Blood was in his mouth. He saw the horse rearing again, the rider turning in the saddle with the mace raised for the killing blow. Feet grounded in the dirt, legs braced, he took a firm grip on his shield.
There is a hollow at the heart of fear; he was trained to find it and make it his own. The noise of battle fell away, the screams and the roar of combat, the blinding dust and the glare. The armoured horse turned against the brightness of the sky, its legs kicking, and as it fell forward he threw himself behind the shield, the muscles of his shoulder bunched against the wood – one solid lunge, all his weight behind it – and he felt the impact as a great punch through his body, a jarring shock that burst pain through his shoulder and across his ribs.
The horse staggered, reeling, the rider thrown off balance and pitching in the saddle.
His shield arm was dead, the pain a solid pulse, and his face ran with blood, but he held his ground and struck out with his sword, the long blade wheeling through the air in an overarm cut.
He felt nothing, no impact, and thought the blow had gone wide – then wet heat sprayed across his face, and when he blinked his eyes clear he saw something round and dark plummet heavily into the dust at his feet.
The horse shied back, kicking; the rider still straddled the animal’s back, his arms loose and stiff, streamers of bright blood jetting from the hacked stump of his neck.
The soldier stared, uncomprehending at first. Pain filled his head and body, raw and brutal, but he was still on his feet, still alive. And now there were others alongside him, raising their shields beside his. Overhead flew the darts and the javelins. The panicked horse with its headless rider bolted forward, and the shield wall opened to let it through, still carrying its grisly trophy. The other cataphracts had turned as the momentum of their charge died under the hail of iron. Some were caught, ringed by Roman blades, and cut down. The wall of shields held; the gap in the line was closed. Then the horns sounded the advance, brassy and triumphant, the men of the legion stepped forward in unison, climbing over the bodies of the slain and the broken corpse of their centurion.
The young soldier felt only the pump of pain through his body. Time and distance had no meaning now. A wrack of broken weapons and bodies, tumbled men and horses, caught at his feet. Around him he could hear the victory chant, ROME AND HERCULES, ROME AND HERCULES. The slope was taking him downwards, through the battleground and into the area of scattered slaughter, where the allied cavalry had already cut up the fugitives. His head was ringing, his vision shrunk to a bright wavering funnel ahead of him. He saw Persian banners trampled in the dust, the stream running red with blood, corpses sprawled in the shallows. The water had widened and he could not think why, then he glanced to the left and saw the vast bulk of a dead elephant, fletched with arrows, blocking the stream. He took a few more staggering steps forward and collapsed. He barely felt the arms that caught him and eased him down onto the solid ground.
‘This is going to hurt,’ a voice said, ‘but not for long.’ He felt a wrenching pressure in his shoulder and pain burst through him. He was awake, staring into the sweating face of a bearded army surgeon.
‘Don’t know how long you were walking around with a dislocated shoulder,’ the doctor said, swabbing at his face with a damp rag, ‘but that should fix it. You need to rest, though. There’s a lot of blood on you, but not too much of it’s yours.’
‘Did we win?’ he heard himself saying. His tongue felt dead. The doctor grinned.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said.
Then he was on his feet again, his left arm bound up in a sling. Ranks of men opened before him, and a centurion he did not recognise was leading him forward. Teeth clenched, he tried to breathe slowly through his nose and not curse aloud at the fierce ache in his shoulder.
Noise of horns, and voices raised in acclamation. To his right he saw a raised mound heaped with Persian weapons and banners. A figure loomed up before him, out of the bright haze: he saw a glowering red face, a black beard above a gilded cuirass.
‘Come on now, lad,’ the centurion behind him said in a harsh whisper. ‘Don’t you know how to greet your emperor properly?’
‘No need for ceremony,’ the man in the gilded armour cried. ‘We’re all brothers here! Brothers in victory!’ He raised his arm, and just for a moment the young soldier feared he was about to be clapped on the shoulder. Galerius, he remembered – this was the Caesar Galerius.
‘Dominus!’ the centurion said, with a slight bow. ‘This is the soldier who stopped the cataphracts breaking though the front line of the Herculiani. He killed the leader – flicked off his head with a single blow! I saw it myself.’
‘What’s your name, soldier?’ the emperor demanded.
He opened his mouth, but his throat was dry and he could not speak.
‘His name’s Knucklehead!’ somebody called out, laughing.
‘His name’s Aurelius Castus. Ninth Cohort, century of Priscus.’
‘Aurelius Castus,’ the emperor called, almost shouting so all around could hear him. ‘A true warrior of Rome! A true Herculian! Tribune Constantine, present this man with the torque of valour.’
Cheers from the assembled soldiers. Another officer was stepping forward now, a tall young man with a raw flushed face and a heavy jaw. In his hands was a circlet of twisted gold with a clasp of linked horse-heads. The young soldier stood still, trying not to flinch, as the tribune fastened the torque around his neck.
Caesar Galerius had already moved away, congratulating other men, awarding further decorations. From the raised mound, surrounded by the spoils of war, he turned to address the assembled troops.
‘Persia is yours,’ he cried, in his thin metallic voice. ‘The empire is yours! Joviani, Herculiani, Claudiani, Flaviani, victorious! Unbreakable!’
He slept for thirty-six hours, and missed the plundering of the Persian camp. But he heard about it later – the Great King’s treasury, his priests and ministers, even the ladies of the royal Zenana were all in Roman hands now. The soldiers were glutted with gold. One man had found a tooled leather pouch full of round grey stones; he threw the stones away and kept the pouch, and became the laughing stock of his cohort. The stones he had discarded were pearls, lost in the dust now, but the soldiers were so rich that nobody cared.
Narses was beaten, a fugitive in his own domain, but still Galerius led his army onwards, east down the Araxes and then south across the border into Media Atropatene. Everywhere cities opened their gates, chieftains knelt before the conquerors from the west. Through Corduene and Adiabene they marched, down from the tight cold air of the highlands to the summer heat of the Tigris valley. The mighty Persian Empire, Rome’s oldest and most implacable foe, collapsed before them.
Turning westwards, they forced a crossing of the Tigris above the ruins of Nineveh and marched out onto the plains of Mesopotamia. Then, after breaking the siege of Nisibis, they turned south down the wide flat valley of the Tigris. All the way to Ctesiphon, the young soldier marched with his comrades of II Herculia in the vanguard of the army. When the Persian capital surrendered, he joined them in their parade through the streets, their spears garlanded with laurel.
For the rest of his life he would have the memory of this victory. He kept that thought in his mind on the long hard march home, back up the Euphrates and across the Syrian plains to Antioch and the distant garrison forts of the Danube frontier. Surely nothing in the remainder of his days would match the glory of that campaign: into old age he would dream of it.
So he told himself. But he could know nothing of what his future held.