Victor did not hesitate. Spurring his horse forward he raced to the front of the Roman lines, transferring his sword to his left hand as his right arm dangled useless and bloodied at his side. Raising the weapon high in the air, he opened his mouth wide to bellow the command to charge, though before the words reached my ears it was drowned by the shrill howl of the Gauls' battle cry, which the entire army had taken up as its own.
Breaking their three-step rhythm, the men burst into a mad dash, shields held high, straight into the midst of the enemy arrows, which now rained down on them in a thick hail, a cloudburst of whizzing death. Long had we known that the Persians' greatest strength lies in the skill of their archers, and the most effective though painful method of defeating them is to charge into their very teeth, straight into the bows, and simply bowl the devils over, for the archers have little defense besides light wicker shields, which they prop up before them on the ground, braced with one foot. Such a charge is terrifying — into the very maws of death, hiding your face in the concave shelter of your shield, running blindly forward and struggling to align yourself with your comrades on either side, peering occasionally over the rim to gauge your distance. The steady pelting of the missiles on your shield and armor intensifies and thickens, and sometimes arrowheads emerge through to pierce your cheek or your eye if you huddle too closely behind the deceptive wall of ox hide and bronze you are carrying.
With the sudden clash of the lines a huge cloud of dust arose on the plain and I lost track of the battle, concentrating instead on keeping Julian in sight, should my services be required. He ranged back and forth across the field, straining to peer into the roiling haze, shouting furious oaths in his frustration at being unable to see. At one point he leaped into the thick of it on his horse, and I despaired of seeing him emerge alive, but emerge he did, several moments later, hacking viciously at a pair of Persian cavalry riders who were flanking him and attempting to trip up his horse with their lances. They were quickly dispatched by his guard, who had been as disconcerted as I when he had disappeared into the dust and as relieved when he rode out again, though to their horror he quickly dove back into the fray and emerged once again many moments later, his sword and greaves covered in gore.
The fighting that day was horrendous, hand-to-hand under the broiling sun and that fatal dust cloud. When the filth rose occasionally, lifted by the faint wafting of a breeze, one could see mountains of corpses and writhing horses in the ditches and at the bulwarks where they fell, so covered by layers of blood and filth that I was unable to make out to whose side they belonged. In the end, the dust cloud began slowly moving back, yielding toward the thick-stoned walls of Ctesiphon, as the Persians retreated. The cloud moved gradually at first, then faster, until with a final clash and a weary shout the Persian lines finally broke, and from the rear of the haze thousands of enemy raced panic-stricken toward their city, and I saw the enormous gates begin to swing ponderously open to receive them.
'The gates!' Julian cried, rushing toward the battle line, which was quickly moving away from him as the men raced to the walls to head off the Persians. 'Victor — seize the gates!'
It would have been impossible to hear him above the mad fray, but Victor was still there with his men, now slumped painfully over his horse's neck, supported by a guard who rode alongside him. The wounded general, weak from loss of blood, struggled to shout out his orders. The rout swirled around him as the Romans followed hard on the terrified enemies' heels, hacking at their backs and calves, hamstringing hundreds and tripping them up, then quickly slashing them to immobilize them and leave them to die in their own spilled juices. The Persians ran headlong toward the city and began pouring through the gates as the townsfolk on the walls above wept and tore their hair, raining rubble and bricks down on the Romans who were as yet too far down the slope to be hit.
'The gates!' Julian called as he thundered forward on his mount, his voice hoarse from his exertions but his eyes glinting in triumph at having thus achieved his goal. 'Look, Caesarius! The city is ours!'
Victor, in a supreme effort, pushed himself up from his horse's neck and rode directly in front of his line of men, between them and the fleeing Persians, the now broken arrow shaft still protruding forlornly from his injured shoulder. Stopping his mount and facing his troops, he raised his left arm, holding the sword sideways. It was the signal to halt. The exhausted Romans did so immediately, some almost collapsing in their weariness, falling to their knees, and then to their sides in fatigue, mingling indiscriminately with the thousands of cadavers already occupying the height.
Victor sat swaying on his horse, triumphantly surveying the terrible carnage before him, as the last of the Persians scrambled up the hill toward the walls. As they limped and scurried inside, the huge gates again swung heavily shut; Julian stopped and sat thunderstruck, watching the scene before him, and a single, enraged, sobbing bellow filled the air, echoing over the field.
'Victor, you fool… you fucking fool! The gates!'
Two and a half thousand Persians had been killed, to our seventy Romans. The ground was covered with enemy cadavers, and wealth greater than that of all the cities we had taken on our march thus far was stripped from the bodies of the officers alone. Still, Julian was desolate, for Ctesiphon remained unconquered, its vast walls impregnable, its defenses intact. Victor was delirious from loss of blood and the pain of his wound, but in a lucid moment he justified his halt of the attack because he felt the exhausted men would have been endangered had they continued their mad rush into the circuit of the walls and been overwhelmed in the streets of the strange city. The argument had merit, but Julian was inconsolable.
After raging in his tent for an hour, talking and muttering to himself while the generals cowered outside in the doorway, Sallustius entered.
'My lord — the men have fought hard… fearfully hard. They will require some words from you, perhaps a sacri-'
'And so they shall have one,' interrupted Julian, 'so they shall have one. Tonight let them sleep the sleep of the dead, for this they deserve even more than the dead themselves. At first light we shall have a sacrifice such as has not been seen this entire march!'
The next morning as Dawn, the saffron-robed child of morning, spread her rosy fingers across the purple sky, the men were rousted from their sleep and gathered haggardly at the enormous altar that had been set up almost within an arrow's distance of the very gates of Ctesiphon. They limped and groaned into formation, stretching their protesting muscles, some of them bearing armor still slathered with the gore of their efforts the day before, but their quiet chatter was content as they looked forward to the sacrifice and the distribution of plunder that would follow soon afterwards. I stayed to watch, Brother; for one of those rare occasions I willingly stayed to watch Julian's sacrifice, for in truth, in that vast, empty plain, occupied only by our army and the enormous walls of the huge city, there was nowhere else for me to go. I stood among the ranks of a body of archers, rather than take one of the places of honor he always reserved for his inner court, Maximus, Sallustius, Oribasius. In any case, he was so accustomed to my absence from these bloody ceremonies that I suspect he would have been startled to know that this time I was watching the entire proceeding.