The Fort

by Adrian Goldsworthy

  ‘Then go!’

  Brasus ran back to the gateway as the Bastarnae came through, yelping their strange cries and grinning like devils. He let them go, trusting that they would create plenty of chaos on their own and doubting that they would follow orders even if he gave them. Half a dozen of his men were clustered around the gate, smiling at what they had done. For the moment the Romans were hanging back or had fled, but he knew that there were still some on the tower above them.

  The track outside the fort was empty. The mist was starting to rise so that he could see a little further in the pale light, but apart from a handful of his archers there was no one there. Brasus stared into the mist, longing to see shadows take shape and a rush of warriors surge out of the fog. He stared out, as if willpower and faith could make it happen just as it had led him up and over the wall. Give him two hundred more warriors and the fort was his. With one hundred he might just be able to take one of the other gates from the rear and let another column inside. The odds would still be against them, but with faith and courage it might just work,

  No one came. The archers were trading shots with the Romans on the tower, keeping them busy for the moment, but as he watched one of them was pitched over by the bolt of an engine.

  ‘My lord!’ One of his warriors was calling and pointing excitedly. There was the red of flames coming from a building ahead of them, which showed that the old man was doing his job. Then there was the thunder of horses and he saw a line of Roman cavalry charging into the score or so of warriors who had gone down the road. A Roman was shouting and he saw a big man with a centurion’s crest coming in against the flank of his men in a lone attack.

  It would not be long now. There was no sign of any break-in from the front gate, and while he could not see the rear gate from here, surely there would have been some sign by this time if they had succeeded.

  Brasus rested his falx on the ground and touched one of his warriors on the shoulder to attract his attention. The man carried an ox horn trumpet slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Blow the signal!’ Brasus told him. ‘We’re going!’ He could sense their disappointment, but knew that they would obey. If they waited much longer there would be no chance of escape and he wanted to win, so he would return and take this fort another day. ‘Don’t run straight. There is an engine up on the tower, so dodge as you go. All of you first, and I shall follow!’

  The plan had failed in spite of all he had done, so Brasus ran.

  XXI

  Piroboridava

  Later the same day

  FLAVIUS FEROX ACHED and was so tired that he knew that if he sat, let alone lay down, he would be asleep in moments. There was too much to be done while they had the chance and not enough time or pairs of hands to do it. Everyone was exhausted, so he had divided the fit men into four groups, and each would get two hours’ rest while the others worked. It was not much, and might even mean that they woke even more weary than before, but it was the best he could manage for the moment. He had to order the officers to try to sleep when their turn came, because as soon as they realised that he planned to keep going they were eager to do the same.

  ‘We did it, sir, we did it!’ Sabinus’ exhaustion manifested itself in an unceasing flow of chatter. This was the first time that he had been in any sort of serious fight, and all the fear and exhilaration combined with the sheer relief at still being alive left him elated. Ferox had allocated the centurion to sleep with the last group, the men he judged to be freshest because he doubted that the man would be able to sleep at the moment. So together they toured the fort, smiling, encouraging whenever they could, telling the men that they had fought well, and sometimes also yelling at them to work harder and faster.

  ‘We’ve won, sir!’ Sabinus repeated. ‘Well done, boys, well done!’ he added as they passed a group of soldiers carrying baskets full of stones picked up from outside the walls. They were one of several teams scouring the ditches and ground in front of the rampart, recovering any missile that could be used again.

  ‘We have won for the moment,’ Ferox said after the men had gone on back into the fort. ‘They’ll be back.’

  ‘Won’t be so keen next time though, will they, sir?’ Sabinus spread his arms to indicate the enemy dead. ‘Over two hundred of the beggars – apart from the ones we caught inside. Make ’em think twice, won’t it?’

  Ferox reckoned that something like a thousand enemies had attacked them, which meant that, with the fifty-one corpses that had been picked up inside the walls and then carried out to where they would be burned, around a quarter of the Dacians were dead. That was a heavy price for a failed attack, but it had not been easy. The ones charged by Maximus and his cavalry died quickly even though they fought hard. One, a stocky bare-chested warrior with a falx, had sliced away the front legs of Ferox’s horse, as he was bearing down on him, pitching the centurion far and high and giving him his worst bruises of the night, He was lucky that nothing was broken, and luckier still that Maximus had appeared and hacked down before the staggering warrior recovered himself and came for Ferox.

  Thirty more men had got inside the fort and they had died hard, fighting until each one had to be killed. They were Bastarnae, that odd, half-German, half-the-gods-knew-what race, with their hair tied into knots at the side of the heads, and their fondness for falxes and long spears. Ferox had almost forgotten the ferocity with which they fought, as they charged like wild animals. Dacians, especially the aristocrats following the code of their stern religion, fought as if they despised life and willingly sacrificed it, but they also fought with skill and cunning. Bastarnae fought as if violence itself was a joy to them and there was no tomorrow, no gods judging the deeds of men.

