Blood of Kings

by Andrew James

  Darius went into the tomb for his weapons and armour. When he came back Dadarshi and the twenty men were waiting by the rope ladders, all with the same haggard look on their faces, the same caking of orange dust on their clothes, armour and beards. Looking over the edge of the cliff Darius still couldn’t see the bottom. He threw down a rope ladder and clambered backwards into the void, counting off the sixty steps to the ground. On the forty-second step he stumbled and fell, throwing his arms out to shield his head. His hands dug into a mound of soft sand which had piled up against the cliff. He scrabbled down the mound until he reached solid ground, then called a warning up to the others.

  When all the men were lined up behind him, Darius set off towards the spring. The men were unusually silent. Overawed by what they had just lived through, the usual laughter and teasing seemed pointless.

  The ground between the base of the cliff and the pool should have been firm, with scattered rocks, clumps of camel thorn and tough spiky grasses. Darius remembered a belt of soft green tamarisk trees to the right, then the date palms where the Ammonians were camped. Ahead should have been the squares of irrigated crops. But nothing was the same. The thorns and grasses, the cropland, rocks and trees were all gone. Whether blown away or covered, he couldn’t say.

  They passed the spot where the farm labourers’ mud-brick huts had stood and found just the corner of a roof sticking out from the surface of newly deposited sand, so smooth it looked like sculpted bronze. Underneath, Darius thought he could hear faint scratching. Horrified at the thought of men trying to scratch their way free he called out, but if the noise had been there at all it stopped. He feared that the men inside, the sick and wounded, were either crushed or suffocated. Remembering his dream of being buried alive, he imagined the panic they must have felt as they realized they were trapped, discovering too late that the door was blocked by sand piled against it. They would have beaten against the palm logs with all their failing strength, screaming helplessly, while the dust swirled around them and the air grew thinner, and their lives were snuffed out.

  At Darius’s command soldiers wielded mattocks and shovels until they had exposed a section of flat roof. The top of a wooden shutter hung crooked from a leather hinge. It had been punched out from inside in a futile effort to escape, but the high window would have been too small for anyone to climb through. Taking a shovel Darius smashed it down hard on the mud and reed coating of the roof. Flakes of dried mud flew off the surface. He smashed it down again and again, pulling away bits of reed and mud until he had broken through to the split palm logs beneath. In a gap between the logs he could see into the dim interior of the hut, clearly making out the tops of men’s heads. Overcome with emotion he shouted down into the hut, but no one moved or answered. Perhaps the scratching had been a mouse or lizard. ‘Poor bastards,’ he said softly. ‘Dadarshi, get some men to dig them out and take them up to the heights. At least we can give them a decent funeral, rather than mummifying in the sand like Egyptians.’

  As he passed on the orders and men started pulling the bodies out, Dadarshi looked dreadful. His wild, staring eyes were red-rimmed and his beard matted from the storm. Darius remembered that his brother, Zariadris, had been commanding the men around the spring. Understanding his friend’s fear he spoke gently. ‘They’ll be all right. The reeds are tall enough to give them shelter.’ Even as he spoke, Darius doubted it was true.

  At first Dadarshi didn’t reply. He just faced the direction where Zariadris’s six thousand men had been camping, cocked his ear and frowned. ‘Sir? Listen.’

  Darius listened. The silence was absolute. Knowing what was coming he felt sick to his stomach.

  ‘Not a sound, sir!’ Dadarshi’s voice rose in panic. He pulled back his lips and screwed up his face. ‘So where is everyone? How can six thousand men, camels and horses make no noise?’ They walked another fifty paces. Dadarshi cupped his hands to his mouth and called out his brother’s name. The men broke into groups, frantically calling names of friends. No one replied.

  The search went on far beyond hope. Long before they reassembled, Darius knew they wouldn’t find anything; there was nothing left to find. No palm-frond barrier, no stakes, no reeds, no pool, no spring. And no Persians.

  Standing on pristine sand, Dadarshi stared vacantly at the spot beneath his feet where the camp had been. His jaw hung open, his face was completely blank. He flicked his eyes left and right, as though expecting someone to suddenly appear. He opened his mouth and tried to choke out words but they stuck in his throat. ‘Buried … alive, sir?’ he managed to say at last. ‘Six thousand men? Buried alive? It’s not possible.’

