Caesar's Sword: The Complete Campaigns

by David Pilling

  “Courage, Romans! Have no fear of these barbarian animals! Cast your javelins at them, shower them with arrows and rocks and boiling oil! Send them fleeing back to the northern wastelands that birthed them!”

  Belisarius’ voice rose above the tumult. His words put fresh heart into our soldiers. The ballistae and onagri on the towers hurled their missiles into the densely-packed enemy ranks, flattening scores of warriors and impaling others. I gave a savage cheer as I witnessed one bolt drive clean through a spearman’s breast, burst from his spine and transfix three men behind him.

  It was now that I saw Belisarius snatch a bow from an Isaurian archer, take careful aim, and put an arrow through the neck of a Gothic officer. Our soldiers gave a great shout when they witnessed this exploit. Belisarius promptly took another arrow from the grinning Isaurian’s quiver and repeated the feat.

  “Shoot the oxen!” he commanded, and our archers lining the walls bent their bows and let fly. They aimed at the beasts pulling the four siege towers rumbling towards the city, and within moments their targets crumpled to the ground. The towers stopped dead, and Procopius howled with laughter at the confusion on the faces of the Gothic soldiers packed inside.

  “Look at those stupid Germanic pigs!” he cackled, forgetting that half our own men were Germans, “they spent days building those big towers, and didn’t think to put some armour on the oxen. Fresh cows needed, brother Herman!”

  His laughter was short-lived. The towers were rendered immobile, but the ram continued to rumble on towards the gate. Belisarius screamed at our archers to fell the men pushing it, but most of the arrows rebounded or struck harmlessly on the thick coverings of ox-hide the Goths had stretched over the compartment at the base.

  Some of the Isaurians were supplied with rags dipped in oil, and had lit braziers ready to set the rags on fire after they were wrapped around the tips of their arrows.

  The fire-arrows had been intended to set the Gothic towers ablaze, but now their officers ordered them used against the ram.

  It worked. The ox-hide was dry as tinder, and the flames quickly took hold. Most of the men cowering inside abandoned the ram and fled into the open, where our bowmen had great sport picking them off.

  Now the great swarm of Gothic infantry broke into a charge. Our archers mowed them down as they struggled across the ditch, filling the freshly-dug trenches with twitching bodies. Their comrades clambered over the dead and wounded, or filled the ditch with heaps of faggots and reeds to act as rough bridges.

  “Let them burn!” roared Belisarius, and the Isaurians poured their flaming arrows into the ditch, setting the dry reeds alight.

  The flames turned that ditch into Hell on earth, through which the Goths struggled, screaming as they burned alive. Many of them suffocated, trampled by their fellows, but still the rest bravely came on.

  So much wasted courage. The few that managed to cross the ditch and reach the foot of the walls were exposed to javelins, rocks and hot oil dropped on them from above.

  Every man on the wall was supplied with three javelins apiece. I cast the first of mine at a Goth just as he glanced upwards. The slender iron-tipped missile passed straight through his gaping mouth and out the back of his neck.

  “Well struck!” cried Procopius, his voice shrill with excitement, “give me one of your javelins, Coel, and let me fell one of the bastards.”

  I handed him one, and laughed at his clumsy attempt at a throw. The javelin flew well wide of any Goths and stuck, quivering, in the earth.

  “Another!” he demanded, but I was distracted by a sound of a trumpet.

  I looked down and saw Constantine standing in the street. His helmet was dented, and his breastplate smeared with blood. He had a desperate, wild look in his eyes, and waved his arms frantically at me.

  “The Goths!” he shouted, “they are inside the city! My men cannot hold them!”

  Constantine, I remembered, had been entrusted with guarding the north-eastern quarter. His troops were stationed at Hadrian’s mausoleum on the south side of the Tiber.

  The noise of battle was deafening, and only I and a few other men on the walls had heard him. I risked a charge of desertion if I abandoned my post, but Constantine was clearly in dire need of reinforcements.