  When Sabinus had seen what the thirty Bastarnae had done in the hospital he had vomited again and again until there was nothing left to come out. Plenty of others had done the same, for the warriors had not simply killed, but mutilated everyone they found. There had been thirty-seven patients in the rooms, a couple of them men just brought in from the ramparts. One had survived by hiding in a big box used to store blankets, but all of the others were dead, hacked into pieces where they lay, hands and arms severed as they tried to protect their heads. Most of the staff were dead as well, along with some slaves and two wives who had been visiting sick husbands. The women’s bodies were barely recognisable, just like the men’s, left in pools of their own blood with more spattered up on the walls.

  ‘I wonder if they…’ Sabinus could not finish the sentence as he started to gag.

  ‘There was no time,’ Ferox told him. He had not been sick, even when he saw this and the reek filled his nostrils, and wondered what this said about him, but was too tired to think and too frightened of what he might learn. Perhaps it was the nightmare thoughts of what could have happened if the Bastarnae had broken into the praetorium instead of the hospital and he had found Lepidina like this, or her son, or Philo and his wife or any of the others.

  A thousand had attacked and a quarter died, with more wounded who had been able to walk or had been carried away. There were no prisoners, wounded or whole. Ferox had been stunned by his fall and it took a while for his wits to recover. By then word of what had happened in the hospital had spread and no one was in the mood to take captives. He did not blame his men for sparing not a single Dacian and finishing off even the direly wounded with a quick thrust. There did not seem to have been any other Bastarnae in the attacking force, but to most of his men all the attackers were simply a murderous enemy to be killed like a mad dog. Ferox might even have given the order to execute any prisoners they had taken and kill all the wounded because such men would be a burden, needing to be guarded and fed. Still, it would have been useful to interrogate a few beforehand.

  One thing that puzzled him was why there had been so few attackers, given the force Maximus had seen. The Dacians must have had a pretty good idea of the size of his garrison, and known that the cavalry had ridden away, yet had attacked with barely do
uble his strength. It made little sense for them to launch the attack on the west gate without anyone to exploit it. If they had had a couple of thousand, Ferox suspected that the fort would have fallen and he and all the rest of them would now be dead or captive. He had left the west gate too weakly defended, since it seemed least threatened, and the men he had sent there were not his best. By all accounts Bellicus had made a fool of himself and his men had hesitated for too long and then broken. There could not have been many more men attacking the gate and rampart than defending it, which meant the way that the Dacians had got in was even more remarkable. There was talk of a tall warrior with a great falx scything through men as if they were wheat as he charged along the wall. He did not seem to be among the dead.

  Apart from the massacre at the hospital, the garrison had lost fourteen dead, and three or four more who would most likely soon join them, and thirty-nine wounded more or less seriously.

  Sabinus had been pleased with the numbers. ‘We killed fifteen or more of theirs for every one of ours – more than four if you count our wounded as well, and most of them aren’t too bad.’

  The centurion’s calculations were loose to say the least, and did not allow for the other damage. A small number of Dacians had brought torches and little barrels of pitch, and had set light to a granary and two more buildings before they were caught and killed. Ferox was thankful there had been so few of them and that they had not had enough fuel to get the blazes burning more quickly. As soon as the attack was repulsed and even before he was back on his feet, Dionysius had set men to fighting the fires. They saved half the granary and its contents, helped by the new way of storage Ephippus had suggested to them after the last fire. This meant that there were wide lanes left at regular intervals between the stores and a wall of mud bricks half way down the floor, broken only by a doorway. The other buildings, a barrack block and a storeroom, had been gutted, the latter taking the bulk of their straw for feed and bedding with it.

  Yet everything could have been so much worse, and the fears that thought brought to his mind helped Ferox to drive himself and the men to work. The mist had cleared, which was a comfort and although they saw a few Dacians watching from a mile or so away on the far bank, none came any closer and that left the Romans to labour with only a small number of pickets to keep an eye on the enemy.

  Ephippus was supervising gangs of men tearing down the buildings of the canabae, taking all the material that could be useful. The engineer had an idea that Ferox thought was a good one, and although he was not yet ready to start work on it for a while, he wanted the man to have what he needed ready and waiting. Once they had all the useful timbers and stone they could get, the buildings were to be burned. The only exception was the bath house, which was too far away to be much use to the enemy as cover and because it would have broken the legionaries’ hearts if they had had to set a torch to its roof.

  ‘Sir!’ A shout interrupted Ferox’s train of thought.

  ‘I see them,’ he said, shading his eyes. His helmet had lost a cheek piece in the fall and was being repaired, so he went bare headed because Philo had insisted that he was unable to find either of his battered old wide-brimmed hats. Ferox suspected that this was deliberate, and that the boy disapproved of what he considered to be undignified headgear.

  ‘Oh, sweet Diana, no,’ Sabinus gasped as he realised where the others were looking. Higher up the valley an army was advancing. The closest were half a mile away, a vanguard of perhaps a thousand unless they were some of the survivors of the night’s attack. Behind them, another mile or more, was a dark shadow like the ones made by clouds, but there were no clouds on this sunny day.