  Darius remembered Zariadris’s cheerful nature. Hardworking, capable, he had not sought Vinda’s rank for himself when the chance came, thinking only of the welfare of his men. He had been a man to admire, and Darius grieved for his loss. And hardened as he was by the deaths of men over the years, he was appalled by the manner of his dying. He put his arm around Dadarshi’s shoulder, feeling the grief building up. ‘I am truly sorry, my friend. Did he have sons?’

  ‘Yes, sir. One, and three daughters. How do I tell them?’ Wracking sobs of grief shook Dadarshi’s heavy shoulders.

  Darius didn’t know how to console him. ‘If you want to go back, lose yourself in wine …’

  Dadarshi grabbed handfuls of dust and poured them over his head. ‘No! Don’t be sorry. Can’t you see? It isn’t true. He can’t have survived all the fighting to die in a heap of dust!’ He collapsed on the ground, beating his fists on the sand. ‘What sort of way is that to go?’

  Upset as Darius was about Zariadris, a bigger, deeper fear was taking hold of him. If the six thousand men sheltering in the reedbeds had been buried, what hope did Phanes’s forty thousand men have, out there on the open dunes?

  The mist in the air was thinning. Darius stood at the watch rock, right arm raised against the hazy glow of a re-emerging sun, looking south into the desert. There was nothing moving down there. He clambered down to the plateau, shouted some orders, and moments later five hundred usabari were thundering out of the gate and turning south. The riders’ faces were grim. Darius was at their head, turmoil in his stomach and his jaw set hard. Whatever the fate of Phanes’s army, he had to know.

  They came out level with the palms at the spot where the Bactrians and asabari had met. All sign of that meeting was gone, the hoof marks and mercenary corpses long since buried. The desert was pristine, the surface of the sand traced with fine rippling patterns by the wind. Starkly beautiful, the austere scene filled Darius with despair. The only sound was the wind over the dunes and the sibilant pattering of five hundred sets of padded camel hooves swishing against powdery sand. Darius raised his fist for the halt and looked about to get his bearings. ‘Wasn’t there an escarpment over there?’ He pointed left. ‘And a dune over there …?’

  Dadarshi’s voice was flat. ‘There was, sir.’

  Stunned as Darius was by grief, the upheaval still astonished him. The very bones of the desert had been recast. Sand piled in new dunes, old ones poured away, rocks buried, new ones revealed.

  ‘Over there, sir!’ an usabari trooper shouted excitedly and pointed. Darius followed his arm to a dull glint of metal on the desert floor. He rode towards it, jumped down, knelt on the sand and scrabbled with his hands. An iron spear tip appeared, then the whole blade, then the top of the cornel wood shaft. Darius wrapped his fingers around the shaft and tugged at the spear, feet digging into the ground, shoulders straining. It wouldn’t move.

  ‘Two men here!’ he shouted. ‘Get tools, dig it out!’

  Mattocks thumped into the sand. Men sweated in the strengthening sun. Following the spear shaft down they shovelled away sand to the depth of a man’s height before one of the soldiers suddenly jumped back, his mouth an open circle of disgust as he pointed at the dead fingers poking up through the sand. Darius pulled him away. Dry-mouthed and trembling he knelt, gently brushing the sand aside to reveal a hand wrapped
around the butt end of the spear. Repelled yet fascinated by the tragedy of it, he reached out and touched the fingers. They were warm from the heat of the sand but slightly stiff. There was perfect, poignant silence as Darius brushed away more sand. A wide, flared sleeve fell away from a tanned muscular forearm. The usabari took over, digging with the mattocks to reveal the top of a head. Throwing the tools aside they dug with bare hands again until the face was visible, a young man with a finely curled beard and oiled moustaches. Darius sniffed. Above the first early hints of putrefaction he could still smell the scent of the man’s rosewater perfume. The dark eyes were staring, pain and terror frozen on the face. With disgust, Darius opened the mouth with a finger. The throat was clogged with sand. It would be in his lungs as well. He had suffocated. When Darius pulled off the corpse’s hood the black hair below it was curled and scented like his beard and there were thick gold rings in each ear. A trooper leant forward to remove them then screamed as Darius kicked his hand away savagely. ‘Any man caught looting the dead will be impaled! Hear me? Dadarshi, give the order.’

