That would not pertain on the following day; the carts would follow the army not precede it, for they would be close to where they expected they might find their enemy. If they were west of the wells Flavius would have no choice but to order an immediate withdrawal, which would do nothing to enhance his standing here or in the capital. To give his infantry as little marching to do as possible he had sent the cavalry ahead to find the Sassanids and give him warning of what he faced.
His orders had been explicit: locate and wait unless they are west of the wells and seemingly set up to do battle, in which case we will make a display of force then retire out of the desert. Personally, he longed for them to be beyond the wells and his mood was a mixture of eagerness and anxiety as to what would be the outcome of his first battle as a general if that wish was granted. The history of fighting against the Sassanids was not one of success for the Eastern Empire but if he could deploy as he wished, then he had a chance to alter that.
How good it would have been to have someone close enough to him to confide in, to share such thoughts, like old and crabby Ohannes, long gone to meet his maker, or even his mentor Justin, to say that if he knew he faced failure he would embrace that, anything rather than risk men’s lives for his personal aggrandisement.
‘Rider coming, Your Honour,’ came a call from one of his escort, ‘and fast.’
‘From Coutzes, no doubt,’ Flavius replied.
He rose in his stirrups to cast a look to the front, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. The messenger was closing at a flat-out gallop, the tail of his horse near horizontal, which had the Belisarius heart feel as if it was suddenly in his exceedingly dry mouth. That went to positive leather when the missive was delivered by the breathless rider, one of the numerus commanders that Flavius had met briefly.
‘Dux Coutzes sends me to tell you that he has halted behind a ridge that overlooks the wells. The Sassanids are drawn up between us and water but he can see few in number and they seem unprepared to defend their position.’
‘Few in number?’
‘He has counted the tents and puts them at less than a thousand.’
‘Cavalry?’
‘None within sight.’
What followed was a verbal sketch of what this fellow and Coutzes had seen. An array of tents within which it was expected the enemy were sheltering from the sun and a calculation put Roman strength well above theirs. For security, the Sassanids were behind a barrier of pointed stakes buried in the ground but had left avenues through which their own men could come and go.
‘My Lord feels it is possible to mount an attack and catch them unawares using those gaps between the stakes.
‘Your lord has his orders.’
‘I am to impress on Your Honour the point that matters no longer fit those orders. The enemy, dux Coutzes asks me to inform you, are at our mercy.’
‘What of the other captains?’
‘They are eager to back up his calculation.’
‘They are obliged to follow mine.’
Flavius fell silent as he examined what he had been told while at the same time conjuring up a mental picture of what lay before his cavalry. If true, it was indeed a golden opportunity but would an enemy commander be so foolish as to leave himself so exposed? He must know that a Roman army was on its way; no force five thousand strong could move in such a region without news of its presence getting ahead of its progress. There was, of course, the obvious solution; he must see for himself.
He spurred his horse and took off, forcing the messenger to jump to one side, in which he was nearly trampled on by the hooves of those bucellarii who now formed his own comitatus. The dust cloud they sent up as they raced across the desert, thankfully not deep sand in this area, perhaps sent a message ahead to Coutzes, or was it just the hunt for valour that animated him?
By the time Flavius had sight of his mounted men they were lined up on the skyline, having ridden to the top of the ridge behind which, he had been told, they had previously been hidden from the enemy. All Coutzes had to do was look over his shoulder to see the man to whom he was bound to defer approaching. Did he do that, Flavius did not know for the sound of the horn, floating across the intervening space, saw the whole of his cavalry disappear down the slope before to leave an empty skyline, though they could hear the loud yells of over a thousand throats.
By the time Flavius and his escort crested that rise Coutzes, right to the front with his banner-bearer by his side, had closed the gap between the ridge and the line of forward-pointing and sharpened Sassanid stakes. The rest had echeloned into ragged arrow shapes and were, following that dux banner, heading towards those gaps that had been described, while to the rear Flavius saw what seemed like panicked defenders seeking to get to their stacked weapons and prepare to mount a defence.
From their elevation Flavius and his men could see what happened, a sight denied to those who rode in the wake of Coutzes. As soon as he chested through the gap, his body fully extended in his stirrups, his sword raised and swinging, the sand-coloured ground disappeared beneath him. He and his horse had charged into a deep, concealed ditch and those following him did likewise, the noise of screaming men and terrified horses filling the air as riders and their mounts piled on top of those already fallen.
‘Back to Atafar. Tell him to turn round and march to the west as fast as he can.’
Order given, Flavius spurred forward, for what was before him now was a melee of his mounted units, riding in circles with no set purpose, while he could see the seemingly disordered Sassanids were anything but. In the distance, probably having been camped at the wells, bodies of mounted men, horse archers by the size of their mounts, were cantering forward to take part in the fight, proving that this had been a carefully designed stratagem.
Worse, disciplined units of foot soldiers, many more than the tents they had abandoned should have contained, were formed up for battle, preparing to advance over solid ground to first finish off those in the ditches and then to take on what was now a completely demoralised force of cavalry.
In amongst them was their general, waving his sword and yelling for them to retreat, a command hard to get across until he found the horn blower was still alive and could sound the right call in a way that would reach those who needed to hear. Some did not follow Flavius as he raced back towards that ridge, either out of loyalty to their dux or sheer confusion and they would surely die.
There was little doubt of his fate and those who had followed him. If the horses and riders falling on top of Coutzes had not killed him there were enough slashing Sassanids in the ditches to carry out the deed. So busy was he trying to get his remaining men clear of danger, it was an age before Flavius Belisarius came to realise the truth. In his first battle as a commanding general he had been soundly defeated.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The wait was frustrating: how would Justinian respond to what had occurred? Fast the imperial service might be, but it still took time to cover six hundred leagues there and back and that was before you factored in the period taken to assess not only the reverse the force from Dara had suffered but how to react to it. Even considering all those particulars it still seemed to drag out to an interminable wait during which, even after a month, Flavius could not get out of his mind the scale of the defeat.
Half his cavalry had perished either by rushing headlong into those concealed ditches or in the ground between them and the ridge from which Coutzes had attacked. They had been victims of the infantry but it was the enemy cavalry that posed the greatest threat. Leading the remainder of his own mounted forces away, Flavius had sought to distract the pursuit by drawing them off from Atafar and his retreating foot levies, who needed time to have any chance of avoiding a massacre. The ploy failed; the Sassanids had declined to follow him on a more northerly route and kept their mind on the primary task.