  “Follow!” I yelled in the ear of one of my Heruls. He passed the word to his comrades, and I led them down the steps to the street. A few others, no more than a dozen or so, trailed after us.

  “Coel,” Constantine said warmly, gripping my wrist, “I knew you would not fail me. Come, we must hurry.”

  We raced through the streets, heading towards the sepulchre of the Emperor Hadrian. The enormous silhouette rose above the ramparts and dominated the skyline in that part of the city.

  The sepulchre consisted of a massive square base, with a circular mole, about a thousand feet in circumference and made of great blocks of white marble. Its base was adorned with statues of gods and equestrian figures worked in bronze and marble, and the whole surrounded by a paved sidewalk and a railing of gilt bronze, supported by pillars crowned with gilded peacocks.

  Appropriate to the memory of the great soldier-emperor whose remains were housed inside, it served as a fortress as well as mausoleum, and was connected to part of the outer defences.

  “The Goths hid beneath the Church of Saint Peter,” Constantine breathlessly explained as we ran, “my attention was called away to another part of the walls, and I left just a few men to guard the mausoleum. Suddenly the enemy poured out of hiding and rushed the defences.”

  The Church of Saint Peter lay outside the circuit of the walls, within a stone’s throw of the mausoleum. Some clever Gothic officer must have had the idea of concealing some of his men in the arcades and porticoes of the church, while the others were sent to draw away the defenders.

  Constantine had left his men to hold off the Goths while he went in search of reinforcements. The sound of fighting grew louder as we raced over Hadrian’s bridge and through the archway into the vestibule, a great square chamber dominated by an equestrian statue of Hadrian. His stern, bearded features seemed to glower in disapproval at us as we ascended the spiral stair leading to the central chamber.

  Constantine was first through the narrow door that led onto the roof, where his men were struggling to hold back waves of Goths. The enemy had laid ladders against the outer wall of the mausoleum, and were swarming up them in their hundreds. Constantine’s Huns and Isaurians had thrown down some of the ladders, and littered the ground below with Gothic corpses, but there was no end to the brutes.

  He ran to aid his men, locked in vicious combat on the western side of the base. It was obvious they could not hold for much longer. They had already suffered terrible casualties, were out of arrows and javelins, and exposed to the Gothic archers below.

  I hesitated to join the fray. My six Heruls were not likely to make much difference, and I was reluctant to waste lives to no purpose.

  One of my men – Ubaz, I think his name was – pointed his sword at one of the bronze statues. He had no need to speak, for the same idea had already occurred to me.

  “With me!” I yelled at the others, and all seven of us ran to the statue and knelt to seize its legs.

  “Ready – lift!” We put our shoulders to the task and lifted it a few inches off the floor. The damned thing was crushingly heavy, even with seven of us, and I bit my lip as fresh pain scorched through my bad shoulder.

  Grunting and cursing, we shuffled sideways, crab-like, across the roof. Constantine had seen us, and shouted at his men to clear a path.

  I peered down at the teeming mass of Goths below the wall, shouted “heave!” and with a final effort we pitched the statue over the edge.

  It was some eight feet high, and I like to think that the long-dead sculptor who shaped it would have had no objection to his creation being used as a missile against invading barbarians. Horse and rider plunged down onto the heads of a band of Goths clustered at the base of a scaling la
dder, who looked up just in time to see the fatal shadow descending on them. The screams that rose in their throats were cut off, suddenly and satisfyingly, and replaced by a grisly squelch.

  “Fetch more!” Constantine roared, and a number of his men ran to pick up more of the statues that crowned the base. Some, such as the statues of Apollo and Venus and other pagan deities from Rome’s distant past, were lighter than others, and could be carried by just two or three men.

  Within moments the bemused Goths found themselves being pelted with statuary. I later heard a poet declare, much to the disapproval of the priests, that Rome’s ancient gods had come to life to protect the city, where they were had been worshipped and adored before the arrival of Christ. It was a nice image, but the hands that threw down the statues were entirely mortal.

