Legionary: Land of the Sacred Fire (49 page)

Sura stroked the matted tufts of his beard as if studying some legal scroll. ‘We climb up, we gut the bastards in the cabin, then we . . . ’

Just then, a cry went up from the Median spearmen guarding the paighan and a raucous chorus of reply sounded from the freed men. Pavo looked over his shoulder to see the majority of the paighan rushing their captors, spearing with a vigour that told of their hatred. At this, Tamur spun to the disturbance, nostrils flaring in outrage.

‘Insolent dogs! At them!’ he cried, waving his pushtigban and the war elephants towards the rebelling paighan. The ground shuddered under the great beasts’ footsteps.

‘Bollocks! That makes it a bit harder,’ Sura spat as the nearest elephant thundered past at the back of the herd, the knotted rope jangling.

‘There’s no time. No other choice. Come on!’ Pavo wrenched Sura up from the grassy dip, waving the flat-nosed man with him. The ground jostled before him as he ran, from his own stride and the mighty footsteps of the elephants. The rope danced violently as the elephants picked up pace. He reached out and snatched at it, the tether lifting him from the ground with a jolt. He shinned up the rope, his palms burning on the fibres. Halfway up, he looked down to see that Sura and the flat-nosed man had grappled the rope too. They were crying out to him, but a ferocious trumpeting from the beast drowned out their words. He glanced up to see the source of their alarm – an archer leaning over the side of the cabin, winking behind his nocked bow. He pressed flat against the elephant’s midriff, feeling a whoosh of air as the arrow zipped past him and punched into the sand. The archer fumbled to nock his next arrow and Pavo hauled himself up the last few feet. As the archer stretched his bowstring, ready to loose, Pavo clutched the edge of the cabin with one hand and reached up with the other to bat the bow out of line, the arrow falling from the string. The archer’s cry to his comrades perched at the other edges of the cabin never left his throat, as Pavo grasped at the man’s windpipe then hauled him over the edge of the cabin. A dull crack of bones sounded as he landed on the ground headfirst.

Pavo pulled himself into the cabin, immediately tearing his spatha from his scabbard. The other three archers were oblivious to the fate of their fourth colleague, too busy firing down upon the fleeing swarm of paighan. Pavo plunged his blade into the ribs of one and the other two spun at the guttural, gurgling roar the man emitted. The two gawped, then saw that Pavo wrenched desperately at his spatha blade, stuck fast in the dead archer’s ribs. The pair grinned, drawing long, curved blades from their belts. In the next heartbeat, Sura leapt into the cabin, bringing his spatha scything down on the nearest man’s forearm. With a crack of bone and a howl, the archer toppled to the floor of the howdah where Sura despatched him with a sharp downwards thrust to the heart. The flat-nosed paighan thumped into the cabin at this point, and the last Persian archer gawped at the three who glared back at him. Then he cast a quick glance over the edge and leapt with a shrill cry.

At this, the mahout sitting astride the elephant’s neck glanced over his shoulder, first with an irritated frown, then, on seeing the three foreign faces there, with bulging eyes. He called out in alarm to the riders on the elephants ahead, but none heard.

Pavo grappled the flat-nosed man by the shoulders. ‘We’ll deal with the mahout,’ he gestured to the man on the elephant’s neck, ‘but you must be ready to take the reins, yes?’

The flat-nosed man shrugged, smiled and nodded as if such an act was trivial.

Pavo nodded to Sura. ‘Ready?’

‘Never more so,’ Sura replied.

Pavo crept forwards, out of the cabin, Sura following close behind. The elephant’s shoulders rolled as it charged, and there was little to grip onto bar its furrowed flesh. He slipped and grasped out, inches from falling to the ground and under the beast’s stride.

‘I can’t get any purchase!’ Sura cried behind him.

The mahout, hoarse in his cries of alarm, twisted round again. This time his face drained of colour, seeing Pavo and Sura coming for him, albeit haphazardly. Immediately, he started thrashing at the top of the elephant’s skull with the iron hook-tipped cane. The beast trumpeted in fury, thrashing its head from side to side. Pavo felt the world shake as the beast thrashed, emitting a pained roar that seemed to shake him to his bones.

‘He’s trying to throw us off!’ Pavo cried, finding a modicum of purchase with one foot on the lip of the elephant’s iron plate mask.

‘Romans!’ A cry sounded from the cabin.

Pavo and Sura twisted.

‘Wait,’ the flat-nosed man said, ‘don’t move, just wait!’

Pavo frowned, then looked forward to see sweat leaping from the mahout as he lined up to thrash at the elephant’s skull once more. This blow gouged chunks of skin and bloodied flesh from the poor beast’s head, and this time it started to rear up. Pavo felt his grip weaken. His gut tightened as he readied to fall. The mahout twisted in his rope saddle, grinning. ‘Now, you will be cast to the ground!’ the man hissed.

The words had no sooner left his lips than the elephant stopped rising, sunk back down, reached up with its trunk, snatched the mahout from his saddle and hurled him groundwards like a rock. The creature then rushed forward to trample the mahout. A chorus of grinding, bursting and popping sounded, then the man was little more than a crimson patch of gristle in the creature’s wake.

Pavo panted, sharing a relieved glance with Sura. Shorn of its rider, the beast seemed to calm a little. The flat-nosed man scrambled past them, along the elephant’s neck to sit in the saddle. The beast tensed at first, but the man stroked around its wounds, speaking in soothing tones as he did so, then threw down the hooked stick as a gesture of goodwill. With a quick squeeze of his left thigh, he had the elephant turning at his behest. The crew of the other war elephants ahead carried on, unaware.

