Ballista took care not to look at Bathshiba. He could sense her stillness. 'I am afraid that I cannot grant you this. It could not be done in secret. Once it was known that you had evacuated your family to safety, everyone would assume that the town is about to fall. It would cause panic. If I let you do this, how could I refuse the others? Anamu, Ogelos, the councillors – all would want a boat to take their loved ones, themselves, to safety.' Aware he was talking too much, Ballista stopped.
'I understand.' larhai's mouth was a thin line, like the mouth of a fish. 'I will not trouble you further. I have to do the rounds of my men. Come, daughter.'
Bathshiba got down from the wall. As they made their formal farewells, Ballista could read nothing in her face.
Calgacus appeared and led them out.
Ballista leant on the wall and looked out into the night. On silent wings an owl was hunting over the big island. Again he heard the bark of a fox, nearer now. There was a light footstep behind him. He turned fast, his hand going to his sword. Bathshiba stood there, just out of reach.
'That was not my idea,' she said.
'I did not think that it was.' They looked at each other in the pale moonlight.
'I am worried about my father. He is not himself. The fight has gone out of him. He hardly ever goes to the battlements. He leaves everything to do with the troops to Haddudad. He stays in his rooms. If you ask him his opinion about anything he just says that it will be as god wills. You must have seen. He is even being nice about Anamu and Ogelos.'
Ballista took a step towards her.
'No. My father is waiting at the gate. I left something.' She walked around Ballista and picked up her cap from the wall. She pushed it on her head, piling her long black hair under it. 'I must go.' She smiled and left.
Back sitting on the wall, Ballista took the amulet from his purse and turned it in his hands. MILES ARCANUS – literally secret or silent soldier. It was the mark of a frumentarius.
Ballista was sweating like a Christian in the arena. The air was very bad down here, close and fetid. It was hard to draw breath properly. At Mamurra's gesture, the northerner moved at a crouch to the far right of the gallery. The sweat was slick on his sides. Kneeling down, he put his ear to the first of the round shields held to the wall. The bronze was cold to his ear. He listened. He would have liked to shut his eyes to concentrate on listening, but he feared what would happen when he opened them again. He had done that once before, and he had no wish to relive that almost physical surge of panic that ran up through his body as his eyes told him that he was still in the tunnel.
After a time he looked at Mamurra and shook his head. He could hear nothing. Mamurra gestured to the next shield. His fear making him clumsy, Ballista shuffled along and put his ear to this one. He put his hand over his other ear. He tried to calm himself, tried to filter out the thumping of his heart, the small scratching noises as the shield moved imperceptibly against the rock. Yes, now he thought he heard something. He listened some more. He was not sure. He made a gesture of uncertainty, palms up. Mamurra pointed to the final shield. With this one there was no doubt. There it was: the steady, rhythmic chink, chink, chink of pickaxe on stone.
Ballista nodded. Mamurra pointed, his hand describing an arc from straight ahead to about forty-five degrees off to the left. Then, still without speaking, he held out the splayed fingers of his right hand, once, twice, three times. The enemy mine was approaching from the left; it was about fifteen paces away. Ballista nodded and jerked his head towards the entrance. Mamurra nodded back. Still crouching, Ballista turned to leave, hoping his pathetic relief was not too evident.
Back above ground, back from the realm of the dead, Ballista sucked air into his lungs. The hot, gritty, dust-laden air that hung over the town of Arete was like the coldest, cleanest air off the northern ocean of his childhood. Gulping it down, he used his scarf to mop the stinging sweat and dirt from his eyes. Maximus passed him a skin for water. He cupped a hand, filled it and bathed his face. Above him, the wind sail over the entrance to the mine hung limp. One of Mamurra's engineers was tipping a bucket of water over it to try and make it draw better.
'Now I can show it to you from up above,' said Mamurra.
In contrast to what had gone before, the view from the battlements of the south-west tower was Olympian. There off to the right was what remained of the Persian siege ramp. Broken-backed, it lay like a stranded whale. Beyond it was the broad sweep of the plain. Shattered missiles, scraps of clothing and bleached bones broke the wide, dun-coloured monotony that stretched all the way to the Sassanid camp.
