

Kronos shook his head ‘They were in
testudo
formation. One man broke an ankle when they fell back. I have sent for the ram to smash those gates open.’

In addition to the ballistae that Dura’s army had gained when I had defeated a Roman army before the walls of my city, at the same time it had also captured a battering ram. This ram comprised a large tree trunk that hung from chains fixed to the top of a sturdy arched frame. Over this frame were fitted wooden boards, protected by hide, clay and finally iron plates. The thick roof was designed to defeat enemy missiles and the clay was a fireproof barrier. The ram was mounted on four large wooden wheels to allow it to be pushed forwards and backwards. On the end of the tree trunk was a massive iron head cast in the shape of a snarling ram that the troops had nicknamed ‘Pacorus’.

Men standing either side of the log operated the ram, which had leather straps fixed to it that allowed them to pull it back and then hurl it forward to smash the iron head against the target.

After their experience at the walls, what was left of the enemy was clearly weary of our machines and so had hidden themselves in the gatehouse and in the towers. It was suddenly eerily quiet as we waited for Marcus and his ram.

‘Do you think Mithridates is in there?’ asked Kronos, tilting his head towards the palace.

‘I hope so,’ I replied, though I did not think so. In addition to being a murdering wretch the stepbrother of Orodes was also a coward and my gut told me that he was long gone.

I heard a crack and felt a slight breeze on my face, which was then showered with liquid. I heard a groan and saw with horror that an arrow was stuck in Kronos’ neck. He collapsed to the ground.

‘Shields, shields!’ screamed Domitus as he grabbed Kronos’ right arm and began to haul him away from the walls. I took his other arm and we pulled him across the ground as a century of men rushed forward and formed a wall of shields around us.

Blood was spurting from the arrow wound as Kronos looked up at me and tried to smile.

‘Don’t talk, keep still,’ I told him.

A medical orderly knelt beside him, took a bandage from his bag and applied it to the wound in an effort to staunch the flow of blood, but the arrow had penetrated too deeply into his neck and Kronos was dead within seconds. The fountain of blood subsided as life left the commander of the Exiles and I stared in disbelief at my dead comrade. This was the man who had marched all the way from Pontus when that kingdom had fallen to the Romans; who had helped me raise a legion of his exiled countrymen and forged them into an élite fighting formation. He had fought beside me at Dura, the Tigris, Babylon, Makhmur and Susa and had not suffered a scratch. And now a single archer had killed him.

Domitus commanded the orderly to remove the arrow from the wound and then had the body covered with a white cloak and taken to the rear where it would be cremated alongside Drenis when the fighting was over. They would burn with Mardonius, whose body I had ordered to be removed from the walls. My hatred for Mithridates burned with a white-hot intensity for what he had been responsible for at this place. I vowed to hunt him down even if it meant going to the end of the world to find him.

The ram arrived shortly after we lost Kronos and its iron head was soon smashing in the two gates. The soldiers in the gatehouse above tried to halt its progress by hurling spears and rocks against it but Marcus had also brought his smaller ballistae with him and they shot iron and stone balls to splinter the wooden shutters, and then dismounted companies of Vagises’ horse archers poured volley after volley of arrows at the firing positions. Very soon no missiles were coming from the gatehouse.

Like most of Seleucia’s defences the palace gates had not been maintained and though they looked impressive they were very old, over two hundred years at least, and when they were subjected to a fierce pounding they gave way easily enough. The defenders had had no time to reinforce them with braces or rubble and so, after twenty minutes of being battered, they were forced open.

The same orderly who had tried to save Kronos re-bandaged my wounded arm as the first of the Exiles forced their way through the gates and into the palace compound. Domitus had wanted to lead them but I had forbidden him to do so – I did not want to lose any more friends this day. So as the first shards of light appeared in the east we stood and watched as century after century raced into the palace to exact revenge for the death of their commander. Most of the Thracians and Cilicians were butchered without mercy whether they threw down their weapons and tried to surrender or not. A few Sarmatian horsemen attempted to mount their horses and cut their way through the mass of Exiles who flooded into the palace, but their horses panicked in the face of the dense ranks of the legionaries and their riders were soon dragged from their saddles and stabbed to death.

After the brief, violent battle was over I walked with Vagises and Domitus, escorted by a century of Exiles and a hundred horse archers, through the smashed gates and into the palace compound. The ground was sprinkled with enemy dead all around, mostly Thracians and Sarmatians but a few bodies attired in short-sleeved red tunics marking them out as Cilicians. There were some shouts and screams coming from inside the palace but most of the fighting was over. The gatehouse and all the towers had been cleared of enemy soldiers and groups of Exiles were standing guard on the walls, at the gatehouse and at the entrance to the palace itself.

