Sands of Egypt

by S. J. A. Turney

  Very few men made it out. Over more than a quarter of an hour the Romans cast everything they had. Every time the enemy tried something, they failed. Shields over heads only held off the inevitable, the boards gradually broken and ruined and then bricks finding their way through to break the men beneath.

  Salvius Cursor sighed. If he’d known it was going to be this effective, he’d have stockpiled more stones. Perhaps they could have kept the enemy here indefinitely.

  His musings shattered at a strange foreign cry as an Aegyptian suddenly burst through a hatch in the roof, out into the sunshine, wearing some ridiculous, ostentatious armour of crocodile skin. While they’d been held back, someone had found a weak point and managed to get into the buildings. Even as Salvius bellowed the order to fall back to the acropolis, another Aegyptian emerged from the trapdoor behind the first. Two soldiers rushed over even as Salvius ripped his sword free and ran for the man. One of them tackled the second Aegyptian while the other rushed to the trapdoor and slammed it shut, jumping on it to block access to the roof.

  Salvius dipped left as he approached the man in the crocodile skin, whose sword was some strange curved cleaver of local design. As the man stepped to his right to meet Salvius, the wily tribune recovered from his feint, instead moving right and slashing out. He was impressed at the efficacy of the crocodile skin. He’d expected to cut through it, but it turned his blade as readily as any iron, and he managed only with some luck to draw blood on the arm in passing.

  The man spun with difficulty in the bulky armour, his sword lashing out. Fortunately, despite his own armour and the oppressive heat, Salvius still had the advantage over the strange getup his opponent wore. He danced out of the way and lashed out twice in quick succession, the first blow slamming into the leather ties that held the front of the armour together and, as it flapped apart, the second thrust into the ribs and on through the body, cleaving the man’s organs and robbing him of life. As he twisted the blade with difficulty and yanked it back out, Salvius heard more cries. Other trapdoors were opening, and men emerging. Even as he shouted at the two men with him to run, the one standing on the trapdoor stiffened as a spear rammed up through it, deep into his groin from an unseen assailant below.

  Salvius looked around. Many of his men had gone. Some had been cut off by Aegyptians emerging from the houses below. The rooftops were lost. There was nothing he could do now but either sacrifice himself or run and get out alive.

  Regretfully, and wondering if Fronto was having a deleterious effect on him, since a few years ago he’d probably have stayed and fought it out, he put boot leather to rooftop and pelted off to the north, racing for safety. Behind him the last tardy legionaries were overrun.

  Breathing heavily, he reached the roof edge and without the luxury of a ladder trusted to luck, jumping from the parapet onto an awning below. The fabric tore with the force of the impact, but remained intact enough for him to roll, and then drop from there to the ground without injury. Looking up to see enemy warriors appear at the parapet, he wiped his sword on a piece of fallen awning, then sheathed it and ran.

  At the count of sixty three racing heartbeats he turned the corner to see the redoubt of the acropolis awaiting, packed with legionaries and the last of his men racing through the new gate to safety. With a prayer to Mars he followed them, disappearing inside as the soldiers slammed the portal shut behind him and barred it, stacking beams and barrels against it.

  ‘That’s it then sir?’ a centurion probed as he leaned over, hands on knees, to regain his breath.

  ‘That’s it. We’re under siege. But they’re going to be careful and slow now. We made them pay for getting this far. A good thousand enemy bodies line Canopus Street to the walls, and they won’t consider committing their elephants again. Is this place secure?’

  ‘As secure as we could make it, sir. We’ll hold them here.’

  ‘We have to. It’s that or die. Unless Fronto’s got us some ships.’

  He turned and peered towards the harbour, though he couldn’t see that far. He tried not to think what Fronto was going to do now if he’d secured the harbour and the fleet. They had expected to have time to consolidate their grip there or perhaps move the ships into the Palace Harbour, but in the end they’d run out of time. The legate and his men would be trapped in the harbour and cut off.

  ‘Good luck, Fronto,’ he breathed, as he listened to the sound of whooping Aegyptians moving slowly but relentlessly through the streets.

  Chapter Three

  Galronus crouched in the manner of a hunter atop a strange edifice that appeared to be part-temple, part-gateway and all peculiar, covered in statues and carvings of men with animal heads. His position was deliberately chosen as hard to spot from any local ground level location, which was, in retrospect, a good thing, given the positions of the enemy.

  Glancing this way and that at the last moment before he needed to move, he plotted every position he could see. Street fighting and sieges were not the field of choice for a horse warrior like Galronus, and he had willingly taken on the role of scout along with several of the more alert men of the Sixth and the Twenty Seventh. His role, to give warning primarily to the men at the harbour, was well-suited.

  Away to his left – to the east – he could see that the last of the legionaries had pulled back to the redoubt line around the palace, the theatre and the Palace Harbour. There the strange, clever, queen and Caesar were content that they could hold an enemy for a protracted period, possibly indefinitely if they could open and maintain a supply route through the port.