They kept low behind the much-repaired parapet. Since the fall of the ramp shooting had been desultory, but a man in full view would still attract missiles. Mamurra borrowed a bow from one of the sentinels. He selected an arrow with bright fletching. He looked round the crenellations to find his mark, ducked back into cover, took a deep breath and stepped out to draw and release. Ballista noted that Mamurra drew the bowstring not with two fingers but with his thumb, like the nomads of the steppes.
'Hmm.' Mamurra grunted as the arrow embedded itself in the ground, its bright red feathers quivering. He considered for a moment or two. 'You see the arrow? Now move your eyes five paces to the right. Now almost ten paces away. Not as far as the scrap of yellow material. You see what looks like a large molehill?' Ballista saw it. 'Now move further away, twenty-five, thirty paces. You see the next one? Then, at a similar distance, the one beyond that?'
'I see them. That was not a great shot,' Ballista said.
'I have done better.' Mamurra grinned. 'It served its purpose. Now you can see the air shafts the reptiles have dug up from their mine. The Persian tunnel is considerably longer than ours so those air shafts are necessary. Ours is about forty paces long. Much further and the air gets bad at the head of the mine. The wind sail helps a little. If there had been time I would have dug another tunnel next to our mine: if you light a fire at the mouth of a parallel tunnel it draws out the bad air.'
Allfather, but he is a good siege engineer this one, a good Praefectus Fabrum. I am lucky to have him.
'I think that their tunnel will pass just to the left of our cross gallery. We will have to dig a little more to catch them,' Mamurra continued in answer to Ballista's unspoken question. 'There is a risk that they will hear us digging, that they will be ready for us. But we will dig and listen by turns. Anyway, it cannot be helped.'
Both were silent. Ballista wondered if Mamurra was also thinking that the traitor might already have warned the Sassanids of the Roman counter mine.
'When you intercept them, what will you do?'
As was often his way, Mamurra slowly mulled the question over. 'We could try and break into their tunnel from below, light a fire and smoke them out. Or we could come in from above, throw down missiles, maybe pour in boiling water, try to make their mine unworkable. But neither really answers. As I told the Greek boy when he talked of bears, bees, scorpions and such things, it will be nasty work in the dark with a short sword.'
'And then?'
'Collapse their mine. Preferably not with us still in it.'
'How many men will you need?'
'Not many. Numbers can be an encumbrance underground. When I ask, bring up the reserve century stationed on the campus martius. I will take twenty of them into the tunnel to add to my miners. Have the rest of the century around the entrance. Keep Castricius with you, in case things should work out badly.' The corners of Mamurra's mouth were turned down.
'I will tell the centurion Antoninus Posterior to have his men ready.'
Two days passed before a red-faced messenger sought out the Dux Ripae. Ballista collected Antoninus Posterior and his men. When they reached the mine Mamurra was waiting. There was no time for an extended farewell. Ballista shook the hand of his praefectus fabrum, and Mamurra led twenty legionaries into the tunnel.
Faced with a period of inactivity when nothing was required of him, Ballista did what all soldiers do
: he sat down. There was no convenient shade from which he could see the entrance, so he sat with the hot sun on his back. He watched the awful black mouth of the mine. It was the twenty-ninth of September, three days before the kalends of October. It was autumn. In the north it would be cool. Here it was still very hot. He draped his cloak over his shoulders to keep the sun off the metal rings of his mail coat.
Calgacus arrived with some slaves from the palace. They handed round skins of water. Ballista took off his helmet and scarf. He took some water in his mouth, swilled it round and spat it out then, holding the skin away from his lips, poured a sparkling jet of the cool liquid into the back of his mouth.
Passing the water skin to Maximus, Ballista looked round and caught the eye of his latest standard-bearer, a lumpen-faced Macedonian called Pudens.
'Dracontius, take my standard to the Palmyrene Gate. Let the Persians see the white dragon flying there as usual.' Ballista picked one of his equites singulares, a Gaul with fair hair. 'Vindex, take my cloak. Put it on and show yourself by the standard. Play at being the Dux Ripae for a while. Let the Persians thinkit is just another day.'
