After another hour or so of steady progress, one of the vessel’s sharper-eyed crewmen called out, pointing to the northern horizon. Marcus saw what it was that had caught his attention, an almost invisible cloud of ochre dust, barely visible against the oncoming storm’s dark grey wall as it swept down from the north in pursuit of the fleeing vessel.
‘Riders. Only a few, but even one is sufficient to bring more of them.’
They watched grim-faced as the thin plume thrown up by their pursuers’ horses grew steadily thicker, deviating to neither left nor right, and Thracius shook his head in disgust.
‘As if that bloody storm wasn’t enough. They’re riding down the line of the river.’
He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin and staring back at the oncoming riders.
‘Perhaps they’ve worked out that last night’s attack was a deliberate distraction. Or perhaps it’s just a patrol.’
‘But if they see us?’
The master stared at the horsemen’s dust for a moment before answering, and Marcus guessed that he was working out distances and travel speed.
‘We’re still hours from the joining of the two rivers, Tribune, and even then the Khabur winds just as bad as this. We need to buy ourselves more time, or they’ll catch us before we make the turn. You, Tribune, will have to make sure the king’s man doesn’t try to escape, or to draw attention to us.’
While he issued a string of orders to the crew, then steered the boat into the shelter of the right bank where the river swung to the west, Marcus went forward to join the king, Lugos looming behind him.
‘My apologies, Your Majesty, but I must restrain you both.’
Osroes nodded wearily, his eyes still dull and the set of his body listless.
‘I was wondering why your captain has pulled into the bank. You have seen some sign of my people?’
‘A patrol. Lugos?’
The big Briton stepped forward, Martos close by with a hand on the hilt of his sword, much to the amusement of Gurgen who held his hands out to be bound at the wrists.
‘Whatever it is that makes you think I might resist this monster without so much as a toothpick, Prince Martos, you are much deluded.’
Martos waited for Marcus’s translation, his face unchanging as he listened to the words.
‘I sense danger in you, Parthian, and the last time I ignored that sense it cost me my wife and children.’
The noble shrugged, settling into the boat’s curved side and closing his eyes.
‘Wake me when you’re ready to release me.’
Several of the crew had busied themselves anchoring the vessel to the bank’s grass-covered earth, while others had brought forth several bows from a wooden box in the vessel’s stern, each with a thick sheaf of arrows attached to the curved wooden staves, their strings kept safe from moisture in sealed waxed leather pouches. Stringing the bows and taking cover at the top of the bank, they peered over its lip across the flat ground beyond, and the plume of dust that was now close enough for the riders to be clearly visible.
‘Four men.’
Thracius nodded at Marcus’s count, waving his men down below the bank’s lip and speaking loudly enough to be heard by everyone, his voice hard with command.
‘They must all die here. If any of them escape to raise an alarm, then their mates will catch up with us within hours, most likely before we reach the Khabur. We’ll only have one chance to finish them all without leaving any survivors, and that means waiting until they are close enough that we can’t miss.’
Listening intently as the distant patter of hoofs on the hard baked earth gradually hardened to a drumbeat, the riders drawing steadily closer to their hiding place, the sailors waited with arrows nocked to their bowstrings, each of them looking to their leader for the command to attack. What it was that betrayed their presence was never clear to Marcus, perhaps a swift impatient glance over the bank’s lip at the wrong time born of fear, or nerves, or perhaps one of the riders sighted the boat’s black outline peeking from the bank’s cover, but whatever it was that alerted the Parthian scouts, their reaction was instant. Shouting a warning that had his comrades reaching reflexively for arrows, their bows already strung and out of their bow cases, the closest of them hurled his spear at whatever it was that he had seen, the long iron blade catching one of the crewmen squarely in the throat as he rose to shoot an arrow at the scouts, sending him toppling back down the bank to fall backwards into the boat at Gurgen’s feet with blood pouring from the deep wound.
The crew rose from their hiding places with brave determination and loosed their first arrows with more speed than accuracy, dropping one of the riders with the fletched end of a shaft protruding from his chest, and hitting two of the horses, but the Parthians’ response was swift and deadly. Another of the crewmen jerked back with an arrow in his chest, as the scouts’ return shots whipped into the ambush with the accuracy of men who had been using bows on horseback for most of their lives. Martos snatched the bow from his spasming fingers, nocking a shaft and rising from his place in defiance of the risk, sighting down the arrow for a moment before putting its wickedly barbed iron head squarely into the closest man’s chest. The master loosed his second attempt with equal nerve, ignoring a shot that whistled past his ear and pinning a rider’s thigh to his beast’s flank with a deliberately aimed arrow. The last man fell with a pair of Roman arrows in his side, toppling out of the saddle to land on his head with a distinct snap of breaking bone.
The surviving scout turned his horse and spurred it away, ducking under the arrows that were sent wildly after him, both horse and rider badly wounded by the arrow protruding from his left thigh to judge from the beast’s uneven gait and its rider’s stiff, agonised posture. Martos loosed again, putting his last shot into the man’s right shoulder and almost knocking him over the horse’s neck, but by some miracle the Parthian stayed on his mount and rode on, too distant for any realistic attempt to bring him down. Marcus leapt to his feet, sprinting towards the spot where the only unwounded horse stood nudging its fallen rider with a gentle muzzle, uncomprehending of the fact that the man was already dead, his head canted at an unnatural angle. Snatching up the dead man’s spear with his good left hand he stabbed it into the ground beside the horse, heaving himself into the saddle and then pulling the weapon’s blade free of the earth in which it was buried, transferring it to hang from his right hand before wheeling the beast around with the reins gripped in the other, digging his heels into its flanks.
The wounded rider had a quarter-mile start, but his horse was clearly struggling with the effects of the arrow wound it had sustained in the short bloody fight, its pace slowing as the blood loss that painted its flank and its rider’s leg dark red weakened its muscles. The Parthian looked back, and on seeing Marcus bearing down upon him raised his bow, blood-covered fingers groping for an arrow. Putting the shaft to the bow’s string he drew it back as far as his weakened arm could manage, but the resulting shot was both weak and misdirected, the arrow striking the ground a dozen paces to the right of the oncoming Roman. He reached for another, but as he was struggling to nock the arrow, his hand shaking visibly with the shock of his wounds, Marcus dropped the reins and gripped the spear in his left hand, leaning in to stab the long blade into the hapless rider’s chest, punching him out of his saddle to lie broken and bleeding in the plain’s dust.
Reining the horse in and dismounting, he walked slowly back towards the fallen Parthian, looking down the spear’s shaft at the dying man. The scout stared up at him uncomprehendingly, muttered something unintelligible and then spasmed, his body tensing for a moment before collapsing back onto the dry earth with a death rattle in his throat, the life leaving his eyes as the last breath sighed from his body.