Blood and Steel. Harry Sidebottom

the last moment. He gave the order for the cavalry to advance.

      A trumpet rang out. Its call was repeated throughout the army. Volo’s men swung up into the saddle, and cantered away through the intervals in the line of heavy-armed foot. There was a short pause, and then the light horse out on the Steppe to the right also moved off. The cataphracts remained with Sabinus Modestus, level with the infantry front line.

      Maximinus often wondered how he and Paulina had produced such a son as Verus Maximus. Perhaps at the moment of conception she had looked at something weak and perverse, some picture or statue. Certainly – and it was the one criticism he would make of her – she had spoilt the boy. Things might have been different if they had had other children. But the gods had not been kind. While she lived, their son had attempted to disguise his vices. Now she was dead, and he was Caesar, the only thing Verus Maximus tried to mask was his cruelty to his wife. Maximinus felt sorry for Iunia Fadilla. An attractive girl, she seemed amiable and easy going. Most young men would be delighted to have such a wife. Verus Maximus must be a fool to think his father did not know. Of course there were imperial spies in their household. His son was a fool, as well as a coward.

      Ahead volleys of arrows arced up into the sky from both sides and fell like squalls of black rain. Squadrons of Persian and Parthian horse wheeled back towards the army, then turned and raced towards the enemy, before wheeling back again; all the time shooting, as fast as they could. Here and there the tiny shape of a man pitched from his mount, or rider and mount together crashed to the ground, as a nomad shaft found its target. Volo’s Moors would be closer to the Iazyges, using their javelins. Like all light-cavalry fights, to the inexperienced eye it would look like chaos.

      Maximinus called for his warhorse. While Borysthenes was led up, his gaze fell on Marius Perpetuus. The Consular looked as frightened as the young Caesar next to him. Maximinus had given him the signal honour of being one of the two Consuls who had taken up office on the first day of the previous year because once, in his youth, he had served under Perpetuus’ father. The son was not the man his father had been. Few Senators matched their ancestors. Virtue was in decline. Was Perpetuus one of those who muttered against their Emperor? Closeted with his ilk, all servants banished, drink imparting a spurious boldness, did Perpetuus call him Spartacus; the Thracian slave, the Thracian gladiator?

      Without dismounting, Maximinus stepped from the hack to the charger. He leant forward, smelling the clean, warm horse in the frigid air. He rubbed Borysthenes’ ears, patted his neck. The sky was overcast; the wind getting up at Maximinus’ back carried a few flakes of snow.

      Paulina had been right. The elite hated him, not just for what he did, but for what he was. Maximinus had never tried to hide his origins. He had been a shepherd boy in the wild hills of Thrace. What else could he have been in the small village of Ovile? He had risen through the ranks of the army, via the patronage of Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla, but also through his courage and his devotion to duty. He had achieved high command, but he had never desired the throne. The recruits he had been training had forced the purple on him. He would have been dead within the day, his head on a pike, if the Senatorial triumvirate of Flavius Vopiscus, Honoratus, and Catius Clemens had not ridden into his camp and offered him their oath and that of the legionaries they led.

      Maximinus had not wanted to be Emperor. It had brought nothing but tragedy. Micca, his life-long friend and bodyguard, speared in the back as they stormed a ridge in the forests of Germania. Tynchanius, his companion since childhood, cut down by mutineers in the town of Viminacium. Even now, twenty-one months after, Maximinus’ mind often shied away from that day. Other times, like now, he faced the horror. Tynchanius had died trying to save Paulina. The old man had failed. Reports indicated she was alive when she fell from the high window. Maximinus would never know if she had jumped or was pushed. But his imaginings of her last moments – the cobbles of the street rushing up – would never leave him.