  The Goths panicked and scattered, ducking for cover and holding their shields above their heads. No fragile linden wood shield is proof against half a ton of marble, and before long the ground below the wall was strewn with dead men, flattened like insects under a man’s heel, their bodies crushed into so much bleeding pulp.

  Having almost lost Rome to the Goths, Constantine was in no mood to allow them any respite. Leaving me to hold the mausoleum, he took some thirty of his men down the stair, fetched their horses from a nearby barracks and led them out of the city via a postern gate.

  I watched, panting and rubbing my aching shoulder, as his cavalry pursued the fleeing Goths, spearing them like rabbits and driving them headlong across the fields. Fresh reserves of the enemy stood waiting about a mile beyond the city, and for a moment I thought Constantine meant to lead his handful of men in a death-or-glory charge. Thankfully, he turned about and trotted back to the safety of the walls.

  We had slain over two hundred Goths, for the loss of some thirty or forty of our own men. Not a bad tally, but it was nothing more than a minor victory snatched from the jaws of disaster. The thousands of Gothic reserves were unperturbed by the defeat of their fellows, and stood in disciplined squares, waiting for the order to renew the assault.

  “That is twice you have come to my rescue,” said Constantine when he returned from his sally, “I owe you much, Coel. Be assured that someday I will repay the debt in full.”

  He was the same over-earnest, slightly unsettling character I had known in Sicily. His startling blue eyes gazed at me from a mask of blood and sweat with brazen intensity.

  “I have told you before, there is no debt between us,” I said, disengaging my wrist with some difficulty from his clasp, “one of my men had the idea of using the statues. I have done no more than my duty to a fellow officer.”

  I may as well have remonstrated with the wall. He enfolded me in a bone-crushing embrace, and I might have never escaped from it had the Gothic horns not renewed their dreadful song.

  “They are coming again!” he cried, pushing me away, “back to your post, Coel. We can hold them here now.”

  I led my Heruls back towards the Salarian Gate, none too quickly, for I was exhausted from my vigours and reluctant to risk my skin a third time. God had so far kept me safe in the battle for Rome, but a man can only stretch his luck too far.

  The streets beyond the Bridge of Hadrian were all but deserted, for the terrified citizens had taken refuge inside their homes from the fury of the Goths. I took the opportunity to lean against a wall and catch my breath.

  My Heruls stood around, waiting impatiently for me to recover. They were all young men, my juniors by ten years or more. Only ingrained respect for a superior officer prevented them from running back to the sound of fighting, like hares outpacing a tired old hound.

  God, it seemed, intended to keep me busy that night. I had not rested for more than a few seconds when the sound of hoof beats clattering over the cobbles reached my ears, and Bessas thundered into sight, accompanied by a few troopers.

  “You!” he shouted, reining in at sight of me, “to the Praenestine Gate, at once! Every man is needed there!”

  He rode off without waiting to see if I followed. The Praenestine Gate was at least a mile away, in the south-eastern quarter of the city, and was part of the region called the Vivarium, where the Romans had once housed the wild beasts they kept for public entertainments.

  Duty summoned me for one last effort, and so I forced my aching legs into a trot. The Heruls jogged at my side, eager for more bloodshed. They were a savage and warlike people, as I had learned in their camp outside Constantinople, and their taste for violence and fighting knew no bounds.

  As we drew nearer to the Vivarium I overheard the thump and crash of artillery. The Goths were bombarding the gate and outer wall, which was lower than the inner and made of inferior quality stone, with their catapults and onagers.

  The bombardment abruptly ceased, replaced almost immediately by the clash of steel and the familiar sound of men fighting and dying. We turned a corner and almost ran into a column of our soldiers, advancing at the double towards the gates.

  I paused to take stock and wipe the perspiration dripping from my brow. The Vivarium consisted of an enclosure between the higher inner wall and the outer bulwark, which the Goths were attempting to storm. Our men inside the enclosure had abandoned the bulwark and retreated a few paces, where they stood at bay to repel the tide of barbarian warriors pouring over the rampart.

