Marius' Mules XI: Tides of War

by S. J. A. Turney

  ‘By the time we actually touch the sea again, we’ll have enclosed half the republic,’ Fronto grunted. ‘If we keep going south with the wall like this how far can we go before we hit water anyway?’

  Mamurra frowned and unfurled the map he carried, marked out with current works and projected plans. His eyes slid down the vellum roll. ‘Oddly, I reckon the beach where you first landed is due south. About ninety miles, I’d say.’

  ‘Even if we could build such a thing, we could never man it all,’ Antonius snorted. ‘We’ll have to get ahead of them and turn the corner, close them in and head for the shore as we initially planned. It has to be possible.’

  Fronto shrugged and glanced over at Mamurra. ‘Well?’

  The engineer sucked his teeth again and pored over the map in his hands, repeatedly lifting his gaze to the hills around them and transposing the one onto the other.

  ‘If it is possible, then it relies upon taking several strong positions and enclosing them. See that twin hill over there that looks a little like a pair of breasts?’

  Fronto and Antonius peered in the direction the man pointed.

  ‘If you’re meaning where I think you’re meaning, you’ve met some weird looking breasts,’ Fronto snorted. ‘But yes, I think I see what you mean. Pompey’s line will naturally take in those hills, yes?’

  ‘The way we’re all going, yes. But if we can press for that furthest hill, then his line will be forced back towards the shore. His circuit will become tighter and we can begin to press west towards the sea. There are two other places on the map I think we’ll be able to do the same. If we can make a concerted push in each of those three places, we can force Pompey’s wall back and enclose it.

  ‘Looks like we’re having another little skirmish,’ Antonius harrumphed.

  ‘I thought you said no one wanted to fight?’ murmured Mamurra.

  ‘I said the legions didn’t like fighting one another. Native auxilia are a different matter.’

  Fronto peered down at the works. In some places the lines were little more than half a mile apart, and there was the constant fear that artillery might reach across the gap. And whenever the works came close enough for worry, and the terrain allowed it, the enemy would commit their rabid oriental archers. It was happening right now, as had become an almost daily occurrence.

  The work parties on the leading edge of the rampart were running from their work, dropping their baskets of stones and mattocks, leaving personal effects scattered across the grass as they dived for the cover of the great hide and felt shields that had been hastily assembled for this very purpose. Centurions’ whistles blew, as well as the horn of a lookout on the walls. The man there pointed out the locations of the skirmishers only to topple from the rampart with an arrow jutting from his neck. The enemy soldiers closed on the location before coming to a halt and letting loose with full fury. More than half the workers had reached their shelter before the deadly shafts of the Greek archers dropped in a cloud, skewering men and clattering off tools and armour.

  The archers stayed for a count of three missiles launched, and then melted away into the undergrowth as swiftly and unexpectedly as they’d arrived. It was an unfortunate side-effect of the terrain, with its ridges and rocks, shrubs and bushes, that small, cunning units could advance through it almost invisible to the watchmen on the walls. Naturally, the Caesarian forces responded, Illyrian auxiliaries hurrying out after the fleeing archers. They would catch a few. Maybe half a dozen, and the bodies would end up displayed on the rampart as a futile and ineffective warning.

  Thus it went, and might do forever, if they couldn’t seize those specific points Mamurra had identified. If they worked hard, they could occupy the first, and that might change things.

  * * *

  Fronto watched from the tower, tense, wishing the Tenth had been chosen rather than the Ninth, for there was nothing so frustrating for a good officer than impotently watching a peer fighting a crucial action. The men of the Ninth advanced up the slope. The task of taking the critical hills of Mamurra’s had been given to the Ninth for two reasons. Firstly they had some redemption to seek after the near mutiny they had been involved in last winter, and secondly, they served Sulla, and the man had something of a reputation for pushing hard, and had asked for the opportunity. Caesar himself had remained in the main camp, attending to supply issues, leaving Antonius in charge of the main operations to the south.

  Antonius stood in the next turret along, with his signallers and musicians, commanding from his optimum viewpoint.

  Two cohorts of the Ninth climbed the hill under full arms, two more behind them bringing timbers and rocks and tools. As soon as they took the height, they would need to fortify and secure it so that it could be incorporated into the works. It was a dangerous push, for it was ridiculously close to Pompey’s own work. If they could take that hill, then they would turn the lines back towards the sea. It was, as the engineer had noted, one of a pair of twin hills, and, though the nearer hill would be less effective, they could still begin the turn on that. Fronto had argued for that one to avoid too much trouble, but Antonius, Sulla and Caesar had agreed to try for the one closest to Pompey and save the nearer one as a fall back if they failed to take the further.

  The Ninth reached the top and came to a slow halt, bristling with steel, expectant. Sulla was dangerously close to the front of his men, where he could see what was happening. Fronto, from his vantage point some distance away, could see just how close the two armies were here. Pompey’s rampart occupied another ridge not more than six hundred paces from the ranks of the Ninth.

  ‘Why have they stopped?’ Galronus murmured.