We stood in the middle of the square in front of the palace as parties of Exiles began dumping enemy swords, bows, spears and armour in separate piles that would be examined by Marcus to see if any could be salvaged for further use. All the weapons and armour for Dura’s army were produced in Arsam’s armouries to ensure their quality, but captured stocks could always be sold on to third parties such as Alexander’s Jewish insurgents. His fighters had originally been armed with weapons produced at Dura but since then he had suffered a series of crushing defeats and he had used up all of his gold reserves. Perhaps I would send him the weapons that were being stockpiled in front of me free of charge. They would, after all, be used to kill Romans and the fewer Romans there were in the world would be of benefit to the empire.

Marcus sauntered over to where we stood and raised his right arm in a Roman salute. Dressed in simple beige tunic, sandals, leather belt and wide-brimmed hat, he looked like a gardener rather than a quartermaster. But he had one of the keenest minds in the empire and his organisational skills were second to none.

‘Terrible business about Drenis and Kronos,’ he said. ‘My commiserations.’

I nodded and Domitus stood by impassively.

‘Your engines did good work, Marcus,’ I told him.

‘Seleucia’s walls will need rebuilding and strengthening,’ he replied.

‘That is not our concern,’ I replied. ‘Once Mithridates has been captured Orodes can rebuild them at his leisure for there will no longer be any traitors to hide behind them.’

But a thorough search of the palace revealed that, just as I had feared, he had fled the city before we entered it. Some prisoners were taken, however, when a group of the enemy had barricaded themselves on the veranda in the north wing of the palace. They had shouted to the legionaries who were battering down the doors that they were men of importance who would command a great ransom and were known to the King of Dura. The latter declaration probably saved their lives as they were ordered to open the doors and surrender themselves immediately.

There were five of them: two Thracians, a bearded Sarmatian officer dressed in a magnificent scale armour cuirass, an unconscious and pale Nicetas whose shoulder wound had been bandaged but who had obviously lost much blood, and an individual whom I had met before.

‘Udall,’ I said to the man with the scruffy long hair who stood before me.

I had first encountered him when he had been a junior officer in a force of foot soldiers sent by Narses to intercept my army near Seleucia. Vagises’ horse archers had destroyed most of that force and Udall had been taken prisoner. I had let him and the rest of those men who had surrendered with him march away, after which he had spun a tale to his king about how he had slowed down Dura’s army. As a reward he had been made governor of Seleucia and was in that post when I had stormed the city as part of an alliance of kings led by my father determined to remove Mithridates and replace him with Orodes. After the city had fallen I had once again let Udall go free, and now here he was before me a prisoner for a third time.

‘I submit to your mercy, majesty,’ he said, bowing deeply, his hands bound behind his back like the others standing in a line in front of me.

I said nothing to him as I moved to stand before the Sarmatian. These people spoke Scythian, a coarse, harsh language that was spoken by the savage nomadic peoples who occupied the great northern steppes. As part of my boyhood education I had been tutored to speak and write it but had not spoken it in an age.

‘You are far from your homeland, Sarmatian.’

‘I go where there is work,’ he replied indifferently.

‘Where is Mithridates?’

‘Long gone,’ he smiled. ‘He has escaped you.’

I moved along the line to look at the Cilicians, both of whom were swarthy wretches who looked at me with hateful eyes.

‘What is your story?’ I asked one of them, to which he replied by spitting in my face.

Domitus standing beside me drew his
gladius
and thrust it through the man’s neck, after which my face was once more showered with gore as blood spurted from the wound. The Cilician collapsed as Domitus stepped over his body and rammed his sword into the side of his comrade, driving the blade up under the man’s rib cage to pierce his heart. He too collapsed to the ground. Domitus pointed at Udall.

‘This is the consequence of letting people go free instead of killing them, a mistake that Mithridates would not have made.’

I ordered the surviving prisoners to be taken back to the palace until I decided their fate and walked over to a water trough to wash my face. Domitus followed me.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ he asked.

I rubbed the stubble on my chin and saw that blood was seeping through the fresh bandage on my arm.

‘You cannot let them live,’ he continued before I could answer. I could tell that he was seething with rage over the deaths of Kronos and Drenis.

‘You are right,’ I said, ‘but first we have to attend to our dead.’

That afternoon, after Alcaeus had dressed my arm again and I had changed into a fresh tunic, most of the army was drawn up on parade to the west of the city wall. Two cohorts, one from the Durans, one from the Exiles, were left in the city to man what was left of the walls, guard the palace and the bridge over the Tigris and patrol Seleucia. The rest, including the squires, farriers, armourers, veterinaries, physicians and civilian drivers, plus the legions’ golden griffin and silver eagle standards, were drawn up to witness the cremation of our dead. We had lost only a hundred and fifty killed during the capture of Seleucia but it did not feel like a great victory, not with the bodies of Drenis and Kronos lying on their funeral pyres.

The shields of the Cilicians and Thracians had been collected to make individual pyres that had been soaked in oil, and now they were lit to consume the bodies on top of them. Thumelicus, tears streaming down his face, lit the pyre of Drenis while Domitus did the same for that of Kronos. I held a torch and lit the heaped shields beneath the body of Mardonius and then watched as the flames took hold and black smoke ascended into a clear blue sky as the souls of our comrades were welcomed into heaven.