All is lost, Julian thought, his heart hammering against his ribs as he spurred his horse onward, the iron heel of his boot slamming into the beast's flank again and again nearly drawing blood. The hooves beat against the hot sand in a frantic rhythm that matched the panic churning in his gut, beat for beat.
As commander of the reserve, Julian had been watching the battle from the one place with a proper view of it when everything turned. Moments before, victory had seemed a thing already in hand. The enemy centre had begun to sag and fold. Then defeat had reared up out of the dust like a snake out of a woodpile, faster than any man could answer or really understand.
First had come the camel riders, dark shapes tearing through the chaos toward the rear, slamming into the archers and scattering them like grain off a table hit by wind. Then the emperor had charged, the banner of the empire flying high and snapping proudly in the wind, the clibanarii gathering behind it in a wedge.
And then the banner fell.
Some soldier at the back of the line, may the gods curse him to the last generation of his blood, saw it go down and shouted.
From that single shout, everything came apart.
The mood turned the way a summer afternoon turns when the cloud finds the sun. The rumour ran faster than any horse on that field.
"The emperor is dead. They have taken his head."
"Dead!Dead! The War Imperator is dead!"
Julian felt the blood drain out of his face as the panic took hold of his men, and the words sat burning in his mind like a curse he had been handed personally.
He was a seasoned man. He had fought in more battles than he cared to count and had rallied breaking lines before, more than once, with nothing but his voice and the flat of his sword.
This time , it didn't work.
The enemy, smelling the turn the way dogs smell a kitchen, came on with everything they had left. And the Romelian line, which had been a line five minutes earlier, stopped being one.
Julian tried to hold them. He was far too late. Some threw down their arms and raised their hands in the old gesture, the one that had meant something for six hundred years, and found that it meant nothing at all this afternoon. The mercenaries, who had been battered and bled for hours and had a great deal of accounting to settle, answered every raised hand with steel. The cries of dying men mixed with the clatter of dropped weapons as his soldiers were cut down piece by piece, blood settling on the thirsty sand that left nothing but the hazy crimson.
In that moment he knew it was finished, and that knowing it changed nothing except what he did next.
He gathered his trusted guard, thirty men in all, and without a second thought they spurred their horses and rode off the field, leaving the levies behind to be slaughtered where they stood.
Julian did not allow himself to think about the men he was abandoning. There would be years for that later, if he lived. Right now there was only the road and his father old words.
Cut your losses and survive if need be. There would be other fields, but no other lives but the only.
But luck, it seemed, had gone over to the other side with everything else.
A glance over his shoulder told him all he needed. The camel riders had finished with the archers, had seen a small mounted party breaking away across the open sand, and had turned to follow.
The horses pulled ahead at first, powerful gallops cutting through the sand like a hot knife through fat. But camels were built for this country, and they were closing. Slowly to begin with, and then less slowly as the horses began to labour and blow.
The desert stretched out ahead of him like an emptiness with no other side to it, and Julian's heart sank further with every breath his mount dragged in. The heat, the glare, the endless grinding pursuit, all of it blurred into one nightmarish haze. And behind him, always behind him, the heavy methodical thudding, closer and closer and closer.
Is this where it ends, then? On sand, running?
With a curse torn out of his throat he tightened his grip and urged the horse harder. The animal had nothing more to give. Its breath was coming ragged and wrong.
Not all of them intended to sit through it.
In the chaos of the chase one of the spymaster's guards forced his voice through the noise.
"My lord, we're losing speed!" He twisted in the saddle to be certain of it before he said the rest. "At this pace they have us inside a mile, and then it's the knife or the rope. Let us slow them for you!"
There was not the smallest hint of uncertainty anywhere in the man's voice. Every one of them knew his duty and had known it since the day he was given the post. For men like these it was an honour to spend their lives if the spending bought their lord's.
They all waited for his consent.
When he gave it half of Julian's guards wheeled their horses around to face the oncoming riders without waiting for any command at all, as though the same thought and the same courage had arrived in fifteen men at the identical moment.
Julian gave them a grateful nod that not one of them saw, and spurred onward.
They were soldiers, born to fight and die for their lord. And he, though it ached in him to admit it, knew this was the only way he would live to make anyone pay for today.
He turned around to see the manner of their deaths.
With a thunderous cry the guards drove forward, lances levelled.
The camels loomed up before them, massive and strange and towering, and the horses balked. They reared and shied and fought their bits, nerves shattered by the smell and the sheer wrongness of the beasts in front of them, eyes rolling white with a primal terror no rider on earth can drill out of an animal.
Julian's guards were seasoned men, and they adapted the way seasoned men do.
Seeing at once that no lance would be delivered from a horse dancing sideways beneath them, they hurled the lances instead, flinging them like javelins into the oncoming mass. But their mounts were plunging and turning as they threw, and the casts went wild, the shafts skidding off into the sand a dozen paces from anything worth hitting.
So they drew their swords for a last stand in the sand of somebody else's hell. The steel flashed in the hard desert light as each man forced his trembling horse forward with knees and heels and sheer insistence.
With a cry equal parts desperate and hopeless they threw themselves into the enemy ranks, crashing in with reckless abandon, and took a few of the riders down with them as they went.
Others, with no time left to spend on courtesies, forgot the riders entirely and went for the animals. They aimed low, at the sides and the throats and the legs where the barding did not reach, and for all their size the camels shrieked like nothing on earth and came down in thrashing heaps that brought their masters with them.
For all of it, the guards were outnumbered and outmatched and outmounted. They fell one by one, taken by lance and sword and axe and the merciless weight of that country, with various degree of courage as they were cut down. Their blood stained the sand and their bodies marked out the last field their loyalty would ever be asked to hold.
And as they fell, they did precisely what they had turned around to do.
They bought their lord the time.
And few would be better for that.