  ‘Waiting for the supplies to be brought up,’ Fronto replied, pointing at the cohorts lugging huge timbers and the like up the hill.

  Even as they watched, the front cohorts of the Ninth began to spread out under orders, creating an arc across the hill crest, where the rampart could be raised behind them.

  ‘Any moment now,’ Fronto muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Should have stuck with the nearer hill. That one’s too close to Pompey for comfort. If we’d been conservative and taken the nearer hill, there would have been sufficient distance still between the lines that the enemy would probably have let us. But not there. Pompey can’t let us have that. It’s a direct call to war, is that.’

  Sure enough, a moment later, horns sounded at the far side of the enemy’s part-built siege works.

  ‘Now things will go to shit. I hope Antonius has a backup plan. Two cohorts can’t hold that hill if the enemy really want it.’

  ‘Why not commit more of ours, then?’ Galronus fretted.

  ‘Because the hill is not large enough. And if we commit a full legion there, we might just trigger the mass slaughter we’ve been trying to avoid. Look, he’s still just committing his auxiliaries. The moment Pompey decides to field legionaries against us, there’ll be no stopping the bloodletting.’

  The men pouring out from Pompey’s defences were clearly auxiliaries. The advance units poured forth without much call for order and discipline. Groups of archers and slingers hurtled towards the Ninth on their hill, spear men coming behind in blocks.

  ‘Greeks, Cretans, Illyrians, Thracians. Not a Roman citizen among them,’ Fronto noted. ‘But they’re going to cripple Sulla’s cohorts.’

  He watched, teeth grinding, as the enemy hurried towards the legion. A whistle blew, and the lines of Caesarian soldiers hefted their pila.

  ‘No,’ Fronto fumed. ‘Don’t waste them.’

  But as soon as the auxiliaries came near to pilum range, another signal was given by Sulla’s musician, and the legionaries launched their missiles. It was futile. By the time the first shaft was even in the air, the nimble enemy had halted and dropped back. The hundreds of iron-headed javelins crashed to the ground, bending and breaking, very few finding a target. With a roar, the natives responded instantly. Pila range was easily bow and sling range, too. Th
eir missiles began to fly, thudding, thwacking and punching into the legionaries of the Ninth.

  ‘Why does he not give the order to advance?’ Galronus said in a near whisper.

  ‘Because Sulla is impulsive and hard, but he recognises the danger there. If he advances beyond the brow of the hill, he’s walking into a natural trap. The enemy will just pull back before him and then suddenly he’ll find himself far from help, facing the spear men and within easy bow shot of the enemy ramparts. They’d be slaughtered.’

  ‘They are being slaughtered,’ noted the Remi nobleman, pointing.

  Gloomily, Fronto nodded as he watched legionaries falling with every heartbeat, killed by arrows and sling bullets. The two cohorts were being devastated, while their companions still struggled up the slope behind them with timbers and baskets of rocks and tools.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ Fronto harrumphed. ‘They need to abandon it and concentrate on the nearer hill. Gods, but this could be a mess. Sulla needs to recognise the impossibility of his position, and I damn well hope Antonius has a plan, or that lot will all die in retreat.’

  They watched in cold, angry anticipation as the legionaries of the Ninth died in droves to the enemy’s missiles.

  ‘For the love of Venus, Sulla, retreat!’

  As though he’d heard Fronto’s imploring, the Ninth’s commander finally gave a signal and horns blew. The leading cohorts of the Ninth began to flee. There was no ordered retreat here, but a desperate need to be out of range of those archers. Fronto watched, chewing his cheek, as the legionaries poured back down the slope. The archers and slingers made way for light, fast Illyrian spear men, who came flooding after the running legionaries, cresting the hill. The Ninth were now in full retreat from that rise, with spear men close behind, and missile troops following on. It looked like a disaster.

  ‘Even the other cohorts are running,’ Galronus said.

  Fronto’s gaze dropped to those secondary cohorts, and he frowned. ‘No. Not quite. Look what they’ve done.’

  While all attention had been on the fight on the top of the hill, those cohorts behind had not just dropped their timber and stones and tools, but had subtly, cunningly, created a wall of obstacles. Even as the fleeing legionaries leapt over it and ducked past, roaring spearmen horrifyingly close behind, Antonius in the next tower had his musicians blow a call out across the hills.

  From shadowy delves, three cohorts of Hispanic archers and slingers appeared. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were. And it took only a heartbeat for them to be ready. Pompey’s spearmen reached the obstacles and even as they began to climb and jump, each and every one was struck with arrows and stones, their shaking corpses adding to the obstacles.

  ‘Cunning bastard,’ Fronto smiled. ‘Still, he wasted good men up there.’

  Sulla took up the signals again now and, at a triple blast from a horn, his men stopped running instantly, turned and began to form up. Their flight had been far more careful than it had appeared, clearly, for while the front lines had cast their pila at the hilltop, now those men were at the back, while the previously rear ranks were now at the front with their pila raised.