Mamurra took his ear from the bronze shield. It was time. Holding it so that it did not clash on anything, Mamurra stepped between the two miners, then between the two men with bows. Putting the shield out of the way against the side wall, he squatted down. In the flickering light of the oil lamps everyone stared at him. Very quietly Mamurra said, 'Now.'
The two miners hefted their pickaxes, looked at each other, then swung. The noise was very loud after the silence in the enclosed space. Crash-crash, splinters flew. The two bowmen shielded their eyes. Crash-crash, crash-crash, the men with the pickaxes worked as a team, concentrating their blows in one place. Stripped to the waist, their bodies shone with sweat.
Mamurra drew his weapons, an old-fashioned short sword, a gladius, in his right hand, a dagger, a pngio, in his left. A lot depended on how quickly the axemen could make an entrance in the thin wall of the tunnel. Mamurra fervently hoped he had got it right. By all his calculations, by all his instincts, the Persian mine had advanced beyond the Roman counter mine. The breach should bring the Romans out some way behind the Persian pit face.
Crash-crash, crash-crash. Come on, come on. How thick was the wall? Mamurra was sure it would give at any moment. He found that he was humming under his breath, a legionary marching song as old as Julius Caesar: Home we bring our bald whore-monger, Romans lock your wives away! All the bags of gold you sent him Went his Gallic whores to pay.
One of the pickaxes went handle deep through the wall. The miners redoubled their efforts to enlarge the hole. Crash-crash, crash-crash.
'Enough,' shouted Mamurra. The men with the pickaxes stepped back. The bowmem stepped forward. They drew and released straight through the hole. The arrows could be heard ricocheting off the opposite wall. They drew again. They shot again, this time one to the left, one to the right. The arrows snickered down the rock walls. The bowmen stepped aside.
Mamurra and the man next to him hurled themselves through the hole and into the Persian mine. Crashing into the far wall, Mamurra turned right. The man next to him turned left. Mamurra took a couple of steps, then waited until another man joined him.
Together they moved forward. Mamurra kept low. Without his helmet or a shield he felt terribly vulnerable. In the distance, a shaft of light came down from one of the Persian air holes. Beyond it Mamurra could see the indistinct shapes of Sassanids. He caught a glimpse of a curved bow. He resisted the urge to flatten himself against the wall – arrows could follow walls. He crouched, making himself as small as possible. He heard the wisp, wisp sound of the feathers as the arrow spun through the air, felt the wind of its passing.
Straightening only a little – he had no desire to crack his head on the jagged roof of the tunnel – Mamurra ran at the Persians. The two eastern warriors at the front drew their swords, stood for a moment, then turned to run. One tripped. The legionary next to Mamurra was on the fallen Persian, a foot on the small of his back, stabbing repeatedly down at the man's head, neck, shoulders.
'Hold,' yelled Mamurra. 'Bring up the shields.' Wicker shields were passed forward. Four legionaries improvised a barrier. 'Where are the miners? Good, bring down those pit props and collapse the reptiles' mine.'
As the men with the pickaxes set to work Mamurra turned to find out what was happening in the other direction, at the head of the mine. He did not see what gave him the blow, he just felt the terrible dull impact. He stood for a moment stunned, feeling nothing but a vague surprise. Then a violent wave of nausea surged up from his stomach as the pain hit him. He saw the rough floor of the tunnel as he fell. Felt his face smash into the rock. He was conscious just long enough to hear the Persian counter attack, to feel a man stand on his ankle.
The first Ballista knew of the disaster below ground was when a legionary ran out of the entrance to the mine. His hands empty, the man stopped, looking around stupidly. Another legionary followed. He nearly ran into the first man.
'Fuck,' said Maximus quietly. They all rose to their feet. The soldiers around the entrance hefted their weapons. Antoninus Posterior started to get them into line. Now there was a stream of men running from the mine. Everyone knew what had happened. The Persians had won the underground fight. At any moment Sassanid warriors would burst out of the mine hard on the heels of the fleeing Romans. Castricius was standing by Ballista, waiting.