The flat-nosed man looked back over his shoulder, his face still etched with that easy smile. ‘And now we go to battle, yes?’

Pavo inched back into the cabin, finally pulling his spatha clear of the archer corpse. Sura stood beside him. The pair looked to the filthy crimson stain on the shoreline. Thousands of corpses, Persian and Roman, now floated in the sea or lay draped on the sand, a carpet of dead surrounding the ferocious battle on the waterline. But so very few intercisa helms still stood amidst the storm of Persian steel.

‘Aye, to war,’ Pavo cried, ‘and make haste!’

Gallus wondered if he had died back in Bishapur, if the constant battle and bloodshed since then was simply his place in Hades. Blinking barely cleared the hot blood from his eyes, and every breath brought with it a mouthful of crimson spray and that familiar metallic tang. He heard the rasping of his own breath, the hammering of his heart upon his ribs, and little else. The Persian warriors came at him like demons. Many of them had dismounted now to finish the last handfuls of Romans off. Pushtigban warriors had forced their way to the front, sensing imminent victory and eager for a share of the glory. Gallus struck the flat of his spatha across the neck of one of them. The warrior stumbled, winded. Gallus ripped the facemask away and thrust the blade into the man’s eye socket. With a gout of dark blood and chunky matter, the warrior fell to Gallus’ feet, piled there with so many others.

Is that enough glory for you, whoreson?

Another pair rushed for him, and he knew he could kill only one of them. The other would take his life at last. An animal growl tumbled through his gritted teeth. He sought out Olivia and Marcus in his mind’s eye as he hefted his spatha back for the last time. But he halted, blade overhead, as two spears punched up and under the arms of the approaching pair. Blood erupted from the iron mask eyeholes and mouth slits. Zosimus and Quadratus roared as they pulled their spears free.

Not yet,
he realised, the image of his loved ones fading,
but soon.

Quadratus and Zosimus pushed up either side of him. The last of his kind, it seemed. He raised his shield with theirs and the Persian blades hammered down on them with a rhythm akin to the relentless war drums.

‘Are you ready for this, sir?’ Zosimus cried by his side, his face caked in strips of skin and blood.

‘For what?’ he panted.

‘For that,’ Quadratus pointed a finger; over the thrashing mass of Savaran that clamoured to slay them, something was coming. A colossal shape silhouetted by the morning sun. While the rest of the war elephants circled up on the grassy dunes where some disturbance had broken out amongst the paighan, one beast had broken away. The creature’s every stride threw up great clods of wet sand and the sun sparkled on its serrated tusks. It was coming for them. Coming for them fast.

Now this is surely the end,
he realised. The beast thundered up behind the gold-painted Persian war drummer, who looked on at the last throes of Roman resistance excitedly, his arms thrashing as he upped the beat a little more. Then he slowed, looking over his shoulder in realisation, then up at the massive creature about to trample him. At the last, the drummer ducked out of the way.

Gallus frowned, then squinted up to the cabin on the creature’s back. Two figures stood there. They held Roman spathas. A desert-dry grin stretched across his features and his sword arm tingled with a new lease of life.

The panicked squeal of the drummer faded as the war elephant thundered onwards, the drumbeat striking up again moments later.

Pavo leant from the edge of the cabin, willing the creature not to draw up short. Ahead of it lay the majority of the Savaran. This close to victory, the Persian ranks were in disorder, thousands of them dismounted and fighting as infantry. But when the elephant trumpeted with all its might, many Persian heads turned, eyes bulging, mouths agape. At once, they broke out in a roar of panic. They scrambled to get clear, but weighed down with iron plate and ring armour, they were cumbersome and slow. Suddenly, the cabin juddered as if the elephant was charging over rocky ground, but the crunch of iron, bone and the screaming of men below told a different story. The flat-nosed paighan guiding the elephant uttered some jagged command, patting at the side of the creature’s head. Without hesitation, the elephant scooped down with its tusks, tearing the serrated bronze tips through a throng of clibanarii, tossing pockets of them up into the air. Their armour crumpled from the strike. Limbs were shattered, flesh torn asunder and brains gouged from skulls. In moments, the tight pack of flashing swords and spears around the Roman pocket had disintegrated, men fleeing in every direction. Of the clibanarii and pushtigban who waded out to sea to escape the beast’s wrath, many stumbled, falling into the water. Despite being prone in just a few feet of water, these men found the weight of their armour anchored them to the seabed and many drowned, their faces only inches under the surface.

As the elephant wreaked havoc through the Savaran masses, the flat-nosed paighan guiding the beast cried out in unintelligible Parsi. He punched the air, his air of serenity gone at last as he no doubt unleashed his anger over years of marching in chains.

Pavo felt an ember of hope in his heart.

‘They’re still alive,’ Sura grasped his shoulder, pointing down to the shallows.

Pavo followed his friend’s outstretched finger over the edge of the cabin. Down on the crimson shoreline, while the Savaran scattered, a ragged band of legionaries stood there. Barely a century of them, still poised and ready for the Savaran to return. Gallus, Zosimus and Quadratus still stood. He looked this way and that. Perhaps there could be a way out. Perhaps they could survive after all.

Then his eyes snagged on the activity a mile or so up the beach, where the vast Persian fleet was disembarking. Tens of thousands of fresh riders and spearmen fanned out, blades piercing the skyline like an iron grin.