Without dismounting, Maximinus stepped from the hack to the charger. He leant forward, smelling the clean, warm horse in the frigid air. He rubbed Borysthenes’ ears, patted his neck. The sky was overcast; the wind getting up at Maximinus’ back carried a few flakes of snow.
Paulina had been right. The elite hated him, not just for what he did, but for what he was. Maximinus had never tried to hide his origins. He had been a shepherd boy in the wild hills of Thrace. What else could he have been in the small village of Ovile? He had risen through the ranks of the army, via the patronage of Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla, but also through his courage and his devotion to duty. He had achieved high command, but he had never desired the throne. The recruits he had been training had forced the purple on him. He would have been dead within the day, his head on a pike, if the Senatorial triumvirate of Flavius Vopiscus, Honoratus, and Catius Clemens had not ridden into his camp and offered him their oath and that of the legionaries they led.
Maximinus had not wanted to be Emperor. It had brought nothing but tragedy. Micca, his life-long friend and bodyguard, speared in the back as they stormed a ridge in the forests of Germania. Tynchanius, his companion since childhood, cut down by mutineers in the town of Viminacium. Even now, twenty-one months after, Maximinus’ mind often shied away from that day. Other times, like now, he faced the horror. Tynchanius had died trying to save Paulina. The old man had failed. Reports indicated she was alive when she fell from the high window. Maximinus would never know if she had jumped or was pushed. But his imaginings of her last moments — the cobbles of the street rushing up — would never leave him.
Shouts and the rumble of hooves brought Maximinus back to the wintry plain. Volo’s light horse were steaming back through the infantry. All order gone, each man seemed to ride for his own life, the picture of rout. Off on the right, it was the same with the auxiliary troopers. Like a stream in spate, they lapped around the cataphracts of Sabinus Modestus, circling and pooling behind the motionless iron-clad men and horses.
Now, Maximinus thought, gazing forward. By Jupiter Optimus Maximus, by all the gods, now. As if impelled by his will, the rear eight ranks of the legionaries and Praetorians jogged around their fellow soldiers, and filled the gaps between their formations. Where there had been isolated pieces, waiting to be swept from the board, now stood a solid mass of armoured men. Eight deep, shoulder to shoulder, the silent line of soldiers reached out two thousand paces from the wooded stream.
Maximinus spat on his chest for luck. Flavius Vopiscus had done his part. Now it depended on the Iazyges. Everything hung in the balance. The spittle trickled down over the sculpted muscles of his cuirass. Would the nomads take the bait?
Iotapianus was hurrying his archers close up behind the heavy infantry. The covers were being pulled off the carts, men leaping up to man the catapults on them.
Drums and horns sounded out to the south. The Iazyges were ordering their lines, the horse archers retiring, the armoured lancers moving to the fore. Did they believe the Romans were afraid, starving, had attempted to escape them by a night march? Had they taken the flight of the Roman light horse at face value?
In the centre of the Roman line, where Flavius Vopiscus stood with his veteran legionaries from Pannonia, the tall pikes of the front ranks shifted and clacked together like dry reeds when the wind blows. Maximinus smiled. Daemon-haunted, Vopiscus might be, but an intelligent competence lived alongside his many superstitions. One evening in camp, they had discussed the signs an experienced commander can read on a battlefield: how the sounds the troops make and the way they brandish their weapons can reveal their state of mind; how nothing more clearly indicates fear than the wavering of spears. This was an unexpected touch of near genius from Vopiscus — as long as the pretence did not translate into the reality.
The barbarian drums beat a different rhythm, their horns blared, savage incitements to battle. At a slow walk, long, thin lances pricking the sky, the Iazyges began their advance. Numbers were impossible to judge. The armoured warriors in the front rank rode knee to knee. They stretched unbroken from the line of trees to beyond the Roman infantry, and beyond the cataphracts. Sabinus Modestus had the latter arrayed two deep. Say two paces for each cataphract, another two thousand paces. Exceeding four thousand paces, the enemy frontage had to contain over three thousand riders, possibly many more, and their formation was very deep, no telling how many ranks.
‘Gods below,’ someone muttered. ‘Look at them.’
‘Silence in the ranks,’ Maximinus snapped.
The Sarmatian tribesmen were closing into effective bowshot, some three hundred paces beyond Maximinus’ position behind the front line. Bright dragon standards writhed above tall pointed helmets and a shimmering wall of scale armour. They had moved up to a canter. Necks arched, their horses were plunging, lifting their front legs high to break through the standing snow, hooves struggling to find purchase.
It had worked. They were committed. Maximinus took stock. Volo’s light horse were moving close up behind the infantry, and the auxiliary cavalry out to the east had rallied around Sabinus Modestus’ cataphracts. Maximinus gave the order for the cohorts under Florianus and Domitius to pivot to the right to protect the rear of the legionaries should, as was only too likely, the riders under Modestus be overwhelmed.
Maximinus and the horse guards stood alone in the lightly falling snow.
A fresh peal of trumpets from the Roman front line. The long pikes that the front four ranks had been issued for this campaign swung down. The rear four ranks hefted their shields above their heads. A moment later the thrum of thousands of bowstrings. The click-slide-thump of the ballistae. The air was full of projectiles; arrows arcing, artillery bolts darting. The arrows seemed to vanish into the mass of barbarian horsemen, their effect negligible. Where the ballista bolts struck Iazyges went down, men and horses crashing to the frozen plain. The following riders jostled and bored around them. Some were brought down. The line became ragged, but the momentum was unbroken.
A hundred paces out, every detail was visible. Scale-armoured warriors and mounts — steel, leather, horn — fused together like some nightmarish amphibian beast. The wicked spearpoints bobbing through the cloud of kicked-up snow. Wild-eyed horses, ropes of saliva streaming from their gaping mouths. Fierce bestial faces of the riders, screaming, the sounds lost in the thunder of their coming.
Seventy paces. The archers — horse and foot — shooting as fast as they could over the heads of the legionaries. The artillerymen winding their machines like daemons. All their efforts futile. Nothing human could break that charge.
Fifty paces. A tremor ran through the Roman line. Stand, boys! Stand, pueri, stand! Maximinus was yelling. Forty paces. Thirty. The line held, a hedge of pikes, backed by a wall of bodies.
Hauling on their reins, encumbered by their swaying lances, the Iazyges tried to pull up. Horses swerved, skidding on the slippery surface. They collided, fell, took the legs out from under others. In a heartbeat the irresistible charge was reduced to a tangle of flailing, fragile limbs, and the crushing, rolling weight of horseflesh. Pila flashed up from the rear ranks of the infantry. The square steel points of the heavy javelins punched down into the mass of rearing, balking horses, and the riders clinging desperately to their necks, punched through armour, down into flesh.
A terrible sound, like a great oak falling in a forest, smashing its way through other trees. Towards the right of the line a lone Sarmatian horse — maddened with fear and pain, perhaps already dead — had run on, impaled itself on the pikes of the 2nd Legion. Falling, its bulk crushed legionaries, hurled others backwards. Its rider was thrown over its head, knocking more soldiers off their feet. Like flood water surging at a crack in a dam, Iazyges poured into the opening.