  Behind him, to the north, the harbour was under Fronto’s control, with a thousand men of the Sixth to defend it. The rest of the legions had been sent back to the redoubt to help hold there. The problem was that while the redoubt was a solid fortification, having been carefully planned and executed over days, the harbour was almost impossible to fortify, being a wide front with many access points. All Fronto’s men had been able to do since they’d taken control of the ships was tear down some shanty buildings and use the rubble to block the streets. A determined sheep could cross the defences there, let alone an enemy army, and Achillas’ force outnumbered Fronto’s by a margin too high to comfortably count. Moreover, there was no connection between the harbour and the redoubt. When attacked, Galronus’ friend could not pull back to the safety of the others. And there was little doubt he was going to be attacked.

  Again, Galronus peered intently at the streets off to the south. The army of Aegyptians was moving slowly, carefully, more like a tide coming in than a flash flood. The Roman defenders had made them pay so heavily for their initial advances that now, even though nothing really remained between them and the Roman centres, they were wary and sluggish.

  He could see Aegyptian forces moving parallel along at least five streets. Some of them were moving towards the redoubt and the main Roman position, where Caesar and the queen commanded. Others, though, and a sizeable number of them, were closing on the harbour. Fronto was about to be hit and hit hard.

  Time to move.

  Galronus rose suddenly, red flag hanging limp from the top of the spear shaft as he lifted it from the rooftop. Three waves towards the palace, warning them that the enemy were just three streets away, then five waves back towards the harbour. Five streets. Not much.

  Having given away his position in delivering the signals, Galronus became a target in an instant, archers and slingers among the units just a few dozen paces away in the street, nocking and swinging with sudden urgency. But by the time the first shot whipped through the air, Galronus was gone. Dropping from the rear of the roof, he landed on the head of the statue of a dog-faced man of ancient black stone. Plenty of handholds on this thing, and in a couple of heartbeats he was in the narrow alley behind the strange temple-thing at ground level.

  The enemy would be close, but he felt confident they wouldn’t hurry after him. They were moving nervously and slowly as an army, and he was only one man, not worth riski
ng running into a trap for. Turning a corner, he entered a wider street and pelted along it. Ahead, he could see the barrier of rubble in the street, the red and silver shapes of Fronto’s legionaries behind it. Beyond them, distantly, he could see a blue-grey haze scattered with masts. It did not look defensible.

  Galronus gritted his teeth. His orders were to pull back to the redoubt, but he had no intention of doing so, and leaving Fronto fighting without him. Caesar would get over it. It wasn’t as though this was the first time Galronus had blithely ignored his orders.

  His feet clapping on the stones of the street, he closed on the rubble, calling the password as he neared, and the Sixth stepped to the sides, opening a path across the makeshift barrier for him. As Galronus scrabbled up the broken stones and mud bricks, he noted the defenders with dismay. Maybe fifty men. Enough to hold the blockade for only a very short time. The defences were so spread out with so many accesses that Fronto’s men were too thinly distributed. There was, in Galronus’ opinion, absolutely no chance of holding the harbour.

  Nodding his thanks to the men, and warning them that the enemy would be on them at any moment, he asked where the legate was to be found.

  ‘Ship three jetties along,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘The Diomedes.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Running on, Galronus entered the harbour. Small pockets of legionaries were clustered along it, presumably reserves to plug gaps, as though they had any chance of holding this leaky sieve of a fortification for more than the blink of an eye.

  As he pounded along the stone dock, making for the colourful trireme three jetties along, he frowned. No, the small pockets of men along the length of the harbour were not idle, waiting to help. They were standing at the ends of certain jetties while some of their number were clearly active aboard the vessels at those places. As he neared the Diomedes, Galronus watched with interest. They were more or less at the centre of the dock, and Fronto had split the fleet in two, with his command post on the ship at the centre. For some reason, he had the ships on the jetties to either side already on the move, crewed inexpertly by men of the Sixth.

  As he ran, frowning, along the jetty for the ramp that led up to the Diomedes, Galronus watched the farcical sailing of the soldiers. The two warships that were pulling away from the jetties continually bashed against the timbers, moving slowly under oar power from a very small number of inexpert rowers, while a man with apparently no sense of direction steered at the rear. He clenched his teeth as the ship to the left crashed into the next one, the two scraping along each other with the groaning of tortured wood and the sound of oars smashing and splintering. He hoped fervently that there were no men at those oars, for if there were they would have almost certainly just died horrible deaths.

  What were they doing? They were going to wreck both those ships, and any vessel they came into contact with. Two of the legionaries saluted him as he ran up the boarding plank and onto the deck, and he nodded at them as he angled towards Fronto, who was standing with a man in a senior officer’s uniform at the highest part of the ship, looking this way and that and gesticulating.

  ‘What is going on?’ Galronus asked curtly as he came to a halt, breathing deeply.

  Fronto turned in surprise.

  ‘You’re supposed to be safe at the palace.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ he repeated, pointing at the ship that was still scraping along the side of another.

  ‘Opening up a space around my command post,’ Fronto grinned.

  ‘They’re wrecking the ships.’

  ‘I expect so,’ shrugged Fronto. ‘Hardly matters.’

  ‘You don’t want to preserve them?’