  Dadarshi’s voice was hollow. ‘They were brave men. They deserve our respect.’

  They had deserved better than this. Death in battle was dirty, bloody, horrible. But at least it was noble. This was just forlorn. Darius felt anger and loss. He refused to accept the obvious; that the entire army had perished. It was too big, too cataclysmic to grasp.

  When they freed the body the spearman was curled in a ball, knees up to his chin, hands clutching the spear above his head. It was the only solid thing he could find to cling to as he choked away his life. Darius wondered who was his sweetheart? Whether he was good to her? Whether they had children? He would never see her again. Just as well she didn’t know how he died.

  They had dug out five more men before a horn blared. Hooves clattering and whips cracking, several hundred Carthaginian light cavalry raced towards Darius from the oasis. They deployed in battle formation, hands grasping javelins, bucklers strapped to wrists. At their head, the Great Chief of the Desert Lands brandished a sword. Beside him a chieftain carried a tall pole, topped with a wooden carving of a ram’s head with curving horns.

  Darius spoke an order and the usabari dropped their mattocks. Bows were hastily strung and turned on the newcomers, who drew up thirty paces away. The two forces faced each other in a tense standoff, javelins facing bows.

  Signalling to his men to lower their weapons, the Great Chief sheathed his sword. ‘I come in peace, Persian!’

  ‘Then you are welcome.’

  ‘A great calamity has befallen you. Ammon has taken his revenge on the ones who sought to defile his lands. But I am a civilized man. Such a great loss of life cannot leave me unmoved.’

  Darius wondered how many of his men had also died? Sheltered in the thick mass of palms, probably not too many.

  ‘You allowed us to take our dead for burial. I must allow you a day to search for the remains of your men, and to remove those you find. I know that to a Persian, lying buried is an unclean death.’

  ‘It pollutes Ahura Mazda’s holy ground,’ Darius agreed.

  ‘You may even bring your magus priests here to pray and carry out their cleansing rituals. My men will not molest them. You have until the sun has risen tomorrow morning.’

  Darius nodded. ‘That is gracious.’ He waited for the Great Chief to demand the release of Prince Si-Ammon in return. If he had, Darius would have had to agree. Instead he turned, pulled on the reins, shouted ‘Oosh! Oosh!’ and galloped his horse back to the palms. The chieftains and Carthaginians followed.

  Dadarshi chewed his lip as he watched the Ammonians ride away. He rubbed his beard with his thumb. ‘Beware Greeks bearing gifts, sir? Or is he genuine?’

  Darius understood. The Great Chief was only part Greek, but he was all viper.

  Saws rasped and mallets thumped as soldiers repaired the stockade. A satapatish in bronze armour hailed Darius and bowed his neck as he passed. The men stopped working and cheered. Darius had told Dadarshi if everything was clear at the camp he would send him more men. If not, he would blow the recall.

  Vinda was outside the tombs, deep in discussion with several commanders. A hazarapatish was pointing down at the spring. Everyone was armed and armoured. Their faces were taut. Despite the storm, Darius noticed that Vinda looked immaculate, armour shining, neatly curled beard glistening with scented oil. He had recovered from his moment of self-crisis and had regained his old assurance, but he treated Darius now as an equal. Darius dismounted and gave the reins to a groom. ‘Problem?’

  Vinda nodded. ‘Down there.’ The wind had died yet again and the dust was settling, allowing Darius to see the remodelled oasis clearly in the afternoon sun. The tops of the labourers’ huts were just visible, with fifty Persian soldiers stripped of armour digging the bodies out. Nearby, five hundred archers and spearmen were in battle formation, tall spara shields forming a barrier at the front, spears pointed through gaps in the shields. Archers in the second rank had bows strung and arrows in their hands. Opposite, several thousand Ammonian warriors were prancing and capering at the edge of the palm groves, shrieking and jeering. Vinda looked down at the Siwan rabble. ‘They really are animals,’ he said contemptuously. ‘They were trying to stop our burial party retrieving the dead, so I sent five sata down to protect them.’