  Ferox glanced around him. It was the sixth hour of the day and by this time they had gathered in all the spent missiles that he could see. The enemy dead still lay scattered everywhere, apart from in the ditches, and from a few dozen already burning on a pyre. He had lost his temper earlier when the man in charge of a work party had suggested tipping them all in and covering them with a bit of earth. As far as had been possible, the lilliae and other spiked obstacles had been cleared and repaired.

  ‘Start getting the men back inside,’ Ferox told Sabinus. ‘There is no great hurry, but let’s not leave it until the last minute.’ He jogged over to see Ephippus.

  ‘Have you got all you need?’

  ‘Pretty much, my lord.’

  ‘Then finish and put a torch to the lot of them.’ Ephippus seemed shocked, but behind him several of the veterans grinned happily. Soldiers always liked burning and breaking things.

  ‘Serve ’em right,’ one of them said as he carried a torch over to the fire to light. He covered his mouth with his other arm to block the sweet smell of roasting meat. ‘They always cheated you if they could.’

  His comrade lacked sympathy. ‘Nah, you just can’t add up, you daft old sod.’ They lit more torches from the first and walked purposefully over to the inn.

  ‘I am not used to destroying,’ Ephippus said sadly.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Ferox told him, ‘and it’s a lot easier than making things.’

  An hour later Ferox was once again up on the tower over the porta praetoria. The scars on the parapet seemed a lot smaller than they had during the fight, when the enemy arrows had been coming at them. Someone had spread sand out on the floor to cover the bloodstains, and it crunched under his boots.

  The enemy kept on coming. Through the black smoke from the burning houses he could see some five hundred men around the bath house and bridge. No one was coming closer than a long bowshot, after the first to try was spitted by the bolt from a scorpio and the man next to him narrowly missed by a second shot. Another large band had moved over the bridge and now stood or sat in the fields either side of the track leading down the valley. A dozen riders were within half a mile, and he suspected that they were leaders for some way behind were eighty or so cavalry, and behind them a lot of infantry, some marching in more or less neat columns and some straggling like a crowd coming out of an amphitheatre after the games. Beyond were waggons, lots of them, and mules or other pack animals and more soldiers on foot.

  ‘There’s a lot of them,’ Sabinus said. The arrival of the enemy army had taken much away from his earlier good spirits.

  ‘About eight or nine thousand, so far,’ Ferox said, ‘near as I can judge, but more coming.’

  ‘How can you tell? Looks more like twice that to me. Almost too many to count.’

  ‘A wise old primus pilus once taught me a trick – you count their legs and divide by two.’

  ‘Ah, a wise man indeed.’

  Ferox stared down the valley and still saw nothing moving. The cavalry ought to have been back before now, that is if they were coming on their own. The convoy probably had ox carts and oxen were slow and stupid and could not be rushed. If they had found the supply convoy then it could be another day, which meant that they had not the slightest chance of getting past the Dacian army and must then abandon them or die. That the enemy had bothered to send men across the river to wait made him think that they might have word that someone was on the way, or could just be a commander taking sensible precautions. Most Dacian leaders were not fools, as they had shown time and time again. Ferox had let the men use the bridge unmolested, wanting to keep the monâkon a secret for as long as possible. That’s if the enemy did not already know about it. After all, they’d built the thing in the first place and they seemed to know far more about the fort and its garrison than he would like. Spies inside these walls were likely enough, whether some of the civilians or still disgruntled Brigantes willing to send word to Ivonercus and the other deserters. Ferox wondered whether the man was out there amid that host.

  ‘Send for me if anything exciting happens,’ Ferox told the sentries. ‘And you, centurion, get some rest. No arguments this time.’ He headed back to the principia where the innkeeper and several others were waiting to receive signed statements that their property had been destroyed on army orders accor
ding to military needs. The odds were that the statements would not do them much good. Legal rights for anyone living in the canabae were pretty loose at the best of times, until the garrison had been there for many years and the civilians organised themselves and were granted the communal status of a vicus.

  Half way through the last hour of the day, Ferox was called back to the gate tower. There were thousands of Dacians now, close enough for him to see bands of king’s men, chieftains and their kin and tenants, some groups that were surely deserters, and more than a few warbands of Bastarnae, but none of this was why he had been summoned.

  ‘There, sir! It’s them,’ the sentry was excited as he pointed at horsemen coming over the rise to the south west. They had a blue vexillum standard at their head, and there was a smaller figure riding a grey in the lead.

  Well done, wife, or Vindex or whoever had made the decision, thought Ferox. They must have forded the river lower down, so that they did not need the bridge. That helped explain why they had taken so long to get here, for the only crossing places were half a day away and even then could only be done a couple of horses at a time because the banks were broken in just a few places allowing the animals through.

  There was not any sign of waggons or pack animals, but Ferox had never really expected that. What mattered was that the horsemen kept coming over the crest and across the field towards the west gate and as far as he could see they had lost no one.

  ‘Scorpiones!’ Ferox shouted. He did not want Dacian archers moving to shoot at the cavalry. That was the most that the enemy could do, because they were in the wrong positions to block the horsemen and would have to move closer to the fort to get at them. If they did, then he would make them pay a high price.

  Julius Dionysius appeared through the trapdoor.

  ‘Sorry, but would you mind going to the west gate to see them in.’