  Fronto shook his head. ‘We can’t. I went through every option in my head. Defending the ships is impossible. You saw our situation. We’ll be overrun very quickly. I wondered whether we might manage to sail the ships, or at least as many as possible, into the Palace Harbour. In fact we’ve done that to a small extent.’

  He pointed off to the east and Galronus peered past the other ships, through a tangle of masts and ropes, and could just see the shapes of several vessels disappearing into the protective arms of the Palace Harbour.

  ‘That’s many of the prisoners we took, under a small guard. More – the defiant ones who were not willing to comply – were just released into the streets as we can’t afford the men to watch them. Others… well…’ He swept a hand around the ship and Galronus looked around. Aegyptians sat at the oar benches of the Diomedes.

  ‘You’re going to sail away?’

  Fronto nodded. ‘With all the men I can preserve.’

  Galronus heaved a sigh of relief. It was good to know that his friend at least had a plan.

  ‘Sun’s only a couple of hours from the horizon now, I reckon,’ Fronto mused.

  Galronus nodded.

  ‘We’re dragging it out as long as we can,’ Fronto said. ‘I want to leave the enemy with an evening in which they can’t rest and recuperate.’

  Galronus frowned again, and Fronto chuckled, tapping the side of his nose conspiratorially.

  A noise rising from the city behind them indicated that Achillas’ army had finally come into contact with Fronto’s blockades. The sound seemed to arise from numerous places at once. They were being hit all along the harbour.

  ‘How long will you hold?’

  Fronto rubbed his hands together. ‘Each position has orders to pull back only dependent upon the retreat of other units. It’s all been orchestrated for the best possible defence. We need to hold them as long as possible while the men work.’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  Fronto simply tapped his nose in that infuriating manner again. ‘Just watch and enjoy.’

  Galronus did just that. Standing at the rear of the Diomedes, he looked this way and that. The two adjacent ships were now well clear of their jetties and had managed in a haphazard way to come around behind the other vessels, and there drifted to a halt. Frowning, he watched the men who had badly handled them into position throwing ropes and tying them to the nearest ships, then leaping from one to the other and hurrying back to the jetty and safety.

  Barely had they made it that far before a signal blast arose from the far western end of the dock.

  ‘The dance begins,’ Fronto grinned.

  A second signal answered that first from the eastern end of the dock, and in moments Galronus watched a small unit of legionaries, small indistinct figures at this distance, fall back from a street in tight formation. They moved slowly and carefully, backing towards the nearest ship. His head snapped the other way and confirmed that the same had happened at the far end. The men were falling back from the extremities first.

  As the soldiers neared the two furthermost ships, Galronus narrowed his eyes. Men leapt from that ship and joined their comrades on the dock, retreating towards the next ship along. Simultaneously they blew whistles, which received whistled answers from the next blockaded street, and another unit slowly backed out to join them, the forces combining, growing, as men now leapt from the second ship to join them.

  Why this was happening escaped Galronus until the third ship, and the addition of a third unit. At this point the enemy appeared at the ends of the harbour, advancing on the retreating Romans carefully and suspiciously, wondering what new trap awaited them. But it was not traps they had to look forward to. Galronus’ eyes widened as the triremes at the far ends suddenly burst into flame, columns of roiling black smoke rising into the pristine blue afternoon sky.

  ‘You’re burning the ships?’

  Fronto grinned. ‘Good, eh?’

  ‘Burning them?’

  ‘We can’t sail them away without the sailors to do it, we can’t protect them as there aren’t enough of us, and clearly we can’t just let Achillas have them.’

  ‘Caesar will be furious.’

  Fronto shook his head. ‘Caesar would have ordered it had he been here. He will ratify my decision when we meet him. He would no mo
re want Achillas retrieving those ships than I do.’

  Galronus stared left and then right as the second ship went up. As they burned, the procedure was being repeated along the dock. The units were falling back in careful order, working by a system of whistled signals, and as they passed the ships men leapt from them, having ignited the kindling they’d packed in at the last moment. By the time they were closing on the harbour centre, and the position of the Diomedes, the ends of the fleet were burning furiously. The enemy force that had spilled out onto the dock were panicked and confused, not knowing what to do. They were too late to save the ships already ablaze, no matter how many buckets they grabbed, and the ships that were still unburned were behind the retreating lines of the Sixth. Each ship and each blockaded street they passed they grew in number, and more and more vessels exploded into flame.

  ‘Ready the lines, oarsmen do your thing,’ Fronto shouted to the men on the ship somewhat inexpertly. He turned that grin on Galronus. ‘I’m determined to enjoy this. Depriving the enemy of the fleet, saving the men. It’s the best win I could hope for here, and even I should be able to make it as far as the Palace Harbour without being sick.’

  Galronus shook his head. Fronto was enjoying this all too much. And it was neat. Something had to go wrong. He watched the legionaries now falling back and joining together at the end of the Diomedes’ jetty. The enemy were closing, edging forwards nervously. The entire fleet was ablaze now. The sheer quantity of wood docked at the harbour side ensured that the fleet would burn for quite some time and would be entirely unsalvageable. Despite non-specific misgivings, Galronus had to admit that Fronto’s plan seemed to be working well.