  Darius silently concurred. The more he saw of the Ammonians, the less respect he had for them. ‘That was well done.’ He told Vinda about the Great Chief’s promise.

  Vinda laughed. ‘He’s trying to tempt us into the desert so he can storm the plateau! The man has not a shred of honour.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Darius debated whether to blow the recall. There were forty thousand men buried out there and he knew he was fooling himself if he thought he could dig out more than a handful. His first concern was to keep the survivors alive. He sighed deeply. No. His first concern had to be to hold back the tide of hopelessness threatening to engulf him. It had been there all morning, like a dark shadow lurking in his head. He realized it had probably been building up for days, a slow steady decline in confidence in the expedition. It had started way back on the day they nearly died looking for Pillar Rock. The successful attack at the Two Lakes had nearly dispelled it but now it had come back tenfold, washing over him with sudden force. Everywhere he looked he saw problems without solutions. He had lost over half his men in the storm, leaving him just three and a half thousand soldiers. Even if the Great Chief had lost a few thousand men, the Persians were still hopelessly outnumbered, eight or nine to one. There was no hope of rescue from Phanes now; his army had perished. Food was not a problem – a single camel would feed two hundred men for a day, and they had five hundred camels on the plateau – but there was water for only a few days. And with the pool destroyed and the men holding the spring dead, when their supply ran out they would no longer be able to replenish it.

  His men were trapped. He could see no way to leave this oasis alive.

  The desert moon rose fiery and huge, a glowing coal that hung above the dunes looking squashed, the sky flaring blood red around it. Darius shivered, recognizing it as a sign.

  Despite the Great Chief’s promise to hold off, the Ammonian attack came long before dawn. Shadows crept in the grey blue light at the base of the cliff, surrounding the plateau with a ring of iron. Suddenly horns blared. War cries shattered the calm, ladders clattered against the cliff face. Thousands of screaming warriors rushed the Persian defences, hands reaching over the stockade, ropes looped over the trunks for teams of men to drag them away. The sharp twang of thousands of bows, then the whoosh of arrows taking flight. Rushing feet as javelin men ran in to hurl their darts.

  Darius’s men were ready for them. The ladders were toppled, warriors sent hurtling, screaming through the air. At the stockade, Ammonians drew back bloodied stumps as scimitars slashed the ropes and severed the hands that tied them. On the plateau, five hundred archers rained arrows down on the attackers
at the base of the cliff. Cauldrons of red-hot sand were poured over the men below, who shrieked in agony as it blistered their skin. The Persian commanders gathered outside the tombs in the glow of a fire.

  Darius warned them, ‘The main attack will come at the stockade. Dadarshi, keep the asabari in reserve in case they break in.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And the camel riders?’

  ‘Send them out to fend the attackers off. The longer we hold them back …’ Darius stopped mid-sentence. He could see in the commanders’ eyes that they didn’t want him to lie. They knew it made no difference whether they kept the Ammonians from the stockade or not, they were simply putting off the inevitable. ‘The longer we hold them from the stockade, the more of us will die dignified deaths as soldiers rather than be enslaved.’

  They nodded grimly. Everyone clasped wrists. The commanders returned calmly to their units.

  Mist over the desert. Not the hot mist of windblown sand, but cold, clammy morning mist that chilled Darius’s bones and beaded in wet drops on his scale armour. Enemy spearmen and cavalry massed in its depths, pale outlines of men and horses lit by the cold glow of a waning gibbous moon. The first attack had been driven off, but the Ammonians and their mercenary allies were regrouping to try again. Darius could not judge their numbers. Nor did he care. It was enough to know that if they broke through the stockade it would be over. Dadarshi looked down at him, one leg folded over his camel’s neck, scimitar glinting in his hand. His hood was tied against the chill, his mouth muffled with a heavy veil. Darius recognized the dangerous glitter in his eyes as the look of a man determined to kill or be killed, and knew he was set on avenging the loss of his brother.