'Bring down the mineshaft,' said Ballista.
Castricius turned and issued a volley of orders. A group of men with crowbars and pickaxes fought their way into the mouth of the tunnel against the flow of panic-stricken legionaries. Others took up the ropes that were already tied around some of the pit props.
'No!' Maximus caught Baliista's shoulder, his grip tight. 'No. You cannot do this. Our boys are still down there.'
Ballista ignored him. 'As quick as you can, Castricius.'
'You bastard, you cannot do this. For fuck's sake, Mamurra is still down there.'
Ballista rounded on his bodyguard. 'You want us all to die?'
The noise offrantic work came from the darkmouth of the tunnel.
'You bastard, he is your friend.'
Yes. Yes, he is but, Allfather, I have to do this. Don't think, just act. Plenty of time later for recriminations, for guilt. Don't think, just act.
The men with crowbars and pickaxes sprinted back out of the mine. A couple more legionaries emerged with them. Castricius bellowed more orders. The men on the ropes took the strain and – one, two, three – began to pull.
Ballista watched. Maximus had turned away.
First one, then another of the gangs of men shot forward, stumbling, some falling as the strain came off their ropes. One by one the pit props were pulled away. There was a low groaning, then a strange roaring. A dense cloud of dust enveloped the mouth of the mine.
There was just enough light to see in the Persian tunnel. Although Mamurra kept his eyes shut, he could tell there was enough light to see. He was lying on his back. There was a crushing weight on top of him, a strong smell of leather. He could hear Persian voices. One of them was obviously shouting orders. Strangely, his ankle hurt worse than his head. The harsh, iron taste of blood was in his mouth.
Cautiously, Mamurra opened his eyes a fraction. There was a boot on his face. It was not moving. Clearly its owner was dead. There was a distant groaning, which changed to a roaring. There was a burst of shouting, the sound of men running, and the tunnel was filled with dust.
Mamurra shut his eyes and tried to breathe shallowly through his nose. He did not dare cough. When the moment passed it was quiet. He opened his eyes again. He tried to move, but only his right arm responded and, in doing so, the skin of his elbow scraped along the wall. He shifted the dead man's boot a little to make it easier to breathe.
He was at the bottom of a pile of bodies. Somehow that and the roaring and the dust told him everything. The victorious Persians had thrown h
im and the other casualties aside, out of the way. They had been following hot on the heels of the routed legionaries when Ballista had collapsed the Roman mine. Bastard. Fucking bastard. There would have been nothing else that the northerner could have done, but the fucking bastard.
It was very quiet. Biting his lip against the pain, Mamurra moved his right arm. Both his sword and dagger were gone. He rested for a moment. It was still quiet. Slowly, stifling a whimper of pain, he moved his right hand up and across, pushing it into the neck of his mail shirt, down under the collar of his tunic. Grunting with effort despite himself, he pulled free the concealed dagger. He let his arm drop, the dagger close by his right hip. He closed his eyes and rested.
Death did not worry him. If the Epicurean philosophers were right, everything would just return to sleep and rest. If they were wrong, he was not too sure what would happen. Of course there were the Islands of the Blessed and the Elysian Fields. But he had never really been able to tell if they were one place or two, let alone discover how you entered them. He had always had a talent for gaining access to places he was not meant to be – but not, he suspected, this time. It would be Hades for him. An eternity in the dark and cold, flitting and squeaking like an insentient bat.
It must be easier for the Sassanids. Fall in battle, become one of the blessed, and straight to heaven. Mamurra had never bothered to ask what their eastern heaven was meant to contain – probably shady arbours, cool wine and a never-ending supply of fat-arsed virgins.
It must be easier for a northerner like that bastard Ballista – for sure he had had no choice, but bastard anyway. The bastard and he had talked of it. Fight and die like a hero and the northerner's high god with the outlandish name might – just might – send his shield maidens to bring you to a glorified northern warlord's hall where, in a typical northern way, you would spend eternity fighting every day and, your wounds magically healed, drinking every night. No, not eternity. Mamurra half-remembered that, in Ballista's world, even the gods die in the end.
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