The harbor of Ravenna was a tomb.
Moonlight spilled over the empty slips where the mighty Classis Ravennas should have been docked. Instead, black water lapped against the stone quays, mocking the thirty-five thousand men trapped on the shore.
Marcus knelt at the edge of the pier. He dipped his hand into the Adriatic. It was cold.
"Parthians," he whispered.
On the horizon, the enemy fleet was closing in. The purple and gold sails of the Parthian Royal Navy billowed in the night wind. They weren't clumsy transport barges. They were sleek, tri-banked warships.
His warships.
He recognized the hull lines. The reinforced rams. The elevated archery towers. These were the designs JARVIS had generated—the "Project Neptune" blueprints he had traded to Phraates months ago to buy peace.
He had sold the sword that was now at his throat.
"They are blockading the harbor," Narcissus said, his voice heavy with doom. "If we try to swim, they will shoot us in the water."
Behind them, in the city, the bells of the Basilica were tolling frantically.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
"They're at the walls!" a messenger screamed, sprinting down the cobblestones toward the docks. "The Cataphracts! They've breached the outer ward!"
Marcus stood up. His legs felt like wood. The stimulant was wearing off, replaced by a crushing exhaustion that sat on his chest like an anvil.
"We have no ships," Varus's second-in-command, a centurion named Felix, said. He was shaking. "We have no food. We are trapped between the horsemen and the sea."
Felix looked at Marcus. "We should surrender. Maybe they will take ransom."
"Ransom?" Marcus laughed softly. "Valerius wants my head. The Parthians want Rome. There is no ransom, Felix. There is only the end."
He turned to look at the city.
Ravenna was burning.
The first waves of Parthian fire arrows were arcing over the walls, igniting the thatched roofs of the warehouses. The sky was turning a bruised purple-orange.
"Get the men to the harbor," Marcus ordered. "Barricade the streets leading to the docks. Use wagons, crates, bodies—anything. We make our stand here."
"Here?" Galen looked around the open stone plaza of the shipyard. "This is a kill box, Caesar. We have no cover from the ships."
"I know," Marcus said.
He walked toward the largest warehouse—the Imperial Arsenal.
"Break it open," he commanded Narcissus.
The giant kicked the door in.
Inside, it was mostly empty. Pompey had stripped the weapons. But in the back, covered in dusty canvas, were massive stacks of timber. Seasoned oak. Planks meant for hull repairs.
And barrels. Hundreds of barrels of pitch and tar.
An idea sparked in Marcus's mind. It wasn't a good idea. It was a desperate, suicidal idea.
"We can't sail," Marcus said, staring at the pitch. "But we can float."
"What?" Narcissus asked.
"Rafts," Marcus said. "We build rafts. Anything that floats. Doors. Barrels. Timber."
"To go where?" Galen asked, incredulous. "The Parthian fleet will ram us to splinters before we get a mile out!"
"Not if they can't see us," Marcus said.
He pointed at the burning city.
"The smoke," Marcus said. "The wind is blowing offshore. It's pushing the smoke out to sea."
He turned to JARVIS.
WIND DIRECTION: WEST-NORTHWEST.
VELOCITY: 15 KNOTS.
SMOKE DENSITY: HIGH.
"We use the city as a smoke screen," Marcus said, his mind racing. "We burn the pitch. We make the smoke thicker. We launch into the cloud."
"And then what?" Felix asked. "We drift until we starve?"
Marcus looked at the dark water.
"We don't drift," he said. "We swim. To their ships."
The insanity of the plan silenced the group.
"You want to board the Parthian navy?" Narcissus grinned. It was a terrifying, bloodthirsty grin. "From rafts?"
"They are sailors," Marcus said. "They fight at range. They aren't ready for thirty thousand angry legionaries boarding them in the dark."
"It's suicide," Galen muttered.
"It's war," Marcus corrected. "Start building."
The next three hours were a blur of frantic labor.
The army tore Ravenna apart. They ripped doors off hinges. They lashed barrels together with ropes. They dismantled the warehouse roofs.
Thousands of crude rafts were assembled on the water. They bobbed unsteadily—ugly, unstable platforms of desperation.
The sounds of battle grew closer. The Parthian heavy cavalry had broken through the main gate. The rear guard—Varus's survivors—were dying in the narrow streets, buying time with their blood.
"They are here!" a lookout screamed.
A Parthian Cataphract rode onto the quay, his horse's armor clattering. He leveled a lance at the frantic workers.
Narcissus threw a hammer. It hit the rider in the helmet, knocking him into the harbor water. He sank like a stone.
"Launch!" Marcus screamed. "Everyone into the water!"
It was a chaotic exodus.
Men jumped onto the rafts, overcrowding them instantly. Some capsized. Soldiers stripped off their remaining armor to stay afloat.
Marcus stepped onto a raft made of wine barrels and a door. Narcissus and Crixus joined him.
"Light the pitch!" Marcus ordered.
Soldiers rolled the barrels of tar to the edge of the pier. They punctured them and set them alight. Then they kicked them into the water.