  At the line of obstacles, the enemy spearmen were still pressing, trying to cross the timbers and bags and baskets and crates, along with the numerous dead bodies of their own fallen, and they gave a great cheer as the missiles stopped flying, and launched over the obstacles, only to come face to face with the legionaries. No longer in flight, the men of the Ninth now took the initiative; released by a centurion’s whistle, they charged en-masse, punching into the lines of spear men. The obstacles provided little trouble for them as they butchered the light infantry, largely lacking armour and shields with which to defend themselves.

  At the same time, the archers who had stopped loosing at the spearmen in order to avoid hitting the Ninth, now drew harder, aimed higher, and began to drop arrows among the enemy slingers and bowmen, who were still following on, ready to fall into position What had been a gleeful pursuit of the Ninth had now become a bloody rout. The enemy’s officers, Roman prefects of Pompey’s, were back among their own defences, hopelessly ignorant of the wholesale slaughter of their men out of sight beyond the hill.

  It was over in a matter of two dozen heartbeats. The enemy skirmishers were back over the crest, screaming in panic and in hugely diminished numbers. Less than a quarter of the men who’d attacked returned to the Pompeian lines. The disciplined forces of the Ninth halted at a call from Sulla, below the crest of the hill. In moments they were back in formation, and carrying the ‘obstacles’ away from the carrion field, making for the second, nearer hill.

  ‘Why do that at all, if they were happy to settle for this hill?’ Galronus mused.

  ‘Because we all know we can’t hold and maintain the further hill that close to the enemy, but Sulla and Antonius just gave Pompey a bloody nose. We lost perhaps two hundred men on that hill. They lost well over a thousand. It might not exactly even our numbers, but there will be a lot of berating and punishment in the enemy camp tonight, and I think that’s the last we’ll see of these irritating little skirmishes for now. They’ve learned a hard lesson. And maybe I did too. Trust Antonius. He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘I never know what you lot are doing,’ Galronus sighed. ‘The Roman way of war is so different to the Remi and other Belgae. The very idea of pretending to run away would shame any of our leaders. They would never think of such a ruse. Dishonourable way to fight.’

  ‘But damned effective,’ Fronto grinned. ‘With civilisation comes deviousness. Sad, but true.’

  Galronus cast him an irritated look. ‘Only a patrician would think that just because we’re not Roman, the Remi are uncivilised.’

  ‘Poor choice of words,’ Fronto laughed. ‘Though I have tasted your beer, so I’m not so sure.’

  The two men looked out over the hill, its grey-green summit discoloured with blood and scattered with corpses. ‘With luck we can turn the angle now, and finish closing the man in,’ Fronto sighed.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What happens when the lines are finished?’

  ‘We try and starve them into submission. And if we fail, it won’t be Illyrian spearmen we face next time, but Pompey’s legions. Pray to your gods for sense to prevail, Galronus.’

  Chapter 7

  Near Dyrrachium, Late Maius 48BC

  The three men looked down from the viewing platform on the last of the low hills. The final stages of the defences had been messy. The Caesarian forces had succeeded in turning the corner finally and had raced Pompey’s construction to the sea, sealing them in, but it had involved more than one little skirmish along the way, despite Fronto’s earlier words. Then, as they closed on the coast, it had been dangerously close to opening up into full warfare. The Ninth Legion had constructed a fort at the water’s edge next to a small river, while the men building the defences made for it to seal the gap. However, defended by only a few engineers and pioneers, freshly constructed, the small fort had fallen to a surprise attack through the local woodland by Pompey and had instead been incorporated into the enemy’s defences, forcing Caesar’s men ever further south.

  Still, they’d managed in the end, and Caesar’s legions instead constructed a new camp in their own defence line, close by. Galronus and Salvius Cursor peered into the flat land, trying to make out the end of the siege lines and the water there, but it was almost impossible. The low land here went on for miles with scattered areas of woodland, the hills too far inland to be of any further aid in the siege works.

  From Pompey’s main camp at the Petra hill, his fortifications covered a distance of perhaps fifteen miles, sealing in a good area with plenty of flat land for his numerous cavalry mounts and beasts of burden. The Caesarian lines covered a distance of almost twice that, at their furthest no more than a mile from the enemy line, and at the closest perhaps only a third of that.

  Now came the crucial
moment. Would Pompey sit and suffer, believing that Caesar’s army would submit first, or would he snap and decide that war could no longer be avoided? While almost everyone hoped for the former, they generally expected the latter. Pompey would starve first if it came down to that, for though he still had more supplies available than Caesar, delivered by ship to his protected harbour, he had more men, many more animals, and his extra supplies from the east had been cut off. Caesar had fewer supplies, but fewer mouths to feed and, crucially, as the spring rolled on into summer the crops would begin to ripen and the men would be able to forage freely without fear of Pompey’s forces interfering. Those crops could not come soon enough, though, for the legions had been on half rations for some time, and two days ago even that had been further reduced.

  ‘The men are beginning to lose the will for this,’ Salvius said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fight. It’s hard enough at the best of times to motivate Romans to fight Romans, but this privation and hardship is wearing their patience and spirits. If something doesn’t happen soon, the hunger will get to the men and we’ll be looking at insurrection across the entire army.’