‘See? That will teach these blasted easterners some manners!’
Another salvo of bolts arced out from the city’s walls, slamming down into the Parthian lines in a random scattering of terror and death. Somewhere out in the darkness beyond the fires’ light, a horse was screaming in its death throes, and Scaurus decided that it was the most horrendous noise he had heard in a military career that had contained more than its fair share of unpleasantness.
All along the siege line the enemy were struggling back from ground they had previously believed safe. Some of the enemy soldiers were running to kick sand onto the fires that were providing the Romans with such a convenient point of aim, others taking refuge from their deadly light by huddling in the darkness between the fire pits.
‘Switch point of aim!’
Another volley of bolts was hurled from the city’s walls, this time plunging down into the spaces between the fires where the press of men seeking the darkness’s protective embrace would be at its thickest. A fresh chorus of screams and enraged bellows erupted as each of the heavy missiles killed and maimed with arbitrary brutality, redoubling the enemy soldiers’ panic in the face of such impersonal and unpredictable murder. Petronius looked out over the Parthian line, more and more of the fires being extinguished as the besiegers hurled handfuls of sand to quench their flames.
‘Two more bolts apiece and then I think we’ll call it a night, shall we First Spear? I think we have the desired result.’
The watch fires overlooking the Mygdonius were suddenly dimmed, the ruddy pools of illumination they had cast over the waters masked by the dozens of men who had run at the command of their officers to snuff out the flames.
‘Go!’
With the unhurried speed born of long practice, the crew flashed out their oars and bent their backs with a will, digging into the black water with swift, coordinated strokes that took the loitering boat from standstill to a swift marching pace in a dozen heartbeats. The master called out another command in the same harsh whisper.
‘Ship oars!’
Ceasing their rowing and pulling in their wooden blades, the oarsmen slid under their hides as the Night Witch hissed through the water towards the river’s gap in the Parthian line. With his night-adjusted vision, Marcus could see the scene on both banks with perfect clarity, dozens of Parthian soldiers still milling about around the glowing embers of the dying fires.
‘They will still see only the fire. Cover yourself!’
The Roman slid under his own hide, leaving the narrowest of openings between deck and leather and watching with helpless fascination as the boat swept swiftly towards the point where their fates would be decided by the night-blinded eyes of the men gathered on either bank. A single Parthian was standing on the right bank and staring at the water, perhaps more aware than his comrades, perhaps simply fascinated by the Mygdonius’s dark ribbon. With one last twitch of the rudder, the boat master eased her course towards the eastern bank, aware of the lone watcher, and then they were upon the point of maximum danger. To their left the Parthians were unheeding, still focused on completely extinguishing the fire’s last glow, but on the right the soldier still seemed to be following their progress intently, as if, despite the fact that his eyes could not yet have fully adapted to the darkness, he suspected that there was something on the water that ought not to be present, a hint of foam at the vessel’s bow, or the faintest gleam from her wet timbers.
Another volley of bolts whipped in, plunging down into the Parthian line with the remorseless terror of shots launched blindly into the dark, one last shake of the dice cup, chancing a few dozen wood and iron missiles against the possibility of killing a man on whom the battle for Nisibis might yet hinge. A soldier standing within a few paces of the watcher was caught squarely, his body burst by the horrific impact, blood and shattered bone spraying across the men around him. The soldier recoiled, his attention wrenched from the river before him by the stinging impacts of bone fragments, and, in the moment that it took for him to regain his equilibrium, the moment in which he might have realised what it was that he was looking at, was lost. As the boat slipped away into the night’s deeper darkness, he shook his head and turned away, wiping the dead man’s blood away from his neck and hair in obvious disgust.
‘Oars.’
The crew rolled out from beneath their hides at the master’s command, rolling up the thick skins and placing them at their feet as Thracius stared back at the fortress.
‘Now we run.’
Petronius turned away from the wall, drawing a finger across his throat as a signal for his first spear, the officers watching in silence as the bolt thrower crews stood down and trooped away to their barracks with a general air of quiet satisfaction.
‘Our men got away cleanly, from the look of it.’
Scaurus nodded.
‘I think there would have been a good deal more excitement if they’d been detected. Well done, Prefect, that was a masterly piece of deception.’
He turned to the north, pointing at a spot low on the horizon where a flicker of light had caught his eye a moment before.
‘That looks ominous though.’
The prefect followed his gaze, and as the two men watched, the lightning flickered again, so distant that the rumble that eventually followed it was almost imperceptible.
‘Possibly. I’ll issue an order for the night watch to wake me if it looks like coming this way.’
10
Dawn found the Night Witch far down the river from Nisibis, the ship’s speed the result of both the strong southward current and continuous rowing in which Martos and Lugos took their turn while the crewmen took food and water, and relieved themselves over the boat’s side.
‘It is fifty miles from the city to the Khabur river as the birds fly, but the Mygdonius takes many turns on the way, and so it is in truth double that distance. We have covered perhaps one half …’
Marcus looked down at the mast, still lying flat across the rowing benches.
‘Why do you not use the sail?’
The master shrugged, putting the rudder over to guide his vessel around yet another bend.
‘This river meanders like the path of a snake in the desert, Tribune. If I were to order the mast raised then much work would be required to continually trim and re-trim the sail. Rowing is easier. And besides, see how flat the land is to either side of the river as far as the eye can see? The sail will be visible for miles, and might betray our position to a horse patrol – and we have far to go before we can forget the danger of the Parthian cavalry. Although that worries me more …’
He pointed back to the north, and Marcus saw a distant mass of dark cloud on the horizon directly above the river’s course, a bruise in the sky’s otherwise clear blue vault.
‘If that storm’s coming south we could be in trouble. The Mygdonius floods quickly, when the water from the mountains is swollen by rain on the plain, and it could run so fast as to be impossible to navigate. We should all pray to our gods to send it away to rain on someone else and not us.’
Scaurus and Petronius struggled onto the windswept parapet at first light, both men huddled into hooded woollen infantry cloaks thick with the natural oils that made them the best protection against the rain that was lashing down on Nisibis. Down below, the river was already significantly higher than had been the case the previous evening, swollen by run-off from the mountains to the north. Petronius pointed at the closest of the city’s roofs, water cascading from a drainpipe unable to cope with the flow of rainwater.
‘Things are going to get interesting for the crew of the Night Witch, I’d imagine.’