  Bessas was riding to and fro behind the lines, shouting at our infantry to form a shield-wall. Reinforcements were hurrying towards the fray from the various smaller gates inside the inner wall. Bessas roared them into battle, and the weight of their additional numbers stiffened our sagging line and shoved the Goths back, slaughtering many and driving the survivors back over the wall.

  It was a temporary respite, and the sound of those hateful bull-horns gave warning that the enemy were reforming for another assault. I offered up a quick silent prayer and led my Heruls on to take our places in the rear ranks of the shield-wall Bessas was hurriedly assembling.

  “Fill those gaps, there!” he yelled, his voice shrill and hoarse, “get the dead and wounded to the rear. Take a mouthful of water and pass your pottles around to those who have none. Move faster, you dogs!”

  I thought it a vain effort to try and defend the outer bulwark. The wall was too low, and our numbers too few to hold it indefinitely against wave after wave of Goths. I looked around at our men, and saw only grey faces, drawn with effort and exhaustion.

  There was another who agreed with me. Hoofs clattered behind me, and I looked around to see Belisarius cantering through a gate inside the inner wall, followed by a group of his officers.

  The general had come straight from the battle at the Salarian Gate. He looked no less tired than anyone else, his helmet and breastplate dinted and smeared with blood, his face gaunt, heavy jaw clenched against fatigue.

  He summoned Bessas to his side. The two spoke urgently, their voices too low to hear above the din of horns and war-shouts. When they were done, Belisarius wheeled his horse and disappeared through the gate, while Bessas gestured at his trumpeters.

  “Withdraw!” he screamed once the shrill blast of the trumpets had died away, “abandon the wall, and form line here!”

  He pointed at the foot of the inner wall. Our men shuffled backwards to reform in front of him. The manoeuvre caught me by surprise, and I was almost knocked over and trampled under the front ranks, but two of my Heruls pulled me clear. I thought I overhear one of them grumble something about looking after the old man, and shot him a venomous look.

  “Throw down your javelins,” Bessas ordered, “swords and shields only.”

  The men of the front rank did so, casting aside all their spears and javelins and drawing their swords for close combat. I stood in the third line, with Bessas just behind me, and kissed the blade of Caledfwlch for luck. There were no walls to hide behind here, no supply of statues to rain down on the enemy. We would meet the enemy to their beards and make a final stand, here, where the defences of Rome were at their weakest.

  �
�I promised you hard service, Briton,” grunted Bessas, “see you make the shades of your ancestors proud. I wager your grandsire never took a backward step.”

  I was flattered he even remembered who my grandsire was, and tried to will away the cramp stealing across my limbs. I could feel my strength ebbing, just when I needed it most.

  We waited for what seemed an agonisingly long time. The Goths were taunting us, letting fear and doubt gnaw at our minds while they gathered their superior numbers for the final charge.

  “Come on, you bastards,” I heard a Hunnish spearman mutter in front of me, “let’s have it over with.”

  I was taller than most of the Easterners that made up our infantry, and able to peer over their heads at the Gothic banners outside the bulwark. One of them was huge, a great square crimson standard fringed with gold, and with a shock I realised it was the banner of their king. Vitiges himself was present outside the Praenestine Gate. I tried to picture him, and shuddered at the image my mind conjured up of a gigantic bearded savage, red to the armpits in Roman blood and wielding a battle-axe bigger than my head.

  With a final blast of horns and a mighty shout that split the night skies, they came. Their forward line of warriors leaped over the bulwark and galloped towards our line, roaring like enraged lions. Hundreds more flooded in their wake. Against this multitude our flimsy treble line of swords and shields seemed certain to break, smashed to bits and swept away, leaving Rome open to the vengeance of the Goths.

  They hit us like a steel fist into an exposed gut. The big Hun standing in front of me was shoved backwards, and the back of his helm smashed into my face, breaking my nose. Tears started to my eyes. I staggered, blinded and whimpering in pain, and gasped as my spine thumped against the brickwork of the inner wall.