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 bestiarius deal with a camel like that in the circus,’ Magnus admitted, ‘so I thought that it’d be fun to have a go myself, seeing as they don’t put up much of a fight.’
‘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.
‘Because it means that we won’t have to force your new little friend to show us where the next well is,’ Vespasian replied, looking at the young Marmarides sitting against a rock with his hands bound behind his back. ‘If you want any breakfast you’d better hurry, the turmae are saddling up. We need to get a move on; it’s five more days to Siwa.’
Refilling the water-skins of one hundred and twenty men at the well had taken most of the rest of the day after the skirmish, so they had camped at the outcrop. One of the tribesmen had been found sufficiently alive to be able to confirm through a translator — with the help of the skilled use of one of the trooper’s curved knives — that Capella and a couple of his men had been captured by the Marmaridae; they had been taken to Siwa to await the departure of the next slave caravan bound for the distant city of Garama, seven hundred miles to the southwest.
Grumbling, Magnus roused himself and rummaged in his bag for a strip of dried pork and some semi-stale bread; his new slave looked greedily at the food.
‘I think he’s hungry,’ Vespasian observed, ‘you’d better feed him otherwise you’ll find yourself owning a dead playmate.’
Magnus grunted. ‘Keep your sword handy while I untie him, then.’ He moved over to the Marmarides and manhandled him round to get at the knot. ‘You’d better behave yourself, savvy?’ he hissed in the man’s ear as the rope came loose. Understanding the tone of voice the captive nodded.
Magnus cut a hunk of bread and a slice of pork and handed them to him; taking them gratefully in one hand he touched the other to his forehead while saying something in his own language.
‘I think he’s thanking you,’ Vespasian commented.
‘So he ought to, he owes me his life.’
After quickly swallowing a couple of mouthfuls, the young man looked up at them and pointed to himself. ‘Ziri,’ he said nodding, ‘Ziri.’
Vespasian laughed. ‘Oh dear, you know his name now, you’ll have to take him home.’
‘Ziri,’ he said again and then pointed at Magnus.
‘Master,’ Magnus said, pointing to himself, ‘master.’ He then pointed to Vespasian. ‘Sir. Sir.’
Ziri nodded vigorously, looking pleased. ‘Master. Sir,’ he repeated.
‘Well, that’s got that sorted out,’ Magnus said, biting into a lump of bread.
Aghilas, much weakened by his wound, guided them without mishap to the second well, just two days from Siwa. Here the landscape changed; the hard-baked ground gave way to sand. At first it was just a thin coating on the desert floor but as they journeyed further from the well it became thicker until by late afternoon they were travelling over sand dunes as tall as a man. Their horses started to struggle in the soft footing and eventually they were forced to dismount and walk. The scalding hot sand on their sandalled feet was a torment to them all.
‘I’m beginning to think that this is much too much effort to go to just so that you can get yourself a good breeding wench,’ Magnus grumbled as they crested yet another mound of loose and treacherous sand with Corvinus and Aghilas; behind them the four turmae trailed into the shimmering distance.
‘We’re also rescuing a Roman citizen from a life of misery as an agricultural slave in the middle of nowhere,’ Vespasian reminded his friend.
Magnus grunted and battled with his unwilling horse, trying to encourage it to make the descent down the other side of the dune.
‘Horse, go!’ Ziri shouted, whacking the recalcitrant beast on the rump; it jumped forward and skidded down the dune, sitting on its back legs, taking Magnus with it in a flurry of sand, much to Vespasian’s and Ziri’s amusement.
‘I’m going to stop teaching you Latin, you fuzzy-haired little camel-botherer, if that’s the use you put it to,’ Magnus spluttered, trying to pull himself out from under his struggling horse.
Vespasian laughed as he led his horse down the dune. ‘I thought that was a perfect use of the language; he chose exactly the right two words from his vocabulary of at least twenty to make the horse go.’
Ziri grinned broadly, displaying his ivory teeth as he came down to Magnus. ‘Ziri master help?’
‘I don’t need your fucking help, desert-dweller,’ Magnus replied as he managed to extract himself. He brushed the sand from his tunic and began to lead his horse towards the next dune; with another grin Ziri followed.