Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth Read Online Free PDF Page A

careful patience. ‘And in this case, he certainly has not done so. My lord? It may be timely now for you to reclaim your throne.’
    He cast his voice over his shoulder, north, to the ever-moving sea, and there, from amongst the huddle of cooks and pot-boys and serving-men, a figure stepped forward.
    He was taller than any of the servants, and, now that he removed the cap that had hidden it, his stone-grey hair was full and flourished to his shoulders; the hair of a man who has fed well through his life, who has never had his head shaved to show his servitude. His bearing was tall and vigorous and as he walked through them the slaves and servants fell to their knees and pressed their brows to the turf.
    Very shortly afterwards, the seventeen client kings slid down from their horses and did likewise. King Ranades IX of Hyrcania was not first, but he was most assuredly not last. He dropped the body he had been holding as a man might drop a dead snake, and his brow touched the turf and stayed there while the man they had believed to be dead these past eight months walked past to mount the bay mare.
    Thus it was that Vologases, King of Kings, lord of all life, supreme ruler of the Parthian empire, may the gods for ever venerate his name, returned to reclaim the throne from the son who had done his best to usurp it.

C HAPTER T HREE
    ONE MONTH TO the day later, I stood in the royal pavilion and watched a mass of armoured horsemen flow across a valley.
    Bright as the polished moon, afire under the early sun, alive with rippling silk in every colour known to the Parthian empire, the heavy cavalry of Parthia, nearly five and a half thousand men, rode their horses at a hand canter from the mouth of a gorge to its blunt end amidst the mountains.
    The earth rolled beneath them. Birds fled from the skies. It was said that the King of Kings could command the weather, that he ordered sun for himself, except when his subjects needed rain for their crops, and that he sent hail and snow, mud and thunder to plague his enemies. I stood less than a spear’s throw away and watched him, as he watched the display of his army, and I believed every word of it.
    Three hundred at a time, they rode by us, clad in chain mail that chimed softly over the echoing beat of their mounts’ feet. As they passed the pavilion, they turned to face us, and even the hardened warriors of the Hyrcanians gasped the first time, for every man
and every horse
was masked in polished iron, so that the men were silver-faced but for their eyes , which were black behind the gaps in the masks, and the horses were monsters, inanimate and terrifying, and I, who had never seen their like, felt my innards churn.
    A thousand by a thousand by a thousand, they rode by, and now the last phalanx of three hundred horsemen came to take – perhaps to retake – their oath.
    At their rear, a man shouted an order. Another blew a horn, not a curled one, such as we use to control our legions, but a long one that stretched to the high sky.
    Three notes sounded, and the galloping men wheeled left in a single block, so that they were riding straight away from us. Another blast, and they turned left again, and another and they were riding straight for us, and this time I saw their twin-headed axes, which could kill a horse with a single blow – we had seen it done, earlier in the day – I saw their lances, the mythical
kontos
, ten-foot poles with long-swords affixed to the ends that might both slash and stab the enemy. Rumour said they had daggers on their butt ends, so that the riders might pierce a man beneath them should they have need. I could not see that they would have need.
    They came at us, spear-swords levelled, and even though we had been subject to this seventeen times already I still flinched when I saw the eyes of the front rows flare white at the edges before the trumpet blasted one final time and, in the finest display of horsemanship I had ever seen, they brought their