      Shouts and the rumble of hooves brought Maximinus back to the wintry plain. Volo’s light horse were steaming back through the infantry. All order gone, each man seemed to ride for his own life, the picture of rout. Off on the right, it was the same with the auxiliary troopers. Like a stream in spate, they lapped around the cataphracts of Sabinus Modestus, circling and pooling behind the motionless iron-clad men and horses.

      Now, Maximinus thought, gazing forward. By Jupiter Optimus Maximus, by all the gods, now. As if impelled by his will, the rear eight ranks of the legionaries and Praetorians jogged around their fellow soldiers, and filled the gaps between their formations. Where there had been isolated pieces, waiting to be swept from the board, now stood a solid mass of armoured men. Eight deep, shoulder to shoulder, the silent line of soldiers reached out two thousand paces from the wooded stream.

      Maximinus spat on his chest for luck. Flavius Vopiscus had done his part. Now it depended on the Iazyges. Everything hung in the balance. The spittle trickled down over the sculpted muscles of his cuirass. Would the nomads take the bait?

      Iotapianus was hurrying his archers close up behind the heavy infantry. The covers were being pulled off the carts, men leaping up to man the catapults on them.

      Drums and horns sounded out to the south. The Iazyges were ordering their lines, the horse archers retiring, the armoured lancers moving to the fore. Did they believe the Romans were afraid, starving, had attempted to escape them by a night march? Had they taken the flight of the Roman light horse at face value?

      In the centre of the Roman line, where Flavius Vopiscus stood with his veteran legionaries from Pannonia, the tall pikes of the front ranks shifted and clacked together like dry reeds when the wind blows. Maximinus smiled. Daemon-haunted, Vopiscus might be, but an intelligent competence lived alongside his many superstitions. One evening in camp, they had discussed the signs an experienced commander can read on a battlefield: how the sounds the troops make and the way they brandish their weapons can reveal their state of mind; how nothing more clearly indicates fear than the wavering of spears. This was an unexpected touch of near genius from Vopiscus – as long as the pretence did not translate into the reality.

      The barbarian drums beat a different rhythm, their horns blared, savage incitements to battle. At a slow walk, long, thin lances pricking the sky, the Iazyges began their advance. Numbers were impossible to judge. The armoured warriors in the front rank rode knee to knee. They stretched unbroken from the line of trees to beyond the Roman infantry, and beyond the cataphracts. Sabinus Modestus had the latter arrayed two deep. Say two paces for each cataphract, another two thousand paces. Exceeding four thousand paces, the enemy frontage had to contain over three thousand riders, possibly many more, and their formation was very deep, no telling how many ranks.

      ‘Gods below,’ someone muttered. ‘Look at them.’

      ‘Silence in the ranks,’ Maximinus snapped.

      The Sarmatian tribesmen were closing into effective bowshot, some three hundred paces beyond Maximinus’ position behind the front line. Bright dragon standards writhed above tall pointed helmets and a shimmering wall of scale armour. They had moved up to a canter. Necks arched, their horses were plunging, lifting their front legs high to break through the standing snow, hooves struggling to find purchase.

      It had worked. They were committed. Maximinus took stock. Volo’s light horse were moving close up behind the infantry, and the auxiliary cavalry out to the east had rallied around Sabinus Modestus’ cataphracts. Maximinus gave the order for the cohorts under Florianus and Domitius to pivot to the right to protect the rear of the legionaries should, as was only too likely, the riders under Modestus be overwhelmed.

      Maximinus and the horse guards stood alone in the lightly falling snow.

      A fresh peal of trumpets from the Roman front line. The long pikes that the front four ranks had been issued for this campaign swung down. The rear four ranks hefted their shields above their heads. A moment later the thrum of thousands of bowstrings. The click-slide-thump of the ballistae. The air was full of projectiles; arrows arcing, artillery bolts darting. The arrows seemed to vanish into the mass of barbarian horsemen, their effect negligible. Where the ballista bolts struck Iazyges went down, men and horses crashing to the frozen plain. The following riders jostled and bored around them. Some were brought