The inattention was his undoing. Something caught his boot. Off balance, he ran another four or five steps before crashing to the ground.

His hands and forearms were grazed by the stony desert, his chin gashed, the sword cracked from his grip.

A yell of triumph, of hunters closing in on their prey.

Frantically, Valens grabbed the hilt, and was up and running, oblivious to the pain.

‘Get down!’

The fall had knocked the wind out of him. He could not draw breath. He was not going to make it. The Arabs were right behind him.

‘Get flat, you fool!’ The shout was in Latin.

Valens dived to the earth.

Something whisked above his head.

He rolled, hilt clasped in sweating palm. The nomads were but ten paces distant.

But they had stopped. One of them was looking at his chest. With a look of utmost surprise, he regarded the fletchings of the arrow buried in his body. The others gazed at their companion. Then, like a bad actor on the stage, he toppled.

Three more shafts tore through the night. Two vanished into the dark. But another struck home. It took the tent-dweller in the throat. He was plucked backwards, as if yanked by a rope.

The remainder of the nomads – a dozen or more – hunched down. A couple of the bravest, or most foolhardy, edged towards the prone figure of Valens.

The next volley again yielded a single victim. An arrow hit a nomad in the shoulder. The blow was not fatal, but all the better for that. The injured man spun around, clutching the wound, and screamed in agony. Fear enters by the ears as much as the eyes. At the ghastly sound of his suffering – a suffering inflicted by an unseen foe – the rest lost their nerve. As if heeding a command, they turned and fled, loose cloaks flapping.

The wounded nomad hobbled in their wake.

No one stopped to aid him. He had made half a dozen steps before three shafts thumped into his back.

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

Adiabene

AT MIDDAY THERE WAS A COLUMN of dust in the distance on the northern horizon. It was tall and thin and rose straight in the air. Decimus said its shape showed it was raised by a column of mounted men moving fast, three, perhaps four miles away.

Reunited after the raid on the nomad camp, the soldiers had ridden through the remaining hours of darkness. The cool of the night, and the wind of their motion, acted as a tonic. They were in good spirits. They had eaten and drunk in the saddle. Valens was glad to be alive. If the gods had cared, he would have thanked them.