Thick, black, oily smoke billowed up, instantly catching the wind. It rolled out over the harbor, a wall of artificial night.
"Push off!"
The flotilla of trash drifted out into the Adriatic.
Behind them, Ravenna was consumed by fire and iron. The Parthian cavalry reached the docks, but they were too late. They paced the stone edge, firing arrows into the smoke, but the targets were already gone.
Marcus lay flat on the wet wood of the raft. The smoke stung his eyes. He couldn't see five feet in front of him.
"Where are they?" Narcissus whispered, clutching his axe.
"Ahead," Marcus said. "Listen."
Through the gloom, they heard it. The creak of rigging. The slap of water on hulls. Voices speaking Farsi.
The Parthian blockade.
They were drifting right into the teeth of the enemy fleet.
PROXIMITY ALERT.
TARGET: 100 METERS.
"Paddles!" Marcus hissed.
Men used planks, hands, and helmets to paddle silently.
A dark shape loomed out of the smoke. A massive trireme. Its oars were shipped. The crew was likely watching the burning city, expecting the Romans to die on the shore.
They didn't look down.
Marcus's raft bumped gently against the hull of the warship.
"Now," Marcus signaled.
Crixus stood up. He threw a grappling hook made from bent iron bars. It caught the railing of the ship.
He pulled. The rope went taut.
Like spiders, the Romans began to climb.
It was silent work. The "Ghost Army" went first.
A Parthian sentry leaned over the rail, trying to peer through the smoke.
Crixus reached up, grabbed the man's tunic, and pulled him over the side. The sentry splashed into the water.
"Up! Up! Up!"
Hundreds of Romans swarmed up the sides of the ship.
They spilled onto the deck.
The Parthian sailors were lightly armed—scimitars and bows. They weren't prepared for heavy infantry, even infantry without armor.
"Rome!" Marcus screamed as he vaulted the rail.
The violence was sudden and absolute.
Marcus tackled an archer, driving his pugio into the man's chest. Narcissus swung his axe, cleaving through the mast rigging.
The ship alarm bell rang, but it was cut short as a legionary severed the rope.
"Clear the deck!" Narcissus roared. "Turn the weapons!"
They took the ship in five minutes. Bodies were tossed overboard.
But the alarm had spread.
Across the water, other ships were waking up. Torches flared in the smoke. Drums beat the rhythm for rowers.
"They're turning!" Galen shouted from the stern. "Three ships coming about!"
Marcus looked at the captured ballista on the foredeck. It was a bolt-thrower, designed to punch through hulls.
"Load it!" Marcus ordered.
"We don't have bolts!" a soldier yelled.
"Use the pitch!"
They loaded a barrel of unlit pitch into the ballista. Narcissus lit a rag and stuffed it into the bung.
"Fire!"
The barrel arched through the smoky air. It smashed onto the deck of the approaching Parthian ship.
Liquid fire exploded across the enemy vessel. The sails caught instantly.
"Ramming speed!" Marcus commanded, grabbing the tiller. "Take us into the fleet!"
The captured ship, crewed by starving, desperate Romans, surged forward.
It smashed into the side of another Parthian vessel. The sound of splintering wood was deafening.
Romans didn't wait for planks. They swung across on ropes. They jumped the gap.
It wasn't a naval battle anymore. It was a boarding party on a massive scale. The Roman "raft fleet" was swarming the Parthian galleys like termites eating a wooden house.
Ship after ship fell. The smoke confused the enemy captains. They fired on each other. They rammed their own allies.
By dawn, the chaos settled.
The smoke cleared.
Marcus stood on the quarterdeck of the Parthian flagship. The deck was slick with blood.
Around him, twenty captured warships floated in the morning calm. The rest of the Parthian fleet had scattered, fleeing south.
They had done the impossible. An army of beggars had stolen a navy.
"We have ships," Narcissus said, leaning on his axe, exhausted. "We have a fleet."
"But we have no home," Galen reminded them.
He pointed back at the shore.
Ravenna was a smoking ruin. The Parthian army controlled the coast. Valerius controlled the north. Rome controlled the south.
They were pirates now. A legion without a land.
"Where do we go?" Crixus asked. "Egypt? Spain?"
Marcus looked at the bloody ring on his finger.
He looked south. Toward the heart of the Empire.
"No," Marcus said.
He turned the ship's wheel.
"We aren't running anymore."
He pointed the prow of the ship down the coast.
"Set a course for Ostia," Marcus commanded.
"Ostia?" Galen blinked. "That's the port of Rome. You want to sail right into the mouth of the wolf?"
Marcus touched the hilt of his stolen scimitar.
"I don't want to sail into it," Marcus said, his eyes cold and dead. "I want to break its teeth."
He looked at his army—men wearing Parthian silks over their Roman tunics, eating Parthian rations, wielding curved swords.
"We are dead men," Marcus said. "And dead men can go anywhere they want."
DESTINATION SET: ROME.
ETA: 4 DAYS.
PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL: 0%.
Marcus smiled at the zero.
"Perfect," he whispered. "I like those odds."